Our interview with @TeamSteem or Guillaume Cardinal continues here and is available in full with 
TeamSteem Interview Part 2
Jerry Banfield:
What I like about Steem, it encourages this art form almost of even when there are things that happen like the Steemit chat service just went down, and a Witness was upset about the rewards and the votes, Steem motivates me to think, how can I write about this in a kind and loving manner?
Because if I write about it in a gossipy tabloid way like, "This person sucks and they're awful," I'm likely to lose followers and not get very good rewards out of that, and at the same time, I don't want to, that's a form of violence to me as well, to try and take down another person.
I see that's the first thing you said on your post: "I practice non-aggression principle."
I love that the money in Steem tends to flow based on the non-aggression principle.
TeamSteem:
Yes, I think everyone wants to help one another and sure we evolve as a species. Competition made us evolve and this competition between species is a merciless competition. But now that we are human, we can go beyond this. We can try to go beyond this. I've always been fascinated by this power struggle the humans are going through and war, but we need to try, even though it seems impossible, we need to try to go beyond that where we become our own governments.
Some people say that I'm against governments, but I'm not against governments. I'm for seven billion of us. I want seven billion governments. Everyone needs to govern themselves and everyone needs to be able to defend themselves.
When we're delegating our power to defend ourselves to the police, this means that defending ourselves is important to us. That's why we accord importance to police because they're able to defend us, but the best person to defend yourself is yourself first and foremost.
If you value self-defense, you should be able to defend yourself and that's why I think that we are the best people to defend ourselves and decentralize not just money creation, but governments, self-defense, and even health and everything that we can think of will benefit from decentralization and it will help most things.
Jerry Banfield:
What are some of your favorite authors or books, videos etcetera, that have inspired and helped to transform your life, to bring you where you're at today?
TeamSteem:
I would say, Dan Larimer, the guy who created Steem.
I'm not trying to get his vote because he's not voting anymore.
That's not what I'm trying to say here.
He's really been influential in my life. I think most people know this about me now. If you've been on Steem for a couple of times, I would say go read my post, "Thank you, Dan Larimer. You're a great mentor." This is one of my best posts and 99% of this post come from his writing. I'm just quoting his writing and this is one of the best thing I've ever read.
As far as spiritual writing, I would say a book that is called "The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali," who was a Yogi more than a thousand years and wrote a book on meditation and yoga. That's one of the very influential books I read and another book is "The Art of War."
I would say those two books are opposite. One is mental peace and the way to bring out peace in the world, and the other one is trying to control others and trying to exploit and deceive others.
I guess the middle way is the best way.
Jerry Banfield:
I'm interested, have you read, "The 48 Laws of Power?”
TeamSteem:
I did. It's one of my best books.
It's a very, very interesting book. I read most of the author's books. He wrote four or five other books and they are all great books. "The 48 Laws of Power" is the best book.
Jerry Banfield:
Have you read, "The Power of Now?”
TeamSteem:
I did. I did read, "The Power of Now."
It's interesting because Dan Larimer talks about "The Power of Now" in one of his posts and it's probably his best post. I talked about this post from Dan Larimer in my post I just mentioned, it's a very powerful book and it's a very powerful philosophy for sure.
I really enjoyed this book.
Jerry Banfield:
Excellent!
It's funny, I just had a feeling. I love those books as well and I just had a feeling you've read those books too.
TeamSteem:
Yes, they're very popular books.
Jerry Banfield:
Have you read anything by Tony Robins?
TeamSteem:
Yes, I read "The Most Powerful Question" I think, something like that. I am not sure if it's just a talk or a book, but he's a great guy, I love him. I've listened to a couple of his talks.
Jerry Banfield:
Well, I appreciate you sharing so much with us today.
What would you recommend to a reader who's new on Steem or who's done Steem for a while and is feeling kind of disappointed, or that's doing really well and hasn't faced the disappointment yet?
TeamSteem:
Well, I would say the most important thing is not about money because not everyone can make money on Steem, it's a mathematical fact. If we're creating money out of nothing and it's easy for everyone to make money, then this money won't have any value.
I would say the most important thing is trying to be part of the community, this growing community and trying to get the best knowledge out of it. It's all about knowledge and it's all about how we use our knowledge, and we should try not to focus too much on money.
I know it might be easy to say because I make a lot of money, but there are so many people right now who have nothing, and when I say nothing, they have nothing. It's very heartbreaking to think about those people and that's what we need to focus on as a society, to try to redistribute and make things fairer.
That's what we need to think about, we need to focus on.
Jerry Banfield:
Focus on the contribution that's being made to Steem and focus on the biggest return, which I've had a huge return out of Steem and the posts I've read on Steem have impacted me, changed my vision for the future, changed things I've wanted, helped me when I was struggling.
I read several posts this morning. I was feeling disconnected and down, and I read several posts that cheered me up a lot.
All those posts don't have any ads on them, it loads fast and I can comment and directly interact with the author, it's amazing.
It helps to remember that when I started blogging I didn't make any money either. I've been blogging for six years now.
How long had you been blogging before you joined Steem?
TeamSteem:
I wasn't blogging per se. I wrote a couple of stuff on Facebook, but that's it. I was working and I'm still working on creating an educational tool because I was reading so much on the Internet, not just reading, but watching so many videos.
I'm working to put all of these videos and all of those articles I read throughout the years into a data bank that would create some sort of school, some sort of meaningful data bank that anyone can use whether it's for health, whether it's for creating better form of governments or about technologies because these aren't taught in school.
The new technologies aren't taught in school. Cryptocurrencies aren't taught in elementary school and these need to be taught. How money is created needs to be taught in school, but it won't be taught in school because school is just an indoctrination camp.
That's what it is.
It's a sorry state of the society we live in, but we need to fend for ourselves and this will come from decentralization, from people to other people, not organizations because there's always an incentive to exploit one another.
Decentralization just solves this problem, I would say, because it pushes us to help one another and not trying to exploit one another, but really to cooperate with one another in an honest way.
Jerry Banfield:
I love that.
Tim Ferriss has a book called "Tools of Titans" where he basically put together a bunch of things that had been most helpful for him.
If you had that basically in an online database for free with the best videos and blog posts and things you read that'd be an amazing educational resource.
TeamSteem:
Yes, I've been working on this like for years.
When I was working, I was listening to 20 to 40 hours of material a week.
Jerry Banfield:
At work?
TeamSteem:
At work.
Jerry Banfield:
Nice.
TeamSteem:
That was totally forbidden, but I was doing it and so I accumulated so much information. Whether it be audiobooks or I was taking web articles and putting them into audio, and so I rated all of the best and it makes for a very interesting database.
Jerry Banfield:
Well, I would love to see that and I'm going to read your post about Dan as soon as I can after this.
What's your favorite tool you use that makes a huge difference in how you use Steem?
TeamSteem:
I would say text-to-speech.
Well, that's not related to Steem per se, but I use text-to-speech to listen to a lot of content. I would just copy paste and it would just straight up go into my software, and it's really very good, you wouldn't really even realize that it's a robot reading.
As far as the tool, I love Steemd.com. If you've never used Steemd.com with your name Steemd.com/@username, that's very helpful.
Steemdb/@username is also very useful.
These are two very useful tools.
Another tool that I really love is SteemReports.com, which is one of the most useful tools.
There's another tool right now that I really enjoy that is becoming more and more useful. It's called MySteemitFriends.online by @magicmonk who is a really cool developer, and he's now adding a lot of stuff to this website.
It's not very well known right now, but I'm supporting his work every time he's adding a new feature. Right now the latest features he added was to have the conversation you have with someone. If I ever posted on your blog, I can see it. I will write my name and I will write Jerry Banfield, and we will see all the time we interacted on each other's blogs.
That's really cool that we cannot see this anywhere else, but on that tool, so it's very useful.
Jerry Banfield:
I really need that. I'd like to be able to look because I get so many comments. If you reply to something two days after I make a post, I more than likely haven't seen it.
How do I get started using that?
I've got @magicmonk's website up and the Steemit followers.
Do you use the conversation record on it to go over there and do that?
TeamSteem:
No, not really.
That would be more for looking for something specific because you won't have all of the replies.
No, that's not how I use it.
Jerry Banfield:
Well, this is awesome.
I've just brought it up real quick. I put TeamSteem in and JerryBanfield, and I can see all the comments we've had back and forth right on here the whole time we've been on Steem.
I don't think I saw the last reply you made. This is great. I love this.
Thank you for telling me about that. I've really needed that, and then I can just bookmark some pages and go through and see if certain people responded to my comments.
That is awesome.
TeamSteem:
Yes, there are a couple of useful tools on this website.
You can see the power of your vote, it's called the Effective SP. You can check your Effective Steem Power Ranking where you will see how powerful your vote is, taking into account your delegation and what has been delegated to you.
There are a couple of very useful tools on this website.
Jerry Banfield:
Well, this is awesome.
Then we can just look and see where the most powerful votes are.
@utopian-io has the single most powerful vote in one account, that's awesome.
Since that's an open source project that rewards open source project contributions, that's amazing. It's got over ten million dollars of voting power today.
We've talked for over an hour when we include the two interviews we've done together.
What would you like to mention that we haven't covered yet?
TeamSteem:
I'd love to mention this, it might sound a bit silly, but I love to think that talking to strangers in the street in some unconventional way in the sense that if you're saluting a stranger or passer-by, it's a revolutionary act.
You're creating something there, where you will impact the life of someone with a very simple gesture, you can really change the life of someone. I feel like Steem can help do this in the sense that it's going to bring us a lot closer to one another and in a more meaningful way than we are on Facebook, because on Facebook you interact mostly with the people you know and whenever some people might disagree with you, they might be very mean to you.
On Steem the more people are going to join Steem, the more this positive influence that Steem has is going to have a repercussion on everyone else.
I feel like I'm very positive and very enthused by the future, and hopefully, I'll be right about this. We can see a better future, that's for sure, and we need to work towards this.
Jerry Banfield:
I love that, every little act of kindness we do and just recognizing another person makes a ripple impact. It's like a butterfly impact, it changes the world.
I saw a guy I feel like most of us would say a bum on the street and he was sitting on the curb the other day drinking a Mountain Dew. I got out of my car and I looked at him. I said, "What's up," or "Good afternoon," and he just looked really surprised that I just said it to him like he was anyone else on the street, like an attractive girl or a rich man I wanted to impress, like just anyone else on the street.
"Hi," like the recognition of that basic humanity. I feel like that you've shared something all of us can do. It's not asking to do a whole lot, just notice someone else and they might notice us back too. A lot of us go through our whole day without anyone really looking at us or seeing us. If we really look at and see other people, then we will get that attention we want too.
TeamSteem:
Yes, that's right.
Right now everyone wants to have more money and that's the whole bias of life. Everyone is caught up in this race, and hopefully it will change. We can go beyond that and I feel like this is what the universe is pushing us towards.
The universe is a very special place and it seems like it's pushing humanity to outgrow itself, to come to another stage and whatever the reason is of reality, I feel like we shouldn't look further than what we're living in the present moment.
This is what reality is, enjoying the present moment, whether or not there is something after or there was something prior that we did in our life, what is, is what is right now, what we are experiencing, what we are conscious of right now.
We need to acknowledge that some people are going through some hardship, we should help them if we can and this comes from compassion towards ourselves and compassion towards others.
Jerry Banfield:
Well, thank you for a beautiful message in this interview today.
For those of us watching would you continue to get to know @TeamSteem? Or Guillaume Cardinal?
TeamSteem:
Yes, Guillaume Cardinal.
Jerry Banfield:
Get to know Guillaume better on Steem, it's at https://steemit.com/@teamsteem. Check out the posts that Guillaume resteems as well as shares because Guillaume thinks carefully before resteeming posts.
I've found a lot of posts I've loved and enjoyed by seeing post by other authors. If you're getting started reading on Steem, I would imagine looking through the posts Guillaume has both made and resteemed might be a great way to do it.
And if you're already on Steem, I will ask on your behalf, would you please make a vote for @TeamSteem as a Witness, because Witness votes are the most important votes we make on Steem.
These are essentially choosing our representatives on kind of a governance level and having @TeamSteem up there allows Guillaume to represent us in all the changes going forward on Steem.
TeamSteem:
Yes, thanks Jerry for the support to my Witness. I would invite everyone else to look at what Jerry is doing. He has a Witness on Steem and he has a lot of support too. He has been in the top 30 now for a long time and I'm supporting Jerry since pretty much the beginning.
I would invite everyone else to go look at what he's doing, he's been doing a great job. I really enjoy what he's been doing on Steem. Just go check him out if you don't know what he's doing and see for yourself.
Jerry Banfield:
Thank you very much, Guillaume.
Guillaume has done a huge amount in helping me stay motivated on Steem. Guillaume was one of the first big Witness voters on my Witness and Guillaume's voted up so many of my posts.
I always smile when I see the @TeamSteem upvote because I know about how much time and energy you put into selecting your votes.
That's what I love about Steem, we help each other and we collaborate. A guy in Montreal and a guy in Florida who've never met in person working together to build the same world without hardly any rules, or even implied rules, guiding our behavior. This is what we do with our own free will and that's what's so cool about this.
TeamSteem:
It is and for some people, it might seem too beautiful to be true. I'm inviting them to see for themselves. We're not forcing anyone. If they're not joining, someone else is making the rewards. Sooner or later people will join, that's my feeling.
Jerry Banfield:
I'll try to remember that. My success rate converting my own friends and family's been really low.
I say, "I'm making good money on this. People are reading. This is awesome."
They respond, "Well, maybe I'll think about it."
It's not for everyone who needs it.
It's for everyone who wants it.
TeamSteem:
Yes, exactly. I was looking at the popularity of Steemit.com and it's going up a lot faster in other countries than in the United States.
It's going faster in countries like Nigeria, the Philippines and Venezuela where people are going through some financial hardship, and for them, a couple of dollars is a lot. In that sense, I love it because it's helping the people who need it the most. It's very good and I love it.
Jerry Banfield:
That's what I love too. I love these guys in Nigeria printing out handbills and going to universities. A hundred Steem Dollars is like a month of income there. That's awesome that we can work together like that.
I can collaborate with guys in Nigeria and they're bringing more people on who will read my posts. I'm helping them earn enough money to feed their families. This is crazy. This is the most exciting thing I've ever seen online and I've been online a long time, since 90 something. This is amazing.
TeamSteem:
Yes, you're bringing an important point. This is the most exciting thing there is. If I would be Facebook right now, or some big shareholder in Facebook, I would be concerned looking at Steem.
I would be really concerned because how can it be stopped?
How could Facebook continue to compete against Steem?
Some people don't see Steem as a competitor because they don't see the potential. They see Steem as it is right now, but they don't see that everything that is done on Facebook can be done on Steem.
Pretty much, whether it be the album. Some people think we cannot put out albums on Steem and that's not true, we can do this. We can do Twitter, we can do Instagram, we can do so many things and I'm very excited.
As you said, this is the most exciting thing I've seen on the Internet, and sooner or later I feel like people are going to realize it, and people might regret not having realized it sooner.
Jerry Banfield:
Yes, I'm grateful. I was on Facebook right when it first started, but being a college student with $700 in the bank, I couldn't invest at all. On Steem we can actually just invest our time and energy and even if we just make a little money that over time as this is growing will be huge.
If I'd have been able to put $100 into Facebook and actually got compensated for all I've contributed to Facebook since 2005, I'd have a lot of money today just as a reflection of what I've done.
People look for the next big thing. I'm very grateful to be here with you in the middle of a big thing that's here that we can actually use and we don't have to fantasize about.
It's amazing today.
TeamSteem:
Yes, you're right.
If we look on YouTube, a follower or a subscriber on YouTube can be monetized. If you have a lot of followers on YouTube, you can pretty much take out any video and you're going to make some money.
This is true about Steem at some point. You're going to just grow your following and at some point, it's going to reward you in your life. If you need something, you can just put out a post saying, "Hey, you guys know me, you know we're part of this community, I'm going through this hard time," or whatever and people are going to look to help you and that's what we're seeing right now.
We're seeing a lot of lives being positively impacted on Steem.
Jerry Banfield:
Yes, it's amazing.
We could probably talk about it for 10 more hours today. I guess an hour we've done a full show on this by now. I'm excited.
I'm planning to do YouTube ads for this, so I hope if you've watched the video at the end of this post as an ad and signed up, would you please comment on @TeamSteem's blog on his newest post to say, "Hey, I saw your video with Jerry. I watched the ad to the end. I'm here and I'm interested in what you have to say," because that helps us to understand what we're contributing.
Does it feel a little obscure for you what you're contributing sometimes when you're just sitting at a computer all by yourself?
Like, what good have I done today reading posts and upvoting?
TeamSteem:
Well, like I said, these cryptocurrencies are very tangible because it's going up in value and looking at it long-term, we're seeing national currencies losing money.
If this continues as we're seeing it, centralized companies and centralized organizations are going to go down in power and influence, and decentralized platforms like Steem and other cryptocurrencies are going up.
In that sense, I see it as very tangible. Sure, the votes and the little stuff on Steem might seem intangible, but overall I feel like all of this is very tangible and it's having a huge impact, a very huge impact.
Jerry Banfield:
It has because all the things you've done have had a huge impact on me and here we are talking about it.
Are you ready to wind it up or would you like to add anything else before we go?
TeamSteem:
I didn't expect that we would go for one hour.
I didn't have anything prepared.
Jerry Banfield:
Me either.
TeamSteem:
One thing I want to mention and it's true that we could go on and on about this. We're very passionate about this. One thing I want to mention is that cryptocurrencies right now, the market cap of all cryptocurrencies are in the top 10 of all the biggest companies.
Right now it might be the eighth-biggest company compared to the SP500, but when it was at its peak, cryptocurrencies were the third-biggest market cap right behind Apple and Google.
Jerry Banfield:
Wow.
TeamSteem:
It’s huge and we're still after the crash or after the correction, we're still in the top eight. It's absolutely huge and if we're looking only at Bitcoin it's in the top 50 biggest companies and Ethereum on its own it's in the top 100.
This is a very serious thing. People need to take this seriously and learn about this, learn about what money is.
What is it that they're running after?
That's very fundamental to our life and so I think we're going to do more. I feel like we should have more conversations with each other, Jerry, I really enjoyed it.
Jerry Banfield:
I would love to do some more of these as well. I'm grateful I saw someone else interviewed you. I think it was David Pakman and I said, "Hey, he interviewed him. I didn't know you did interviews."
I've enjoyed this call a lot. I feel like we have so much in common. It's almost like we're clones in respective different locations. It's like talking to myself almost, which you know I love to do with all the videos I do.
Oh, now. Here's the one.
Guillaume?
TeamSteem:
Yes.
Jerry Banfield:
Yes, all right.
After one hour and thirty minutes for one interview, I forgot to turn my mic on another one, Guillaume. I've got your name after 20 attempts.
Thank you, Guillaume, for doing this with me today and for listeners, watchers and readers, thank you for making it all the way to the end here with us.
We'll hope to see you again on another one of our posts soon.
TeamSteem:
Yes, thanks, Jerry.
Thanks, everyone.
It was a real pleasure.
Jerry Banfield:
All right. I guess I'll turn it off now.
TeamSteem:
All right. I really enjoyed it.
Final words
Thank you for reading the second part of the interview, which was originally filmed as the video below.
If you found this post helpful on Steem, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed?
Love,
Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk on the transcript from @deniskj
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