I’m Jeremy’s friend who is working to connect the Tron film audience with the TRX offering using my company’s [www.bigstory.biz] storytelling process.

To be clear, ours is NOT in any way an investment strategy, that’d be insane, since, as Jerermy says, I’m new to blockchain/crypto. While our group [30 ‘friends of Tron’] includes several experienced investors, it’s primarily composed of noobs looking to learn about blockchain who think this is a a great way to do it. We’re not making financial investments, we’re making learning investments, by testing a storytelling theory as it relates to crypto currencies and blockchain platforms.

Further to the podcast interview:

The original Tron film premiered in 1982. A 35 year old film with a cult following would not, in itself, be sufficient to justify our experiment. What makes it a worthwhile experiment is that Tron offers what call a ‘lively story field,’

The Tron story field is enlivened by multiple factors:

– several of us conducting the experiment worked on the original film, so it’s a story we’re passionate about, and it makes the experiment a lot of fun. On a personal level, it’s a re-birth story we’re enacting.

– the producer of the original film today owns the world-famous Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, and is partnered with a multi-billion-dollar Chinese electronics company, TCL, which bought the naming rights to the Theatre.

-the original producer’s wife is a French-born actress who speaks Mandarin and starred with Jackie Chan in a Chinese-made film released in 2013. She has a following in Asia.

– Tron’s narrative elements include: a memorable arcade game that accompanied the original film; social media networks of Tron fans; a recent sequel, Tron: Legacy; two legit sound tracks, by Wendy Carlos and Daft Punk; an animated television series shown all over the world; and the most popular attraction at Shanghai Disneyland, which opened in June 2016, is the Tron ride, which doesn’t exist at any other Disney theme park. All this means that the story field is multi-generational, multi-cultural, and isn’t limited to chronological time–all important factors in bigSTORY’s process.

– the Tron story field is well-articulated, and offers a relatively easy-to-identify audience, i.e. it’s easy to characterize who’s in the field, and who isn’t. Jeremy, who saw the original film when he as a kid, is an example of someone who’s in the field.This isn’t often the case for blockchain products, or for most products generally. Most customer audiences are less articulated and identifiable. Most story fields have fuzzy boundaries. And most product marketing has to tap into multiple story fields to pay off. The easily-identifiable audience makes our experiment more viable, because it’ll be easier for us to quantify outcomes.

– the fact that Disney owns the Tron IP adds to the ‘testable’ aspects of the experiment. What happens if they sic their lawyers on TRX? That’d be part of the experiment too. What would make that scenario compelling is that it would mirror the Tron mythology– a centralized authority [ENCOM and its Master Control Program] attempting to destroy the creator of original IP [Flynn/Jeff Bridges], who wants to preserve his equity in the games he designed [Space Paranoids!]

For whatever reasons, aside from a couple of passing responses to people asking about it on his live Periscope feeds, we haven’t seen Justin Sun or the TRX team reference the Tron film story. If Team TRX don’t make any efforts in that direction, it will be very hard for Team Tron to do it on our own, no matter how much energy we put into it. For example, it’s perfectly possible for us to host a U.S. launch event at the Chinese Theatre, and even have Justin Sun imprint his hands and feet in cement in the forecourt of the Theatre, just like George Lucas, Brad Pitt and Jackie Chan. But if he and TRX don’t want to play that game, we can’t very well play it on our own.

In terms of how TRX is approaching the narrative for the currency, it’s consistent with our storytelling approach. It seems to us they’re playing the long game, and assembling a team that can play it. They’re making solid moves, recruiting pedigreed developers, signing partnerships, finding mentors, dealing with policy issues related to the Chinese gov’t and decentralized control. They’re building a foundation, and they don’t seem overly-obsessed or predictive about what will end up getting built on it, which is an honest approach, because, really who knows? We always advise our clients to have the courage to begin a story without needing to bullshit the world about how it’s going to resolve.

Thanks for your podcast. I found it smart, enlightening and refreshingly honest and skeptical. It was like breathing fresh air in a smoke-filled auditorium. Team Tron will be following!