Richard Muirhead, Managing Partner at Fabric Ventures: WTF is Web 3.0?

Richard Muirhead is the Managing Partner at Fabric Ventures. In this conversation, Richard and Anthony Pompliano discuss privacy by design, rational optimism, data sovereignty, the importance of encouraging experimentation, the key components of Web 3.0, and modern monetary theory. ----- Curious about Cryptocurrency but don’t know where to begin? Storm Play is a free and fun way to start earning in exchange for you time. Simply download, register and discover microtasks that meet your interests and be rewarded with Storm Bolts. These Bolts can then be converted and withdrawn into your favorite cryptocurrency, including Storm Token, Ethereum (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC.). Earn cryptocurrency rewards by playing new games and trying out cool products! Download the app to start earning crypto here! https://bit.ly/30pSxh9 (Available for iOS and Android). ----- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  Richard Muirhead is the managing partner at Fabric Ventures. In this conversation, we discuss privacy by design, rational optimism, data sovereignty, the importance of encouraging experimentation, the key components of Web 3, and modern monetary theory. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well.

• 0:36Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:18Speaker 02

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  Alright guys, bang bang, I'm here with Richard, all the way in New York City during Blockchain Week. Thank you so much for taking the time to come do this.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  Great to be here.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's a busy week for everybody, so if I can get people to sneak off here, it's fantastic. We had Max on from the fabric team already, so I love the fact that we can get another perspective from your team. Maybe let's just start with your background, right? So you're not American and you've done a whole bunch of stuff kind of pre-cryptos. Maybe just go over some of that.

• 2:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks, no problem. Yeah, so, yeah, no, I'm not American.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  The accent did not give it away.

• 2:22Speaker 03

  It did not give it away, although I like to say sometimes I have a bit of a mid-Pacific accent wherever that comes from. And I do have American family, so my stepmother actually is over in Santa Fe, New Mexico. So I like to know, I understand a little bit about Americans.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  Every American other than New Mexico just said Santa Fe is not America, but yeah, you're right.

• 2:42Speaker 03

  She grew up in Missouri.

• 2:44Speaker 00

  That's the heart of...

• 2:45Speaker 03

  Tuscany, Missouri.

• 2:46Speaker 00

  That is definitely the heart of America.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. But that happened later. My parents are Australian, so they grew up in Adelaide and then they, after a few back and forth, they shipped us over to the UK.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  And so I grew up then after about seven in London, where it was about as bad as it is today in New York. Always held that against them a little bit. And then I wanted to be an engineer, I guess. I went off and did engineering at Cambridge and there was a sort of very general course. Thought kind of being involved in fast cars would be fun, so I worked with Lotus and McLaren. But figured out pretty quickly that maybe there was more mileage in being in software in the mid 90s. Actually kind of figured with my brother that the closest we could get to being in rock and roll was to actually be involved in the internet. My dad had been in the music business, so it kind of made sense in some way.

• 3:45Speaker 03

  And so we built a company, a telecom software company whilst my brother was still at university, but a couple of years after I'd come out of university. And that was a telecom software company. And then we went on and built another company. I built another company. Called in the data and automation space, but some of my kind of, I guess, formative experiences, maybe even predated that.

• 4:13Speaker 03

  I was, I guess, in the eighties, you know, we still had Soviet Russia in Europe. And this is a bit of a common theme with the Europeans coming on the podcast here with Max. And it's true, of course, you know, Europe has experienced different forms of extreme politics over the last hundred years. That has not been the case here in the US. And, and so I actually had the chance to go over there in like eighty seven and eighty eight. And, you know, I guess a confession is that I could see the logic of what they were trying to achieve with. You know, the address the inequality that can occur under capitalism. But, you know, nonetheless, you could also see how that can go wrong in the extreme forms.

• 5:00Speaker 03

  And, and I think that experience, and in fact, I was actually went back in ninety five. And worked there for a little while and saw the aftermath of that kind of seventy year economic experiment. You know, that got me to thinking about, you know, how do we combine? You know, the principles of everybody's, you know, collective interest with the motivational forces of. Entrepreneurialism and the individual and the incentive of capitalism. And it feels like there's got to be a better way than the kind of two extremes that we've seen kind of hitherto.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  Kind of a hybrid. Yeah, kind of a hybrid was being, you know, pitched as collective capitalism, which I think has been around for a couple of decades. By some folks and, you know, I'd seen in the first job I kind of had, I had one, should we say, proper job out of university. Working on, actually in a building society or a mutual. And I saw the power that you could have from actually plowing your profits back into everybody's benefit. Who's in all the stakeholders who might benefit and actually even deploying loyalty schemes. Now, all of this is pretty, is pretty similar to the concept of creating tokens and incentivizing stakeholders and so forth.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  So, you know, it was one in twenty thirteen that my good friend Steve Waterhouse over at Orchid. Sort of reintroduced me to kind of to Bitcoin and crypto and the concept of decentralized autonomous organizations. I mean, it's. It was appropriately crazy to think that this might actually all come together and work and could, you know, not just be a set of technologies, but something that would change, you know, the very substance of society and how we operate. Give more opportunity to individuals, but have produced something ultimately that is of a greater and more equal overall benefit for all of us.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  And as you kind of got indoctrinated into it, this idea of decentralization, but also the coordination of resources seems to have really kind of grabbed hold of you. And that was the thing that you said, hey, if this works, this could be incredibly powerful. Is that accurate?

• 7:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, that's where it kind of, you know, ended up. I mean, my journey before that, I mean, we sort of, as I kind of decided to kind of, that it was going to be a fun ride to get involved in the internet in the mid 90s. You know, I guess my first experience of doing that, which was pretty exciting, was to be, you know, plowing into a new field. And what you find is that in a new field, however young you might be, even if you're in your twenties, we were both in our early twenties, and my brother and I, we set this company up. You have the enthusiasm and the diligence and so to get ahead of the field pretty rapidly.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  And so we were involved in, you know, that first, you know, burgeoning of the kind of whole new IP network, the religious wars going on between that. People forget how crazy it seemed that the IP network could be the one that became dominant. And then the work to try and upgrade it with protocols and make it all kind of, you know, operate for business. So we'd seen that wave and look, it's been used many times as a kind of comparison. You know, in 2013, when I got sort of stuck into Bitcoin and decentralization and also had been observing the, should we say, the renaissance of AI.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  And my second company, which sort of employed some components of AI, built a super scalable kind of database and. You know, model things ontologically and semantically. Actually, we avoided calling it AI because it was so desperately out of fashion at that point in time. But, you know, saw those components, saw how radical the concept of decentralization could be and thought that this could be, you know, something extremely, you know, give you some purpose, like some, you know, mission. And I think that once you've been involved in something that's got some purpose and mission, you you become somewhat addicted to it. And the only mistake I've since made since then is to not think long term about the mission and get distracted by short term life events.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, and to me, you know, one of the things I've thought a lot about is this idea that peer to peer networks, they've existed for a long time, but there was a balance between being able to build a peer to peer network that works and then being able to build a peer to peer network that you can make money from, right? And the element of making money from providing that peer to peer network usually incorporated some level of centralization. So if you look at the Napsters of the world or something like that, and we saw time and time again examples of, yes, there was a element of decentralization in these business models, but because it had that level of centralization, they could easily be attacked or kind of killed off or stopped.

• 10:03Speaker 00

  And it was all because of the capitalism component, right? If somebody just said, hey, I want to have an open source decentralized platform or network, the tech was always there, right? In some form or fashion. It was when we started to apply the business models. I think what we see today is the ability to continue to have these decentralized networks, but there's actually business models attached to it, right? You can do these things without having to have that point of failure through centralization.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  Although although a lot of people would still say that, yeah, we've at least got the design space to build these new, you know, token driven, you know, business models for sure, but ones indeed that that, you know, don't have to have that rent seeking at the at the heart of it. And but I mean, you know, one thing we've been thinking a lot, quite a lot about at Fabric Ventures is is, you know, how hard it is to see exactly how these business models are going to evolve. And if you take the Long view, you realize that actually, of course, that was always the case with each of these ways of computing. But, you know, definitely now more than ever, and just spent this last weekend at Ethereum, for example.

• 11:04Speaker 03

  You can see, first of all, the talent, secondly, the growing optimism. But just there are so many different components of these new business models that people are kind of deploying. You know, different types of tokens, different mechanism design has become, you know, first, you know, right to the forefront of what any, you know, sophisticated project is looking at. And there, and even beyond that, you know, working extremely hard on how do I run simulations of how this is going to work when I roll it out. Because sometimes it's hard to, you know, roll back if you've done that. And even then, of course, you get it to the point where you need to deploy it and hopefully kind of iterate it over time.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  But I, you know, I think that's, that opportunity is now there, although I think we should, you know, be realistic. That it is still hard to know exactly how those are going to fall into place. There's only a couple, say Bitcoin, Ethereum, maybe Maker now, where you could say, yeah, that that feels like it's got like kind of fit between the token economics and the market opportunity, if you will.

• 12:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, and part of it is, I know that from your perspective, this idea of experimentation, right? There's a ton of different teams that are trying all kinds of different business models, different technology stacks, different go-to-market strategies, et cetera. I think that we see, you know, eye to eye on this idea that like, rather than inhibit experimentation, we should actually be encouraging it, right? And we should try to see how many different ways there are to do things in the early stages, because that's really where the innovation will come from. And then only once we see kind of all the options can we say, oh, A and, you know, option D are the two options that are going to work. Let's go put all the resources behind those two. You can't really do that until you see, you know, A through Z, right?

• 12:52Speaker 03

  For sure. I mean, this is the essence clearly of venture capital, that, you know, you accept that there are going to be many experiments and a couple of them are going to land. But I mean, you know, you've got a Environment here, it's like it's fit, it's totally fit for purpose for for generating ultimately some outlier successes. It's open, it's, you know, we've got this new innovative component of trustlessness, or however you want to describe it, trust minimization. And, you know, and it's permissionless, exactly, but permissionless on a level. Uh, obviously that even goes up to getting, you know, governments and regulators and the rest of them concerned. It wasn't, it wasn't quite that level even in the nineties with, with, with the internet.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  Uh huh. And so how do you think about the balance between the experimentation and risk taking, right? And so what I mean by that is, uh, as a venture capitalist or an investor, you want to encourage as much experimentation as possible, right? Because that's ultimately what uncovers the innovation. At the same time, uh, we as investors are incentivized financially to see as much risk taking as possible, right? Uh, from an entrepreneur's standpoint, there's, I think, a much more balanced view, right? In terms of they want to take calculated risks that, uh, have a high probability of being successful. Uh, and if they are successful, have high payouts, right?

• 14:16Speaker 00

  In terms of the value creation. Do you think that those two things are aligned? Or do you think that there's some disconnect there between like the risk profile and the experimentation? Uh, from an investor's perspective and an entrepreneur's?

• 14:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it definitely became clear to me as I crossed the other side of the table. Uh, it became hyper apparent that even though I thought I was someone who was like totally out for taking risk and, and building companies. Uh, that actually indeed as an investor, you, you want the entrepreneur to take more risk on each individual, you know, case. Uh, than perhaps they might even contemplate, you know, being, you know, comfortable with. And, and I think, you know, one of the crucial things, I mean, if you think about, you know, what it is that continues to give the US an, an edge, um, and but I think you, Europe and indeed, you know, China's getting there. Is that, uh, mindset about, you know,

• 15:13Speaker 03

  Taking, you know, definitely, um, uh, in education about, you know, how to, you know, think as an entrepreneur. Uh, and, and, and indeed though, also the safety net. So if you've got to be ecosystem and you can build a company. And if it doesn't work out that it's a billion dollar success, you're going to get snapped up by somebody. Um, that, you know, does give you enough comfort to go for it. It gives you the kind of the safety net, the, you know, the, the, the ropes to, to give you. Um, the confidence to go for it. So, yes, there is, there is definitely a mismatch, but I, but I think. You know, you're only being disingenuous as an investor if you're not, if you're not clear about that, that, you know, someone, I think Steve Blank, who said like, if you connect.

• 15:55Speaker 03

  Uh, you, once you take money from a venture capitalist, you are, you are actually blending the venture capital business model with the business model of. Of your, of your startup and you need to know that. Um, uh, and then, you know, I think from investor perspective, you're, you're looking to not take. Almost any founder and co-founder risk. I mean, it, it's been said a million times, but judging the teams is so important. Um, and then depending on your stage, you work through, you know, technology and product and marketing, the rest of it. Um, uh, but I think I, I sometimes mentally liken it to, uh, absailing. So like you want your whole team to kind of like, uh, pile off the edge of the cliff and commit to what they're doing.

• 16:39Speaker 03

  And actually kind of counter intuitively, like with absailing, if you, for that, so if you kind of hold back, you end up with your face. I mean, you're, you're a military man, you must have done a couple of these things, your face splattered against the cliff. But the more you commit to it, you know, actually, in a sense, you're kind of mastering the risks that you've got there. And I think that's how you want to encourage your entrepreneurs to think, think about.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  It is, uh, pushing the pace and many things in life actually leads to a much farther gains for sure. Um, all right, let's, uh, switch gears and talk a little bit about privacy by default, right? I think that's something that, um. You know, you, you've got some unique ideas around in terms of, uh. Maybe that hasn't been what companies have done to date in terms of most of the business models we've seen in the centralized internet world is get as much data and attention as you can on your platform and then you can figure out tons of ways to monetize that data and attention because there's very little privacy, right? I think that that is switching in a decentralized world. There's decentralization that leads to higher level of security, privacy, data sovereignty, etc.

• 17:45Speaker 00

  How do you see privacy by design affecting business models as we kind of move forward?

• 17:50Speaker 03

  Look, I think where it's going to start from is that actually, you know, and this interesting article just recently from the A16Z crypto guys, you know, that data network effects don't exist. But the essence of that is just saying that actually, you know, to have an edge from data is super tough. Actually, it doesn't get easier to have that edge from data over time. It kind of gets tougher. And so the point about that is that even though we've seen this kind of massive increase in the quantity of data through, should we just call it web 2.0, this, you know, the Uber, you know, Lyft, Facebook, mobile, etc. sort of era, actually a huge amount of that is untapped. And it's untapped because, you know, that might seem contradictory because we know a

• 18:35Speaker 03

  lot of it is being tapped by, for the purposes of advertising, but there's actually way more data that is not being tapped because people are not comfortable sharing it. And so, and they need to share it on an ongoing basis, you know, sort of data has a half-life, yeah, or a super short half-life. It decays and then it's not as useful as it was. So if we really want to move to new business models, if we can, you know, encourage people to, well, to come on to these new decentralized approaches, have self-sovereign, you know, nominal control, ownership and control of their data, and but be more comfortable then to, to release them to, for the purposes of, I mean, you know, medical purposes or the purposes of credit scoring or all of these different avenues, then that can do something

• 19:20Speaker 03

  really useful. The product, the end product can be better because of the use of that data. Now, I think that's easier said than done. And people talk about ownership of the data as being a solution in itself, but it, but it ain't. I mean, because if you own all your data, I mean, imagine how much of that there is. What do you do now?

• 19:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, and I guess really part of this is the data sovereignty is a crucial element, right? It's the the idea that you're flipping, forget a business model, you're flipping a user experience on its head, where it used to be, just give us all the data and we as a company will figure out what to do with it. Now it's you keep all of your data as the user and then we are going to figure out reasons for you to permission us into the data. And in that situation, we're going to have to be really, really smart about providing more value to you than we're taking, right? Or you're not going to permission us.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  But just really smart about the UI UX, like, how do you have that engagement with the user and them feel comfortable, they know what they are actually saying yes to, or even being comfortable, I know the product that I want, and therefore, because I know it's going to be done in a way that my privacy is not be compromised, I'm just going to allow the system to work out what data it needs access to and how, and just like, and run and run with it. But that's a whole sort of new setup that I think we're, you know, we're just at the beginning of scratching the surface on.

• 20:40Speaker 00

  Absolutely. How how does data sovereignty actually become a reality? Like, what are the the things that need to happen there?

• 20:48Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, like, again, we're scratching the surface, I think we haven't even got to the point of having decentralized ID nailed. Yeah, so I think you

• 20:55Speaker 00

  Do you think we need the decentralized ID before we get there?

• 20:59Speaker 03

  I think it's got to be attached to the individual. So, so, and I think someone's going to crack it, as ever, like, I mean, you never really see a runaway platform success without a killer app. So somebody's going to crack a bit of decentralized ID by delivering something. I don't know whether it's storage for photos, or whether it's sharing my notes, or maybe it's something on the DeFi space that's certainly, you know, seems to be gathering steam. But that app will then, you know, support a decentralized identification that then, once you've done that, you'll start, it will start to aggregate your kind of data footprint. And then you'll be in a position to say, right, okay, I'd like to apply that now to another decentralized, you know,

• 21:44Speaker 00

  It's almost like the the shared support across multiple applications or platforms of

• 21:51Speaker 00

  The equivalent of like a decentralized single sign on, right? Would then immediately cement that decentralized single sign on as the default. And that would then kind of set the, the, you know, avalanche off.

• 22:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's, it's the genius entrepreneurs that somehow can build something that is, is going to be, actually could be built out into a platform and be the kind of single sign on. But somehow actually magically, you know, find the, the thing that takes off in the short term.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  Can Facebook decentralize Facebook Connect and that become the, uh, the go to?

• 22:24Speaker 03

  I mean, the one word answer has got to be no.

• 22:26Speaker 00

  Why not?

• 22:28Speaker 03

  I mean, I, so obviously there's lots of speculation and I, I certainly don't have the inside track. Maybe you do, maybe you can give us the inside track.

• 22:35Speaker 00

  I know nothing.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  But, but, uh, uh, and then the speculation is that, that, you know, they create a stable coin. It's used for payments internally, you know, shifts to the kind of WeChat model. And they take it at like a tithe on, on real transactions, perhaps through the messaging platform. Uh, I think they have a, a ton of hurdles with regulation, uh, uh, monopoly, uh, commission. Let's not call that it over here, but anti-competitive trust or something. Um, to, you know, to, to deal with it before they can get to, to that point. Uh, they're going to have to do, you know, such a shift, uh, in terms of their business model. Um, that, uh, I think it's, history would tell us that that's pretty hard to do. I mean, they did a great job, obviously, in, you know, sort of flipping or a little pivot to get mobile

• 23:21Speaker 03

  working for sure. And they've, they've clearly experimented hard and pulled back when things have gone too far. Although in general, it's been amazing how the boundaries of privacy have been, you know, you know, dented. But I think, well, yeah, my soothsaying would be to say that this is a little tricky.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  That's fine.

• 23:41Speaker 00

  I think that it is not unreasonable to think that it's hard.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  Especially, you know, there's advantages to having 2 billion plus people use your service and having tens of billions of dollars in revenue, but there's also disadvantages as well. Because you actually, you've already kind of promised the user an experience and certain things. And so when you go and whether it's intentional or unintentional violate that, right, or change that, some people aren't going to like it.

• 24:08Speaker 03

  But they might, but I think the, I think just off the cuff, the, the, the main objections are going to come from the shareholders. When you say like, I'm going to rebuild the business model. And then they say, well, we're going to have, not going to have the growth that we were going to have. And then it might even come from the regulators if you offer the, from, from governments to say like, you know, some people might say and have said in the press recently that he's got a, there's a pretty extraordinary amount of power. And you say, well, we're going to shift that from being that power base to now effectively somehow having a say over this new form of decentralized ID that, I mean.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  I, see, to me, I think that Bezos and Amazon has way more power and way more potential negative impact than a Facebook, right? Because Facebook is with our personal data, right? In terms of, yeah, they can take our photos, they can take when our birthday is, they can take our messages, right? I mean, there's, there's sensitive information there. But the idea that, I don't know what, Amazon's probably taken about 50% of all e-commerce revenue right now across the globe, right? They are probably supporting, let's call it, benefit it out, 30 to 50% of all cloud computing, right? In at least North America.

• 25:23Speaker 00

  And these are massive numbers, right? And so it's, when you start to look at one company doing that, it is, it's pretty crazy.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, he clearly has an empire. As soon as you have time to kind of launch rockets into space, you know, you probably should have the rest of your, your situation analyzed. But, and, and he's obviously perhaps not, you know, the president of the US is not his biggest fan, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. And, but.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  He doesn't like the Washington Post.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  He doesn't like the Washington Post. But. But I like that's clearly the case, but that's just one example. You've got Facebook, you've got Amazon, you've got all of these tech titans, you know, I think, you know, the narrative is fairly clear that have an access to a huge amount of data and they deliver a service. I mean, let's, you know, I don't think we should ignore that. But ultimately, you know, we shouldn't stop innovating and see if there's a better way of doing things and one where maybe we're less of the product and there's less of a monopoly and innovation creativity can thrive. So.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  Speaking of a better way to do things, before we started recording, we were talking about recessions and monetary policy. And in a recent piece, Ray Dalio described this idea that we've had kind of two monetary policy playbooks, right? So he labels one monetary policy one, which is just the ability for us to cut interest rates. The last two recessions, he's the interest rates have been cut 500 basis points or more. We obviously are sitting at like 2.25, 2.5 now. So unlikely that we can cut five. But the second monetary policy playbook has been quantitative easing, right? And since we are still engaged in

• 27:16Speaker 00

  that, that's also not going to be a very strong tool right now. And so if we were to enter into a recessionary type period, his belief is that we'll go hard on monetary or a modern monetary theory and this idea of, you know, just printing more money in unique ways. How does this affect crypto, right? Is this all important to crypto? Should we not be paying attention to it? Do you think it's just, you know, something that a bunch of academic, intelligent people use to pass the time? Like, where are you out on all of this?

• 27:48Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I would say if you think about, you know, how, why we're excited about, you know, this space in general, like, you know, the web three and decentralized apps and networks, and then sort of tokenization of ownership is a sort of second thread. And then thirdly, this this concept of sound money. I must say probably sound money is the is third fiddle in what, you know, What we focus on, but you know, it makes intrinsic sense that, you know, making vast populations subject to, you know, decisions of, of, you know, centralized government as to how to handle these kind of, you know, complicated situations, you know, is fraught with with danger.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  But I mean, I, I, I think perhaps, I think it's relevant, clearly. Perhaps maybe the bigger issue though is, I think, one of, you know, if, I think I saw a stat the other day that, that, that, you know, there's 20% of kind of middle aged men within the US still don't have a, don't currently have a full time job. And that, that, you know, people speculating, I think, for example, in the context of Andrew Yang's proposed campaign.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 29:03Speaker 03

  Or campaign for presidency of, you know, about, it's fine if we automate all away all of the jobs and that, you know, we have a recession that is driven by this, you know, lack of employment and so forth. And that the people can just retrain, that's not going to happen. So I think perhaps, I don't think you need a print money to do it. But you can, you know, redirect taxes to a universal basic income. I think that has a simplicity and elegance, at least that, you know, appeals to me. And then hopefully that will, it cycles back through the, the economy because you, you know, buying products and services, but also I think it goes back to this question of, you know,

• 29:43Speaker 03

  individualism and entrepreneurialism, it provides, you know, an opportunity for people to, to, you know, have social mobility, to build things, take risks, build things, create things and move up from whatever situation they are into a, to a better one. That, that sounds like a, a good use of, of government tax dollars.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. So one of the things I've talked about previously on the podcast is this idea that. Could we replace UBI as I think it's been proposed with this idea of data sovereignty? Right? So if you think of, why do you get paid? Right? You get paid for either your physical efforts. So you physically create value, you intellectually create value, right? And are paid for it. But there's a third bucket of the data you create, right? Kind of the tertiary value that you create. And in my mind, there's a world where if the technology works, if data sovereignty actually becomes real, if companies want to use the data and there's some permissioning, you know, mechanism that's put in place.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  All of a sudden, everything from your heart rate to how many steps you take to what ads you viewed on the street, to who your friends are, I mean, all this stuff, right? You could actually drive income by simply permissioning that to companies. Now, that is a, what I'll call like a digital basic income, right? So it's not necessarily universal in that everyone gets it just for breathing, right? You do have to opt in, you do have to permission data, you do have to create data, right? But in some form or fashion, that data is almost more valuable than, let's say, the physical labor that somebody could provide, right? In some cases, depending on what the data is.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  Is there legs there? Is that just a kind of utopian pipe dream? Like, what's your thoughts?

• 31:38Speaker 03

  I think there's legs and we discussed some of this with the guys over at Ocean Protocol, who are building kind of data marketplace and on a decentralized basis. And but from what I understand, for those who've really dug into the data, you know, at the moment, it's just speculation that you could generate enough value to really, you know, cover that UBI. So the folks who are smart in this space are still telling me that that's a bit of a stretch. But maybe they're being too constrained in their thinking and that as things roll forward, that will work out. But I think the other thing that's worth, you know, considering though, that if you stipulate that you've got to share that data in order to say, receive UBI. UBI, um, you know, where does that stipulation stop?

• 32:23Speaker 03

  You know, what other um, uh, rules must you adhere to in order to be a good citizen? And and to receive UBI, because I think it opens up that opportunity. And who's who sets those rules? I guess the the government again. But again, I guess, I mean, it probably does go in in in keeping with kind of collective capitalism. You're you're allowing people to contribute as part of the collective. And and government hopefully is getting out of the way as much as possible. But just setting the bare minimum set of of rules for you to be this good citizen and to and to be supported as part of this kind of new global village that we're maybe kind of moving towards.

• 33:04Speaker 00

  So this idea that um, technology can solve our problems, right? Is one that I think technologists really like, right? Because it's a, it almost feels like we are in control of our own destiny. When we can build technology that solve the problems. The issue or the challenge with that is sometimes the tech doesn't work. Sometimes we build technology that works, but it doesn't solve the problem. And then the third and probably the most likely is there's technology that's built that could solve the problem. But we can't get people to use it, right? And I think when I look at web three, uh, that third bucket is like really top of mind of just, it feels like there's a lot of good ideas, but nobody's using this stuff, right? In terms of like real like mass adoption.

• 33:46Speaker 00

  If you take out kind of the Bitcoin, the Ethereum, the the speculation of the the liquid assets and that.

• 33:53Speaker 00

  Are we in a period where, you know, if you look at the ninety eight to two thousand and two internet bubble? All those ideas ended up getting built. It just happened ten years later, right? We we still had food delivery. We still had, you know, all these internet services, etc. So right ideas, probably just wrong time. Are we falling into that trap with some of the web three stuff? Or or do you think that, you know, we can kind of crack through this? And and the user experiences and the user interfaces get better? And and we can really start to get that mass adoption for some of these uh, these applications that are built?

• 34:24Speaker 03

  It'll it'll happen, but I'm, you know, I'm probably I hope to be a rational optimist generally speaking, but I it'll happen. But for sure, it's going to take a hell of a lot longer than we're currently thinking. But there are very concrete reasons why, you know, that it's not panned out so far. I mean, a few few kind of this thoughts. Number one, I think if you overfund projects, I think I'm not sure you're doing them necessarily a great favor. I think there's a lot of wisdom in Goldilocks, seeing the kind of funding of projects scarcity, you know, it's a sort of motherhood of all and invention.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  You can suffocate a project, just like you can starve it.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And and so I think that's been one thing that clearly we've witnessed. It's well discussed, of course, the issues with scalability. So that's, you know, perhaps one constraint, although it's not like we see lots of apps not succeeding because they haven't scaled yet. Usability and that's a focus on even go to market is one that's been a problem. But but I think this next in this next wave, as security gets addressed, as sort of governance gets addressed, and also the kind of language question gets addressed. I think, you know, the the rise of Wasm, you know, as opening us up to a whole bunch of different, like, well understood languages that can be used to then build decentralized applications,

• 35:44Speaker 03

  that's going to be a big move, you know. It's hard to script on Bitcoin. Solidity is a big step forward, but still, you know, pretty challenging. I think Wasm is gonna take us forward because at the end of the day, it by definition, very few of the experiments will work. But if your experiments are tough to do, take a long time to come through to fruition, you know, you're not going to get to that one or two or three per hundred that's going to really kind of drive the success.

• 36:10Speaker 00

  As somebody told me, the ERC twenty standard shook the world, right, in terms of a single, a single thing that really kind of changed the way I think people think about building applications and think about building technology in today's world. So it's pretty pretty cool.

• 36:24Speaker 03

  I think it's a good a good reference to, I think it was seven days that shook the world was referenced to the Bolshevik revolution back in there. So hopefully this can be a have a better outcome.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Before I finish up, I always do a rapid fire. Most important company in crypto other than fabric.

• 36:44Speaker 03

  And we definitely wouldn't say that, but um, so definitely with fans and they are in our portfolio, fans of the guys over at Polkadot, you know, I think, you know, you've got a very strong team there, which has got experience and things that went right and wrong historically within Ethereum, as they always do, that have gone out and been sort of delivering on time, you know, trying to address, you know, what I think is a pretty critical issue around interoperability. So there's a lot of debate about, obviously, do you have one blockchain to rule them all? Or do you have, you know, many of them? I think, you know, we've seen sort of a growing consensus, perhaps, that Ethereum might be the kind of DeFi, you know, blockchain. And personally

• 37:25Speaker 03

  speaking, what resonates for me in that context is that, um, so having worked a lot at trying to, in the product role within companies, as I've built them, you know, for the first 15 years of my career, the whole Jeffrey Moore concept of the whole product, all of the different things that are required to really make something work and get adoption. I think we, we sort of, we're still very technologically sort of centric in how we think about this exciting, you know, new wave. I think blockchains are going to require all of that. There's going to be the language and the developers and the preference and the brand and the services around them that will make them work for a particular sector, say like DeFi. So on that basis, we're going to, there's going to be a tapestry of blockchains

• 38:08Speaker 03

  and they need to interoperate. And I think, you know, Polkadot can help address, you know, important parts of that and scalability to boot. So these guys, I think, are onto something.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  Got it. What regulation would you change or improve if you could?

• 38:24Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm certainly not qualified to talk about regulation. I tend to think that these guys just need to sort it out. But I mean, I might say that I think that there's areas where more regulation can actually be kind of co-opted by crypto in a positive way. So to give you an example, I think that GDPR, which I think in Europe, the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe, which obviously also applies to companies who are dealing with European, you know, customers, they, they I think that almost in a sense could be the beginning of a little bit of a third way. And I don't know whether you've heard people talk about this, but you know, I would kind of balance again between, you know, the state caring about the rights of the individual, but yet allowing

• 39:07Speaker 03

  individuals, they can have their freedom with respect to data, you know, and something that's a little less Wild West than the US and maybe a little less controlled than China. So I think you can bake some of that into crypto, so some more regulation around in that area could be good.

• 39:27Speaker 00

  Got it. Most important book you've ever read?

• 39:30Speaker 03

  I'm not sure whether I'd describe it as most important. And, you know, I love books like The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley and Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee, those for me are, you know, sort of foundational ones, but for some reason, whenever I try and think about this, I come back to a book called Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein.

• 39:56Speaker 00

  Stranger in a Strange Land?

• 39:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:58Speaker 00

  Okay, what is that?

• 39:59Speaker 03

  Well, so it's science fiction. Essentially, it's a retelling of The Jungle Book where rather than having kind of Mowgli get brought up by wolves, this human gets brought up by Martians and comes back.

• 40:16Speaker 00

  So you believe in aliens?

• 40:19Speaker 03

  A hundred and fifty percent.

• 40:21Speaker 00

  You fit in around here.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  They're amongst us, but.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  What happens in the book?

• 40:27Speaker 03

  Well, so the mission goes a bit wrong and I think I read this when I was like 10 and they, he gets rescued and he comes back to Earth when he's like 20. And really the lesson is that he then shakes everything up and forces people to question the whole way in which sort of society is constructed.

• 40:50Speaker 00

  Cause he's like, this is how the aliens live?

• 40:52Speaker 03

  Well, he's just got this very, he's, he's blessed with a slightly messianic kind of set of superpowers. So that sort of helps, helps him shake things up. And also he's inherited all the money from the kind of colonization of Mars. And actually, in some senses.

• 41:07Speaker 00

  So the book is about Elon Musk.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  The book is about Elon Musk. But, but you can, indeed, indeed, you know, maybe like, you know, question everything, whether it be, you know, use of drugs or the way government should work, or how we should think about religion, or families, or power, you know, power and, you know, the oil industry, yeah, question everything. So, uh, doesn't tell you what to believe the book, but it, it, it tells you, uh, perhaps you should question more things.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  Got it. That makes, uh, makes sense. All right, aliens, 150% is a pretty big number. Uh, why so confident?

• 41:42Speaker 03

  Hmm. So I think that, uh,

• 41:50Speaker 03

  you know, it's quite interesting to try and get out of your human worldview. Um, and, and understand that the same things we're trying to bring back to the way we interact with each other with these technologies and the, of decentralization, the kind of implicit trust you can have for individuals and, and machines across the, the network, that's, that's a good thing in that context. But I think, um, uh, the opposite is also true, that, that our understanding of the universe is massively constrained by that perspective. Um, and I just.

• 42:26Speaker 00

  There's just gotta be something bigger out there.

• 42:28Speaker 03

  There's gotta be something broader and bigger and, and like, you know, I think even, uh, being arrogant enough to think that you can even analyze it as a human, it doesn't make much sense to me.

• 42:38Speaker 00

  Would you rather go to the depths of the ocean or to space?

• 42:42Speaker 03

  Uh, certainly space, definitely had the astronaut dream growing up. Um, I just think, you know, it's beautiful, incredible perspective. And at the end of the day.

• 42:53Speaker 00

  I don't know very many kids who were like, I want to be a submarine, uh, and go to the depths of the ocean. Like, that wasn't my thing.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  I mean, even with the claust-, I mean, uh, think about the claustrophobia element, you know? And, and, and it's sort of dark and it, no, it doesn't sound good. And the space sound good. I can remember going to IMAX in, uh, Florida when I was like 19 and that was, that was pretty. But I think.

• 43:12Speaker 00

  I'd love to go to like a volcano on the crust of the earth in the ocean.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  Like where life began or kind of like this.

• 43:19Speaker 00

  Well, like go inside the volcano that is at the bottom of the ocean.

• 43:24Speaker 03

  This is sound like a bon baddie sort of layer you're wanting to kind of construct.

• 43:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't I don't know why. I just like for some reason, the idea of you can't go inside a volcano on the crust of the earth, not at the bottom of the ocean, right? Because they're active. So you can look inside of them. You can do that type of stuff, but you can't actually like go down into the volcano. Uh, if they are under the ocean, you can though.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  I think it'd be a good one day trip.

• 43:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, you don't have to live there.

• 43:51Speaker 03

  I'm thinking of the space, though, like that, you know, it gives you perspective. And I think perspective gives you some kind of happiness at the end of the day.

• 43:59Speaker 00

  All right. Psychopath test. How long do you dunk Oreos in milk?

• 44:04Speaker 03

  Hmm. Hmm. Yeah, well, I mean, Oreos, I think I only eat Oreos and like ice cream.

• 44:13Speaker 00

  And ice cream? Okay. That's like frozen milk.

• 44:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I like I like I like um, I like having, do you know if I said I wanted a flat white brevet, would you know what that was?

• 44:24Speaker 00

  No, other people in the room are shaking their heads. Yes, like like saying I'm an idiot for not knowing what that is. What is that?

• 44:29Speaker 03

  Well, that was taught me by my Missouri stepmother.

• 44:33Speaker 00

  It's a flat white. Say it again.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  Brevet, it's just with half and half apparently, but in a kind of.

• 44:39Speaker 00

  Listen, people in Missouri, they say wild stuff. They eat, I don't know, they like milk their own cows and then some from Missouri should tweet at me and tell me I'm a bad person for saying that.

• 44:48Speaker 03

  We should go back to that. There's some uh, there's a great book about going back to kind of like making your own own bicycle and milking your own cows.

• 44:56Speaker 00

  Really? What's that book called?

• 44:57Speaker 03

  Uh, it's it's the magazine is called The Idler. It was written by a guy called Tom Hodgkinson.

• 45:03Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 45:04Speaker 03

  Uh, and it was it was, how to be idle and how to be free. Those are the two books.

• 45:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, uh. I'll let you ask me a question to finish up, but before I do that, uh, there's this wild theory that I have, uh, which is not fully fleshed out. So I caveat all of this with, uh, I don't even know if I believe this yet. Um, but if you think of Bitcoin's deflationary structure and, uh, disinflationary supply schedule, uh, it actually incentivizes people not to spend Bitcoin, right? It's store value, hold it, and it'll increase in value. Uh, and if Bitcoin became the global reserve currency, uh, would we see a world that returns back to minimalism? Because it would actually drastically increase the incentive to not

• 45:53Speaker 00

  buy all the bullshit that people buy and have all the material goods that we don't need.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  I love it. That's, I think you should read How to be Idle, How to be Free. It's basically that.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  The idea of how to be idle and free sounds like exactly what I should read.

• 46:06Speaker 03

  Yes, but it comes down to not buying all the bullshit.

• 46:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:09Speaker 03

  And not getting sucked into, unfortunately, what happens in the Facebook news feed half the time.

• 46:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:15Speaker 00

  It's, uh, it's

• 46:16Speaker 03

  Emotional manipulation.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  People own a lot of knickknacks that they don't need.

• 46:19Speaker 03

  Plastic knickknacks, even worse.

• 46:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. Trust me, we could talk about this for days. Uh, all right. Well, one question you have for me to, uh, finish up.

• 46:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. So like, I mean, I, I, I mentioned earlier that I'd seen that you had a military background. Haven't had a chance to discuss that with you. Clearly that's a super fascinating topic in itself, but we also managed to make the, the leap from there to, to business and, and now to, you know, your own businesses. Do you have any kind of, you know, I think this is a critical issue for a lot of people who've been in the military. And whilst I'm a kind of big believer in kind of small government and nonviolence, you know, military is kind of part of that detente you probably require.

• 47:03Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 47:04Speaker 03

  So how do we look after people when they're coming out of the military to help them be as, least as successful as you have been in that transition? Cause it doesn't always work out so well.

• 47:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I think, uh, the, first of all, uh, coming out of, I think it was Vietnam. I want to script the data so somebody will correct me on the internet. Uh, but it's like 80% of Fortune 500 companies were run by military veterans as CEO. Right? And some of that is misleading in the sense that just like everyone went. Right? So like there was just a high degree of military service. Uh, but also there's a lot of parallels between running a business and being in the military, right? The discipline, the ability to, um, drive, you know, the coordination of resources, the kind of, um, mental fortitude, the, uh, ability to, uh, get people to want to follow you, right?

• 47:56Speaker 00

  All that kind of stuff. Um, I, I think plays into it. Uh, I, I frankly think that, um, there's two components to the transition back, right? So first of all, uh, we don't have people who suffer from PTSD if we don't put them in positions to get PTSD. Which is like the whole idea of like, maybe we shouldn't be so reactive here. We should be much more proactive. Uh, if you are a, I believe now 18 year old in the United States, you lived your entire life with us in major conflict with another country in a violent manner. Uh, that's probably pretty stupid. Um, frankly, uh, there's not very many soldiers that I know that deployed to,

• 48:37Speaker 00

  uh, Iraq and Afghanistan that felt like we should still be there in the manner that we're there. Right? So it's not to say that, uh, we don't have a purpose in terms of there's bad dudes in the world. Right? And, uh, um, that there's, uh, a reason why we have a military, right? And I'd much rather be on offense than on defense. Um, but, uh, there's this guy, Marcus Luttrell, and, uh, he gives a speech. Uh, so he is the soldier who survives in the movie, The Lone Survivor. So four Navy SEALs in Afghanistan, right through them die. Uh, and, you know, these four guys are badasses. They killed 180 guys by themselves. So it's four on like 200. Um, and, uh, what he says is,

• 49:21Speaker 00

  what politicians need to understand is, uh, your job is to be diplomatic. Your job is to negotiate. Job is to keep good relations. Your job is to keep everyone happy with us and your job is to do everything you possibly can not to send me somewhere. Cause when you send me somewhere, I'm gonna fuck shit up, right? And that's my job. But I'm the last resort. So don't send me unless you don't want that to happen.

• 49:44Speaker 03

  Can I have a rapid follow up question then? So that on that basis, are you a believer in kind of uh conscription or kind of universal service? Because it seems to me you're talking about key lessons that come from actually going there yourself or from really understanding that

• 50:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:00Speaker 03

  That is a last resort.

• 50:02Speaker 00

  I I'm more uh, so I think there's a lot of advantages that come out of service in general. Uh, but it had to be military service, but I think, uh, I think a lot of people serve in many different ways, right? So like the difference between a US soldier who goes overseas, right? And is fighting a battle versus uh, somebody who stands outside at Christmas and rings the bell and raises money to help people at home. You could argue right? And I would argue like both of those jobs are important in their own ways.

• 50:29Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  Um, and so I think that it's uh, if you take a nationalistic view of the world, then service becomes a much broader definition. Um, what I think I'm more interested in is like, what does service look like in a globalistic world? So all of a sudden, if you get out of the like us versus them and it's like, hey, we need to have a much better world in general and much better relations between humans. Forget all these imaginary lines we drew. Uh, again, the definition of service changes. Um, but the other piece of it is uh, the best way to win a war is to never have one, right? And the way to do that is actually to have a really strong military.

• 51:13Speaker 00

  And so uh, it's almost this weird paradox of like, you want to have the strongest military because it is actually the greatest deterrent to war. Uh, at the same time, you need to have leaders that are disciplined enough not to use the military that they have when they don't need to. Um, and I think my greatest fear is uh, you know, a couple hundred years ago, we used to have to send people there. I mean, you know, forget a couple hundred years ago, a couple decades ago. We literally had US soldiers rushing the beach. And there was machine guns on the other side and they're just mowing people down. And frankly, it was uh, it was a lottery. Did you get shot or did you not? Right? And it was just wrong place, wrong time, right place, right time, right?

• 51:58Speaker 00

  That sucks. And so we've evolved now to through better technology. Maybe we're not rushing the beach, right? And we can kind of, you know, we invaded Iraq, for example. And we did it in a way where there was much less casualties on a percentage basis. And we did it very swiftly. Like we, we went from not in, you know, in the country to complete dominance of that country in, I think, like two weeks. That's a pretty impressive, you know, display of military might.

• 52:30Speaker 00

  There's a big question, I think, in my mind, and I was in Iraq. Should we have just left after that? Right? We could debate it all day long. I don't know if there's a right answer or not, but I think that that's like a, you know, one way to look at it. The other is if you continue on as technology has gotten better and better, like maybe we don't even need to send as many soldiers. So today we're fighting wars where like we just spend specially trained soldiers, right? If you look at, you know, going to get Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. We sent like less than 20 soldiers, right? I think, I think it was like 18 soldiers or something. We send them into a country, they go and they take out one specific person and they leave, right? Well, eventually that's just going to be drones, which we're starting to see today. And then eventually it's going to be just cyber attacks.

• 53:12Speaker 03

  Is that better or worse? Maybe better on, on the side of drones, but it make, you know, it's kind of, you know,

• 53:19Speaker 03

  rather kind of insulate people from the consequences of war, at least on the other side.

• 53:23Speaker 00

  Well, what happens when it is not even necessarily lethal war, right? What I mean by that is what happens when, you know, terrorism, for example, is simply the ability to drive fear into a population, right? And so one of the, you know, most interesting acts of terror that could happen, that would have a profound effect. Imagine if somebody took down the electrical grid in Manhattan.

• 53:54Speaker 00

  For an hour, eh, you got a lot of pissed off New Yorkers. For two hours, people are annoyed. For a day, hmm, getting a little kind of fuzzy. We get three, four, or five days down the road, you're gonna have people killing each other.

• 54:10Speaker 03

  Sure. So, but why do we think that hasn't happened? It feels to me like there are a lot of imaginative plots that people that don't get executed.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  I think that there's probably a lot of people actually trying. It's just that as technology has advanced, the offense and defense accelerate at very rapid rates in a somewhat balanced way. And so as people get the technology to attack, people also get the ability and technology to defend. And so you get this balance. But ultimately, you know, to bring this full circle back to crypto and Bitcoin, you know, I'm on the record saying that I think Bitcoin is the first weapon of the people that I've ever seen. When it falls in the hands of the wrong group, it can't be used against the people. Right? So if you think of a weapon, if I have a weapon today and I own

• 55:03Speaker 00

  that weapon and it falls into the hands of, you know, an oppressive government, for example, they can turn and use it against me. They can turn and shoot me, right? With Bitcoin, the way that governments actually control and oppress people in many countries, or not necessarily the US, but in many countries, is through inflation, through monetary policy, through capital controls, etc. And so the second that you give the people a way to fight back against that in a nonviolent way, if that government just starts buying Bitcoin, it didn't hurt the people, right? It actually may even help them because of the scarcity component of it and makes it more valuable, right? And so it's a really interesting dynamic of, you know, does conflict in general, maybe it changes, right? I don't think conflict ever goes away.

• 55:47Speaker 00

  But when you start looking at governance and conflict in a world where you take away some of the tools, right? You see Brad Sherman, the congressman in California, talking about banning Bitcoin because it will disempower American foreign policy.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  That's a good thing.

• 56:03Speaker 00

  That guy gets it, right? Like, like, there's an element there of, you know, does this single asset actually create more equality, not only in just the United States, where you actually get less income inequality, but on a global basis, do you get less of the superpowers and you get more kind of evenly distributed economic, you know, freedom? Maybe, right? Or maybe we're all just crazy and this is all theoretical and it just can't happen, right? I don't know. We've seen that yet.

• 56:31Speaker 03

  It's a bit theoretical now, but, but I mean, it sounds like you'd be in favor of that people's weapon being used to, you know, subvert the borders and trade restrictions. And I thought I heard you also say that, that, you know, if you have countries who are trading together, they're less likely actually to go to war. You know, those interconnections tend to, that intermeshing tends to kind of preserve their security over the longer term.

• 56:57Speaker 00

  Look at most conflicts in the world. It really boils down to a very small group of people who either from an egotistical standpoint, a capitalistic standpoint, or literally just psychological ineptitude, decide that they want to do something and they go and they do it, good or bad, right? And so we like to think that we live in very democratic countries around the world, whether it's the United States, you know, making unilateral decisions to go to war, or it's other countries, or even dictatorships. It's usually a very small group of people who make these decisions that have a profound impact on how the world gets shaped and can cause and also solve conflict. And so I think that, you know, if

• 57:41Speaker 00

  you start to take that power and that decision-making away from, you know, a select group of individuals, it's probably better off.

• 57:49Speaker 03

  A good thing. But I mean, I think if you take your broad definition of service, which I think I like, and that makes a lot of sense, and you then make it something that it is universal, folks have to go through that at a certain, you know, age, for example, that feels like also it's going to encourage better decision-making. And maybe we can connect it back to one of the conditions for receiving universal basic income. I mean, it's part of Being a good citizen that you have to, that's a component of society. You give up your data and you have to do your service.

• 58:18Speaker 00

  Here's a free idea I've never told anybody before. Uh, and I have no clue if anyone's ever thought of this. Uh, I would love if somebody's thought of this and I could just read and learn from somebody else. I have to not think about it anymore. I think it would be really interesting to have a program where you have to have national service. But the service was to a country other than Europe.

• 58:36Speaker 03

  Great.

• 58:36Speaker 00

  So you have to serve to, you know, in Israel, for example, you have to be in the military for two years. What if you had to go and actually serve in a country other than the one that you were born and grew up in? I don't know.

• 58:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:47Speaker 00

  There's probably some impact there in terms of, you know, you, you have more empathy, right? For others and so, uh, I have no clue what the ramifications, I haven't thought about it enough. But like, that's the type of stuff where I just don't think we've, we've explored.

• 59:00Speaker 03

  I think it's a great idea. I mean, like, um, you know, in, in the eighties, I've kind of mentioned, we were talking before. There was this concept that, you know, perhaps the Soviet Union was an evil thing, but I just had that opportunity to go and spend time with people and you spend time with people. And of course, you know, you understand them as humans and, uh, and you see beyond that for sure. Uh, and there's very clear statistics, for example, in the UK that, um, the areas frankly, that have got the fewest immigrants. Therefore people have actually only understand the concept of people, you know, coming into their country. Rather than actually having met the individuals are the ones who've voted most for Brexit. Which was mostly a, you know, anti-immigration kind of vote or we could debate that.

• 59:44Speaker 00

  I'm not even going there.

• 59:47Speaker 03

  It's, it's, yeah, we might have a better chance of getting to the other side than the current debate in, in the UK. But nonetheless, let's not start it.

• 59:55Speaker 00

  For sure. Now, listen, I, I really appreciate you, uh, you coming on. Uh, it's great to have you here in New York for blockchain week and lots of this again in the future.

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  Great to be here. Thanks, man.

• 1:00:06Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:00:48Speaker 00

  Hey everyone, Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.