Ryan Shea: Battling the Internet Giants Pt. 2

Ryan Shea is the Co-Founder of Blockstack, a new internet for decentralized apps. In this conversation, Anthony Pompliano and Ryan discuss freedom of speech, the manipulation of user data in the digital world, how decentralization will improve the internet, and how governance will evolve in the digital age.

• 0:02Speaker 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.

• 0:14Speaker 00

  Ryan Shea is the co-founder of Blockstack, a new internet for decentralized apps. In this conversation, Ryan and I discussed freedom of speech, manipulation of user data in the digital world, how decentralization can improve the internet, and how governance will evolve in the digital age. Ryan is well-read and refreshingly intelligent. There are many great takeaways in this one, so I hope you find it as valuable as I did.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  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. Alright guys, here with Ryan Shea. Welcome. Thank you for coming to spend some time with us.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Tom.

• 1:11Speaker 00

  Absolutely. We'll try to keep this under two hours.

• 1:16Speaker 00

  Alright, so for people who don't know, let's just go through kind of your background. Where'd you grow up, you know, high school, what are your interests, all that, and then we'll get into some of the later years.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Sure. So, I grew up mostly in Seacock, New Jersey. Actually, my parents moved around quite a bit when I was younger. I was born in White Plains, hopped around New Jersey a little bit, Connecticut, New York. But I went to Seacock High School. I was very interested in science, mathematics, was captain of the cross-country team.

• 1:53Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  You know, captain of indoor/outdoor track.

• 1:58Speaker 00

  What's the farthest you ever run?

• 2:00Speaker 01

  The farthest?

• 2:01Speaker 00

  In one setting?

• 2:03Speaker 01

  You know, it's not actually that far, just like 15 miles. I've never done a marathon before.

• 2:07Speaker 00

  Really?

• 2:08Speaker 01

  No, but it is something that I want to do. It's most, I mean, you know, you think like we were doing 5K 3.1 mile races.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  So it was a much shorter distance, and in track, my main distance was a mile. Uh, so, um, that was really what I specialized in. I also did two miles, also did like half a mile, uh, you know, eight hundred, um, four by four.

• 2:30Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Uh, some occasionally four hundred, but that was my.

• 2:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Forte in particular.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  It's a, running, running's a wild sport.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  I know, yeah.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  You get into all the details.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:39Speaker 00

  Uh, alright, so, uh, Seacocks High School, and then where'd you go after that?

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Uh, then I went to Princeton.

• 2:44Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  Uh, went there was, did, um, mechanical and aerospace engineering for my major.

• 2:50Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  And then did a minor in computer science.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  Got it. And, uh, that, that's not a very common major, so what was kind of the thought process? You know, what were you gonna do afterwards?

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I was always interested in, in, in inventing things. Uh, my, my grandfather, who's an inventor, he has seventeen patents, um, across like, that, that have been used in so many different places. I mean, pretty ubiquitous, like, he has patents that were in, like, the sprinkler systems that power most of the buildings in the city, um, you know, since the seventies, um, patents in, uh, the, uh, the lunar landing module, stealth bombers, all, you know.

• 3:29Speaker 00

  All kinds of stuff.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Weapons used in the Vietnam War, et cetera, et cetera, right? Um, so things like that, I was just super, super interested in, um, and he would like sit down with me and, and we would go through some, like, uh, engineering puzzles and things like that, and they're just super fascinating. So, a, a, a big part of that, um, really sparked my interest in being an inventor, and that's what, you know, when you're, when you're in high school, uh, there is no, the closest thing to that is actual science, so that's why, like, that's why science was, was what fascinated me the most, you know, physics, chemistry, uh, biology, human anatomy, uh, just everything was just, that was, that was what I grasped on to, and, and of course mathematics, because it's so, uh, so interrelated.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Um, didn't have any computer science classes in high school, um, would have, I wished, you know, wished that I could have had that opportunity, but, um, when I went to, uh, when I went to college, you know, um, At that point, I was interested in really inventing things, specifically things that were like in the physical world. That's why mechanical engineering really, really spoke to me. And of course, computer science is important for, as a component of that, so that's why I was also interested in computer science. But it was less like in terms of like, I was less excited about like just pure software at first. That I grew to love more and more over time.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  And, and part of that was, you know, so I did mechanical and aerospace engineering, I did computer science. I also was very involved in the entrepreneurship club from, you know, throughout my entire college career. There was a story that one of the, one of the presidents of the entrepreneurship club when I was a freshman said was like, that we had this, this fair for all the different clubs. And he told, I, I actually don't remember this, but this is what he says, that, his name is Nikhil. He, he says that when we went to sign up for it, I was the first person online to join the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  And then later throughout my career, I ended up being a president and, and started a bunch of initiatives, including Hack Princeton, one of the largest hackathons in the world and all these other initiatives, like really, you know, tripled the size of the, of the programs at the school.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  But anyway, so I was interested in mechanical engineering, interested in physical products, started getting deeper, deeper into software. And this is, this is 2008 when I was starting my college career. And this was like, you know, around the time when Y Combinator was starting to gain some steam. It was around the time when, when Facebook was becoming popular. So it was, I would say, you know, to some extent, before 2005, before 2004, there wasn't that much of a,

• 6:21Speaker 01

  there, there wasn't as much like methodology around starting a company. There wasn't as much knowledge or like, like just startup books or, there wasn't, there wasn't much of an industry around it outside of the like.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  It was somewhat esoteric, I would say. It was like, I think it was pretty confined to Silicon Valley. It was pretty, there wasn't much information sharing. It was harder for people to kind of, to kind of get in and learn how to build software, just pure software companies.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  And it seems like that really picked up around that time. And as part of that, I started to get interested.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  You think that's because the media was kind of sensationalizing, you know, hey, look, here comes these companies that are growing really fast and there's a lot of money being made by, you know, kind of the Silicon Valley, you know, heroic entrepreneur? Or do you think it was something else that was driving that narrative and kind of the interest into, you know, technology startups, etc.?

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think it was a lot of forces. I think like, you know, after the dot com crash, there was like a somewhat of a lull in the industry. That's one thing.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  I do think that the rise of Facebook, the media attention around it was a very important factor. Obviously, the rise of Amazon, the rise of Google, many other, many other internet businesses that people were starting to get really exposed to. Also, I think Y Combinator was very important, starting up in 2005.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  I also think, I don't know, for some reason or another, there were a lot of,

• 8:04Speaker 01

  there were classes that were starting, that were coming out that were around entrepreneurship and startups. There were books that were coming out, Four Steps to the Epiphany,

• 8:16Speaker 01

  you know, Lean Startup, some books like The Hard Thing About Hard Things came out later. I mean, there's just like some things that you didn't see as much of that earlier. And I'm not exactly sure why, but there's something around.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Maybe you needed some level of critical mass, some amount of people having exits and going to start on their next company and so on. You had people, obviously the PayPal mafia, then the second derivative of that, you know, the next step. I think all those things are very, very important and the intermixing and that just led to much more of a visible industry around startups and entrepreneurship. And that started to really pull on me and I got really, really excited about that throughout my college years.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Okay, so this is like 08 into 10, 11, right, all of that's going on. Where was your interest or where did you think you were going to end up kind of post-college? You know, kind of sophomore, junior, going into your senior year? What was the plan?

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I always wanted to start a company. Actually, the first time I applied for Y Combinator was in 2010.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  So with a really good friend of mine, who was a previous president of the Princeton Entrepreneurial Club, and he was a, you know, also knew him from the Computer Science Department, his name is Joseph Prilla, and we were, we actually applied to Y Combinator as a late application in 2010. What we were going to do is drop out of college and it was going to be his second time dropping at Princeton, actually, because he had actually come back for that, for another one of his companies. So, you know, that early on, I wanted to even start a company and was willing to ditch college to some extent. And my, what I always wanted to do was to start a company right after college. That was like the default path. And I would consider applying to different companies. You know, one of the companies

• 10:08Speaker 01

  that I wanted to work for, like 2011, 2012, was Path. I was really excited about it. Ultimately decided not to and ended up right after college.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Experimenting with a couple of different companies that I was, that I wanted to start. And, and eventually ended up starting a company called GraphMuse in 2012. When I was, when I'd moved to Philadelphia. Right off Queens and worked with two, two friends of mine to start this, this company, which would, which essentially did analysis of social network data in real time using GPU clusters. So we could do pretty extensive analysis of social networking data that is, would normally take hours of computation to do. If you had a single core, normal, normal CPU.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  And we could do it and crunch the numbers and get it, get a, an analysis out in a second or a fraction of a second.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And we could do that for, we, we had a different, couple of different customers that we did this for.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  For example, like gaming companies that they wanted to, for them, it's very important to get the, their viral loop. Like perfect. And they would, they would try to, try to do, and a lot of this was through Facebook. So they would try to, they would, they used Facebook as their main distribution channel and they would get

• 11:39Speaker 01

  people to come and try the, try the game. But before they even started the game, they would have them invite their friends. And we would help them figure out who were the friends that they should surface for them to invite.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Cause the industry standard at the time was just alphabetically sorted list. So all the Anthony's, Andrews and Aaron's of the world were getting like hundreds of invite. I'm sure you probably experienced that.

• 12:06Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  So you were getting like the disproportionate share of all the invites. And we're like, whoa, whoa, this is ridiculous. Let's help, you know, come in and, and.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  And so you do the ranking based on like close friends, engagement.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Close, exactly. Closeness, like proclivity to like that game, things like that.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  And we could do, we actually were able to surface information that people didn't even think that you could get from, from the data. In real time.

• 12:27Speaker 00

  So, so walk me through how you go from that, which is a pretty technical problem, right? And I would consider a, you know, early stage startup where you're selling to other companies, right? Kind of the, the technology and the data, et cetera.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  When do you first come across Bitcoin, crypto, you know, kind of what is that interaction like?

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I would say it's a, it's a pretty, um, it's, it's pretty different and, you know, in that case,

• 13:01Speaker 01

  what,

• 13:05Speaker 01

  I mean, what we were,

• 13:08Speaker 01

  what we were doing was

• 13:13Speaker 01

  helping businesses make better use of their existing data, you know, it sounds like we weren't, we weren't really, we weren't selling data to them. We were helping them take the data that they already had and they already had access to, which are these social graphs of their users.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  And helping them analyze it and get insights out of it.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  And, uh, one of the things that, uh, you know, I, I took away from that was just the level of dependence that not just those businesses, but our own business had on a company like Facebook.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  Yep, platform risk.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Exactly. Huge amount of platform risk and we saw that there, there was like this heyday where there's a lot of businesses that were getting built off of Facebook platform. You know, Zynga, perhaps the most notable, um, and those days soon came to an end.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  Yep. And, and just to clarify, the, the platform risk you're talking about, right? So everyone is on the same page is basically you build a company on top of a platform, right? Facebook had a platform. If you were a gaming company, could come on, they said, hey, we'll give you distribution, you know, we'll do all these things. Uh, and then at any point in the future, that platform, whether it's Facebook or some other platform, reserves the right to change the rules.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 14:20Speaker 00

  Kind of, you know, pull the rug out from underneath these companies.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 14:22Speaker 00

  Um, usually not malicious, but you know, they're making, uh, kind of, um, self, uh, self-centered business decisions.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  They're, they're doing what's best for themselves and that has a, you know, material and sometimes negative impact on businesses that are built on top.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  Um, and so I think that, you know, there's a number of companies that, you know, Zynga is probably one of the top ones that, you know, we saw over the last 10 years get built on a platform. The platform changes the rules or, or does something, all of a sudden that business goes from highly valuable to not so valuable.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:53Speaker 00

  Um, and, you know, good entrepreneurs are going to try to navigate the waters to, to find some other path forward. But really what ends up happening is they had the best business when they were built on top of that platform. They no longer can do that.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:04Speaker 00

  And so the warning call to-

• 15:06Speaker 01

  They put too many of their eggs in one basket.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, and the warning call I think to most founders goes out, hey, watch out for the platform risk.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:12Speaker 00

  Right? You know, i- it's a double edged sword. You get the power of the distribution and the connections and the social graph. But at the same time, you know, you always have this thing in your back of your head where we've got really high platform risk.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:23Speaker 00

  And what's gonna happen if the rules change.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. Yeah. And that happens with Facebook with, yeah, I think, Apple, iOS, Android, Google.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And that's what makes those businesses so valuable.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  Right? Is they get the lock in, the network effect.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  That kind of that platform. And then once they have it, it's really hard to unseat them.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Exactly. Yeah. You look at what's happening with Fortnite. I mean, they're circumventing the Google Play Store altogether so that they don't have to worry about the 30% cut.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Yeah. So, so, so explain this more, what's going on right now? Because I don't think probably a lot of people understand.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Sure. So, um, so there's this, this game, probably, I think, maybe the most popular game right now?

• 15:59Speaker 00

  It's probably the most popular and probably the, one of the highest grossing of all time.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Highest grossing, yeah. Of all time? Wow, okay.

• 16:04Speaker 00

  Uh, look how many video games are making billions a year.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, seriously. Yeah. Okay.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  Was it top 25?

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So I think it's at least the top grossing right now.

• 16:13Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Um, but yeah, it might be, I have to look into that. But it's, you know, and it, and it's like highest in terms of live streaming, maybe highest in terms of, it's up there in, in users, whatever.

• 16:23Speaker 00

  Very, very popular.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  It's very popular. Um, and they are making enormous amounts of money. They really frustrated about the fact that the Google Play Store is taking 30% of all revenue through the store itself. Just like Apple does. So I think 30%, if you're making, you know, if you're one of these companies, you bring in a hundred million dollars, well, um, now, Google or Apple, they take 30 million.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  You know? And then that, you know, that's just a huge chunk of your business that's being pulled out. So what they're doing instead is they're allowing the user, they're telling the users, you cannot download it from the, from the Play Store. You have to download it this way. Um, and they provide instructions on their site. And then if you download it, they can circumvent- The the process completely.

• 17:10Speaker 00

  It's kind of, I mean, Audible does this, right? In in terms of the the audiobooks.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Oh, web purchases, yeah.

• 17:15Speaker 00

  So what what you can do is you can download the app in the App Store. Right? But you're you cannot purchase an audiobook via the mobile app. Right? Because they would be subject to that thirty percent fee from Apple or Android.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 17:29Speaker 00

  And so instead, they say you have to go to the web and you can purchase books there and then download it to your phone. And so, you know, Fortnite is not the first one to do this, but but I think they're kind of the latest example of people circumventing that platform.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Yep, exactly. And in a big part of a big problem with this whole situation is that you have components that these businesses produce and provide that they work well together. But the business is saying, if you use this, you have to use everything else that we provide. And you have to do it exactly the way that we say, or else you're out. And, you know, you you have an iPhone. The iPhone has to use iOS. Right? That's the operating system. That's what you see on your screen. When you're on your iPhone with iOS, you have to use the Apple App Store. Right? You have to use, you have to use some version of Safari.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  On even if you're using Chrome on your iPhone, that Chrome browser is actually WebKit in the background with some modifications, which is, you know, so so so Apple is still requiring that you use some kind of version of Safari under the hood behind. Behind Chrome. So Apple is saying, in our ecosystem, you play by our rules and you use every single thing that we do, even if. And we, by the way, we take thirty percent of all of the transactions that come through, every single purchase, every single in-app purchase, everything. And that causes lots of problems for

• 19:01Speaker 01

  for innovation, for competition, for like creating a viable business. And obviously, a company like Amazon is not happy about that, which is why that they do the purchases in the web. And I, you know, I'd actually be curious what would happen if Apple said, you know, even that you can't do. What would happen? I mean, what?

• 19:19Speaker 00

  But could they, could they actually stop somebody from doing that? Right? Could they basically say, you know, if you want your app in our App Store, we're going to tell you how to run your business off of our operating system?

• 19:32Speaker 01

  They could in the web. I mean, there are things that they could do. It just depends on what are they willing to do. So for example, what they could do is they could say, Amazon, if you don't give us 30% cut through amazon.com when people are on our phones, then we will block your domain. Right? Now, they would, they would never do that. And part of the reason is because there is, there is precedent for that. There is like, we have gotten so accustomed to a free web, where like, there aren't restrictions of the things that you can do when you visit a website. But we've also, when it comes to native apps, gotten accustomed to a world where there are gatekeepers.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  So we're just, we're just used to that. It's kind of like, there's like a precedent. There's like case law. There's like a, in some, some kind of habituation. And so they would, to some extent, I think if they were to say, amazon.com, we're blocking you on mobile devices. Well, there would be two issues. One is their users would be very angry and potentially it would be give them a reason to switch to another phone. The second issue is it would probably cause enough of a,

• 20:51Speaker 01

  enough of a public backlash or like recognition that that could lead to some kind of antitrust situation.

• 21:01Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  And I think they're caught to some extent, like towing the antitrust line right now where they're like, doing just enough that they can get away with it without the government stepping in and saying, this is, this is not okay.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Well, and I think that what's interesting though is in that situation, Amazon would be the victim.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 21:20Speaker 00

  Right? Because Apple would say, hey, you have to do what we say or you're out.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  But then if you go a step deeper, Amazon is doing this to other people.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 21:30Speaker 00

  Right?

• 21:30Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 21:30Speaker 00

  In their marketplace to say, sure, you can come in and sell your items right in our marketplace, but we're going to take, you know, sometimes more than 30%.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 21:37Speaker 00

  Right? And so I think that.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Oh, and by the way, we're going to take Amazon basics and we're going to service them above your products. And, uh, and we're going to slowly squeeze out your business.

• 21:48Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Right? And, and, and Amazon's doing that to, um, to, to, to potentially millions of business owners across the country.

• 21:55Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. Well, it is, uh, I, I saw a stat and I forget the exact number.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Around the world.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  But it, it was, uh, I think it was like over 30 or 40% of all e-commerce purchases, uh, went through Amazon.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  Right? In some form or fashion, um, in a year. And I was, I mean, it's just, it's insane to think that a company, you know, that what, uh, probably 20 years ago, right?

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:16Speaker 00

  Or, uh, probably no, less than 30 years ago existed now, you know, holds that much.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  Uh, so they've grown pretty quick. Uh, all right. So, so, um, let's go back to, uh, to crypto specifically, right?

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 22:27Speaker 00

  So, um, you know, really into entrepreneurship, uh, you know, obviously understanding the platform risk and all these key components. Like, how do you initially start to explore this idea of decentralization, cryptocurrency, Bitcoin? Like, what, at what point does that start to at least become a thought in your head? And like, what do you do, you know, once you get it?

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Well, actually, so building off of the platform risk, we'll just pick it up right from that point in the, in the story. Um, one pretty jarring thing that happened with that business is, uh, our business relied upon us being able to, um, work with, uh, data.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  That was accessed by these companies.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Through the Facebook platform.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  And Facebook didn't like that we were doing this analysis on behalf of these companies. And they sent us a cease and desist.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  And told us we could no longer operate on their platform in that, in that fashion.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  How'd that feel?

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Uh, that was, that was terrible. That was a, that was a really, you know, rough blow because it, and, and, and of course,

• 23:33Speaker 01

  in retrospect, I would, I would think. Knowing what I know now, it doesn't make sense to, to, to rest your business completely on some other business, right? But when, when you are hit with that, when that is, that is something that comes up, it's a, it's just like, it, it, you know, shatters your world. It's a, it's, it's like, what are we going to do now? I mean, we could, we could have tried to, we could have moved into a different direction, tried to, tried to pivot, come up, come up with a different product offering that was, that wasn't quite the same.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  But it was just a really, really tough situation to be in. And it was either, it was either pivot or, or, or work on something else. And, um, and ultimately, we made the call that it didn't make sense to go forward.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  Yep, absolutely. And, and so, uh, okay, let's go work on something else, right? What, what is kind of that next thing, or would you start exploring from there?

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, so after that, um, I moved back, I moved to New York.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  Like I said, I was in Philadelphia at the time, working with my two co-founders, Tony and Chuck. And so I moved, moved to New York.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  My next, I decided that the next thing that I wanted to do was to start another company.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  But before I did, I wanted to learn from some, uh, from some, uh, successful CEOs, and some industry experts, uh, both about how to run a business and about what are some really, really,

• 25:12Speaker 01

  learn from industry experts about problems that they, uh, come across

• 25:19Speaker 01

  on a daily basis, um, or that they're addressing, or that they have quite a bit of exposure to. And so I did two things. One, I

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Got a job at this health technology company called OmniActive.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Shadowing the CEO of that company. I shadowed him for about six months. And then the second thing that I did was, I was really interested in healthcare at the time, and I started shadowing this doctor as well, this gastroenterologist. And really trying to learn both, both how to run a business from someone who, who was running a 200-person business at the time, and also learn firsthand what it's like to be in a doctor's office. What are the types of problems that they're facing? How could technology bring the healthcare space forward?

• 26:22Speaker 01

  And through those two things, I learned quite a bit.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Towards the end, like basically around like May of 2013,

• 26:37Speaker 01

  I started getting, started getting into Bitcoin a little bit. A friend of mine, he kept, kept talking about it, kept introducing me to things, kept sending me all these articles and videos and the white paper.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  And, you know, it was one of those things where at first I'm skeptical.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  But I just kept getting exposed to it. And throughout that month, I got really, really excited about Bitcoin. And around the same time as well, I was living in New York, bumped into my co-founder Minnie, who you had in the podcast earlier. And we just kept bumping into each other in, in the Princeton Club of New York on the street. We decided to get drinks, talking about what were startups and some ideas we had. And at some point, we were like, hey, we should start a company. And that, the, the approach there, it was separate from any particular idea. We were thinking, the team's going to come first, let's start up a company.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Let it, let us experiment with a few different things and figure out what we're both into. Yep. And we can rapidly prototype things and put them on the market and see, get feedback from users and so on. And so we did that. We had a few ideas that we, that we tested. One was. Around like networking and helping people meet each other. Another one was in healthcare. We messed around with a few different things. And all throughout that same time, I still kept getting more and more into Bitcoin. And a big part of this was learning about the Byzantine generals problem, learning about

• 28:21Speaker 01

  what was the actual technology behind Bitcoin blockchain technology, learning about like, what was the ethos behind it and decentralization? And participating in the Bitcoin subreddit and all these and the Bitcoin forums and all these communities. And I was slowly getting indoctrinated. I was drinking the Kool-Aid and it felt really good, you know? And that's that was I was just getting more and more into that. And as many of I were going through and experimenting with these different products and trying them out and trying one, putting it out on the market didn't work. Let's try another one. Seemed might have been working a little bit, but we hated it, you know, for whatever reason.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Throughout this, a lot of this also that I was really being exposed to, many was saying that I couldn't stop talking about Bitcoin in the office and and just kept getting him into it. And we just start started talking about it a lot more and more. And now at first, again, he's also skeptical, starts starts getting more and more into it as well. And over time, now we're both hooked. And we applied to Y Combinator with this, this product. It was called Scope. It was like I was talking about before, this, this tool for networking, for, for meeting people. It would essentially like you connect your Gmail and your LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook

• 29:47Speaker 01

  and it'd pull in all your data and then it would tell you if you wanted to meet this person, who you should get an introduction to. Like who was the, who was your friend who knew this person the best? Or could possibly reach them because they were coworkers or had some connection? And so we were working on that. We applied to Y Combinator. We, we ultimately got rejected, but.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Even, it's hard to know exactly when this was, but even before, like, it might have been right when we submitted the application or something. We were, we were starting to hatch the ideas of this, of this decentralized internet. Because we were thinking, wait a second, as we're building this, we're running into many different issues with the LinkedIn API and, and Google and Facebook and, and Twitter. And it's such a shame that all of this data that is rightfully the users is being locked up by these businesses.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  It's such a shame that there are so many interesting things that could be built that can't be built in a meaningful way because of the level of control that all these businesses have over the digital world.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  And we thought, well, what would it look like if the internet were different? What would it look like if the internet was really about the people, about the individual user? And the internet revolved around us instead of revolving around data silos. And that's when Blockstack was born. That's when, at the time, the, our first, our first idea for, for the name was called FreeGraph.

• 31:40Speaker 00

  Ah, interesting.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it was the first, the first layer that we were envisioning. The first inspiration was this free and open social graph. It could have, obviously, private data, but the important thing was that it was free and controlled by each person, by the people.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  So you, in, in that model, you as the user would be able to elect, out of all of the data that I have available, you know, in this graph, I want to expose X percent.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  And you could do that and keep the rest private.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  Exactly. And even the data that you have private, it's under your control and so...

• 32:20Speaker 01

  If you have, you could have software that is able to run on your computer, run in your browser.

• 32:28Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Uh, on your mobile phone, that would keep, keep the data still on your device. And analyze it, do something with it and help you, uh, do whatever you're trying to do. So just because it's private doesn't mean that it's not, uh, able to be, like you could, you could.

• 32:49Speaker 00

  It's accessible.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  It's accessible. You could theoretically like navigate an entire private graph. Right? Um, and with, with, with individual operations and permissions along the way. You know, there's so many things that you can do, right?

• 33:04Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Well, it, it's one of these interesting things. So, uh, I've thought for a really long time that, um, you know, humans are, uh, compensated for the value that they create.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  Right? And, and so, uh, we usually think of that as, uh, output in terms of work.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  Right? And so, uh, there's people who trade their time.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  Right? There's people who trade their manual labor.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:27Speaker 00

  There's people who trade their intellectual abilities, right? Uh, but one of the, uh, and that's all valuable in a analog or a digital world, depending on.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 33:38Speaker 00

  What's, you know, value you're creating, right? So obviously manual labor is not as, uh, valuable to an internet company. As a, you know, landscaping company.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  Right? Intellectual capabilities are much, much more valuable to an internet company than that landscaping business, right? Now, one thing that is, uh, ubiquitous is data.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 34:00Speaker 00

  And so whether you're a landscaping company, an internet company, or something else, data is in some way used in your business. Right? Whether it's the data that your employees create.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  The data that your, um, customers create in the market, you know, whatever.

• 34:15Speaker 00

  If you look at what humans have been able to monetize for themselves, either manual labor, intelligence, well, there's a third bucket that has been unmonetized for a really long time, which is the data in which they create.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  Right?

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  And so it is an output that is based on the actions that that human takes. Why not?

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  Right? And I think your argument here is it's because somebody else realized that that data was valuable and they were able to silo it.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  Not give you access to it and then use it to monetize, right? Because they don't actually sell the data. What they do is they allow the data to be used.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  They sell access to the data.

• 34:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, they allow the data to be used for targeting and things like that. But they control the data. You don't have that data.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  And so you can't monetize it and we've operated on the internet like that for the last 15, 20 years.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  Right?

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah, they sell the ability for a business to target a specific audience without actually seeing the data.

• 35:14Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And so if we continue on this path, right? So I think there's a couple of key components here. One is, hey, we've got these products that frankly operate pretty well.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  Right? You know, if you look at, think about from Google to Facebook to LinkedIn, Twitter, right? These are some of the products that are, you know, heavily, heavily integrated into our lives.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  I don't know if LinkedIn works.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  Okay, so Ryan's not on the LinkedIn train, right? But I think that, you know, we use these products a lot.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:42Speaker 00

  And they've brought a lot of value to us.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:44Speaker 00

  But there's obviously issues, right? In terms of whether it's privacy, trust, right? The data manipulation, the monetization of data for individuals, all this stuff. Let's say it doesn't change, right? I don't even know if you can say fix, but it doesn't change.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  And we continue down this path over the next 20, 30, 50 years. What does that world begin to look like? Like, what are your fears along that path that you think are likely to occur?

• 36:13Speaker 01

  I think, I think there's a few problems, a few things that could really happen. One is something that we're seeing already, which is just a massive slowdown in innovation across the entire internet. And there's so few new, you know, new social companies coming out, gaining traction. So few companies actually getting funded because they know that there's, you know, what do they call it? The, uh, there's the Facebook kill zone, the Amazon kill zone, and the Google kill zone.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  Right? If you're doing something that is in any way in those spheres of influence of those three companies, you've, you gotta watch out. I mean, if you're doing an e-commerce company, you first have to answer, well, how do you?

• 37:01Speaker 00

  How do you beat Amazon?

• 37:02Speaker 01

  How do you beat Amazon? Or how do you survive in a world where Amazon is this all-powerful e-commerce lord? Right? If you're doing something that is at all related to social networking, how do you make the case that Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, whatever, is not going to eat your lunch?

• 37:26Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  Or that you can even get traction, right? Or that, or that Instagram's not gonna copy your features, like your, the core feature of your business, like, like what they, what they did with Snapchat.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  You know, even Snapchat wasn't safe, right? And, um, and of course, you could say there's other reasons why Snapchat, um, kind of has started on, on a decline. But you look at, uh, in, uh, in China, right? There, um, there's a really good article that came out recently that was talking about how

• 38:01Speaker 01

  the vast majority of businesses that have any chance of getting any, uh, mid to late-stage traction, uh, are, end up being the ones that are funded by, uh, two or three companies, Tencent, Baidu.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Um, Alibaba.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Right? Um, and they actually have huge investing arms where they essentially anoint.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  The winners. Right? If you're, if you're suddenly anointed by one of them, every other competitor just goes to the wayside. We saw this happen with Meerkat. And with Periscope, right? Meerkat was getting a lot of, a lot of traction running on, you know, essentially, um, you know, it was running somewhat on Twitter, uh, so was Periscope. Twitter wanted to acquire Meerkat, Meerkat said no. Twitter shut down Meerkat, said, okay, you don't get to play anymore. Acquired Periscope and integrated Periscope deeply into Twitter.

• 39:04Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  So they just were the kingmaker, right then. And they killed a business at their own whims.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  And they decided to make this other business the winner.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  Now, do you think, right, because I hear you and I think that a lot of people will, uh, agree with you, right? So I think it's important for us to talk about the flip side of that argument, right? If you believe in a capitalistic society, right? Isn't that just competition?

• 39:35Speaker 01

  It is competition, but it, it gets to,

• 39:41Speaker 01

  it gets to a certain point where these are no longer simply businesses that provide services and products. They are, they are in a sense, providing a digital

• 39:59Speaker 01

  world to people, right, that you are in, which is closer to something like a city. Right? It's closer to something like a, uh, you know, land and the buildings and all of the, um, communication and all of the, uh, landlines and everything that, that, that is part of a city, right? And so we have, we have to separate, like, what are the?

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Like that's, that's more the equivalent of the digital world. And, you know, we have certain laws in the United States and countries around the world. That are meant, that are, that are contrived laws, in a sense, they're, they're not, they're not like natural laws. They're, they're just come up. Manmade. Manmade, they are invented, they are whimsical, we could have come up with any other set of laws. And these laws are intended to have a particular effect. Right, we have intellectual property law, right? Intellectual property law specifically was designed to promote innovation. It's not because there was some natural right to ideas. That's not, at least in the United States, that's not, that's not the thinking there.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  It was specifically designed because it was believed that it was what was needed to ensure innovation. If you had a product and someone else copied the product and used a label that was identical. How would, how, how could that business possibly operate and be able to have trust? And be able to, you know, outside of a single town. Absolutely. If, if anyone could just copy your label and no one would know that it was the same product, maybe it'd even have poison in it or something, right? Yep. And so that was genuinely a very difficult, a very, a very rough situation to be in. You had to address that with trademark, right? Obviously you have to do, address that with copyright for written works and other types of creative works.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  And patents were meant to specifically incentivize people to move away from a model that's predicated on trade secrets. And more, which hurts innovation, and more towards a model where entrepreneurs, business people are incentivized to disclose their secrets. So that a certain number of years from that point in time, the world could build off of it. Yep. Right, so these were things that were.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  They were not natural, they were contrived, they were specifically designed with a goal in mind to promote innovation, right? And because we decided as a society that we value prosperity, that we value competition, that we value a well-functioning economy, right? If that economy no longer works for us, if that economy is no longer serving us, if competition breaks down, right? And it tends towards monopolies, right? That's not capitalism. You end up in a situation where you have single corporations that can decide everything that, you know, think about a single business in an area that has the ability to,

• 43:12Speaker 01

  that is the only provider of a very important resource, electricity, internet, water. What if they started to start engaging in a, in a, in a situation where they can cut off access to anyone they want, right? And

• 43:28Speaker 00

  Or price manipulation.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  Price manipulation. Price, yeah, uh, price manipulation. They say, well, you know what? We're, you know, our electricity prices are no longer fixed rate, they're now a percentage of your, of your income. Uh, percentage of your net worth. So if you are, whatever, you know, you, you, you're now gonna get, you're gonna, now gonna be charged a hundred thousand dollars a year for, for electricity, just because we said so. Um, the government would step in and say, no, this is not okay. Because this is so important to our society to be functioning well, that we can't allow this to happen, right? Now, you can do that with government, you can do that with other mechanisms in place, right?

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Some mechanisms for, for correcting this, obviously, we know, we're very familiar with government. Historically, another mechanism was violence, right? We know that some people would, would say like, no, you can't cut off my electricity, um, you can't behave this way. You're, you violated our contract, and then violence would ensue. And one of the reasons why we use governments is because we don't want it to resort to violence.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Right?

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Still, there are other ways that we can, we can address this. We can address this with

• 44:43Speaker 01

  other types of contracts between individuals, between corporations. And specifically in the digital world, we have some, some very interesting capabilities where we could create some level of governance using, or some level of social contracts between millions upon millions, potentially billions of people that doesn't require a

• 45:11Speaker 01

  what we would consider traditionally to be a government.

• 45:13Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  And there are interesting things that we can now do in the digital world that we maybe aren't as, you know, we have less capabilities to do in the physical world. So, in some sense, if you have one of these

• 45:32Speaker 01

  externalities, you know, negative externalities from the breakdown of a free market, like for example, tragedy of the commons, you need a way to address that. And it doesn't have to be government, it doesn't have to be violence. It can be some market mechanism, it could be any of those things. But there has to be something, or else the tragedy of the commons will persist, or else whatever other externality, negative externality you think about will persist.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  Would it be fair to say that government is needed in times of conflict when the incentive system was not adequately created before the conflict? Right? Basically, if you, if you construct a situation where the incentive system through market forces, you know, personal incentives, etc.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 46:20Speaker 00

  Works so that people are aligned in their interest?

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 46:25Speaker 00

  And are incentivized to act in the best, or the common good?

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 46:31Speaker 00

  When that's broken, then conflict ensues and government is needed to have a civil kind of recourse?

• 46:39Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 46:40Speaker 00

  To avoid violence?

• 46:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  Why don't we just fix the incentive system? Right? Could we basically avoid all of the issues if we just fix the upfront incentive system of a lot of these different, you know, issues?

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Yep. So I think, I think that's right. I think you need, there's a lot of cases where you do need to fix the incentive system. There are other cases where you need to fix the rules of the game. Right? So for example, um, which is outside of incentives. So just give a quick example. If you're in a situation where you have, uh, patent law.

• 47:11Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  That is granting monopolies.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  To certain corporations. Then remember patent law, patent law is a contrivance.

• 47:21Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  And it is enforced via violence.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  By the government. So however many years, 17 years or whatever, depending on the, you know, the, the country, uh, exact, um, laws for the industry. But let's just say something like 17 years to have a patent and have a monopoly on a particular thing.

• 47:40Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  That is an unnatural phenomenon. That isn't, that is like, that is a weird situation. That is like, um, that is not something that arises from the, the natural physical world. You can make an argument that there is this pure capitalism that just, you know, happens to have patent law in it.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Right? Um, you have to say that in order for us to have well-functioning capitalism, we need patent law of some kind. Right? Now you could also make the argument that maybe capitalism would function better without patent law. Right? I don't know. Um, uh, I think there's, that, that might be a pretty bold claim. I wouldn't necessarily make that, but, um, I do think that there's a lot of, like a lot of cases where, uh, our patents are directly hurting our ability to have competition and our ability to deliver, uh,

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Efficient, low cost, great products to consumers.

• 48:39Speaker 00

  Well, and it's not black and white either, right? Like the binary nature of conversation, I think, is, you know, kind of what catches the mind share.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 48:48Speaker 00

  But really, there are times where patents make a ton of sense.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 48:53Speaker 00

  Right? And there's times where patents make zero sense.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 48:55Speaker 00

  And so I think that that's part of the complexity for a regulator, for a lawmaker, to work through is difficult.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 49:04Speaker 00

  And so it's much easier just to put a blanket, there's patents, there's not patents.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  And, you know.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Maybe you reduce the number of years that you can hold a patent on to.

• 49:13Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  Maybe you have different rules for different industries.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  I think all of that is directly tied to, you know, changing the rules of a game.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 49:26Speaker 00

  Can have a direct impact on the people playing the game.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 49:29Speaker 00

  But also can have a number of unforeseen impact, right? Around innovation, etc.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  But you just have to realize that you are in a game. Yep. And you're in a game that was written, for which rules were written, over a period of hundreds of years.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  And it's a particular game that only happened in our historical timeline, right? There could be parallel universes for which there are completely different games.

• 49:52Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Right? You know, the whole, the fact that we have copyright that can extend a lifetime of the author plus 70 years is the kind of a ridiculous result that we've ended up with. You know, in our particular timeline, we ended up with an internet that started out with a particular set of features, that started out with a domain name system that was highly insecure, that started out with the client-server model, that started out where we really had an emphasis on advertising models, and everything needs to be free, as opposed to emphasizing, well, you should pay for your software.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  Right? That was just one particular way that the internet evolved, you know? A lot of the things that we participate in, that we are immersed in, we don't realize that they're just really games, that they are the matrix, and that they have been written by someone else. And that the game doesn't have to be that way, the rules don't have to be that way. You could rewrite the game, you could create a new game, you could invite people to play in that game with you. And, you know, we can go back to incentives, like, we were talking about. The rules around patents, but of course, there's some really interesting rules around incentives. What does, what does an, what does, if you were to create a new digital world, a new digital economy, what does that look like? What is the, if you were to create a currency for that digital economy, how to behave? If you were to create monetary policy, right? If you were to create um

• 51:20Speaker 01

  systems for how people could participate in the economy, for how people could contribute resources, for how they could um extract things from the system. What would, what would those, the rules of those, of those interactions look like? And we, with blockchain technology, with the uh these, this entire industry around decentralization and decentralized applications, we can create systems that have rules for which we believe would lead to prosperity and would lead to um really productive systems, right? That help lots of people.

• 51:53Speaker 00

  Absolutely, it, it's um, you know, we spend a lot of time thinking about like the financial system, right? And so this idea that um, I, I talk a lot about, you know, there's four types of assets you can own. So stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities. And then I say, in the digital world, there's just digital stocks, digital currencies, right? Digital commodities, etc. And I always say, that's a new financial system. And people say, well, how is it new, right? All you did was improve it.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 52:18Speaker 00

  And, and I think to your point here is we're watching the uh building of a completely new digitally native world.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  And that includes communication, information, assets, transactions, everything, right? And so when that happens, of course, the people building that new digital world have, have the uh historical benefit of seeing what has played out, right? And, and so they understand what do we have today? They understand how did we get here? And now they can look and say, what do we build from scratch moving forward?

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 52:54Speaker 00

  And so there's going to be a big overlap, right? That, that, there's a lot of good things, I think, going on in the non-digly native world, right?

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Yes, totally.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  Look, you know, in, humans today are much safer and more prosperous on an aggregate basis than they've ever been in the history of human race.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 53:11Speaker 00

  And so we've done okay, right?

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 53:14Speaker 00

  We can improve.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  And building this digital world, I think, is a piece of that. And so I think that, you know, this nuance is really important of you're building a new digital world with a piece of technology.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:26Speaker 00

  That inherently is attacking one of the core competencies of the non-d digitally native world.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  Right? The non-d digitally native world is built on trust of centralized institutions and third parties.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  Because that's all we had.

• 53:41Speaker 00

  Exactly. And so I think that with this new piece of technology, what you're seeing is that's what's being attacked. Right? And I think that it's almost like a superpower.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:52Speaker 00

  Right? And if you give a superpower to 100% of people.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:58Speaker 00

  Probably 80% of people either misuse it or don't know what to do with it.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:01Speaker 00

  20% of people really know what to do with it.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 54:03Speaker 00

  Right? And so you're giving this piece of technology to a bunch of people, and I think that's what we're seeing here. 80% of people have no clue what to do, or they're just applying it in weird, you know, unsustainable ways.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  But there's probably, you know, 10, 20% of people who, wow, if I understand that I can use this technology to go after those centralized third-party institutions and recreate a digital world that is improved without them.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:27Speaker 00

  That's a really interesting use case, right?

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 54:29Speaker 00

  And so I think that, you know, as we move into that world, what do you think the areas are that kind of come under attack first, right? What are those types of institutions that you think are just, you know, ripe for replacement or disruption?

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I just want to make a quick comment before I address that. You were talking about like reinventing the financial system to some extent.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  But I think that's right. And I just want to highlight the fact that when we talk about financials, when we talk about like all these different components that are related to a financial system, I would say that they are.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  It's not like we're focusing on financial services, or we're focusing on just finance. It's that when you create an economy, or you create a new digital realm, an important underpinning is how do people transact? How do people exchange value? How do people collaborate? And, or, or get other people to help them? How do people help other people, you know? And a lot of that comes down to, well, you need to make payments. You need to, you need to pay for goods. You need to pay for labor.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  You need to have some agreement where if two people work together, they can share in the upside, right? And all of these different things could be encoded as different components within a system. But they're, you know, they're important underpinnings for a lot of the rest of society that can get built on top. And to some extent, we're taking, like, we're building this in the digital world, but we're not doing it for the digital world alone. I mean, we're, we're upgrading our own world to be partly digital.

• 56:31Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  You know what I mean?

• 56:32Speaker 00

  Well, it's, I mean, look, humans are a network of transactions and incentives.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  That's it, right? And, and so there are, you know, that's a very, very elementary explanation.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  It's a communication, like, you know.

• 56:45Speaker 00

  Well, it's just transaction of words, ideas, thoughts, etc., right? And so.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  Using a liberal.

• 56:50Speaker 00

  When you really, really boil it down, it's just transactions.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 56:54Speaker 00

  And incentives, right? And so at that core, there's a lot of things that we've done that are probably not where we would have started if we were to start over, right? Now, it doesn't make sense to jump out of a perfectly good airplane and kind of build a new one.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 57:12Speaker 00

  Right? And, and so I think what we're seeing is people are saying, look, let's thoughtfully redesign some of this.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  And so let's take it back to the internet itself, right? The internet has been probably one of the most impactful inventions of, I don't know, the last hundreds of years, right?

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 57:32Speaker 00

  And, and so.

• 57:35Speaker 00

  I don't think anyone could deny the positive impact it has had in the world.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:40Speaker 00

  Right, in terms of really connecting people, empowering people, etc.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:46Speaker 00

  But there's these negative side effects of it.

• 57:48Speaker 01

  We wouldn't know each other if it weren't for the internet.

• 57:50Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  We wouldn't, I wouldn't be sitting here, you know.

• 57:53Speaker 00

  It's funny you say this. How mu- what percentage of your friends do you think that you would not know if the internet didn't exist?

• 57:59Speaker 01

  I don't know, 90%?

• 58:00Speaker 00

  A high percentage.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:01Speaker 00

  Right?

• 58:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:02Speaker 00

  What percentage of the people that you knew kind of pre-internet, right? So you were probably elementary, middle school, didn't really, you know, the internet was kind of a thing, but you didn't really access it every day, that type of thing.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:14Speaker 00

  What percentage of those people are you still in contact with and only because of the internet? Probably almost all of them.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of, a lot of it's, yeah, because of the internet, for sure, yeah.

• 58:25Speaker 00

  Right? If you didn't have the internet, you would have lost touch with all of them.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly, yeah.

• 58:28Speaker 00

  And, and so I, I think just that alone is pretty cool.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  Right?

• 58:31Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  Um, walk me through, how do you think through the positive impact of the internet, right, in this kind of centralized model?

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:39Speaker 00

  Versus these negative side effects, right? So privacy, security, um, you know, the inability to control your data, you know, all these things that are kind of hot topics. What, how do you think through that balance?

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, you know, first of all, I say like, I do truly believe the internet's like just so immensely positive, like on the net positive side.

• 58:59Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  Um, it's just like seriously moved the world forward, uh, on so many different levels. I mean, every, every, um, major business in the world is, is impacted by the internet in some way and has to have like a very serious, um, uh, engagement with the internet. All of us, obviously, like billions of people on social media, Facebook and Twitter and everything. Um, the incredible benefits that we get from having knowledge at our fingertips.

• 59:29Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  Um, the ability to, uh, share things, books, you know, things that we're doing, um...

• 59:41Speaker 00

  I mean, humans are exponentially smarter because of the internet.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:45Speaker 00

  Right, on an individual basis, the amount of knowledge that you would have.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, to some extent.

• 59:50Speaker 00

  First post-internet?

• 59:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:51Speaker 00

  Is incredible.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:52Speaker 00

  Right, now they, now they also-

• 59:53Speaker 01

  There's a lot of misinformation.

• 59:54Speaker 00

  Well, completely.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  You know, that like, that brings people backwards, but yeah.

• 59:58Speaker 00

  Uh, uh, uh, in, okay, so let's explore that for a second, right? Even the misinformation.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  Right? A hundred percent of the information that those people consume is not misinformation, obviously, right?

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:09Speaker 00

  A hundred percent of it's not accurate either.

• 1:00:14Speaker 00

  I think that the amount of misinformation could be overstated. Right, if you think about all of the information that you are consuming on the internet on a daily basis.

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

  I just don't see people consuming, you know, kind of mid-double-digit percentages of misinformation. Right? So on an aggregate basis, if you look at all of the data that you consume.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:37Speaker 00

  It's not like fifty percent of the information you consume is, is misleading.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:40Speaker 00

  Right? Now, the counterargument to that is, it doesn't need to be fifty percent.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  It doesn't.

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  It actually just needs to be the most, you know, the two most important pieces of information.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  The, the, the, the piece of information that drive your most important decisions throughout the day.

• 1:00:55Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  Right, or throughout the year.

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  Um, there are some, if you go like through the YouTube, like, tunnels, I don't know if you've ever done that, but it gets kinda weird.

• 1:01:06Speaker 00

  Uh, Reddit is, uh, is the place where I've seen.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  You just, like, what are these people talking about?

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  Uh, okay, all right, so, so, uh, we've got the internet, right? We're, we're kinda moving along here. Talk to me about what, uh, what your thoughts on this like decentralized internet where, uh, you're able to use, you know, technology, whether it's blockchain or other technologies, to really attack those centralized kind of third-party institutions, um, that again are just playing middleman to those transactions and incentives.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Well, actually, before we get into that, Okay. I just want to cover a couple more things. Because we got a chance to talk about like innovation. Yep. How that's being hampered.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  That's being really stifled by low competition. Yep.

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  And, well, actually, I have just one more comment to make on that. That's just, I love talking about that stuff. Your show, man. Just keep going. Whatever you want to talk about. No, no, we'll quickly come back to this. But, uh,

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  there's, I mean, there's, there's just, there's a lot of debate around really censorship on Twitter and Facebook and all these different platforms. And

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  people will talk about, well, you know, isn't it, isn't it private property of these businesses? They have a right to, they have a right to do what they want with their own private property. And, and to some extent, that is true.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  But in another sense, it's not. Because what is actually happening is when you have a profile on that social network. Yep. There is a piece of that that you own. You know, you have created something with, you know, obviously, within their, within their walled garden. Yep. But you have put in work into it. Yep. You've put labor into that. Yep. And when that happens, you come, you till the soil regularly.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  In, and, in, within the confines of something that's owned by another particular business, you actually do have rights, you know, especially if you do that over a long period of time.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  And

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  we shouldn't

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  You know, it's kind of like, there should be a difference between thinking about like, who owns the building, who owns the apartment within the building? And who is subletting from that apartment within that building, within that city? You know what I mean? So, the ways that we look at property on the physical earth, we have a good sense for that. We've defined that over thousands of years.

• 1:03:59Speaker 00

  It's a generally accepted construct of these different variations to ownership.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  Exactly. We have not addressed that when it comes to the digital world. When you think about social networks. I mean, as an example, right? You have, what are you, twitter.com/apampliano? Okay. So, I'm just advertising your Twitter right now.

• 1:04:24Speaker 00

  Appreciate it.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  So, let's unpack that for a second. What you are, is you own a property called A Pompiano on twitter.com. Well, what some people don't realize is that Twitter owns a property on a network called .com. That's owned by VeriSign. So what if Twitter kicked you off? And you were friends with the CEO of VeriSign? I don't know.

• 1:04:55Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  And, or somehow you were able to...

• 1:04:58Speaker 00

  And they kicked Twitter off.

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  And they kicked Twitter off. They were like, "You lose your .com." And by the way, then Twitter complains to ICANN. And ICANN says, "Hey, VeriSign, that was not cool. We're kicking you off of, we're revoking your .com. And we're giving it to Google." So, you have to think about like, what does digital ownership actually mean? In a world like that? And if there is some problem, to some extent, because we don't have a good framework for that, and because no one's stepping in and no one's really like making these rules, really it just comes down to whoever has the leverage...

• 1:05:40Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  Whoever has the physical ability to do something in the digital world, ends up coming out on top, as long as it doesn't...

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  Alert, it doesn't like, trigger

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  a government to think, wait a second, that's illegal. And

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  in this case, we just really have to get down into that.

• 1:06:09Speaker 00

  Well, and I think, you know, if you really go deep on this censorship issue, right, so, you know, I tweeted a while ago and got people all rallied up because I said, you know, censorship in any form is a slippery slope, right? And it is a violation of all of our rights.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:06:27Speaker 00

  And so I think that people, you know, they kind of ran with that and they were saying, hey, you know, there's definitely forms of censorship that are appropriate. Right? And I think that the key component here is, you know, just like we're talking with the patent laws, there's different forms of censorship, right? So for example, if these social platforms want to remove somebody, they can full on blackball them, prevent, you know, technology driven prevention of using that platform.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  Right? So you can no longer sign and use your account, etc.

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  A watered down version of that could be, you can go on and you can post, but maybe they're not going to give you as much distribution. This whole shadow banning and all this stuff, right? Then there's a world where actually we're going to keep the distribution the same, but we're going to put some sort of, you know, cover or opt in to, for people to see your content.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:19Speaker 00

  So if you scroll through your feed and you saw something and it said, hey, you know, this content isn't, you know, it's something that Twitter stands behind.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:26Speaker 00

  Blah blah, whatever, if you would still like to see it, you know, click through and then you can see it.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:07:29Speaker 00

  Right? So it's a way to kind of alert people and they can opt in. You can go all the way down that rabbit hole, right? Well, I think that what people in the United States specifically, forget a lot of times, because we live in this democratic society where free speech is encouraged, etc.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:46Speaker 00

  This is not the environment for many people around the world. Right? And so we don't think that if, you know, use Twitter for example, because they're actually pretty good with not censoring people, but let's just say that they did start to censor, you know, kind of all of the fringe or alternative, you know, viewpoints.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:03Speaker 00

  Right? And so whether, you know, all ends of the political spectrum, all kind of different, you know, ideas, they basically said, look, if you don't fit within-

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  Antifuzz getting out of hand, we got to censor them.

• 1:08:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, everybody, right? They just started saying, look, you know, we're going to start censoring all this stuff.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:17Speaker 00

  I think there'll be this uproar from everyone.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:19Speaker 00

  Right? Where they get away from it on the censorship side is when- They censor somebody that majority of people don't agree with. Right? Because then it's, oh, well, that person, that's a bad person, right? That's a bad viewpoint. It's a bad idea, right? And so the slippery slope to that is, well, when they start censoring any idea, who's to say where the line is?

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:08:43Speaker 00

  Who's to say where the bad ideas end and the, and the good ideas start?

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  And it highlights who is the decision maker.

• 1:08:50Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  And, and so I think that that's part of this whole censorship thing because we see it in other countries around the world.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:57Speaker 00

  Is we see outright banning or, you know, uh, the, the ones that are the most kind of egregious to me are, um, in politics and, you know, a lot of these countries. They might just bail, uh, they just may jail their opponent.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:12Speaker 00

  Right? And, and so you're literally, that's the utmost censorship that you can apply to somebody.

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  If you think about what freedom of speech is, freedom of speech is specifically the ability for the oppressed to communicate.

• 1:09:27Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  You don't need freedom of speech if you are in power by definition.

• 1:09:33Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  Right? You don't need freedom of speech if you are, if you do not have the potential threat of infringement upon your speech.

• 1:09:42Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  Right? So it's only applicable in cases where there's some version of oppressed, you know, group or whatever that, uh, needs to be able to speak out, that is being, and we might not agree with them, we might agree with them, it doesn't matter, right? You know, to some extent, we have to be able to protect that and we have to figure out, um, I, I think we really have to figure out exactly how we do communication.

• 1:10:16Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  In the digital world because it was so, it's so early with this, right?

• 1:10:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, uh, somebody once told me, and it's something that, that I, it really, you know, kind of stayed with me is this idea that one of the most democratic things you can do is disagree with someone and still protect their right to share those ideas.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:10:34Speaker 00

  Right? And I think that's a really big leap for a lot of people.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:38Speaker 00

  Alright, so I think that we're setting the stage very nicely for there's issues, right? Net good internet, but still a lot of different issues that either one, we haven't had to deal with, right? Two, we've chosen not to make decisions on.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  So we talked about the innovation, freedom to innovate. We talked about censorship.

• 1:10:59Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  I think the third major one is privacy.

• 1:11:03Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  What is actually being done with our data?

• 1:11:05Speaker 00

  Yep. So walk me through, what do you think the issues are today? You know, if you had to say, what's one thing that the centralized third-party companies are doing with data? That people may not be aware of that you think they should know, what is that?

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  I actually think it's maybe not what people think.

• 1:11:25Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  Or it's not, and it wasn't even in the public conversation until this past year. And that is the ability to manipulate your views based on information about you.

• 1:11:42Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  Right? It is like, once we have all this information about you, once we have information about how you respond to things, what you actually believe, how we have information about what are the things that you click on? What are the things that you keep coming back to?

• 1:11:55Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  Once you have all of that information, you can make some really, really... The deeper the analysis that you do, and the more that you combine that with potentially other information from other individuals.

• 1:12:09Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  You could then start to figure out, well, how do I indoctrinate this person? How do, you know, and there's situations where this is intentional.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  For example, with the Cambridge Analytica scandal. There are situations where it might be unintentional. Where you have algorithms that are just feeding people into these content spirals. Like is happening on YouTube.

• 1:12:39Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  Right? Where the algorithm's just optimizing for time on site. It's just optimizing for engagement. And what it doesn't realize is that it's going in a certain direction where it is driving people into this particular type of a content hole. Content, you know.

• 1:12:59Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Well, it goes back to... Propaganda.

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:13:04Speaker 00

  Is at the cornerstone of this entire argument, right? And so, we happen to call the propaganda that we believe to be harmless, advertising?

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:13:15Speaker 00

  Right?

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:13:15Speaker 00

  But it is still propaganda.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, for sure. Sigmund Freud and the beginnings of the advertising industry, like they call, they even, at the time, propaganda was a positive term.

• 1:13:25Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And we've turned it negative.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:13:28Speaker 00

  Right? It's also the idea that human psychology is a very weird and strong thing.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:35Speaker 00

  And I think as people have begun to understand more and more about human psychology, there's really interesting things we can do to benefit humans. So, there's a study that has always caught my mind. If, when you wake up in the morning, I think it's like if you read or see three positive headlines before you read three negative headlines, people at the end of the day say that they had a better day.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  No way.

• 1:13:59Speaker 00

  Right?

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  Okay, that's pretty cool.

• 1:13:59Speaker 00

  All kinds of stuff like that, right? So, you can go really-

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  And you just literally flip them, they saw both.

• 1:14:04Speaker 00

  So, yeah, and then if they see three negative headlines at the start of the day, then at the end of the day, they actually report they were less happy or they had a less well day. So, there's this whole thing around like, you know, positive journalism, blah blah stuff, right? Well, as you go deeper and deeper in there, what you realize is like, in the military world, this is, you know, psychological warfare and also, like, we change the nomenclature of what we are describing.

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:14:28Speaker 00

  Depending on the environment at which it is applied.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:14:31Speaker 00

  But at the end of the day, it's human psychology.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  Totally, yeah.

• 1:14:34Speaker 00

  Right? And so, is it bad because it is inherently bad in some situations? Or is it bad because we don't like it or we don't agree with it?

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:44Speaker 00

  And that's the, you know, that's a core question that I think a lot of people struggle with, a lot of people disagree with, and it kind of leads to these different perspectives on what technology should be built, how should it be applied, what are the rules, right? What are the incentives, all that stuff?

• 1:14:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think we should take much more seriously the behavioral information that we give off and how that is distributed.

• 1:15:06Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  Who gets access to that? And we should take much more seriously our regular exposure to advertisements.

• 1:15:14Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  You know, in a talk I gave at the Oslo Freedom Forum, they actually introduced this concept of the fact that there are three digital sins, three main digital sins that are exerted upon individuals in the digital world.

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  And that is surveillance, censorship, and manipulation.

• 1:15:35Speaker 00

  Very interesting.

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  And I would say those are, those are the three main things that as an individual. Uh, you need to be concerned about and, um, and there's a lot of push for people to install ad blockers and to, to move away from these, you know, endlessly scrolling feeds with advertisements that are just, you know, uh, conditioning us in a certain way. Um, and, and we need to make sure that we are both, we're being careful about both the information that reaches into our minds. The right access to the brain, to our brains, as well as the information that's leaving us, which is the read access to our brain.

• 1:16:11Speaker 00

  And, and so how do we fix this stuff?

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  I mean, the way that we fix this, we have to move away from the current

• 1:16:21Speaker 01

  model, the current relationship between users and, and their software.

• 1:16:24Speaker 00

  Actually, before I ask how we fix it, uh, can we fix it? Like, are we just screwed? Right? Are we so far down the, down the rabbit hole that, that there's no getting out? Or do you think we actually can fix it?

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  No, no, I, I do, I do think we can. And I think, I think it's hard.

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  It's not gonna come easy.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  Nothing good ever does.

• 1:16:43Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  Uh, but, but we can fix it.

• 1:16:46Speaker 00

  Okay. All right. So how do we do that?

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  And

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  first of all, there has to be a better system. A system that serves us as consumers better. And second,

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  consumers have to find that and appreciate it and understand it.

• 1:17:05Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  And when I say this better system, what I mean is a different relationship between consumers and their software and, and businesses. And that means that consumers are not essentially being harvested for their data and their attention. That is what's happening currently with Facebook, with Twitter, with, with Instagram, with all these different businesses, these different social networks. We are being harvested.

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  In essence, we are the audience, right? And businesses are paying to reach us and to be able to have right access to our brain.

• 1:17:40Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  And Facebook has read access to our brain. And the businesses say, well, I want this, these characteristics. Facebook reads in the information, has a huge database, a dossier on you, and is able to serve you with propaganda.

• 1:17:57Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

  And in some, in some senses, it's exactly what you wanted to be able to buy this new jacket, right? Whatever. And sometimes it's not. And sometimes it's something that, um. It is, it really just changes your thinking. So we need to, we need to move away from that. I would say, you know, a new model, very important, uh, to rethink business models, to rethink, uh, advertising. Um, not saying advertising is categorically bad, but I, I do believe that the type of advertising that we are being continuously exposed to every day.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  In many cases, when it doesn't, it's not even clear what's the difference between an ad and what's, you know, maybe you can see in small, fine print, but like what's an ad? And what is, uh, just content that is being algorithmically surfaced to you?

• 1:18:43Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  Right? Um, so, so I think that's important that we move away from it. I think it's also important that we move towards a model where we have choice with our software. Given a particular use case or given a particular, uh. Vertical, product vertical. So for example, with email, we have choice, right? You can email me, I can email you, it doesn't matter what email provider we have, right? I can use Gmail, you can use Outlook, someone else can use AOL, right? Knock them, uh, if they're up there.

• 1:19:22Speaker 01

  But the cool thing about email is it's a true decentralized system. It is potentially the original decentralized, uh, application network.

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  And you have a series of protocols and many different pieces of software that all speak those protocols. And that means that each, every business is on the email network can innovate independently. New features can be introduced, other businesses can copy those features. There's high level of competition. And you know, there might be some, like some large players that get a lot of part, a large percentage of the market share. But there's still preserved freedom for the consumer. And that's, I think that's a very fine situation to be in. Gmail has a lot of market share, Outlook has a lot of market share, that's fine. You know, you can ultimately choose and you can move your data with you from one to another and it's actually meaningful. Contrast that with something like Facebook where all they give you is an export.

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  You can export your, your data that's useless. There's no, you can't bring your social graph with you, you can't, you know.

• 1:20:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, but the way you're saying is, is data is an asset, right? It is a personal asset that you own and therefore you should not be required to give it away for free.

• 1:20:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:20:33Speaker 00

  Right? And just because these social networks have been built and they've reached such massive scale, right? The ability to basically go play in a different sandbox, right? The example, and the reason I use that expression is like if, you know, everyone's on the playground, they're playing in a sandbox. There's one ball, you brought the ball, well, it's socially unacceptable in many cases for you to take that ball and leave and go play somewhere else.

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:58Speaker 00

  Cause everyone gets mad at you.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:59Speaker 00

  Right? But if it is your ball, you should be allowed to do that, right? And so there's a trade off there. Now, I think with data, and this may kind of skip us ahead a little bit, but if it's a personal asset, right? Does that mean that all of a sudden it's like a balance sheet? Where it sits next to my stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities and my data, right? Can I transact that data? Can I actually sell it to some people and monetize it? Can I use it as a, as a, as a badge to get into certain networks, right? So, hey, you want to use Facebook, great.

• 1:21:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:33Speaker 00

  You choose to say, yes, here's my data and I'm going to filter out the things I don't want you to have about me, right? And then now you, you give me entry into your network, right? It becomes, now you go into a whole different rabbit hole where data is that asset, right?

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I, I, I think so. I mean, and I would, I would make a distinction between, there's like. There's data itself, there's things like reputation, they're all intertwined.

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  There is identity, right?

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  To some extent, if you have data and you put it out there for the world, you publish it, well now everyone has it. You can't sell it because everyone can get it for free.

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  Reputation, when you build that up, you have ratings on Airbnb, you have ratings on Uber. That references, you know, statements about who you are. And that can be utilized to gain you access to things, it can be utilized to, to, to allow you to participate in a business transaction that requires trust and so on and so forth. But yeah, I think we should.

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  We're in a model today where the businesses have all the control, a few businesses. Actually, if you think about it, like Facebook, Google, Amazon. And, and Apple and Microsoft, you could add to that as well.

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  And the vast majority of the businesses. And all of us as individuals are beholden to them.

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

  And that has many negative externalities for us. And we need to move to a model where that isn't the case, where we have control over our data, where we have the ability to have our own privacy, where we have the ability to choose our own software. Where we have the ability to have freedom of speech, where we have this level of competition that does encourage innovation. And all of those things together can be accomplished with a decentralized system.

• 1:23:39Speaker 00

  Do you think that, let's say that we get to that fully decentralized internet infrastructure, you know, consumer apps. Everything is built in a way that would be the, the farthest end of the spectrum of decentralization, right?

• 1:23:56Speaker 00

  Do you think that the innovation pace can sustain, right? Can we actually continue to innovate in that space? And then two, what would be the negative side effect of reaching?

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  Kind of full decentralization of the internet. Yeah.

• 1:24:13Speaker 01

  Well, I'd say, I mean, if you, if you get to a world where there is like true decentralization, you, you get innovation picking up. You think there's, there's a faster pace of innovation? Yes. Okay, explain that. Well.

• 1:24:27Speaker 01

  You get more innovation because you get more. Experiments that can be attempted. It's a lot easier to go to market. It's a lot easier to get consumers, right?

• 1:24:38Speaker 01

  Good luck, you know, pulling consumers away from something like an Amazon, right?

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  If there was a decentralized Amazon.

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  And of course, the challenge is getting to that point where you could have a decentralized Amazon that even can compete on user experience can, you know, has a series of service providers that can actually deliver upon the. Delivery times, promises and things like that. That is. An enormously complex situation. But you could end up replacing Amazon with a thousand businesses. That each contribute resources to a decentralized. E-commerce network. I mean, look at the way that BitTorrent operates, right? BitTorrent is. Really hundreds of different service providers, all contributing to the underlying network, right?

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

  You have, you have so many different nodes that are actually storing the files. You have many different trackers that are being run. You have so many different. Websites that allow you a window into the torrent network. That's incredible. You look at Bitcoin, what's happening there? You have.

• 1:25:53Speaker 01

  Thousands of miners.

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  Dozens of mining pools, major mining pools, that are all contributing to maintain this network. Right? At the base layer in terms of mining, in terms of keeping, making sure that Bitcoin doesn't have any downtime. And then you have hundreds of businesses that are all providing services on top, transaction, you know, exchanges, wallets, whatever. You have this huge economy around.

• 1:26:22Speaker 01

  Around a digital money system.

• 1:26:24Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  Right? You have this huge economy around a digital file storage system. And you have all these incredible experiments that are that are happening in the blockchain and decentralized app industry, like, for example, Filecoin, like, for example,

• 1:26:43Speaker 01

  you know, Augur, like, all these other, every, all these different applications and systems that are being built on top of Bitcoin and Ethereum and and all these different systems. I think that that is something to look to, where I do expect to see some really incredible things. I don't think, I think I think Bitcoin

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  and BitTorrent and email with the hundreds of businesses that are building on top of this network. That's just the beginning. And we're going to see so many more incredible

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  platforms that emerge with hundreds of businesses that are making up the

• 1:27:35Speaker 01

  the core software, the under, the infrastructure and everything above it.

• 1:27:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is truly incredible what can occur, right, between now and that happening, right? All right, so what's one thing you believe in crypto blockchain decentralized world that you think a large majority of people would disagree with?

• 1:27:57Speaker 01

  Hmm, the contrarian view.

• 1:28:03Speaker 01

  I feel like I have a lot, a ton of them. It's just hard to bring to mind right now. Well, let me hear, can I hear what yours is?

• 1:28:11Speaker 00

  Ah, you usually let people ask one question, you're jumping ahead.

• 1:28:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, look, I think that in this space, because it is so heavily driven by technologists, there's a lot of focus on the actual technology, how it works, you know, what can you make the code do, etc. And I think majority of the companies and projects that win are not going to be focused on the underlying technology, but they're going to be focused on the user experience and user behaviors.

• 1:28:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:44Speaker 00

  And so this idea of the companies today, many of them are being built incorrectly.

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:51Speaker 00

  With the focus on the wrong thing.

• 1:28:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:54Speaker 00

  Is scary.

• 1:28:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:55Speaker 00

  Right? And I think part of it is just that happens to be the types of people who, you know, were in early. You've got some people.

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

  Can you say focus on the right thing? Give an example?

• 1:29:04Speaker 00

  So, for example, if you build a decentralized Twitter, right? People are not going to use the decentralized version of Twitter if it is as good or worse of a user experience, a network effect, etc. In order to get people to use a decentralized Twitter, you have to be better experienced. You have to pull them away from what they're already using.

• 1:29:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:29Speaker 00

  And so decentralization is a feature, right? It is not the reason why somebody's going to jump, in terms of a mass consumer. There's some subset of people that will jump just because decentralized. That, all of a sudden, makes decentralization.

• 1:29:44Speaker 01

  One example, it could be like regimes where there's censorship on Twitter.

• 1:29:50Speaker 00

  Absolutely, absolutely. They will actually enjoy a worse experience. Yeah, they'll enjoy a worse experience for the decentralization and the avoidance of censorship, for sure, right? But the kind of mass consumer, right, is only going to jump if it's a better experience. And so if that is true, right, which I believe it is, the focus has to be building a better Twitter that, oh, by the way, is also decentralized.

• 1:30:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:30:14Speaker 00

  Right? And so it can't be, I'm building decentralized Twitter. It's, I'm building a better Twitter.

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:21Speaker 00

  Right? And one of our core competencies or core ethos is that it's decentralized.

• 1:30:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:26Speaker 00

  And so I think, again, very nuanced, you know, change, but I think when you start to describe it differently or focus on different. Metrics, right, etc. Your time, energy and resources is applied in different ways.

• 1:30:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:30:42Speaker 00

  So it's not like some groundbreaking truth, right? I think it's actually pretty intuitive when somebody hears it.

• 1:30:48Speaker 01

  Yes, for sure.

• 1:30:49Speaker 00

  I think it's just easy to focus on the sexy technology component right now. But over time, I think really it is that user experience that that ends up being the the driving force.

• 1:30:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I think it also depends on like when you think about crossing the chasm. How do you approach the market?

• 1:31:03Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:31:05Speaker 01

  And

• 1:31:08Speaker 01

  for those for people who haven't read the book, it's a, I think, pretty, would you say it's it's like a staple, right? It's like

• 1:31:15Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:31:15Speaker 01

  There's a joke that a friend of mine told me that was like, when you arrive at business school, they like have it waiting on your desk.

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  The idea is like, there's this this adoption curve from like innovators to early adopters to the chasm, which is the hard part between the early adopters and the early majority, the late majority, and then the laggards. And it forms this like bell curve. And

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  there, there's an argument to be made that that that one of their one of their key points or takeaways is like, if you go straight for the majority with your offering, you're doomed to fail. And you have to, you have to go for some innovator group and then some early adopter group. And they they use the term innovator to refer to like hyper early adopter.

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  And I think in that case, you do want to latch on to some community. And, you know, in the in the world where if you're starting a decentralized Twitter as a competitor, you're not going to be able to compete on feature set, user experience. You can maybe come out with a product that has a better user experience, but has 5% of the features. Right?

• 1:32:31Speaker 00

  There's probably people who want that.

• 1:32:32Speaker 01

  Yes, so you. Exactly. So I think you either come out with a 5% Twitter with a better user experience. Or you come out with like, whatever, 20% Twitter with a worse user experience. That specifically gives certain demographics something that they would never go to Twitter for. Like they, and they absolutely want, they, they need this, right? So it's like a hair and fire, hair and fire problem.

• 1:33:01Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:33:05Speaker 00

  Okay, so, uh, last question for you.

• 1:33:11Speaker 00

  What is the one thing you have?

• 1:33:13Speaker 01

  Real quick. Also, we have a decentralized Twitter on Blockstack.

• 1:33:16Speaker 00

  Oh, really? Okay, alright, alright.

• 1:33:18Speaker 01

  And it's called, it's called Afari.

• 1:33:19Speaker 00

  Okay, so real quick, walk me through what is currently built on Blockstack. So you have a decentralized Twitter, Afari? You've got like a Google Docs type, uh, uh, product, right?

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  Yes, so yeah, it's Google Suite competitor. So they have Google Docs equivalent. Google Sheets equivalent, uh, and some other, uh, other applications as well. It's called Graphite Docs. Graphitedocs.com. Uh, Afari, that's decentralized Twitter that launched recently. We have a decentralized Instagram only for travel.

• 1:33:51Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:33:52Speaker 01

  And it's called TravelStack.

• 1:33:54Speaker 00

  Very cool.

• 1:33:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I think that's cool because they focused on, they didn't try to just like do a decentralized Instagram. They are focusing on a particular vertical.

• 1:34:03Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:34:04Speaker 01

  And they're like, you come to TravelStack for travel Instagram, you know?

• 1:34:06Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  Um, we also have Stealthy, which is a decentralized equivalent of WeChat or, um, or, or, uh, WhatsApp.

• 1:34:21Speaker 01

  What other, what other Facebook businesses do we have competitors to? Um, we don't have a decentralized Facebook yet. Um, we have a, and when I say we, I mean, the, the, the network. We don't, yeah, there's all these different businesses, all these different teams, incredible teams that are building these apps on top of Blockstack. There is, what else is there? Um, oh, there's really cool.

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  Decentralized multi-sig wallet.

• 1:34:51Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:34:52Speaker 01

  Called Mistos, M-I-S-T-H-O-S. That is specifically geared towards multi-sig for businesses. And what their, what their goal is, is to do multi-sig for Bitcoin first. They're gonna have stacks at some point as well. They might do other, other digital assets like, like Ethereum and so on.

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  But then over time, they're going to do multi-sig for documents. And for all the parts of the business. That means if you want to change your certificate of incorporation. If you want to change your bylaws, if you want to change your voting rights agreement. You could do that with a rule set on Mistos. The way that Mistos works is you create, you, you, instead of creating a wallet, you create a venture.

• 1:35:42Speaker 01

  And then you add partners to the venture. And then you have rules for how the partners can spend the money.

• 1:35:50Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 1:35:50Speaker 01

  So, let's say you have five partners. Well, maybe all of the funds can be withdrawn with

• 1:36:00Speaker 01

  100% of the partners' approval, right? But if you want to use fewer partners, you can wait a longer period of time. So maybe three, three out of five partners takes a day or a week or something. Now, if partners, like, let's say, let's say, three of the partners, God forbid, died. You can actually have the multi-sig degrade down to a two of five multi-sig. After three months. And all this happens with Bitcoin script.

• 1:36:32Speaker 00

  That's really cool.

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  And then, and then all of the identity authentication, storage, everything is, is, is powered by Blockstack. So it's like Bitcoin script and Blockstack, and that's it. That's, that's a, that's an incredible smart contract, I gotta say.

• 1:36:43Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:36:43Speaker 01

  Using just Bitcoin script.

• 1:36:45Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:36:47Speaker 01

  So, so there's really cool things, and, and they're gonna add some other features in the future where you can do, like have partners, have employees, and they have different permissions. Maybe you need like, you know, five employees to authorize this, or, but just one partner to author. So this is really cool, uh, it's just really cool, um, extremely powerful. Think of like the digital.

• 1:37:09Speaker 01

  Embodiment of the corporation with all of its monetary assets, all of its document-based assets and so on.

• 1:37:18Speaker 00

  Absolutely. It it it's fascinating to me how quickly this stuff is getting built, right? And and how high quality it is.

• 1:37:25Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:37:26Speaker 00

  All right. So, uh, last question. You got a magic wand. You can wave it and change any one thing about the crypto blockchain decentralization, you know, movement. What do you change?

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  My instinct, first thing comes to my head is the wild price swings.

• 1:37:46Speaker 00

  The volatility.

• 1:37:47Speaker 01

  And the focus, the volatility and the focus on speculation and the focus on this, you know, hop.

• 1:37:57Speaker 00

  It's pure speculation.

• 1:37:58Speaker 01

  Pure speculation.

• 1:37:59Speaker 00

  Human greed.

• 1:38:00Speaker 01

  Token casino, the greed, it's out of control and the, the investors that are trying to flip tokens and the, uh,

• 1:38:09Speaker 01

  you know, another thing I would say is the, just the, um,

• 1:38:14Speaker 01

  herd mentality and the fads, you know, the NFT fad, there was the, the, um, the, uh, you know, the NFTs, non-fudgable tokens. I like to call them crypto collectibles because I think NFTs is the worst, you know, horrible name. The names in this industry, what have you, you know?

• 1:38:37Speaker 01

  People coming up with things that just have all these different, you know, it's just crazy. I mean, and then there's the whole token curated registry fad. I mean, they're, they're, they're cool things. They're, they're important to talk about, but I think.

• 1:38:48Speaker 00

  Stable coins, right?

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  Stable coins.

• 1:38:49Speaker 00

  A bunch of those.

• 1:38:50Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:38:50Speaker 00

  Like, once, yeah.

• 1:38:51Speaker 01

  You know, everyone has a stable coin. Uh, and then there's just this herd mentality is like, you know, our thesis is stable coins. And then there's another one. It's like, well, our thesis is privacy coins because of course, you know, well, we, you know, invest in scalable, scaling technology that, you know, has like, we just really, we're into the, the graph-based, uh, you know, solutions to scaling. Well, we're really big on proof of stake, you know, uh,

• 1:39:15Speaker 01

  we're looking for, uh, it's just, I mean, it's, it's, it's crazy. It's, uh,

• 1:39:19Speaker 00

  They described one single company.

• 1:39:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:23Speaker 00

  What do they do after they find that company? Awesome, man. Thank you so much for the time. I appreciate you spending so much with us.

• 1:39:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. Thank you for having me.

• 1:39:30Speaker 00

  This is fantastic. I think you've got a really interesting view of the world and I think that we are moving closer and closer to your vision every day.

• 1:39:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. Totally. Wait, one more thought before we go.

• 1:39:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:39:41Speaker 01

  Okay, cool.

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  I... There's a book that I'm reading right now.

• 1:39:47Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:39:47Speaker 01

  I'm actually...

• 1:39:50Speaker 01

  I'm kind of sad that I haven't gotten around to reading it until this point in time.

• 1:39:53Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:39:54Speaker 01

  It's a pretty famous book, especially for the science fiction buffs. It's called Neuromancer.

• 1:39:58Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:39:58Speaker 01

  By William Gibson. I don't know if you've read Snow Crash or...

• 1:40:02Speaker 00

  I have, yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:03Speaker 01

  So...

• 1:40:03Speaker 00

  They actually give Snow Crash out to every Facebook hire.

• 1:40:06Speaker 01

  Do you really? Okay, well then you need to read Neuromancer because to some extent, Snow Crash is a satire of Neuromancer.

• 1:40:13Speaker 00

  Oh, amazing. Okay.

• 1:40:15Speaker 01

  So, and also Neuromancer inspired The Matrix. Actually coined the term, as they use it, The Matrix. Also coined the term cyberspace. Yeah, well, sorry, it's inaccurate. William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in a previous book, but he popularized it in Neuromancer.

• 1:40:30Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  Extremely influential, but I mean, there are people who say that the way the internet turned out was largely inspired by Neuromancer.

• 1:40:39Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:40:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, people ended up building what they read in his book. I mean...

• 1:40:43Speaker 00

  I'm gonna read it this weekend.

• 1:40:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Do it. And so, which is an incredible moment in the book where, you know, essentially you jack into The Matrix. That's the way the world works. There's a physical world, just like in Snow Crash. Physical world, there's a digital world. You plug in and you're now in the digital world. Your neurons are actually wired up to the digital world and you're in there. You're in The Matrix. And there is this scene where the protagonist, Case, he actually gets... He ends up stealing from his employer and he's, you know, in deep with like some really shady people. What they do instead of... Instead of, he's like, "Are you gonna kill me?" whatever. Instead of killing him, they...

• 1:41:28Speaker 01

  They damage his neurons. They say, "You're never going to work in this town again." And they're, "You're never going to work again," and they've removed him completely from the matrix. Now he's in the physical world. He says that he feels trapped by his physical body. The fact that he can no longer enter the digital. He can no longer be in that world. And so what they've done is they made him not exist in the digital. Right? That what, to him and to them, was

• 1:41:58Speaker 00

  It's the ultimate penalty.

• 1:41:59Speaker 01

  The ultimate penalty. The most damaging thing that you could do to a person was deny them access to the digital. And one of the things that I worry about with where we're headed today is that we have a few businesses like Facebook and Google and Twitter and Amazon and Apple that are deciding who gets to exist in the digital. And in order for us to move to a world where the digital, the digital is actually pervasive and powerful and it is like physics, right? It just is. Because there's incredible, amazing things that you can do when, when, when digital just is, when it's just like physics.

• 1:42:42Speaker 01

  And there's, there's no one to turn to because it just, it permeates. They call it in the book, "A collective hallucination around the world." In order for us to get there, we need to have decentralized systems. We need to build a decentralized foundation. And all of the layers of the digital world need to be decentralized in that fashion. And that's, that's where

• 1:43:05Speaker 00

  That's Blockstack.

• 1:43:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's Blockstack. There we go. That's, that's, that's the whole industry and, and I hope we can do some incredible things with Blockstack.

• 1:43:11Speaker 00

  You, you, you've got a number of us that are cheering you on. So, so best of luck with that. I think it is a worthy cause.

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me on.

• 1:43:20Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 1:43:20Speaker 01

  Always a pleasure.

• 1:43:24Speaker 00

  Hey, everyone. Popp 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.