 Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage here in Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound, global conference where leaders from around the world, Silicon Valley, Miami, New York, all over the United States and Puerto Rico and Moscow and South Africa, all over the world come together to talk about the impact of blockchain, cryptocurrency, and a decentralized internet and the impact on society. Our next guest is David Urban, who's the managing director of Network Society Ventures. Also does some investing on the keynote speech at the closing session here in day one of Blockchain Unbound. Thanks for joining me. Thank you very much for having me. So one of the big things that we're seeing in this revolution of blockchain and cryptocurrency is an awareness of how to reimagine democracy, society, and among other things, money transfer and how that's impacting the world from entrepreneurship to NGOs and society for good, AI for good, technology for good. So I got to ask you, I heard some of your presentation is that there's some good tailwinds and some headwinds in this industry. What's your assessment right now of the state of the globe with respect to how a network society will evolve and what are some of your observations and conclusions? One of our fundamental assumptions is that social change is only possible if sustainable technologies emerge to catalyze it. You know, if a slave rebellion won under the Roman Empire, the night of the victory, the slaves would be around the fire to decide who would be the slave the next morning because they needed slaves to do everything. Today, not only we have achieved a level in our human civilization to outlaw slavery, we have incredible new inventions like blockchain to imagine a new social contract that is going to unstoppably come. The social contract is interesting because now you have, I mean, democratization and digital transformation has been kicked around for a long time. Where are some real good examples that you can point to where you're seeing really bright lights of innovation around democratization and digital transformation where it's working and also where it's not working and what we need to do better? Certainly it is fashionable to pretend that technology hasn't helped. And one of the reasons why many people take that stance is because they are confused. Too many simultaneous changes make the future even harder to predict today than it used to be the case 10, 20 or 100 years ago. This is especially hard for those who are in charge of making those predictions. Politicians, regulators, policymakers, we appointed or elected them in order to make decision for everybody else. It is an impossible job, but they cannot afford to say that is the case. And certainly we're in the media business and our model is open media and even the media, you still have these gatekeepers. So we see interesting trends, right? So we're seeing disruption horizontally across all industries. If you look at blockchain and some of the things that are coming out, it's spurring real creativity from entrepreneurs as well as leaders, progressives if you will, that are being focused on efficiencies which is spawning these little spots of innovation. I saw your use case around the solar panels. It was working, they killed it. So this is examples of where you see people get to value really fast. So where are the efficiencies? Where's the value creation coming from? What is blockchain? What is crypto? What is decentralized apps enabling? Is it, are we running too fast? Is it an enabling technology? What's your reaction to thoughts? Some of us have been around in the first internet boom 20 years ago. At the peak, $3 trillion of value have been achieved by the dot-coms as measured by their market capitalization. And you would say, well, that bubble burst and it all disappeared, but it didn't. We are still using the transatlantic fiber optic cables that were laid down then and that created the premise for the next 20 years of technology-based economic growth. So with blockchain, we are seeing the same except that contrary to that, which was a quite provincial Silicon Valley phenomenon, blockchain innovation is today global. So it is going to incredible places incredibly fast and it is extremely competitive. There are projects that are doing the same thing, addressing the same challenge all over the world and it is fantastic. We even have a name for it. It's called Forking. Hooray Forking. Yeah, Forking creates competition but also faster time of value. Let's talk about the bubble. The dot-com bubble, which I lived through and you have as well, was, again, a Silicon Valley phenomenon, some New York, mostly America basically, but everything happened. So everything that was talked about actually happened. But at that time, we didn't have a very wired community. Today we have organic communities in place, whether it's from open source communities online to actually a connected global network, aka mobile internet. The role of communities now seems to be that counterbalancing, self-governing opportunity. So I want to get your thoughts. Is the bubble going to be predicated or letting some air out of that bubble? Can it come from the communities? Because you could argue that efficiency in the communities with sourcing the truth, if exposing the data, can create very fast efficiencies around the transparency. So the thesis is, with the bubble behavior, also comes a connected community. So what's your view on the role of the community as a mechanism to continue to clean up or sanitize or whatever word we want to use to manage and help the self-governing? Because if it's organic groundswell, the communities theoretically should be monitoring and self-governing the growth. Your thoughts. Those that are afraid of what is happening are incredibly capable of accusing the blockchain world of a thing and its opposite. Because they are seeing, oh my God, the value, the network value, which some mistakenly call the market capitalization of tokens, is increasing too fast. This is a bubble. And then maybe a month later, they will say, oh, look at everything is going to zero. I told you so. Well, either one is the problem or the other is the problem, but not both. The answer to your question is that yes, the community is expressing what is going on at a fine granularity that was not possible before, because you would measure that by the subsequent venture funding stages of a startup. And maybe there would be a year or two years or more between one or the other of the stages. Today with tokens, every minute we are measuring the heartbeat of the project and the sentiment of the community around it. And everybody can vote with their tokens. Do I want to be part of this or I don't feel aligned anymore? And it is beautiful. But an even more important fact is that yes, today the community is global. When in 1976 Richard Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene and the last chapter defined memes, which were the unit of the evolution of culture. He didn't mean silly images on the internet with captions. What he meant is we should really be able to build a new science here. Memetic engineering is what is fake news and it is up to people like you and me who believe in the positive role of technology to show that we can actually have memetic engineering that benefits society and the markets. I mean, if you look at fake news, there's two things, the payload of fake news and actually the infrastructure gamification of what it did. I postulate that for on one end of the spectrum is fake news. You can almost move to the other side of the spectrum and say this is good news. So click bait equals fake news equals bad behavior. Real bait content equals real news, real community. So there's a spectrum that you can almost say we can actually weaponize content for good. Evolving our tool set in order to make sure that the wisdom of the crowds creates incredible investment and wealth creation opportunities for billions, not only for the gatekeepers is what should be the regulator's best job and they should be excited to have it rather than panicking. I want to ask you a question, philosophically, you mentioned tokens and governance, what we can vote for, what people can vote with their coins and or some sort of consensus gesture or actually real token transfer as a way of voting. This actually could solve the truth problem because if you think about it, this is a new mechanism to understand sentiment within whether it's a project or society, this new mechanism could be a source of truth, hence the no centralized control. So you got the decentralization thing happening, but that's all predicated on going around a central authority, but the token dynamic actually, if you think about it, could be a token of truth because statistically it should work that way. Is that how you see it happening and is that a directional correct statement? For too many years, we believe that that Churchill's quip, democracy is the worst kind of governance except every other kind of government was just a joke. He was giving us a challenge and we were too weak to step up to that challenge and to design better governance mechanisms, better political instruments and that is what is happening today. More and more people realize that they are freed up by technology where their relationship with the nation state that pretends to own them through citizenship and taxation can and will be renegotiated. I got to ask you a question, I love your logo, you got a network graph up there that shows kind of the network society implying that we're all connected, almost can argue borderless nations if you will, but I got to ask you, as that vision of a network society implies we're all connected, so we're all in one big tribe, although maybe with different characteristics, but how do you see the future as we look at the current internet as an almost a 30 year old stack? I mean, we're talking ancient relic by today's standards. So how do you see the stack evolving to match this criteria of a network society where the expectations of users and communities in society, whether it's government or groups are expecting new kinds of experiences, new kinds of outcomes, what in the stack is evolving? I mean, blockchain is one piece of it, but we deal with an old stack in this old guard stuff, keep companies in legacy, but the stack needs to be modernized. How does a stack modernize to intersect with your vision of a network society? Biological evolution has never been able to go meta. Our eyes are still so badly designed that the nerves bringing signals to our brain puncture the screen on which the images are projected. It's so stupid. We are able to understand when our designs are bad and we are able to go deep and actually reap out what has been the best way of going about certain things. This has happened in energy where we are still in the process of electrifying a lot of things. Many stoves are still gas stoves rather than electric as they should be, or in transportation where we went from horses to cars and now we are going to rapidly go to electric transportation. The internet is very young. It's just 30 years old in the consumer space, just 50, 60 years old as a technology, but it must be fundamentally rebuilt and rethought. It needs an engine change, it needs a tune-up. What is dangerous is that there are very powerfully faulty memes being planted into the brains of too many people bringing desirable vulnerabilities in our infrastructure and too few understand that those vulnerabilities have caught everyone, whether they are friends or real or pretend enemies. We have to build a sustainable human civilization on a solid foundation. Nobody is served by maintaining those vulnerabilities that are still poking holes in vital infrastructure around us. Yeah, I mean vital infrastructure and also the soft infrastructure, aka the human psyche, aka memes have been one tactic to control the belief system and the narrative, but that's an attention-driven mindset, so we're seeing that fake news, weaponizing content, really preyed on the attention aspect of people where the reputation piece wasn't there and a lot of people are now realizing that. How important is reputation in this new era of society because that is something that's been challenging. We're seeing every project, I mean every project that I see that I like has an element of reputation in it. So there's a, because you have identity, identity is super important, attention we know what does there, get my attention, but the new discovery, the new navigation, the new progression to proficiency or value needs to be trusted. Reputation is an important part, your reaction. And blockchain is making a lot of things measurable that were not before and measuring them, it is able to assign value to them and wherever there is value, new markets are being born. That is how incredible resources are now being poured in problems that were ignored for many, many years and what is beautiful is that blockchain is doing it open source. That is why new sustainable business models are evolving so fast. Back in the days we would say an internet year is three months, I am now saying a blockchain year is three weeks. So that's fundamental, this value piece, that seems to be the equation, that seems to be consistent. That's what you're saying, this value measurement seems to be a key metric and store, that's where the value is going to circulate around, is that? So for the moment our lives are bounded, limited, we have a given number of years to live. And more and more people realize that what they need to maximize is their benefit together with everybody else's benefit because that is what makes human society valuable to its components and as a whole. So that kind of new outlook is being driven in the blockchain industry by people who don't necessarily need the second billion or the second million but there are too many people who need to make ends meet and it is just plain unacceptable that we let them live a life that does not fulfill their potential. This is a new opportunity to reimagine that equation. So I got to ask you, I love your work on social economic impact with blockchain. One of the things that we're observing in our reporting and analysis is societal entrepreneurship is now emerging. What used to be a waterfall philanthropy exercise of NGOs and whatnot, fund something, stand up some servers, build a data center, up the funding's over, project's over, start all over again, you're kind of chasing this tail. We're seeing real action with people who understand the businesses of nonprofits, we're turning that domain expertise into real viable ventures. This is now an emerging trend we're seeing certainly in Washington DC where they have networks of people that they know and now folding on a tech staff is easier than it ever was. So you're not starting to see these real business opportunities getting funded and growing that never would have got funding before. Whether it's an app for missing and exploited children, human trafficking, battered women to water, saving water, purification, all these things are now happening. What's your view on this? Because this is kind of an unreported area around this entrepreneurship trend that things are getting to value faster. Do you see the same thing? If you ask the founder of the Ford Motor Company if he believed that damaging a community was a good business practice, he would have probably punched you or at least laughed. Because today, those who feel that maximizing profit is a sacred duty of any capitalistic enterprise, even if it does include extracting and harming communities, employees, stakeholders is extremely misguided. Positive impact is not counter to profit. They go hand in hand. So mission-driven enterprises can exist. It's not just for the philanthropy. There is nothing else but a sustainable business. In the long-term, an unsustainable business cannot be sustained. So if you want to build a business that lasts, you must build it sustainably, ecologically, socially, but of course, also in terms of it being profitable. And what is beautiful about the blockchain is that it completely decoupled the long-term sustainability of a project from this silly decision. Should it be a for-profit? Should it be a non-profit? Who cares? What it should be is an inspiration for millions of people to align their creativity and passion with that project and profits and sustainability will follow. And the funding's there and an opportunity time to value is shorter than ever before. Thank you so much for spending the time coming on theCUBE and sharing your ideas and your mission and vision and thanks for coming on. theCUBE appreciate it. Hey, we are here with David Orban, Managing Director Network Society Ventures, Changing the World, Society on Economic Impact. I'm John Furrier, you're watching theCUBE. More live coverage day two tomorrow. We're here both days, Thursday and Friday here in Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.