 So, you know, within crypto today, there's sort of three interesting categories of Base blockchains, there's the Bitcoin blockchain, which is optimized for security and decentralization So if you are trying to redefine money that thing better be secure and it better be split up across lots of people There's the Ethereum blockchain, which is optimized for programmability So if you want to build a shadow financial system, you want to do derivatives options escrow contracts Stable coins prediction markets all these things those need rich application programming interfaces. They are Which is a direct trade-off with security because the more Programmable something is the more doors there are into that system the more avenues of attack there are And then but and the more complicated it is the harder just a scale But the more applications it can be used for and that's kind of where Ethereum and dozens of other blockchains actually compete but Ethereum is the best known and And then there's sort of this sector of privacy coins Which include like Zcash and Monero and a bunch of others and that's all around replacing cash with digital cash So it's anonymous. It's protected But you can do some you can do some really cool things with cryptography like with something called zero knowledge proofs Where I can like pay my taxes. I can prove that I paid my taxes But nobody other than me in the IRS knows how much was paid even though it's done in a public blockchain Or you could build a voting-based blockchain where each of us can cast a vote Each of us can check that our vote was properly recorded and tallied With exactly what we put in there But nobody else can see our vote only we each can see our vote and the system collects all the votes and gives the right Proveably mathematically prove the right answer, but nobody's in charge Nobody other than the individual cast the vote has the ability to go in and change your vote or counter or not count it So, you know these kinds of systems can be developed in top blockchain technology So I think that those those are the three most interesting categories right now We will see more categories emerge later but that's sort of where the the token fuel plays out and Great summary the With regards to tokens and then especially in the New Zealand context I'm curious, you know if you could wave a magic wand if you were a regulator and say, okay Here's the kind of environment policy environment right strategy as a country around tokens What would be yeah, so in the in the US there was or even globally It was sort of a free-for-all with ICOs where people were selling coins like very liberally to anyone who'd come along And we suddenly went from no fundraising online to fundraise anywhere anytime online people raise ridiculous amounts of money And now we're sort of swung the pendulum all the way back where the regulators have said well This is a security and everything falls back under the old school securities laws and those are those are extreme So I think a lot of companies now That are building actual utility tokens are trying to sort out how this works So, you know in the US we have like Verizon and AT&T and a few others, right? But telecom carriers tend to be monopolies or oligopolies. They're not the fastest moving They don't necessarily give you high bandwidth wherever you want it whenever you want it And today we have the capability for example to stitch together Wi-Fi networks You know how everyone has Wi-Fi networks in their homes But they leave them closed because there's no real incentive to open them up kind of opens you up to hacking But you could imagine a world in which the Wi-Fi access points Have an incentive mechanism built in where if I open up my Wi-Fi access point Anyone going by can use it and their phone will automatically connect and pay some micro pennies using a Wi-Fi coin and I'll collect the Wi-Fi coin in my network and that will be credit for me so that when I go traveling I can use other people's Wi-Fi access points as now all done seamlessly and wherever there are gaps in coverage Entrepreneurs will say well I can make a lot of Wi-Fi coin by dropping a Wi-Fi access point here So you could use a blockchain based network to create a global distributed Wi-Fi network That would be very high bandwidth throughput Maintained by all the nodes and owned by nobody and would be upgraded on demand just based on where the real usage needs Now to create that kind of a network now. Let's say I'm a group of developers who creates that network what I'll do is Early on I'll give a lot of I'll program the network to give a lot of tokens To the people who are providing the first Wi-Fi access points So in a sense, I'm bootstrapping the network I'm basically saying to them is like if you're an early adopter your Wi-Fi access Wi-Fi tokens gonna be worth a lot more later And you'll be able to get a lot more Wi-Fi credit or even sell it for cash Same way if I was trying to compete with uber with a blockchain based network The early drivers would get a lot of compensation in my new uber coin So that when my uber beats the normal uber, they'll be rich because they took risk early on by driving people around before they Were enough riders so tokens kind of can help bootstrap networks And solve the cold start problem that network suffer from but now in the regulatory environment We're in these are all considered securities So under securities law I can't just distribute you a Wi-Fi coin or an uber coin because I have to worry about did I comply with securities laws Am I ripping you off? Are you speculating and there's such onerous restrictions that it basically just kills the whole thing So at least in the US we seem to have gone from this model of like everything is a utility token to nothing is easy So everything is a security token and that kind of uncertainty is making it very hard to innovate So one example that I think a forward-looking regulator could do is they could say okay when things have a dual use case Like a utility token and a security token. We will err on the side of letting it be used for utility early on We're gonna work with the companies to have a clear regulatory framework And then you could see a whole bunch of companies that want to experiment with utility tokens basing out of here And bootstrapping large networks that could then eventually go on and compete globally Because it is a nature of these things to be winner-take-all So if we build a ride-sharing coin that takes over from uber or we build a Wi-Fi coin that takes over from spark or Verizon That's gonna be a global network. So it's this is a this was interesting by crypto You can launch a comp a crypto company from here that can literally take over the whole world There are no barriers to adoption in crypto. There's no language barriers. There's no app store download barriers There's none of that So you so if you had a friendly regulatory environment here You could literally build the internet and financial system that runs the world 20 years from now and instead of Everyone here being a vassal of Facebook or Google or YouTube You know, they're all using a New Zealand developed property and all the people here who adopted those coins early on would actually be fabulously wealthy Let me give you the extreme example. The extreme example is like if I was a dictator for a day You know, I would probably just go through the top 20 coins Tokens on on coin market cap in crypto and I would figure out which ones have very high quality code like Bitcoin for example, it's very well maintained But I find like a fork of Bitcoin that still has a really good developer base is well maintained But it's relatively low price like the whole thing is worth a few billion dollars I would secretly buy up as much of it as possible And these are unregulated markets for the most part So there's no disclosure rule, but you know, let's say the government of New Zealand buys up half of you know A five billion dollar coin and then basically announce that we're going to start making this coin legal tender over the next decade We'll slowly start weaving the economy people pay taxes on it We'll roll it in the credit cards people start accepting it. You can bank with it. We'll pay interest on it You know, just start making it legit and viable now all of a sudden you have a winner in the cryptocurrency Wars you've anointed a winner You've basically said here is a coin in a major country that always take this and it'll create what in game theory is called a Shelling point for the rest of the crypto universe to Coalesce around so all the developers will start building for a people will start storing value and wealth in it People will start building on top of it and that coin will end up winning the crypto wars very with a very high likelihood And it could be worth hundreds of billions of trillions of dollars and as early adopters New Zealanders would get filthy rich so that basically Today there is no government that has put its weight behind any cryptocurrency Whichever cryptocurrency gets a legitimate government putting their weight behind it first will win the crypto wars Winning the crypto wars is worth a minimum of ten trillion dollars is the value of gold not even counting all the other use cases and so if you're willing to be the first one out there and put Your neck out there and bet on that Your people benefit you're essentially the founding shareholders of that thing Maybe it's not 50% maybe you keep 10 or 20% the rest of the world splits 80 But either way you've sort of disproportionately batted out of your way and the key observation here is a lot of crypto is just norms It's like we're trying to establish. Do you drive in the left side of the road or the right side of the road? You know, do you speak English or do you speak Maori or do you speak Japanese, right? We're trying to decide on norms, but these are financial norms So if you are the one who establishes the financial norms for the world Then you have the benefit the financial benefit of those stored assets So that is an example of how one could hack the system and you have a tweet that says you get paid for being right first And to be first you can't wait for consensus. That's right Like to make money especially in a financial context or to kind of win in these sorts of situations Waiting for consensus is expensive right by the time everybody like we say in Silicon Valley Like if you want to if you want if you want to make a good venture investment You want to be non-consensus right? Right if you make a wrong investment you lost your money make a right investment you can make money But if it's conventional wisdom if it's consensus then it's heavily competed the prices are bit up You're not going to make that much money So you get paid for being non-consensus right and non-consensus especially in technology context means being first so you take risks and This is this is trite and over over communicated, but Silicon Valley does Places zero penalty on failure essentially because that because we know that You're gonna fail nine times out of ten or even nine nine times out of a hundred But the one time you you win the victories a thousand fold ten thousand fold hundred thousand fold And that's just a consequence of us now operating in Virtual and intellectual domains instead of physical domains We're evolved for the physical world where it's like you know one input one output You know you spend one resource maybe you win one back, but in the digital world. It's very different You know you you have almost unlimited upside if something works, and you have very limited downside You know one of the sad things is it probably is just as hard to start a successful restaurant as it is to start a successful tech company You know the restaurant owners working just as hard They're working to the maximum number of hours that they have and they're putting all their time and effort into it But one just has this on but the starting Facebook you have an unlimited market of seven billion people And you can just stamp that product out with no marginal cost of replication So in the digital world the the upside and the winners is so large That there's almost no such thing as risk And on that point about being first I mean how what advice would you have as a culture within New Zealand? But also what advice would you have to entrepreneurs in terms of cultivating that that willingness or that courage or whatever those ingredients are to go Be first on something At least in the technology business like whatever the geeks are doing on in their garage on weekends Is what like the entire world will be doing 20 years later as a mainstream thing? So you sort of have to have a culture of tinkering experimentation Following intellectual curiosity, you know for example all the weird things that you guys do in terms of environmental conversation recycling composting You know all the strange little technologies that Seem idiosyncratic you can see how those will eventually the ones that work will be transported out to the whole world But that is true all across technology The story of technology is you know one monkey discovers fire and then you know everyone starts discovering fire because they can they can Spread that so the beauty of it is that just one person has to figure out how to do it and then everybody can do it But you're not going to figure that out unless you have people who are obsessive tinkerers You have you have to be kind of obsessive about weird things The good founders tend to be strange the good the good businesses all look strange at first It's only in hindsight that they become accepted asset classes. So for example when Microsoft was first funded before their IPO Back then people didn't used to invest in pure software companies Venture investors thought that you can only make money in hardware what you're just selling bits. You can't do that People can just copy that there's no money in bits, but then Microsoft came along and then nobody thought that a pure Cloud services business could be that big, but then you have Google come along right and up until then venture capitalists wanted to invest in Paid software not free services Or it was a media company like Yahoo You know you made analogies to media to make money when uber came along a lot of VCs passed because the belief was We don't invest in atoms. We only invest in bits. We don't invest in moving physical people around That's not what venture capital does. That's private equity. So every great business just looks weird at first It breaks the paradigm in some way, but every terrible business also looks weird at first, right? This is this is this is true in humans, too Like to the to the average person a genius is indistinguishable from a mad person or very close to it It but it's you know, there's a thousand of them and 999 are crazy and one is a genius and the art isn't picking out Who that person is or or the environment picks that person out of the standout eventually? And actually many of those so-called mad people aren't actually mad. They're just miss-time genius, right? So it's just the nature of the beast that you're you're gonna have to Figure out Where the where the needle is in the haystack and that that's just a process of constant experimentation So a lot of times you see you look at people look at Silicon Valley and they say, oh, it's so wasteful Why do you have a thousand incubators? You only need what one Y-com that or what do you have so many? Investors you just need a few. Why do you have so many companies? Most these companies are doing useless things There's no way to tell which ones are useful or useless until you run the race It's actually where the horse track, right? It's like why do we have horse races to figure out who the winning horse is? Why don't we just pick the winning horse and say that's the winning horse? That's it only this one's gonna go around the track, right? Well, you have to run the race to see who the winning horses and you have to do it over and over and over again And that's what these ecosystems do they run races all day long and in the New Zealand context given that we're a small country I mean, how do you think about that tension between running a lot of experiments and having a lot of What could be replicating functions versus kind of tripling down on a couple key winners or industries and the like and how does that? potentially look in the development of this ecosystem Yeah, it's a tough one. It's like, you know as an individual If all you do is trend chase you will go insane, right? Like oh AI is hot I better go brush up in AI. Well by the time you get good at AI it'll have moved on to autonomous vehicles So I think you're much better off following your genuine intellectual curiosity Rather than chasing whatever is hot right now the equivalent for a nation is Whatever it is that you're naturally good at doing and have both geographic and cultural and educational advantages in doing Which somehow aligns in the world stage and I don't know enough about New Zealand to say what that is But you mentioned to me in one of our conversations for example that Wellington has a lot of content creation design art Production capabilities. So for example, if that was a nationwide strength, you could see okay Maybe we should be looking at VR and AR kind of industries You know, it's the crypto stuff we talked about you can combine regulatory arbitrage with We're in you know, three hours from the Pacific West Coast in the United States So we have a time zone advantage and it's English speaking and rule of law and non corrupt and all that and Gateway to Asia Pacific Rim, but still from a Western host. So I think there's multiple places to play and I Don't know if it's a top-down decision I think maybe it's just a combination of let's have some friendly Immigration policies for innovators combined with some friendly regulatory policy for experimenters And you just kind of see what bubbles up There's nobody sitting around Silicon Valley saying what the next big trend is or deciding what it is what they rather are Is it's just it's a good place for the witches brew of entrepreneurship to come together? You you just import as many as much technical talent as you can and you sort of get out of the way So I'm gonna invite People who have questions you can start queuing up at the microphone I'll ask a couple more shifting gears a little bit before we go to the questions You talk a lot about happiness and one of your tweets was a rational Person can find peace by cultivating indifference to the things outside their control Yeah, this is not popular because the the current environment is to get interested in an outraged about everything and then signal your Involvement as a way of sort of getting social validation what you called as signaling virtue as a vice It's a vice in multiple directions You know one of the traditional virtues is you don't talk about your virtues right because people who do that There's there signaling a little too hard and then it's a it's a holder than that sort of thing It also you can just get trapped in signaling a lot of society is just about signaling Everything from both buying hand wet and handbags to being maybe a little over-the-top eco-friendly, right? So really what I mean that the tweet was and this was all these tweets are to myself Fundamentally, right? I'm just talking to myself. So if it doesn't make sense to you, that's fine But I'm basically saying I'm reminding myself that there's a few things in life that I care about And there's a few things in life that any of us can like truly passionately deeply care about things that we want to change In effect and you kind of want to focus on those and not get distracted by caring about everything that comes along Because we're evolved live in tribes of a hundred fifty people We're not meant to have all of the world's breaking news and emergencies Packaged up into clickbait news attached with graphic images and videos and delivered to us with your phone buzzing in your pocket And while I'm saying this my phone is buzzing in my pocket, right? That might be Twitter alerting me to something horrible. That's happening somewhere in the world, right? You're just not meant to take on the entire world's problems all the time. It'll just destroy you internally I see that a lot here for example in the environmental crusade There's a lot of people here who care a lot about the environment and they're developing technologies And they're fighting hard to save it and that's all great But just make sure you don't ruin your happiness stressing over every little thing that's wrong with the environment because you can't fix it all and If you if you destroy yourself in the process You're just gonna drown and you can't you can't help people while you're drowning I mean one of the problems I have with the modern environmental movement is it is it is a culture of pessimism And that does not appeal to people It's it's a culture of fear and I would rather appeal to people through greed and optimism You know which people respond to like just imagine how like let's let's show you instead of saying the world's gonna end Unless you do what I say and then you know someone will tell me a thousand ways it's gonna end and I acknowledge all thousand They're like well, I got another thousand. I got another thousand. Did you hear about this one? Okay? Let's let's start small. Can we clean up this river? Can we? You know reforest this area. Can we make this person's life better? So I just think that you have you really have to be indifferent And not in a reactive way not no I must be indifferent just but just by realizing that if you take on all the world's problems It will destroy you You know in a thousand years ago if you saw a murder that was a big deal if you saw a dead body That was a big deal people would talk to you about it for months or years Well, you'd had to get over the trauma of that but now you turn on the TV by the age of 18 You've seen thousands of graphic murders. Where is that energy being stored inside of you? Right? That's that's damaged your psyche at some deep levels is desensitized you right in some ways We are desensitized to the horrors and then we are constantly being Oversensitized with just this wave of news just constantly coming in And you have to be okay with saying to people like I've got my thing. I'm working on it I'm solving that problem. You've got yours fantastic. I'm glad you're solving your problem But I can't take on all the world's problems. Otherwise I become a problem But but on that point I mean you're extremely well read and you're in touch with a lot of these Exponential technologies and the risks of whether it's a GI or the environmental crisis or synthetic biology and the like And so how do you how do you reconcile that kind of recognition of how enormous? Not just the headlines, but how enormous at a deeper level the risks are to everyone And at the same time maintain that equanimity. I think it's if you just look at history Look, we got we got here. All right The world is not perfect, but it's better than it used to be I know that there's a lot of habitat destruction, but I grew up in India just long enough to see what the average person lives like We're extremely lucky The average poor person is getting better off You know, there's good news too. It's just you can cherry-pick. This is why I don't like reading Macro-economics or history because just depending on which data points you pick you can weave whatever narrative you would like And I'm not saying that one has to be a blind optimist But I think it's rational to see that as a the the average Individual humans life is getting better as time goes on average, right? Not always not across all domains and disciplines and times but We we are better off than we used to be as a species now the earth may be more vulnerable But even there you can see that rich societies wealthy societies start caring about the environment And people are becoming more and more environmentally conscious with every day I think the percentage of people that are environmentally conscious, for example, it's not going down. It is going up So I think the trend lines are in the right direction And if you want to be effective if you actually just want to make a difference You need your mind rested you need to your body rested you need to be capable And that's not gonna happen if you're just frantic about everything. Maybe it's just because I'm old some desensitized Right and and I've also been around long enough that I've heard the end of the world things so many times That even when I say it and there's a podcast coming out where I talk about it and how all the different ways the world could end I'm actually not that worried about it The human race that seems to be pretty pretty good at figuring these things out But and but part of the reason why it's good to figuring these things out is because certain people do get alarmed at it It's just I'm not gonna get alarmed over every little thing. I'm gonna work in my piece. You work on your piece I mean when I see the Now I'm gonna embarrass him but I was at his house and he's trying to do a zero-waste thing We're literally like every little thing in the house has to be composted The the teabags are folded up and put away and reused and it's insane. I look at it like Like there's no possible way I could do this and function as a human But I'm hoping you'll figure it out. You will solve it You will systematize it and maybe you'll help the rest of us get 80% of the way there Because that's your mission and your pride and your joy that you're working on It's it's you're tinkering you're tinkering at the edges of environmental science to do that So I think if we each kind of stay focused on our task and do it well without stressing out over the whole world We'll be more effective and we can actually make it All right Let's open it up. The mic is open. We have 30 minutes Hey, Neval I've heard you talk a lot about Sort of what sounds to me like a kind of like conscious consciousness evolution and I find That like such a really like it's a very interesting question And I think Elon at one point was also asked something similar like do you think that we'll be able to evolve ourselves through? Like what is now a natural sort of process of us? Learning through language, etc. To be able to evolve our consciousness. I'm kind of curious from your perspective Do you see that there's a way that technology can be or that tech will be enabled for us to be able to grow our Consciousness over time to like accept effectively accelerate that that that that that process Yeah, technology is a tool and it can be used for anything good evil whatever whatever judgment you want to make You can use it to Increase our consciousness to you know, the one thing I was surprised about is the Is how the meditation apps are all doing really well like people are using headspace and calm and insight timer and so on And it's becoming a thing and technology is helping meditation. It was bizarre to me because for me the idea of meditation is like Be quiet dark place. I don't want someone talking in my head or telling me what to do, right? So it almost seemed like technology couldn't make a difference there, but yet it has You could even argue like that some of the things that are making a difference in the consciousness movement everything from So-called plant medicines to yoga. These are ancient technologies that are just becoming more prolific They're becoming more widespread But they're becoming more widespread as a consequence of technology It's it feels like everyone in Silicon Valley is going to Peru for mysterious reasons recently You know, but that's facilitated by a technology called airplanes another technology called the internet. So these are these are tools in terms of like is Just technology itself gonna raise human consciousness. I've seen some interesting experiments. There's this artist Android Jones who's doing a lot There are definitely people who are doing things like with brain adaptation Brain wave scanners There's this fantasy of this thing called why wire heading which is really scary and interesting There's a Stanford lab working on this and wire heading basically says well your brain is just electrical signals what if I can put a little headband on your head and Give you the electrical signal to be happy right now And it's consequence free It's not like a drug we have to take it and it has to hack its way through your system and go through various enzymes and Overload your liver and then some small amount across the blood brain bear. No, I literally just go and change the dials And now you're happy and you're like well that doesn't feel right. I need some meaning in my life. Okay, great Now you have meaning But I need love great love. What else do you want, right? So technology and It sounds really far-fetched, but it's actually not they've already done wire heading on monkeys to the for the Bliss machine the bliss box not the meaning box But right now it involves drilling a hole in your skull. So it's not quite ready for prime time But you can imagine the technology will start giving us these answers another extreme example is You know in Roman times one of the ways that you kept the masses from fighting each other all the time was you had Bread and circuses right very famously you give him some bread you give him some entertainment. They're busy keep him out of trouble. Luckily Modern society we're very enlightened. We don't have to we're not going to be fooled by such things So we have cannabis and video games in Netflix, right, which are the advanced technological versions I guess it's this long-winded way of saying technology is a tool you can use it for anything You can use it for consciousness. You can use it for unconsciousness social media brings people together To form digital mobs to fight each other Right, it's it can it can play on both sides And as I said in the morning, unfortunately I think that in many cases the destructive power of technology arise before the creative power But the creative capabilities of technology are actually unlimited whereas the destructive is you know, it's it's limited Downside, you know what happens when you destroy something whereas when you create something It's almost impossible to predict the levels that it could go to No one sitting around in you know in Jesus's time, for example could have predicted anything of what's going on here today It would be impossible Because the way you can just combine and recombine and recombine and create life and civilization is is unlimited But if you want to talk destruction that always ends the same way. It's just barren Cool all right next question Kia ora We in the room Have you know, we're mostly facing in the right direction and we're collaborating and that sometimes we find ourselves in competition so Can you speak to different kind of ways that we could think around? cooperating while we're trying to compete for the same grant or trying to compete for the same investor we're We're actually trying to compete against a new way of change in the way the markets trying to think Yeah, I think it's like the best it's a competition is this terrible trap you can fall into a Lot of it comes through, you know if you've read your René Girard He's a French philosopher and polymath and he talks about mimetic theory, which is most of your desires Are actually mimicked from the people around you at a very young age and you take your cues from other people In terms of what to desire what to go for and the explicit forms of this are advertising But the implicit form could be I went to law school I see everyone competing to get that law clerkship with that Supreme Court justice And so I believe that's the highest calling when actually the correct answer for me might be to go be a food entrepreneur But I'm just not even thinking about it because I'm in law school surrounded by law students So there's a way of getting sucked into competition by looking around you and the way to escape competition is through Authenticity because no one can compete with you on being you no one can compete with your business and doing what it uniquely Does the more authentic and this is this is the beauty of the Internet the Internet enables you no matter how strange or odd or Weird or specific you are to find your tribe You know you can be the you can be obsessed with Legos as an adult And I build and I guarantee you there are enough Lego collectors out there on the internet that you can make a fortune Just collecting and building Legos So I think the most successful entrepreneurs are extremely authentic to who they are and what they uniquely can do and as such They don't really operate in competition and I've learned this the hard way because I'm actually a very competitive person So when I was doing my earlier career in Silicon Valley, I used to focus on my competition a lot So one of my one of the companies I started was called opinions And we did product reviews the net and they turn into this online comparison shopping site where you could go and compare prices and our fierce competitors were biz rate and next tag and trying to think a price shopper and Forget all the names. There were about seven of them and we competed fiercely and It was just completely wasted time because it turned out that all retail got won by Amazon and All the reviews that we were working on we should have gone local instead of online price comparison But because we were focused on competition. We actually did the wrong things Whereas if we had been authentic to what we really focused on which was reviews and stuck with that Maybe we would have been yell And that entire market just disappeared and actually all those founders are now my friends because we commiserate over our experiences together So competition is sort of this it can it can suck you in into thinking It's the reality, but it's actually not a reality and the easiest way to see that is Think of any human being that you know it could be any single person You know now think of if that person was not in your life Who would be the substitute who would provide the same demeanors the same intellect the same insight the same behaviors the same emotional support the same action the answer is no one Every human being is so unique that there is no substitute for them whatsoever and parents who have a children see this right like you have three kids and they're all completely different like where Did that come from? So companies are the same because companies are just collections of humans So if you're competing you're kind of establishing a similarity to each other that doesn't actually exist And I think even consumers and customers are starved for authenticity They're looking for brands that are unique that are authentic to the founder that are expressing something that they can't find elsewhere People you know people don't want to go to Starbucks for their coffee They want to go to the local unique You know every time you walk into a store now you look to see what's different and what's unique about that that store And I think that's a consequence of wealth It's kind of consequence of taste the consequence of technology consequence of individualization But we're coming out of a factory based industrial world that was built in the 1800s Where one size fits all for efficiency reasons and we're heading into a boutique artisanal world where seven billion people will want seven billion products so I'm not I would say that yes competition is a real thing it does exist I'm not saying it doesn't exist But it actually exists more in fake human-made games like sports and politics where for one person to be above another person has to be Below right those are status games But when it comes to actually creating new things whether it's ideas or writing books here's another example No two authors compete with each other Okay, you can't you can't take a book and substance because these are authentic self expressions of who the author is and I think all Products are headed that way and all services are headed that way. You do not want to compete you want to be a market of one Kia ora so my question is really around the fact that The capital markets and the financial markets need to evolve and I know that you know Generally things are getting better for some people But the growth between rich and poor is actually growing at least in New Zealand And what do you think that next evolution of the capital markets is what is a thing that is actually going to be this step Change that we need to bring everyone along to the ride. Yeah, unfortunately. I don't think that's necessarily a consequence of capital markets that the divide is growing I think it's a natural consequence of technology and this is the unpopular thing to say because you know I'm supposed to sit up here and say take how great technology is and it is but technology is a form of leverage And it's the ultimate form of leverage it if I'm a programmer what people don't realize is I have a Million robots working for me if I come up with an idea. I code that idea up now There are million robots will care that idea. They're just they're just sitting in a data center for heat and efficiency reasons and space reasons They're loaned to me by amazon.com who takes a little cut with Amazon web services, but that leverage means that If I decide on the right thing to do versus the wrong thing to do I can make a hundred million dollars or zero dollars It's a wide swing where for someone who is not leveraged through technology. They don't have that force multiplier So someone who's working a traditional industry does not have that force multiplier So I think you when we talk about the distribution of capital We're used to thinking of money as the main source of capital And before that the main source of capital used to be people how many people are working for you, right? That's why like older individuals society tend to be really impressed by how many people are working for you And people who are a little more savvy or like how much money are you managing or how much what kind of revenue Are you doing? But really the correct question is how many robots are working for you? How many programmers are working for you? How many machines are working for you because those are the ultimate force multiplier So I believe that the way out is through technology education And where technology education falls down is that it's really popular to Preach education for kids. Everybody wants to educate kids Why because kids can't talk back. They have no choice go to school sit down shut up and learn But what about adults? We have this myth that adults can't be educated adults either self-educate or they can't be educated We have this myth that if you're 45 years old and you lost your job Your factory shut down that you're done your your only options now are either your destitute and we have to figure out how to bail you out as a society or We have to somehow preserve your job Through some false tariffs or barriers to trade or whatever Tax breaks for some company even though that the world doesn't need you to do that job anymore Really, I think we need to have a culture of adult education What if we had a model where every four years? You were expected and it was socially and culturally acceptable and there was a financial support that you would go to school for a year So every you know after every four years you say, okay now, it's my school year and this year You know, I'm gonna go and learn about You know, I'm gonna learn electronics like that's the thing that I'm gonna learn this year And you spend a year going to school learning electronics and you can be 54 years old You're learning electronics, and I think that should be a valid part of society We need continuous education to be built into society because the the leverage that you're craving the leverage that you're asking for is Actually permissionless. It's available to everybody, but it's knowledge-based The the the the gate to it is not some banker sitting on a pile of money Although that would be good too if that was released But the gate to it is really knowledge and and it's the building of that knowledge and the sharing of that knowledge I would think that the gate is actually community and how you activate them around what you're doing But it's a discussion for later. Sure. I mean, it's also there's there's many ways to get that out there You're not going to be able to learn that kind of thing without massive community support for sure Hello, thank you so far I'm hearing lots of talk that decentralization comes with some promise We're talking about collaboration as well, and there's a lot of goodwill and intent Certainly in the room. We've heard a little bit about that already I'm trying to reconcile that with the statement you made earlier about when they take all When it comes to blockchain technology Is that really the position that it's when I take all and and if so should I be talking to Arthur back there? Because sounds like he saw some cool stuff It's it's winner-take-all in the sense that blockchain technologies are really protocols and Protocols are how we communicate things communicate information with each other. So they are winner-take-all by nature For example language as a protocol within New Zealand people are speaking English and Maori and that's it If I were to launch an effort to speak Hindi in New Zealand, it just wouldn't get very far It's inconvenient everybody has already established English and Maori and they want to communicate in those tongues So similarly once there is a protocol for money transfer or wealth storage in crypto Let's say that if that ends up being Bitcoin You probably wouldn't want a number two. It can't get there But separate winner-take-all from ownership who owns Bitcoin and the answer is nobody Anyone can play in it. It's a level playing field now. It is a meritocracy. It's a market and markets can be brutal and unforgiving They can that you know, they don't necessarily look out for the weaker elements of society So there always has to be a human layer that is on top of that Because markets don't they they have their own very cold and clinical definition of fairness But what they bring is they bring efficiency and the case of a protocol market like a Bitcoin They at least bring uncorruptibility They you know, there's there's not gonna like in a Bitcoin economy if the bankers crash the economy and hold us all hostage They don't get billed out. We don't need them anymore So it gets rid of some of the worst exes of crony capitalism But it is not in itself fair It is winner-take-all, but it's winner-take-all for a protocol to give you examples of other winner-take-all protocols TCP IP which underlies the internet SMTP the simple mail transfer protocol which runs email The you know, these are winner-take-all protocols, but we're okay with that because they're decentralized They're not owned by any entity on the other hand if I look at a protocol like the app store on our phones That's owned by Google and Apple. That's not an open system. I hope That someday that will be replaced by an open protocol because those two companies just have far far far too much power It's funny to me how people worry about Facebook, but when Facebook one of their apps was leaking information Apple Kick them off the app store instantly all their apps. Everybody in Facebook was scrambling that tells you who's really in charge It's Tim Cook. It's not Mark Zuckerberg that app store is the critical access point into the entire technology ecosystem And the fact that that's owned by private companies means that all of the means of leverage now This is where Karl Marx would have a field day Karl Marx today Would not be attacking the people who own the money or the machines They would be attacking the people who own the gateways to the app stores Because that's where the means of production are really are really gated And they get they get 30% of everything on your phone Which is your entire life and they get it all in profit. It doesn't cost them anything for that 30% So I think we even a decentralized world that we can converge upon Protocols that are winner-take-all for certain use cases, but as long as they're not owned by a single entity We're fine You're a novel you don't really strike me as a busy guy I was wondering if you had an extra two hours in your week How would you spend that if it was towards advancing the human race? Yeah, I'm not a busy person actually and I'm not busy because I refuse to schedule things I'm famous for not scheduling things and not doing meetings and not it being as busy place There's a time because I think busy is the depth of productivity and and people will spend a lot of time Responding inbound to meeting requests and Notifications and squander all their time and energy Whereas if you want to accomplish anything in life, it gets done through focus Intent and focused action and that only happens when you have free time You have to get bored before you can be creative anyone who's ever done a creative job knows you have to be bored You cannot be creative on schedule. You can't be creative from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. You know five days a week You cannot be creative when you just run from meeting to meeting to meeting from to do to do to From task to task to task so and all the great endeavors in life are creative right at some level I I do firmly believe that everything I've done in life is useless You know, it's not going to bring me any lasting satisfaction or peace and it doesn't follow me to the grave So it's kind of pointless I so if I'm going to do it do it for the art of it do it because you enjoy it do it for its own sake do it for self-expression and so Just it's very important to not be busy. How would I spend two extra hours? I probably just play with my kids to be honest. I don't I don't I don't believe in work time I just believe in like you have time and you spend it doing what you want to do it And sometimes you spend doing what you have to do and you want to minimize that And if you have to do something you might as well enjoy it because you're still there It's your time, you know, so why suffer But just sort of avoid getting into situations where you are sacrificing today for some imagine tomorrow Because tomorrow doesn't exist. It's just today is here So I don't I don't have unfree time And I would encourage all of you to just be ruthless about not scheduling you will have to disappoint people You will have to disappoint society You will have to let people down, but when they want your time, that's their problem not yours And the best way for you to give them your time is to spend your time doing what? Only only you can do and most uniquely do and then that is a gift to the people who need that But you cannot be reactive. You cannot respond You have to act From inside if that makes any sense. Sorry. I got weird there, but Yeah, I'm very defensive of my time and you know as these guys know like they've been even at welcome week Right, you didn't show up to this on time Well, I've probably been the hardest person to corral at welcome week because I need four to five hours of time a day By myself doing nothing Because if I don't have that time then I will not be able to do anything Because the because I mean think about your days like if you get up at seven in the morning and you run around you're going Meeting conference meeting conference conversation, then you come home You watch a little TV your little book you talk to the family your exhausted you hit the bed Like what actually got done you you're you you haven't even you haven't even detoxed from all this the crap you took in that day Right, it's all just weighing in your mind and some of it is lodging there and that comment She made and that thing he did and I'll sort that all out later. It's probably on a therapist couch 10 years from now right You have to process your day. You have to let it go Let it pass through you and then you have to get a little bored and then what's left You're kind of tinkering and something interesting may come out of that We need that note. We have seven minutes and 50 seconds to the next exactly 749 Hi, I Agree with you that the big challenge is education We have billions of people cannot participate in a discussion at this level and technology can be the answer How far we are of self-engaging platform for kids audits to keep their education going at the scale or free Yeah, we're very sorry, which initiatives you see that are around that could follow. Thank you We're very very close actually I think the bigger problem that this generation will face is adult education not children's education children are learning machines and They just need the tools and the tools are there. They're just unevenly distributed So you could there was an experiment done in Pakistan where they maybe was I'm maybe getting the details wrong So someone looked this up but there was an experiment where it took a bunch of Android tablets and They left them in some poor village in a third-world country and the kids unpacked them and hack them and Reprogram them and figure out how to use them and we're teaching the adults how to do it kids are self-educating You just give them the means they're curiosity machines. They'll figure it out it's the adults that are the bigger problem and I think they're again the The the means are there the internet is there MIT courses are there yell courses are there I could even you know if you had a good software platform today, and you said hey We're ready to re-educate all the adults who need it. I need volunteer teachers You get a million volunteer teachers from the first world The problem is the problem is the desire it's a desire to learn that is scarce and as we talked about earlier desires are memetic desires are copied Humans copy each other's desires. So if you see You know, there's the old Mark Twain line. There's nothing so damaging to one sensibility as watching a friend get rich All right, it's kind of classic Mark Twain But the same way if you are an adult that needs to that is facing a difficult situation And right now you're not thinking about education as a possibility But then your neighbor goes and gets educated. Well, that's interesting right now all of a sudden you want to keep up with the Joneses so perhaps you'll do that and the role for society and government might be carving out that space saying actually Instead of unemployment benefits instead of universal basic income or whatever We're going to give you a one-year education stipend, right? So here's the money to survive for a year while you get an education Here's like 10 different educations you can choose from these are what people in your neighborhood are doing and also kind of reconnecting employability to education like the the four-year university system Exists in this fiction of do what you love, which is fine. I'm actually a big believer in do what you love I'm just not a believer and spend four hundred thousand dollars in four years doing you know learning what you love like because not everything can withstand that return on investment and and make sense with taxpayer so I Think some combination of giving people the space and time to learn as well as mimetically making it Acceptable in society making making it great in society like wow you but you went back to school for a year And you got your degree in X like that's amazing, right? That should be like a positive So I think we can get there. I think we can do it that the tools already there the tools already exist Kia ora. Thank you. Thank you Kia ora so with the talk about education, I often listen to your Suggestion on equipping everyone with tech literacy and whether it's adults or children quite often When we're going through becoming tech literate It becomes very very consuming because it takes a very steep learning curve for quite a lot of people obviously and then How do you balance it with say? Having four hours a day to be by yourself walking by the river so that you can be creative as you need to be Because like I feel that same way. So it would be interesting if you have Yeah, learning isn't that time-consuming actually I Know that we have this model where you spend eight hours a day in the classroom and that's how you learn But you're not learning eight hours a day a lot of that socializing a lot of that is responding to the teacher's requests You know a lot of that is studying things that frankly are kind of obsolete or you shouldn't be learning in school anyway when it comes to Actual Technology literacy, I'll bet you like two hours a day for six months is really sufficient for most people I'm not talking about turning everyone into a hardcore programmer I'm just talking about enough that they're not scared of technology anymore, right? It's like when my mom picks up her computer That's picking my mom. She's great. She's got an iPad. She's fully functional at the first few times She's afraid of touching something. She's like what if I destroy it? What if I what if I delete everything? I'm like, oh mom, you're just been crazy. You don't have to worry about that and she's like, okay Well, how do I delete a file? I was like, well you drag it to the trash can she's like, then how do I eject this disc? We drag it to the trash can but won't that delete it. Oh Yeah, you're right that will delete it right and so she has a proper fear because we have made technology Still very complicated in a way that to the average person they can make Irreversible errors like if you hand your parents a Bitcoin key, right? That's a high-risk maneuver So some of it is just we have to make technology easier to use but I think the education is there to get over that fear Like whatever your level of mathematics proficiency is for example Determines how much science you can learn like wherever your math tops out You don't want to pick up a book past that because it's just gobbledygook. It's just like a lot of a lot of jumbled Letters and numbers and that's why I'm not a physicist today because my math wasn't good enough So I think the same way with technology What your your knowledge gets you to a fear threshold it gets you to a point where the limit of where you can learn So I'm not saying we educate everybody to be a great computer scientist But we get them to the level where they're comfortable pulling a book off the shelf or going to a website and learning what they need to on demand The beauty is that we have this external brain called Google and Wikipedia and wiki how and so on We don't need to remember everything We just need to know how to use the tools to get the things that we need when we need them Maybe just a point on how to balance it though with that aspect of gaining energy That is outside of that particular area of literacy You mean in terms of the the time the free time piece free time or other Nature whatever it is that brings you Yeah, I mean I I'm from Silicon Valley where everyone's an egghead and everyone's spending all their time indoors I think in New Zealand you have a much better and more harmonious relationship with nature I'm probably not the person to advise you on that because I spent too much time indoors there is a not too unrealistic Joke in Silicon Valley that part of the reason why people in San Francisco are innovative is because the weather is not very good right the summers aren't great and like the beaches are actually cold and Etc. And Where's the Los Angeles where the weather is really good and it's nice. It's actually hard to get work done The outdoors beckons. That's okay. All right. We've got time for one more Hi Kira aim from a court one We've got amazing group people in this room nonprofits social enterprise start-up people What's your recommendation for them to prepare for fundraising in the future? And what do they need to know to be ready for that? Yeah, I can only speak to technology start-up fundraising I do not know enough about nonprofit or social entrepreneurship fundraising The only thing I would comment on social entrepreneurship is if you really want to have an impact in this world It's better to make your your enterprise economically sustainable So in that sense, it's you know, you're Get profitable even if even if you're a nonprofit get profitable Because then you don't have to go begging for money begging for money sucks and You know be a be a profit center and I don't and it is hard But when you do it then you can truly scale what you're doing and it can last for a very long time In terms of fundraising for technology companies here in startups it's difficult because you're not in a technology hub and Funding markets actually develop backwards people think like I'm gonna have angel investors and then series a and series b But that's not how the market develops the way the market develops is some company bootstraps is way to an IPO Creates a whole bunch of millionaire angels Then those angels the smart ones actually don't invest in seed stage companies They actually invest in companies that are about to go public And then those ones then they form little firms and invest in the ones that are just stepped before that step before that So you de-risk all the way back down to seed level and when you see seed Investing crop up in an area where there's no series a or series B or series C market Then those companies run out of money very fast or you get brain drain where those companies the winners get exported out And they go to Silicon Valley to raise money and they never come back The good news is that Silicon Valley has gotten insanely expensive and we've been saying that for a long time But now it really is extremely expensive like it might be twice the cost of Manhattan to run a company in Silicon Valley So it's becoming much more accepted now for companies to raise money in Silicon Valley and then go back to their hometowns and spend it You still have the burden and challenge of standing out So it might make sense to have a Silicon Valley or New York office with one founder or key executive there who can build relationships So you can put to the so you can be part of the trust network in Silicon Valley Which is really what makes financing and capital work there But then build a company here in terms of expansion. I think every Large company in Silicon Valley and every venture investors looking for the next place that has tech talent And so to the extent that you have a strong university system. You have a digitally literate populace You have young people coming up who are programming and I hope older people who are programming I think that's very very attractive So in the Bay Area, it's now well accepted that for example University of Waterloo In Canada stamps out all these amazing engineering students Vancouver has become like a legitimate acceptable hub to have startups or have most the operations of a startup Same with Toronto. There are a few of these kinds of places forming and I don't I don't see why Wellington can't be one of those I think it just it takes a little bit of focus and effort But I think Wellington is well within striking range of being a great place to build a startup and you just funnel the money in from Silicon Valley That's a great place to tie it off. How do people follow your work when and follow you online? I'm just at Naval on Twitter. So that's the easiest way. Let's give it up for at Naval