 Okay, we're back. We're live 2 p.m. Block 2 p.m. Block Rock what have you I'm Jay Fidel here on Think Tech and my special guest is Si Weiss. He's the energy committee co-chair at the Sierra Club for Oahu. Welcome Si. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Yeah. Nice to have you here. We've been we've been touching on this issue since we talked last week and it's really important. Let's we're calling it here on leadership making leadership work. We're calling it blockchain is what much more than just bitcoins because it's associated with bitcoins and and the message to take home is if you're not looking if you as an entrepreneur are not looking at blockchain technology you're not innovating hard enough. I took your So anyway we're talking about blockchain today and we're talking about what it can do for us talking about what it can do for us not only in in currency and bitcoins but in so many other things in making decisions in doing real-time decisions in managing our society and of course in managing energy as a critical part of our society and it's just emerging now it's you know it's kind of it it's snuck up on us it's snuck up through bitcoins and now we find that inherent in bitcoins is the kind of technology that could run so many other things. So let me begin by asking you know what is blockchain and how does it relate to bitcoins and how does it relate to artificial intelligence which we keep hearing about. So blockchain is a database that stores it's a public ledger that it's decentralized that stores information and transaction and it can be utilized in any technology that has buying and selling or you know something like smart contracts that requires some kind of input and output. So that suggests that a it's a learning it's like artificial intelligence is learning so blockchain is learning and the database is always getting new information and becoming more more intelligent more smarter all the time and that's perfect for a market because in a market you have to handle all the influences all the vectors all the facts and circumstances and come up with some kind of solution. It sounds very powerful this markets are very powerful. Right so this technology can be utilized in let's say a market condition in what we saw the rise of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to where it decentralizes it and makes it to where it democratizes a currency to where it is not controlled by some kind of central power like a either bank or government or institution. So it really puts the power in people's hands and that's why we saw the rise of Bitcoin and what we saw with I think it's around almost it's around two thousand something dollars per Bitcoin you know fluctuating it's gone down a little bit recently but nonetheless it's still a powerful currency that is used on the internet. Yeah one thing that strikes me from what you said is that democratization this is really powerful stuff to have a democratized currency where nobody is actually manipulating it I don't think where you know nobody is actually controlling it no central bank no nobody it's just reflective of the human condition the human marketplace which makes it by by definition a democratic experience this this is my right this has never happened before in any context. Right I mean this is thanks to the internet and the ability for you know the ability for like me being able to talk to you or transact with you from any part of the world as long as I have internet connection has enabled everyone to become on this you know to be a part of a marketplace that enables people to buy and sell goods that you wouldn't normally have been able to do before if you didn't have some kind of mode of transportation so or some form of communication that you know went beyond just talking or speaking with the person over the telephone. So what in fact does blockchain do for bitcoins? How does it how does it act in the Bitcoin experience? Right so there's in the Bitcoin experience there's the blockchain which is basically the backbone of Bitcoin to where it creates a public ledger of where everyone can see and it's and it's anonymous but some argue that it is not truly anonymous your identity on the ledger but nonetheless it enables a person to to view the transactions in real time of where these coins are going and the difference between cryptocurrency and specifically Bitcoin compared to the dollar for example is it's infinitely divisible so I could give you point zero zero zero one three digital yeah exactly of a Bitcoin rather than you know having to give you you know some loose change that I could give you in your pocket that's not you know infinitely divisible. So Bitcoin is obviously becoming more important these days maybe for the reason that you just described but I mean I wonder about this the whole thing with the backbone and the ledger the database you know if humankind can build it then humankind can open it up again. I mean even Apple with all its you know secret algorithms you know there's ways to crack that code and there's white hats and black hats and people who can crack what the other guy did so if the information about you and me in this backbone and the blockchain background is in there somewhere then can couldn't a third person get into it. So and that's a great question and that's something that you know programmers and people on the internet are arguing over you know on a daily basis how do we create an ecosystem that is fully transparent that you know mitigates or gets rid of fraud and it's something that is secure and that's going to take time you know it's not going to be something that happens overnight you know blockchain is or excuse me Bitcoin is the first of of the cryptocurrency world to really take off and there's other there's other forms of the blockchain technology in the cryptocurrency world that are currently evolving so you know it's something that is evolving and that we down the road will later find out what system doesn't work and what system is going to work. At the end of the day though we realize that programming and having some kind of open source technology where people can see how the program is being developed is essential in making sure that the whole system functions democratically and and that it's decentralized. So the the main point of this technology is the decentralization of power so you want to give it to the people rather than some kind of central entity that would control the flow of of that current. What I hear you're saying is that the kernel of it the essence of it the part that is highly sensitive the part that maybe controls information we don't know we don't want to be public it's just it's part of the market analysis but we don't want to get out that's going to be secret by virtue of what open source coding except none of the open source coders can actually get in to see it. I mean is there going to be some little room down a back street called blockchain corporation where some guy in thick glasses is sitting there he can control it or we'll know one ever control it and that's that's a that's you know that's something that we're going to find out currently as it stands it's you know people meet in a physical location and discuss around how the technology should move forward and specifically you know the Bitcoin blockchain so now there's something going on with bitcoins and Bitcoin cash where the where the coin has now been split too so you know they're they're it's evolving it's something that's not you know set in stone overnight and this is the way it's going to be moving forward forever something that's evolving I think as we move down further on in technology I think we will see some kind of solidified consensus on how exactly how blockchain should work. So it sounds like open source in general nobody necessarily makes any money by evolving it but but the net effect can be useful in different contexts. Right but people are actually making a lot of money off of Bitcoin. By trading Bitcoin. Exactly. But not necessarily by doing open source coding for the blockchain. That's correct but then there are things like ICOs which are called initial coin offering where an entity or a company or a group of people or even a single person could come out and say this is a currency that I've developed for X reason and I am putting it out there to you know fulfill some kind of goal or you know there's some attachment to to that currency so though I mean there are there are different ways of it's evolving for example there's something called you know a solar coin where it pays you on how much solar energy you're producing. Like solar panels. Exactly so there's it's attached to your meter then that's a verification of proof of work then you're now then given a token or a coin for that work that you did. So let's say someone in you know in the middle of India that has a coal fired power plant wants to say we want to offset our carbon footprint we're gonna buy these carbon these solar coins from this person to offset but we're you know sending off. So it sounds like from what you say is that it's it's useful in a market situation and it's also useful in making decisions around the market situation. PSI stumbled into Eddie Murphy's movie last night trading places I think it was back in the 70s the early 80s it's hysterical it is a classic movie and it is about cornering the market on orange juice and you know it shows you how you can do that but you know I suggest to you that this kind of software this kind of you know backbone database learning database can deal in any market including orange juice. So I could use this I could use this software to corner the market on orange juice is just the way the guys tried to do in the movie. Exactly I mean to even it let's say you wanted or purely organic orange juice right and you and you wanted to look at where is this coming from are they actually producing it organically because nowadays people can just slump on a you know an organic label that there's a slew of different organizations that will quote you know certify organically you know certify organic you know label your product. So blockchain what it would enable to do is some kind of contract to show you like okay this farmer didn't use these pesticides use this farming method therefore it is actually bona fide you know organic orange juice. So that's where the technology could come in and you could say well now I can go to the store and pay you know using your cryptocurrency for that organic orange juice and theoretically corner the entire or cannibalize the entire market because you now consumers know you are a true producer of organic orange juice. That goes to what you were talking about before the show trust yeah because you have to build into the system trust for people trust it and it is trustworthy right how exactly do you do that. So in terms of how do we create the blockchain to be trustful is that trustworthy right trustworthy in other words okay I'm surrendering my decision process my market evaluation whatever it is to the blockchain technology and I think this will happen more and more going forward how do I how do how do you make this technology trustworthy for me and make me trusted. Well the technology itself isn't reliant on emotion you know as humans we are emotional creatures so the technology itself is going to be purely on logic so if X happens it's going to go into a direction of Y you know if if A happens then you know we need to work the machine is going to work in the direction of B because of what happened in with that so I think that the whole idea of getting back to as we as humans have a distrust for each other and that's why blockchain is going to thrive is because we can trust the machine a software then I can trust you know you for example of course I trust you but I'm saying like as another human being there is a mutual distrust that we have with each other which makes blockchain flourish and especially now in the future we're going to be not only transacting with other humans from across the world right once and we do have you know more people from you know developing countries hopping on to the to the to the internet but in addition we're going to be communicating with machines yeah and I think that's going to be you know a big a big thing for blockchain is we're going to be enabling the processing of machines and human transaction yeah well it's really interesting I was telling you also that you know from the time I started practicing and saw computers emerging way back in the 70s I guess it was personal computers and the availability of computers and programming to the average person I thought that why not have computers in this kind of technology actually answer legal questions well we have that really why not have this technology make legal decisions like judges do or juries do and I mean there's a certain concern that in the law is built in this notion of humanity and sometimes there are value judgments that are that are not that are not as good if they're totally logical and maybe the human condition requires something illogical to function I resist that because I actually believe that if you could if you could make decisions logical all the time you wouldn't need to crank in human emotion you know human emotion actually maybe a negative factor factor in making a clear cut decision so if you accept my point of view then you can make the decisions judges make maybe better you could make the decisions juries make maybe better feed them all the facts and let them learn you could rely on precedent whatever it is you could make legislators legislation let's legislators legislation let's lay churs make good laws right and so forth I mean every branch of government including those branches that are called on to do discretionary things like the executive branch you can have them make better more logical decisions in fact you could run our whole society it's more than just practicing law or practicing justice it's everything ultimately can be done by this kind of blockchain artificial intelligence kind of analysis of things it's going to change our world and and and of course in the process it'll change essential elements of our world will the world be better side I think so I think it will it will help improve our world we wouldn't actually have I personally think as many lawsuits because of the idea of being able to trust the ledger rather than the motions of another human being but to also add to your your analogy of using the blockchain in government is actually do buy is proposed by 2020 they want to put all their government paperwork on the block little box about that big yeah yeah so you know there's already governments moving that direction the private sector has already been jumping on utilizing blockchains and as you know as you said they're only earlier in the show you know if you're not looking into block chaining into in your in your company you're not innovating hard enough yeah so you know there it's something that is not going to happen you know exactly right away in the marketplace it's going to be some you know some odd number of decades but it's going to be something that's inevitable that will be coming down the pipeline in terms of how we as a society are going to function so I think we can join together on this piece of advice forget about plastics don't go into plastics young man a woman come into blockchain and for now let's have a break we'll come back in a minute this is think tech Hawaii raising public awareness all the better to see you with my dear what are you doing okay research says reading from birth accelerates the baby's brain development and you're doing that now oh yeah this is the starting line posh this is over read allowed 15 minutes every child every parent every day aloha my name is Steven Philip Katz I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and I'm the host of shrink wrap Hawaii where I talk to other shrinks did you ever want to get your head shrunk well this is the best place to come to pick one I've been doing this we must have 60 shows with a whole bunch of shrinks that you can look at I'm here on Tuesdays at three o'clock every other Tuesday I hope you are too aloha okay we're back on making leadership work here in Hawaii talking about blockchain blockchain is not just for bitcoins and our special guest is a Psy Weiss he's the member of the Energy Committee a co-chair of the Energy Committee at the Sierra Club Oahu and we're talking about leadership so what's what's the relationship okay a bitch of bitcoins and blockchain with leadership I think in leadership people are going to have to look at utilizing this technology and convincing companies before you know the end of their company is that you have to be innovating with blockchain because if you're not then someone else is going to do it and in that case you're going to have to change your business model before company B comes in and takes over so in leadership I think it's you know our our duty as as entrepreneurs is to look at ways we can integrate this into society yeah yeah and Thomas Friedman's new book thanks for being late he talks about accelerations accelerators in our world today and one of them of course is technology moves faster all the time it strikes me from what you say that it's it's not an option if you are a young executive or if you're an executive period and if you are an entrepreneur period you have to follow the new technologies especially when you consider how fast they move if you lose out on something like blockchain you can't catch up you're done you will not succeed in this market you will not succeed against the accelerating forces all around us so what we talked also about what the low-hanging fruit would be I mean yes law and government and business in general and who knows finance yeah that's perfect there it's all numbers yeah but we also talked about energy and I that's why you and Sierra Club have wrapped around on this issue so what's the connection between blockchain and energy so the as blockchain has helped the decentralized well let's let's pedal back a little bit as blockchain has helped cryptocurrencies and helped it decentralized kind of the finance world I think that blockchain can be utilized in energy and helped to decentralize democratize energy and hopefully here in Hawaii we could be a testbed for something like that so how do you do it well it's going to take innovation in terms of developing the correct algorithms and the software and ultimately convincing you know our monopoly utility to get on board and to start utilizing this technology because ultimately we want to create an ecosystem where we can work alongside the utility and where rooftop solar and battery storage can be centralized power can work and actually be a net benefit for our society and the utility business model so I think that would be a win-win for everybody utility the homeowner and for even our environment with reducing our carbon footprint by incentivizing more pv batteries okay so if I'm the utility and I see this I accept this vision what do I do first now we're talking about energy we're talking about balancing loads we're talking about storage versus solar generation we're talking about you know taking a whole big system and a kind of harm harmonizing it and looking at the markets of each one of these balances or imbalances and making them all work totally together using something like this kind of blockchain algorithm how do I start that out so what do I do I call you up so actually this is where the entrepreneurs can dive so the entrepreneur for example can set up a company primarily I think in the first phase would be consulting the utility about this technology why it's important there's come you know there's organizations already in the US that are working around it in Brooklyn for example there is a microgrid that is working alongside with the utility over there to help enable homeowners to buy and sell literally buy and sell power from your neighbor and be able to enhance the reliability of the grid so that's reminiscent of Wheeling in Texas right so and that's and that's I think I think that's and you brought up a great point is that we need to look at Wheeling because this is in a sense not really Wheeling but it is similar very similar to Wheeling where you're allowing that the use of transmission lines and selling power to another end to another end and that's where you know we have to help the utility understand that Wheeling is something that is necessary and that's going to actually accelerate and help us get to that 100% renewable energy by 2045 I keep thinking of the the whole thing about the what is it HOV lanes or HOV T lanes whatever it is where that you know if you if you want to get on this fast lane in the highway you pay more and but depends on how many people are already on the lane so if the lane is crowded your price goes up per mile per whatever it is and it's all automatically billed of course you know as you pass by can sing a port sort automatically bill on a credit card basis and if there are very few people on that lane then your price goes down and it's an algorithm that changes the price and the price changes all the time it is real time and I think what I hear you saying is that is that if you apply this to balancing the the grid and and establishing by algorithm the charges that people would pay for energy or people would get for supplying energy into the grid it's real time it doesn't have to be fixed it doesn't have to be in a tariff it's just the way the market works in the work it works instantly with this kind of Bitcoin rather blockchain technology right right so like for example if you had you know your home in let's say Kailua and you were producing panel or excuse me you're producing power during the day from your solar panels and you know you're at work right here in the studio you could theoretically be making money at that point seamlessly depending on what the utility would accept for that for that rate of energy so right now we have a system called the energy metering which no longer exists which actually in the end yeah which no longer exists now we have something called consumer self-supply but this all begs the question is what do we are what are we going to price this type of power into the grid and so if we create a system alongside with blockchain with the parameters of accepting power at this time of the day at a certain price then we can establish a marketplace where there's we create prosumers where we create a marketplace where people can produce and consume and sell power to the neighbors or a you know a company that is nearby that needs that excess power during the day or night so I think it's going to enable to create an ecosystem that democratizes energy so that you and I can participate in the buying and selling of power yeah and it also incentivizes and de-incentivizes certain kinds of conduct that's desired or not for example you know if you wanted to balance you know at night you would charge one rate because it's at night you feed this in to the block the blockchain so you're incentivizing or de-incentivizing and changing the way the community works but here I'd like to you know give you a challenge question okay I mean we talked earlier about the challenges in making any democratized open source system is you're going to have black hats and and they could do bad things to it you can have equipment failures and that you get in a way there there are challenges with any sort of totally centralized system but talking about the marketplace aspect of it okay so I submit to the rates that are established by the algorithm with all of the influences and vectors and you know forces that are built into that making of that algorithm but I don't know exactly what the rates going to be at a given time or a given day I don't know how the market's going to actually conduct itself and therefore in business as an entrepreneur we're talking about leadership I can't plan I can't I don't know what's going to happen so it strikes me that there's a missing link there if I submit you know to this algorithm that has all these factors and this is sort of intelligence that goes beyond what I could figure out and I am at its at its at its whim I'm at its mercy and therefore you know making my budget for example on the cost of electricity to run my business I may just not know and a question I put to you is so what do I do I get my own I get my own blockchain and I and I try to anticipate I'm just throwing this out actually I try to anticipate what what the democratized blockchain is going to do I may not be perfectly accurate about that but at least I can budget I think I think I think there are going to be you know opportunities for people to create their own blockchain I definitely see that down the road where there will be some kind of program that will let you put in certain parameters to develop some kind of blockchain and let's say you created a family blockchain let's say you who with your relatives have created some kind of currency intermodal currency where you get to use that currency for some kind of family affair some kind of you know transaction that you would want to conduct but getting back to the whim of the technology and what's going to happen I think that's going to happen with what we're going to have to talk about as society is that the regulations around this kind of technology in the marketplace what are the price of certain technologies on the grid and I think that's something that we're arguing about today you know what is the value of solar on the grid what is the value of battery storage and I think further down the road we're going to figure that out and blockchain technology will help enable the transactions of those electrons and the buying and selling of power much more efficiently faster and it'll be more secure the kind of concerns that people have about it as well you know what's going to happen with price I think we're going to find out what price is most effective in the marketplace over time it's this is something that is so new so you know bleeding edge that we're still trying to figure out how to integrate it even in our economy yeah but you know with the project with grid plus and with the Brooklyn micro grid project with utilizing blockchain and solar and battery storage in that neighborhood in Brooklyn I think that that's one step further and there are utilities already looking at it I mean it's not something that you know some idea that's a pie in the sky kind of kind of thing it's something that's really being looked at you know there are there's actually a nonprofit foundation I forgot the name of the organization right off the tip of my tongue but nonetheless there are Fortune 500 companies that are investing into trying to utilize this in their business because they know it's inevitable it's something that's going to be coming down the line and then they got a you know either adapt or they they're going to they're going to fail yeah so I think with time with understanding and educating people and and different entities around blockchain we're going to see it fully be integrated into this side and and and ultimately with energy it's going to help incentivize I think it's going to help incentivize renewable energy on the grid because we're going to be able to let people you know purchase and store and sell to the utility their excess power yeah and in Hawaii where we're so conscious of energy and clean energy we could we could build a system to put the applicable regulations into this box so to speak we could put you know the market influences in there we could like the sensors you know you spoke of me we could we could put all the information we need in order to put the thing to negotiate the market and come up with a price and come up with the signals to the elements in the in the grid structure to make it work most efficiently and once we've done that we will have made a huge contribution to development of clean energy in Hawaii and the development of the grid which we need to do for sure but then there's one more point and that is the point about about learning from that and so that's the low-hanging fruit seems to me in energy but once we learn how to do that once we evolve with that once we bring all these factors together and have the thing decide we can apply it to other parts of the human experience other parts of our society and ultimately you know whatever whatever you call it artificial intelligence or blockchain whatever it is it will emerge as a significant feature in making our society more rational more efficient more productive more prosperous we're happy well that's what we all want to be more happy I think that's the ultimate experience so what's your message to the people at the end here let's see why don't you talk to that camera over there and that one and and tell them what you would like to leave with them today say well I would like to leave with them the idea that blockchain shouldn't be something that is intimidating or scary or too hard to understand that there are a lot of videos on the web that explain what the technology is I think most of us right now we have to educate ourselves around understanding this technology and how it's going to be integrated into today's economy and tomorrow's economy as well and that it's something that's inevitable we have to you know look at how this technology is going to benefit us the society and be able to adapt around it is at the end of the day it's going to be something that is going to happen whether we like it or not yeah let's have it happen here yeah let's let's we could start you know since we do have the highest solar or rooftop solar penetration per capita in the entire nation you know we're ripe for something like testing a you know blockchain powered microgrid and you know we could we could innovate something and use that data to then put on a water scale here in the island I think that's something we could bring the utility involved and I think that the utility shouldn't be intimidated and say oh well this is going to end our business I think it's not going to end their business so so to say as the utility but it's going to change their business model and it's all about how to innovate and how to become be prosperous in the future and be able to you know have a win-win and have everyone be stoked that renewable energy is a thing that we need to have making leadership work. Si Weiss, Sierra Club, thank you so much for coming down. Aloha.