 Chris welcome to the New York State podcast. Hey biology Harry great to be here, you know You and I have been talking crypto for like 10 years and it's kind of like raising a child together So you've got this new book and it's read write on you want to hold it up for the camera. Do you have a copy? Oh, yeah Here we go everyone read write on available January 30th read write on calm has you can bought force by today Amazon but also if you want to support other smaller booksellers or whatever you prefer it's there and we have audiobook and Kindle to coming in the same day wonderful. So go and own read write on and you know, it's funny I'm glad you wrote this book because It's kind of like crypto one-to-one 2024 I think people ask me what this crypto thing is all about I can just point them to this and this will be sort of a onboarding manual You said you wrote it for a smart high school student. You want to talk about that? Yeah Yeah, yeah, so I mean, that's exactly what I'm hoping that the book becomes is that it's the book that like, you know You join you're a employee who joins Coinbase and your family and friends are like isn't crypto that thing that like FTX And a bunch of speculate and I can't I mean I've literally heard this like a thousand times and then I go to DC a lot You know and just meet with you know press and policy makers sort of part of my job is to you know So do that and kind of work on policy stuff and literally almost every meeting There's like what book should I read and like there's some great books on Bitcoin specifically and there's some great books Like there's a you know the history of Coinbase and the history of Ethereum But there isn't sort of as you said like kind of a 2024 onboarding manual that sort of explains What I wanted to do was to look and I wrote it partly to test myself frankly because this I wrote it during you know After FTX and this sort of downturn and I was like let me you know I think it's Richard Feynman who said if you can't explain it to I forgot like a 10 year old You don't understand it right now. And like and like I've always said like this is you know that that that blockchains and crypto or about kind of You know decentralizing various internet services and returning power to Users and software developers and creators and kind of the edges of the internet You know as opposed to these big intermediaries, but like can I really write it out in detail in a way that that could convince somebody Who's a skeptic but like open-minded skeptic? Who doesn't have a background in technology in the internet and like as I said, yeah, someone said a smart Actually, I think I think I got it indirectly from Peter Thiel someone told me he wrote his like agent told me he wrote it for He wrote zero to one which I have a lot of respect for that book He wrote that um for our smart high school students and I and I thought that kind of was a great Kind of God guidance so I thought about that a lot and so I don't use I avoid jargon And except when I absolutely needed and I define it Actually when one rewrite to I went through, you know the first very Yeah, for those who've written obviously you've written a lot including your book ball of you it's easy to kind of slip into passive voice and kind of Make assumptions that kind of jump over stuff And so I was very like if you notice there's very few like kind of superlatives in the book There's very few Very little passive voice like every eyes part of the discipline of it is like who did this You know what did they do and I'm going to show you not tell you I'm not going to claim something I'm going to walk through the details and I was it actually took me I mean it took me a year And a bunch of kind of rewrites and somewhat painful to like Get it to that point where it's just really kind of broken down That's what I'm hoping is the sort of first principles You're you know open-minded But don't have a background in this I do a brief Um History of the internet in the beginning with a specific folk. I mean and it's very important like one thing I realize when speaking to people um in the general public and like Maybe like why write a book like I'm of the sort of I think probably the biology Naval school thought that Why write a book when you can write a blog post right now used to blog for years and I was like It's no point writing a book You know why why a book now and a lot of business books are kind of like filler, you know I've gotten all these people ask me like did you write the book like they think it's like this goes to It's like a ghost because you know I run a fund so they assume it's like ghost written and it's like seven seven habits of You know successful people or some kind of like inspirational thing, which is not it's not at all Right, yes, I wrote it and yes, and it's like this is like a you know, you may even not agree with it But it's like a it's a book. It's not a you know I mean you and I are both academics, so No one would ghost write our paper. Oh academic Yeah, we're both reformed reformed. I think I think we were we were smart enough to leave at some point We were dumb enough to stay too long and smart enough to leave or something like that, but So um Anyway, so Okay, I sorry I could go on you go ahead and ask a question. I just want on that actually so Just to digress on the topic of writing for a second You know what I found hard about writing a book and right now I'm doing the second edition of the network scene Actually, I never see a movie But um movie movie. Wow. Yeah, okay. I guess I just broke some news there fine. That's coming Okay, what I found hard about doing a book is if you're writing 10 or even 15 page essay You can read and reread the whole thing Okay, I think I think I know where you're going here. Keep going. Sorry, but the exactly but the moment it gets to like Maybe a hundred pages a little on 200 or something You can't reread the whole thing start to finish before you write page 201 And so you have to have it's like it's like a code base which becomes large enough That normally you'd factor it into functions and just import them The only way you can get through something like that is with a really good outline That just sort of decompresses and even then you kind of need either an editor or nowadays ai to find the redundancies and so on I think i'm going to have a better tack on that, but I'd love to know what your approach was on that No, no, no, it's very interesting. You're right because I've done a lot of blogging obviously And it really does change when it's longer and and so I'd say a couple of things like one like one of the hardest things Was had I already explained that I think this is what you're saying with redundancies Like could it's really annoying when you're reading a book and you're like they explain something twice or they Over explain it sort of the second time right like it hasn't been explained enough Right, it's so hard when it's in this case 230 pages like when you get to this you're reading chapter 7 and you're like wait a second Is this Did I did I already explained this enough or not? Right um and what I found is I had to take if I didn't take I had to take two week breaks sometimes to clear my head Yes, I didn't take a two week break Then I couldn't read do a fresh read and read it as like right and like be like oh wait that feels silly that I didn't explain that or I over explained that And I had to take these two week cycles and then and what I would do in the meantime Is I would like work on small pieces of the code base so to speak Right and then I would say okay now my brain's fresh and I can do a full read And then I would do like a two and then I would take me like two weeks to do a full read or something And at one point actually for my case so I actually had Also, I had the other thing I learned is that with so with you think about your reading like a non-fiction book And let's say they make like three claims in a row and let's say as you read, you know When you're reading it's really interactive process, right? You're kind of saying I don't agree with that And if they keep saying stuff and they don't address your concern You'll probably quit reading because you'll be like wait a second, right? Like it's kind of like the tree forked too far away from the reader or something So I had like 20 people really smart people a lot of them work with me on my team read it Including like Dan Bene, Tim Ruffgaard and like CS professors, Bill Hinden and law experts And they would give it was amazing. They gave me like paragraph level comments, right? Like this doesn't make sense This is a counter argument and then I went and addressed them all and that took me four months or something And but then the code base had to I read it again. I was like holy crap This is just all messed and it's messed now the code base was a mess I then had to refactor the whole thing, right because it was like just like all code, right? It was just like had, you know, kind of metastasize or something in all these different weird ways Um, and so anyway, so yeah, but that that's the Yeah, go ahead Yeah, it's it's just sorry finish finish your thought because I'll tell you no, but you're right Like I just had no idea that like the pure length of it. I guess it meant like I couldn't keep it in In memory on board memory ram. I had to go It I had to uh page to the hard drive or something That's that's exactly That's exactly how I felt and I think you and I both have actually normally a pretty good memory for written text and whatnot So this is like a buffer overflow And the other thing is you can't just import You mentioned, oh, you know people have explained it too much in maybe by repeating a definition in the chapter seven The opposite of course is you are very concise and like a math textbook You introduce five definitions and you use them all Back to back to back, but then people are lost because you just use five keywords that you explain but not used together, you know Anyway, so, um, I think you did that pretty well by the way for what's worth. Thank you You know, hopefully this also gives like a verbal overview for people Yeah, I was very happy with like so I sent it to like for example, kevin kelly who I have a lot of respect for Who's the founder of wired? Um, you know great writer written mini books and he's sort of a real tech optimist for those who don't follow him You should he's he's brilliant, but he's actually I know him and he's been always a crypto skeptic And actually he's one of the quotes I have on the back of the book and he's like and I he's the kind of guy He's not going to bullshit me. Yeah, he like he's like this changed my mind This is I think the response I've been happy with overall But I think it's actually been more positive the less into crypto. They are yeah So like some of the crypto like on my team, they're like, well, I kind of knew the first, you know Two-thirds of it chris. Well, also they hear me. They're like chris. I've been around you for six years She's been saying it over and over, you know, but um But I think that that you know that that I'm hoping is sort of how it lands Is it kind of like the crypt? I hope the crypto people like it I think particularly like in the token section like I have this framework faucets and sinks, which I think is It's not it's not my ideas But I think I do a nice kind of crystallization of a lot of the best ideas So I think crypto people will find some of that interesting Um, some of the I do have a treatment of the regulatory topics like securities laws Um, I have a bunch of application example application areas So I think the I hope crypto people will find parts of it You know a lot of the younger crypto people won't know the internet history stuff as much So hopefully that will be helpful to them But but fundamentally I want them to I really hope they like it But I really want it to be the book they recommend to the kind of adjacent layer Which I just feel like because look we have You know, it's I think you're the I think you invented the sort of phrase or I think so right like kind of Speculation is the bootstrap mechanism speculation is insulation It's insulated sort of yeah, it's sort of the but like what is but like the question then is like, what is that? What does that mean exactly? Like how do we actually get there? You have to value the thing on the other side installation installation of what and then we'll get to that in a second I do think by the way that you have something in the book for everybody because Uh, I think you're right that junior crypto people who are in their 20s Didn't live through web one and web two like we did and that's just been around their whole life So they'll learn something from it and you know, Kevin Kelly is a good example of like the tech swing vote Who is like a rational actor, but just hasn't dug into this or would have you and now you know He's smart enough. He understands it from your your description. There's something else by the way the TL writing zero to one for a smart high school student probably helped him bring Vitalik to the TL fellowship I'm not sure if the timing on that It's sure. I forgot. I forgot he has a program that recruits smart high school Right, so there's a utility to it there as well. Okay, so why don't we why don't we jump into the book itself? You know a crypto is a big enough area people come at it from different schools of thought Many come out as a financial thing I come at it as a primarily political thing and you come at it as a technological phenomenon And of course those are interlinked, you know, your your book is divided into five sections Which you know, I'd roughly summarize. So you've got read write. That's your brief history of web one and web two You have own which is on the like the invention of blockchains and the concept of cryptographic ownership A new era which I called maybe the basics of crypto economics But in a in a nice distilled way which aggregates 50 different blog posts and heuristics into into a nice little chapter Here and now the current controversies which You know will be the most in a sense timely section of the book and then what's next where we can build with crypto So maybe, you know, tell me if you think that's a correct overview. Yeah, that's perfect. Yeah Great and you want to do you want to give your overview of like the book as a whole and maybe Drill into those sections a bit go ahead Yeah, so And and maybe just to give a little bit of context, you know, I got into the internet sort of late 90s And I've spent my entire career on the internet. I was originally an entrepreneur and an investor and And as you mentioned earlier, I've sort of a Reformed academic and I actually think I wouldn't like I was attracted to the internet because I mean it was an amazing amazing promise of A network that was Truly decentralized and owned by the users, right? This was the original internet And that happened for a variety of reasons. You know, it's origins and academia and government and there were sort of political motivations But to me And by the way, that was not a fated complete like there were alternative visions like bill gates and Comcast and disney had this information super highway which sort of is centralized internet, right? And like, you know, our friend mark andreason was on the kind of the open internet sort of open sourced side And of course, you know, with Netscape and everything else And and to me that was just a remarkable thing I mean that we would link all the computers in the world and we would do it in a way that there was no kind of Intermediary, right that was taking tolls money and power and control and that this was actually sort of the thing owned by the people And the specific instance is a specific way that Address so you have and and that was kind of came so like, you know You had the sort of base layer of the course of the internet ip But then you had these layers on top like email and the web and they respected ownership and they did it I go through in the book a little bit through, you know, this mechanism of dns And you know, one of the key features just technically of dns, right as you have the user has control of the mapping Of the domain name to the hardware, which means if the hardware provider turns evil, you can exit, right? dns gives you the ability to exit Yes, and this was and this is a very very so this I think this is an often overlooked but profound feature Of the early internet that ability to exit meant that First of all, you know creators Political dissidents activists, whoever they might be had the ability to go do something, right? And like put up have their own little plot of land and as long as you were obeyed the law You could have your plot of land, right? But it also enabled entrepreneurship, right? Like that's why larry page and And jeff bezos and others they knew they could if they built something on that plot of land And it was valuable that that that they would own it, right? Or that they and their shareholders would own it but like there wouldn't be sort of an apple in the middle taking 30% or something Like it was it was true ownership, right? An analogy that I think we've probably both made. I mean the auth code of dns is very similar to a private key From crypto. Yeah, yeah, it's because it's it's all about that mapping, right? It's like, right It's that one layer. Do you control the layer of the virtual to the physical? Yes, right And who has control of that is it twitter that has control or does the user have control? Yes, right. And actually it's funny because I remember, you know, actually, I'm not sure if this is in the book or not But I think maybe we've both made this analogy different times You know, I somebody, you know, who's a web two person. I asked them, okay You're doing a new company. Are you gonna buy the domain name? Or are you gonna lease it because you know some some of the really nice domain names They want you to lease it or something like that, right? And the problem with that is you're five years in and now suddenly they can jack up the cost on you know, your domain name because You just add always valid. That's why, you know, every good restaurant in the world goes out of business is they always jack up the rent Exactly just to the point where they They built a neighbor. Yeah, exactly. They just assume that they can put another restaurant in there because they don't own it That's right. And so You know, the right the smart out first says, oh, of course, I'd want to buy the domain I wouldn't want to just lease it. I'm like and now you understand crypto That's digital ownership, right? Whereas they don't own of course their social like you jump forward to web two You don't own your twitter name. You don't own your instagram name You don't know like all of these different things. You don't own your, you know paypal or your Square cash or any of these services, right? You're just You're just there at their discretion and their whims Yes, and and yet your username is becoming As important if not more important than your real name I mean most messages that come into you are coming into Your c. Dixon not your physical mail, right? 99% of communications online. Okay, so Good, so that's kind of go ahead. You're yeah, so then I sort of Give a little bit of you know, it's one chapter on the kind of web one and look that's and that's really why I got into this For example, like I got into the internet as I thought this was just amazing thing And then so then web two comes along and and I talk about the history of this a little bit But the you know on the good side was was this movement to make the web read and write So in the 90s the internet was what I you know call skew morphic, right? So it was like a lot of new forms of media It was sort of porting old media onto the new form right like early early films We're just like a camera on a play and then later on they figured out that you could have a close-up An establishing shot and kind of established the grammar of film Right and the same way early internet, you know, if you go back and look at these retro Archive things you'll see they're just like brochures magazines, you know You did have like online shopping, but it was very primitive and and so the web two movement Which I this is when I became an entrepreneur in the early 2000s was said was saying Hey, the internet actually has these sort of native two-way possibilities You can build you don't need to make the user just a passive consumer You can let the user publish, right? And so that was a social media and it began social media movement and that began with blogging And morphed into you know Facebook and Twitter and all these other things which everyone of course knows today In the course of that happening what happened is that in the 2000s kind of two Architectures for how social networking would happen one was an open architecture Most notably rss, which you know today still exists people use it for podcasting But in 2007 eight it was literally had the same number of users as you know Facebook Twitter and everybody else combined people forget this It was a legitimate horse race in like 2008 or so up until that point Which one which one uh, but rss did Oh, yeah, yeah RSS was legit Yeah, if you go back like I was going back and looking at my early blogging like my whole blogging career Beginning was always this rss versus proprietary social media debate. Yeah. This was uh This was a and look I would argue that this People say you know today the top five tech companies are five 50 percent of nasdaq up from 25 10 years ago Top one percent of social networks is 99 percent of social networking traffic and revenue Like why did we get so consolidated? I would argue that was the pivotal point was the was the fall of rss Was the fact that rss the fact that social networking Is you know people spend seven hours a day on the internet and like it's like I think four hours of that A social networking or something like it was a mass had a massive economic Consequence here's how I think about that and then uh, you know, you give me give me your thoughts or you're you're in bio I was in bio, right? So I was like, yeah, you weren't in the in this battle that battle That's right. I'm a little bit like kevin kelly actually in reverse where I actually tried to stay off of social media because Just like so kevin kelly, you know, I'm just saying because of his remark there He's relatively late to crypto, but he's smart guy and so on. He's just thinking about other things I was in bio and I was actually trying to stay off the internet and I actually only started tweeting in december November december 2013 Right, so like seven years after because I thought it was all tweeting breakfast and so on and so forth And that's a power of that's the equivalent of oh crypto scams and and hacks or whatever when someone's on the outside That's basically all day here Uh, but I but I wanted to say so web one web two web three At the time web 2.0 was thought of as a jackson google maps and interactive stuff and what have you But now in retrospect we can say that there's there's a front end evolution for example with going from login pass through the web one Social login and oauth and web two and then like connect wallet with web three And there's a back end evolution where you go from peer to peer like p to p Then mvc and then what I call cbc client blockchain clients. So like peer to peer every node is equal, right mvc You know like the rails a pioneering thing But just the hub and spoke architecture around a center and now client blockchain client which combines aspects of both of them You've got some of the peer to peer aspects and because open source and it's open statements programmable But you also got the monetization and the single global hub of the mvc era So this is like the best of both worlds the reason I bring that up is That's why I was a little surprised when you mentioned rss because rss was certainly good for Uh like static content distribution But the moment you you wanted dynamic content you had like like a facebook page or social networking You kind of needed to have that hub. Otherwise, you'd be message passing social profiles. You're exactly right So so no, I mean I completely I think we agree, but I'm just saying like historic like at the time At the time it seemed like a horse race in the past. Yes And in fact, I have a section like a smaller section of the book the fall of rss where I try to diagnose Why it failed and so and of course that leads to exactly your argument, which is I I view blockchains as As ameliorating the the things the things that the reasons rss failed. I believe are two things features and funding Yep, okay So features is the ability to store for example your username. So rss asked you to it didn't have any storage It was a stateless protocol as as like htp and smtp Therefore and like actually quote in this thing There was a wired article from 2008 where they tried they they tried to build a social network And they said we can do everything except for the except storing the usernames We have no way to do that and there were all these proposals at the time I was involved in these debates. It was like should we create a nonprofit this store is a social graph It could be like wikipedia like how do we store it dns Yeah, and of course it was what you need. It was a blockchain, right? You need a community owned Decentralized database, right? And so what yeah, so what yeah what actually the way rss worked is you had to go pay eight dollars Biomain set it up and that was just not a consumer value proposition when when twitter and facebook said just click a button Then you get an aim It just that was one thing and then the other is subsidization So I think a lot of people that don't work on the internet that aren't internet investors like me and things don't realize How much subsidization has gone into the building of social networks? And so the example I use in the book is youtube So when youtube came out 2005 it was actually originally a dating site and then it pivoted. I remember it came out Yeah, it pivoted into a you know appeared like a social Video site and by the way at the time there were all these video sites But it was like much more of the kind of uh, you know Anyone can upload something a lot of the other web ones were like taking cbs content and right Whatever And so that's why that's why they beat google video because they're more risk tolerant But anyway, go ahead. Yes So with youtube when it came out It they they pursued the strategy called that I call come for the tool stay for the network So when youtube came out there was no no one went to youtube.com All right, and everyone had their audience on their blog like I did right and I wanted to have video on my blog Now to have video on my blog at the time I would have to before youtube I would use rss as the as the kind of protocol for people subscribe But then I would actually have to host it like fiddle with some software To host it on my site and then pay for the bandwidth costs, which were really expensive Right And so youtube came along and said, you know what you click a button you upload stuff And we will pay for the hosting cost and you can put you can embed it their killer feature Which you can embed it in your blog They actually had the first thing you saw on youtube was these big html at the top that was like the embed codes, right? Um And and they said oh and by the way, we'd like to also put it on youtube.com No one comes here, but what the heck why not right right and so that was the strategy And so all the people in the beginning use it as this sort of free video hosting thing to host on your blog But then of course over time right it was come for the tool. That's the tool the free hosting the single player The network suddenly youtube had all this great content. I'm not going to go to cdixon.org anymore I'm just going to go to youtube And you know fast forward it's worth like wall street analysts say 140 billion dollars probably more as part of google But they spent you know, this is why did twitter and facebook and all these guys raised tens of billions of dollars A lot of its subsidization they they spend tons and tons of money What is a blockchain like I think of it is sort of thesis antithesis synthesis thesis is protocol networks, right? I mean you like these The thesis is protocol networks Antithesis is what I call corporate networks is kind of centralized networks and then synthesis is Blockchains, right, which is the best of both worlds you get you get the way I kind of characterize in the book You get the societal benefits of protocol networks, but the competitive advantages of corporate networks Exactly you get the ability to do subsidization through tokens You get the ability to store state right through the blockchain state But you don't as part of that have you know for people in palo alto who get to decide the the flow of global culture business and Economics, which is the current state, which is the trade we make today with corporate networks, right? Like it's we've we've bizarrely, you know, it's like as if at and t got to decide who made phone calls and who gets to How and how and they get to take you know anytime you call somebody up They get to take a bunch of the money like that and they're asked and they're also asked to get in the middle of that And people want them to filter and so yeah all this stuff. Yeah, I mean I don't care what your political views are like the idea that we are going to outsource these incredibly important global communication systems to seeming apparently arbitrary group Like I just fundamentally against that idea. I think these I agree Decentralized community on systems a couple of reactions or thoughts So first is you know, you had a good line a while back Which is every command line tool becomes an app, right? Like every unit's command becomes a yeah Exactly, right? So our man man becomes stack become stack overflow and and our sink is like dropbox and Grabbed his google and you know, I don't know right. Yeah So now, you know one of the things I've thought is that you can revisit every protocol And then you say what does it look like when you can add global state? Yeah, right So for example, what does bit torrent look like with a blockchain? And for discovery so you don't have to go to pirate bay or whatever, you know Like there's there's 50 kinds of things like this where you know almost every protocol is a is communicating with b And so what does it look like scp with discovery or you know ssh with discovery? There's probably something interesting there in that space of things, right? Yeah, I think you go both ways you could start like I list some of them in the book But they're and I you know, I didn't do a bunch of research on this but I mean there have been Hundreds of serious attempts to create new protocols, you know in the last 30 years You know everything from somewhat successful ones like, you know jabber and Secure skull like like there was all these social attempts like diaspora and You know, there's a million you know status.net and there's a hundred of them So I think there's and like a lot of these things There's probably a lot of good ideas and as you say because they were just limit They had to one arm tied behind their back because they couldn't exactly they didn't and they didn't have money They didn't have fun. There was no the protocol had no funding Right. I mean they could go and maybe raise a little venture capital or do this But they couldn't They there was no like the vcs wouldn't want to put a ton of money into an open protocol network because they're not Going to get the prize at the end the prize at the end of a facebook as you control a network effect Right. Yes, that's right. If you're if you're liberally giving away the network effect to the community as you are in a protocol Why would the vcs put billions of dollars in it's actually important from another standpoint as well Which is one of the good consequences of all of that, you know, it's called subsidization build out and whatnot is The user interfaces for something like youtube or twitter or facebook or would have you have actually now remain relatively constant for about 10 years Like I mean, I'm not saying they don't add new features, but essentially It's kind of the same looking feed, right? And why that's good is have you seen like the early history of like electrical power outlets? There was a lot of innovation until it settled on a few standard eyes. Yeah. Yeah form factors, right and those uh form factors for like wall sockets I mean, there's a few different like australians australian's model and like britain's model and the us model Um, but there's a few form factors in kind of the same way I think of these sorts of feed formats as like form factors for our mind, you know, they just plug in, right and Uh, they're sort of like natural fits like like the same with the handle of a cup as a natural fit Once all of those billions of dollars have gone into just perfecting how twitter looks how uh, How youtube looks every new video site can copy youtube's format basically and then slightly innovate We've now seen like 10 different twitters that basically copy twitter's ux and swap out the community And the other thing they can do is they can copy twitter or you know, uh, youtube's ux and swap out the back end So that's actually something where a lot of web three things. I think are essentially taking the same user interface of web two adding balances and payments and Adding global state and now you actually have a transformably new app like a there's like web three whatsapps, you know that do this kind of thing now You can have balances and their stuff go ahead No, I agree. I completely agree with you. Look, and I think I you know, I'm obviously somewhat critical of web two in some ways I think there's also really strong things about it and one of them is sure user experience like I think the web two You know whatsapp facebook twitter Are you know approaching the the perfect or pinnacle of design and user experience? They've done a great job on that Look, they've also done a great job just to give them all credit of getting free services to five billion people Like I don't want to take that away Like I think there's been a lot of positive things And by the way, the other thing I just mentioned is I think I have a lot of friends of these companies I think they're good people my critique in the book is not of the people It's of the system that leads to these kinds of issues But but I agree with you completely I think that web three needs feature parity at a minimum With web two it needs feature parity and then it needs to have these advantages that benefit the users and the Developers and the entrepreneurs through ownership I think that's right And I think basically, you know as you were also just saying in the early 2000s the concept of free hosting phenomenally easy to use interface global reach I mean those were so many things all at once that were so transformative that facebook and YouTube and twitter and so on were giving people and that was an absolutely amazing deal at the time I mean, you know one way I put it You remember the unabomber, you know in the early 90s, right? Yeah, okay So unabomber he blew all these people up, but why did he blow these people up? He blew them up so he could get an op-ed in the washington post in the new york times Okay, that's how scarce Yeah, he wanted to get his manifesto out. That's literally that's really why he did it, right? So Distribution was so scarce that he killed for the distribution And so then distribution became so abundant That we kind of took it for in like 20 years 10 15 years It became so abundant that we basically took for granted that you could tweet something out and anybody could see it anywhere in the world It's actually a remarkable remarkable shift Well, and by the way that 5 billion people can do it and you can do it for basically I think it's 10 dollars now is the going rate for a low-end android phone Right, and like there were all these kind of It talk about, you know digital divide, etc in the 90s now The stat I heard recently is more people have access to the internet than running water, right? It's more reliable Yeah, and it's just a remarkable thing right that anyone can plug in And and participate in publish and it's just amazing, right now now the problem is screen time It's too much time online not not not enough seven seven hours a day Coming back to what you were saying I mean and then let's go through the book and whatever a couple a couple of thoughts I've had and you know probably related to yours or that if you just take every web 2 app And you add a web 3 wallet that has a balance and that has the ability to do encrypted signing You enable completely new things like a web 3 whatsapp You can now do for example pooling like crowdfunding within a whatsapp group, right? Like just in the same way you can just instantly attach a message or a video or something like that So i'm seeing tools to do this or like, you know far caster, which we you know we invested in which is uh Dan Romero's thing now you have you have twitter But you can have communities that are defined by like, you know the crypto that they hold and and so they've got common interest And so just taking those web 2 things and adding web 3 to them I think I think people are starting to see the value of that But I agree with that and like I would add to me you just described one of the user facing Kind of improvements. I think there's also like a very important developer facing improvement Yes, which is you take whatsapp and you just you can make you can hack it and make a different client You can make a different interface you can make a different you can set up a different service that you know I don't know as a group chat thing that it becomes this hackable lego brick, right? Which I think look if you look at the his one of the case arguments that make in the book If you look at the history of software development, there's kind of two great threads of software development Like eric raymond calls it the cathedral in the bizarre, right? It's the sort of the open movement of you know, unix The web was open, you know, obviously linux and the open source movement And then there's sort of the microsoft kind of the cathedral the proprietary movement And a lot of the history of the internet of computing has been driven by these kind of decentralized Communities of developers. I think I would I would argue the pc in many ways, you know Wozniak and jobs at the homebrew computer club Was sort of I called an outside in movement a tech movement of kind of outsiders from the fringe I think we've lived through this centralized era of sort of app store last 10 years Everyone's got and I believe people in tech have this kind of Stockholm syndrome where they're like It's great to be controlled by this guy that takes all your money Right, yeah, and like right, but when they get a taste of freedom I think like when they get a taste again of like, what does it mean for developers to be able to do what they want And not have to worry about getting rugged by the corporate overlords I think that there will be, you know, this renaissance in in kind of developer Sort of hacking together the these, you know, composable Software, so I would just add to your point like I think there's adding tokens and financial things But I think there's also adding composability and developer fits and features It's like the chinese You know the romance of three kingdoms the empire long united must divide long divided must unite right So the romance of the three webs Technology long centralized must decentralized and then when it's decentralized I mean I get accused a lot of like fanciful I'm sure you do too like magical thinking fans And maybe but like the other hand is like we're 30 years into something that's clearly as important as like the printing press And like oh, yeah, should we assume that the structure is locked in Or that you know or that these historical forces like you just said of like The you know like the pendulum swing back and like I think it will I think we're very early in this development Oh, yeah, I think I mean Basically, what happens is I don't think it's magical at all in the sense of if we go and just look at you know When any one of these gets too strong than the other one If you have a period of too much decentralization then what happens is people want it to just work Apple an apple like thing to emerge where it all snaps together and they're willing to pay for that And so amidst that anarchy then one solution arises And then it becomes too powerful and then people want to decentralize and they want their freedom And we've just seen like 10 cycles of that in computing from You know centralized the the centralized mainframes to personal computing to the cloud to You know local again to and and so on and so forth, right? I don't know if you followed this but like the new thing social networks are doing now So they've they've moved from sort of all you know user growth and everything else to Keeping you in the app the whole time and so they've all now been punishing people for linking out linking out, right? Yes, like you get you know, if you put a link in your tweet, it will get demoted in terms of its reach, right? Like subsets that's true. Yeah, the subsets the word that can't the word that can't be said Well, you know and like what it's up. What is sub stack and patreon in a way in a way what they are right is their their Um escape hatches back to the open web, right? Right, so like you you put a link to sub stack and sub stack of course is driven by email patreon by the web Those are web one protocols that don't charge you You know 100 90 30 percent whatever they charge you 0 percent Now sub stack charges some fee on top But the point is like it's it flips the economics, right on twitter you get nothing on sub stack You get 90 percent or you know patreon or whatever and I don't know what the exact take rate on patreon But but but but then that's why they're devaluing the link So I think you're going to see even more like to your point of like consolidation I think you're about to see even more where You just move to like really really keep people within one of five apps and and the occasional time that you click Out and go to a website today like it's still a thing you do and if you look at the data Like it's still pretty common for people to use websites Like I think you're going to see further pushing back against that over the next couple of years To the point where? You know, I believe they'll overdo it and then there will be this counter movement, right as you described Right and I think actually it's interesting because I think the web one web two web three also has some relevance to what you're saying there where Web one is in a sense another definition of it different slightly different than the definition you've been using Is it's a web that google can index it's the Web crawl or accessible web and then web two is the social web, which is much better structured But it lives on facebook's Database servers it lives in twitter databases and they can sequel query it and they can get It's much more clean than the open web, but it's much less accessible right And then I actually think in a sense web three also combines the best of both worlds because Um block explorers are search engines. What's awesome about them is you just get all the updates pushed to you every You know block and so you don't have to go and scrape and crawl a bunch of mess to find out what change You get all the edits pushed to you and it's really rich and so you can index it and so on and it's open and it's public So it's as structured as the web two style databases But it says open as a web one style web. And so I think that's actually The new open web and it's not a moment too soon because AI is making the old open web kind of under threat, right? So these are two things that feedback on each other, you know Yeah, I was going to say ai has excelled like so reddit and twitter just you know put greater restrictions on their api because they feel like These ai systems came and took their content and trained on them And then like look stack overflows traffic is way down because a co-pilot and yet co-pilot was trained partly on stack overflow Right and so there's right a sense in which these these ai system like i'm pro ai Etc etc, but but there is this dynamic going on Where these systems are essentially incentivizing further Closing down of the web. By the way, if you're a graphic designer, you know Do you want to still put your content? On the open web or do you want to put it behind a paywall? Like I think we're going to see a move towards sort of pay paywalls and siloization Unless we figure out a good model for paying those people for keeping it open And I think to your point like and I make I have a whole chapter on this at the end I think blockchain is not only do what you do, which is they Commit to open systems, but they also provide business models For creative people in an ai world and that's very important. You need a way to pay those people I I believe both sort of societally, but also For to keep the internet sustainable like you you don't want an internet where people don't want to put their stuff online Like that's just not a good good internet I agree that and I think what's interesting about it is like Many of the things that ai is doing crypto is like the counter force to it Like for example ai makes everything fake crypto is how you can make it real again You know with cryptographic signing. It's yeah deep. It's the answer for deep fakes It's the answer for counterfeit persons the answer for proof of person hood Of course it is right like it's the only answer And you talk about this towards the end in chapter five and we'll come to that in a second And then the other one is what you just talked about and we've we've probably both You know like I may have seed invest in some of the same things Attributability right micro nfts allow artists to Maybe you know if something is incorporated into a work you can see You get much more tracking and provenance on on something if you if you want to go that route And it's like how the offline world works Which is like you don't like an artist doesn't generally doesn't monetize through the Photograph of a piece of art. They monetize through the authentic real piece of art And the photograph is just out there and they don't control that right um, and so you have sort of a layer of of The the the layer that can be easily copied by technology is the free is the free layer and the freemium like the The paid layer is the scarce layer right and right By the way video guy has some stuff on this in the book the Video game industry figured out this out a long time ago. It's a very interesting case study with the so video game industry has grown In revenue annual revenue to 180 billion while all other forms of media have been flat to down In that sense bigger than hollywood a flip hollywood a while back Significantly bigger and like like grant that thought of the new one six or whatever it is five six Will be bigger bigger than any marvel movie and you know, it's it's far bigger. Um And so, you know, why is that? I mean, there's a bunch of reasons including graphics cards and just Video games designers are great, but a big part of it is they were very Um, they they essentially moved to what like the dominant model now is a free games with with virtual goods Which are essentially nfts So you look at games like legal legends and fortnight. These are free games and what they figured out was you look You're not you're not gonna Lock down the game There's just a million people making games in the same way there's a million people making generative art And there's a million people writing stuff on social media and there's a million like news has become a commodity like There's just all like the games the games industry said look the gameplay itself will be a commodity Let's not fight that let's let's not try to fight the natural kind of pull of the internet, right? So let's let that be a commodity. Let's let it spread by the way streaming that was very controversial beginning Nintendo actually They could shut it down through copyright Nintendo fought it in the beginning streaming came out in the late 2000s Because they're like it's cop. You're taking my content and copy. It's copyright. Game streaming. Game streaming. Sorry game streaming Yeah, but then the game industry was like if you look at other industries, they fight it game industry Finally was like, hey, this is good the the net, you know, and that led to create an attention Yeah, but and more attention is good. Let's monetize something else. And so then they said Let's lean into this let's let the gameplay is going to be commoditized Anyways, let's make it free and let's monetize community And what force what virtual goods are our status signaling in the community, right? But they're essentially monetizing the the people and the status signaling within those within those communities It's actually good. It's actually good to push status signaling to virtual goods Because it removes it from physical goods. And so then you decouple The dispensable online signaling from the just, you know, right? Yeah, I mean, it's it's like it's the same behavior. We see I mean Does that Ferrari down the street actually worth a million dollars or it's probably a hundred thousand dollars in car And nine thousand dollars in status in brand, right? I mean, yes Almost every good you look at around anywhere you go is like a lot of it is status signaling in the in the developed world, right? and so You know, I think similar stuff will move to the online world and so so yeah So in a world of abundant content where anyone can push a button and get any piece of text and any Piece of art and a movie, you know, you're just not going to probably monetize through the actual content You're going to monetize through something else. I think that's right. And so that actually brings to the title of your book I mean, we're spending all this time online You know one one of the lines I've had for a while is ask people how many hours a day are they looking at a screen And then they'll say six or something I'm like, oh, so the majority of your waking hours just been looking at screen Which means most the rest of your life is going to be in the matrix, right in some sense Vision pro and oculus all make that a real chris early oculus investor as well And so you're living in these, you know, increasingly virtual worlds. We're spending a lot of time online We're earning these digital chotchkes We're not owning them And so I think most people kind of understand what reading and writing on the internet is What is owning on the internet mean that that third verb? What exactly does that mean? Yeah, so I think to go back to the kind of web one example like you own your domain name All right, so you own that in the sense that like if I you know If I have my if I'm hosting my website at amazon or whatever rack rack space and they decide to Jack up the the prices I can just leave copy my files and then I can redirect my domain name And I don't lose any of my followers quote unquote anyone can still send me an email You know, I'm still ranked in google the same way Right it all happens behind the scenes and so imagine just as this is one of many examples But imagine a world where social networking worked that way and you had you know I'm at cdixon and I control that and I choose. Hey, I'm going to go and use this interface or that interface But I own it now because I don't own it now the most visible consequence of not owning my name My social media name is de-platforming right people talk about this of you know So and so was kicked off this network and that's a real issue But part of my point of my book is there's a lot of very common subtler effects Of not owning your name and not owning your digital presence Including you know, the fact that out of whim they can change the way ranking works, right? So like I Hey now now sub stack links are demoted And the fact that the probably the most consequential in my mind that that's overlooked is the fact that they control everything means They control the economics And so, you know every social network outside of youtube Makes money through advertising and has a basically effectively zero percent Revenue share with the users. So, you know, you go to instagram you go to tiktok You're not going for the instagram and tiktok created content. You're going for the users, right? And those users are outside of these little like kind of You know, de minimis sub one percent of revenue creator funds that some of them create like it's just really just not Material they don't share revenue with the creators And so the creators I have a bunch of creator friends and they're off trying to do these weird sponsorships and they're selling, you know You know body lotion and do their kinds of things because they can't get on the internet And yeah, one exception being youtube, which which is is pretty generous It's like, you know, close to 50 percent of rev share and that's that's great and youtube That's for historical reasons There's a bunch of reasons why but all the other social networks don't do that So that's that's one What is a circle reason on that? Actually, I don't know is it because of adsense or something? No, I have it in the book because they were competing. It was a competitive thing. There were other There were other I have a little thing about it in the in the footnotes, but the um, there were some other Services out there that were that were that were giving out rev shares and they just had to do it as a competitive thing So it was just kind of video At that point for whatever reason like the entrepreneurs were viewing it more as like a marketplace Because remember how social networking started, right? It was it was not User-created content like facebook was just literally profiles Right and then people started changing their profiles And then people started looking for the changes to the profiles and then facebook and then he saw the news feed It was an emergency and then he created the news feed which was the sort of that list of deltas the the diffs Right. It was a it was a grep of diffs and that freaked out by the way for those who don't know that Was yes controversial thing in history if the internet is doing that And so and so facebook just kind of evolved much more like it was a profile system And why would you share revenue whereas youtube very much started off as like this is a marketplace like airbnb Right and then we have a take rate and that was how all these video sites started and you had to have a So it says kind of a historical legacy Mindset thing that that they have a take rate that they share but tiktok doesn't for example So so anyway, so what does ownership means it's essentially that you know that users developers all the kind of participants Entrepreneurs have digital rights like you you you know you use a service you you can Own a name you can own your money. You can own A virtual good you can own an nft you can own like some kind of item like Embodied in a token a token is a way to kind of encapsulate ownership That gives you rights that can't be taken away, right? And that's one of the key things a blockchain enables is a blockchain It can make these strong commitments that says you once you own this you really own it And even though you're using this service you they can't they can't remove it from you, right? So it's like like we're used to this concept in the offline world Like it's property rights right in the off imagine a world where instead of you owning your house in your car You you know every venue you went to you had to like go and get a new set of clothes and And you know you leave and they own it. That's the internet today It's a very strange world that evolved and we're all kind of I think kind of You know numbed into thinking is normal, but it's not normal It's not the way that something you spend seven hours a day should work You should have the same kind of property rights that you do in the off By the way, you don't own the kindle book on your phone. You don't you know that like they remove those things all the time Music disappears like all these things and like what's your what commitment to these services give you? They give you a 50 page terms of service privacy policy, which nobody reads no one negotiates They can do whatever they want with their data like so you're just going to these services and And giving them all of your data all of the rights all of the control all the economics And the users and and all the other participants are just have no power and or disenfranchised and The alternative sort of web 3 vision is one where you actually have real kind of rights And you control data and you control economics and you know, you can have money where you are in control and you don't have to You know Paypal decides to change page 40 of their 80 page privacy policy and you're and you know This line of businesses or this this category businesses. They're now banned like Is that the kind of internet that we want to live in I mean, I'm all for rule of law And like we should have the obviously like with the web and email There were laws governing it you can't put up a website that does illegal stuff You know, you get you go to jail and that's the way it should be But we don't have a separate tribunal That's a bunch of other people that aren't legally enforced that decide things right we rely on democracy and that's how we should do I think with other digital Systems, you know, I had this concept in 2018 this talk I probably should have made a public this talk at coinbase on the nouns and the verbs You know, like nouns like like miners and stakers and and so on holders and the verbs Bicel center see but also like mint burn, etc. And one that we were just talking about is switch and One one issue currently with these web two services is your practical alternative is really just take it or leave it Either you take this huge terms of service thing, which you you you can't redline it and send it back and can You know, you have no negotiating leverage as an individual or you just accept it in toto but With you know, web three profiles and this is already two for crypto exchanges to some extent you can just Withdraw all of your funds or all of your assets and then move to a different Exchange so we know that already works at the asset level And it's starting to work at the username level with ens where you can take your entire profile out and then bring it into another site And so technology changes microeconomic leverage Right and so that's that's exactly what you're talking about where it's giving the individual more leverage against A giant company that otherwise, you know Everybody they don't actually have a real option beyond just clicking yes in the job service now they do Yeah, both users and creators so example tick tock What happened is you know, they kind of rose up in the last three years And and a bunch of creators got to like a hundred million followers like there was it was driven by like 10 big 10 big it's kind of influencers on tick tock And then tick tock, it's yeah, I mean it's like the demilios and a bunch of others kb lame and and so on Yeah, and so it was very power law right as you as a lot of things are but then to tick tocks Like we don't want to be dependent on these 10 because then they can go and negotiate So they deliberately then turn the dial down in those 10 and turn the dial up on a bunch of new people So they what they want is 10,000 people with a million followers not 10 people right because it's it's this is too concentrated This is porters five forces. This is too much supplier power And but they're but all the social networks are constantly doing this They're constantly turning the dials They're you know, they're and by the way, a lot of this is happening now through AI and it's not some malicious thing. It's just profit maximization I'm not I'm not against them doing that. I am what I am against is when there isn't leverage on the other side as well Yeah, that's that's what I'm saying is because there's no leverage on the other side These guys can't like look, you know, they can't switch they can't leave like their entire thing is dependent on tick tock And so there's no yeah, I'm not like I'm for free market and the company should do what they want The problem is they're doing what they want with the strongest force in the history of business namely network effects Giving them unlimited power over their dominion, right? Right the network effects like I'm all for Businesses competing but like look how web hosts compete they compete on features service price Like aws competes on in my mind on good good things, right? They can it's like they're fighting google and other web hosting providers Through features and pricing and just all the thing and they still make profits and that's great But they don't have like aws doesn't have lock-in like you're hosting their your website there because of network effects, right? And network effects are just such a powerful lock-in force that if you don't have a counterbalance like digital ownership for users You just end up with these I think what we have now these five monopolies who run roughshod over everybody It is it's definitely a pain to withdraw from aws But it is also something where they know their customers are developers and developers There's always new dev tools and stuff coming up So they know you can and then therefore they can't they can't fuck with you too much. They're just they're just not going to do it I mean That's right That's right and they know you'll pay some premium for convenience But it's just it's very different to have your moat, you know more in buffet style moat be scale And quality and scope and all the kind of traditional moats Network effects are just a very or just in some ways an op moat, right? right Like it's just it's just really really powerful and the only really counterbalance I think credible counterbalance is to let users like to your point have new verbs and switch would be a key verb there So, you know towards that end, right like basically Now let's say they they have the own of rewrite on they've got their private keys locally, right? That is interesting because Own can be individual ownership. It can be developer ownership. It's community ownership It's algorithmic ownership like an algorithm can now own property Even a robot like a physical robot can, you know have ownership. So You know Talk about that you touch on each of these things in the book, right? I have a section about machine to machine payments as an example that like right That's one thing but basically like you have the community ownership where a crowd can buy things like You know these we just talked about how an individual who's dealing with the corporation now gets microeconomic labor shaken They have better negotiating power But you can now actually have a group of people that all move at once for example, right? Or you can have an algorithm, you know, go ahead Well, yeah to I guess another way to frame it Maybe is there's like the way I like to think of it is when new computing platforms come along And I think of a blockchain as a computer and I know that's a slightly controversial statement. I just when I say computer I mean Ledger to me is not strong enough Because ledger to me implies it's the hard drive where it's also the it's also the processor It's both the nouns on the verbs, right? So that's why I like to use computer because it's even stronger than ledger, right? It's a because you can modern blockchains like Ethereum are fully, you know Semi-turning complete programmable computers. It's actually yeah So what you say, I mean in fact just to compliment what you're saying is I think that they're like the third operating system because you had Operating system you had the web browser, which is os of web 2 And the blockchain is os of web 3 because you have a developer environment You have a compiler and you have all that stuff, right when you have new computing movements come along Like when you sort of look at historically and I and I go through some of this in the book Is you generally have what I call skeuomorphic and native applications And so skeuomorphic applications are kind of are basically taking older Existing applications and layering on kind of new functionality new web 3 functionality So it's a little bit what you're describing earlier Like you take what's that you take messaging But now you kind of reimagine it with once the users and developers and creators can have digital ownership, right? There's a second category of and and so like youtube is a good example kind of Going back to 2005 there was a whole wave of video startups then venture back video startups in 2005 Because that was the moment where broadband had sort of crossed over narrow band in terms of penetration And everyone realized video was going to be a thing, right? And there were broadly two approaches to doing video one was take CBS and nfl and all these existing tv content and kind of poured it over to the internet And the other was just put up a website and you can upload and it's you know And basically the bet youtube was made that was of course youtube but the bet youtube was making In some sense was crazy because it was like there is no one doing that today There are no Video creators on the internet the closest analog was like america's funniest home videos or something. Yeah, exactly And you ask youtube at the time It's a little bit like i remember the strike founders said this too when they were raising money initially Who are your customers? They said they don't exist yet, right? Like who are your who's going to put video on there? They don't exist yet, right? But that so youtube was the native video, right? And the and the ones that were doing like the cbs content like bright cove and stuff that was that was a skew morphic video Right. So I think it's similar with blockchain's and by the way, I think skew morphic and native are both valuable So i'm not i'm not saying one's better They're two different turns in the idea maze, you know, right like Netflix and You know first party content also did really well and it just turned out to be a different branch Yeah, and it's both can succeed right and so I think that there will be sort of web3 social networks web3 games But then there'll also be these crazy new things that just couldn't exist before and and like one example I like is what I call collaborative story people call collaborative storytelling And so this is an idea that a crowd of people kind of wikipedia style Can get together and essentially do what hollywood does today. They can get together and you know A thousand people all over the world Get together and create the next marvels the next harry potter the next star wars, right? So today, you know, you have these really excited fan communities if you go read reddit and things But they're just sort of passive observers And they're like wouldn't it be cool if obi won did this or whatever they say, right? And you know, but they're really enthusiastic now Imagine if you actually had these fan created communities and then those those those creators were rewarded with tokens for their kind of proportional to their contribution And then what's really cool is that they would then you know If you think about the power of meme coins like dogecoin You have these armies of people out evangelizing these coins in the case of dogecoin It's kind of the silly meaningless coin But now imagine it sort of you know this harry potter universe, right? And they're out evangelizing it and that that's a very important thing because it You know why is hollywood stuck in a rut where there's everything's a sequel It's stuck in a rut because it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to to go market a new narrative world So what if these communities it both sort of opens the gateway allows anyone to become, you know, it's sort of globalizes and decentralizes hollywood And solves the marketing problem of hollywood because you have these organic communities who can just go out and evangelize it, right? I love that idea. It's a really cool idea. We made a few investments It's still early and like no one has proven it yet But like that's the kind of thing where you just have like a brand new behavior that to your point like a sort of a crowd coming together And by the way, could some of those Participants be machines like why not like I my view is if a machine is like in all of these systems There's no reason a machine shouldn't be an ai shouldn't be part of that system And you know if the ai is you know, you already have this on Wikipedia to some extent You have bots that go fix commas and stuff like this You know like so like it's like if you look at a typical page on Wikipedia like You know on the planet jupiter or something. There'll be some a couple of astronomy the fishinados who are editing it, but then there's like the comma guy and the You know and the the split infinitive guy and like there's a whole bunch of other people coming and messing with it And I think a similar thing here with storytelling. You may have ai's that come in and say I think that's a You know, you should add a little more flourish to the third actor I don't know what they're gonna do right and if they're doing a good job They should get paid and then you can have like, you know some programmer somewhere who's like You know prompt engineering and ai who's then participating in some economic system and You know and like why not right? Um, so it's funny because I uh, I have thought about this A lot from a slightly different angle, which is the class of tasks that you can Improve crowd sourcing with with crypto online. So storytelling is one. There's uh, there was something called the um It was like the massively math project or something like that where terence tau posted Uh an unsolved problem and had his comment section try to go to work on it in math And they were able to make progress on it I'm not a math person But my understanding is math overflow stack overflow is math thing is a very active and successful site And so and it's a lot of it is crowdsource math. I mean, you know crowd Yeah The the big thing I've been thinking about is something where right now crowdsourcing is Low skill activities like a mechanical turk and something I've thought about for many years and actually, you know I've done iterations on this theme imagine if for example, elan could tweet out a task and limit it to that percentage of his Uh user base that actually was qualified in rocket science and attach 10 000 bucks to it, right? And so that would work if they had a crypto resume and they had like nfts in there that Proved that they had that skill then it's kind of like, you know, the limit who can reply to this You could limit it to those people, right? So that's kind of, you know, the version of that here would be Okay, here's all these people who are actually good writers and you source these 30 right users would have what you're describing like they'd have sort of public nft credentials They'd probably also have private data that they could then choose to share with select providers, right? So all these things would be, you know, you basically have this massive unlock of new applications you could create Like the one you're describing where the elan is is You know selectively crowdsourcing If you maybe elan isn't the guy Maybe he's not the guy but it might be something like that where now you can uh Because crypto helps another way you can give a little small payments and all the kind of stuff I like to call it the missing primitives like I think of it as One of the, you know, it's it's wonderful that the internet was sort of created in this bottoms up Open source way, but as one of the byproducts of that They were just kind of missing pieces and like payments was one of the missing piece like search index control digital identity Yeah, yeah reputation systems were missing and so And what happens is if if you don't step in and fill it with a public good it gets filled with a private good So like in some ways google there was a gap which was we needed a reputation system for websites And no and it wasn't part of the open internet And so google made that a private good and made, you know, a boatload of money off of that And the same thing's going to happen with all like all these systems like proof of person like captures don't work anymore How are you going to prove your person? How are you going to prove like, you know Looking at the text of an email does not going to work anymore for detecting if something is phishing listening to an audio You know, that is you it sounds like your voice that's not going to work anymore Right that all of this stuff is going away very quickly And so in that world like how do we fill the gap where we prove things are real And I think that's look I think the gap my view is the gap is going to get filled It's either going to get filled by like a company like facebook or it's going to be filled by a public good Like a shared community service that's part of the open internet And that's like kind of one of the key questions right now is We need to build those things now before they get subsumed by these companies Because it will get filled in some way like it's not the world's not going to let it be the case that you just you know Get phished all the time, right? So I I think that's right And I think basically the crypto version is going to be a lot more secure You know, there's there's a chapter five that you wrote There's there's a lot that you're excited about in the next 10 years of crypto and it's not just crypto It's becoming it's now crypto is like a primitive that we can use for things. It's global state It's it's it's signed messages. It's micro payments. It's all of this kind of stuff What what do you think is is is exciting to you what what kinds of things Yeah, and just if I can make one note about the book for the for the listeners is that I wrote the book Although it's a book and it's meant to be read beginning to end It's all chunked into three to four page chunks And so what biology is describing is uh, you can jump around like if you're an expert You can jump to like the last part five is seven application areas that I picked just to like Kind of because a lot of the critics will say like what problems does blockchain solve, right? Now, of course a blockchain is a better way to build networks. It's like a building material It's more like it's like asking what problem does steel solve like steel doesn't really solve a problem It just makes it so you can build better buildings and unlocks new possibilities. It's just like a better building material But you know, I wanted to go really specific into some areas So I talk about social networking because it's just such a big important category I talk about finance d5 bitcoin payments I talk about the thing I just described the collaborative storytelling I talk about AI well specific the specifically around AI like it's a little bit what we're talking about with paywalls But you know that the the internet has operated on this implicit economic covenant between distribution namely search engines and social networks and content like websites You know media sites, etc. Right and the and the Implicit covenant is that like google the website says google you're allowed to index me You're allowed to use a snippet on your page, but you got to send me some traffic back, right? You know like like I was on the board of stack overflow and like one of the biggest fears you have as a content site Is that you get one box, right? So one boxing is when google takes your content and just shows it without linking back because suddenly your traffic drops off overnight And so, you know in the world of AI you're going to have it's you're going to have these systems that you just say Tell me 10 restaurants to go to in new york and it just gives you the answer and doesn't link And that's how a lot of these systems work today And even if they do link, why would you click through? Because you get the answer and so what's the new economic covenant in that world? And that's so that's one chapter of like how do we in this? How do we rethink business models for media creative people anyone putting content on the internet in a world where You have infinite content generation And distributed search systems that just give you the answer right and so you know that that needs to be rethought I talk about sort of metaverse and video games metaverse is one of these, you know Kind of jargony words. Yeah, but you know what it's it's real I mean like that's a funny thing Both crypto and the metaverse were kind of in the trough when you started work on this and now with vision pro and bitcoin ETF Just around the time like I think metaverse. I mean, whether you call it metaverse apple's calling it spatial computing Of course, it's real. It's like all this time online. Of course. No. No. It's very real And and look it's also like there's sort of two ways to look at it There's the extreme thing of like apples, you know vision pro Um, and then there's sort of this other thing which is this gradual immerse greater greater immersion of the Of virtual experiences so games the graphics are getting better and better people are spending more and more time They're becoming more social the world are becoming more persistent It's becoming more like real life and there's a question of like in that world where Most experiences 20 years from now I think it's pretty credible to think a lot of internet experiences are 3d three dimensional experiences It doesn't mean you always have a headset on but they're in 3d worlds How is that 3d spatial world organized? Is it organized as like social networks today? Were five companies control everything or is it more like the open web? Where it's like a bunch of you know Little areas that are all linked together in an open system and anyone can set up a storefront or You know Content site or make a micro game or whatever it might be and I think that's a critical question And you know it's interesting. I have I talk about it because I'm Tim Sweeney the founder of epic and fortnight has a great podcast I cite the podcast is in my end notes On like how to have an open metaverse right and he's you know He's using a lot of Kind of web protocols and other things and he actually is pro blockchain Which is somewhat unusual for the games folks, which is nice But like you know, how would we build? I think now would be the time we if we open technology internet people Want this to happen now is the time to start thinking about these standards and protocols and things because it's gonna The way tech works is like, you know Hemingway. How'd you go bankrupt gradually then suddenly like yep? This is how these things are going to work. It's going to be like, oh gradually the metaverse It seems bigger and then one day boom It's like happening and we better be ready with the right standards and protocols if we want to see these these new worlds be open Or you know be open systems All the web and not closed systems all our web too That's actually so there's a whole bunch of you know, like you and I just have one chapter on finance, but that's its own, you know, defy and everything It's its own huge topic. So I think the The broader implications are profound. I tried to keep the book manageable and readable on but it's good. It's good that you covered I mean, there's obviously a lot of folks who have I shouldn't say written There's a lot of folks They haven't written book length treatments But there's a lot of coverage of the financial aspects of crypto So I feel like it's good that you got into the technological aspects and you know Kind of like me getting into the political aspects or we have these kind of kind of a different lens, you know Awesome. All right. So book comes out January 30th. Yeah, January 30th. Yeah anything any Easter eggs. There's the nft thing Right to cover the tea thing and I actually have a I won't just sell the whole thing But there's I'm doing some AI stuff around the book too that I'll be releasing It'll be some some interesting tools I hope people, you know, if they have a chance to read it I might my intention is to To any good faith counter arguments, which I'm sure there are good faith smart counter arguments My intention is to you know, kind of in long form respond to any of those So I would love to see I'm sure I'm not right about everything. I think I'm I believe I'm mostly right but But I'm sure that I'm sure there are things I overlooked or you know Critiques that can be made and I'm looking forward to that, you know, having that discussion Look, I think part of why I wrote a book is I just think all the dunking on Twitter people dunk on me It's ad hominem. It's appeals to authority. Like I just would like to see I don't know I just would like to see the tech discussion elevated Sure And it whether it's you know, this topic or AI or whatever it might be Um and just like these are and this actually we didn't really talk about the policy side But if I could just briefly the sure, of course Part of it is you know, like the to me the right way to do to think about tech policy, whether it's AI or crypto Is Let's go examine. What is this thing? Like what is a blockchain and what is it useful for and like any technology? You know, you can use a hammer to destroy or to build nitrogen can be explosives or it can be fertilizer, right? Like nuclear can be You know free clean energy or it can be bombs. Um AI can Create bio weapons or it can enable a new golden age of creativity, right crypto can empower users and you know Shift power of the internet back to the edges or it can be a gambling casino like ftx, right? And so a smart policy view I think instead of having the twitter dunks and sort of everybody taking a side and this sort of food fight and Oh, they're on the other side. Let's fight them Why don't we go and really look at the technology? Look at the what is the actual kind of good case and that's what I try to write on I try to make the best case of like what is the productive positive use cases for blockchain, right? We've seen the negative use cases like we've read about them in the news all the time And now here's the positive side and in my view the right policy approach Would be then to say how do we design a policy that maximizes the good and minimizes the bad As opposed to what's happening now, which I think is very reactive and very emotionally charged, right? People are like they're on the other team crypto people are on the other team Therefore, let's dunk on them. Let's hate them. Let's ban them Let's take laws from a hundred years ago and use them to take them to court Right and is that like is that what a smart Country that wants to get ahead of the future and design a policy should be doing or should it be doing? What I would describe as more proactive and ai look there's these very interesting questions of like How do you balance? Obviously we want ai to progress, but we also want You know creators to get paid That's going to probably play out in the next five to ten years over like the new york times open ai lawsuit It's going to be a series of lawsuits. You're going to have people reading laws from 200 years ago And like is there something implicit in 200 years ago laws about how you should treat copyright and ai like I don't think so like I mean i'm sure you'll have some judgment or ruling But in the end, is that the right way to do policy? Shouldn't we be saying what's good about this and how do we maximize the good and minimize the bad like And let's have like a intelligent honest conversation Like that's what i'm trying to begin and I i'm trying to commit myself going forward to do that and not dunk and not Right and so I just say to your listeners if anyone reads it and wants to respond like i'll be active on you know Twitter and things and blogging and I would love to have a discussion About that's great. Awesome. And chris is actually quite responsive and smart and interesting on twitter x x sorry x x.com, right? Yeah, but hard hard to switch hard to switch the names Yeah, I will definitely get uh, and I will recommend read write on to anybody who Is just trying to figure out what this thing is in 2024 and that's uh, that's actually a lot of people So it's a it's an amazing thing to just kind of Checkpoint and say here's where the whole space is as of right now It's a great thing to give out to all your employees or something like that. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you