 Boom. What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sakyan. We are still on site in New York City, New York, on Manhattan, and we are going to be talking about the architecture of Dataflow. So we're going to be talking about all things media. We're going to be talking about all things future of humanity. I'm super excited and grateful to be with Jon Battelle. Hello. Hello. Thank you for coming on to the show. So good to be here. Greatly appreciate it. Of course. And it's an honor to be here because you have been a huge figure in this industry over the last two decades. And it's... Oh, we're counting it's three, man. It's now it's on the third. Yeah, since 1992. Well, really, I started in 86. So, longer. So older than I am in the industry, which means there's been a massive accumulation of a wealth of knowledge in Jon. So this is exactly why we sit down with people like Jon. So background on Jon, founder of seven companies all in the media space, journalism, event production, advertising, author of the search, how Google and its rivals rewrote the rules of business and transformed our culture. Also an investor in 35 seed or series A in media, tech, consumer mobile companies. And he's also the CEO and co-founder of Newco. So let's start with a big history synthesis of things. You and I were talking earlier and you made this really interesting point. We were talking about how, okay, here's the human race we've evolved on on earth and we're now kind of at this tipping point with exponential technology, 7.7 billion of us now. Crazy. So you were saying we're in the kitchen with the Oracle. Yeah, this is like my sort of... I run down the transcript in the dialogue that happened during that scene in the matrix where Neo is in the kitchen with the Oracle and she's offering him cookies and he's kind of like, I can't believe I'm talking to this. He's been looking for this person. And she's just like, I've seen a thousand of you. I might see a thousand more. How do I know you're the one? There's no reason for me to think you're the one. You're going to blow it. Humanity is going to die out. The world's going to end. And then another one is going to be back here. Her sense of time is the sense of time that physics has, which is essentially timeless. Whereas our sense of time is like, well, we have an urgency to fix things in the next 30 years or we're just the Neo who didn't make it and there'll be another one in half a billion years or so. And I think we're really at that moment where we just came into the kitchen and the cookies are being served. We're just realizing that we have a very big task ahead of us and we may not actually complete that task. And when there's too many people distracted and not so many focused on the ethical dilemmas that are the most pressing of our time, this is one of the oops ways to. Right. I mean, I think we've gotten to the point with the technologies that we've invented and the knowledge we've acquired where if you're spending time watching things like your show and, you know, reading certain books and paying attention to certain thinkers, you can't but sort of come to the conclusion that there is a, you know, alignment of the tectonic plates happening. And it's time for us to change a lot of things about our assumptions that we maybe grew up with. And this has to do with our economic system, our system of governance, our government, you know, our relationship to technology, you know, our fixation with religion. There's a number of things that we sort of need to adjust in really the span of maybe half a generation. And that's the kind of rapid change that has never really willingly happened in human history. It's accidentally happened World War Two. You know, in other words, we've had wars that have changed human history significantly. But interestingly, we've never had multiple existential threats at once. And we've got them now. We've got nuclear, we've got AI, you know, we've got synthetic biology, you know, we've got a lot of things going on at the same time. Brain computer. You know, yeah. And all these things coming together, portend a much higher possibility that we may screw it up. So that's a good way to start. And this is all the areas and this is why you're focused on specifically these areas in the next decade. And so we're going to get to John's focus in this that he's focusing on. We'll get there in a little bit. I want to make sure to explain this this trajectory three decades of this trajectory for you from wired to standard to Web 2.0 to federated sovereign and new co give us a synthesis of how that what you what you what you did. Yeah. Well, when I was an undergraduate, I studying cultural anthropology, just, you know, self referential, you know, set of studies, it's a study of mankind. So studying us and how we work together culturally. And during that period, I was taught kind of fundamental lesson is to understand ourself through the things we make. And those are essentially technologies, right? Now, if you're an archaeologist, which is cultural anthropology of the past, you look at artifacts, and you say, Oh, you know, with stone tool, what can I, what can I understand about an entire culture from this like small set of artifacts I've dug out of, you know, the Gobi desert or whatever, right? But if you're a cultural anthropologist, you study the present. And as I was studying that, the Macintosh computer came out. And I, you know, newly trained to see all that we make as artifacts. I'm like, Well, here is the most important artifact in the history of humankind. This right here, this computer, I was convinced of it. And fascinated by it for a number of reasons. As were a number of early converts, you know, there was like a complete cult around the Macintosh. And so when I graduated, I decided that instead of trying to get a doctorate in cultural anthropology, which I was considering that kind of had an academic bent, I decided to become a journalist, because a journalist, you kind of write history in real time. And that seemed kind of more interesting. I joined a startup magazine, my first startup, it's not like on my resume, because I just joined as an intern. But it covered Apple. And so I got a chance for three years, I kind of rose to senior writer, senior editor and so on, to cover Apple and the Macintosh and networking and graphical user interfaces and databases and basically all the stuff that became the web before well before the web in the 80s. Okay, you know, but those of us deep in the weeds there, we knew it was coming, right? And that laid the ground for about three or four years later. I realized I was so on fire about this, but I didn't have the tools to really write the stories that I wanted to write. I was convinced that the whole world was going to change radically, and that no one really understood that. And it was really important. I was not alone. But there weren't that many of us that were convinced technology was going to change everything in 1989. And so I thought I need to go back to school. So I went back to Berkeley, got a graduate degree in journalism. And while I was there, you have to do a master's thesis. And the master's thesis was, you know, this one year thing where you, you know, do some big project. And I wanted to start a magazine that I called the Rolling Stone of Technology. And I got shot down by my Dean. So I didn't start that. But I did I wrote a long paper, which you can find somewhere. But instead, when I graduated, I was offered a job by the LA Times. Now that's like the shit back in 1991. Like that was, you know, big paper, great job. I hated it. And I quit and I got a phone call almost the same weekend from this crazy man named Lewis Rosetto, who was starting the Rolling Stone of technology. He called it wired. I didn't have a name for it much better name because I didn't have a name. And he asked me at the ripe age of like 25 to be the managing editor, which was just, you know, being prepared meeting, you know, it's just luck and preparation, right? And I was ready to do that. And so wired, you know, our purview at wired was to see absolutely every single possible impact that technology might have on everything. It did not matter. It could be education, it could be medicine, it could be, you know, entertainment, it could be business, did not matter. We wrote stories asking a simple question, which was what's going to change? How's it going to be? Right? And we were so convinced that it was going to be different. And we were so convinced it was going to be better, that, you know, the wired optimism was kind of is a well known, you know, fact of, you know, and matter of fact, the wild eyed kind of optimists of the California, you know, everything's gonna be great, you know, I think that that set a tone or reflected a tone of an industry, the technology industry, that started to believe it's on bullshit, like, we're gonna change the world, we're gonna make the world a better place, you know, we have these amazing new tools and we're gonna use them for good. We all believe that very, very strongly. About five years after starting Wired and doing a whole bunch of crazy stuff as part of that, I got another idea, which I pitched to Lewis and my partners there, and they're like, it's a good idea, John, but we don't really want to do it. It's kind of not a wired thing. And it was an economist for the internet. And so I left to do that. And I started the industry standard. And this was essentially I want to say you had this really cool, a polymathic look at because again, you were seeing technology, but in education, health care biology, you started seeing network. And but to me, I've spent my whole career following one story, the impact of technology on society, right, digital technology specifically. And I saw an inflection happening in about 9596 that where that was going to break out the most sort of, you know, in the most dramatic fashion was going to be in business, right? And so I thought that story was really like the story of technology and society wired was sort of writing the digital revolution. Like where the digital revolution where the rubber was going to hit the road in the late 90s was the internet. So I left in 97 and started the industry standard to cover that story. And as a weekly magazine and daily website and research and you know, all the stuff you do conferences, all of that. That was a wild ride because that was the go go dot com boom, right? That was 97 to 2001, where you know, for the first four years, this thing grew faster than any media company in the history of media had the most ad pages of any magazine in history. And it was it was profitable in year four made tens of millions of dollars in profit. We were going to go public companies that had a tenth of our revenue had, you know, half a billion dollars valuation. So, you know, stars in our eyes and big plans to take on Dow Jones and Business Week and all that and then needle scratch that shit because, you know, it all fell apart with the dot com boom crash, right? And so we went from a 200 million dollar revenue run rate to a 40 million dollar revenue run rate in about a quarter. And that was a huge lesson to go through that as an entrepreneur, you know, as a sort of semi public figure, you know, as a face of this thing and all that. We had 500 people, we had we had magazines in 15 countries, you know, it was a big kind of thing. But it was a long time ago. So 2001, I find myself with, you know, a failed company, you know, a sort of reputation, I hope a good reputation in the industry as a starter of things. But, you know, also this thing was a big failure front page, New York Times, Wall Street Journal kind of failure, you know, that's tough, you know, and with kids and early 30s and, you know, and I just couldn't believe what I was reading, which was sort of a celebration that the internet was over. You know, thank God, it's just, you know, it's just, it's a good place to sort of send email and communicate with people and it's good distribution for our old line businesses, you know, but it's not going to be what all those people like Patel were saying out there in California, especially New York, where I now reside, where we are right now. The New York press was almost throwing parties that like the internet thing was over because they were terrified that it was going to upend their, you know, their incumbent position. But I just couldn't really believe that it was true. My faith in the story was like very shaken, but it wasn't broken. And so in 0102, I started looking for proof that their, that the story still had legs, right, was my story. And I had spent, you know, my early career really in it. And I found it. I found it in two companies. One was Google, which I knew from the industry standard days. We had put it on the cover once before anyone really knew what Google was and like 99, 98, 99. And then another one was called Overture, which is a Google-like company down in Southern California. And these companies, when you visited them at that time, 0102, they were going off. They were hiring people, free lunches, everyone was happy, doing great work. It was the opposite of the absolute like pile of ashes that the entire technology world was in at the time. And so I'm like, wow, you know, what's going on here. So I went deep into that. And I learned a lot. And what I learned was, of course, you know, became the subject of the book, the search. But essentially what I learned was, we were about to remake our relationship to knowledge. Yeah. You know, humankind had had over the process of the early internet and into the first boom. And now, even as the second boom was building, had rewired our ability to access knowledge. And that was super powerful and important in laying the groundwork for where we are right now. And so I wrote a book about it. I started a company that drew from its insights called Federated Media. And I started a with a partner, Tim O'Reilly, who's an amazing dude, started a conference to think about it out loud and talk to the leading lights of who are involved in this process. And we called that Web 2. And the idea of Web 2 was there's a new set of companies that are arising from the ashes of Web 1 that are leveraging the sort of the fact that bandwidth is getting better, processing is getting better, new sets of technologies like Ajax were emerging that are allowing for interactivity with information in real time using the web. And it seemed like we were just at the cusp of making an incredible open connected internet space. And it was super exciting. All these new sites and services were launching. All these things were starting to share data and make mashups. And it was just like, wow, we're on our way again. You know, and so that early optimism wire was starting to pay off in the web to, you know, zone. And so, you know, I started a company that got, you know, very big and very successful called Federated that I want to say the perseverance that you had to get through the ashes. I don't know if I call it perseverance as much as I would call it like I just need to feed my kids. Like I just end my head, you know, like, like, and you also knew where to look. You went to the ones that were still thriving in the ashes to dig and find that it was this big, the fact that we've collectively learned as society to get to now. And then you went and figured out that it the internet is now we're actually able to parse the collective. Yeah, we had, we had a significant problem, which, you know, my current work, which we'll get to is focused on, which is, you know, all of a sudden we had access to all the world's data, but we couldn't make sense from it. And what Google became was it was a massive new sense making organ. Right. We have eyes. We have ears. We have skin. We have these sense organs that we've evolved over hundreds of millions of years. But we are, we had begun to make digital sense making organs and and anyone could get one. Right. You could add a Google to your sense making organ lineup. Right. If you just get a computer and go on the web and you could start to make sense of things. Right. You could start to refine data into information and make sense of that information and make it useful to you or to society. I was totally into that shit. Right. And now one of the ways I made sense of it was I made a company that now narrowed from everything wired business industry standard to media, federated media. And my idea that when I started the company for 2004 was the relationship of the three parties that really make up the media ecosystem audience publishers and advertisers that that relationship was completely being renegotiated. And I called it conversational media that everyone was talking to everyone else, whereas the mass media one to many approach to sort of, you know, monologue media versus conversational media. And I started a company in that space and I recruited all the best blogs, which were the conversational media of the time. Right. Because people left comments and there was a whole linking, you know, structure that had been worked out people, you know, citation and and, you know, one guy would write a post and someone would respond with another post and they'd link back to each other and Google loved blogs because it helped them understand interest and all of that. So I started a company with the best of those and helped them make money and deal with their ad operations and all that stuff. And that grew very, very large. You know, we got into the top 20 in ComScore. We got, you know, it became a big thing, got a lot of money raised and, you know, everything was awesome until it wasn't. And what happened, you know, I'll shorten this because it's a long story. We don't have any bourbon here, but, you know, what happened really is that, you know, we grew and grew and grew and everything was awesome. We rethought kind of the role of advertising. We came up with new approaches to advertising. We called native advertising sort of in blog stream, you know, sponsor content, stuff like that. Seems like duh now. But back then it was very novel and even though it really wasn't because the idea of, you know, sponsor content goes all the way back to P&G doing soap operas and goes all the way back to inserts in magazines and newspapers or, you know, it's not a new idea. We adapted it for the media. But what we couldn't do and didn't do is we didn't think to become a centralized control point for everything. My great blind spot and I hope strength as well is that I believe in decentralization. Yes. And we watched Facebook from 07 really when it started to matter through 012. We were growing like gangbusters. But it was about 1112 when they turned the newsfeed on and then they put that ad unit in the middle of the newsfeed and advertiser and automated the ability to buy it out there against the audience. That undermined the independent web. It undermined what we stood for, right? We had tens of thousands of sites that we were repping at that point. We had a huge audience but they had an even larger audience and the ability to, you know, with the data they had to allow an advertiser to pick and choose any audience member they want and have them in a captive moment, right? And there was very hard to compete with that. So, fortunately, I saw that coming and Federated had purchased a company that was in the automated programmatic advertising space. And in 2013, we spun that company out and created a new company and moved all of our cap table and key people into that company, sold Federated. And that was called Sovereign. And the idea was you should be the sovereign owner of your own data, right? If you're a publisher, you should have control. And Sovereign goes on to this day and it's still a struggle because Facebook, Google and Amazon are very dominant in this market of data and advertising. But that was company five. By this point, I was starting to think maybe I should not be starting companies anymore. Maybe I should sort of start investing, which I had started doing and maybe I should be on some boards and I joined the board of a big data company called Axiom Now LiveRamp and writing more and sort of thinking out loud more and doing that kind of stuff. And I sort of started down that path, but I had this side project called NUCO that I was doing. It was an idea that because of the Web 2 boom, almost every college graduate from sort of 2010 on had the option, should they choose to, to become a CEO of a company when they graduated. All they had to do was like, you know, borrow five thousand bucks from their parents, get an AWS account, you know, get a WordPress site, put something up, start coding or hire someone to start coding for them. And there was a chance they could be the next Mark Zuckerberg, right? And everybody was doing it. It was what I was noticing is there's too many of them. Not all of them are really driven by any kind of purpose that has to do with making the world a little bit of a better place. And there was a lot of just like, you know, let me see if I can figure out a way to, you know, rent seek on parking spaces in San Francisco. You know, it's just a lot of bullshit. So I thought like maybe what we should do is identify the companies that are truly leveraging these technological tools to create significant change in the world. We'll dub them new COS, new kinds of companies, and we will identify them, celebrate them, you know, write about them, do videos about them, you know, and that was the idea of make a media platform for new kinds of companies. And along those lines, we did an event and we've done it in 30 cities where we identify those companies and they all open their doors on a given day. And it's a big celebration of these kinds of companies in a particular city. They did much better in small cities like Cincinnati or larger cities, but that are not as connected to New York or San Francisco like Mexico City than they did in New York or San Francisco, which is really interesting. But beside that, it was a great product and a terrible business. So it sort of, you know, we tried, we tried, we tried, and we ultimately pivoted into a high end thought leadership conference and a small media platform. And so that kind of piece where, you know, the mission of the company was really to step up above technology and look at what is the one agent of change that might be the vehicle that we as a society can use to cross the chasm we're about to face, right? And to me, that agent of change is the corporation, right? And if we're going to do that, we need a different kind of corporation than the one we currently have, because since the Milton Friedman School kind of took over all of thinking in capital markets, really Reagan Thatcher in the 80s, profit seeking has been the number one goal of corporations. And it's, I'm going to extract capital, and I'm going to put it in the pockets of my shareholders. That is the number one job of corporations. And so the new co ethos was, no, that should be table stakes, making money. You got to do that to be a business. But maybe you need to make other kinds of value besides money. And maybe you have more stakeholders than just shareholders. So that idea was at the core of new co and my view was, I should spend all of my energy. So I became full time CEO of that company. It was a side thing for a while. But I, you know, trying to identify and, you know, sort of shout from the rooftops. This kind of company, we should be emulating that kind of company, maybe not. Right. So I was not a fan of Uber before it came over, but I was a fan of Lyft. You know, I was not a fan of, you know, I don't know, I'm going to make something up now Colgate, but I was a fan of Unilever. Right. There are companies that are really trying to change things. And and so what I realized about three or four years in is it's a really big job. Number one, number two, I would have to raise 10 or 20 or $30 million to do it right. And number three, I wasn't that interested in doing that. And that's sort of the thing you can do when you're a seasoned entrepreneur is make a decision to not raise money as opposed to do a decision to just keep running through walls, which is what most entrepreneurs do, you know, we're sort of programmed to just not see obstacles and then run into them until we get through them around them over them under them or redefine them as not an obstacle, but a feature, you know. So I just said, you know what? No, I don't want to run through that obstacle. So I pulled back from that last year. And I was thinking really deeply about what do I want to do. And I realized what I needed to do in order to answer that question was get out of the space I had been in for so long, which was the Valley, you know, all the companies that I mentioned and the book and every other project I had worked on and all the investments for the most part were in Northern California. And it was time for me to change the conversation that I was in. So my wife and I decided to move here. And that decision was made early last year. And we moved here in the fall of last year. Yep. And there's a huge to two huge things that you talk about. You talk about the company, the formation of companies that choose to rent seek versus formation of companies that are solving world's challenge, pressing problems. Huge difference between those two things. And it's really important for as we come up with our moonshot ideas across the world is to really keep that in mind all the time. And the other thing crucially you mentioned was the the paradigm of capitalism. And what the what a court what an entity of a corporation doing of just taking funds and moving it to the shareholders versus now it's about solving those pressing challenges. And we see that a little bit with the benefit corporations. We see that a little bit with some of the millennial and Gen Z drive towards looking at mission statements of companies and putting our money into those companies. And so now you've made this move. And actually I will agree with you actually quite I'm 26. I've only been in the valley less than seven years still. But I have seen a lot of thought monoculture in Silicon Valley. And I'm I'm I'm also very excited to be in New York talking to different different thought culture. Well, I mean, it's the thing I say about the valley and it's, you know, part of partially ingest but but in all humor is truth is that the that the valley is a company town. And I don't mean like it's a technology industry town, but that is also true. It is literally a town that wants to talk about companies. That's all it wants to talk about. So if you know, one of the things that was really starting to bug me and I was even starting to take notes every time I was in a meeting in my notebook, I would say now we're talking about companies again. So you'd start talking about an idea. But it would always end up being how do we turn that idea into a company? Are there other companies that are already doing that idea? How can I invest in that idea? You know, so it's always company, company, company, how do I make a company? It's like, you know what? The point is not to fucking make a company, right? The point is to figure out a problem. The company is the vehicle. And if we over obsess on the vehicle, we forget about what we're driving to. Yeah, right. And so like, I thought I need to get out of that dialogue. I love San Francisco. I love where I lived for many, many years, Marin. I even love the Valley, although I have some issues with sort of the culture of the Valley. But I needed to jolt myself out of it. Because I knew I had more work to do. I just couldn't enunciate it. And I knew coming here and forcing myself into a new conversation would would sort of bring it out of me. And I think it has. Yeah. And I'm glad you also took a big leap into a cold water pool and into into this shock for you because now, yeah, you're immersed, your nervous systems immersed in this in the environment of thinking differently. I also just want to reiterate for viewers that are that are my my age 26 and younger, it's difficult for us to to get behind your eyes and the eyes of so many others that were actually there over these last three decades of technology going from that first Macintosh all the way through the dot. I mean, I was your age when, you know, when I when we were doing the first edition of wired. So yeah, that's that was 25 years ago. So that's that's something. Yeah. Yeah. And I have a son who's 22. And, you know, what did he do when he graduated college? Started a company. Like, you know, that's what and I think he's got a great idea and I wish him well. But, you know, I also have quoted to him exactly how many of these companies actually succeed. But, you know, he's very passionate about it. So this is a this is a in this pivotal moment, the slowing down to think about what we're doing with exponential technologies and what we're doing with geopolitics and how we can find a sense of unity together is the most salient right now. So OK, so tell us about what's going on. OK, we have now we like to say it this way. The the the the second the second greatest invention of mankind is the data we leave behind. And the first greatest invention of mankind is how do we measure that data and make it applicable to our lives. Right. And it has yet to be invented. And so now you're obsessed with the architecture of data flows and rightfully so. And we're trying to get out of silos and into decentralization and into actually making sense of this data. So teach us about this. I think it's time. I think we finally have the right set of circumstances for to start to justify and defend some new answers to some old questions. Right. First of all, the second book that I was working on that I abandoned in 2014 2013 2014 was essentially about trying to understand the distinction between data and information and the impact of data on society. And I could not quite get my brain around it. And I'm a proxy for my kind of what I consider like my readers. You know, if I can't do it, then at the time isn't right. You know, and there's a lot of brilliant books that were written before that period and written since that are about this. But we haven't quite been able to find the metaphors to help us get to another place. But I think we're there now. And I think one of the things that's happened in the last five years is number one. Most of the sort of sentient population has realized the importance of data. You know, you try to tell people in 2013 how important data is and they're like talking about, you know, you try to talk about, you know, how much data, you know, Google or Facebook or Amazon has about you in 2013. They're like, it doesn't really matter because I'm getting stuff cheaper. I'm my searches are getting answered quickly or, you know, I stay in touch with my high school friends on Facebook. What's the deal? What's the problem? Right. People were talking about it, but it wasn't an issue yet. It is now. It's a fun like people have woken up and said, Holy crap, you know, and now we're wondering, you know, I've got Alexis in Google Homes around here. You wondering, you know, what are they listening to? Right. People are there's an ambient awareness of information and data that just didn't exist five years ago. That's number one. Number two, we started to solve a lot of hard problems around distributed architecture at scale. And we've gotten a little overexcited as it relates to blockchain and ICOs and all that stuff. But the truth is that this set of technologies is not nascent anymore. It's developed and it's starting to come up its own scaling curve, which is exciting. So that's a fundamental thing. And the third thing is we have existential crisis driving this massive existential crisis that people are waking up to. We can't do nothing about global warming. We can't do, you know, nothing about the idea of a generalized AI. We can't do nothing about the impact of synthetic biology. We can't. If we do nothing, then the Oracle in the kitchen will just dismiss us and know that someone else will be back in a few hundred million years. We're done, right? These are big, big, you know, potentially, you know, you know, civilization, wiping technologies that we've created. I didn't even mention nuclear, but they're still nuclear, right? So and by the way, you know, when the AI, you know, gets a hold of the nuclear codes, you know, that's the Terminator series, right? So we have to find a way to have a civil dialogue about these issues. And the way we find it is through media. What you're doing right now, this is how we have the dialogue. We need to imagine and create new forms of media that, you know, it didn't end with fucking Facebook. I'm sorry, social media is not the last form of media. And if it is, we are true and well, well and truly fucked. Okay. So we need to keep going, man. Like if you're in the media business like I am, you can't just stop and say, okay, well, you know, first we invented, you know, the pamphlet and then the newspaper and the magazine and then we figured out television and then we invented, you know, the online publication and the internet and email lists and and then video logs and and then social media. Now we're done. No, we're not. We have to keep going. We have to come up with better media to solve the problem that is in front of us. I've been obsessed with the role of data and information in society for quite some time. In 2007, I wrote a piece called The Data Bill of Rights. And it listed sort of these, I think, 10 things that I think we should have the right to around personal information. And this was not sparked by Facebook. In 2007, Facebook had just sort of flipped from being a dot edu service to being a generally accepted service. It was really because of Google that I was thinking about this stuff. And so I've been thinking about this for like 11 years really deeply, or I guess I wrote the book in 05 so earlier, but data flows according to rules. Information flows according to rules. In the internet 1.0 kind of, you know, and the web 2.0 world that we had been part of prior to now, there was an assumption about how that information would flow. And it was essentially a difference between a mainframe computing architecture and a PC internet architecture. So what are the main differences? Well, a mainframe architecture has two components. There's a big ass computer in the sky. It's really expensive and it's where all the value is. And then there are these things called dumb terminals, nodes. And what they do is you put data into it and it goes up and gets processed by the big computer in the sky. And then the computer will send back a program that gets run on the dumb terminal to tell the person putting data in what to do. It's a siloed back and forth and the nodes never talk to each other. They'd all talk to the master controller, right? And that was the 1960s and 1970s in computing. Because those big ass computers were super expensive, super valuable and controlled by a big entity, usually a corporation, right? Then came along the PC revolution and the internet revolution. And all of a sudden the intelligence and control and value exchange at the center at the top got pushed to the node and all of us were in charge, right? And we were the intelligence and we started sharing data laterally, right? And so this distributed network approach to information architecture. When I got involved in the internet in 93, 94, you know, well the internet, I mean I was on the well in the 80s and you know, copy-serve and all that but the real internet as we understand it today, we just assumed that that architecture would continue forever. And what happened was it got consolidated and this has been sort of Tim Wu has done a good job of this in his books, Master Switch and The Curse of Bigness and the Attention Merchants. This consolidation occurred which is the result of rent seeking, capitalistic, you know, true norths that say extract capital and put it in the pockets of shareholders. So what happened is the same cycle happened to the internet that happened to every other medium and where do we end up? Five biggest firms in the United States are all technology companies and they're all rent seeking data driven companies, right? And so those corporations now own and control a vast universe of information, right? And that architecture, you know, that I described all the power and control up here and just sending an application that we're just sort of data inputting on this side and we're getting that application sounds a lot like Facebook, right? I can't take my Facebook data and give it to you or give it to Amazon or give it to a startup or give it to a researcher or give it to whoever might make value from it. I can't because Facebook has this big document called the Terms of Service that won't allow me to do that, right? They say you own it but you can't do that shit with it, right? So what we've done is we've created a silent and what they don't know what the big giants don't know is that they could even be making more money by taking a percentage of that data that we would own as a packet of like you said, a machine readable and then distribute that. And the research like you pointed out to it's so interesting to think about all the missing research that is not being done on this data. So I've been thinking about this, I've been writing about this for the last couple of years, mostly in obscurity to be honest. I mean, you know, thousands of people read what I write but not hundreds or millions, you know, hundreds of thousands of millions. But I've been sort of thinking out loud, thinking out loud, trying to figure out how to put it all together and how to make some progress in this space, right? These guys are seem so dug in that it's such a kind of oligarchy now. Like our entire ecosystem of startup entrepreneurs like, you know, dream of selling to one of them really. It's you know, it's like the odd company that is that makes it to an IPO these days. And it's usually in the enterprise space, you know, it's not in the sort of consumer societal space. It's in the cloud security or, you know, some other, you know, it docusign, right? It's not, it's not, you know, but in any case, what I realized was is there was this shadow constitution that in the United States, particularly we without voting on it without declaring it without studying it without thinking about it, we are governed by a constitution as it relates to how data flows around our society and who gets to make value from it. And we've never really ratified this constitution. We've never thought about it very deeply. But it exists. It's very powerful. And it's the product of this very strong intertwined rope of technology and capitalism, right? And that's what I was studying at NUCO. And so it kind of all comes together. And I was like, wow, what is this constitution, right? Well, I have a theory, which is that it's the terms of service of the largest technology companies. And those terms of service, which run 20, if not hundreds of pages, you know, are written by lawyers to protect the business model of current companies. And almost every entrepreneurial startup, except for the ones that are trying to fight the system, of which there are many and they're great. But they're very difficult to do. But almost all the startup community just copies those because those are the successful companies. So I'm going to write the same terms of service that Amazon has because look at Amazon, they're crushing, right? So I'm starting a startup. I'm going to have the same terms of service about how I handle data. Data is the most powerful potent resource. So I'm going to hoard it. So we have this data hoarding architecture in our economy, right? I thought to myself, what would be a different architecture? If we could just go to the white board and build a new architecture of how data flows around society, what would it be? Right? And I imagined and, you know, not which is a great question to ask across every sort of industry is if you every industry, if you could rebuild an industry, how would you design it from scratch to make it much better? And of course there's huge problems getting from utopian, you know, you know, perfect design land to where we are now. And we can talk about that. But I looked at healthcare. I looked at financial services. I looked at agribusiness, you know, ag and what was striking in all of those from just sort of a cursory, some research that I did, you know, over the last couple of years is they all have the same architecture. They all hoard data. They all don't share it laterally and they all are extracting capital from it for the benefit of their shareholders, not for the benefit of society. And so now a lot of people have noticed this problem. I'm not like unique in noticing this or talking about any of this shit I'm talking about, right? But one of the things that I think I'm semi-good at is creating media and, you know, thinking out loud about, well, we have a problem which we do about it or we have an opportunity. What should we do about it? That was wired. That was the standard. That was federated. That was, you know, even NUCO. I think what we have is the opportunity to rethink some basic regulatory gates in our society. Some very simple things we could do to change things. They would be radical. There's no way that the tech oligarchy is going to like this at all. But it's a very simple idea. And I wrote a piece about that just a couple of months ago. They may actually end up liking it. They may end up liking it because I think there's a strong argument to be made, but I've got to make it. That's why I'm at Columbia doing this research, that this is actually a 10x or 100x of their business. But they've got to make the transition to get there. Right? So the simple idea, and again, I'm creeping heavily from the shoulders of many giants, many of whom are anonymous, but in the open source world and the distributed architecture and blockchain world and beyond, that if we just let the data flow in an environment that is regulated, not by either a oligarchic company or by the government per se, but by us, with an environment of trust, safety, security, privacy built in, the things that could happen would be extraordinary. And so I've been writing a series of pieces with examples of those, right? You had this great image of a bunch of valves that you control and give to researchers more data, get paid for that data. Right. And so people often obsess and right now they are because people are so, as we were discussing earlier, people are so sort of woke to the power of data, right? Your privacy is imperiled. You're not getting paid. If you're not getting paid, or if you're not paying, you're the product, right? Everyone's sort of woke to the power of data. So there's a lot of obsession on well, my data should be worth something, I should get paid. I think that's the wrong thing to pay attention to. It's not payment, it's value. Yeah. And how much value could we unleash for society if what could be known is knowable? So just an example and imagine we're here on a block in New York City and one of the things I noticed when I moved here is there aren't very a lot of interesting restaurants in this specific neighborhood. And there's a reason for that, but that I understand. But there's a million reasons I don't. Yeah. And there's a million reasons why the bankers who might back a small entrepreneur starting a restaurant here don't understand. And customers don't understand. There's just a there is knowledge lying on the ground. But it's not being picked up because we have hemmed that knowledge into silos that cannot be shared laterally. So 50 years ago you might have had to go and walk on every door in the neighborhood and ask the questions to people. But now that data is here. Imagine I just moved to this neighborhood, which I did and I'm I have a hankering to start a restaurant. Now, you know, currently starting a restaurant is as crazy if not crazier than starting an entrepreneurial business in tech. It's like that the failure rate is like 90% after year four. So it's crazy, right? So if you're going to take your hard earned savings and pour it into a restaurant and hope it works, wouldn't it be good if you knew as much as you could about what's going on that might affect that restaurant, you're going to start down the block? What's knowable now that wasn't knowable five years ago? Well, imagine if you could ask a question of the world and the world answered it, right? So I'm going to start a restaurant. I think I might want it to be an Italian Vietnamese mashup restaurant, right? That's my idea. Okay, I've got a hypothesis. We're talking about enlightenment. So I can use a little bit of metaphor. We've had a renaissance and data in the last five, 10 years, a deluge of data, renaissance. Everyone is awoken to the amazing power of data. Well, if history rhymes, let's go back to the last renaissance, right? The last renaissance predated a very important moment in human history called the enlightenment, right? That was after the renaissance when all of a sudden we opened up and realized the potential in the renaissance. And then we thought about it and we came up with something called formulating a hypothesis, gathering the data, testing the hypothesis against the data, sharing and being transparent about both the hypothesis and the data so that others can test it. Yes. Rinse and repeat. That's the scientific method, right? And that has driven us to the point of progress we are now. That has given us the microprocessor, the internet, everything. Okay, the scientific method is at the core of all of that. And that is shorthanded by the enlightenment, right? So we've had a data renaissance. We haven't had a data enlightenment, right? And so here's the imagined scenario. Imagine that if I want to start this restaurant, I could say, okay, I'm going to go to this great company that started a few years ago called the Research Board. There is something called that, but let's just call it that anyway, the Research Board. And I'm going to put up a request for proposal or a request for token, okay? I want 1,000 people who qualify in my neighborhood, right? I'll just ring fence it, geofence it, right? Within a mile of where I live, I want you to give me your Uber data, your Lyft data, your Rezzi data, your OpenTable data, your Yelp data, your Search data, all the data that might in any way help me understand whether or not having a restaurant here is a good idea. Everyone who's driven by in an Uber, go into a restaurant. Anyone who's ever signed up to go to a restaurant around here and then canceled and why? What did they eat? How much did they pay? What kind of food was it? Right? You know, did they do it once a week, once a month, once every quarter? You know, how much money did they spend? All of a sudden, I've got all of this data from all of these, it's just out there lying like fruit on the ground. We just can't see it. Now I can. I can ask questions of it and I can make from that unrefined data information that will drive the creation of a physical thing in the world called a restaurant. And I can take that data and if I'm smart enough about it and there'll be a whole ecosystem of people helping me be smart about it, I can go to a bank and go, check this data. Here's my token for why this restaurant makes sense. Run that through your fucking algorithms and they do and they go, damn, I'm going to back this thing. I'm going to give you a loan to get your restaurant equipment, right? Right now it's just like, well, do you have good credit and, you know, can I take your house over if the restaurant fails? I'll just, you know, that's basically where we are right now in our economy. But imagine if all of this data laying on the ground could be applied to that one problem and 10 million others just like it. It just gets me so fucking excited. It's crazy that this data exists and no one can use it. It's crazy that our economy is not flourishing because it has the information to flourish, but we have not figured out to release it. And that's what I'm all about right now. So the project I'm doing at Columbia is trying to prove that we have a broken architecture and there's a better way. And so I'm literally creating a visualization based on the terms of services of the four largest firms in the United States, all tech firms, right? And saying, here's what they're, here's what they're allowing and here's what they're not allowing. Now, let's compare them and contrast them and see what you could do. Could you do what I just described? The answer to that question is no, you know. And of course, you know, Uber, you know, Lyft, Rezzi, these, these, these are smaller and so they, you know, Uber not so much, but they don't get as much shit. But the truth is they all have similar data policies. So you need to, if you're going to make change, you first have to understand where you're standing. What's going on right now? We need to see that we have an architecture of data control in this, in this country that is busted. Once we see that, we can then say, we should change it. How? And my idea is just one. There's probably a lot better ideas than mine, but you got to have at least an idea to, you know, to sort of tell the story, right? We got to admit that we have a problem. It's number one of A8, right? You know, acknowledge what you're doing. Acknowledge you have a problem. And then crowdsourcing solutions and ideas to the. So that's the work at Columbia. And what's interesting is, again, history rhyming or echoing when the dot com crash happened. I not only, you know, sort of, you know, for a couple of years, it was rough. I was, I went to Berkeley and I started teaching at Berkeley and I started studying and I ended up ultimately writing a book. I started studying search because I just thought that was the most important and interesting thing happening in a world that seemed completely fucked up and broken at the time. Right now, our world doesn't seem so great. I'm sorry, even though employment is, you know, at record lows, it's not good employment. And even though, you know, me and my friends are doing pretty well because we're highly educated and we've been successful in our careers, most people aren't doing very well. We've got a broken society and it feels that way to me, especially when you go to New York and, you know, you can't like live in Moran and in Silicon Valley and kind of be, you know, insulated from it. It's right in your fucking face here. You know, it's very real what's happening. And so what can we do to fix our political system? What can we do to fix our technological system? The two are absolutely, irrefutably interconnected now. And so we, you know, the work has to be what is the, you know, what's the rock we can lever off of? What can we identify that is something that can change the conversation? Right? And that's what I'm focused on. So the work at Columbia is all about that and it's not driven by any commercial. Like, it's just I want to know this. I want to see this. I want to see what the world thinks of it, you know. Share it. And I think it's going to lead to something else. You illustrated this really interesting these fruit that has these fruit that have fallen from the trees, these data fruit. It's an invisible fruit. These invisible fruit that have fallen from the trees and the creative potential that exists across all of the different fields if we can just forage those fruit and then put them in different assemblies that can then provide us with so much more value. What we need for that to happen besides sort of political will, which is very important, because I realize I haven't kind of talked about the one kind of the one line that we need to change in our architectural code, our regulatory code. I'll get to that in a minute. But what we need technologically to do that is we need the ability to create a trustless environment. In other words, not no trust, but you don't have to worry about trusting it, right? We need the ability to that, you know, billions of consumers of citizens and consumers can trust an environment that they can manage their own security, that they know that this is that as they share this information, it's secure that they can revoke it, you can turn it off, turn it on, turn it off and that there are economics associated with it. All those things need to be true. We need to invent technologies to make all that possible. Guess what we have? We literally have already solved all of those problems for other things, right? So we don't have a technological reason that the system can't happen. We have a cultural reason. We have a societal reason. We have an economic reason. But the one line of code that needs to be changed is simply this. And this is sort of under let the data flow, right? Every data service. At scale, because I don't think you should tax like the startup necessarily, but I think every startup, if this were true, would already build this into what because they want to get to scale, right? Every data service at scale must allow their customers to create tokens that encapsulate all data created, co-created with the service into a machine-readable, portable vehicle that they can share with whoever they want. So my entire Amazon purchase history, my entire run and ride history on Strava, my entire ride history on Uber, anything that I do with that service, turn it into a token, machine-readable and portable. And so there'll be a standardized system I'm not worried about. We invented a really good one called the internet, you know, where I can just give that token to a startup that wants to try to do something cool with my Amazon data or give it to a university that's trying to study something that has to do with my Amazon data or give it to a nonprofit that is trying to crack a really hard problem because my data is somehow relevant to them. And I have the ability to turn it off remotely and I have the ability to get value from it. And I know that it's secure and I know that the party that's taking my data doesn't actually have it. They have access to it. Very important distinction, right? We've solved this problem. It's called the ad tech ecosystem. It's built. It's built. My little company, one of my companies called Sovereign, does nine billion requests a day, a day. So we've solved this big processing based on parameters and rules thing, right? Securely. It's not even blockchain. Could be, probably should be. But it's not. So also the ad tech-based business is a little bit gray in many of its areas as we well know. But we can do this. So. The proposed method, the token act. I call it the token act. It's very interesting. The problem is that the tokens are so corrupted because of the ICO stuff. There has been a big issue with that. I've got to come up with a better name. But you've formulated in a way that it gets people to understand that their data is worth value for society in so many different ways. Right. And it's also worth value for the company to open up their data silos. And then this single machine readable format across different. You get your token again of your driving data through Uber or your purchase day through Amazon. I also wanted to indicate this as well that this is so everyone likes to live healthy. Everyone finds living healthy to be something that's extremely important to them. And we're starting to understand that we spend such little amount of money on preventable health care and medicine that we now understand that if we can turn on the data flows of our biometrics out for research. Perfect place where this kind of a regulatory framework which is what this is. People go oh regulations it's terrible. Bullshit. There's a regulatory framework called no regulation. That is a regulatory framework. So get over it. No matter what we're in a regulatory framework a regulatory framework is simply the structures we create to ensure that we don't dissolve into entropy. OK. That's what a regulatory framework is. It's like how we can our bodies are regulatory frameworks. Right. And so why aren't we taking the data off our bodies in real time and making ourselves healthy? Because we have a sclerotic bad architecture of information control in the health business. Who built the data information and architectures in the health business? Insurers. Why? Because they're the ones that pay. That's 1950s capitalism controlling 2020 outcomes and that's bullshit. You know and by the way we have 1950s capitalism controlling outcomes in our technology industries as well. And so we have to change that core architecture. That's what the argument is of my work at Columbia. We're really looking forward to that in the research with Columbia. We're really looking forward to doing a follow up on this. John, couple quick questions that we like to go through on the way out of the show. Sure. First question is let's start with what is a core driving principle of yours? Core driving principle of mine. Work on stuff you can't help but work on. Like if nothing's getting you excited do nothing. Like I've never worked on anything. A company, a piece of writing that I am not stoked about. Sorry, I'm a Southern California guy. But like I think that as it relates to work and then personally never fuck with your family. Those are kind of two core principles. Don't do anything that is against, you know, that messes up your life with your family. And if you let the which you're kind of trying you're doing this right now but I want to see all the way back. Let's bring the whiteboard all the way back. So if you could rebuild civilization from scratch how would you design it? I've never thought of that question. I mean, I studied civilizations, right? It was like my undergraduate major. I could design it. How would I design it? I think I think the greatest impediment to civilization is otherness, is a sense of otherness and one of the greatest strengths of humanity is a sense of otherness, right? So this idea of the individual is that we have of each of us as being other. Like I am separate and apart from you. It's sort of one of the remarkable things that makes us interesting and when we combine that socially one of the things that fucks everything up, right? So I think if I could go back and redesign civilization as you say, I might if I were such a God give the gift of everyone who initially is part of the first civilization, I guess, a overwhelming knowledge that the other is okay, you know? That the other is not someone who's gonna steal your kids, kill your wife, kill you and take your shit. That the other is just you with a little bit of a different spin that's worth checking out. Because I think we're still acting so fucking tribal and, you know, and I don't want to lose this essence of, you know, I'm not an advocate of we should all just dissolve into oneness, but I do think that we need to understand that we are all one, right? And so somehow that philosophical concept which took millennia to really start becoming something that could be discussed publicly without getting either shot or laughed at, I would give the gift of that early. Yeah, well said. And do you, this wouldn't be simulation if we didn't ask you, do you think we're in a simulation? Yeah, I've really struggled with this one. I think that the technical answer is yes, but I think it doesn't matter. Why? Why is it yes? Because one could argue that, you know, given what we don't know, if there is a chance we don't know, then it's technically possible. Now there's, we don't know what the ultimate rules of the universe are. We don't. We know that. All scientists acknowledge that. All true scientists who are scientific method driven scientists say we don't know like how the fucking universe works. Sorry, we don't know, you know. But we're understanding the code, which is math. Yeah, we're pushing our way toward that understanding, but right now, we don't know. And since there's a chance we don't know, there is a chance it's a simulation, right? And if there's a chance it's a simulation, you know, I'm gonna say it probably because I like the idea that it probably is. But the fact is, I mean, look, we started this conversation talking about, you know, the Oracle and the kitchen and the cookies. That's right. That was a simulation, the whole thing, right? And that's what the Chesky brothers were actually asking. You know, is this all just a simulation? Or is it a system that just keeps repeating, right? Well, if it's a system just keeps repeating, it could just be a button on someone's coat. You know, and so even if it's not a simulation, it's just a button on someone's coat. Might as well call it one. That's what, you know. So it's just this, you know, it's like the end of, you know, men in black with the aliens and the marbles. Like, you know, there are these ineffable questions, right? I prefer to answer them in a way that makes it sort of fun to stroke a chin. Yup, yup. And last question is, what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world? Well, the first idea that came up was my wife giving birth. I know that's totally fucking, like, cliche. But like, you just asked, and I just like saw my wife holding our first kit. So, but the most beautiful thing in the world past the cliche is when you're in the flow. You know, like when you completely lose your sense of self and, but at the same time, you're well aware that you're in something that's bigger than you, but you are making it happen. So there's this cycle that's happening about you and the flow and the flow's not you, but you're in it and when you're in that, that happens to me when I ski, when I ride bikes, when I practice yoga, when I write a piece and when I get into conversation like this, like that flow is the most beautiful thing in the world. Then we should all pursue it. It seems like the deepest cognitive instinct is that. It seems like that is what brings us meaning if we can hone it on that. Yeah, get in there, man. Get in there and stay in there as long as you can. That's why people are lifelong surfers. You know? John, this has been such an enlightening conversation. We are very much looking forward to the new architectures of data flows. John, thanks again for coming out to the show. Great, I appreciate it. Thanks everyone for tuning in. You usually appreciate it as well. Give us your thoughts in the comments below. We'd love to hear from you. Let us know. Join the community chat. Let's get talking about these concepts and coming up with our ideas about how to solve some of the most pressing challenges going on in the world. Inspire these conversations around you. Check out John's links below in the bio. Check them out. Also, join us in supporting simulations so we can continue coming on site to great places and talking to incredible leaders like John. And go and build the future. Everyone manifest your destiny into the world. Build, create, execute. We love you very much and we'll see you soon. Peace. That's it. All right, man. That's it. That's how we do. Thank you, brother.