Chris welcome to the network State podcast hey bology how are you 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 own you want to hold it up for the camera do you have you have a copy yeah yeah here you go everyone read WR on available January 30th rewrite own.com has uh you can bu of course buy it at Amazon but also if you want to support other smaller book sellers or what ever you prefer it's there and we have audiobook and um Kindle too coming in the same day wonderful so go on read write own and you know it's it's funny I I'm glad you wrote this book because it's kind of like crypto 101 2024 I think if 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 it'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 specul 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 is to do that and kind of work on policy stuff and literally almost every meeting there's like what book should I read um and look there's some great books on bitcoin specifically and there's some great books like there's uh you know the history of coinbase and the history of ethereum right um 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 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 feeman who said if you can't explain it to a I forgot like a 10-year-old you don't understand it right you know and like and like I've always said like this is you know that that that blockchains and crypto are about kind of you know decentralizing various internet services and returning power to um 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 um 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 teal someone told me he wrote his like agent told me he wrote it for he wrote zero to one which I I have a lot of respect for that book he he wrote that um for smart high school students and I and I thought that kind of was a great um kind of gu guidance so I thought about that a lot and so I don't use I avoid jargon and except when I absolutely need it and then I Define it actually in one rewrite too I went through you know the fir very it's for those who've written obviously you've written a lot including your book biology it's easy to kind of slip into passive voice and kind of uh 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 um very little passive voice like every I 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 G to walk through the details and I was it actually took me I mean it took me a year um and a bunch of kind of rewrites and somewhat painful to like get it to that point where it was just really kind of broken down so that so that's what I'm hoping is a sort of first principles you're you know open-minded but don't have the background in this I do a brief um uh history of the internet in the beginning with a specific fol I mean and it's very important like one thing I realized 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 nval school of thought that why write a book when you can write a blog post right and I used to blog for years and I was like there's no point in writing a book you know why why a book now and a lot of business books are kind of like filler you know i' I've gotten all these people ask me like did you write the book like they think it's like this ghost it's like a ghost because you know I run a fun 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 it's not it's not at all right and yes I wrote it and yes and it's like this is like a you know you may not agree with it but it's like a it's a book it's not a you know it's not I mean you and I are both academics so no one would ghost write our Pap academic yeah Reed AC reformed reformed I think I think we were we were smart enough to leave at some point we we were dumb enough to stay too long and smart enough to leave or something like that but that's right so um question for I okay sorry I could go on on you go ahead and ask question I I just on 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 actually Network save movie um but um 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 write a 10 or even 15 page essay you can read and reread the whole thing oh God 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 100 Pages let alone 200 or something you can't reread the whole thing start to finish before you write page 2011 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' done a lot of blogging obviously and it really does change when it's longer and and so i' 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 it's really annoying when you're reading a book and you're like they explain something twice or they overe explain it sort of the second time right like has it 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 seven and you're like wait a second is this did I did I already explain 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 if I didn't take a twoe break then I couldn't read do a fresh read and read it as like right and then be like oh wait that feels silly that I didn't explain that or I overe explain that and I had to take these two week cycles and then in 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 that 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 you're reading like a non-fiction book and let's say they make like three claims in a row and let's say as you're 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 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 Fork 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 Benet Tim Ruff Garden like CS professors Bill Hinman law Prof you know 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 counterargument and then I went and addressed them all and that took me four months or something and but then the codebase had to I read it again I was like holy crap this is just mess and it's a mess 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 metastasized or something in all these different weird ways um and so anyway so yeah but that that yeah go ahead yeah it's so 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 onboard memor Ram I had to go I had to uh page to the hard drive or something like 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 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 in 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 it'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 a founder of wired um you know great writer written many 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 I know him and he's been always a cryptos skeptic and actually he's one of the quotes I have on the back of the book and he's like and he's the kind of guy he's not going to me yeah he 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 you've been saying it over 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 crypto 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 um so I think the I hope crypto people will find parts of it uh 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 P I think you invented the sort of phrase or I think so right like kind of speculation is the bootstrap mechanism speculation is insulation is insul sort of yeah sort of the but like what is but like the question then is like what exact what does that mean exactly like how do we actually get there right you have to Value the thing on the other side installation installation of what and then we'll get to that in a sec 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 were 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 what have you and now you know he's smart enough he he he understands it from your your description there's something else by the way the teal writing 0 to1 for a smart high school student probably helped him bring vitalic to the teal Fellowship I'm not sure if the timing on that it's true I forgot I forgot he has a program that recruit 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 crypto is a big enough area people come at it from different schools of thought many come at 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 interl you know your your book is divided into five sections which you know I'd roughly summarized so you've got readed 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'd called maybe the basics of cryp cryto 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 what 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 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 and maybe just to give a little bit of context you know I got into the internet sort of late 90s and have spent my entire career on the internet I was originally an entrepreneur and an investor and and as you mentioned earlier sort of a reformed academic um and I actually think I wouldn't like I was attracted to the internet because I mean it was an amazing amazing promise of of a network that was truly decentralized and owned by the users right this was the original internet um and that happened for a variety of reasons you know its Origins and Academia government and there were sort of political motivations but to me and by the way that was not a fat complete like there were alternative Visions like Bill Gates and Comcast and Disney had this information Super Highway which sort of a centralized internet right and like you know our friend Mark andreon was on the kind of the open internet sort of open source side and of course you know Netscape and everything else um 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 and power and control and that this was actually sort of the thing owned by the people and the specific in the specific way that address so you have and and that was kind of came so like you know you had the sort of Bas layer of 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 um and you know one of the key features just technically of DNS right is 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 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 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 think we've probably both made I mean the off code of DNS is very similar to a private key from crypto yeah yeah it's 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 um and and who has control of that is it Twitter that has control or does a user have control yeah that's right and and actually it's funny because I remember you know actually I'm not sure if this 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 g to 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 5 years in and now suddenly they can jack up the cost on you know your domain name because you just add this why you know every good restaurant in the world goes out of business is they always jack up the rent exactly just just to the point where they built neighbor yeah they just assume that they can put another restaurant in there because they don't own it that's right and so the you know the right the smart 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 they social like you jump forward to web 2 You Don't Own your Twitter name you don't own your Instagram name you don't own like all of these different thing 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 and I mean most messages that come into you are coming into your C Dixon not your physical Mail Right 99% of communication's online Okay so good so that's kind of go go ahead you yeah so then so then I sort of s 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 skoric 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 film films were just like a camera on a play and then later on they figured out that you could have a closeup and establishing shot and kind of establish the grammar of film right and the same way early internet you know if you go back and look at these retro internet 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 2 movement which I this is when I became an entrepreneur in the early 2000s was 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 um 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 it still exists people use it for podcasting but in 20078 it was literally had the same number of users as you know 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 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 yeah this was a this was a and look I would argue that this people say you know today the top five tech companies are five 50% of NASDAQ up from 25% 10 years ago top 1% of social networks is 99% 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 is social networking or something like it was a ma had a massive economic um consequence here's how I think about that and then uh you know give me give me your thoughts are you were you were in BIO that at that I was in BIO right quite yeah you you weren't in the the 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 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 is scams and and and hacks or whatever when someone's on the outside that's basically all they hear uh but I but I wanted to say so web one Web Two web 3 at the time Web 2.0 was thought of as Ajax and Google Maps and interactive stuff and what have you but now in retrospect we can say that there's there's a frontend Evolution for example with going from login password web one social login and ooth and web 2 and then like connect wallet with web 3 and and there's a a backend Evolution where you go from peerto peer like P top then MVC and then what I call CBC client blockchain client so like peer-to-peer every node is equal right MVC you know like the rails 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 State and 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 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 back 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 2008 at the time it seemed like a and then it pass 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 fail 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 HTTP and SMTP therefore and like actually quote in this thing there was a wired article from 2008 where they try they 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 the stores a social graph it could be like Wikipedia like how do we store of course it was what you needed 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 buy a domain set it up and that was just not a consumer value proposition when when Twitter and Facebook said just click a button and you get a name 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 um 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 PIV I remember it came out it pivoted into a you know peer to like a social um 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 you know whatever um and so that's why that's why they beat Google video CU they more risk tolerant but anyway go ahead yes so with YouTube when it came out it they they pursued this strategy called that I called 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 to 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 was 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 single state for the network suddenly YouTube had all this great content I'm not going to go to c.org anymore I'm just going to go to YouTube and you know fast forward it's worth like Wall Street analyst say $140 billion dollar probably more as part of Google but they spent you know this why did Twitter and Facebook and all these guys raise tens of billions of dollars a lot of it's subsidization they they spend tons and tons of money what is a blockchain like I think of it as sort of thesis antithesis synth is thesis is protocol networks right I mean you like these these Frameworks like I do the thesis is protocol networks uh antithesis is these what I call corporate networks these kind of centralized networks and then synthesis is blockchains Right which is the best of both worlds you get you get I 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 so 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 four people in Palo Alto who get to decide the the flow of global culture business and and economics which is the current state which is the trade we make today with corporate networks right like it's we we've bizarrely you know it's like as if AT&T got to decide who made phone calls and who gets to uh how and and they get to take you know anytime you call somebody up they get to take a bunch of the money like that's 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 um Global uh communication systems to seeming apparently arbitrary group like I just fundamentally against that idea I think these I agree decentralized Community owned 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 Unix command becomes a yeah exactly right man man becomes stack becomes stack over flow and and R sync is like Dropbox and uh gra gra is Google and you know I don't know right yeah so now you know one of the things I thought is that you can revisit every protocol and then you say what does it look like when you can add Global State yep 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 could go both ways you could start like I list some of them in the book but there and I you know I didn't 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 I like there was all these social attempts like diaspora and you know there's a million you know status.net and there's a 100 of them so I think there's and look 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 keep State they didn't and they didn't have money they didn't have fun that 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 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 is you control a network effect right yes if if you're if you're deliberately 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 let's call it subsidization buildout and whatnot is the user interfaces for something like YouTube or Twitter or Facebook or what have you have actually now remained 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 Fe 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 still standardized yeah yeah form factors right and those uh form factors for like wall sockets I mean there's a few different ones like Australians Australia's model and like Britain's model and the US model um but there just 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 way the handle of a cup is 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 uux 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 3 things I think are essentially taking the same user interface of web 2 adding balances and payments and adding Global State and now you actually have a transformatively new app like a there's like web 3 whats apps you know that do this kind of thing now you can have balances and other 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 to in some ways I think there's also really strong things about it and one of them is the user user experience like I think the web 2 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 inevitably leads to these kinds of issues um but but I agree with you completely I I think that web 3 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 to I think that's right 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 that 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 uh you remember the unibomber you know in the early 90s right yeah okay so unibomber he blew all these people up but why did he blew these people up he blew them up so he could get an oped in the Washington Post in the New York Times okay that's how that right I don't know is that is that actually what why he did he wanted to get his Manifesto out that's literally that's Lally 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 five billion people can do it and you can do it for basically I think it's $10 now is the going rate for a low-end Android phone right like they all these kind of it talk about you know digital divide Etc in the 90s now my 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 um and and Par participate and 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 yeah coming back to what you were saying I mean uh and then let's go through the book and what not but a couple couple of thoughts I've had and you know probably related yours are that if you just take every web 2 app and you add a web3 wallet that has a balance and that has the ability to do encrypted signing you enable completely new things like a web3 WhatsApp you can now do for example pooling like crowdfunding within a WhatsApp group right like re just in the same way you can just instantly attach a message or a video or something like that so I'm seeing tools that do this or like you know forecaster which we you know we invest in which is uh Dan 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 two things and adding web 3 to them I think I think people are are starting to see the value of that but 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 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 I 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 and the bizaar 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 inter of 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 wak and jobs at The Homebrew Computer Club was sort of I call it 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 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 um 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 in developer fa 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 man of the three webs the technology long centralized must decentralize 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 fan and maybe but like the other hand it's 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 the pendulum swing back and like I think it will I think we're very early in this development oh yeah I I think I mean basically what happens is I 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 then 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 so like you get you know if you put a link in your Tweet it will get demoted in terms of its reach right like suback true suback can't the word that can't be said well and and like what is sub what is substack and patreon in a way in a way what they are right is they're they're um Escape hatches back to the open web right um right so like you you put a link to substack and substack 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% whatever they charge you 0% um now substack charges some Fe on top but the point is like it's it flips the economics right on Twitter you get nothing on substack you get 90% or you know patreon you whatever I don't know what the exact take rate on patreon is but but the 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 there's 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 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 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 I think the web one Web Two web 3 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 difference we've been using is it's the web that Google can index it's the web craw ER 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 SQL 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 3 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 push 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 2 style databases but it's as 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 are two things that feedback on each other you know yeah I was going to say AI has Exel 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 a way down because of 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 be a pay wall like I think we're going to see a move towards sort of pay pay walls and Silo isation 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 blockchains 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 right I agree with that and I think what's interesting about it is like many of the things that AI is doing crypto is like the counterforce to it like for example AI makes everything fake crypto is how you can make it real again you know with cryptographic signing yeah deep fake it's the answer for deep fakes it's the answer for counterfeit persons it's the answer for proof of personhood of course it is right it's the only answer and you talk about this towards the end in in chapter five and we'll come to that in a sec and then the another one is what you're just talking about and we we' probably both you know like I may have SE invest in some of the same things um attributability right micro nfts allow artists to uh maybe you know if something is incorporated into a work you can see that you get much more tracking in Providence on on something if if you if you want to go that route and um well it's like how the offline World Works which is like you don't like 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 the layer that can be easily copied by technology is the free is the free layer and the freemium like the the the the paid layer is the scarce layer right I and um by the way video G I have 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 same bigger than Hollywood it flipped Hollywood a while back oh significantly bigger and like like Grand Theft Auto the new want six or whatever it is 5 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 uh they they essentially moved to what like the dominant model now is a is free games with with virtual Goods which are essentially nfts um so you look at games like League of Legends and fortnite these are free games and what they figured out was look you're not you're not g to 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 Milli like news has become a commodity like there's just all like the games the games industry said look the game play 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 in the beginning Nintendo actually um they could shut it down through copyright Nintendo fought it in the beginning when streaming came out in the late 2000s because they're like it's cop you're taking my content and cop it's copyrighted content game streaming game streaming sorry game streaming yeah yeah but then the game industry was very like if you look at other Industries they fight it game industry finally was like hey this is good the the net you know in attention yeah but more attention is good let's monetize something else and so then they said let's lean into this let's let the gaml is going to be commoditized anyways let's make it free and let's monetize community and of course what virtual goods are are status signaling in a 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 dis you know right um yeah I mean it's it's look it's the same behavior we see I mean does that Ferrari down the street actually worth a million dollars or it's probably $100,000 in car and $900,000 in status sign right I mean 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 you know and so you know I think similar stuff will move to the online world 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 it's right and so that actually brings to the title of your 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 spend looking at screen which means most most the rest of your life is going to be in The Matrix right in some sense Vision Pro and Oculus all make that real Chris early Oculus investor as well and so we're living in these you know increasingly Virtual Worlds we're spending a lot of time online we're earning these digital chachis but we're not owning them and so I think most people kind of understand what reading and writing on the Internet is what does owning on the internet mean that that third verb what what exactly does that mean yeah so I think to to go back back to the kind of web one example like you own your domain name 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 Rackspace 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 work that way and you had you know I'm at C Dixon 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 deplatforming right people talk about this of you know so and so was kicked off this network and that's a real issue um but part of my point of my book is there's a lot of very common subtler effects um of not owning your name uh and not owning your digital presence including um you know the fact that at a whim they can change the way ranking works right so like I hey now now substack links are are demoted um and the fact that the 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 um makes money through advertising and has a basically effectively 0% uh Revenue share with the users so you know you go to Instagram you go to Tik Tok you're not going for the Instagram and Tik Tok created content you're going for the users right and those users are outside of these little like kind of you know di Minimus sub one% 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 I have a bunch of Creator friends and they're off trying to do these weird sponsorships and they're selling you know um you know body lotion and doing other kinds of things because they can't get on the internet and one exception being YouTube which which is is pretty generous it's like you know close to 50% of 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 the historical 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 comp competitive thing there were other um there were other I have a little thing about it in the in the footnotes but the um there were some other um Services out there that were that were that were 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 cont like Facebook was just literally profiles right 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 was an and he created the news feed which was just sort of the list of Deltas the diffs right it was a it was a GP of diffs and that freaked by the way for those who don't know that was the most controversial thing in history if the internet is Zuck doing that um 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 that we have a take rate and that was how all these video sites started and you had to have a so it's just kind of a historical Legacy mindset thing that that that they have a take rate that they share but Tik Tok 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 uh a virtual good you can own an nft you can own like some kind of um item like a 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 and that's one of the key things that blockchain enables is a blockchain make can make these strong commitments it says you once you own this you really own it and even though you're using the service you they can't they can't remove it from you right so it's like look 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 and 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 U uh you know numbed into thinking 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 they remove those things all the time music disappears like all these things and like what's your what what commitment do 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 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 three vision is one where you actually have real kind of Rights um 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 of businesses are 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 obviously like with the web and email there were laws govern 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 it I think with other digital um 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 Buy sell send receive 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 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 3 profiles and this is already true 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 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 train service now they do yeah both users and creators so example Tik Tok 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 100 million followers like there was it was driven by like 10 big 10 big kind of influencers on Tik Tok and then Tik Tok is yeah I the demilios and a bunch of others K lame and so on yeah and so it was very power law right as as a lot of things are but then Tik tok's 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 on 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 this is Porter's five forces this is too much supplier power but they're but all the social networks are constantly doing this they're constantly turning the dials they're you know they 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 right I'm 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 that's what I'm saying it's 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 Tik Tok and so there's no yeah I'm not like I'm for a 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 um 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 it's like they're fighting Google and other Web House hosting providers through features and pricing and just all the thing and they still make pro profits and that's great but they don't have like AWS doesn't have lockin like you're hosting there your website there because of network effects right and network effects just get are just such a powerful lockin 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 rough shot 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 like they know you can and then therefore they can't they can't with you too much they're just they're just not going to do it I mean um that's right you know and they know you'll pay some premium for convenience but it's just it's very different to have your Mo you know waren Buffett style Mo be scale and quality and scope and all the kind of traditional Moes Network effects are just a very are just in some ways an OP mode right um 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've they have the own of rewrite own they've got their private Keys locally right that is interesting because um 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 a corporation now gets microeconomic lever Shen 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 could have an algorithm you know go ahead well yeah to 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 I think of a blockchain as a computer and I and I know that's 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 and 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 Pro modern blockchains like ethereum are fully you know semi- tur complete programmable computers it's actually yeah so what you 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 the 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 it historically and I and I go through some of this in the book is you generally have what I call skoric and Native applications and so skoric applications are kind of what are basically taking older existing applications and layering on kind of new functional new web 3 functionality so it's a little bit what you're describing earlier like you take WhatsApp you take messaging but now you kind of reimagine it with once the users and developers and creators can have digital ownership right um there's a second category of and and so like YouTube is a good example kind of go 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 is going to be a thing right and they were brought two approaches to doing video one was take CBS and NFL and all this existing TV content and kind of poured it over to the internet and the other was just put up a website and anyone can upload and it's you know and basically the BET YouTube was made of course YouTube but 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 sort of little bit like I remember the stripe founder said this too when they were raising money initially who are your customers they said they don't exist yet right like who who are your who's going to put video on there they don't exist yet right um 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 skoric video right so I think it's similar with blockchains and by the way I think skoric and Native are both valuable so I'm not I'm not saying one's better there two different turns in the IDE 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 and so both can succeed right and so I think that there will be sort of web three social networks web three games but then they'll also be these crazy new things that just couldn't exist before and and like one example I 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 um get together together and create the next Marvel's the next Harry Potter The Next Star Wars right so today you know you have these really excited fan communities if you go read rdit and things but they're just sort of passive observers and like wouldn't it be cool if Obi-Wan 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 is kind of this silly meaningless coin but now imagine it's 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 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 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 by the way could some of those participants be machines like why not like I my view is if a machine is cont 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 a like if you look at a typical page on Wikipedia like you know on the planet Jupiter or something there'll be some couple of astronomy afficionados who are editing it but then there's like the Kama 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 AIS that come in and say I think that's a you know you should add a little more flourish to the third act or I don't know what they're going to 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 crowdsourcing with with crypto online so storytelling is one there's uh there was something called the um uh it was like the massively math project or something like that where Terren to posted uh an unsolid 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 overflows math thing is a very active and successful site and 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 Elon 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 um 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 Elon is is you know selectively crowdsourcing if you maybe El 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 little small payments and all the kind of stuff I like to call it the missing Primitives like I think of it as yes one of the you know it's it's wonderful that the internet was sort of created in this Bottoms Up um 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 control digital identity yeah reputation systems were missing and so and what happens is if 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 a private good and made you know a b load of money off of that and the same thing going to happen with all like all these system 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 a email does not going to work anymore for detecting if something is fishing listening to an audio you know that is it sounds like your voice that's not going to work anymore right that all of the 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 I think that's look I think the Gap my view is the gap's going to get filled it's 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 that's like kind of one of the key questions right now is 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 fished 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 this kind of stuff what what do you think is uh 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 bolog 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 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 um but at the 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 defi Bitcoin payments I talk about the thing I just described the collaborative storytelling I talk about AI well specific specifically run AI like it's a little bit we were talking about pay walls but you know the 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 M 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 onebox right and 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 with 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 and 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 distri 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 the funny thing both crypto and the meterse were kind of in the trough when you started work on this and now with Vision Pro and Bitcoin ETF just around the time of this I think vse I mean whether you call it metaverse Apple's calling it spatial Computing of course it's real it's like spending all this time online of course it is no no it's 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 Apple's you know Vision Pro um and then there's sort of this other thing which is this gradual immers 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 is pretty credible to think a lot of Internet experiences are 3D threedimensional experiences 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 where 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 a I I talk about it because um Tim Sweeney the founder of Epic and fortnite has a great podcast I I cite the podcast that's in my endnotes 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 H how would we build I 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 going to the way Tech works is like you know Heming way 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 prot calls if we want to see these these new worlds be open or you know be be open systems Allah the web and not closed systems Allah web 2 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 Defi 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 but it's good it's good that you covered uh I mean there's obviously a lot of folks who have I shouldn't say written there's a lot of folks uh 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 what have you kind of kind of a different lens you know awesome all right so book comes out January 30th yeah January 30th yep anything any Easter eggs uh there's the nft thing right the cover the book thing and actually I 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 my 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 um but I'm sure that I'm sure there are things I overlooked or or you know critiques that can be made and I'm looking forward to that you know having that discussion look I think I part of why I wrote a book is I just think all the dunking on Twitter people dunk on me it's at homonym it's appeals to Authority like I I just would like to see I 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 have 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 I think 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 use 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 boms AI can create bioweapons 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 dum and sort of everybody taking a side in 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 right 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 we read about them in the news all the time and now here's the positive side and my view the right policy approach would be then to say how do we design a policy the 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 ing questions of like how do you balance obviously we want AI to progress but we also want you know creators to get paid and that's going to probably play out in the next five to 10 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 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 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 try 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 topics awesome and Chris is actually quite responsive and smart and interesting on Twitter x x sorry xx.com right yeah but hard to switch hard to switch the name yeah I I will definitely get uh and I will recommend read WR 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 or something like that awesome thank thank you bology that Back To Top