RV Classic: Ethereum & the Future of the Internet ft. punk6529

29:27Eventually in the fullness of time, you'll be in the, you know, local barbecue pit masters club and you will get the like barbecue master of the month NFT in your wallet, right? So everyone's coming over the course of the decade. Everyone is going to have many, many NFTs. And I think it's important to note here, the average NFT in your wallet is not going to be a grail for that or whatever. It's going to be something closer to your Chipotle coupon card. Have you ever wanted to trade Bitcoin but haven't dared try? With Plus 500 Futures, you can trade crypto without the hassle of opening a wallet.

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30:59But it doesn't matter. Like these two things mean there will be widespread adoption unless something goes wrong, which we'll talk about in the later section. So thesis one, it's a consumer application. And it's also a way of organizing complex adaptive societies. um that's what really got me interested and i've been very interested in social tokens and nfts for community as the new business model and it creates a wholly different dynamic when you have combined network effects between your consumers or your network of of users and yourself or your business well here is this isn't in my mega thesis but here's here's a framework to thinking about this.

31:44I think of NFTs in the variation you spoke about as two things. First of all, it's a community interest group where the database is publicly readable and readable. What do I mean by that? We don't know or need to know who all the punk's holders are, but there's probably some psychodemographics that apply to them. And those are different psychodemographics that apply to Bordeaux holders, which is different than Azuki holders, right? And that's no different than the world at large, right? If you're in the database of the Catholic Church, you're statistically, not an individual basis, but in aggregate, different than someone that's in the database of the Lutheran Church.

32:30But an individual might be not that, but in aggregate you are. The difference is the PUNKs database is publicly composable. You can not be a PUNK holder, You cannot be Google Labs now, and you can still write an application that airdrops something to a punk or composes a punk or allows you to interact with that community. So first kind of version of this is it's turning community groups and membership groups inside out. They're sitting there in public as opposed to being hidden. And anytime something goes in public and is composable, it becomes a much bigger deal. The other part, though, that comes from the non-fungibility is you can represent much more complex social structures with NFTs than you can with fungible tokens.

33:24Non-fungible tokens arguably are a superset of fungible tokens, not as upset. Because if I made every single NFT the same, it's a fungible token. I think of Doge as an open edition, one piece of art, NFT. Right. The only, right. But with NFTs, you can actually represent, and I have dozens of real life ideas that I'm saying of run organizations, run organizations. Well, because you can get granular, you can represent granular roles in a way you can't with Bitcoin. Absolutely. So I agree completely with this. Let me just stop you one sec, because you've brought something really interesting. And I had not thought about this before, but I see it because of my bloody wallet, and you will see it.

34:20What we've essentially also got, amongst other things, is an open email address book. Yes. So if you think of what we talked about was, you know, the kind of how do you contact your customers? Right now, most of us do it via email, or if not, you might do it via pop-ups on a mobile site. But what we've done is made every single email database public in NFT world, in the future world, which creates a bit of a problem of the excessive amounts of information that get thrown at you via your wallet. Because anybody can drop anything to any like-minded person. And this going to be a marketer's dream for a period of time, and it's going to be a nightmare for the rest of us.

35:04Have you thought about any of that? RAOUL PAL I think it is simply email before effective anti-spam. I think it is going to be first a marketer's dream, then I'm at the leading edge of this, because the amount of scammy airdrops that get pushed to my wallet, so that people think that I'm minting, you know, the slithering snake collection is extraordinary. Like the activity feed, it's every couple of minutes all day long, right? This thing is a temporary problem because in the exact same way as we were able to build and effectively solve spam, this is just a form of spam and eventually systems will be built.

35:58And because they can be built in public, then we'll iterate pretty quickly to be like, this is a scammy collection. I'm just going to hide it from you and your interface. Like the token will be in your wallet, but you're just never going to see it. And then people or collections that are serious or from trusted providers or that you've clicked in your address book that like, you know, a Zuki airdroff to something today. Certainly not what I want to see. Right. some random thing, I'd let someone spam score it, right? And it can be community-based, ultimately, spam scoring. And you can see all the metrics, right?

36:39If people use them and trade them and whatever, you know, this is a pretty good collection. Let me surface it. Maybe you've actually gotten a nice NFT here. Yeah, because if you've got verified stuff, let's assume in that world, but let's assume you're a punks holder and Aku airdrop something, you need a verification that you haven't verified, but whether it's a large group, because it's distributed, we can pretty much solve that quite quickly by allowing the community to decide what is a verifiable thing and what isn't. And then so maybe that works. Yeah, I think it's an immaturity of the tools.

37:12And it's fine, because I mean, all this behavior is emergent. No one thought that this was not an issue for anyone a year and a happen. And so now it's then people figured it out. And so I'm not so worried about that. I mean, you say it's like an open email address, but email is fairly open, right? That's why you get spam. But then we've solved it with filters. So two more big picture theses. One that is not like conceptually important, but it isn't important when we talk about NFTs more specifically, I'm pretty sure NFTs are going to flip in fine art distribution. And one of the stories I told on Twitter, so I lived in Soho in Manhattan for 20 years, and it was always like an early in my life life dream to own an Andy Warhol tomato soup kit.

38:04And so when I was 22 in Manhattan and certainly did not have the money to pay that much for a I'd go to the museum and I'd take dates to the museum and go look at it. Someday one of these will be mine. And then I get older and then at some point I'm like, hmm, I think I have enough money to be able to do this. And I lived a block away from some of the top Warhol dealers on the planet. The process is hilariously bad. You go to them and say, hey, do you have an Andy Warhol tomato soup can? No. Okay. Do you know when you'll have one? Also no. Will you call me when you have one? Maybe. And they say yes, but the guy there at the front desk is writing your name in a post-it.

38:53And I'm like, oh, God, he's never going to call me. That post-it's going to be in the trash by tonight. All right? And so this goes on for years. I'd pop in every couple months. No, do you want a black bean soup? We have a black bean soup. I'm like, I don't want a black bean soup. I want a tomato soup. It's like a life dream that I have one of these things. So this goes on for five years, right? And I think during that period, there might have been one or two that I just missed. Of course, I forgot to call. They called some guy they wanted to sell it to Moore. I don't know. Until finally, I see one in the window.

39:27And I said, oh, okay. I want to buy this one. And then how much is it? Like, it was, I don't know,$140 ,000. Okay. Why is it this price? Because, basically, because we say so. Okay, fine. You know, here's me, like, fairly, you know, naive. How do I know it's an Andy Warhol? Here's his signature. I'm in crypto for years at this point. That doesn't mean anything. That's security here. How do I know that's a signature? Well, we are going to give you this certificate that says we say it's a signature. I'm like, you're printing it out right in front of me. It doesn't mean anything either. This was signed in the 1960s.

40:15You're printing out the certificate right in front of me today. And witnessed by whom? Yeah. You know, witnessed by me. Who also, how do you know it's a signature? Well, we bought it from this guy in Europe, and he had it in his closet for a very long time. As you can see, it's really good quality. I mean, a whole bunch of things were interesting, but not actually why we know that it's Andy Warhol's signature. But, you know, that's how it is. That's how I bought it. And I'm pretty sure I have a certain one of those tomato soup cans, as sure as anyone else who buys from the gallery. But I wouldn't say, like, I bet my life on it, right?

40:53And so, like, okay, interesting process. And then I compare it to when I got a second time around at the punk store and I said, oh, I'm going to buy a punk. And then another punk and another punk and I can't stop. But there, did I have to go to West Broadway and Soho? No. I was, in fact, several thousand miles away from there. In fact, I was locked down in COVID. In fact, I couldn't leave my sofa. but all that I need an internet connection and how do I know it was the right price? well I had the global order book since inception in front of me every sale, every bid, every ask every transfer I can bid anyone I want even if it's not for sale I can see who has them you have full transparency and you're like oh I see this is art distribution's internet moment it's going from being a pre-internet business to a post-internet business and some here's someone in our world's like no no but we have websites where we sell art that's different right this is now natively internet right the whole thing is it's not you have an order management system and then a different unit ships this out to you, right?

42:20I've done that too. I've shipped art across continents. It takes months. It's painful. It costs a surprising amount of money, right? And, you know, eBay did not turn out to be some type of subset of Pennsylvania antique shops. It turned out to be a gigantic superset of Pennsylvania antique shops. It was like the global marketplace for non-standard goods or something, right? And that's what's going to happen here. It's not that, I am not saying fine art galleries are going to go away. I mean, there's antique shops in Pennsylvania today. There's radio stations today, right? But the market opportunity for selling art, and then a bunch of other things which we'll talk about in a second, online, is vastly larger than selling it through a subscale retail shop that on average on a Tuesday afternoon, 11 o 'clock, has zero people in it.

43:18Zero. None. That is actually typically what it looks like. Right? And so, you know, it's better for artists. You know, Damien Hirst did this drop last year. Damien Hirst, of course, a very famous artist. Damien Hirst can sell his art whenever he wants. But he sold 10 ,000 pieces in like five minutes. and even if you have like five galleries working for him at the same time they couldn't sell at that volume at that pace in the real world even if you're damien hurst i i own one of those as well yeah so do i i was like if if it was if you had to go to i don't know london or geneva or miami or new york to buy one would you have gotten out about to buy one i don't think i would have no and look i've tried to buy damien hurst in the past because that was a cultural reference for me, it was a fucking nightmare.

44:07That's what I'm telling you. It's just as simple as that. It's just a nightmare. You don't know the price. The gallery's ripping you off. Everybody's ripping you off. You don't really know what you're getting. And I just didn't bother in the end. I bought signed rock and roll music photographs, Mick Rock stuff, because it was easier to get validated because I could buy it from Mick Rock himself. But other than that, I gave up. Excellent. Yeah, I agree. This is how it is. But the other end of the spectrum is societally more interesting because Damon Hurst is going to be fine in both cases, right?

44:36But imagine you're like the top butterfly photographer of Knoxville, Tennessee. Realistically, in a physical retail system, you can't make a living. It has to be your hobby, right? You have to have some type of other job. How many people in Knoxville are going to buy photographs of butterflies in repeating quantities? Not enough. You're going to do your own website to try and sell them, try and get into one of the big articles. Difficult. Here, though, and I'm not saying it's easy, but you can, Chris Dixon style, find your 50 or 100 true fans that there are probably 100 people in the world who would buy.

45:22one or two butterfly NFTs a year from your style, and you can turn your hobby into your actual profession. This is going to be an absolute boom for everyone who works in the creative professions. This is going to be, you know, the idea of, oh, the creative professions are not well paid is, I think, largely just because we don't have good technology to transport in tangents. Yeah, they don't scale. They just don't scale generally unless you're Damien Hirst and you have a marketing engine. And I was going to come onto this later, but I think it's a point is discoverability is still a problem, right?

46:07I go into OpenSIM, overwhelmed. And then I go into Nifty Gateway, it's even worse. And then I go into Rarible. It just becomes overwhelming. HUGH HENDRY - Huge problem. We're missing that layer, I guess, the Amazon. I hate to use something like that, but the Amazon experience where it will find you and you find it. HUGH HENDRY - We will see vastly different cuts at this. Some of that will be that. Some of that will be much better. Some of them will be skeuomorphic, real-life style visualizations. I throw that again in the bucket of time, money, economic incentives, and the fact that it's extremely valuable to do discoverability well is going to solve this problem.

46:49Yeah, I agree. And so it doesn't mean automatically because usually NFT you're going to make money. It doesn't mean that at all. But you have access as a small artist to the same distribution rails as Damien Hirst has on a first class basis. And also, what's really fascinating to me is not only do we do it because we can think in US terms, but we do it at a global scale. We've got a global clearing price for art. So you can be a young up-and-coming artist in Niger. It's game-changing because you sell on a global basis at a global price, which you don't have an ability to do right now. It is one of the best things about this.

47:35there's a huge community of Indian photographers in the NFT world. And I bought some pieces from them. And I've had this exact thought, what is the chance I would have bought from one of these photographers before? The chance is not one in a zillion. How would I find them? And what, ship it to me and what have you? here you have the you know it's interesting it's about discoverability I don't actually discover anything in OpenSea my discoverability engine is Twitter probably the best place to see NFTs today is Twitter yeah I see you asking and people come back to you and give you stuff I love that right like you just things come into my feed my feed's large obviously and they're like oh that's interesting and then you go in OpenSea and look at them so So I think it is like all democratizing technologies, right?

48:33Good for people who have less access previously, right? And then, you know, people are like, oh, well, it's not fair. They sell their NFTs cheaper. I mean, how can you really say that? I mean, you're going to say people shouldn't have access to the same payment rails as the rest of the world? In some parts of the world, why shouldn't they have access, right? Why shouldn't they have that access? So I think it's going to be, and when I say it's going to flip on it, it's going to take time. I mean, fine art galleries with physical works will be here in 50 years, right? Nothing's going away. But there'll be vastly more growth and potential in this area.

49:09But I think here's where we get to the meat of it. Obviously, the most important thing about NFTs is not that we can put art on them, right? nfts are going to go in my view like this um today we're doing art and collectibles but also some other things like the board api club for me doesn't slot into art or collectibles cleanly it's also like some weird decentralized lifestyle franchise media yeah something like that right great it's i keep thinking about it's like a franchisee mall right like it's the except you're don't go through you don't have to go to mcdonald's university in illinois and like spend six months getting approved to have a mcdonald's franchise if you want to do something cool with a certain ape and what have you you just buy it and then you have the license to commercially exploit it and here's one where there's still a gigantic failure of imagination people like oh Well, sure, some things have happened, right?

50:14Like someone made a microbrew with their Bored Ape, and someone made a band, and someone made a coffee brand. None of these things are big yet. But this is just a complete failure of imagination because obviously, whether it happens with Bored Ape or any other project of this type, obviously a model where you are not rate limited by the number of people you hire in your startup, but you're limited by the world global community, is one of them is going to commercialize vastly better than buying to hire a marketing person and a business development person. How do you scale globally? You can't do that.

50:54So it's just because these projects are early. In three to five years, we will see global brands that were built off NFT collections, probably first in the PFP space. and the basis of acceptable solutions there now, not acceptable solutions, people can do whatever they want, but the basis of solutions that are going to work is either commercial rights to token holders or public domain CC0 in PFP collections. From the moment that Yuga bought the Punks IP and took the Punks to the Bored Ape commercial model because they were the last important holdouts, it's over it is impossible that you can say i want to make a competitive pfp collection and you the holder can't do anything with it right like that's that's done now so the question is just and it's a very interesting question which will do better people who are conagulated for they have their own rights themselves or go all the way to the nouns the oh i won't say the word the MFers and so on, where anyone can do anything.

52:03So that's the basis of competition. So the board names are in that type of Web3-ish type business, sort of, we don't know what to call it yet. I don't think we've seen even a fraction of the models. We'll see, but there'll be a class of things that are like that. The other part of this that's happening quickly is music. I know it's part of the creative arts. Yeah. But music feels like that is a big area that needs solving, and NFTs work perfectly for large parts of it. It's much less developed than the visual arts, but arguably, so let me take you a step back. The visual arts have been on their back foot for decades relative to music, right?

52:51The visual arts haven't been culturally as important as music for decades now. Think about how much day-to-day impact and throw a dart at some random person in the world. How much impact has contemporary art had on them versus music? It's not really been that close in the last seconds. Whereas some of the prior visual arts movements did, I think, have a bigger impact. NFTs in their first stage have brought the visual arts roaring back, right? Like NFTs today are still primarily visual arts. It's primarily a visual field. But there's all types of super interesting things that can happen in music as well.

53:40And I think interesting hybridizations, right, between on-chain and off-chain in music. and it's the whole coming back to making a direct connection with your collectors, fans, community, that it's hard to do it in a nice way through a database. It's just not the same, right? It's not that same. Being a database entry in someone who's sending me an email just does not feel the same as owning a PFP from that person's collection. like the aesthetic experience is completely different right the psychological experience is completely different you feel much better in the second than the first right so but where do we go from here we're going to go to gaming we're probably two to three years away from like the next generation of games i mean there's a lot of stuff you know what's not going to work is that every PFP collection of 10 ,000 NFTs makes their own like half-baked game for those 10 ,000 NFT holders.

54:49None of that's going to work. No, you need interoperability and people who are good at gaming build gaming out. Correct. It's going to take a couple of years because building good games is like making a movie. It takes a big budget. It takes a couple of years. It needs a talented team. It's orders of magnitude more complex than putting out a fee project. So a lot of people are going to get disappointed slash rugged with gaming roadmaps in the short term. But eventually the idea that you can and should own your in-game assets and that the take rate of the gaming company should drop from 100 % to 3 % feels inevitable, right?

55:31And that's coming. I would say from there, you look at all societal intangibles. And here, I'm going to have a scratchy surface of it. I think this is transportation tech for societal intangibles. It's like when people figured out how to create whole classes of financial instruments. And the fact that you can hold and own and transport and compose intangibles means they will become more valuable. I've been talking a lot about this. A lot of people don't really understand what I'm trying to say, but there's$63 trillion of intangibles on the global balance sheets of corporations. That's just corporations, not the intangibles that we all have.

56:13$63 trillion. This turns intangibles into tangibles. That is where the enormous multiplier effect on GDP and wealth comes from. We are on exactly the same page. Those are the ones that are accountable, the intangibles. Correct. There's so many more we don't even know yet. Well, I mean, the United States of America, the Statue of Liberty, the US flag, the land of the free and the home of the brave, the American dream, these are all intangibles. Those intangibles are worth, my guess is individual, that complex of intangibles are worth trillions of dollars to the United States. I've generally found that the intangibles, once you tokenize them, just theoretically speaking and observationally speaking, are worth more than the actual equity of most things.

57:03Yep. Correct. I think that's right. We are taking the story of financial markets is taking things that were not tradable and making them tradable. And this has been that way for centuries. More and more assets you can make markets of. And people are going to hear this and say, oh my god, this is terrible. It's the financialization of the world. The one thing we had left. I disagree completely. The starving artist is a bug, not a feature. Intangible cultural providers in a world where all the basic stuff is going to get automated should be highly paid. Culture is the most valuable thing we have.

57:53And I want to get into this conversation about memes and all of this because culture is it. That is what it is to be human. And as you said, we can allow the robots to take our jobs, but culture is all we have as humans. So it's valuable. I'm well known for saying this. I use memes in my own interpretation, but I think it's the casual way to say the Harari intersubjective myths. The intersubjective myths that these are the, and what are intersubjective things? Things that don't really exist, but we all pretend they exist to organize large groups of people. The United States, human rights, General Motors, none of these things exist.

58:35You can't find General Motors. It's an idea. It's a framework, right? But the idea of General Motors existing allows you to organize a lot of people in a coherent manner. It's how you go from societies of 150 people to millions of people. They are the most important things in the world. Everything is downstream from them, right? Obama was a master meme maker. Donald Trump was a master meme maker. Yes, we can and make America great again. Each of those two things give you access to enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet. It's just some simple words, some simple imagery, repeated many times, and you become the most powerful person on the planet.

59:19Just do it. Three little words, a very simple swoosh. How many tens of billions a year of additional revenue is that worth? I see these estimates of how much the Nike IP is worth, and it's like tens of billions of dollars. That's wrong. It's way wrong. It's that much per year. Correct. Because otherwise, if Nike shoes were unbranded, they wouldn't sell for one-fifth the price. So this is the basis of human society. This is how human society is architected. And now we have - Sorry, that's religion. that's government, that's everything. Everything is a narrative that we tell ourselves in order to accept a societal organization, as you say.

1:00:10We are designed to think in narratives, right? The human brain thinks in narratives, and it's how society organizes itself. And what has happened now is those narratives are leaving the hands of centralized parties, right, and are now accessible on an individual basis, right? They're being communityized. It is the exact same model that you had a bank account in 2013, and then I say, oh, Bitcoin, right, it's a bank account without the bank. It's the same thing, but for narratives, for myths, for memes. So I keep saying, seize the memes of production. And what do you mean by that? Because I don't think me included really understand what you mean.

1:01:04I mean what I just said a second ago. I gave two examples of people who became president, right? And they operated in a party system, right? If you were just as eloquent as Obama but ran as an independent, you probably couldn't become president. If you had a nice logo but you weren't Nike, you probably can't make a competitive company to them. Here, you can actually directly own intangibles on a first-class basis with anyone else. If we agree that – and agree is just a social construction. If we start moving around intangibles on tokens in a permissionless system that everyone can access, that everyone can use the same rails, that Nike doesn't have a distribution advantage.

1:01:52They might have a marketing advantage, so that's different. The marketing advantage and the distribution advantage are different. Damien Hirst might have a marketing advantage to the butterfly photographer in Knoxville, but Damien Hirst does not have a distribution advantage. Previously, he had a distribution advantage. He was in the gallery in the big cities, and the butterfly photographer is not. Now, they're on the same rails, ERC tokens with a variety of marketplaces and discoverability and all. They have a marketing advantage, which is fine. There's always going to be marketing advantages.

1:02:25So now, any person on the planet has access to the same meme transportation technology as the most powerful person on the planet. And generally, the medium is the message, right? Things change when mediums change. There's a land grab of sorts, right? Because the medium is the message, the message changes with the medium, so the message is changing because the medium has changed dramatically. And so there's a period that's not an infinite period where you can set new cultural and societal standards, right? That period is now. In 10 years, it's going to solidify. It's going to ossify. And then, you know, 20 years from now, there'll be something else, right?

1:03:11There's that process always of renewal. But a society with television is different than a society without television. A society with the internet is different than a society without the internet. It's not the same pre-internet society, but with Google and Facebook and Twitter, right? The society itself changes when you have Twitter. Everything about how humans interact changes when you have Facebook. And Match and Tinder and Uber and Airbnb, it becomes a different society. And here, society will change because we now have direct first-class access to memetic rails. It's a huge deal. It's an endlessly big deal.

1:03:56Even I, I feel I see just the faintest outlines of what it's going to be. But what I think it's going to be is actually gigantic, right? And I think there's an opportunity today in this field for people with all types of different skills, including for people with skills which historically might have not been valued in the technology industry. The technology industry has sucked up a huge amount of societal value in the last 20 years because it's been very useful. and it has favored a certain type of person, right? The type of person who can found a Google is not hugely different from the type of person who can found a Twitter, right?

1:04:37Well, here we've made the Rails accessible to everyone. There's a little bit of tech you need to learn, but not that much. And then whatever your skill set is, right? You can actually, whatever your culture, your orientation, the thing you want to get out, You have access to the same rails as everyone else. And it's a very big deal. And so my kind of fourth bucket or what have you here is societal intangibles will start moving around on rails. And everyone says, okay, this is all made up. You guys are just playing a game with yourselves. It's just a social construction. Of course, it's just a social construction.

1:05:22but so is the title deed to your house, right? It's a social construction that if a piece of paper is in a certain office and it has your name on it, you then have the right to put a fence on this piece of land and shoot someone who comes on it, right? But that paper, the land is just as off-chain to that paper as anything else we're doing in NFTs, right? And so the reason that paper means something is a whole agreed system that that paper means something. And what has emerged emergently is that if you own this token from this smart contract, in fact, token 6529, we're all going to agree that you own PONC 6529.

1:06:11It's no different than if we say, hey, you have this title deed for this house. We're all going to agree and then use the whole enforcement mechanism of society to protect your house. It's equally made up. You don't think of it. Houses feel very, very tangible. But the fact that the state will enforce your right to live in your house because your name's on the piece of paper is just as much a social convention that I can say I'm 6529 because this token's in my Ethereum wall. Right? And so now we've found a social convention for moving on the tangibles. Big deal. Deeply unexplored yet. Okay? We've barely scratched the surface.

1:06:50And then I'm going to take one more step because this is where it's the part that's most important to me. And that's quote unquote metaverse. That was my next question, the battleground for the open metaverse. Okay. This, to me, also deeply misunderstood. First of all, everyone, not everyone, a lot of people have the wrong idea of what the metaverse is. The metaverse is not going to be like some goofy second life number two where you're walking out with VR glasses and like Minecraft or something. That's fine. It might be great, but that's not the metaverse. The metaverse is just the internet. It's just the internet with two differences.

1:07:27First of all, the visualization layer is going to get better, as it has been for decades. I can see you now, and 10 years ago, this would have been a conference call, right? I wouldn't have been able to see you. But you're still kind of like two square inches on my screen, and I'm pretty sure you're a full-size man, right? And so in 10 years, you're going to have a pair of sunglasses on. I'm going to have a pair of sunglasses on. There'll be heads-up displays. We'll be in augmented reality on a permanent basis. We'll press a button. You'll shop in front of me. I'll shop in front of you. We'll talk about bored apes.

1:08:02They'll float in front of us. We'll talk about skeuomorphic discoverability. And some type of virtual art gallery will show up in front of us. right it's going to be this blended digital hybrid space that we're in permanently it's all your current screen time but plus all the rest of your waking hours that are not screen time because those glasses are never leaving your head because they're going to be super useful and convenient and arguably it's better even for like your friends and family that you don't have a phone sticking your head you can be looking ahead of you and then if a notification comes it comes So the one is the visualization.

1:08:39The other part, though, goes back to where we started. We now have composable cross-application digital objects. They have left the databases of a bunch of companies. We have digital objects now, but my digital objects now, X, my NFTs, are in the Twitter database. My tweets. On Facebook, there's pictures of me doing things. Oh, look, it's me eating a dumpling. It's in Facebook's database. If I want access to another application, what do I have to do? Get an API key. Make sure I follow the terms of service. Code a custom integration with another application. This is pre-internet type stuff. This is like trying to run the internet with content management.

1:09:28proprietary content management systems. NFT is we've now invented hyperlinking. We've invented HTML. We've invented a common platform that I can take 6529 and put him in a social network or put him in a gallery or put him in a game or put him in a lending platform or put him in any one of the next thousand applications that are going to come. And so this is where all the innovation will happen, right? Like all the innovation is going to happen because you have permissionless innovation, just like you have programmable permissionless money with Bitcoin, right? You now have permissionless innovation in cultural digital objects.

1:10:08So you put those two things together, the metaverse is going to be epically compelling, right? Because this is the part where people say like, oh, no, I'm not going to wear those glasses, right? Just like you're not going to get a smartphone, right? Just like you're not going to use Google and Twitter and Facebook and email. Television. Oh, I'm not going to use Google. Come on, right? Like all this stuff is hugely convenient. It makes you more productive. It fires your dopamine receptors. You're always going to do it, right? So since we're inevitably going to live in this space, then the most important societal discussion that we are not having is since this world is coming, how should it be architected, right?

1:10:52And right now, there are only two choices, the ones we said at the beginning of the conversation. It can be those digital objects and your position in those digital objects can be in a database, which realistically means a company's database, because I don't think the government is going to build the metaverse platforms, right? Or it can be in a blockchain. There is no third thing we've invented. These are your two choices. And so if you think NFTs are not the way, then I ask you, tell me which company should own this. And my view is no company should own this because it is problematic. And it's problematic in the classic Web 1, Web 2 scenarios.

1:11:30But surely one company won't own it, right? Just a multitude of experiences of which we can move our digital identity and digital belongings across them. You can move them across if they're NFTs. You cannot move them across if, well, that's the whole thing. It didn't work without NFTs. It's impossible. Well, but that's the whole battle. Because the whole battle, and it is a battle. We have not won this battle. Facebook does not want this to run in NFTs. They want it to run in meta servers. Unreal, the CEO gave a speech the other day in Asia somewhere. It's a multi-tillion dollar opportunity for my company.

1:12:05He means in his company's database. And we have gone astray on internet architecture. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not sure that these people don't understand the magnitude of what is happening. Having spoken to quite a few very senior people at, let's say, Meta, they get the interoperability. They get it. They're like, we can't stand in the way of this because nobody's going to trust us. I mean, whether it happens or not, that's a different matter. Is that why you have to log into Facebook to use an Oculus? Well, only now. In the future, I'll just use my NFT, my digital identity. Right, but like, I know they're saying those things, right?

1:12:46And I hope you're right, by the way, right? Nothing, I'm not an enemy of Facebook. I would like nothing, Facebook could be a huge force for decentralization if they supported decentralized digital objects natively on first class basis. Yeah, I agree. That so far is blah, blah. What is actually a release product is integrated ecosystem. Yeah. And it's integrated ecosystem from the software platform to the hardware platform. and it's a bet the company integrated ecosystem as of today. When that changes, my view will change. I look at what people ship, not what they tell us, right? And it's, you know, Web1 had the right architecture.

1:13:27Came out of academia, that's why, right? Like they didn't think to monetize. So email is SMTP, which means it's an interoperable standard, which means if you like Gmail, you can use Gmail. If you like Outlook, you can use Outlook. If you don't like any of these things, you can run your own email server. short messaging online turns out to be twitter and that has all types of weird outcomes right one thing that like was i think a wake-up call is a wake-up call for a lot of governments around the world it doesn't matter if you like jack dorsey or don't like jack dorsey it doesn't matter if you like donald trump or don't like this is completely relevant to what i'm about to say It is deeply weird that for some strange reason, Jack Dorsey was one of the most important people who had to have an opinion on if there was a coup happening in the United States.

1:14:17Because Jack Dorsey is a talented tech executive, but he's a random CEO of a random tech company. Why on earth would that be his decision? It's like saying, we need to decide on, I don't know, our policy for national defense, and we're going to ask the CEO of Procter & Gamble. Right. Like we have courts. We have elected representatives. Right. We have police. We have all of these systems of democratic governance. And in no model of democratic governance would you assume that the person who can wipe you off the Internet should be the CEO of one or two random tech companies. Right. And they're all within their rights.

1:14:57The First Amendment does not apply to private companies. The problem isn't that Twitter doesn't want Donald Trump on their servers. It's a perfectly fine decision. They might not want him. That's a business decision. The problem is once you're not on Twitter servers, you're cut off from global short messaging. Whereas once you're Donald Trump, I don't know if he's been knocked off of people's posted emails, but he clearly can send emails because worst case scenario, he can have a server. And the problem is, oh, but I don't like Donald Trump. But the problem is they have to make this decision for 8 billion people on the planet.

1:15:34It is an impossible decision. All right? The Russian foreign ministry has a Twitter account. Are they more or less appropriate to have a Twitter account? I have no idea. It's not like they can. It's impossible to make these decisions correctly, right? The answer, I mean, imagine it the other way. Imagine if we said, no, no, no, we need to have a CEO of email, and that CEO needs to be a public company CEO with all the obligations and risks and shareholder pressures of a CEO, And that CEO has to decide if every single person on the planet has to email. It's obviously ridiculous. And yet that's what short messaging is, and it's what medium messaging is.

1:16:15Medium messaging is Facebook. And so project out now 10 years. This metaverse isn't like Twitter, isn't like Facebook. It's infinity times better. It's photorealistic. It gets all around you. It's augmented. It has all these great features. If you can get kicked out of that space, it's like you're going to be cast into the darkness. You could maybe live with losing your Twitter account. You will not be able to live with losing the nervous. Your productivity is not going to happen. You're not going to be able to work. You're not going to be able to socialize with your friends. Essentially, it's like being put into prison.

1:16:58Correct. It's a digital prison. It's a state level decision by the jurisdictional structure of society, and it can't be decided upon by a corporation. Right. And by a corporation, I keep saying Jack Dorsey, but it's not really Jack Dorsey. No, it's a bunch of teams somewhere in some outsourced data center trying to make these decisions, right? It's wholly inappropriate people to make these decisions, right? What context do they have? Do they have legal training? No, they're just following some checklist. How else can you do it at a scale? But there's also something else. I keep saying the end state is augmented reality.

1:17:31I think it is, right? But how does augmented reality work? Augmented reality works because you have a camera looking into your field of vision, right? So imagine you have a family, you have kids, you have – what do you think to yourself? It would make a lot of sense for some tech company to have God's eye view of everything your son or daughter is seeing for the next 20 years. Even if they told you, no, don't worry, I'll be encrypted. We definitely won't use it inappropriately, right? Would any of those tech executives say, yeah, you know, 6529, I would be happy if you go place a camera on my family's face.

1:18:15Yeah, my wife, me, my kids, you have a camera. I'm sure your privacy policies are fine. It's 6529, and you certainly won't do anything inappropriate with having constant video surveillance of my life. Right. And we remember that Mark Zuckerberg tapes over his his camera on his laptop, if you remember. Correct. And this is going to be 100 times more intrusive. Right. And then the bigger problem is not Mark. It's not Jack. Any system that generates this much power. Will be impossible for it not to fumble the power to the state. If you have global God's eye view of everyone on the planet, on everything they're doing, the NSA is going to show up to your door.

1:19:03And if it's not the NSA, it's someone else. The state will not be able to tolerate a company being vastly more powerful than the state of infrastructure. And so the very weird thing, we know that China is building some type of social credit system of this. other. And it's like, there's all types of presentations of it. And you read things in the media, not exactly right, but broadly it's right. Like broadly the idea that like, oh, look, we weren't too thrilled with what you've been doing recently, back to the second class trade, et cetera, et cetera. And we say, oh, I can't believe the Chinese are doing that.

1:19:39That's for me. We're building the same system. We're just building it by mistake. And we're building it across all dimensions. We talked about the metaverse visualization part, but we are progressively centralizing everywhere. Take a simple example, a taxi ride in New York. 25 years ago, if you wanted to block me from taking a taxi ride in New York, effectively, you have to arrest me. Okay? How are you going to block it? You hail a taxi, you take some cash out of your pocket, take me to 52nd Street, right? Okay. You'd have to arrest me to stop it. How do you stop it? today we're not all the way there but mostly there if you just flip a switch on uber and lyft because uh you don't like me i can't hail a taxi right now there's still some yellow cabs but i noticed the other day that like uber is now going to be also integrating yellow cabs i mean the yellow cabs have their own app another three to four years all taxis are going to be electronically intermediated by like three or four companies and then inevitably someone's going to be socially the undesirable and blah, blah, blah, blah.

1:20:46And, you know, you violate the terms of service. And, yeah, we don't want that type of person in Uber because, you know, we have liability. What if he punches a taxi driver? What if he punches a Uber driver? We don't like him, right? And then you'll be able, with a flip of a switch, to ban someone from taxis in New York, which sure sounds like the types of things that we say, oh, that's very bad happening in China, right? The other dimension of this, CBDCs. CBDCs are very interesting. Should there be national, sovereign currencies, true stable coins available online? Yeah, I think that's interesting.

1:21:21But what's less interesting, the less interesting part is this. If you look at what the BIS says, what the ECB says, it's a little bit more mixed in the US and the Fed. It's a little bit more mixed. There's voices in both directions. But they say, oh, it's great. We'll be able to, I don't know, effectively end crime because we can censor any undesirable transaction. They'll use it as a behavioral economic system. I've been saying this for ages. And that's both good and terrible. And it's even worse than that. Maybe that's good or bad. What will actually happen is some aspiring totalitarian will get a hold of their central bank's node, and his or her political opponents, election time won't be able to buy a tomato.

1:22:08Okay? Because if you think about the top totalitarians of all time, they still couldn't prevent someone many time zones away from their capital from transacting. Right? Hard. It's hard to prevent people from transacting in cash. Right? You have, it's a very intensive process to get every transaction under control. Once you move everyone to a centralized permission CBDC, then you just run machine learning algorithms, you run big data algorithms, and you have what I worry about. And it's interesting because I've been worried about this for years. And all my in real life friends randomly are subjected to these rants of like dinners and stuff.

1:22:53And they start with like, it's weird. we're like setting up, I think it's mostly accidental. It's partially, you know, it's partially the U.S. financial surveillance infrastructure, but it's also partially accidental. We're bit by bit setting up the fall, a global censorable digital money system,

1:23:16a oligopolistic services infrastructure, you know, cars, Airbnbs, et cetera, et cetera. now the digital space in which we're going to live all the time in 10 years, the metaverse, right? And let's say all of these end up in 10, 15 entities, right? You have set something up that if someday a truly bad person ever managed to grab power, it's the biggest tiny pot in human ED HARRISON Yeah, I totally agree. The issue I've got with all of this is we sold ourselves to the devil 15 years ago. Every single thing that we do, we have given to databases controlled by very few people. I mean, people argue this is, oh, you're taking my privacy.

1:24:05You haven't been able to take 10 ,000 pounds or in Europe's case, in some cases, 2 ,000 euros out of a bank account for 10 years now and move it around. So everything is now, obviously, anything the government wants to know, they can know. But even bigger than that, that I have a real problem with this, is I don't know if you've read This Is How They Tell You That The World May End, about cyber hacking, written by the New York Times. It's an extraordinary book, and it's utterly terrifying. Because it's not about, let's just say that democracy works, and power is not seized in Western democracies.

1:24:44that everything just ticks along as it has been in the usual drama that is a democracy. But the fact that this stuff can get hacked is the fact that you can have an entire, entire sovereign state seized by a third party, and there's pretty much nothing you can do about it. It is utterly terrifying. Look, I think the reality is, and every decision on law and order is a tradeoff between private crime and public crime, right? That's why we have constitutional democracies. If we said the state is always right, and then by definition, you don't need civil rights. The state will always, by definition, make the right decision.

1:25:35If you're a bad person, you should be punished. And what's the need for due process? The AML-KYC infrastructure, which I'm not, as a matter of principle, opposed to AML-KYC, but I am opposed to the way it's been architected. It runs through FATF. There's very limited national debate on what the trade-offs are. And there's no due process. You don't have to look far. The fact that most crypto companies can't get a bank account, even though crypto is perfectly legal, is a perfect example of this. The democratic thing to do is to pass a law and say, it's illegal to be a crypto company. It's illegal to be an adult entertainer.

1:26:26It's illegal to have a marijuana shop. And then the people can choose if they agree with what their elected representatives did and want to live in a country where crypto and all different types of everything, they go, fine, it's all right. If they say, no, actually, I don't want that, they can elect different representatives. This will change the laws. Here, we have the laws that say X and a shadow system of bureaucrats that nobody has ever discussed. Nobody elected. Nobody has any transparency in what they're doing. Who have just made up their own set of rules and just doing their own thing.

1:27:03It's bizarre. And it's in very nice terms, risk management and this and that. It kind of avoided your attention that they've seized Russian oligarchs, whatever, by what definition, all of their assets in foreign countries with no due legal process. Look. Slightly terrifying. to me, the funniest one of all, I mean, not funny, but funny, was the Canadian thing, right? Because I've been harassing people about this stuff for a long time, and mostly people think I'm nuts. And, you know, I'm generally otherwise a pleasant and, I think, mild-mannered person. And they're like, oh, there he goes again.

1:27:48And I'd always say, look, what if some aspiring dictator does that? I'm like, uh-huh, uh-huh. Uh-huh. Justin Trudeau? Really? Justin Trudeau? Like, Justin Trudeau hauled out the full, like, terrorism national emergency. We're going to freeze everyone's accounts and starve them out of the square infrastructure for these things? I'm not saying these things aren't annoying. I'm sure they're annoying. I'm not even saying that I suspect I don't have very much in common with the guys that were causing all these issues, right? I suspect if I lived there, I'd find them immensely annoying. But the reality is, if you set the precedent for something that I'm pretty sure was not the type of national emergency that Canada was going to fall, right?

1:28:31I don't think they were going to – Canada has a pretty serious army, right? Canada was not about to fall. If that means you can, without due process, freeze the money of anyone who's even sent them money for a sandwich, that is the model of which the next attack is going to happen. All right. That's a small trial run from the most implausible place of all. Right. I don't think and I don't even think like Justin is planning something crazy. I think he got caught in a tough spot and it was politically expedient to solve it this way instead of like, you know, sending police and having fights in the street and people getting hurt.

1:29:11But the reason he could do it is because the infrastructure is mostly centralized. Today, it's mostly centralized. And we're heading for it to be 100 % centralized. And once it's there, the temptation to use it is high. When even a Justin Trudeau uses this, well, I mean, come on. He's no future totalitarian dictator. He's a fairly normal politician. But he was in a tight spot. The infrastructure was there. He used it. someone else will use it. The lines will erode. And there is, you know, probably I think the most popular treat storm, like you don't actually have any constitutional rights in practice if someone can just freeze your money, right?

1:29:56How do you, oh, I want to exercise my right to free speech. Great. I want to go to D.C. in March. Oh, but I don't have any money, right? Like I can't spend money. I am socially undesirable. Oh, I want to buy a gun. oh, right, money again. Oh, I want to exercise my religion. Oh, right, there's a priest and a church. It's a cheaper way of putting people in prison, because basically you're robbed of all your rights because you can't do anything. Correct. It is a cheap way of depriving all their constitutional rights indirectly. So I get it. I worry some parts of democracy, I kind of think, okay, we've got to draw these battlegrounds anyway.

1:30:37I think democracy itself in this fourth turning moment needs to get redefined in some way that better represents democracy and not an oligopoly or a corporatist world. But okay, so how we've talked about this battle for the metaverse, which is essentially all of this battle. There's two things I want to get from you is, okay, how do we solve that with blockchain with what we're doing? What is required for that to be true? And also, the other thing we've kind of skirted around and haven't talked about is digital identity to make this all unlock. So a couple of things I'd love to hear from you. OK, let's start with the first one.

1:31:16And I think I can give this hyper-complicated answer. Hyper-complicated answers are not viable for anything practical. I think the way we end up in our open metaverse is to get 100 million people using NFTs. yeah oh the reason for that is we have to leverage nfts as opposed to fungible tokens is correct okay correct nfts and i'll tell you why i think that how it's going to play out we said earlier and i think it's unsensible that like dulce gabbana and nike and everyone else and you know high estate universe are going to issue nfts it's an obvious moneymaker for them right So they have a very simple, they can take their, Dolce & Gabbana has valuable intangibles.

1:32:01The Ohio State Buckeyes have valuable intangibles, right? And so now they can directly monetize. So they will. If there's 100 million people using NFTs, they will issue NFTs. And if everyone issues NFTs, then the network effects take over. And seven years from now, there's a billion people using NFTs in its own. There's no attack vector, in other words. If instead, a year from now, there's 2 million people using NFTs, and some web tube company, maybe Facebook, launches a NFTs-like product that looks like NFTs, oh, you own this piece of art, this genre of art, this punk, but it's in a database.

1:32:50and they say, yeah, Ohio State, you can mint to this database. Here's our software development kit, our API, whatever, right? And that gets the lead. Well, Ohio State University is going to do what Ohio State's university imperative is, right? They have students and alums. And if their students and alums want their virtual Buckeye hat on the Facebook platform and not as an ERC-721 token, Ohio State University is going to do that. And because we are maybe one or two years away from a tidal wave of institutions pushing for these things, right, and pushing their own communities towards these things, the path dependence of if 10 years from now are your digital objects behind some company's database or are they on open standard, that path dependence is going to get set in the next six to 18 months.

1:33:48The whole game is going to be done now. And do you not think that, I mean, yes, I agree. And I agree that NFTs are very important because that is culture and some of the really important things that is what brings in the masses. But can cryptocurrencies themselves, because it's been interesting as people go down the learning journey, once they buy something, they kind of learn a bit more about it and then understand this world of decentralization and the ability to own your own assets wherever you are, however you are. Do you not think that applies as well? It depends what scales, I guess, right?

1:34:24I'm a little disappointed in that, to be honest. And my disappointment has to do with a couple of factors. What we have, and it's interesting to tease out why it may be different, it may not be even, why it may be different than NFTs, right? Cryptocurrency has been adopted much more than, faster than I expected, but it's all in centralized platforms. They're like, oh, 30 million people own cryptocurrency. And how many people own that in their own wallet? Tiny numbers. The types of people who anyway were open to this message. We have not had any mass adoption of any decentralization message through fungible tokens.

1:35:06We have had a very interesting financial game, a very interesting technological set of breakthroughs, but we certainly haven't built any robust decentralized infrastructure from it, in my opinion. And it's been eight years. Well, it's been more than eight years, 2009. But if you think that first burst into mainstream media was in 2013, it's been eight years, well, or nine years. It'll be nine years soon. Well, I don't know. Is it just dying to happen and it's not going to happen? I don't think so. I don't – still, most of my friends don't own crypto. But my friends that own crypto all own it on an exchange, I think.

1:35:55Maybe some of the custodians, but mostly on an exchange. I'm kind of – the person I defer to in this is the person I kind of trust in this space. I don't know if you know Ian Rogers. I'm sure you've come across him. Yeah, of course. And I think that's what he's trying to build, is the ability for us to be able to move around with our own wallet outside of the cold storage of Ledger, but a world where we don't leave it on an exchange because it's so easy to put it into a better environment. I don't know. What are your thoughts? And I know he's working on that. And he's one of the world's best UX people.

1:36:31I kind of figure out. We'll get it started. I don't know. I have a different view on it. The reason NFTs might end up not in custodians is because there's more things you do with them. Right? The default thing you do with Bitcoin is nothing. Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. You've got your own wallet because you're using them all the time. Correct. And that was one of my big, I think my most important contribution to the NFT space, why I booted up 6529. I was like, oh, these might work for decentralization, which is going to be very important in the next decade, in a way that practically across hundreds of millions of people, in a way that tokens, fungible tokens have.

1:37:21And I mean, it's clear that they haven't, right? Like, what's the counter evidence that they have? And it's a UX problem, but it's a UX problem more broadly defined. It's fun to play with your NFTs. Yeah. Yeah. It's fun to go mince. Take your, I don't know, cool cat and mint a baby cool cat or whatever you're doing. Or take your NFT and put it in an on-cyber gallery. It's fun. I'm an adult professional, and I'm having fun with it. But it's still fucking terrifying. It's terrifying to move everything around. And I've been involved in this space since 2013. and I'm still terrified of moving stuff around.

1:38:07And are you clicking on the wrong link? Have you got the right address? It's utterly terrifying. That needs to get solved, but I think it will get solved. I think a wallet experience that allows us not to leave things on exchanges, because for the reasons you say, I think you're right, actually. I think NFT is the spearhead from which I also think social tokens, because these are things you're going to use all day, every day. Right. By the way, you remember this in 2013, we were going to use Bitcoin all day every day as well. But the people that just stashed in the ground people won, that's, I mean, okay, fine.

1:38:42The price has gone up. But people don't use Bitcoin. The whole Bitcoin community is like, oh, people are trying to scam you out of your Bitcoins. Don't use them. Well, okay. You go tell a normal person, don't use this, but also go through this super complicated infrastructure to keep it safe. We're going to leave it. I mean, I'm quite technically experienced. I once at some point had to move the 6529 museum NFTs from a treasure to a Gnosis multisigate. Get off the point, I'm like, oh, this is not. I need to step up my security. And I had to move like 1 ,000 NFTs or something. including some of the most like iconic nfts in the world and i spent the whole time terrified that i was going to fumble some type of cultural grail and then i was going to have to go on twitter the next day and shame and be like i know like i'm supposedly sophisticated but i blew it can somebody send me my nse back please my nfts well it's gone forever i've like sent somewhere.jpg into the ether and will never be seen again.

1:39:53Sorry, guys. Literally, when I spent, like, it took me like a week the whole time. That was the whole, I'm like, oh, God, I'm just going to screw up epically, right? So the UX sucks. I have spent quite a bit of time behind the scenes constructively sharing suggestions, let's say, with all the big infrastructure providers in the space. because, and I get, I have some sympathy for them because the space is like 100X in the last year and a half. And so they're like scrambling around just to make sure the lights stay on. But they need to hire every UX person on the planet. And there needs to be a shift like there was with the auto industry.

1:40:35When the auto industry shifted gears from saying accidents are user error to accidents and deaths are our fault. Okay? Every time I see, and this is like every week, someone has accidentally sent their Bored Ape to some scam contract. My takeaway is different than the majority of Twitter is like, oh, there you go, the Bored Ape idiots again, handing over their valuable NFTs, right? No, that should be treated like a Six Sigma quality failure for the industry. Yes. It's obviously knowable by software which contracts are real Bored Apes contracts. It's trivially knowable. You should flag it at the software level.

1:41:24There should be 27 warnings. Don't do this. The last three people who did this were underneath their bed in a puddle of tears afterwards. Are you still sure you want to do this? I mean, that's how it should be. And because if we don't get this right, we will end up on centralized systems because it's not societally acceptable or reasonable that someone makes a fairly innocent mistake in the scheme of things and loses a million dollars. It can't be that way. So the UX has to get much, much better. The industry has to work together. They should set common standards. They should use the same graphics.

1:42:09They should think about, I mean, things that happen. And I'm not blaming anyone because it's just, it's a super challenge. But like MetaMask and Trezor and OpenSea at some point did upgrades at a different time and broke the whole infrastructure between themselves. No one was doing anything wrong, but these things have to interoperate. So there needs to be a significant upgrading and investment of time, energy, UX on safety and usability because it's not ready for mass market. Like mass market's coming and it's not ready for mass market. And so we're just going to have people blowing themselves up.

1:42:44And it's a shame and it's sad. And like a world where the scammers win is not like any type of societal victory. Right. That's a failure state. Of course, people should spend time in education. Right. If I told you I'm giving you keys to my car and, no, you don't have to take driving lessons and you don't have to read the driver's manual and you don't have to pass a driving test, well, you crashed a car. So there needs to be some awareness by people of you should learn the basics, but it's primarily an industry problem to solve, I think. Now, we have another risk factor, though, that it's the most frustrating of all, is that government is working against us, not with us.

1:43:30Theoretically, and it's funny, I think about this primarily in the US and Europe, because quite frankly, China's not going to be on our side on this. I don't think Russia is going to be on our side on this. The people who might think it's important that we have constitutional rights on transactions are going to be the major economies. Okay, well, where does everyone stand? The European Union? They lost Web 2 epically to the Americans. They are digital vassals to the Americans. They have all these conferences on how do we recover our national sovereignty and social networking and search. And they come up with these ideas that, of course, are never going to work.

1:44:19Like France is going to make its own search engine. None of this is going to work, right? And sitting right in front of them for the last decade is the answer. because the most powerful thing the EU could do to reduce the power of the American tech oligopolies is Web3. Yeah, because it beats them oligopolies. Of course. And they have another advantage that they don't have the Howey test. So you don't have this thing that like the second you do something useful for your users, you're violating security laws, right? Like if you give nothing to your users, it's okay. Like, if you give them their fees back, oh, you're violating their rights somehow.

1:45:02Anyway, I mean, this is what it is. Europe doesn't have this. So Europe has this wide open opportunity to catch up, and they're in the process of fumbling. I don't know if you saw the news today. It moved out of committee.

1:45:16They are one step away from banning waltz, right? They're one step away from saying, yes, the future of crypto in Europe is you're going to hold your crypto in a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank and Societage General. Yeah, that's how Web3 is going to happen, right? So, EU's fumbling. The US, okay, definitely has much more infrastructure and a much more developed sector, but there has yet to be a party to just grab this by the horns and run with us. Like, Trump was pretty deeply anti-crypto. There's suspicion of crypto on the democratic side, even though arguably for the same reasons as the EU, it's favorable to them, right?

1:45:58Like it breaks up big corporations, right? But there's suspicion. And so there hasn't been an advocate in, a true advocate for, you know, if we had taken the same attitude in the mid-90s with the internet, the US internet would have not become the powerhouse it became, right? The US internet was given some structural benefits. You know, you don't have to collect sales taxes, or we're going to treat e-signatures as real, or Section 230. It said it needs these to develop, and it turned out to be the greatest productivity machine of the last 50 years. And here, not only we're not getting these types of supportive measures, the whole crypto industry is trying to fight to just keep from going backwards.

1:46:50And that thing that passed the infrastructure bill, and I forget offhand the name, it's section 50, blah, blah, blah, blah. If it's not changed, basically kills DeFi in two years and is going to put a pretty, fairly painful for NFTs too, right? Because since you have to report within 10 days, your counterparty for more than$10 ,000 or three ETH, right? full KYC information, otherwise you're committing a felony. Well, a DeFi is just impossible, right? Because it's a liquidity pool. You don't know who your counterpart is. And so if that stays, DeFi is dead for you as citizens. And you'll be committing felonies after felonies after felonies every time you go to UNISWAR, which is bizarre.

1:47:39I mean, I understand the kind of thought process, but it's pretty overkill, right? And then the other thing on NFTs, there at least you have a single individual counterparty. What it's going to mean that I think is inevitable, the big marketplaces are going to end up KYC. Right. Because obviously, if I'm buying a Borde Bond OpenSea, I'm not going to be able to be like, hey, guy, can you give me your driver's license so I can fill out this form to send it to the treasury to tell them I sent you 80 ETH? OpenSea is going to have to do it. And so for OpenSea is going to have to do it, they're going to have to KYC you.

1:48:20I mean, this is one of the reasons we've just got to solve this digital identity. It's not that complicated to have zero knowledge proofs of our identity behind an anonymous, whether it's an NFT, however we want to do it. So then we can pass effortlessly around the internet. And if the government wants to come and investigate us, there's a blockchain. They can figure it out. And it just stops all of this mess, right? It is, of course, the right answer. Zero knowledge proofs are the right answer to all these things. But I'm in Europe these days, and I met with a bank CEO. And I was whining about how many times a year, primarily organizationally, not in my first life, I have had to send my utility bill and my ID card to everyone on the planet.

1:49:11I feel like half the institutions in Europe know how many kilowatts I spent last month. Yeah, and my assistant does this every week for me because somebody wants my KYC represented. India solved it with India Stack. Now, it's not decentralized. I get it. But they solved it. You could do it with your fingerprint. Right. So I called him, like, look, you need to use zero-knowledge proof for this. What you really need to know is that I live in this city and I'm a citizen of this country. You don't really need to know how much electricity I used last month, right? I might as well have been talking like Mars language.

1:49:48The state of banking infrastructure in Europe and what a zero-knowledge proof is and how they're going to integrate with the banking infrastructure. Leave aside there's not any political interest in doing this, even if there was political interest. You're talking, what, 10, 20 years for that to get integrated across those systems? But the bigger problem is there's no political will for it. If there was political will, of course, the U.S. and Europe have enough technical capacity to do great things. Today, and I don't know how much of this is misunderstanding or how much of it is, I mean, the elephant in the room, which I think needs to be discussed openly and needs to be discussed openly at a political level, and we have an adult discussion of it.

1:50:31I suspect the elephant in the room that they don't say out loud is that they feel for national security purposes, it's better that they have control of the infrastructure, right? I mean, that's what's probably going on behind the scenes. But they expose themselves to the attack vectors. I mean, again, read that book, This Is How They Tell You, The World Will End. All you're doing by centralizing and being protective is making the exact mistake you're trying to stop, which is make yourself vulnerable. I agree with this, obviously. I think countries are more robust if you do not generate a gigantic honeypot, right?

1:51:09Yeah, who'd have thought? Right, like, because that honeypot, we described two different attack factors on the honeypot. You're saying the hacker could do it. I'm saying a politician could do it. In any case, it's generally not a great idea to take all the resources of a country, put it in one specific place and say, here's the key to get everything. You own everything if you unlock this thing, right? And that's the type of discussion of the nature of maybe you have more crime if you have courts and defense lawyers, and maybe sometimes criminals get set free, right, if you let them defend themselves.

1:51:48Maybe sometimes someone who was actually guilty gets away with it because the state was not able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt they committed the crime, right? Of course that happens. But we have decided in the democratic society that the cost of that happening is lower than the cost of saying the state can just, well, I don't like the look of your face, I'm throwing you away, right? Because eventually, in the beginning, you might solve crime and then later will be abused. It's this class of issue. It's a constitutional rights class of issue. It's a due process class of issue. And the level of discussion about it is in no way up to the task of the magnitude of the importance of it.

1:52:30Right? Like, you hear the type of stuff like, oh, it's money laundering. That's not the important point. Of course, there's money laundering in the world. And, of course, it's better that there's less money laundering than more money laundering. But this is an architectural discussion. What is the right balance of various things and the right architecture and the right way to do it effectively? I have not seen any reasonable political debate about this so far. I don't know if you have, but I haven't. No, I've not. I don't think people grasp. Although I must admit, I have heard, bizarrely, the ECP starting to think somewhere in this.

1:53:06They're kind of think tank of people. Yes, there's a bunch of politicians who have their own agendas, but there's actually a bunch of smart people who are trying to tell them the right thing. um so it's there but i don't know if anybody's listening yeah well we have to we have to so i don't know i view everything i think we need to do right and how i'm trying to do my part but my part is the basis of everything i do is like to see how many other people i can mobilize it's not like I can do anything. I mean, I can do something. But the whole idea is to try and mobilize lots and lots of people that everyone does something in the general right direction.

1:53:50So bucket one, get people to use NFTs. It doesn't matter what NFT. It doesn't matter if it's an expensive NFT. I feel the feeling of like having a digital visual asset and moving around and owning in, putting a gallery and some is compelling to people. Even with the nuisance that it is now, Now it's composite. Of course, it's better if we get the UX better. Of course, it's better if we onboard organizations like it sounds like you're going to do with your social tokens and get people to do it. So the more, the better. I am in favor of all NFT collections. I am in favor of all infrastructure providers.

1:54:25I'm in favor of all wallets. The more, the better. Because after all this, we have like, I don't know, a million people using NFTs, which means it's nothing. It's a small trial. It's a small trial. We need to get to several billion. And, you know, the staging point's 100 million. So we've got to onboard. So that's number one. Number two, we have to get these ideas into the air and the ideas that there are actual constitutional due process, important issues at stake here. It's not a bunch. the important issue, while it's important and sad if someone loses their money by losing their board ape, or if someone, I don't know, commits tax fraud or anything, those are normal issues.

1:55:13Those are like normal crime issues that people should deal with as normal crime issues. We have to have the important debate of, in an increasingly digital society, in a society that will be like primarily digital in the 2030s, how should we architect that society? Should it be 10 big corporations in the government? Because I suspect in that world, we become some form of digital serfs. And I don't think, I mean, there might be some people in some government agencies who like that idea. But I don't think this is politically popular with voters. And I think you're right, because what happens, we're in a process of exponential change.

1:55:53and we are trying to use the past as a way to model how we operate in the future. And I'm not, as you say, I'm not really sure anybody's trying to be underhand or even slow. They just don't see the speed at which this is coming towards us and the magnitude of changes that are here. And I just don't think people have. I had a discussion with an MEP in Europe a month ago. But now it's going on and on about my, we have to save the world through JPEGs and the metaverse type of thing. And the MEP is extremely sophisticated about crypto, as far as an MEP is concerned. The general is sophisticated, but for an MEP, off the charts.

1:56:39And the answer was like, oh, I mean, we Europeans aren't interested in that gaming stuff. We're interested in real life, right? Right. And I'm like, oh, oh, gosh, we have so much work to do. Right. Like this is an ally. This is someone who's like believes in our objectives and someone who's like been promoting crypto for many years in Europe. And it's like, oh, it's a Minecraft little thing. Right. That's silly. Like who cares about the silly stuff? Right. Like I remember when Twitter was having the discussion, like I'm now just old enough to see patterns. Remember when Twitter was having the discussion because Fred Wilson was blogging about it, I think.

1:57:21Not Jack. Should it become a protocol or a service? And at the time, it seemed like a normal startup business decision. The decision made was totally sensible. Right? Like it's the safe choice. Right? And Twitter back then was basically where tech grows in San Francisco said, I'm going out to lunch. who cares really if it's protocol or service and you fast forward to today and suddenly like it's the arbitrage of global geopolitics somehow right but now it's too late it's a public company it has shareholders what have you it's very interesting like what could jack even possibly do now nothing right it's too late right that ship has sailed and so we're at that phase now, and this is the part I spend all day and night thinking about, because by the time we get everyone on board to get everyone to your level of sophistication on NFTs and my level of sophistication on NFTs, it's going to be eight years from now, the path dependence story is going to have happened.

1:58:29And so it has to happen now. We need to scale up now. We need to have, and I'm going to say this not to the crypto community, to the NFT community. the nft community which still because it came out of the creative professions sometimes has mixed feelings about business about scale about money or whatever that's right they have to get past that we cannot have an impact if we're just playing if we're just playing a small game among ourselves. Eventually, we'll just be like some niche thing, like the guys who are running their own Bitcoin nodes. It'll be there in the corner in our own world, but the rest of the world will head in the direction.

1:59:19And so everyone in NFT world who's a builder should be trying to think how they get 10 and 50 times bigger than extra threes. Otherwise, I mean, we won't get there. The good thing is, I am seeing people thinking of scale. I thought what Yuga did, now, it's still small, it's still amongst NFT people, but was interesting. And I like the fact that Timberland's building on top of it, creating music. And again, it's not really hit mainstream, but it feels like the shots are being taken. And there are going to be some breakouts. I've been watching what what Socios and Chili's have been trying to do with the football clubs.

2:00:02And there's not been a breakout because of how it's been approached. But there are fires, little fires going on everywhere that could turn into the raging bonfire. And the more of these that get experimented with, and the more people push, it's getting there. But you're right. We don't have long. Look, Yuga is, you know, one has some strife between, I mean, they're like, I don't know, apes, punks, battle, whatever, right? Yuga as a business team is for sure the best performing business team in the space, right? Yeah. They haven't made a wrong move yet. It's impressive. Correct. All right. So I would, my remarks were not addressed at Yuga.

2:00:44They've gone from like zero to a multi-billion dollar business in less than 12 months. That is excellent hyperscaling, right? So they're doing great. the the thing is yuga has a certain aesthetic right and that aesthetic's going to appeal to certain people and they're trying to be untroppable and do a game and what have you and that's fine and that will work but we need many swings at the bat that's right we need many yugas we need many um i'm going to say metaverse but what i mean like is the metaverse is if i I believe the metaverse is everything, which I do, then really what we're calling metaverses are just visualization layers, right?

2:01:26Like it's one way to do a decentralized and one way to do something else. And so I think there is room for, you know, the metaverses have all been land first. And that's a good model. And it's been a very lucrative model. And I think lots of people should try that. And it's like Yuga's going to try that. i think there's room for a different model we're going to try something also six five to nine because a because everyone's trying land-based models that's covered anyway but i'm not a hundred percent convinced that's the right framework i don't know it's what it's it has the feeling of you know how the first tv shows were just radio shows but the camera pointed at the radio Exactly.

2:02:10Physical location is not a thing in the metaverse. Right. You can teleport everywhere. So I don't care if you build a house next to Snoop Dogg. It doesn't matter. Right. I mean, maybe I want a house next to Snoop Dogg. Anyway, but the idea that you start, that the experience starts with a bunch of raw land, and then you have to figure stuff out seems backwards. The experience should start with something you actually might want to do. And then, you know, maybe that then drives value to different coordinates in that space. And so we're going to run a bunch of experiments in that direction. I think that's interesting.

2:02:43I think, you know, we need to keep building bridges to the rest of the world, right? Like one of the things, so people asked me this six months ago because we launched a fund, right? But is that the institutions? I'm like, yeah, it is an institution. It's rich, right? Like rich people are missing the button. They're like, well... Is that contra or towards the ethos? That's right.

2:03:41some TradFi people or some ex-Goldman Sachs people or whatever, and they'll do a fund, and it will start with those values. And so first issue is, well, I'd rather have it run by all pure NFT natives. The whole team there is all these superstar NFT natives, like Bharat and BSY and Han and AC. So culturally, they'll be more in tune. And then what my not very secret plan is, because I tweeted it, I'm hoping in time we solve some of the securities law stuff and there's some way you can tokenize the collection time and then keep it in a decentralized space. So my own collection, the 6529 Museum, I've said I'm never selling it and it's never going in a centralized space.

2:04:30It's my skin in the game. I am now just mansplained for the last half an hour and a half on why decentralization is so important. And if I'm like, cool, let's sell this to Mark Zuckerberg, like, I don't know, it's just embarrassing. Like, it'll be embarrassing, right? So I'm saying this should stay in decentralized spaces. I control it. I can make that decision. And it's going to stay there. And then my not very secret plan, again, I tweeted it, is to get a whole bunch of other institutions. I bought a bunch of NFTs, and unfortunately, I could buy a lot. and then I ran out of money and I got some of my friends to give me some money with the exciting proposition of, I said, oh, what are you going to do with them?

2:05:13We're going to buy NFT. I said, oh, that's great. And then later we're going to sell them for more money. I said, no, no, no, we're not going to do that. I said, oh, oh, we're going to sell all the NFTs together. No, no, we're not going to do that either. Well, what are we going to do with them? Fractionalize the ownership of them. We're just going to stick them into the centralized space. Well, yeah, but where are we going to get our money back? I'm like, don't worry about it. We'll figure that out later.

2:05:36icons into decentralized spaces. It is better that they live in a decentralized space. I don't care which one. We'll figure out there'll be a vast set of experiments across everything from decentralized to you get to 20, 30, 50 that will come on which visualizations work. Eventually, some of them are going to work, and then we'll want to spend time. And so these important cultural objects if it's important for the United States to have the Statue of Liberty right it's important for 6529 community to have a summer.jpg we need these cultural objects they can't all should not all just end up in the hands of like the richest and then okay the model of like my friends giving me money and then I'm telling them I'm not going to bring it back has some limits eventually and so I said so is it okay you've got tolerant friends so far that's all i can say uh oh the the first ones who sent me money uh if actually are permanently on the like the the good list right there they're on the good christmas list for the rest of their lives because literally the proposition was, hey, bro, I need like some ETH.

2:07:00I'm out of money. I've wasted it on the new monkeys. I wasted like eight figures on JPEGs. And the most important thing in my life right now, I'm calling in all my chips in my furniture. We need to buy more JPEGs. Do you understand? Like it's super, super important. We've got to buy more JPEGs. and they're like oh cool like and so what when do you need it like in a month and six months like tomorrow like a couple million bucks in eath by tomorrow would be really great just well is there a company like i'll just send it you see this this address just send your eath here and what are we going to do with it are you going to make money well i don't know i'll set up a company something we're just right now i need to eat because i gotta buy this jpeg because you know last summer i think i got as a collector i broke out of the sea on generative art that's probably my relatively strongest area right and in like august or september i was running around for some like top generative art pieces but as was suzu and a certain very wealthy european right a friend a mutual friend a mutual friend a mutual friend and we're going after the same pieces and i was feeling pretty sorry for myself because i got like billionaires on one side and billionaires on the other side and like sometimes i'd find the peace and i want it and to make you feel better that our mutual friend called me up one day he goes fuck i've got no money left i need to start selling houses.

2:08:38So you're not the only one who ran out. Sometimes they're like, hold on, seller. I'm looking for ETH. And then our mutual friend would just come and body me. And I'm like, oh, OK. All right. So those guys that were there early, I owe them. But it was interesting. So how do you scale this? Because me just putting my money in my friend's money doesn't scale. And then I said, and I've been open with LPs, like, if I don't find a solution to permanently keep you in a decentralized space in 10 years, whatever. We'll sell them. We'll give you your money back, right? But I think I'll find a solution. I've got a decade.

2:09:18I've got a fun life of a decade. I'll find a solution. And then you can unlock large amounts of money. We have to, you can't say, we cannot say as a field, how much is Meta saying they're spending on Metaverse every year? Yeah, I can't remember. Tens of billions. It's just some extraordinary number, right? And so we can't say, oh, yeah, we're going to build our own decentralized metaverse, and we're going to spend like, I don't know,$100 million. The other guy's going to spend$10 billion, but ours is going to be better. And the other guy's starting with like 3 billion daily users, and we're starting with like 200 ,000 daily users.

2:09:53Like none of that's going to work, right? It's not going to work. We have to scale up. We have to do things. We have to like bring all our friends on board, and then bring everyone else on board, and then convince companies and artists and sports teams and universities to issue NFTs, not like some other goofy thing, and then bring capital providers on board, but try and find a solution to keep them on the decentralized side, keep them on the – that it's important to them and maybe their future generations that maybe the world does not become an oligopoly run by 10 firms, right? I don't think that's a good outcome.

2:10:32And I should say this, I have no problem with any of the tech firms. They've done a wonderful job. They're incredible businesses. And what I would highly encourage them, they could change the course of history and solve this in an instant by themselves committing to open standards. Because if they all commit to open standards, then it's game over. And I can, six, five to nine can retire. I mean, I'm having those conversations with people. It's early, but I'm having them because of, you know, and I can't disclose any of this. But by the stuff that I'm doing, I think there is a chance there. There is a crack in the window that I can get a crowbar in and potentially open it.

2:11:16The other one that I've looked at that I thought is maybe the easy way is NFT ticketing. Yes, it's a good one. because everybody understands the idea of having a ticket on your phone. And if all you have to do is make some easy wallet that, you know, if you come to this, you know, concert by whoever it is, you have to download this and do that. Most music fans will do that. They will do a little bit of pain to have the unique experience of owning that NFT. That could be millions. And it can happen pretty quick. So that's just another attack vector for you. Look, we didn't talk about this because I think it's less disruptive, but I'll flag it since you mentioned it.

2:12:01We will also have NFTs representing every other type of off-chain object, real-life object. It's just going to take longer because you need the bridge to off-chain. And so hotel rooms, sports tickets, add time on electronic billboards, sponsorships of stadiums, all of these things are going to become NFTs. And one of the examples I give people that I think is interesting, like let's say you were late in planning your European August vacation, right? and you want for some reason you want to go to the Mediterranean in mid-August or like everyone on the planet wants to go to the Mediterranean. No you never do that that's Americans do that.

2:12:48Right but let's say you did well it's not all the Europeans that's why it's full. Yeah true. Right and and then you start calling hotels and they're like oh well we're sold out you're an idiot you should have called like two months ago. This is actually sold out. Is there not you're wealthy man, is it likely that there's not some elderly couple in Manchester that's booked a hotel room in Barcelona and they paid 300 euros for it? And if you gave them 600 euros for it, they would happily come back in September because they're retired. They don't, but you only have that week off, right? It's a great idea.

2:13:30There's no way to make that trade because all that information, nobody has it. Their reservations and a bunch of reservation systems and booking.com or the hotel reservations are there, there's no practical way that you can ask them. Because these are centralized. So we see it with hotel rooms. Obviously, there's a centralized algorithm. If you made that, as you're saying, a distributed algorithm, then we've got a market clearing mechanism that is decentralized. It's a great idea. Right? Imagine an open seat. It's the whatever, W Barcelona. Is there a W Barcelona? I assume it's probably Barcelona.

2:14:05Yeah, the race, the race. Right. Room 302 these nights. I booked it because I wanted it. But also, I have some reserve price that says like, you know, if someone gave me 700 bucks a night for this thing, I can go somewhere else. I don't want to go to Barcelona. Right? And for 700 bucks, I'll go somewhere else. And suddenly, you will take something from being, it's just the same example as the galleries. Right? The galleries have this completely fragmented, subscale, semi-pointless order book, and then you have a global order book. The hotels have these subscale, fragmented – I don't know how many hotels in the world, but tons.

2:14:47The order book is spread across hundreds of thousands of hotel databases. And you can make it public. And then you say, I can see the global reserve price for a night in Barcelona at any type of hotel, on any type of floor, at any night, all the inventory. And I use hotel rooms as an easy example to visualize. This applies to everything, all of chain assets. Yeah. Yeah. And right now, for example, I'll never forget there was that event in Coachella Valley, which was the desert trip. And it was the Rolling Stones and it was Roger Waters and it was Bob Dillon. It was all of this, everybody together in one place, Paul McCartney.

2:15:34So I went to buy tickets for it because I thought, well, you never see all these people together. And it was the great baby boomer event. I thought I should attend just to see the whole spectacle. So I tried to buy tickets. And on StubHub, you have your eyeballs ripped out. Ticket prices were trading with bid offer spreads of$2 ,000. And what it was basically was the high-frequency market makers in the middle of that taking these massive spreads. And you were not having a full market clearing event because there was basically an oligopoly of who was allowed to make prices. And it was abusive. And that whole system, if it was done in this different way, when you've got liquidity providers, liquidity pools, and AMM, before you know it, you've really created an efficient market.

2:16:30The one I've been looking into is time. So many people ask me for some of my time or you for some of your time. And there are ways that you could tokenize that time. So therefore, the market bids for that time, and you can decide whether you want to release that time. There are inefficient ways of doing that, but there are efficient ways as well, where you can actually clear market time for people. And it actually becomes a way of organizing corporations. So at a corporation, the higher up you are, the more time demands that you have. But also, you can also be somebody who's really in demand because you're doing too many projects at once, and you're good at your job, and you've got all of these people wanting your time.

2:17:09If you're time traded freely within the corporation, you allocate resources effectively, and you prioritize. There's some really interesting stuff around all of this. Well, this is the very interesting saying that even in capitalist economies, most of the activity in corporations happens in a communist system. The edges of the corporation and the edges of the corporation and consumers operate in a capitalist economy, but the internal operations of any large organization have no price signals, none, right? And so, or very, very kind of gross once a year, let's do your performance review. Oh, you try and convince me that you're better than the other person at your level and they'll give you 2 ,000 bucks a year raise or something.

2:17:54There's no markets, right? and this is I have a good friend from the first go around in in crypto Twitter who I'm not going to dox but this is very well known and about a month after I booted up 6529 he DM'd 6529 not moving to me and saying hey I'm really interested in these things you're saying I want to come over for dinner I was laughing. I'm like, let's set up a call. And he's like, wait, it's you? No way. That's incredible. But it's very funny. Within like a few months, all my other account friends followed me, started DMing me. It's interesting, right? Like that's, I hope that was interesting.

2:18:46But anyway, what I started saying is like, NFTs are obviously trivially going to be vastly bigger than fungible tokens, right? They're going to be vastly bigger because, on the one hand, they're the way you can represent arbitrarily the metaverse. And also, they're the way once you have bridges to the on-chain, off-chain world, they can represent all assets in the world. And the world, in general, is non-fungible. The only thing that is fungible in the world are financial instruments. Everything else is non-fungible. And now we have a model to represent the world at large in a digital way, composable ownership, transportation, financialization, all these things.

2:19:27Well, it's trivially the case that they're going to be bigger than fungible tokens. And today, they're like 2 % the market cap of fungible tokens. And I'm like, come on. This is ridiculous. This is the single biggest mispricing in financial markets in the world right now. Okay. So we're going to cut to the chase because you and I can clearly talk for about six hours together. Okay, so everyone gets this now. It's 2 % of the current market, which is, I think, going to go 100x anyway. So this is ridiculous, right? It's a ridiculous opportunity. How does somebody, how does the average person, and don't say, just buy something, because we've all bought something, and most things are worth nothing.

2:20:13What is the single best way? Is it by saying, I'll buy some of the blockchains. I have an answer to this. Go on, then. I have an answer to this. And this is based on watching my friends, crypto civilians, manage their crypto exposure over the last eight years. And the reality is most versions of go buy something, anything, end in disaster. right most i've told so many people since 2013 buy bitcoin right and a lot didn't but even the ones that did somehow managed to lose money on right so the which is incredible right but so my advice on the buying side tends to be very conservative relative to anyone on I'm like, look, you should put an amount.

2:21:08I tell people, if they want fungible tokens, buy the major ones in small quantities over time. Assume your NFTs you're going to buy are going to go to zero. Most NFTs are not going to be a good financial investment. And for someone who's not deeply into the NFT space, buying NFTs as a way to fund your retirement is likely to end in tears also. And for normal people who are not used to the volatility of crypto, the best thing they can do is allocate a small amount of their net worth to it. And allocate it and assume it's gone to zero. And when they look at me shocked, they say, okay, whatever number you had in mind was too much.

2:21:50Just drop the number because otherwise what's going to happen the next time it's 75 % are going to sell. And it's definitely going to nuke 75%. 5%. NFTs in particular feel like, you know, altcoins in 2013, right? Like I spent a year and a half in NFTs. I look at Bitcoin and Ethereum now, they look like a treasury bond. They're so stable, right? And so the best thing people can do is educate themselves because the number of career opportunities in the space are going to be infinity. And whatever level you are in your career. You're junior, you're mid, you're senior, you're an entrepreneur, you're a lawyer, you're accountant, you're a graphic designer.

2:22:36Almost certainly, your career path, your opportunities, your income stream, by orienting to the space, you're going to be better. And along the way, if you start doing things, you will get smarter about the space naturally, and then you'll make better decisions. You can't short circuit the fact that even, I mean, I consider myself quite sophisticated in crypto. And half the time, I wonder if I know what I'm doing, right? Yeah, I've spent 1000s of hours. And so the idea that there's like some type of free lunch that you can tell someone go, there's the only free lunch I would say is probably dollar cost averaging and Bitcoin, Ethereum, something else, and buy NFTs for five.

2:23:23That's probably close to a free lunch, but over long periods of time and with huge drawdowns and whatever. So there's no free lunch of that type, I think. What is, though, a great idea is spend time on it because the single biggest, and this has always been the problem with crypto. It's been the problem for eight years, the problem today. The ideas are there. We're short of people. And so if you are, I don't know, a bookkeeper, but you know how to read Etherscan, your hourly billing rate is going to triple. This is dead right. It's dead right. And so instead of telling - It's scarcity and unlimited demand.

2:24:05Correct. So instead of telling that bookkeeper out of the 5 % of his salary he's saved to go buy some tokens, my advice is learn how to read Etherscair, say, hey, I can do crypto bookkeeping, and your whole salary is going to triple. And then if you want to take some of that, because now you're in the space and buy some things, then it's fine. But yeah, I mean, my view has been that this is the biggest change of global business model we've seen in multiple hundreds of years. If that is the case, exactly as you're saying, just go with the tide. Just educate yourself and suddenly your value, your actual net worth goes up.

2:24:42It's hilarious, but that's as simple as that. You educate yourself in this space, your net worth goes up because your future opportunity set goes up because it's moving exponentially. RAOUL PAL That's exactly right. One of the things that people underestimate is the value of starting part time on the side. okay a lot of people look at it and say well i don't know am i going to leave my secure life go into the space and scary right okay do a little bit spend a few hours on build up supplement your current income at first right spend and then as you get in the space then maybe one day the opportunity will come whether it's whether your life orientation is you want a job or your life orientation is, your entrepreneur will start a business.

2:25:32If you spend time in this rapidly expanding space, eventually you're going to see something that is likely a better expected value for your life than being in an industry that's growing at 5 % a year. I've worked in industries of all types. There's nothing more painful than working in an industry that's slowly shrinking. You worked just as hard as everything else, maybe harder, and you just can't win. It's just this dogfight with your competitors on who can grab the straps. It's just painful. There's nothing fun about it. And so the economy does give us these price signals. And they say, look, we apply your resources, apply your labor over here.

2:26:19I think that's interesting. RAOUL PAL I mean, this was basically the fundamental principle for which I set up Real Vision crypto, the whole thing. Because I've been following this space like you, I felt passionately about it. And I thought people need to understand how big a thing this is. And so I created the rest of Real Vision subscription based. But we did it for free, because it is a massive hack to understand what this is. Because if we got the fastest adoption of any technology in all history, it's growing at 185 % a year, and you get some information, well, you're now a rarity. You're a rare PFP, and we all know how valuable those are.

2:27:01Exactly. Exactly. Listen, my friend, amazing conversation. Thoroughly enjoyed it. I knew I would. And I really appreciate your time. You've spent a lot of time here helping us think all this through. And I think people find it super helpful. Well, thank you for having me. This was a real pleasure. I mean, I feel like we are basically 100 % aligned in how we see the world conceptually. And so it's been fun to talk about it. Hopefully, someone will listen to the discussion and it will help change their life in some positive direction. And then that's the best we can hope for. I appreciate it. And I'm sure we will speak again.

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