The World According to Punk6529, Part II

30:07Yeah. Right? People, it's one of those things like public blockchains are the worst solutions to hold ownership records, except for all the other solutions. Right? People can easily identify why it might be bad. It's volatile. It's this, it's that. People lose their keys. People get hacked. Okay. All these things are true. What's the alternative? Because the alternative, practically speaking, it's an organization. Practically speaking, I don't think anyone believes that we're going to drive a lot of tech innovation out of the government. The government's going to get in the startup business. So it's going to be a company.

30:52Okay. We have companies around. So, okay. I'm willing to have a discussion. I think it's an intellectually honest discussion if someone says, I believe your Fidenza should not be recorded on the Ethereum blockchain. It should be recorded in the art division of Google. They should have a database and they should run an art division. If someone wants to know who owns that Fidenza, we should ask Google or Facebook or Twitter or Sony or Apple or whatever. I've asked this question like 50 times. Nobody ever has an answer. But the alternative answer is that if it doesn't work on a blockchain, it's going to be one of those companies.

31:33And when you ask that question, would you like a credibly pretty neutral platform like Ethereum, Bitcoin, whatever, to store your ownership records? Or some division of some big company that has a hundred other things going on? And forget deep politics. might just decide one day to shut down that division because I'm making enough money for them. Yeah. Right? This happens all the time. I think Amazon Drive is shutting down right now. I saw an email on Amazon. I got an email on Amazon Drive shutting down. People close divisions all the time. Companies go bankrupt all the time. Management changes, strategy changes.

32:12Companies get compromised. Right? Twitter got compromised by many foreign intelligence services. Right? All of this stuff happens, and none of them to me are remotely credible or appropriate to hold important digital goods. None of them. They're embarrassingly inappropriate. And the flip side is, amazingly, to my complete surprise, and I did not realize this until 2020, I'm embarrassed to realize this in 2017, it's solved. NFTs can solve this. RAOUL PAL The one thing we do give them, just as an adjunct, is a bloody ID, which I keep bleating on about that we need to solve. We need to have digital ID on the blockchain in some way, shape, or form.

33:00RAOUL PAL That's going to get solved by zero-knowledge proofs, but God, that's like, I don't know, 10 years away before we can make that happen. But the ID, at least the ID, the database of records of the government. And as much as the government's goofy at some things, it's probably better that your ID is issued by the government as opposed to by Facebook. I'm more confident that at the end of my life, the United States government will exist than Facebook will. Yeah, I'm more concerned about once somebody has your ID, your digital footprint, they own your digital footprint. So Google knows pretty much everything about you.

33:35Use Gmail, they know the content of every single email you've ever sent, what you do on the web, everything you look at. And that's not necessarily secure. and you didn't give it permission to do that. Of course. Well, that's an endless topic on online privacy. I'm not trying to fix that. No. I'm trying to fix the ownership stack. So with all of that philosophical blah, blah, blah, but you knew I was going to stick this in here. Now let's go to what we're actually doing. So every metaverse to date is fully or partially centralized. So everyone claiming they're doing a metaverse. They're not claiming, doing a metaverse.

34:16You say, well, the metaverse internet. A lot of people say, I have a metaverse product, right? Well, there are and will be metaverse products from traditional companies. Minecraft is a form of metaverse, right? League of Legends is a form of metaverse. Twitter is a form of metaverse, right? So I keep saying it's actually the internet, right? Because all of these have metaverse characteristics. All of these are 100 % centralized. I think that's obvious to people. What's interesting is even the crypto ones are partially centralized. The crypto ones are decentralized at the ownership level, but not at the application level.

35:00So when, and I won't name names, but it just applies to literally all. They're all using Unity or Unreal Engine to create the virtual environment. And the reason they're doing it is because it's easy. There's a lot of, if you centralize the world building, it is easy out of the box to build upon decades of game development tools and have a unified world that you can walk around. Right. And so most of what these services are offering is you own your land. You have this NFT. You own your land. And that's truly decentralized. It's on the Ethereum blockchain. But when you log into the world, you're walking through a world that is being rendered from a server somewhere being run by a company.

35:55And then if you look very carefully at the bottom, it says here are the terms of use. And there's 53 different reasons they can say, get off our servers. Right? Right? And if they do, you might have the land, but you can't use it. You can't go in. If you are, I don't know, living in some country and you go in and say politically inconvenient things, I don't even say it's the company's fault, right? Like centralized companies have to respond to nation states. So you go to some country and you say something that that country is not appropriate, And they say, okay, no more Raul giving his inappropriate views in the metaverse.

36:35The company is going to respond to the subpoena, the law enforcement request, whatever, and kick you out. And there is a step forward here, which is if you get kicked out of your Google account, you've kind of lost everything, right? Like if you got kicked out of your metaverse land account, you can probably sell the NFT to someone else and at least recapture some of that value. But if you were thinking about this as a place to build your immersive digital identity, it's not good enough. Because you still have to start over. If you've picked Metaverse X, right, I'm going to build XYZ in this Metaverse.

37:16And that Metaverse, which includes all the NFT-based ones, basically, tiny number of exceptions, but all the major ones like this, you can still be kicked out. And the reason these metaverses do not yet have the exact same types of problems that Twitter has is because as of today, nobody uses them. So it's easy not to have problems when you don't have any customers. Twitter has hundreds of millions of people yelling at each other. These metaverses have nobody yelling at them. So the problems haven't emerged. But if they succeed, all these problems are going to happen. So the idea with OM is to get to something where this is not true.

37:59To get to something where you have no counterparty risk to me, where you can do whatever things you think is appropriate to do, and I can't stop you. I do not want to get letters from a variety of jurisdictions telling me to decide if Raul is doing the right thing or the wrong thing, what have you, any more than I do not want to be in charge of Raul's website. Right? Like, you have some HTML you want to host. Oh, you can, a hoster could tell you to leave. That's different. Someone could decide not to host you. but they can't decide to keep you off the internet, right? And so what does this mean in practice?

38:52And I'm going to get a little bit technical because I think it's interesting.

38:57Home is running on open web standards. The rendering is not using some prebuilt game engine. It is being rendered in your browser. It is being rendered locally. Which means like when you're walking around the 659 Museum District, that's happening on your computer or your phone. What has happened is you downloaded a certain type of file. It's called a GLB. The GLB is the 3D equivalent of the PDF. It's an open source file format that describes how to render three-dimensional spaces. So you've downloaded a certain file. that file is now running on your computer and it's no different than you downloaded that file from you know any other place you download the file once it's on your computer it's on your computer right now things that are going well i believe the quality of the rendering given that we're not touching any game engines given that we're running in the browser is extraordinary yeah i was blown away when i first saw it right extraordinary this is something where you could have said, okay, it's going to suck.

40:14And the only thing that's limiting us is guessing end device computational power. It could get even better, but the better you make it, the more people you knock out on the power of their end user device. So that's going really well. The second part that's going really well, is it the best way to display digital art in these three-dimensional spaces, yes, it's obvious, right? Like some of these like big galleries, it's clearly the display of digital art is going to look like this. One of the things that I sometimes show people is how the MoMA displays its collection online, and it kind of looks like an Amazon page, right?

40:51It's just a list of artwork. Well, clearly that's not going to be how you curate art online, right? Like it's going to be in these types of three-dimensional spaces. So this has been going very well. Now you I say, why do I say it's not fully decentralized yet? Well, today, as we're working very closely with OnCyber on this, and we're completely aligned on where this needs to end up on OM. Today, that file's coming off an OnCyber server. But that's a trivial part for us to fix. Where OM will be in 2023 is the land positioning grid and the link to the file will be on chain. And this is not because I don't love OnCyber.

41:31I love OnCyber. And this is not a bad thing for on-cyber either, but the same thing. On-cyber can't be a single point of failure either. 659 can't be a single point of failure. Nobody should be a single point of failure. I am willing to accept Ethereum as a single point of failure. If Ethereum goes away, sure. But Ethereum going away is much less likely than 659 going away or on-cyber going away. Right. So imagine on chain, it says at this place in the world, download this file. Right. And now that file has the display and show it in your browser. Okay. Here so far, we have not touched a single centralized provider because the file can be sitting on RWEA or IPFS.

42:24So Ethereum, RWEA or IPFS, your local browser, your local computer, you've now rendered a space. This part here, once you're there, this is no counterparty risk. This is censorship resistant. Coming to me and saying, hey, take down Rawls token off Ethereum is not something I can do. No. Right? And this is like, we're going to use NFTs for this, right? And it's just NFTs. There'll be a link in your NFT. It's like the URI. Right? If you haven't, if you've deployed an NFT and you have your URI pointing somewhere to Arweave, okay, that's it. It's in your wallet. You're in charge. And by the way, I'm not saying that you should go do illegal things.

43:13If you go do illegal things, they should come after you. Right? This is not an anti-law enforcement concept. It's an anti-automated censorship concept. It's an anti-rent-seeking concept. Law enforcement, I believe we should have laws, and I believe we should enforce the laws. And I believe if it is the case that Raul Sarr is committing crimes in his metaverse space, I don't know, selling people unregistered securities in the metaverse, I don't know, they can find you. Not Ethereum. I'm not going to call Vitalik and say, hey, can you do something about this? Right? So this is the first step. Now you say, okay, well, for the technical viewers, you're going to say, well, what about gameplay?

43:57What about chat? What about messaging? Those can be done totally decentralized, but there's a big performance hit. Our current thinking is those will be federated. So you can pick your provider. And so, and this becomes like email. Let's say chat. There's a chat box and all. Now, one logical provider could be on cyber, right? I'm chatting and that's just providing chat now. And that's fine if you're talking about, hey, look at these cool fidenzas on cyber is an excellent choice to host your chat. But let's say you're Goldman Sachs and you want to offer securities and have discussions about securities.

44:35And you have to comply with surveillance, obviously, and keep records of everything your people are saying. Well, you probably need a more, quote unquote, enterprise grade, auditable backups, chat thing. That's the requirements you have to fulfill. So in Goldman Sachs' open metaverse space, I want them to be able to say, yeah, we're in fact going to run our own chat server. And we'll archive everything. And compliance will check everything. And we'll see if we told people that, like, don't worry, you can't lose going long subprime mortgages. Right? This is fine. Someone could say to OnCyber, don't host Goldman Sachs and friends.

45:20Okay. That doesn't break the censorship system because so long as Goldman Sachs can pick another chat provider, including ultimately themselves. It's the email model. The email model is not that everyone should host their own email server. It's a nuisance. Most people do not want to host their own email server. The fact that you can exit, though, keeps everyone well-behaved. And so if you think about what the stack will look like, you will have ownership on-chain, spaces in 3D environments, IPFS, R-Weave, those types of locations. But again, people can choose. They can run them on the server if they want, but it's their choice, right?

46:01If they want to run decentralized, they can't. and then a federated model competing providers for higher order service. This, to me, is sufficiently decentralized that I can put the 6-5-9 theory behind it and say, yep, I am comfortable if you go invest time, effort, energy, your brand, developers, etc., to build out your world in this world. You truly own it. It's yours. It's not someone else's. No one can take it away from you. There's no third party who can take it away from you. And this is the whole idea behind crypto, right? Like this is why we're here in the first place. So that's where we want to get to.

46:47Now, what are the things that, so the rendering was nice. The 2023, you'll get this type of tech stack. What have we learned in the interim? I think we've learned two and a half things. One, it's a really great place to display art galleries. So we have... It's funny, right? Because you've got to find the usage cases one at a time. Yeah. We now have, I think, 3 ,000 artists have put their galleries there. I think that's four to five times all the other metaverses combined. There are now hundreds of thousands of pieces of art just in the museum district. And in time, if this continues, is, I don't know, I think there'll be more pieces of art in that district than in major museums, right?

47:35It's funny. It's still very early, and we're hundreds of thousands of pieces. If I had told you, let's go make a physical museum with hundreds of thousands of pieces, that's a billion-dollar project, right? So that works. I've been teaching this class at UNIC, and we've been doing some sessions there, or all the sessions in UM. It's been pretty good. there's some obvious areas for improvement. And so we'll do it again in the spring semester, take what we've learned, build out some spaces. So just to go back one sec, how do we, so you build this open metaverse. How do we get that to scale enough that it becomes the standard?

48:16Because that's the issue, you've got the fight. I'll come to that. I'll come to that. The tooling sucks right now, right like it can't scale the way it does right it's all i'll come to it we and then what's the stuff that hasn't worked which is the stuff that hasn't worked in any of the metaverses do people just go and like hang around there no right and they don't hang around in any of the other metaverses either and i think it's one of these errors that we all have to focus on where you're like, oh my God, this looks so cool. I'm done. But the reality is screen time doesn't come from something looks cool, right?

48:55It looks really cool is like those old flash intros to websites. They look really cool the first couple of times. And then you're like, okay, can you get this out of the way? I want to like, it's annoying. And so if you think where you spend a lot of screen time, it's doing practical things, right? Right. You're tweeting, you're reading emails, you're seeing what people are doing on Facebook, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's practical things. And so I think one of the mistakes all the metaverses have made is you get razzle dazzled by the 3D stuff and not think hard enough about what it is specifically that people might want to do.

49:34And none of them are remotely likely to be successful until this gets solved. Right. All the numbers. And by the way, this is also true of meta. Meta's user numbers are also atrocious at Facebook scale. It's a couple hundred thousand users, right? That's more than OM, but like not much more. OM's monthly numbers are tens of thousands. It's weird. It's only an order of magnitude more than OM, I think. It's weird. Those are atrocious given that you're Facebook. And it's the same thing. It's not obvious which thing you're going to do on the internet that for sure works better in that context. And this is what I'm saying with an example.

50:10Like art galleries work better. They look better in OM than they do on Twitter. They look better in OM than they do on Discord. They look better in OM than they do on Facebook. So, but art galleries aren't something that's going to go 20 times a day to art gallery, right? They'll go a couple times a month, right? So, I think there is still this exercise. Before we get to scaling, we have to solve product market fit. Product market fit, you will know it when people are running in there voluntarily. I've always said no to like contests and prizes and even like, you know, I very deliberately, we haven't sold any land or anything in all many of these ideas.

50:53All that would have turned into a bunch of financial speculation and would have distracted here from the actual problem, which is product market fit, which is why does anyone use this in the first place, right? And as one of these things, it's like early internet journeys of discovery. Which makes me laugh because everyone, therefore, because there's no product market fit yet, everyone assumes it's stupid. It's never going to work. Well, yeah, it's like early internet, right? Like we knew that all these things were going to happen. We just didn't know exactly how. We knew that video was going to come online.

51:26We didn't exactly know it was going to be YouTube, right? This was one of the things that I got wrong in the video era was this. I thought it would be more decentralized online. It turns out, I mean, all video online is basically YouTube and Netflix, and that's it. It's the bulk, the large majority of video online is weird. And you would have thought, like, it wouldn't be like, but that's how it turned out to be. So we have to work on product market fit. And then to the question of scaling, you need a few things for this to scale, which are the following. I'm not willing to put any effort into scaling until it's decentralized, because we're just going to scale people into a centralized solution.

52:05and the further we, and then it might be hard to like switch them. So that's like a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. The other one that is a big problem is the tooling for building the spaces is not easy enough now. It's still very manually intensive. It's still, if you come to me and say, oh, I want to build this cool, whatever. All right, let's get some 3D architects and tell me your specs and send me designs and, oh, let me go back to the designs. And, well, this can't scale, right? And so we're going to need more automation. And by here, we is not um, we is the whole industry, right?

52:53And here, this is the power of open standards. I hope people will build tools that will make GLBs in different ways, automated, template, generative AI-based - RAOUL PAL - Yeah, to display a space for the internet, for the metadata. RAOUL PAL - Yeah, right. And it doesn't have to be one, because if it's an open standard, eventually, there's some kid out there right now who's figuring out how to use a generative adversarial network to make GLBs with an AI. right like it's got to get to the point it's got to get to the point where you can say look i want an office kind of mid-century feel 20 feet by 20 feet um bookshelf dark wood blah blah blah blah law and it starts throwing ideas at you the way mid journey does the way chat gpt does i it's got to be like that right because the current i'm doing it the the current way and the current way is extremely expensive and very annoying yeah right and until or you make standardized spaces which kind of goes away i consider that part of the current way and even making those standard net spaces, expensive and annoying.

54:09And people tend to want some level of customization, right? I think that's powerful. But I do think it will be solved. It might not be solved in the next three months. It'll be solved in the next year or two, right? I mean, if GPT-4 is what people say they're going to be, it's going to be like writing, it's going to be writing whole books. So I'm pretty sure we're going to figure out how to get AIs to make like a nice looking virtual office, right? Like, I mean, and so... I mean, AI is already doing design. So, you can go and say, design me a picture of a car that's like this, this, this will do it.

54:46So, it's there. It just needs to be applied to this. Correct. And there's some... I've spoke with Imad from... Yeah, he's a good friend of mine, old friend of mine. Yeah. So, he thinks it can be done. there are some challenges in that if you see the kind of the visual generatives right like sometimes there'll be whatever a six finger or something doesn't match but these spaces have to follow certain rules about collisions so you don't just like fall out of them right the chair has to look correctly 3d from all angles like it can't be distorted in the back so it's doable it's i think one twist harder than doing a two-dimensional photo, but there's no reason why it's not going to be doable.

55:30And I think we need that. How can I imagine scaling to regular people? It's got to get to the point where you can say, click here, say this, do this, press this button, and now you're live. And it'll be photo quality as well, because MAD's already working on that, and we're seeing extraordinary results from that as well. Yeah. And that's, again, we go back to device performance, right? Like there's no limit to what the quality can be. There's no technical limit. There's only device level limits of, you know, how much do you want people to download on their phones before, you know, their phone starts, you know, complaining.

56:06And so it'll just get better every year as devices get better every year, right? The graphic processing power of the end user device is going to drive that. It's not the creation power. I could make a absurdly detailed space and crash everyone's phones when they get on it. It's like, oh, look, you got to go to the computer with a expensive graphics card, it'll work great, but it won't work great for anyone else. RAOUL PAL, No, although I think the thing that everybody's discovered are the mechanism by which to condense everything down, the compression files are so amazing that MAD's entire file is two gigabytes for almost all words on the internet.

56:43And so I think maybe that compression technology will solve this for visual stuff as well, that you can then do stuff in the browser. So we're working on exactly this topic. One of the reasons we have not launched any other big spaces, we think we've now found a way to make big spaces more efficient. And so we'll find out. And so we're playing around with this. And all of these things though are problems of the type that are completely solvable and will get solved. And the benefit of working on open standards, once we get a little further along, all of these, these are all things that we can solve together.

57:28Right? Like someone is going to, if the format is a GLB and not some proprietary 6.5 to 9 format, right? Well, if Emad solves how to make generative spaces, super. And he can have a business to sell NFTs in those generative spaces, super. And someone else, maybe it's not Emad, maybe he's busy doing that, and someone else will come and do it, and some other kid will adapt it, and will adapt stable diffusion to do it. Except the power here is going to be leveraging open standards, open networks. than that. Because otherwise, if the idea is that OnCyber, which is a small organization, and 6529, which is a small organization, are going to somehow outdevelop extremely large organizations who have deployed tens of thousands of people to the Metaverse platform, it's obviously not going to happen.

58:24It has to be open. It has to be open. It has to be open because anyway, that's the whole point. I have zero – well, this all sounds very hard. I'm like, I understand it's very hard, but I have zero interest in doing the other thing. It's not like I woke up one day and was concerned that there are not going to be enough closed metaverses. Everyone's making a closed metaverse. Every big company is going to make a closed metaverse and some small companies as well. So that's going to happen anyway. I don't need to be the 1 ,523 of those. I'd rather do other things with my life, right? So this is where I think we are.

59:06I think second to third quarter next year, we will see some big things. I hope to be on chain in 2023. I believe it's doable. I'm even more though, I believe in the way we're approaching it now, which is make sure we've figured it out before we put it on chain. And, you know, because we're not taking money from anyone, right? I can say, oh, OK, look, let's try this. This is an experiment. This is this. I was very, you know, I made financing a thousand times harder. The easiest thing in the world was, oh, come in this spring, buy these land tokens, 6529, Metaverse, et cetera. You raise a lot of money.

59:49I said, yeah, I'll raise a lot of money, and then it won't work. No, you'll have lost the soul of it. Well, there'd be people in Discord yelling about their floor price of their mountainside land, right? Like, oh, and don't make the spaces bigger. You got to preserve the value of my token. Like, none of that's what we're going to do, right? And also, people are too schemorphic in all of this, because there's no real reason why buildings need to look like buildings or spaces need to look like the spaces we live in. because they're already just built because of the restrictions of physics or capital but that doesn't happen in the metaverse correct i think there is some it's interesting i think the answer is somewhere in the middle because i've seen we had some designers come up with some completely non-skeuomorphic spaces and they mostly felt like you were like in a bad 1980s music video all right like it's just like any bad 1980s music videos like all these like computer graphics flying around and you're like, okay, I mean, that's cool.

1:00:58But like, could I spend like three hours in this? I don't think so. Right. So I think the part that for me is clear, I do not think you should try and limit land. Like my objections to some of these metaverses, right? They limit land. Why do they limit land? Not because it's a good idea technically, it's to generate value in the tokens. Right. But this is like saying we have the internet and I'm going to limit the number of HTML pages on my website and make them scarce. It's not going to work. Someone else is going to come and say, well, I have more pages on my website. I have more pages on my website.

1:01:37It doesn't cost anything to make land. And so, as we know from economics, things for marginal cost is zero, the price goes to zero. So, land per se should have zero value in the metaverse. Correct. Right. Just like a fresh Twitter account has zero value. A successful Twitter account has plenty of value. A successfully developed community will have plenty of value. And the only reason you might even say, well, even the concept of land is kind of skeuomorphic if you can teleport anywhere. But I think there is value in letting people aggregate near other people. Humans like to do that. the artists all want to be in the museum district why there's a bunch of other artists well i mean that kind of makes sense right like if someone comes to go see one artist and it's oh i'm already here let me see it doesn't work on the internet right i i don't care where your ip address is versus mine you know because i just go of course it works that's not true you don't go to my ip address, you go to www.twitter.com.

1:02:47Yeah, but if I want to go to the OM website versus the Real Vision website, we can amalgamate them also, I guess. Well, the day, how much of web is spent with people not going through a centralized provider to find someone else's website? Zero. Even finding the website, you're going through Google. Yeah, try and guess an IP address. Right. You go through Google, right? finding my guesses, you have not memorized all the websites that you go to, right? I mean, do you remember when we grew up, you remembered the phone numbers of your friends? Mm-hmm. I don't even know my wife's phone number. Yeah, I probably am down to like 10 phone numbers, I remember, right?

1:03:30I used to know all of them. All of them, yeah. Yeah, now we've outsourced that to their phone, and that's fine. And I think discovery always turns out to be an issue on the internet. the shape of the discovery is to be determined on the universe. The kind of simplistic but not very useful answer, well, you can teleport anywhere. Okay, I hear you. But when there's like 27 million spaces, how are you going to know where you want to teleport? And some people are like, oh, there'll be recommendation engines. They're like, oh, you like, bro, like this gallery, this other gallery. He's like, yeah, probably.

1:04:06In a world that only teleporting matters, I'm still works just fine. But I wouldn't build it and just say it's the only thing that's going to matter. Also, how do you get around just thinking this through? Because it's fascinating is, so then AI will say, well, 6529, he loves this kind of art. And he'll just create the galleries for you. of other people's art. I mean, you don't need your own gallery. essentially, everything becomes designed for you by AI. RAOUL PAL I think we have AI is going to be a very big deal. It's going to be a very, very big deal. I think things that I am more fuzzy on than almost anything is what the second and third and fourth order effects are of AI.

1:04:57Because let's take the here. This is very interesting. with chat GPT, the first thing everyone writes on Twitter is, oh my God, students are going to use it to write their papers, right? They're like, oh, we can't do like paper-based assessment. We need to go back to oral assessments or something. You also don't need teachers. I'm going to actually say something different. It's not quite good enough to do this for a lot of stuff. But let's say GPT-6 can answer all student assessments at an undergraduate level in a computer science course, right? Let's say that's, I think that's not far off, right?

1:05:37And it doesn't matter if it's in 2025 or 2029, it's not in 2089, right? I played around enough with ChatGPT that like, you know, sometimes it just goes completely bonkers and tells you nonsense, but sometimes it's right, it's impressive things, right? You can see the edges of the weaknesses in ChatGPT, but probably they're solvable. So let's assume they're solved. And let's assume it can answer all the questions on all the papers and problem sets of an undergraduate degree in computer science. Okay. First thing, oh, we have to change assessments. Oh, do we need to teach? The real question to me is, if that's the case, if a machine can do all that, should we spend four years training a human to do that?

1:06:22right because if after four years of quite expensive education training a human for four years at a university level education costs i don't know minimum 10 in you know developed world minimum ten thousand dollars a year right it's a lot of money and four years of someone's time was even more money right big opportunity costs like someone spending four years doing that and if after that person does that and demonstrates mastery of all these things and AI can just do those things anyway at a marginal cost of zero. Instantly, better. Well, then maybe what a computer science degree is is wrong, right?

1:07:00And the problem, once you start tugging on this thread and start thinking about jobs and degrees, it's not clear where it ends, right? Have you read Scary Smart yet? Mo Gordat's book? No. Good read. You know, it's like Noah Harari's book, but it's simpler, but just really interesting conceptually. You'll enjoy it. Interesting. Scary, smart. OK, I'll read it before the next time I show up here. I don't know, right? Like, I think it's going to be very disruptive in good and bad ways to white collar work. For sure, it's going to hit white collar work a decade before it's doing your plumbing, right?

1:07:38This is the revenge of, you know, all the white collar folks like us did really nicely in the kind of like, oh, manufacturing moved offshore. Oh, we get cheaper goods. Oh, world financialized. People like us make out well in that world. Oh, the poor factory workers, well, they should learn to code, right? All this stuff. And reinforces white collar workers tend to anyway think of themselves as superior, right? And so it feeds into all of their like ego and say, oh, well, this is just how the capitalist society is. and you've got to have valuable skills. And I'm sorry, Mr. Person who works with your hands, you're not as smart as a finance person or whatever.

1:08:22People don't say that a lot, but it's how they act. Well, this is going to be the revenge of that, because it's going to be a lot easier to replace for the next decade, white collar workers with AI than people who work with their hands. Maybe we should all become plumbers. I don't know. RAOUL PAL Interestingly, Amazon has one and a half million human employees. It now has half a million robot employees. Those robots are at least four times as productive as humans, not only because they work 24 hours a day, 365, but they're better at the jobs. It's happening already, even in all of those jobs. So it's happening everywhere.

1:08:59It's extraordinary. Yeah. But I think by the time robots eventually will be able to work in unstructured environments, right? Like on the Amazon warehouse. It's structured. It's structured. Yeah. Right. The question, you know, when can a robot, it's so stupid. My toilet is leaking. When can you call a robot to fix that? Yeah. You need self-driving cars, right? So it's like come to your house. It needs to be able to work in an arbitrary environment. It needs to have human level comprehension of language. It needs to expect weird stuff like, you know, mess and what have you, work with a variety of physical goods.

1:09:41This is quite a bit harder than Shack GPT writing you an essay on the, I don't know, Hundred Year War, right? And so will that also happen? Yeah, I think it will also happen. But it's probably 10 to 15 years behind the white collar stuff. So it's going to be an interesting world. world. Now, look, I go back and forth because historically, every single labor-saving device has led to higher human welfare and new jobs emerged. And we're certainly in no risk right now of running out of jobs. If you look, the issue that's happening right now, people can't find workers, they can't find jobs. And also, population shrinking.

1:10:23So my guess is this is a productivity increase. So GDP per capita probably goes up. RAOUL PAL, Yep. Yep, yep, yep. That's my view of it. So, I don't know how we got on AI, but I think the intersection of AI is going to be very interesting. Generally, I think AI is going to be very interesting. It probably actually even sucks some attention away from crypto for better or worse, probably for better. I think it will take some of the tech tourists over to AI. RAOUL PAL But I think you're looking at the same way as I do is these things are all interrelated. RAOUL PAL Yes. RAOUL PAL That's what I'm thinking.

1:11:00When EmEd came to me and said, this is what I've done, and it's open source, I'm like, huh, okay, this is all in the same vein. ED HARRISON The ones who are doing open source AI are the same way. The other people are doing closed source AI, it's the same concept. I want to build things for people, the EmEd or the EmEds of the future can build. One of the benefits, if something's working on a blockchain, right, and open standards and decentralized storage, AIs can interact on a first class basis with humans. And so given this, we are going to see, I mean, this thing we described that makes your virtual space.

1:11:40Okay, that's an AI. And then here's interesting, maybe it's not just a tool, maybe someone will then program that AI to just go build spaces directly, right? And there'll be an avatar, right? An avatar with the chatting capacity of GPT-7 or something. It's going to be indistinguishable from the large majority of humans. And so, one of the things I've always thought about this world, which is again why it has to be open and programmable, composable, what have you. we will be moving through this world with a large set of non-human characters for sure right and good and bad they'll be good and bad outcomes for this right people will use them for spamming right but also good ones like here's a very simple one you come into the 659 Museum District, it would be really great that someone pops up in a non-annoying manner, right?

1:12:48Once again, sort of, like, hey, want me to turn you around? What do you want to see? Oh, I want to see a turn of art. Let's walk over here. Well, what's this piece? It's this. It's that. It's the next thing. It was made by the mid-returnia. Here's when he made it. Here's how he thinks about this piece. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can't scale that with humans. I can't have a fine arts specialist walk every single visitor for a private tour through the galleries and on. But with AI, will we get there this decade? Yeah. RAOUL PAL So the other thing that I got to with AI and blockchain and that nexus is AI can scale video, written, audio content, millions of pieces, almost instantaneously, almost already.

1:13:35So in the next six months, that's completely solvable. So it becomes a huge problem to know what is authenticated and what's not. Yeah. Nobody's going to know. Yeah. So it has to be solved on the blockchain. It has to have some sort of place on the blockchain, which is basically the same kind of thing that you're talking about, is in the end, there needs to be some digital record of what is what. And it's going to become at societal level of importance, I think, by the next election. I think we've got two years to solve some of this, or we're going to break things. RAOUL PAL Yeah, I think, obviously, AI is going to flood social media as a starting point with fake humans, right?

1:14:16What's already happening will just get really good. Fortunately, crypto is there to solve this, right? Like, you can have, like, oh, how do you know what's, it's funny watching the non-crypto world kind of struggle in the dark outside of obvious solutions. Like, how do we know that anything digital is scarce and real? Oh, we have a way to know that. Strange. Right? We have a way to know that. Now, having said that, will there be persistent identities that are AI? I think so. Right? I think so. But it's interesting, like, if you say, hey, you've got to sign this message with an Ethereum account, right?

1:15:02Well, someone can score that Ethereum account, both for humanness or just general credibility. Maybe the part that doesn't matter is if it's human. Maybe the part that doesn't matter, let's say there is an account pretending to be an NFT art expert. But that account has that Ethereum address, has a 10-year history, has bought a bunch of great pieces, has mints of great pieces, has engaged in discussions with people, has an active Twitter presence, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it turns out that it's an AI. Let's say it turns out I'm an AI. If it turns out that I'm an AI, it's okay. That's fine, yeah.

1:15:42It's fine. That AI is contributing in a useful and predictable way. And there's been some proof of work. They've bought art. They've been to art. They've done stuff. What people worry about is that I'll use that AI and make 17 ,000 Twitter accounts. And now it looks like there's 17 ,000 people who share these beliefs, but there's really only one, right? Well, the solution to that is, okay, make them have an Ethereum address. And if all those Ethereum addresses were created yesterday and there's no activity and they haven't done anything, you should devalue them in your reputation score. Yeah. Right?

1:16:21I mean, I don't think we escape a world, or it's even necessarily desirable, that eponymous humans, synonymous humans, anonymous humans, and all the same for AIs, should all be able to interact. But they should all be judged by the same standards. If those standards, if I said, oh, I'm super credible on NFTs, but I had never bought an NFT. Yeah, OK. I mean, maybe I am, maybe I'm not, but probably I'm not. If an AI says, I'm super credible on NFTs, I bought all these NFTs, and you can look at them, and they were good ones, and they actually bought them. And you can see that, there's no question that they bought them.

1:16:57Yeah, OK, great. I mean, do you care really if it's a human, if it's an AI, or if it's a hybrid? RAOUL PAL No, what I would care is if the 6529 AI was sending 50 different thousand messages to different people with different messaging. And again, that's going to be provable on chain. RAOUL PAL That's provable on chain. RAOUL PAL Yeah, then you get around all the bullshit that we've got to deal with. RAOUL PAL That's exactly right. If you force people to sign from something adverse, you can see if I showed up in 18 ,000 Twitter accounts. So great, what's the Ethereum address there? Oh, wait, there's no NFTs here.

1:17:37There's no transaction history. There's no anything. You haven't minted anything. You haven't contributed to Discord. You're just a spam account. Everyone is going to have to start. Every new account in social media, every new address online is going to start with the presumption that it's spam, right? It's going to start with a reputation score of zero. Zero, that's right. And build up. And once it builds up, I mean, okay, if you're doing a good job and you use chat GPT to help craft some of your work, is that conceptually different than using a calculator or Excel? I don't do any of my math by hand.

1:18:16I use a computer to help me do my math. That's Excel. So I'll help it do my writing. It's okay. You have to. And okay, in time, this is where I think ultimately you do need proof of work. I put this in air quotes, but proof of work. As an NFT collector, proof of work is the NFTs you've collected. It's why I do all of those publicly. You can go to 659Museum and see. Good ones, bad ones. I don't buy them in anonymous Ethereum addresses. I don't. And people say, oh, aren't you worried? People might front-friend you or whatever. I say, oh, whatever. It doesn't matter. The broader theory is I want to show what I'm doing and what I value and what I think is important.

1:19:07And people can judge that. Right? I don't want to do it hidden. And this is an important proof of work in NFCR. So, otherwise, it was just some totally anonymous accounts that, oh, I know a lot about NFT. And I'm like, do you? Right? You can judge, you can see both the wins and the losses. RAOUL PAL So, how does the Unix open metaverse, and also the memes that you've produced, how does that fit into this bigger picture? Because I know it's all part of a bigger plan. RAOUL PAL Right. Let's talk about the memes first, because that one's easier and funnier, and then we'll go to the Unix stuff. The theory behind the memes is the following.

1:19:51If someone is running for president, let's say there are two candidates running for president, and one candidate says, yes, we can. And the other candidate says, here is my three-hour podcast about GLB files and my 672-page-long position paper on internet protocols. We know who will become president, and it's not the guy with the podcast. No, it's the guy with the meme. It's the guy with the meme. And memes are all around us, right? They're these intersubjective myths. They're brands. They're slogans. They're national flags. They are the visual-slash-cognitive shortcut where humans coalesce around certain ideas, right?

1:20:50You buy Nikes because you see that swoosh and it makes you feel good, right? You buy Burberry because you see that pattern makes you feel good. You wave the American flag and sing the national anthem before the baseball game. All of these things, it's how humans bind into larger groups. Right? Arguably, one of the failures of crypto, even though it has a fairly appealing message in some ways, has been that it's been too boring and technical in how it speaks to people. And to the degree that it's been good at memes, it's really only been good in a very certain kind of narrow set of memes. I think the Bitcoin hodler meme is basically the only one that was truly a good meme, but But it's devolved into this like various civic, okay, we will just eat steak and sell our chairs and stack sats and like everyone, everything else in a scam, in life is a scam except stacking Bitcoin.

1:21:59I tell you, that's not going to be a popular position for popularizing. That's not a scalable mean. No. Well, that's the type of meme that works super well with a small subset of, like, honestly, left-brained guys, right? Like, these people would have been monks 500 years ago. Right? I mean, imagine looking at America and saying, the way I'm going to get into people's minds is tell them they can't spend money on anything. They just need to save all their money for the future. I mean, okay. So that's a good meme for that type of person. And it was probably the right meme for Bitcoin to get off the ground.

1:22:47Yeah. Right? Because without a hodling type meme, it never generates any value in the first place. If it doesn't generate any value in the first place, it's just a scam. Yeah. Right? But here, and what drew me to NFTs in the first place, was I felt NFTs were an application of cryptocurrency that actually could be appealing to 80 % of the population, not 3 % of the population. Technology becomes consumer ready when you stop talking about the technology, and it has to do with the application of the technology. So the Ethereum consensus algorithm used to be proof of work, and now it's proof of stake.

1:23:33But buying a hoodie punk is something different. It's a layer above that. Right? Like, oh, the hoodie's cool. Look at this one. It's cool. It's cooler than the stringy-haired punk. Right? Sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud. But I literally paid hundreds of thousands of dollars more than my cartoon punk has a hoodie instead of stringy hair. And I'm otherwise a fairly financially responsible and boring person. And that's very powerful, right? The fact that punk 6529 was able to extract hundreds of thousands of dollars or more than a different punk with worse looking head coverage, that's pretty powerful, right?

1:24:17That's how humans work. And so, the idea behind the memes is to complement, though I think what's actually going to happen is they're going to swamp the effectiveness of all my nerd style tweeting. So, my nerd style tweeting is saying, this is why decentralization matters, right? This is why NFT... That itself is only scalable to a certain number of people. the number of people like me i'm you know i'll read all your tweets all day but to 90 of my friends they're like i don't get any of this and why do i want to like read 89 tweet storms of 60 tweets each and all about creative commons licenses like this again it's nerd stuff yeah i think if you actually put it in like a4 format it's like 600 pages or something, right?

1:25:15Like it's a lot, just those threads, not the other chaos of my Twitter account. So since obviously we know that yes, we can, or make America great again, is a more effective way to reach large numbers of people than here's my policy paper. And since my tweets are basically more like a policy paper, right? I mean, here are the other two ways I'm trying to teach people about these things, Like, tweet, and you have to take a university-level course. I mean, imagine thinking you're running for president, right? Like you said, imagine Donald Trump saying, like, look, if you want to vote for me, you first have to take a 12-week course and, like, study really hard and pass tests and whatever.

1:26:01He wouldn't get elected to, like, mayor of a tiny town. RAOUL PAL And your tweets, you have to understand economics, philosophy, psychology, technology, sociology, just to navigate them. ED HARRISON Correct. So the meme cards are a way to spread these messages, hopefully more scalably, more effectively. And I'm really happy with how things are going. I'll tell you the parts that I'm happy about. The first is if you think about before these started, all the things that could go wrong. First of all, like, can you make something that's artistically interesting and on message? I had no doubt I could like call up some artists and they make some nice art.

1:26:46I was with you all day long, right? And if I told them, hey, do you want to like co-mint an NFT with me and we'll sell it to people? I'm sure they would have all said, many of them would have said yes. Here we're like calling up artists and saying, and make lovely art that you make. But like, it's somehow, and the somehow is up to the artist's interpretation, right? That's why they're artists, and that's why they're interesting, right? How they interpret the themes is up to them. But here are the themes. Pick one of these themes and make something in your own cool artistic style that somehow talks about the themes.

1:27:23And, you know, the themes don't have to be, some of them are extremely literal. And some of them are quite abstract and some are in the middle. But there's always a theme somewhere in there. And that's fine, right? A lot of art is, quote, unquote, political in nature, right? A lot of art is passing some message. Even art that's pure art for art's sake, you know, impressionism had a political message embedded in it, right? Like everything has a political message. So here, the political message or the social message, probably social message more accurate than a political message, is that decentralization and self-sovereignty matters in the digital world.

1:28:04That's the message we're trying to get out. But we're trying to get out with things like the Nakamoto Pepe freedom to transact, right? Like that's the way that you see it. And I think it works. How do you still, because I still, and I get what you're doing, and I applaud it, and I think it's working. But how do you get it to people outside of our universe that know what the fuck a Pepe is? So the way the meme cards work, right? So we drop a card a couple times, two, three times a week. But the part that I'm counting on a lot is the fact that there's CC0. And this is one of those things that snowballs.

1:28:46Like in the beginning, week one, there was CC zero, no one had done anything. And so the metric that I'm always looking at is what are people doing with them if people are doing things with them, right? And it's logical that before anyone, it's going to be like one of those like 99, one rules that are like 90 % of people are consumers and 9 % of contributors are wondering what the other 1 % is. But it's like that thing, right? So first of all, before you can even expect that there's people building with them, there's got to be a sufficient pool of people in the first place. Yeah, today we have 5 ,500 holders.

1:29:27And if that's good or bad, it depends on your, you know, it's probably in the top, whatever, 25 or 50 NFT projects, the number of people holding it, right? It's smaller than Yuga, but bigger than MFers or something, right? Like, it's in that range. Is that a lot by world standards? No, it's tiny, but it's okay. It's a start by NFT standards. And am I seeing people doing things? Yeah, there's a bunch of the, they call themselves the re-memers. And so they make their own NFTs. Okay, that's interesting. Now, someone said they're going to make the dollar meme store and resell them all for a dollar and do it on multiple chains and try and get 100 ,000 people to buy a meme for a dollar.

1:30:09It's great. It's exactly what we want. But then that's 100 ,000 people, not 5 ,000 people. Someone said they're making a marketplace. This guy from I think China is making ceramics with them. So like coffee mugs. Yeah, it's still bad. There was a coffee mug. Coffee mug. A few days ago, yeah. Yeah. And so I am leaning on the idea that over one year and two years and three years and five years, if we can keep growing the base number of holders, and if we can then some percentage of them then go do things that bring other people in. And ultimately, we need to get them to be working off NFT Twitter.

1:30:56Now - Here's just a quick idea for you here. I was chatting to Peter Diamandis and his ideas about what he thought about space and how to drive it, and it was the XPRIZE. If you gave a prize annually for the best use of the memes, and it was a meaningful, significant prize, you would explode the amount of innovation that's happening with it. Oh, that's super interesting. Let me think about how I think maybe six months from now we'll be mature enough to do it. Because let's say I had done that in like month one. There still wouldn't be. No. You need a critical mass and you need people doing some things first.

1:31:41Like so far, the two things that I've seen that have been physical world, like Vivian Tam did a meme card and put it in New York Fashion Week. And then I think she got like the Treasury Secretary of Hong Kong to put on a open metaverse shirt or sweater, right? Right. And I think one big crypto firm, someone showed me their office. They have Nakamoto printed on the wall. Like these are baby steps, right? But it's the right direction. And so, I don't know, is the rate of growth fast enough on these? I don't know. Could it be faster? It can always be faster. But the hope can only be that network effects and people's values-based or economic Like incentive-based, right?

1:32:24Like I'm a big believer in that you've got to eventually align economics. So what do I mean by that? If someone says, take the guy in China. I know who he is. He doesn't know who I am. He sells ceramics for a living, I understand. He's like, oh, maybe I'll sell some coffee mugs by putting this thing on there, right? We have no business relationship with him. I don't want to have a business relationship with him. Like, that's interesting. Where would I have found that guy otherwise, right? And this is the power of CC0. He didn't have to ask my permission to make the coffee mug. He's looking around and saying, oh, look, there's a customer base of 5 ,000 people today.

1:33:02Is that a lot? No, probably not. How many coffee mugs are they going to buy? I don't know, 50, 100. But they're pretty motivated, 5 ,000. But if that 5 ,000 becomes two years from now, 50 ,000 meme card holders. And in the derivatives, the re-memes, there's another 500 ,000. Could you sell a reasonable amount of coffee mugs just to stick with this example? Yeah, probably. So that half a million people. And if it becomes this type of network brand model where people have economic incentive to build, because all the things where you say like, hey, people should just go do this stuff. I don't think that ever works, right?

1:33:43I also don't love the down model of like paying people to do it. Because I think you fake yourself out. RAOUL PAL, Yeah. RAOUL PAL, And you've got the wrong incentives. They're getting money to do something. What you actually want to do is reward the end game, I think. That's what I'm thinking about with the incentive system. RAOUL PAL, Yeah. That, and I actually think it's the equivalent. RAOUL PAL, You don't get a medal for running the race. You get a medal for winning the race. RAOUL PAL, I view it from a product market perspective. But I think it's deceiving myself on product market fit. If the point of the memes is to get people to spread these messages in the world so you ultimately drive social and political change, right?

1:34:27It is for sure the case, 100 % the case, that I cannot pay for the tens of billions of dollars of labor this would require to drive social change around the world, right? Of course, I could go say, oh, look, I'm going to spend$100 ,000 and get someone to do something somewhere. And then I'll know simply that if I spend money on a service, someone will provide it. But I know that already. Like, that doesn't, right? The interesting thing is, do the memes create a set of values and interests and people's self-interest that someone's going to say, I'm going to make these coffee mugs, not because 6-5-9 contracted me with them, but I want to do them.

1:35:09It's cool. It's interesting. I have a business opportunity, right? And so my sense is it's going pretty well. The major metric we need to watch is the number of people joining. I think the challenge is the values have gone up quite a bit, right? So the challenge is to make sure it's affordable for new people to join. But this is, I think, one of the benefits of having - If it becomes a speculation game, you kind of - It's going to die. It's going to die. It's going to die, right? And like some people in Discord get mad at me every time the price goes up. I say like, you know, the price can go down.

1:35:48Like don't worry about the price. But we have an advantage here that the structure of the meme cards right now, three new ones are coming a week. Yeah. Well, this is very hard for a PFP project to get around, right? If you have a PFP project and you've now sold someone a four-day for 200 ETH. And someone says, oh, I've spent like$300 ,000 on a Bored Ape. And you say, oh, cool. Now I'm going to make like another 100 ,000 Bored Apes because I want to onboard people. Everyone's going to get very mad at you, right? So here on day one, we said, we're going to do a zillion meme cards, right? And they're all going to be additions.

1:36:31And we're going to sell them for like a very low amount, 0.06529 ETH. Right. Because why why that amount? It's like it's like 100 bucks or something. You know what I tell people, buy an NFT for the large majority of people in normal financial circumstances. They should buy NFTs out of their consumption entertainment budget. I think for most people, they should buy NFTs for the amount they'd spend for a nice dinner with their spouse. Or maybe if they want to go a weekend in Vegas or the nice piece of physical art they buy on their wall. right? And so if I believe that, that's my recommendation.

1:37:12I don't want to be saying like, oh, come buy this thing for me for like five ETH, right? Or 10 ETH or 20 ETH. And so by making them additions, you can say, oh, look, it's a hundred bucks. For a hundred bucks, a lot of you, it's a hundred bucks. Don't expect it has any future value. Just buy because you like it and you can go spread around. Okay. It's reasonable. If you go sell someone a$300 ,000 PFP, it's kind of hard to tell them then afterwards you know just do it for the art you know they're going to get unhappy so i think we have and it's constant it's the weirdest discord in nft land right because i'm always coming in there and saying like forget the price uh the price is going to go down like supply is going to go up price is going to go down like tell me someone asked me like what's the utility of the meme the utility of the memes is i'm going to lecture you on why you're not doing more on decentralization right that's the utility of the memes and my job is to get into as many hands as possible so there is no scarcity correct correct like that's my job now so we'll have some other you know first gm was the large edition for season one we're gonna have a large edition season two i'm not gonna suppose friends but it's gonna be really cool and that should get a whole bunch of new people in and you know i think it's i truly do not care what the price of any meme card is right like that's not yeah that's not the point that's not the point but do people enjoy collecting them sure why not right But if you said, and so I think the combination of the fact that you have many, many meme cards allows any particular drop to be much lower stakes.

1:39:08If you're a PFP project that does one follow-on drop a year, right, they've generally gone badly, right? Hugo's about the only one who's pulled it off, right? The follow-on drops have generally been a disaster for all the PFP projects. But because people don't actually want more supply. and then you know people say oh it's still too expensive for me it's fine steal them yeah that's right steal them save it's fine it's fine mint them right like yeah i don't like how you're doing the drops do your own drops right like i'm i'm not trying to hoard them and keep them i want them out there like perfect world is you know these dollar meme shops and we're We're going to do it on Solana, on finance chain, whatever.

1:39:52Great. Avalanche. Great. I don't have time to do it on Avalanche. I don't want to do it on Avalanche. It's enough work getting up every day and doing the things I'm doing. Someone wants to take on the job of getting the meme cards on Avalanche. Fantastic. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Right. So we went from a few hundred holders in the summer to five and a half thousand now. So check in with me in the fall. If like we're comfortably into double digits, I think we're on a good track. And with the ecosystem around it, because hopefully, hopefully, I don't know. Right. Hopefully these things are quote unquote exponential.

1:40:40So like if you can keep a fast growth rate for a long period of time, the numbers eventually get quite big. This is the main goal, right? The secondary goal that is just super, super fun is I think it's great exposure for the artists who come into the memes. Now, there's a handful who are super mega brands, right? Like X copy or whatever, like X copy doesn't need any more exposure. But there's also a lot of artists that are not hugely well known. And suddenly they have hundreds of new collectors who are like trying to figure out who the artist is, and they are in a collection that gets a lot of eyes on it.

1:41:16And so I think it's great for the artist brand, but it's also great for collectors that they have an opportunity to collect at a economically affordable level from a lot of artists that they might not be able to collect from otherwise, right? So just purely as an art project, I love it, right? Like that's not the mission. But if you're going to say, how are we going to do this mission? Well, we're doing this mission with art. And so then it's, all right, well, from an art perspective, is this good for the artists? Is it good for the collectors? Are we being smart about it? I think we are, right?

1:41:52And so there'll also be, we launched this contract this year called Meme Labs. And so this is going to be like a sandbox for the artists that are ready to do the meme card, where they can, so the meme Cards have some parameters, right? It's got to be about one of these memes. It has this type of metadata, right? It's within a framework. The meme labs is for the artists who have already done a card. They can do whatever they want. I have no idea what they're going to do, and I don't know what will come out of it. It's in the experiment category now. But I'm hoping some interesting things happen, again, once you have critical mass.

1:42:33We have 40 meme artists now. By the end of the year, it'll be 200, right? Probably something like that. When there's 200 very creative, inventive people doing, well, maybe something will come up even there that is different than what we're doing. And, you know, most things I think people will do in the labs will be fine or even a quote unquote failure. But maybe from there, a completely different idea will show up that ends up being effective and drives more visibility to these topics. So overall, I am happy with how it's going. And we're about 1 % of the way there. You're interesting because you set yourself clear KPIs, both with OM and the memes.

1:43:24You've kind of set yourself clear KPIs. Of course. I come from a professional environment. I'm used to doing that. I'm like, yeah, this is like fun and it's all whatever, but like, shouldn't you know if you're doing things correctly or not? Right? Like, the memes have a specific mission, right? And so, and I tell everyone what the KPIs are. Right? KPIs are you get more people in the memes than in the e-memes. And if you don't do that, I think it is easy. let me put it this way our competitors right facebook and apple i can assure you they have kpis right for sure right so if we're just we can't just be like oh we're hippy dippy about decentralization we have to see if we're actually doing anything right like you know this is where all the metaverse stuff the real kpi you know how many people show up every day is still very weak across all of them.

1:44:27Yeah. Right. And so it's why I think it's important at this stage to have the right values and the right architectural values. But none of them are ready to scale because things scale when people are knocking down your door to get in. Right. And the sign of product market fit isn't you're trying to drive usage. the sign of product market fit as your servers are crashing. All right, like all successful internet businesses, Amazon would go down. Yeah, chat GPT is a great example. Yeah, chat GPT is going down. Twitter used to go down all the time, right? Netflix used to go down. When you're in the scaling phase, you're not worried about incenting adoption.

1:45:15You're worried about how you can plug in more servers to the wall, right? So we'll know it. We'll know we're winning when the site's going down, right?

1:45:27It's one of those, like, I'll throw this to the audience as a, sometimes people come to me and say, oh, I don't think this is going to work. Why is this not going to work? Whatever this is, right? There's some third-party product service idea. They're not going to be able to operationally scale. This is literally never the problem with startups, right? All the failure cases are in startups. all of them are, nobody wants to use your service. RAOUL PAL Yeah. RAOUL PAL The failure case is never - RAOUL PAL This is what makes me laugh about the Solana breakages, it's because of excess use. RAOUL PAL Right.

1:46:00RAOUL PAL The failure case is never too many people like your product. When too many people like your product, eventually, you'll figure out a way to serve those people. RAOUL PAL When nobody likes your product, most of the time, you don't figure out a way to serve those people. Most founders do not solve product market fit. So operational scaling problems is a founder who has found product market fit and now needs to fix execution. But execution is much easier to fix. You go hire people who have run high performance, blah, blah, blah, scalable internet services, blah, blah, blah, and it's fixable.

1:46:38This was an issue from the 90s. Oh my God, video is going to break the internet. there are articles and video it's going to break the internet it's not going to work we're not going to ever have video on the internet we're hearing that about the metaverse now by the way of course there's not enough computing power we don't have enough chips nothing's going to work yeah okay okay this is fine this is this is why we're at early days um you had asked about the unicorns yes so this is the kind of hyper nerd version of the uh threads it's killed me okay it's killed me it's been so much work it's like why the reason i've been less active in tweeting because now i have like make powerpoint presentations and i'm really excited about a few things first of all i think this is going pretty well you know it forces you forcing you to put something in like a presentation form like this often tests if you actually know what you're talking about, right?

1:47:41Because you might think you know what you're talking about. And then you go in front of it now and you're like, well, what am I supposed to say? Like, the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone, right? And when you go put together the... Because my tweet storms, yes, they're also a form of teaching, but they're a little bit more personal sometimes. I'm not trying to, like, get necessarily all the structured knowledge out. PowerPoint slide forces you to be structured and you say, oh, I actually don't know the answer to that. And then I find myself Googling to figure out what US trademark law says about whatever.

1:48:19And then I'm like, oh, I have to do reading. So that's been interesting. The other thing that's interesting is we've got a great set of guests. Well, quickly explain to people who don't know what it is, what you're trying to do. So the course is about NFTs and the metaverse. And the simplistic thing is we have all the interesting people in the NFT and metaverse community coming and speaking on the course and doing panels and getting interviewed. And so you get to see the best people in the world in the field. That this is my hook that you should pay attention to the next thing I'm going to say, right?

1:48:57It's not just you'll hear me talking all day long. No, you'll have Beeple and Snowfro and I mean, it's just endless, right? We had G-Money last week, two days ago. It's endless. Everyone. We have dozens of people coming. But the interesting thing is the following two things. It's the first university course, and this was my demand, where everything is handled on chain. So the PowerPoints are minted as NFTs. The video sessions are minted as NFTs. We're trying to figure out how to do the exam on chain. It's hard, right? Because you actually need zero knowledge proofs to do it, I think. And so we'll see if we figure it out for this.

1:49:44We have like a month to figure this out. And also in metaverse, so like the environment where people interact with the course is the three-dimensional OM environment. But let me take these two things together because they have separate implications. The on-chain, at a bare minimum, gets you more openness than you would ever get in this type of thing, right? So you will have these materials with appropriate metadata tagged on-chain, right? You want to take G-Money's session and put it in your on-cyber gallery or download it or whatever. It's there. There's metadata. I keep saying NFTs are a publicly readable database.

1:50:35And so normally universities hide the course material in a learning management system. It is a private database. And here we're saying, well, let's put it out there for the world. Why? Because, well, generally good network effect things happen when you do this. And as we sort of figure out how this works, what I really want to do is that we had more demand to teach than we had teaching spots. In fact, I'm going to be able to get everyone into the session. We'll teach it again in the spring. But what I really want to do is say if Alejandro from Fellowship wants to do a session on, wants to do like a six session mini course on photography, that they can use the same tools and techniques to do it also.

1:51:17And so what I'm trying to build here with the on-chain piece is the network effects on education on these topics, right? The idea a year from now, if today I'm doing 50 % of the teaching on the course, a year from now, we will have figured out how this works so people can more effectively teach, and I'm doing 1%. And it's another part of, you know, there's tweeting, right? There's the meme cards. Well, now we need to build people's skills in this area. And, of course, you can also come and teach about central banking. It's open to anyone. But I think the topics that are going to be popular for people attending an on-chain metaverse university or professional experience are likely first going to be in these technological fields.

1:52:05Yeah. Right? And I hope to get some great generative artists to teach a course on how to make your first generative art. I want to get a lawyer to teach a course on licensing models. And some of them will be free. Some will be paid. I don't know. Whatever people want to do. It doesn't matter. The point is to start building people's skills, knowledge in a different way. And here, I think the direct incentive for people is if you learn these things, it will open up a variety of professional and business opportunities for you. I tweeted something the other day about bookkeepers are a dime a dozen.

1:52:41Bookkeepers who know how to read Etherscan and understand an NFT transaction are like one in a million. If we can accelerate supply and demand coming into balance here, it's good for everyone. Because demand is way outstripping supply in terms of people who know what they're doing. Way outstripping. We have had the hardest time finding these types of things, and they're not even hard. It's an education failure. Like, Etherscan, if you're a trained accountant, the amount of training you've gone through to, like, get your CPA is vastly harder than learning how to read an Etherscan transaction. Right?

1:53:27Like, the hard part is knowing accounting, not knowing how an OpenSea trade shows up in Etherscan. Right? But people don't know to do that last 1 % or 2 % or 5%. And if they did, they would have endless shop opportunities. But this is true of everything. What's the current limiting factor in the development of them? 3D architects, right, who know how to develop not just nice-looking 3Ds, but they match the performance and this and that. So if we want the ecosystem to develop, we need people to have the right knowledge, skills, capacities to succeed in the ecosystem. And so the course is a great course in and of itself.

1:54:07We'll run it twice a year. That's great. it's a way to maybe someone who wants a more structured version of my tweet storms right and all these great guests right so that part's great but the part that is more interesting isn't listening to six five to nine ranting about the open metaverse the idea is we'll try and turn these things we're in the experiment mode now i'm learning what's working what's not working let's say, gigantic pain in my, when I'm trying to do things. We're going to try and fix them. And then we can make this tooling available to others so that we can accelerate crypto-native, NFT-native education, right?

1:54:51So that's the on-chain part. And then the metaverse part is similar, and it's half education and half om slash metaverse. What is the modality that's going to work in a 3D environment? And I was hoping we would have done more during this course, but we just couldn't keep up. For example, we teach the classes in there, and people seem to like talking to others with their avatars, right? But so far, we've gone in through something like this interface with the PowerPoint showing. when I've been teaching, I haven't gone in as an avatar. I feel I should, right? So that's probably next semester. The other thing that we were hoping to build are social spaces for the students.

1:55:43How do they hang out and talk about these things afterwards, right? Or make communities to organize. Didn't manage to do that as well because we got stuck on building, quote unquote, quote, the quote unquote campus, right? So these are, I would call where we are on this, I don't know, where I was in some other things a year, year and a half ago. And so they're very early experiments. At a minimum, nobody, but they're experiments with the following dynamic. If you don't care about it being on chain, you don't care about it within the metaverse, but you just want to take a course in NFTs, it's the best course in the world, right?

1:56:25So you don't have to care about any of these things. You'll still learn a bunch about NFTs in the metaverse and see great people talking about their experiences. But what I'm trying to solve isn't that part per se, is trying to think how you can do something fully on chain. And that, you know, it's really interesting, right? Because if you go do a MOOC from Stanford, you're going to go in a lot of databases to get that MOOC done. The learning management system, some type of CRM probably, probably some type of student information system, and possibly some accounting system. How are you going to get built?

1:57:01And so how do you get this to operate on-chain? And if people are, because they're like, oh, I believe in decentralization. I'm going to spend all my important life activities in centralized databases. We haven't done anything. So I think we can see the pathway now for ART. Well, sorry, the other pathway here is clear to me, another no-brainer, obvious one, is just certification. Well, yeah, that's what I mean. I mean, at scale, everybody. I was actually speaking to the team at LinkedIn who were looking at this, and they're looking at certification on chain. So you can prove it. So I think that's just another big scalable thing.

1:57:51We've talked in the past about airline tickets and what Ticketmaster are doing with other tickets. Certification, I mean, how many millions of people get certified in all sorts of things every month? Absolutely certain. I mean, at the end of this course, the certification that you pass the course is going to be an NFT. Clearly. Right. And so when I say, I hope Alejandro comes and does a photography NFT course, I hope that their certification is an NFT. Right. Those are the type of tools I want to provide to people. That this is more scalable, composable than, all right, you have to call the registrar, Stanford or Unix or whatever to find out who passed the course.

1:58:34Right. Like, why can't we compose them on chain like everything else? So, and are there challenges, you know, that G-Money asked yesterday, are they going to be sold now? No, I don't think they should be sold now. Every one of these topics though, right, has like 50 subtopics that come out of it. Should there be a certification on chain? Yes. Okay. How do you do it? 50 design choices show up. And so this is where I view a little bit my role in all this stuff, which is I think I understand topics pretty well, like the on-chain topics pretty well. I'm willing to experiment. I'm willing to put myself out there and try things and maybe they'll work, maybe they won't work.

1:59:18It's okay. and if some of those things work, well, then we can come and say, this is what everything I do, I come and say, like, you know, how do I think you should do royalties? How do you think you should do allow lists? How do you think you should do certifications on-chain? Wait two months, there'll be a tweet store one. And then wait like another five months, maybe there'll be like what I propose certification should look like on-chain. And all will be open and people can use it or not use it. But this is what we need to develop the ecosystem. And the next couple of years are critical. Overall, I am slightly more optimistic than the last time I was here.

1:59:59And I'm slightly more optimistic because the centralized, I mean, the fact that Meta has struggled, and the fact that we're going into a recession with Meta struggling, and the fact that it's been bad for Facebook stock price right now. Now, Facebook's not going to give up, right? Like, Mark's really good. But it's going to pause everyone for a year, year and a half, two years, right? It's harder for 10 other companies to come say, I'm plowing huge amounts of money into this. Their shareholders might yell, right? So, it buys us the down market, at the recession, buys a little bit of time. I know people think, oh, it's bad because of...

2:00:42Prices, I'm not sure it's bad. All the positive activity in crypto happens in bear markets. RAOUL PAL Yeah, it's not negative. I mean, look how vibrant the NFT community is, even though it's smaller. There's less scam. I've got less spam coming into my wallet. There's the level of interaction is still good. I don't think it's a bad thing. I think it's cleansing. RAOUL PAL And generally, things get built in bear markets. In bull markets, people are too busy flipping tokens to pay attention to building. And so I think we might have, and it's not a message to slow down, we have to go very quickly, but we might get a couple of years of doing things.

2:01:27And the more we can push the ecosystem forward, the more likely we get to the following. If you ask me what my overall KPIs, here's my overall KPI, that any arbitrary large company that says, ooh, I want to sell people digital goods. And I say large company, because if it works for a large company, it's always going to work for a small company too. It is in my economic interest to make it an NFT, not a digital collectible in my private database, because the NFT ecosystem is so much more robust than my private database system is going to be. There's tooling and marketplaces and lending platforms and education and trade people and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that it's in my interest to do it as an NFT.

2:02:15If we hit that point, it's over. Everyone will just naturally choose to do it. Just like everybody - Nobody has servers anymore because we all use the cloud. Nobody has private networks because we all use the internet. Yeah. Right? It would be sometime in the late 90s, it became, because remember, AT &T tried to do the information superhighway. That all of this internet thing is really good, but it's scary and unregulated. And we're AT &T, we're mobile, we're going to give you the safe version of this. And we went through this with crypto with enterprise blockchains. There was nothing I was more sure of before NFTs than the enterprise blockchain thing wouldn't work.

2:03:02And there was like a few years, you couldn't say crypto, you had to say enterprise blockchains and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, oh no, this is the information super high with stuff all over again. We're going to take this good public protocol idea and try and privatize it. And by the late 90s, it was obvious that you you should not launch your network presence on AT &T's information super high. We should do it on the internet. Right? And any time in everyone's more or less adult life, this has also been true. Imagine thinking you're not going to use the internet. Right? No one's going to think that.

2:03:37But this wasn't obvious. I didn't live in France, and I'm too young to overuse it anyway. But like Minitel was a big thing. Right? Like that was another. That was a private version of an internet. as a type of network run by the French government, for those who don't, and nobody's developing for Minitel now, right? Nobody has to argue to companies that they should use the internet, not Minitel, and that this is some type of hard decision. If we can get it to the point that representing digital objects as NFTs, as opposed to private server digital collectibles, is the obviously correct answer for large companies.

2:04:25Because large companies are the ones that can deceive themselves and say, well, I'm going to build a developer ecosystem and make my own tooling. Obviously, if large companies do it, then individuals are also going to do it. Small companies are going to do it. Medium-sized companies are going to do it. And then the fact that I think organizations and individuals have the incentive to create NFTs to represent their various intangible values through their customers can take us the rest of the way so that by the end of the decade, we have broad crypto adoption. So we have a couple of years to make that a reality.

2:04:57And if it happens, I can chill out. So that's my final question. How the hell have you got the time? I understand the energy, right? We're all super busy, but we've got the energy because we're enjoying it. But you're doing a lot, and there's not many of you. Yeah. How do you manage your time? You live in Europe, which helps, although you've got terrible time zone for you. Well, I mean, it kind of helps if you're willing to do what I've been doing the last couple of years, which is just like work all waking hours. So like, you're going to wake up in the morning, do a bunch of stuff while the Americans are asleep, and then like work in the evening while the Americans are awake, and it works.

2:05:42But like, I think of few things, none of them particularly insightful. One is I work a lot, right? This has not been a work-life balance phase of my life. And I think it is, the reason I'm working a lot is I think it is a window of time opportunity where we can all make a difference in how the world evolves. It was not set in stone that Twitter would be a service. It could have been a protocol, and the world would have been better. It is not set in stone that the metaverse will be a Facebook project. It's not. It might end up being an open platform with NFTs as the ownership layer, and then Meta can have a metaverse application, and so can Disney, and so can Sony.

2:06:36I mean, think about this. is shouldn't Punk 6529 be in my wallet and I can take him into Facebook's metaverse and Disney's metaverse and the BBC's metaverse and other side and all these other places? Yes, I think so. I think that's how it should be. I don't think Punk 6529 should be linked to only one person's application, right? Which is how it is now. And so this is this moment in time where we can Maybe make that happen. And so the motivation and the energy comes from the fact that this guy, I mean, it sounds kind of absurd and it might not be true, but I think it's true. Like we can actually change history here, not just, hey, I'm going to work and doing a good job and having excellent professional development in my job and this type of stuff.

2:07:29Like you're not going to work all day and night for that, right? Like, I mean, professional development and accomplishment is, of course, very nice, but like, I'm far enough along in my career that I wouldn't work this hard just for that. Let's put it that way, right? Like, I don't need to work this hard just for professional development and accomplishment, right? So this, the fact that you can actually change history, I think is important. And then one of the things that I'm trying to do, I want the team to be small on purpose. There's actually a point where like, oh, should we make a much bigger team?

2:08:01I got tempted. And I've managed large organizations with lots and lots of people, like four digits number of people. So I know what that's like. Mostly it's painful, right? Sometimes it's inevitable, but in all cases, it's painful. And I said, you know, I don't think the right answer. You know, the whole 6-5-9, like, It seems, I don't know, 10 people or something, right? Like it's tiny. And then you say, okay, if it's 10 or if it's 100 or if it's 200, does that actually make a difference? I'm like, well, how many people does Microsoft have? Tens of thousands, right? Google, tens of thousands. Facebook, tens of thousands.

2:08:47All of them together, like tens of millions. So it can't be the case that it's particularly different that we're going to win or lose if we have, we would lose if we have 20 people, but we'd win if we had 100, right? If it's dependent on the number of people employed at six, five, nine, we're going to lose anyway, right? Because they have many, many more. And so this has forced me, I've kind of gone backwards cards and saying, okay, how should we design our initiatives that they are primarily not driven by how many people we have? The meme card is a good example. The meme cards cannot succeed if it's, oh, look, we're promising a bunch of utility and we're going to have a bunch of people.

2:09:41We're not going to organize a party for you in New York. That's the last thing we're going to do. right we're not gonna make you a hoodie it's the last thing we're gonna do like all this stuff like none of that stuff's a concept right and so because the team is small we lose almost no time on internal stuff in fact like i'm really trying to build in public i mean i sometimes just like notify team members of things we need to do like on twitter on my public Twitter feed, not liking direct messages. I'm like, hey, can you do this? I don't know. It's weird. I have been way more public about the mechanics of what we're doing in this than anything I've done before in my career.

2:10:29The normal things you do is like, oh, we have to hide this. It's confidential information. What if our competitors find this out? And here, I'm like, yeah, we're just going to go totally differently. I'm going to think of something that I think we should do, and I'm just going to tweet it, not like stamp confidential and hide in the filing cabinet. So far, it seems okay. It's interesting. I don't know. Maybe people are stealing our ideas. I don't know. But that doesn't seem to matter. It doesn't matter because it actually adds to your KPI. Yeah, right? Really? It adds to KPI, but I don't think it's even mattered in our own effectiveness.

2:11:06I mean, on a per head basis, I think we're super effective. Like, we're doing a lot of things on a per head basis. And so, but, okay, to really answer the question you're asking, there is a hard limit, and the hard limit is, like, I sometimes need to sleep, right? And so, like, I can't do this pace for a decade. It's impossible, right? Right. And for the message and the mission to scale, it has to network. The network has to take it. You can't carry the network yourself forever. No, it just won't scale. It's not possible. Like there's no important social change does not come because someone individually does things, right?

2:11:57And this is where I'm counting quite a bit on the memes, honestly. You know, I'm going to give another perspective. Even if none of that, if all of that is a zero, I know one thing you've done. There is a big group of people at Meta, at Google, at Twitter, at every one of these organizations that has listened to what you've said. And they're fighting the fight from the inside. And there's a lot of them. I mean, I've done whole presentations to the whole Web3 team at Google. It's big, and it's diverse, and it's everywhere. And you are affecting those people. So in some way, even if your things fail, what you're doing will force the others to change.

2:12:45They get it. RAOUL PAL, Look, someone asked me this. What if Facebook said, oh, yeah, we're going to use NFTs as our way to represent visual objects? Is that a, are you upset by that? Are you happy by that? Like, I'd be hyper thrilled by that, right? Like, I mean, that's the win. The win, and you know, I've had these arguments on NFT Twitter. It was like, oh, man, this corporation issued an NFT. Like, NFTs should just be for the independent artists. And like, denounce this 6529. And I'm not going to denounce it, right? Like, my hope was that NFTs become as ubiquitous as the internet. if they're as ubiquitous as the internet, obviously, large companies are going to use them just like large companies use internet.

2:13:36As long as these are interoperable and composable, then you've won. Because then you can take your toys and go somewhere else. Correct. That's the whole thing. And the most scalable version of getting there is if the large companies with large networks tip over. Right? Like, if any company that has a, take Facebook because there's about two billion users or something, right? If Facebook decides that it's in their interest to not be a point of contention for every political issue on the planet, which is what's progressively going to happen, right? That they're better off as the application provider, not the censorship provider.

2:14:25Right? they get there. Of course, they'll get there faster than I can get there. And that's great. This is what the end state looks like. The end state is not fighting Facebook. The end state is Facebook's also doing this. RAOUL PAL And in the end, let's say they win these big beer moths, but they do it on the Ethereum blockchain. At the end, you'll have still made money out of it. Because your your ETH will have gone up in value. Look, I am not particularly worried about trying to think how to say this without sounding like a jerk, right? I think I guess we're gonna say go on.

2:15:14I'm not doing this. Because if I don't do this, I'm gonna have some type of economic problem in my life. No, we know that. And I'm also not doing this. I'm not working this hard driven by economics. I wouldn't work this hard just for economics. I would trade off more lifestyle, to be quite honest. I would trade off more vacationing. If it was just like, hey, 6529, you'll have some more money in your bank account, but you're working every night till midnight. I'm working like I was working when I was 22 in New York. and I had to like prove myself as an analyst and I made what back then seemed like a lot of money I made$40 ,000 a year so it seemed like an awful lot of money and like I was like oh I gotta get a promotion to go to 48 and I remember that and I'm gonna work 80 hours a week and weekends and all this stuff and like there I was like professionally career and like all the initial ladders oh you get the you get the new title and you you tell your mom look i got promoted and like i got a five thousand dollar bonus i can't remember i was so proud right i was 22 it was very exciting i got a five thousand dollar bonus right no one had given me five thousand dollars before then right like mom i got a five thousand dollar bonus and i don't know my mom's like must be very sweet she's like oh it's amazing like okay you got five grand right Right.

2:16:43Right. So, and so I'm kind of working like that. And I've been doing crypto stuff, as we've discussed, for a decade. I believe in these principles. And this feels to me like the highest leverage opportunity I've seen since the very early days to actually drive the results that I think will lead to a better world. And so it's one of these things that, of course, someone's going to jump all over this and yell at me on Twitter, oh, rich guy says he doesn't care about money. Not saying that. The reason I have money is I care to some degree about my career choices about money. I work very hard to get promotions and bonuses.

2:17:27But at this stage, it's not the primary driver. It's the secondary driver. the primary driver is this. And the faster it happens, that I can take the gas off a little bit, it's a plus, not a minus. It's not like I'm sitting here saying, oh, I hope in 10 years from now, I'm working till midnight every night. That's not exactly personally desirable. No, because you're trading off quality of life. And quality of life is a very, very expensive thing. It's priceless, really. Well, correct. Yeah, correct. And then, you know, you never know, like when you're... And there's these embedded assumptions of like, how long your life's going to go.

2:18:04And sometimes it turns out not to be true. Like, I found out about someone at a professional services firm that I work with in different contexts, suddenly died. And like, was middle-aged, high middle-aged. and i'm sure that person like didn't probably that person thought he had another 30 years of life to do things with and turned out he didn't right so i mean the reason quality of life is very expensive is it goes there's a there's a tweet story about this right it's life is way shorter than you think yeah right it's way shorter than you think you make all these plans everyone lives their life as if they have like infinity days to do stuff and you don't and it always catches you by surprise at the end and you're like oh wait crap like that's wait it's over and like oh or friends or family die and like oh wait i wanted i was gonna do stuff with them and i didn't and i was gonna tell them things and i didn't right and one of the reasons you didn't do stuff with them or tell them things is because you're working right like i mean this is a problem of all like ambitious people.

2:19:19Like you spend a lot of time working and less time with your friends and family. And you always regret that part, right? Like nothing's free, right? Like nothing important is free. They're all trade-offs. They're all trade-offs. Like that's being an adult, unfortunately, is all trade-offs. I think until my mid-20s, I used to believe that like you could have it all, right? You could deceive yourself in thinking that because you didn't have that many responsibilities. You're like, oh, I can drink with my buddies and watch the game and do my work. I'm covered. That's not how it is, right? Everything's a trade-off.

2:19:56Everything costs something. And after a certain point, when there's enough money in the Mac account, the thing it costs isn't money per se, right? The thing that it's costing is what life experience are you getting more value from? arguing in discord with people who thought this should be on the allow list, or spending time with a friend. I don't know. Right now, I'm arguing in discord with people. I mean, I wrote a whole article on this in my Global Macro Investor annual think piece about life experiences. And like you, I've been very lucky. I've traveled the world, done everything, lived in different countries, done absolutely everything, met everybody.

2:20:36But the one thing I'm trading a lot of those things off for is the experience of this. this time, this place is magic. And it gives you a sense of mission, a sense of purpose, and a sense of excitement about a future. And I'll trade off traveling through the Amazon or climbing mountains or going across deserts or whatever for this, because it's special. And it's probably very meaningful too. I think you probably feel the same way. I feel exactly the same way. I felt, I keep telling people, I keep telling everyone in the NFT world who doesn't realize this, the NFT Twitter community is the Bitcoin community in the fall of 2013.

2:21:21I wrote a thread about the fact that I was at the Ledger event in Paris recently, and it was me and Buck Render and OV, OSF, and a bunch of these people, plus Ian, who's a cool guy, and all of it. And it was like, and then there was music people and there was fashion people. And it was like, it was like being in London in the nineties when everything was there, art, music, everything. And it's just like, it's magical. And everyone's one degree of separation from each other right now. That won't last for another two or three years. This is, so the part that I think that feels the most, like everyone knows everyone, right?

2:22:01You said OSF and I know who OSF is, right? And I have a Discord chat open with OSF, right? And if we go through all the top NFT people, we'll probably know 95 % of them, which is how it was in early Bitcoin. Everyone knew everyone. That's right. There was a lot of excitement. There were a lot of interesting things happening. And it was a special time. And then we hit the bear market, right? Because we're where we're now. And again, it was kind of quiet. Then what happened, the next bull market, everything exploded both, not just price wise, but in scope, horizontally, vertically, geographically.

2:22:46In the next run up, you didn't know anyone. It was like, I couldn't - RAOUL PAL and there was a new set of people. That was the Vitalik's and all of these other people who came out of - But just the volume, I credibly could say in September 2013, I knew more or less everything that was happening of importance in the Bitcoin world. I can credibly say today that I know everything of importance that happened this week in NFTR. In the 2026 bull market or whatever it is, there's no way that's going to be true. right? The Brazilian NFT community will be the size of the global NFT community. And they'll be like, the Indian one will be 10 times the size.

2:23:32And there'll be one just for landscape photography in Southeast Asia, which will be this size. And what will happen, and some of the organizations, some of the people stayed the same, right? Like, you know, Barry Solberg was He was important then, he was important now, and we're all the way through. So some people have stayed the same, but the people that have stayed the same and succeeded will have become much more institutionalized by then. They'll have bigger organizations. RAOUL PAL And they'll only be accessible to the people who knew them early on. RAOUL PAL Correct. RAOUL PAL I know Barry, because I've been in Bitcoin since 2013.

2:24:13Now, for any random person now to speak to Barry is zero chance. RAOUL PAL Zero chance. um and so i keep telling people enjoy this time now it's special the next time around it's going to feel in the in the version of the bull market wherever makes a lot of money that's wonderful it's also going to feel colder yeah it's not going to be this like oh look it's cath and it's bats and it's people and it's x and it's going to be colder and so part of what i think is it It sounds like it's the same thing happening with you because I lived it, enjoyed it, and then I know it's going to go away at some point.

2:24:56And it feels that way again. And I say, oh, okay, let's enjoy this. It's not going to be this style for a decade, right? It's going to be this style for maybe another couple of years. It will be this style now so long as we have a bear market. It will go away in the next like mega bull NFT market. RAOUL PAL Yeah. And so the point being, going back to the original point, is it is a lot of fun when it all feels like this, and you've got all the energy in the world for it. But when it becomes bland, and it becomes about business, because next time, it's going to be huge corporate stuff and less interesting, the energy will go a little bit.

2:25:36But maybe the metaverse is the next phase of the energy, but let's see. But listen, my friend, as ever, fantastic conversation, really enjoyed it. it was it was a pleasure as always i think in the spring we need to get you on the unit course and then we can we can flip the script and i can harass you with questions always around and um yeah i'll see you out there on twitter and in discord and in the and in the metaverse and all over the place all right my friend great to see you and good Good luck with everything. RAOUL PAL, All right. Thank you. RAOUL PAL, Get some sleep. RAOUL PAL,

2:26:21My takeaways from this interview are A, how much 6529 is doing and his team, and how they're driven by the mission of how important it is to get this done, and how they think they can make a difference. I think it matters. I think it matters. And I think it's profoundly important for the future of our humanity to have a different way of operating online. And there is so much to learn from his philosophical standpoint, let alone his execution. And also, take away that he's asking you to build on top of what he's doing. And you should do that. If you want to build metaverse experiences, if you want to get involved with his memes, or get involved with education, there's the opportunities to drive this space forward, or even just to learn more about it.

2:27:15So another phenomenally good interview. So much in there. I'm going to have to watch it three times to get my head around it all. I think you probably will too. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it. Today's episode of the Real Vision Crypto Daily Briefing is in partnership with Origin Protocol's Origin Dollar. Put your stablecoins to work in DeFi at realvision.com slash origin dollar.