Read Write Own: A New Era

24:51That's right. And so, it's just coin, there's no asymmetry. It's just, it's, everyone knows. It's just a totally meaningless, useless coin. And it's just like, you're just batting on a number or going up or down. And so, there's no asymmetric from everyone's level playing field. And maybe a dumb luck playing field, but it's a level dumb play. Whereas once you start having a team behind something, building something, then that team might have asymmetric information, which is why all of the guidance from the SEC in the 2000s, I think it was 2019, when there were various guidance, the last time they gave guidance, since then they have not given guidance.

25:25They've only done enforcement actions. The guidance was you need to be sufficiently decentralized, meaning it's okay to people working on making something better, like, for example, Ethereum, people there are a bunch of teams making it better, but there's not one team doing it. There's a whole bunch of teams, and so the information is sufficiently decentralized, such that there is still a level playing field. So there are ways to build things, to have tokens where you build blockchains in a way that is decentralized, such that it's not a security. It's just that sort of a very complex new -nots thing, and it's very simple to go and create something that is unambiguously clear from that.

26:04And so I think if you go to a bunch of these other websites who aren't really crypto companies, like let's say Robinhood, they have, they removed a lot of very useful blockchain tokens, but they support Dogecoin. And you'll see the way things are headed, we'll probably see a Dogecoin ETF at some point, because it's legal. Some big ideas, books have this problem where they kind of just come across as scattered blog posts, But what's nice about this is it actually has a through line. Well, it's interesting too, because I feel like the best part in a lot of ways is the end of the book, which I struggled with, because the end of the book is really the kind of payoff, because it's all the work you do before, and it's like here's like, to the end, the last part, there's seven sections that are like seven really interesting, but I think a really interesting application areas, sort of how you apply blockchains to finance, to artificial intelligence, intelligence to games and kind of metaverse to media and storytelling and a bunch of other areas.

27:05But and as sort of like I was thinking about how you write this, don't you want to have sort of the juiciest parts of the beginning. But the reality is you really need the background to kind of have the payoff because you have to do the work and you have to understand like what are the alternative ways that these things could be built and that sort of goes through a little bit of the history how we got there and then I do a deep dive. People always ask like, what problems do blockchain itself? So I kind of do a deep dive and like why blockchains are a better way to build networks than these other methods and then very specifically go through the benefits.

27:38The economic benefits, the governance benefits, the software development benefits. People use words like decentralization. I don't use that word that much, but I mean, but it's about decentralization. And by the way, some of this is affected by like talking to policymakers, for example, I remember one in particular, I was talking to last year who said, I believe a bunch of the other stuff you're saying, Chris, but I don't think you can really have built software without a CEO. And then I started going and talking about how 95 % of the software in the world is open source software, which has a CEO, Linux, is by far the most successful operating system.

28:17And that was a really, I think a really good conversation. And I think the person I was speaking to found that eye opening, I think it's surprising, for example, that most of the world doesn't know that that's how most software is built without a CEO, that the sort of collaborative bottoms up way to build software. So there's stuff about that as an example. I feel like the open source software movement, by the way, is such a perfect kind of precedent for what's happening in crypto right now. No, crypto isn't very much, it's very much, I think in a lot of ways the cultural and intellectual air to the open source software movement.

28:51I mean, open source software even continues. It's sort of a fork or parallel path. And specifically, open source software is about keeping the software layer open. Blockchains are about keeping the service layer open. I go through this in the book. What basically happened in the last, to 20 years or so, is that much of the software business became commoditized through open source software. So it no longer became a good business, for example, to sell web server software or operating systems because that could create once for free. And so a lot of these companies, including Microsoft, now sort of fashion itself to services companies.

29:31And so services. In Microsoft who invented the software business. That's right. The services are software that's live and running and has storing information and sort of instantiated and active. And one of the ways that you blockchains is essentially, it's taking a lot of the ideas of open source software and elevating it to the layer of services. So a blockchain is sort of in one way to think of it as an open source service. And so something like Ethereum, right? Ethereum is this computer in the sky that anyone can access. Nobody owns it. It's running all the time. It has its own internal economic model that keeps it running.

30:11It keeps, you know, because the run software you have to host software and pay for bandwidth and things. So you need an economic model to have self -sustaining open services. And so Ethereum is this sort of, you know, self -funding. It's not self -funding. You pay to access it. And so users and developers pay to access it. And then that money gets flowed back into the hosting costs and things like that. It's very much like the main frame computing model, time sharing and pays you go back to the cities. It's sort of this open source bottoms up collaborative model and got together with mainframes and created this new kind of open Community -owned mainframe is one way to think of something like a theorem And that lets you then create services on top which inherit those properties, right?

30:52So you can create a game on top of a theorem which inherits it meaning all of those property that is described to being open and Community owned also applied to the thing created on top of a theorem like the game And that has all these downstream consequences, which go through on the book. What do you read? I read also everything. I read fiction, nonfiction. I try to read almost anything that has like a four or above on good reads. I'll read a lot of its recommendations from friends. I always have a stack of books that I'm going to read. So it's all over. Some of it's like edification being a person who's well read, so I try to be broad.

31:29and then sometimes I just go deep in certain topics. But my main theory there is, it's in contrast to social media and the internet, like sadly, because I think a lot of social media has not, and I mean, I write about in the book, I don't think we're in a great spot on the internet today and for a whole bunch of reasons. But I think that there's a trap you can get into where you're just sort of checking Twitter and other things. And I try very hard not to do that into, I sort of think of it, similar to like people who are into, you know, dieting in different food programs, you know, so sort of semi -books or protein and social media is generally sugar, right?

32:11Because I do it sometimes, it's a work thing. It is important to stay in touch with some things going on, right? But I think it's very, very important to have limits around that. I think there's a thing it does to your brain where you sort of get into cycles and you need to avoid that. I found the 50 -page rule on books is a great rule because it's pretty doable to be planned your day right. Obviously, everyone schedules are different and demands on their life are different, so I don't want to presume everyone can do that. For me, I make it a priority and then some days it feels like I was a pain, but it's only 50 pages.

32:44But then what often happens is I start in a good book and I'm like, like, okay, I'm going to read more. I also have a rule 50 pages. It's by Quincen's 50 pages. I have to release 50 pages of a book before I quit the book. That's a good rule. And I do quit books. And I think it's important to quit books. I think one of the blockers you get into in that reading is you sort of stuck on a book you don't love and dug it through it. So anyways. You also have a habit of reading very like out of sync, out of the way that the book is telling you to read it. Yeah, especially with nonfiction, I'm not with fiction.

33:25The fiction you have to read it, I think, in order. Sometimes with nonfiction, yeah. I think, again, if your North Star with reading is just like the one way to think of it, and this is kind of my model, is the North Star kind of metric. The North Star KPI is how much time do you spend reading books? Like that's what you're trying to optimize. as opposed to social media, TV, whatever it might be. And if that's what you're trying to optimize, you wanna really avoid the blockers, right? The blockers of things that like you give board and you stop reading. And so, you know, one way to do that is to just always make sure that what you're doing is interesting and that means sort of this quit a book up if two pages is okay.

34:04And then it's okay to jump around, like with an on -fiction book, first thing you know, the table of contents, and people should know my book. I hope they do. And then you jump to a few sections, They look most interesting and hopefully those are well written and you like them. And then you're sort of, oh wow, maybe I should understand the stuff before. Maybe that's well written and interesting too. And the best case that leads you down the path they're reading the whole book, right? You mentioned Andrew Chen before in his book, The Cold Start Problem. Now I know he's talked about how he will lock his phone in a crate in a far -in -a -cage or something so that he doesn't have access to it so he can concentrate.

34:39Do you do anything like that to enable to carve out that like 50 page period of your? Oh, I definitely, I mean, I don't do the thing where you lock your phone and think because I probably would just go figure out a way to get it out of I do it, but I do definitely put down the phone and like I think there's a I really think it's like this trainable brain response thing this attention span sort of thing that people have now Now, for me too, I have that same feeling. You put the phone down and you have this urge to look at your phone, but it goes away. If you push it, it goes away. It's just like exercise or something.

35:13You first sit down to, I don't know if you have this experience. You first sit down to exercise in the first 10 minutes or probably the hardest, because you're really am lazy and I feel like doing this. But then once you're into it, you're like, it often takes the life of its own. I think it's very similar to other kinds of habits. So in many ways, the initial action is the most important thing. and then it becomes some momentum driven after that. But I kind of think of it as the most important, I guess you sort of think of your brain as an LM, I'm a machine learning algorithm, right? Which, you know, we probably are.

35:49What the most important thing you can do to kind of feed that and improve it is the inputs, right? And so you should be very deliberate about the inputs. It's very hard to have bad inputs, and then people try all these things. I'm gonna meditate, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that, I'm gonna unwind. But the problem is you put all these bad inputs in. You can only do so much to the machine if you've got the wrong inputs. So I think to me, the inputs intellectually at least in my intellectual life, the good inputs are books and conversations with people. Like, those are the two things where I learn the most.

36:29I get the most sort of direct primary information. Very big on primary sources, not secondary sources. I'm very skeptical of many secondary sources. I always like to go as much as I can to find the source. And then sort of get a lot of inputs and primary sources and make my own determination. I think that, you know, like, I mean, I think it's true for everyone and in most, in any kind of information intellectual profession, particularly in investing. It's very important to what I do. It's very important to develop a model of the world that is both true and hopefully differentiated. That's what you're doing and investing is you're basically taking that model and applying it to financial investments.

37:19right? And trying to find things are undervalued or avoid things that are overvalued because somebody, because the world model that most people have is off and yours is better, right? And so if you think about that's what you want to do, you need to sort of be very cognizant of how you're training that world model and the thing, the easiest thing to control are the inputs, right? If we're talking about high quality inputs, do you have a favorite book, a favorite author? I kind of grew up reading, I spent years and years both as a kid and then college, even after college reading, kind of originally computer books, programming and then got into actually sort of the artificial intelligence, what was called artificial intelligence back then, it was very different.

38:14got into a bunch of sort of philosophy books. We, like Daniel Dendin and Douglas Hofstetter and a bunch of these sort of, kind of bridge writers. This funny Douglas Hofstetter, I would probably cite as like the biggest intellectual influence on my own like, I mean, Gertleshire Bach is just an incredible book. And it was really a book that was to me, I hope. It just opened up a word of another world, which was like, and to me was proper philosophy and philosophy of mind and language. And I spent years reading that. I've read, I spent years reading like popular, I think I've read all the popular sort of science books.

38:47I really love like the Steven Johnson books, the, you know, like a, sort of early Malcolm Gladwell books. And then, you know, I read all the sort of, I don't know, physics, popular physics books, which all that kind of stuff. And then eventually, I think after my popular science phase when I was young, became history. So, the thing I always go back to is history. I read a lot, a lot of history books. and all the eras. But I'd say my favorite era of history is probably the industrial Victorian era. I think in a lot of ways you could argue that modern civilization was built between 1870 and 1940.

39:29If you just were in New York, you go look at all the skyscrapers and most of them were built in that era and the bridges and everything else, but also obviously electricity and airplanes and cars and just sort of the whole modern world. And he had this era of sort of these, of like a hundred sort of Elon Musk's or something of these kinds of bold entrepreneurs who would build these big physical world projects. And so that's always an era I love. And I've spent a lot of time reading, of course, computer history, tech history. I really like the, I think it's under, I think an under appreciated area is sort of the origins of computing.

40:14I read an article that was published in the Atlantic magazine a couple of years ago on that. Yeah. How Aristotle invented the computer. So I might sort of thesis with a lot of computing came out of that the true kind of origin of it was intellectually was logic and philosophy and a lot of it came from that. But that era when you had people like touring in Klaus Shannon and John von Neumann and Kurt Grittell and all of these other thinkers and it was a very small group of people. And what was really interesting to me was that what they were doing, I started off that essay with this quote from a computer scientist that was like if you'd surveyed the world in 1905 and tried to find the most useless, unpragmatic area in the world, it would be formologic, right?

41:02But then it turned out later on to be a lot of the things that ended up leading to the design of computers. Claude Shannon has this amazing paper where he was the first one to have the insight that you could basically do a mapping of all of formal logic and sort of bully and logic and everything else onto circuits. And then once you did that, he had the insight that once you could map, like and or and all these are the things, which of course would, you know, the most base level transistor circuits are. Once you could do that, you could then do math and everything else and you knew that because people like Bertrand Russell, like Russell Whitehead famously in the Prink of the Mathematica had written out, you know, a thousand pages of how to construct all of mathematics based on simple and or not sort of Boolean operations.

41:53So they had built all this machinery for this very esoteric, scientific purpose, sorry, philosophical purpose, but then Claude Shannon's insight was that you could take all that machinery and just kind of move it over adjacently onto electronic circuitry and have computers. Anyways, I'm going down a rabbit hole, but the point being that I just think there's a lot of really interesting history throughout that whole period and really kind of going deep. And I really like primary sources because I find that, like, as an example, like people often talk about George Bull, you know, called Boolean because George Bull wrote this book called The Laws of Thought.

42:35He's often almost always talked about as a mathematician. If you go read the book, it's not a math book, it's a philosophy book. I read the book. It's called The Laws of Thought because he's based on it. He's the whole thing talking about Aristotle and how he's extending Aristotle because Aristotle was basically the prior kind of major thing in philosophy. So I find, I just find this again and again. I like the primary sources because I just think it's very different. I find it's a very different view of history. And again, it's sort of like if the goal is both as a human and as a professional to build your world model, you should be constantly thinking about how, what those inputs are.

43:13And by the way, why history? I mean, I think one, I'm just interested in history and it's important. But two, when you're working in areas that are extremely complex systems, so the internet is this, you know, 5 billion people interacting in this very complex way, and there's money flowing and culture and politics and power, and it's, you know, it couldn't be more complex. You can sort of try to come up with little principles and things that try to predict what will happen. and it still looks business as well too. Like a typical business you're interacting in very complex world with policy and competitors and customers and changing trends and cultures.

43:56And there are certain rules and everything else, but I've always found that the best guide is history because history is a series of examples of people interacting in very complex adaptive systems and how that played out, right? And so they give you these very interesting kind of rules of thumb. So like I talk about history in the book, but it's really, I'm not actually interested in history per se. I mentioned history in as much as it helps us. I mentioned the future and and you'll friend, Sep Kampvar actually, he turned me on to this quote from Neil Postman. I'm going to butcher the exact wording of it.

44:29But he basically said like history is the best way to learn any subject, any discipline. You something like you shouldn't teach history, but everything should be taught as history. or something like that. Yeah, it's something like that, which is a great quote. And I think that's, I agree with you. And I think it's sort of a shame too when it's not taught that way, right? Because these things do generally have these fantastic, you know, and very interesting stories, very, and they're very human stories, right? It's like, I always find the humanity behind these, these stories interesting and all the struggles and...

44:58I want to ask about the human element. But first, I also want to just pose something counter to sort of this idea of the house days of all these technologists and pioneers coming up with this incredible new technology. We're living through a period like that right now and I feel like a lot of people, they kind of look at the past with these, you know, glasses and they don't see that there are weirdos like coming up with awesome stuff, you know, today. Oh, I think this is, I mean, like I think that we are probably entering, And I say weirdos with love and respect. Yeah, I think this is one of the, I think this is maybe the most exciting period of technology, you know, I don't know.

45:41In some ways you could argue that the next 20 years is the culmination of all of the developments in computer, computers and computer science and everything else over the last, you know, 80 some years. And it may all be, you know, between AI, of course I think blockchain's a play very important role. the stuff, you know, self -driving cars, virtual reality, like all of this, you have made, and then you still have, you have all these nutrients, you have existing past trends that continue to play out. The internet's still early, you know, 30 years into what will probably be, you know, one of the most important technologies, you know, in centuries, right?

46:23And, you know, the mobile phone is still playing out, like people still figuring out how to use smartphones and all the different applications and, you know, SaaS and Fintech and whatever, all these different areas of, you know, databases. And so you have sort of all of these past movements that are still have a long way to go. And then you have these really powerful new things layering on top. And so I think we're potentially entering. Yeah. And look within that, there's, I talk about a distinction in the book. what I call inside -out versus outside -in technology. So inside -out technologies or technologies that kind of come from the cathedral, they come from Stanford or Microsoft or Apple.

47:07It's the iPhone, it's Windows. I think AI is very much inside -out technology. It's come from Google and universities and places like OpenAI which were spent out of those incumbent technology companies, universities. And then there's outside -in technologies and now the historical classic examples of things like Linux and open source, the worldwide web is now inside in technology, it's kind of this hack -together thing of open source and collaborative movement, I think blockchains are outside in. And so I think we're entering a period where there's all of these very important things happening, all these prior things happening, and then there's really, as it has happened historically, there's the inside kind of cathedral stuff happening that gets a lot of attention.

47:54and I think it gets less attention and is less understood as the outside kind of outside in stuff. And all of the kind of weird fringe things, which is by the way where I've spent most of my career and I think is the most interesting, I'm not saying the other stuff isn't valuable, it's just not what I personally kind of want to work on. So yes, I think there are sort of woes and the acts and, you know, and Linus Torvalds and Tim Berners -Lee's all over right now. I don't know. It'll take a while before we can tell the whole story and understand what it all means. And just the scope and scale of the internet and technology has increased 100 fold probably.

48:42I remember people working on it. Of course, using it. We're talking about these people, these geniuses who really wrenched the world into their orbit and changed the way that things work. With a book like this, it's a big ideas book and there is a tendency for big ideas books to maybe get to abstract. You mentioned the human element, how reading history is so poignant because you learn about these experiences of people who lived these past lives that did amazing things. How do you keep the human element in this book? People care about people fundamentally. So how do you retain that to capture that sort of human interest and maybe engaging?

49:26Well, I tried whenever like a lot of the structure of the book is kind of, I'm not, well, I try not to be overly rigid about this, but I do try very hard to sort of alternate between kind of narrative telling stories that many of which, you know, I know from having been there or been, you know, at the time to then sort of providing more abstract lessons from those stories. And so I tried very hard to balance that and to really make that as relatable as possible. But it is an idea as well. It is fundamentally fun. It's not an air fiction or something. It's not an adventure story or something. There are a lot of ideas in there.

50:13But there's also a lot of history, a lot of stories, and a lot of specifics. And I'll tell you one thing that did it for me. Like you mentioned a few of your, the startups that you founded, and your experiences with them, and how that has kind of tracked the progression of the internet over time. Yeah, I know I was the founder of two companies. The first one was 2004, so a side advisor was a security company. And the kind of there, I mean, the really, really important thing to me was we were built on the open web. And so we went and rated websites and tried to provide kind of security warnings for users if they were dealing with somebody who was doing fishing or spyware.

50:54But very importantly, we didn't have to ask permission to do that. We could go and sort of the web was this open community on network and we could just build new pieces on top of it. And that allowed us to exist. It allowed us to be part of the solution in the end to, I don't know if it's solved, but it certainly has improved the security problems on the internet. Like we were part of that solution we were managed to be acquired by MacAfee and bundled into their software. It's actually our software became, is now very popular or a big product for them. But so that was very much in that kind of web too.

51:32I was in the Web 2 era, but it was piggybacking off of this Web 2 design. These open systems like the World Wide Web. With my second startup, it was an AI company, machine learning company called Hunch. We started in 2008 and was acquired by eBay in 2011. I think a couple of things. I think we were right about the long -term trend about AI. I think we were too early. But our bigger issue was that we kind of assumed that the Internet would stay open the way that had for my prior startup. And so we had used all of this sort of data that we'd crawled and analyzed. A little bit like OpenAI has done now from Twitter and other places.

52:13And those things started. It was kind of amazing. This was 15 years before OpenAI. You were going on a... Yeah, I mean, as they say, in tech, if you're early, the same as being wrong. But so I'm not... It was necessarily good that I was early. But we were dependent on a lot of other data sources. And that was right around when a lot of the data sources started really kind of pulling back. And so, in the end, we ended up selling a company to eBay partly because eBay had their own data and didn't need to use outside data. You talk a lot and you're early blogging about this platform risk, basically, before that became a real issue.

52:50Yeah, yeah. I've been blogging. I was, yeah, I mean, I cite myself in their once, and like, but I had a lot more examples in my blog where I was sort of obsessed with these issues of like the internet becoming consolidated starting and that's sort of blogging about this in 2009 and I have, you know, I don't know. It's been very consistent and very prescient. Yeah, no, I mean, it's funny. Like, yeah, it's not there's no, I could have, I didn't want to, I didn't think it would be appropriate for the reader, but like, there was a lot of the things in the book that I write had been writing literally since 2009.

53:22Yeah. And I was worried. Some people they approach this topic and they see, oh, here's another tech investor. They're going to see the same thing that happened with Web 2, is going to happen with Web 3. I've seen that this other day. Why did I even, why do I work on the internet? Why is that? I picked the internet as my profession. I was very attracted to the ideals of the internet, the 90s ideals of the internet, that it would be this open, democratically -owned, permissionless system, and that you would have all of these kinds of, you know, you would have open APIs and collaborative development and anyone in the world could put up a website and build something, you know, get distribution and get users and build a business, support themselves.

54:06To me, that was what was special about the internet. Like in what made it different than broadcast TV or radio or other form newspapers or other forms of media, right? It was open, it was democratic. it was and I started worrying about that when I started blogging like 2009 -ish. I think it got really bad. I go through this history in the book a little bit like 2012 or 13. It happened to come along right when what I eventually now believe is the potential antidote to it, which is you know new systems build on blockchains, which is what got me interested in that. I think a lot of finance personally.

54:48I do have a section on it there. I think it's an important area for blockchains, but it's one of many. And honestly, I had to kind of force myself to write it because I'm just not interested in finance. But I get you're an investor of venture capital companies. Yeah, but it's sort of, you don't really do spreadsheets in venture capital, I think like that. But it's finance in some sense, but not sort of like trading and interest and all these other CNBCs, the stuff on CNBC, like it's just not. Anyways, that's how I came to it from that kind of perspective. And that's, I think it's a very, I think it's maybe, look, I mean, in the bad cases, maybe over, I go to the stats of the book, there's like five companies that essentially control the internet.

55:36I think it's getting worse. Like Twitter now deprecates your, from my told all the social networks doing this now, and the application posts of you even link out. They've now moved from this mode of optimizing, you know, how many people they have in the money to making sure you're just completely staying there wall garden. I mean, it's so the attract extract cycle that you lay out in the book, which I think that that one concept, understanding that is like seeing the code in the matrix. Yeah, there's a, yeah, there's two you referencing them in this early detection of the book called Corporate Networks and talking about sort of the logic of how, this basically I think a very predictable kind of logic to how these centralized network services like Twitter and Facebook, how they evolve, and they start off attracting, meaning they've sort of become, join us, we'll do all these wonderful things, and then over time the logic switches sort of the incentive switch, and this I'm going through, and this is really like, this is not like some cultural thing, like it's literally the, if you actually just analyze how network affects work, the incentive switch is some point where it's more important for them to extract money from the network than it is to attract compliments the network.

56:41And it happens over and over and over. It happens over and over. It's repeated cycle. People keep falling forward, unfortunately. It's going to happen now again with AI and new generation will fall for this again. They'll build on top of these other platforms and then suddenly things will switch and they'll learn the lesson hard way. I'm hoping they'll learn the lesson easy way. You can read them. Look, they may learn it the hard way. But in its, by the way, I need it's about to get much worse, AI will make it, like I'm pro AI, I think it's a great technology, it's very important, but it's a central, it's generally a centralizing force.

57:12It rewards companies with lots of data and money and compute and everything else, and that will further favor income. So I think it's, you know, a situation. So I got into the internet for its open democratic kind of, and anyone could go and build a website. I think that's a serious risk at this point. I think blockchains are the only kind of credible way to turn that. I go through that in detail in the book. that's what the book's about. And that is what kind of motivates me at this point. There's another group that has a similar concern as you and they're interested in decentralization, but they are not on board with crypto or blockchains.

57:49This is the sort of a massive on folks, like the Blue Sky Protocol. Vitalik, he had a post, Vitalik the creator of Ethereum, he had a post earlier this year called Make A Theorem Cypher Punk Again. And I wrote down a quote that he said, he said, there's a large ideological rift where significant parts of the non -blockchain decentralization community sees the crypto world as a distraction and not as a kindred spirit and powerful ally. And that line really stuck out to me because it's true. And how do you bridge those two forces that should be allied? Yeah. They are fighting against one another.

58:24Yeah, that's a great question. And I think it's unfortunate. I think they do like the blockchain people like me and the Talik and the kind of protocol, I call them protocol networks in the book. The folks who sort of pro -RSS and then there's a bunch of new things like the activity pub is this sort of social interoperability protocol. Mastodon uses Facebook threads and stuff. Yeah, look, I love those things in theory. I've been on the internet 25 years and I've supported these protocols. The reality is there's two protocol networks that are seated in the history of the internet. SMTP and HTTP email on the web.

59:03Both of them were started in the 1980s and grew in the 80s and 90s before there were actual corporate network as I call them competitors, centralized networks. The closest one since then that has come to as exceeding as RSS, and RSS failed in the end. I mean, it still exists, but it's failed to, it's a tiny fraction of the user base of things like Facebook and Twitter. The reality is we've now had 25 -ish years of maybe more, 30 years of protocol networks being developed. I go through in the book, there's literally hundreds of them, and none of them is succeeded. So at some point, after 30 years of failure, I would submit, that you should consider maybe there's something wrong with the approach.

59:54And I think the thing wrong with the approach is I think protocol networks are great from the societal benefit point of view. What they're not great from is features and funding. They have no way features they're limited. They ask you to do things like go get your own domain name. Domain names like go pay dollar for domain name. That's not a mainstream consumer behavior. consumer mainstream. I'm a developer type. I'm an, you know, an internet person. I have a domain name. Ask someone in the street in New York. They have no idea why they would ever buy one. They don't want to buy one and they don't want to pay a dollar a year for to use internet service.

1:00:28I mean people are so accustomed to things being free. It's never, they're never going to, it's never going to have anything that requires stuff like that is never going to. And then funding like, look, Google has, I think it's up to, if you count contractors, I think they have 600 ,000 employees. Like, Facebook, well, I don't know what it is, 1200, they say they invest and they spend massive amounts of money on subsidizing these networks. So like all of this free stuff you do, you have much money across the host that video of YouTube and things, they subsidize it in a way that a protocol network can never do.

1:01:01Right, a protocol, like if you have a new video protocol to compute with YouTube, you don't have, you would need, I don't know, probably 10 billion to start, just to match the subsidies, you would need a hundred million a year, absolute minimum, to support a top flight development team. Look, it's been 25. I'm all for those. These activity pubs, everything else in theory. In practice, it's been 25 years we've been trying this. I've been part of some of these and they haven't worked. So like to me, what a blockchain in many ways is a super evolved form of these old protocol networks where they have, I like to say blockchain networks have the societal benefits of protocol networks like HTTPS and TPP, but the competitive advantage is the corporate networks like Facebook and Twitter.

1:01:48They have a blockchain's having inherent funding mechanism, they have a bunch of software features that let them, that let them compete with some kind of modern user experiences of the centralized systems. So, my mind, they are further evolved, more likely to be to lead to real competitors, but share many of the same values as other movements. I wonder what it's going to take for people to see that vision and to see the potential there. Fred Wilson, who read and reviewed your book, he had some very nice things to say about it. He had a post recently where he said that he believes 2024, there's going to be a chat GPT moment for crypto.

1:02:38That there's going to be this breakthrough moment for the technology that it suddenly everybody's going to realize, wow, it works, it works really well, it's amazing. And it's just going to flip a switch for people. Do you, like, is it going to take that? And by the way, do you think that that is going to happen in 2024? That's a pretty bold. Yeah, I don't know if it will happen. And if it will happen that soon. I think, look, I think AI, those are very interesting case study. And that one is, so the first neural network paper was a call of a kits in 1943, so it's literally 80 years before chat GPT.

1:03:10Long, long history, tons of money went into it. 80 years. I can tell you that like I started as I mentioned earlier, a company in 2008, there were a lot of AI companies started over many decades. And I think a lot of people would argue it didn't really work until 2023. Did you think you were late at the time, by the way, in 2008, when you started it? Or did you think you were earlier? It's a good question. You know, I mean, I thought it's right timing, but I was obviously early. But the thing people didn't know, you know, neural networks were not the most effective method in 2008. They literally, I mean, people thought they were cool in theory and the brain work that way.

1:03:49But empirically, they just didn't have the best results. Now, what was interesting about neural networks right is they happened to take advantage of the same hardware that video games did, GPUs. And so, when ended up happening, of course, is that, you know, companies like Nvidia investing in GPUs for the purpose of video games ended up having this sort of spillover benefit to neural networks, and then it turned out as neural networks got to some level of scale. They improved very, very dramatically. By the way, this is like the perfect encapsulation of your idea of the next big thing starts out looking like a toy.

1:04:22Yeah, and it took 80 years. And by the way, I remember when we were, I might sort of, we called it machine learning, AI was a bad word. That's what happens in the sort of pre -chat GPT moments of technology. You have all these debates, these kind of meaningless debates in my mind of returnology. You see that in crypto today, people say, oh, you shouldn't call it web three, you should called this, I just, in the book, I just use descriptive words like blockchains and I try to kind of sidestep the tribal battles. And the end, I don't think it matters. It's just what matters as products and technology.

1:04:49Like you can have different names, you have different presentations of it, different ways of explaining it. What ends up mattering is the products, I think. And so I think Fred Wilson is exactly right. Like at some point, there will be a chat GPT moment. There will be a breakthrough. I don't know when exactly it'll be. I've learned that I think I've been pretty good at predicting what happens on the internet. I've been pretty bad at predicting exactly when it happens. So I try to put pretty wide error bars around my time predictions these days. So I don't know exactly when it'll happen. But that's actually an interesting point because the timeline of a book is so like, it's so long, it's a sluggish process.

1:05:25It comes out like you finished writing it months ago, but it takes a while to actually get it out in the world. You know, how do you future proof you're writing when you're writing about something so fast moving like the tech industry. Yeah, it's hard. And, you know, in the book, I think specifically, like, look, I mean, it's a balance to you because you don't want to go to the, obviously, the more, in some sense, the more abstract you go, the more time proof it is. But if you go to abstract, it's hard to read. And you want to use examples. Like, you want to use particular, like, name particular products, for example.

1:05:54I, like, I read a lot of business books. I've like, I do remember rereading Cross in the Cows, originally, which is now 30 years old. and he talks about Palmpilot and it really kind of hurts the book. Frankly, these examples look so kind of old. Because inevitably, new startups will pop up, some will do better, some good ones will go downward. And so you'll just get some of that wrong and that will date the book more. And so you've got to be a little careful to avoid things that are kind of timely like that. But at the same time, you need to just give examples. So you can't just be too abstract.

1:06:27So that's one thing. I mean, the AI stuff in particular, like when I started writing it was sort of pre -chat GPT. This was before chat GPT. I didn't actually, and I thought I may have to change more of that, but I didn't actually that much. I think, like I was talking, like I talk about this idea of kind of meeting a new covenant between creators. Yeah. And so there's been like a long time implicit covenant, sort of economic covenant between, for example, websites that provide content and search engines that consume that content and share that content. and there's sort of the covenant is, we'll let you use some of the content if you send traffic back.

1:06:59And it's possible the new AI systems will change that covenant because they won't be sending traffic back. They'll just give the answer. So what's the new covenant, things like that? And so I guess, I don't know, that feels like it's, like that was a timely thing that also I think will last for some period of time. I mean, at some point it'll work itself out, but I think that one probably has a longer term kind of time horizon. You've got seven applications in the back of the book for potential uses of crypto, demonstrating its potential and its utility. If you had to pick one, what's your favorite of the bunch in there, which one sticks out the most to you?

1:07:39Well, there's sort of two dimensions in that question. There's kind of what would have the greatest impact on the world and then what do I just think is sort of cool and luxury? Because like, for example, the finance section, And if you could figure out a way to dramatically improve and lower payments throughout the world and lower emittance costs, that could have a massive economic impact on lots and lots of people, right? Who pay seven percent now or whatever they pay to send money back home or something. So, you know, things like that, I think. Yeah, instantly life changing. I think if we figure out the right way to kind of let creators use NFTs in a way to sort of build direct relationship with their audience and sell them digital merchandise.

1:08:22I think that could have a transformative effect on how much money creators make on the internet. So things like that. Now, I think just from an intellectually coolness point of view, I really love this idea of what I call collaborative storytelling. Collaborative storytelling is basically the idea that you get a community of people together. They collaboratively develop kind of a universe, or sort of think of Harry Potter or Marvel movies or something, but their own originally universe. And then they are rewarded for their contribution, proportionate to how much they contribute through tokens, which they, and then they then also can go out and continue to develop the world, fork the world, add new characters, evangelize the world, build all around it, and then that kind of community, should imagine them coming together, they have some amount of token and in that community can make money in various ways too by licensing out the IP to make movies and cartoons and some of that money flows back proportionately to the user.

1:09:26So why do I like that idea so much? It's so different from the typical media enterprise of like, you know, have a death grip on IP and just like, you can lie that out for days. And it's, and it's, and it's great about this idea is it solves a number of problems. So like, one is Hollywood has a problem, which is like, they just have, you know, we have this problem of all these sequels, all these super -grown movies. And if you ask them why, it's because it costs, it's so expensive to market new IP, right? It costs hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to create some new narrative universe.

1:09:56Okay, on the flip side, you have all of these really active, creative, enthusiastic fan bases who want to be a bigger party and who are up there saying, hey, I think Star Wars should do this, I think Marvel should do this. Who want to be part of it, who write a lot of it in times very good fan fiction, right? So you have this very active fan community, but the fan community wants to be participants but is only, in a lot of ways, feels left out. And of course has no way to make money doing this and it's sort of left on the sidelines. So what's so cool about this idea is it kind of brings these two things together.

1:10:29And so you imagine, and it takes, look at harnesses, like you think about something like I kind of talked a little bit dismissively about Dogecoin before and then it's a meme coin, but there's There's also some really positive about George Coimbe, which I mentioned in the book, which is that it's the power of this community. Millions of people who all feel this sense of being united around this token and who go out and evangelize it and, you know, Bitcoin's the most extreme example of this, where, you know, it's just sort of probably at this point, many tens of millions of people who are true believers, and they spend all this time blogging and writing and tweeting and going on TV and doing everything else.

1:11:04And so what if you took that energy and harnessed it and put it into this narrative universe. You have these people who are passionate about it, who help create it, who fork it, but then who also evangelize it. And that solves that marketing problem. Right, there's no Bitcoin incorporated going out there putting up billboards. That's right. The distributed community is all. But then it also creates like this economic model for these users, right? So these people can be anywhere in the world. They don't have to be in LA, they don't have to know people. It can be just the same way that Wikipedia kind of democratized the kind of the left brain.

1:11:33This democratizes the right brain, right? like the creative side. And you can imagine it's applied to all sorts of other creative areas. And so you take these folks who right now are kind of left out of the internet economics. There isn't really a model to be a writer on the internet outside of going in, you know, TLA or some other hub and joining the traditional world, media world. And so this provides kind of an internet -native way for those folks to pursue creative activities. I think generally, like we are in, I read a lot about this in the book. I think we're in a lot of, I think I haven't done the word count, but I think probably creators and creativity are up at the top of the word count of the book.

1:12:19A lot of my feeling is that this should be a goal nearer for creators. You have five billion people who have smartphones and you can push a button and instantly reach those people. And people are as passionate or more passionate than ever is about music and stories and everything else. And the only reason that is not a golden period, I believe. And I think I'll write, argue this in detail in the book, is because these five or six giant intermediaries inserted themselves in between on that relationship, between the creator and the audience, and took mostly the economics. And if we can figure out a way to bypass those five or six people companies, we can transform the economics.

1:12:59So that's really in a lot of ways the theme I write about, right? And that's one reason I like that idea is it's a really interesting clever way to start to do that. So to bypass those big platforms. And I would recommend the Take Rates chapter for anybody interested in understanding that idea. Yeah, the Take Rates is sort of the toll taken. Literally, it's a word that means a percentage of money that flows into the network taken by the network operator. And one of the remarkable things that Facebook and Twitter and other companies have pulled off is they basically have a hundred percent, and close to 100 % take raise, which is unheard of in any other area of the economy, and I think is really kind of destroy the economics of the internet for most people.

1:13:39What will make this book a success in your view? Yeah, I think the main thing I'd like to do is, well, a couple of things. I think so one I really want, I really hope it will be the book that people are working this industry. A lot of people that work on blockchains and crypto have told me that they can't explain. They're very excited about it. They know why they're excited about it, but they have trouble articulating that excitement to, for sharing that excitement with family and friends and prospective employees. I really wrote this book hoping to be in the book that this is the book that you can get to those people to explain to them.

1:14:19So it's a concise encapsulation of why I'm spending my life doing this, right, or anyone who is. So I think that's sort of step one. I really hope it'll be that. The initial signs are positive. I don't know, it's like 30 to 40 folks in the industry read it and they seem very excited about it and a lot of them are buying it for their company now, like in our portfolio and other places. So it's early, but hopefully that will be the case. And then I think the next wrong around that would be, you know, I sort of my mental model, like for bet for unfortunately crypto and blockchains have become somewhat politicized.

1:14:55And there is a set of people out there who, you know, who have decided that anything involving them is evil. Because of course, on the other side, a set of people who love them. And there's also this weird tribalism within crypto. So people love on the certain blockchains, like Bitcoin. All right. But then I think 80 % of the people of the world, I think don't have an opinion. And in fact, we've had surveys and other things which just kind of demonstrate that. They're like, yeah, I've heard about it, I don't really know. I would like to reach some set of those people and say, hey, this is really promising.

1:15:27And here's why and maybe you should be open -minded to what getting involved in some way, whether it be as a developer or entrepreneur, or just simply as a user, or participant in these networks. And so I hope that my ideal ambitious goal would be for that kind of meme to spread and for people to kind of understand what the kind of productive use cases of blockchains are and not just the speculative use cases and for that to sort of become part of the broader cultural conversation. Yeah, I mean, I'll say my favorite review that's come in so far has been from Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired. Yeah, he said, this book changed my mind.

1:16:08I know. And I, you know, I said, I know Kevin, I'm a of course, a huge fan of his his all his life and I mean all of his career and read all of his books. I had a thriller of your meeting a few times and it was always frustrating because he kind of agreed with everything but didn't agree with that. And so yes, for him to say that, I know he wasn't, he wouldn't have, he would have just said thank you for saying that book or whatever he wouldn't have, he would have politely not said that. So for him to say that and to let us put on the back of the book and everything, I agree with you. That was great.

1:16:36Yeah. I think you get a quorum of that of enough minds changed of that really makes this book of success. If you had to write a second book, what would it be about? I've noticed. I thought the process was kind of fun and it was painful but fun. But to be honest, like, I don't know, I don't have any plans, but I did like the process. So if I had the right thing, I would do it again. I will say when I was writing this, I was like, on the negative side, it's so frustrating how no one seems to understand this thing. I have to write this book. On the positive side, like how often in your career would you you ever have the opportunity where there's like a major tech trend and the delta between how I see it, which I think is the correct way to see it, and the sort of the popular view of it is so great.

1:17:25It's such a wide delta. In some ways, it was sort of the opportunity of a career to be able to try to close that gap. It just doesn't happen. With AI, people in AI, I think it's great, but the rest of the world thinks it's great. I mean, there's some difference in sure in a lot of details and things, but generally, it's not that there's not that much of a gap. Here, the gap is so broad between the truth and the perception. And so that was just a very rare opportunity to try to be the one who closes that gap. And so it would be hard to imagine that happening again. But I hope the space evolves, maybe, and I can write a sequel.

1:17:58Like, you know, like, more stuff happens. I don't know. I have some other ideas on, like, software and innovation and history of software and things, but I had nothing planned right now. So that leads me to my last question for you, which is, okay, pitch yourself 15 years into the future. Yeah. We've had, you know, this computing cycle has gone along and you're thinking about a sequel to Read, Write, Own. What is the word that captures that next internet era after Read, Write, Own? If you had to pick one word, I've always thought of it as kind of a little bit of a thesis, antithesis synthesis, you know, going back to your philosophy.

1:18:35Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit like the, you know, sort of, because the read era was the protocol network era and it sort of just it really showed the great societal benefits of that architecture and then the corporate era, the next year, a kind of, you know, broadened and democratized public went from demarcatizing permission, it's demarcatizing publishing and and really extended the kind of ease of use and and features of the internet and then the third era kind of to me brings kind of combines the, the only or a combines the best of the reason, right? And so if you believe that, there is no, actually, it's the end of history.

1:19:10It's the end of history, but I mean, if you had to, I think the next obvious vector would be sort of this very deep immersion. I do think it will happen. I know it's a cliche, so sci -fi cliche, but it's going to happen, which is people kind of living inside of these metaphors with full, you know, it's a three -dimensional immersion and everything else. So, I don't know, the AI stuff too is for inching, does that lead to some other kind of ear of the internet like that too? I don't know. Chris, thanks so much for sharing this conversation. And everybody else, this book is on sale and you can buy it at wherever you buy your books.