Bankless - 207 - Read. Write. Own. | Chris Dixon

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

✨ DEBRIEF | Ryan & David unpacking the episode: https://www.bankless.com/read-write-own-debrief  ------ Chris Dixon of a16z returns to the podcast today to discuss the new book he authored to explain his mental model for understand crypto: Read. Write. Own. Chris is one of the most articulate people we know at explaining crypto - particularly from the lens of crypto as an evolution of the internet. ------ Listen On Your Favorite Podcast Player: https://bankless.cc/Podcast  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2  ⁠ 🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo  🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  ------ Resources: Chris Dixon https://x.com/cdixon?s=20  Read Write Own https://www.amazon.com/Read-Write-Own-Building-Internet/dp/0593731387  Mental Models for Web3 https://youtu.be/jezH_7qEk50?si=4pk8NRWF69HMRFuR  a16z Episode https://youtu.be/RXHITeaGB8Q?si=NoiqjNiHzmZxFIae  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠ 

Welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Guys, notable venture capitalist Chris Dixon on the podcast today. He wrote down his mental model for understanding crypto in a new book called Read, Write, Own. It'll be out today or tomorrow. It's an absolutely fantastic overview to understand crypto. So there's really two lenses to explain crypto to people.

I think there's first the money lens. We've covered that in episodes that we've done with Lynn Alden and others. And there's also the lens of the internet. And this is the episode you're about to listen to with Chris, because both models are correct. And I think Chris uses the lens of the internet to explain crypto in a way that is unique and incredibly helpful as this third technology generation of the internet. A few takeaways for you.

Number one, we go through the three eras of. the internet. Number two, we talk about why blockchains are like computers. In fact, they are computers. Number three, how crypto will revolutionize this whole internet thing. Number four, why tokens are valuable. And number five, why crypto is now on the cusp of its iPhone moment. We had this episode with Chris Dixon recorded on a old bankless podcast episode in 2021, where he came on and gave us the read, right own thesis. And I think it was one of the most effective podcast we ever recorded to pill people and get them into crypto and understand the power of crypto back in the top of the frothiness of the 2021 bull market. And content like this, I think,

is really valuable to have when crypto gets really chaotic and hectic and, you know, tokens are flying everywhere because it reminds us about the base principles about why we're here. And Chris decided that that mental model worked so well that he needed to put it into a book coming in the tail end of 2022 and into 2023, I think the whole world needed to be reminded about the power of crypto and how all of these emergent phases of the internet are necessary for a better version of the technologies

that they all inspire. And so I think the significance of this episode is just a good reminder for crypto natives who probably listened to that episode in bankless history, but also, you know, maybe should listen to it again, you know, two plus years later into the future as Chris has been able to refine his thoughts and articulate them better.

Yeah, I think 2022, a lot of us asked why are we still here. And this is basically Chris's answer for this. He looked into his soul and looked at what was going on in the world and he reestablished why he was here. And it's all chronicled in this episode. You're absolutely going to love it.

We will be right back with episode with Chris Dixon. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including Cracken, which is our number one recommended entry port into crypto.

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Arbitrum orbit lets you take your project to new heights. All of these technologies leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum. Experience Web3 development the way it was always meant to be. Secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free. Visit arbitram.com.com and get your journey started in one of the largest Ethereum communities. Bankless Nation, we are joined by Chris Dixon. He is a general partner at A16Z, where he leads all crypto investments. He's also one of the most articulate people we know at explaining crypto. That's why he's on the episode today, particularly from the lens of crypto as a revolution, not just of money systems, but a revolution of compute, a revolution of the internet. And he's written all of this down in an extremely

accessible book that I just picked up and read. It's called read, write, own. So we're going to explore the theme of that book in today's episode. Welcome back to Bankless. How you doing, Chris? I'm great. Ryan, thanks for having me. All right. So last time we talked, and I know you've been on Bankless a couple of times, but last time we talked, it was pre-the-absolute chaos of 2022. So it was like, it was like May 22. We had the Tara Luna thing. We were like, what was that? But we didn't yet have FDX. We didn't yet have all of the crypto funds going down. So I just want your take as we go into this episode. How did you weather that storm? How was 2022 for you? How did it compare to other downturns? Yeah. No, it's a good question.

I mean, that was a very bad time. There were a bunch of bad actors, as we now know, who did, you know, some very bad things, including criminal things. And I think, you know, beyond the, obviously the direct harm that they caused to the consumers and all the other kind of victims of those, you know, crimes. There was also just the kind of collateral damage on the whole kind of, you know, crypto, blockchain movement that we all work on, you know, which is frankly frustrating. I've been working on this for a long time. I believe in it very deeply. And I feel like there's a set of people who've come along who kind of co-opt this movement that I think is a very important movement and I think it's an idealistic movement. And I think those folks co-opt it. And I think kind of contort it and give us all a bad name. And that also then leads to this regulatory backlash. So, I mean, frankly, it was very frustrating. You know, honestly, like, I forgot when was that, like, early 2022? Or was that right? Or I may get in the timeline right? Like, when was the FTX thing? Yeah. It was late 2022. Yeah. Look, and I reflected on it. And I said, you know, why am I doing this? Like, I've been, I've sold two companies. I've worked in venture capital. Like I could, you know,

like a lot of VCs pivot to AI times like this, you know, I obviously didn't. But, like, I could do other things. And, you know, including, like, I like writing. They have a lot of interests. Like, it's just, I don't have to be kind of going around and working on this. And so I reflected on that. And, you know, what kept coming back to me was this idea that kind of the gap between what I saw, the potential I saw for this movement. I think you guys see this.

I think others that we work with, like in our portfolio see this. The gap that I saw and sort of the public image was just so incredibly wide. You know, and I guess in my. negative moments, I kind of saw that as frustrating. But then I tried to flip it around and be optimistic and say, you know what, that's actually an incredible opportunity. How often in one's career do you get the opportunity to close that gap? And so I said, you know, instead of sitting here and kind of feeling sorry for myself or whatever, I'm going to write a book. And so that was, you know, middle of 2022. I set out to do that. You know, I also did it because I wanted to test myself.

Because I think, you know, I think it's Richard Feynman who has that great quote. You know, if you can't explain it to a, you know, a 10-year-old. You don't really understand it. I'm butchering the quote, but, like, I do believe that. Like, you know, it's common in this space to kind of, I think, use crutch words, like decentralization. I mean, that's a real word, but people often use it as a way to kind of skip over explaining the details, right? Or we say things like, hey, the casino bootstraps the, you know, utility. But like, well, how does that actually work? Right. Like, what are the details and, like, explain it to, so what I said to myself is what would be an interesting challenge to sort of imagine, let's say, a friend of mine said, imagine a smart high school

student, you know, who doesn't have any background in technology, but they're, you know, open-minded and smart. And can you explain from kind of first principles why this is an important movement, you know, how it works, how it will evolve, why it should matter, you know, why shouldn't it be banned, right? Why is this societally beneficial, right? And so for me, it was, I think, a multiple kind of motivations, like one was to challenge myself. Like, can I really prove this to myself? You know, writing things, you know, Jeff Bezos, I think, talks about this that the reason they don't allow PowerPoints and you're forced to write things kind of discursively in memo form is that it forces you to really think and fill in the gaps, right? And so for me, partly, it was frankly just like

a personal exercise. Like, can I do this and fill in all the gaps? But it was also, I kind of flipped it around. And like, this is an incredible opportunity because, you know, I have the opportunity to write a book that helps kind of take something that I think of as probably I think there's two really important tech movements happening right now, AI and blockchain crypto. And AI, I think is very well understood. You know, I talk about this in the book. I think there's what I call Inside Out and Outside In Technologies we can talk about later. But essentially, it's a technology coming from the establishment and it's well understood.

Like everyone gets the idea that if you have like a super smart robot, like, you know, it could be useful. whereas, you know, blockchains and crypto are not understood. And so I sort of flipped it around my mind. I said, you know, this is a really interesting opportunity to do that. So I, you know, like I have my day job, although, you know, in downturns, that does slow down somewhat. And I have a great team to help me. So I spent, so it was like, I guess summer of 2022, I set out to do it. And I was, of course, like everyone embarking on a project incredibly naive about how much work it would take.

I was like, oh, I'll whip it out in two months. You know, fast forward basically 15 months later, I was finishing. the thing up, went through many, many drafts. I basically was on a schedule of I would get up. I mean, and I'm not complaining. I actually really had a great time and loved this, but I got up probably at six or seven every day, you know, for a year and worked three or four hours every morning on it. And, you know, really at one point, you know, took some time off and one point, like, rented an isolated house and, like, did a lot of work on it. A lot of work. And, you know, a lot of it is, it's sort of the Mark Twain quote. If I had, I think it was Mark Twain.

If I had time, I would have written a shorter letter. Like, I really, really, really tried to compress concepts in a simple way. I cut out, you know, the book is 230 pages main text. I cut out at least that much also, like, 230 pages. As you know, I think, you know, Ryan, I don't go very deep into technology kind of details. That's on purpose because I'm really trying to appeal to the general reader. I could, you know, if there's demand for it, I could write a sequel where I kind of go into the kind of more of the tech and stuff. but if people are interested or, you know, but, you know, it's really meant to be kind of this general reader kind of thing. So, so look, that, that was for me a great kind of both project. I think it was, I learned a lot, but it was also kind of a coping mechanism. It was not a fun time.

Look, we needed that coming out of 2020. Yeah. And then, like, even the last year, kind of downturn and, you know, government's turning against us. I mean, David and I certainly felt that. It was kind of a time for reflections, like, what are we doing here? And, like, do we want to stay here? And, like, do we want to stay here? And, and, Are we going to take this back and clean up after the party? So like from my part, Chris, and I know David feels the same way, we're glad you doubled down, man. And what you've written here is an extremely accessible kind of explanation of crypto. And it's not apologism, you know, so much, although there are elements of that. Like, you get into some defenses here, but it's just like, hey, let's talk about why this is important. And the existential question is, is crypto good for humanity or not? And that's what I think this book tries to answer.

So, Chris, why don't we just dive right in? Because I want to make this an episode where people can send their friends to and their family too. When they're like, what are you doing in crypto? Like in that industry of scams? I mean, we got a lot of that in 2023. But anyway, if I could add, Ryan, I mean, that's really what I want the book to be is I do think there's value for folks like you. I mean, you guys are deep in the space.

You know a lot. You know a lot more than this in the book. I do hope that there are mental models and ways of explaining that are appealing to folks like you. And by the way, I wrote the book very deliberately in sort of three to four page, a blog post like chunks. So like, for example, you guys might skip the blockchain section, but might find some of the other sections on, you know, there's a part on regulation, a part on different applications. So it's meant to be skippable just so you know. But really the

core audience, what I really am hoping is it becomes the book that you give to your, exactly what you're describing, what you give to your friends and family to explain it. I've been going to DC a lot. Like I literally every meeting, they're like, what books should I read? And I don't have a great answer. I mean, there's great books. I just want to say, there's great books about crypto from a like monetary economic standpoint. Yes. There's a lot of, they're very like Austrian economics, Bitcoin. That's not what D.C. wants to read.

Well, and look, and it's just, honestly, I come out of from a different perspective. I know you did. I come out of more from the internet perspective. There's that. And look, like, there's great books on like, you know, there's the, what is it called, the infinite machine on Ethereum. There's a great book on Coinbase. But to my mind, there wasn't sort of an up-to-date, comprehensive book that's like,

why is this important societally? and be specific and no hand-waving, no, you know, like, let me go through the details and explain it to you. And honestly, just sort of walk you through my journey, right? Like, I was a Web 1 and then a Web 2 person, and it was going pretty well, you know, like Andrews and Horowitz, we've done well. Like, why did I switch to this? Like, it's because I believe what I wrote in this book. And so I wanted to share that with other people. So anyway, sorry to interrupt you, but I...

Look, that's the preamble, okay? So let's get right to the goods here. And so, like, you start with kind of this introduction. And I'm wondering, Chris, if you could kind of tell us a story, tell us a story of maybe the early internet as we explore these verbs, read, write, own. And what I like about this is your framing of this, it's, in the beginning, there was the internet and the internet was good, right? There's this sense of a paradise lost that we had something special in the early days,

and it got sidetracked. So maybe you could start us off there. Tell us the story of the early internet. What was different? Well, I mean, so, and I go through this in a pretty rapid, but I think, you know, hopefully helpful way in the book. But, you know, the Internet had its origins in government and academia. And for a variety of reasons, it began as this open, decentralized platform, right?

So anyone could go and, for example, put up a website and you could create art or make a game or start a business. And the key feature was you own that website and you had a direct relationship with your audience, right? So if people came to your website, you could make it free and just a cool thing or you could put ads up or you could, you know, sell stuff. And by the way, Jeff Bezos decided to sell stuff. Larry Page decided to put up ads. Like, this is why all this stuff happened, right? Like, the 90s were, like, happened in the sort of golden age of innovation on the internet, 90s and early 2000s, because these entrepreneurs knew you could put something

up, and if you built it, you owned it. Like, you didn't pay 30% to Apple. You didn't pay 100% to Facebook. But, like, if you fast forward to the platforms today, like, it's very, very different now. Like, back then, you had true ownership. You owned it. You controlled it. Like, yeah, you could lose your website if you broke the law or did it.

other kind of really bad things. But otherwise, like, you had this little plot of land, right? You own something. And it was this sort of this collective bottoms up. I kind of liken it in the book to a city of like this sort of organically growing city, you know, I'm in New York right now. Like, I love New York and I love how it's organic and it's bottom up. And people have little plots of land and there's parks and there's public space and private space and they interact together. And that's what the early internet was like. And look, that's why I got into it personally. Like I was also reflecting on this as I was writing the book. Like, I don't know if I would have been in business, honestly. I'm not in a sort of naturally a business person. I was in academia. I was in a PhD program.

I got into business into tech, honestly, because of the internet and these ideals. I was like, this is amazing, right? That you could sort of unite all of humanity in this global information network in this way that's sort of this owned by everybody. There was no company behind. There's no one controlling it. By the way, that wasn't a fait accompli for those who really dig into the history. There were companies that were trying to own it like Microsoft and Disney and others, but thank God for the kind of open source folks and the open protocol people who won out on that. But anyways, fast forward today, the Internet has essentially, by all the stats, has gotten consolidated around roughly five companies. So, you know, this is Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, et cetera.

You know, it's the top, I think it's 95% of searches are, you know, the top 1% of search engines, top 1% of social networks and 95% of the traffic. The 50% of NASDAX market cap is those top five companies up from 25% a decade ago. Across the board, you look at all the stats, traffic, money, you know, the top five social networks. It works made on $150 billion last year in revenue. You know, that was 95% of the revenue-bated in social networking. You know, so it's just across the board. We are very close to a situation where the Internet went from this open permissionless democratically owned system to something that looks more like old-style broadcast TV

where you have ABC, CBS, and NBC, which I think is a very disappointing outcome. And in fact, I would go so far as to say I consider, like, a lot of the work I've done on the Internet, honestly, kind of a failure if that's where we end up. This is a very disappointing outcome. And so then what do you do about it? You could imagine doing regulatory things about it. And in theory, that's great. I don't see any actual plausible movement towards that.

You know, simple stuff like the Apple App Store, which is clearly, you know, a huge issue for startup. And clearly, I think, an abuse of monopoly power. Are you following, by the way, that Epic versus Apple battle right now? Yeah, and Epic basically lost a thing. Now Apple's doing this very cynical workaround. And it's because, so for folks don't know, it's because Epic just wanted to deploy a payment system inside Fortnite. And Apple's like, nah, you can't.

It has to go through our Apple payment system. And we get 30% commission on those transactions, right? My partner, Mark Andreessen says he doesn't think he could launch, you know, Netscape today, right? You couldn't imagine if you launch an app that said you can open any other app in the world, including all sorts of crazy stuff. Like, that just would clearly be outside of the bounds. So like, we've dramatically narrowed the kind of Overton window of innovation because of Apple's policies.

Anyway, that's a separate topic. But like, theoretically, this problem I'm describing of like sort of this strong consolidation internet. Theoretically, they're regulatory solutions to it. People have proposals like data portability and other things. I haven't seen any serious efforts towards those things. And as we see it with the Apple response yesterday, these companies are very clever and able to work around these kinds of regulatory things. I'm not optimistic about that approach. The other approach is new technologies, right? And I think that the only credible and by far the most important one are blockchains and the network's built on top. And so, you know, that to me is sort

of the broad motivation here is can we build new systems, new social networks, new games, new financial systems, new, you know, just across the board, every kind of internet service you can imagine. Can we build new ones that are able to compete with these what I call corporate networks, the Facebooks, Twitters, et cetera, but have the societal benefits that we saw on the early internet. And that's what I see is the promise of blockchains. Okay. The framing of this is interesting. I think we want to get into it. So you mentioned protocol networks and then you mentioned corporate networks. And I think you also mentioned blockchain networks there. Yeah. And that is kind of like a mental model you use throughout the book. And

roughly corresponds to the three verbs of the title of the book, read, right, own. That's right. That's right. To like outline these three eras. I'm wondering if we could take these kind of one by one in a bit more detail, right? So the first is we just did an overview of the history of the internet and where it's gotten off course. It's like this centralized, now it's permission, it's gate capped. Like, what are we doing here? This is not the internet of the 90s. I'm wondering if you could kind of take us now that we've looked at this in broad strokes. Take us through kind of like the history of protocol networks as they were. And like, again, what was so great about them? And like, what were they missing? Maybe RSS is a good example of this. And how did corporate networks kind of, you know,

creep in here? But also give us the framework here, protocol, corporate and blockchain. Yeah. And let me just say on terminology, like it'll sound a little funny to some people because like in the blockchain world, we refer to networks as protocols. That would obviously, in the context of my book, be confusing. So I mentioned this in the book. So I sort of call them, just to be super clear, protocol networks. I'm referring to things like the web and email, HTTP and SMTP, kind of the original Web 1 protocols.

Like the 90s Internet. Yeah, the 90s Internet. Corporate networks are referring to basically the 2000s Internet, which is sort of pioneered by eBay, but then obviously Facebook and Twitter and all these other services. is where a company runs the network and has full control. They have full control of the economics and full control of access and every other kind of relevant thing. And then blockchain networks are essentially, you know, things that we're all familiar with here.

I use it as an umbrella phrase. So Ethereum I would call a blockchain network. Uniswap, I would call a blockchain network, someone building a game on top of Ethereum. So I kind of, like, I just, I didn't want to get into all the nuances in the book. So I kind of, you know, use an umbrella term to not have to separate L1 and L2 and all these other kinds of things. just so for the crypto people know, like, I realize it's slightly eccentric language. I played around with it a lot, and I found like this was the kind of terminology I thought would be the clearest to the general public.

No, I like it. I think it works. And those three eras roughly correspond to you read, right and own as well, right? They do, they do. Yes, that's right. So basically the kind of story, right, is so that the internet started and, you know, parts of it were started in the 70s through DARPA. But really kind of, I think most people would call like 1981 beginning of the internet. That was the day that IP, the internet protocol was formally launched. And then you had the rise. You had a bunch of different email systems, and eventually people propose SMTP as a way to kind of unify them all. You had Tim Berners-Lee, create the World Wide Web Protocol, HTTP in 1989. But then you really had this kind of explosion in 93, which was Mosaic and Netscape,

which was the first kind of consumer accessible client software. Those early protocols, I would sort of think of them as almost like languages, like the English language, in that they're just specifications of how to speak to each other. They're not actually like live running code, right? So like what HTTP says is, hey, if you send me data in the following format, I'll accept it and I can send you data back in that way. And what that means is if you think about the English language is it's effectively a consensus system, right? Like I can start speaking English differently. And maybe I can nudge the English language a certain way if I'm influential. You know, if you're a influential celebrity or something, you can make up new words

and they'll get popular. But in general, if I go too far, right, you won't understand me and I'll cease to interoperate. You and I will know. or interoperate through the English language. Right? So that's kind of what these things were. And then they had a very important component called DNS, which, you know, is still around today. And DNS is the system, the naming system of the internet where, you know, I own cdixon. dot org.

That's my website. But very important, a very, very important thing they did in DNS is they said the user, the owner, the user controls this mapping between cdixon.org and the physical computer. All right. So in my DNS records, I can control that cdixon.org points to, I think I use Netlify today. But let's just say Netlify decides they're going to start doing stuff that we see the big social networks doing, like charging me lots more money or changing the rules. I can just switch because I control that mapping, right?

I own that domain, right? That was the key thing in the first year of the web was the names, which are your entry point or your digital avatar, right? You control it. And when I leave, and if I switch that name and leave Netlify, all of my networks stay in place. You can still email me. you can still find me an SEO. It all happens behind the scenes, right? So think of it today as like if I had C. Dixon on Twitter and I can say, you know what, I don't like Elon Musk.

I'm going to switch my C.dixon.com to Twitter to some other service. I'm, you know, I'm being a little metaphorical here because it's sort of hard to imagine how it would work exactly. And I can keep all my followers, right? Like, I can leave Twitter today and I can download my tweets, but I can't keep my following. And that's the thing that matters, right? And so that was the key thing with Web 1. You could exit. You could switch.

And what that did, it's very interesting, right, because it's a very small architectural decision, but it had these really profound downstream consequences. But essentially, kind of one of the themes of the book is that these small architectural decisions in how these internet services are built can actually have these very profound downstream consequences. And I try to kind of walk through and explain that. So that was a key feature of that first era. The other key feature of that first era that sort of 90s internet is what I call schumorphic,

right? And that's a word that kind of Apple pioneered and people have kind of, I guess, ported it over to other use cases. But by skeuomorphic, I mean that a lot of early technologies, you know, when they're really radically new, people don't fully know how to embrace them fully. And so what they do is they kind of use, they kind of port over ideas from other forms of media. So, you know, when the first films came along, if you go watch the early films, it was essentially people would do a play and they would put a camera in front of it. Right? because it hadn't yet established the grammar of filmmaking that you could have a close-up and an establishing shot

and all these other kinds of things, right? Do you remember at Yahoo in the 1990s? It looked like Yellow Pages Directory, basically? Yeah, no, exactly. They would literally model them after Yellow Pages. If you went, like, essentially the web in the 90s was a bunch of brochures, like shopping brochures, you know, kind of flyers it looked like,

if you go back and look at the, like it was magazines. Like, it was essentially, and you could do some kind of inputting of stuff, but essentially it was a one-way medium. Essentially, you were going to a search engine and looking up, you know, Abraham Lincoln's birthday or how to buy this widget from some website or something like this, right? And that's what a lot of people call it the read era because it's sort of an analogy to, you know, file systems and things of where it's like one way. You can read only.

You can consume information only. And so that kind of went along, you know, and then we had the internet crash. And then we had this sort of kind of bubbling resurgence. That's when I got into this. I was early 2000s, and I was sort of really excited by essentially what I call the native ideas of the internet, which was, hey, this is a brand new medium. You can do more than just put up brochures and magazines and other kinds of schemorphic things. Like, you know, what if we really leaned into the idea that it can be a two-way medium, that anyone can not only be a consumer of information, but also a publisher, right? But I say we, by the way, that wasn't me.

That was the movement. Like, I was a small part of the movement. It was literally, by the way, called the read-write movement. I mean, there were two names for it, Web 2 and Readwrite. In fact, in the book, I cite a very prominent blog at the time. It was probably the bank list of the 2000s was Readwrite. It was read, right web.com. So, I mean, so that would be like if we were sitting here then, it would be like read write would just be a thing.

Everyone talked about it that way, right? Because that was the whole idea was like, now we can make it a two-way medium, right? And it was all this cool stuff happening. There was blogging and mashups they call. There's all these kind of neat things. And then, you know, and then, of course, you had YouTube and Facebook and Twitter. a bunch of, you know, kind of serious entrepreneurs come in. And they kind of cobbled together a lot of the ideas made by the hackers and they made them more mainstream products. And boom. And then the iPhone

came along in 2007. And the next thing you know, boom, like the whole world's, you know, using their phone seven hours a day, which is the latest. You know, one interesting question, right, is how come social networking, kind of the read-right web, became controlled by these companies and led to the kind of consolidation of the internet instead of being built in sort of the same open protocol architecture of the first year of the web. And we have a very interesting case study, which is there was a very serious attempt to make those systems open. It was RSS. And so RSS is essentially an open protocol that allows you to basically mimic, you know, you can build something like a TikTok or a Twitter or Facebook, kind of social networking. Of interest, by the way,

podcast listeners, if you're consuming this on Apple Podcast, you are consuming an RSS feed. Yeah. And like an RSS is still around, but, you know, and it's used by millions of people, but it's not what it could have been. Like, in my mind, what it could have been is it could have been, we're all using RSS all day. We're using short video RSS instead of TikTok. We're using, you know, micro messaging RSS instead of Twitter. Like, I'm a big fan of RSS for those, you know, like I'm not trying to sort of dis RSS. I mean, like, podcasting is the only like, yeah, use case that still remains. Podcasting and then like kind of, you know, people like me and like other hardcore open tech people. But yeah, it's relatively niche compared to these big social

networks. It didn't have to be. And in fact, I have the stats, you know, in there, it's like, you know, 2007, 8. It was a neck and neck horse race between RSS and, you know, for example, Twitter was sort of the most similar in functionality. And in fact, Twitter, I think of it as there was a real bait and switch that happened, which is all of these closed corporate networks marketed themselves as being kind of nodes in the RSS network. They all fully interoperated both in and outbound. And they said, hey, just, you know, when you write a blog post, instead of just putting it in your RSS feed, all. also posted on Twitter and it'll all interoperate, right? And in fact, if you go, I quote myself just one time in the book of my old blog. I used to blog about this stuff. I have actually went back and look, I have dozens of blog posts arguing with people. And I'm like, guys, we shouldn't believe this. They're going to do switch. I don't know if you remember that part, Ryan, but there's one part.

I don't normally cite myself in the book, but this one part, it was relevant. And it wasn't because I thought they were McIavillian. I just understood how venture capital and business models work, right? I mean, I think they're all good. By the way, I should say across the board, I think I know a lot of people. people that work with these web two companies. I generally like them and think they're good people. I'm critiquing the system here. And the reason I didn't have some crystal ball to see that this would happen, it was the fact that, look, at some point, like Twitter isn't making money in 2008. They're going to

have to make money. They raise money from a bunch of VCs. Like, you know, there's going to be a business model at some point. And that business model is probably not consistent with having all the data go in and out for free. Look, and that was a very consequential outcome. And so basically think of these as sort of all this money is flowing through these networks. There's something called a take rate of a percentage and the money flowing through the network does the network operator take. Like, what's the kind of the toll fees, if you will? Right. And so, for example, with credit cards, it's two and a half percent, rough two to three percent. So that's if you buy something, two to three percent is kind of going to a set of different people who are operating a network.

You know, I think eBay is eight percent. A bunch of kind of physical good things are in that ballpark of 10 percent. Apple App Store is 30 percent. Social networks are outside of YouTube are 100 percent. So they take all the money. It's almost unprecedented in the rest of the economy. So I go to any social network today. I'm going because of these content creators. The network is making money through advertising. They are sharing. Sometimes they have these little creator pool things. I did the math and the book on it. It's like sub 1% of the revenue. It's really just almost a marketing thing. It's so de minimis. But essentially, I wake up in the morning. I go to TikTok. I view these creators. These creators are working on this stuff.

TikTok shows me ads. All of that money. Facebook shows me ads. Instagram shows me ads. Twitter shows me ads. All of that money goes to the network operator, right? Had RSS one, had an open protocol one, there would be no network operator. That money would go to the edges of the network, right?

So we're talking about $150 billion swing and value due to which architecture of network won that use case of that era of the internet. These have very big economic consequences, right? And that's just one cat. I mean, I'm not even talking about. I know you guys like to focus on finance and things. You can go through each category of sort of internet services. And there's a lot, a lot, a lot of money at stake. And a lot of it depends on how you build architect these networks, right? And so, you know, I reflected a lot on this is actually why I got into blockchains because that was of 2013 is when I started making my first investments, Coinbase and others. And that was right around when RSS was really kind of falling off. And I was like, why did this happen? And then I saw blockchains. And I said, you know, what it started to occur to me. It took me a while to fully understand it, that this could be kind of the best of both worlds, meaning it could have the societal benefits of protocol networks, right, where the money flows to the edges, the control flows to the edges, but could have sort of the competitive advantages that you need to compete

against these modern networks. Because look, I mean, the reality is RSS lost, and there have been 50 other attempts to create new programs, at least 50 credible, they go through a list, a bunch of them in the book, many, many, many attempts to create new protocol networks. The reality is only two have really succeeded at scale. The web and email, and both of those were started in the 80s, and I would argue were started before they had serious corporate competition. And so since we've had serious corporate competition, no protocol network has been able to succeed. And I think there's very clear reasons why. And I actually go through this one case study I have in the book is RSS versus YouTube. So, you know, there was a thing called Media RSS, and it was meant to be an open system for

sharing video like YouTube. But YouTube offered a very, very compelling alternative value proposition, which is they they would subsidize the hosting. So in 2005, when YouTube launched, they actually started off as an online dating site, they quickly pivoted. Their pitch to people, at the time, people were,

to the extent they were showing video, they were showing it on their blogs. And their pitch to people like me as a blogger was, hey, videos are a pain in the ass, and you've got to pay a lot of money to host it. You can just click a couple buttons, and we'll pay for the hosting.

We'll subsidize it. And you can just embed this code. And by the way, we'll also co-host it on YouTube.com. We don't get a lot of traffic, but why not? So you're like, this is awesome, right? And then do I want to do that or do want to do a media RSS,

where it's this thing, I got to, you know, configure it, I got to buy a domain, and then I got to pay my own hosting costs, right? So, like, by the way, and this happened with Twitter and Facebook, why did all these social networks raise many, many, many billions of dollars before they went public? A lot of it is subsidization. They subsidize hosting costs. They subsidize all sorts.

This is the major strategy of Web 2. Subsid, subsidize, subsidized. It costs many, many billions of dollars. That's just one example of why I think things like RSS had no chance. were like this rag-tag group of developers with no money to subsidize. So you look at blockchains, you're like, wait, you can design systems with low take rates, you can design systems where the value and control goes to the edges, and you have things like tokens that let you do things like subsidize, right, that let you actually compete in a level

playing field. So to me, and this is sort of the core argument of the book, is that blockchains can be the best of both worlds. They can have the societal benefits of the early internet and protocol networks, but the competitive advantages in advanced functionality and ability to fund and subsidize and other things, the corporate networks do. Right. And so it's really kind of this beautiful mixture of these two things. And look, I saw that and just sort of said, this is, I mean, to me, this is sort of, you know, in my tech career, one of sort of five amazing, beautiful ideas I've seen and just was like,

this is clearly the right answer. By the way, what are the other four so we can see the magnitude of the fifth? I just sort of made up the thing I described for sure, the internet itself. I would say, I would say the internet itself. Look, I'm very much from this, like I grew up on Unix, you know, I mean, not Windows. Like, I'm very much from the open software side of the world in many different ways, both kind of philosophically and just technically that's what I knew. And, you know, architecturally, like small pieces loosely joined. Like the Unix philosophy was always kind of the way I thought about the world.

I would say open source software for sure, like Linux, Unix, just, you know, well, Unix is a standard. But, you know, that whole kind of universe. the open protocols of the early internet, blockchains. I think, look, machine learning, I was too early. I started a machine learning company in 2008.

I remember, I went to this DARPA conference. There was like this academic DARPA conference where they were showing these systems that could like, you know, play 20 questions and do other things in like the mid-2000s and this idea that a machine could learn. I mean,

we're now seeing the results with chat GPT. I mean, I do think it's an amazing thing that you can use processors that were designed to play, you know, shooting games. And you can, repurpose them to make intelligent machines. I mean, that's certainly one of the great ideas.

That's four. Maybe add mobile to the list, maybe. Yeah, I mean, look, for me, you know, the first time I got my hands on an Apple 2 or something was, you know, the clouds parted and, you know, the angel sang and it was a wonderful moment. That's more of a personal, a personal story. But, yeah, like, certainly, I think it's certainly up there. And look, and then going back to our earlier conversation, I think it's really wildly

misunderstood. And I'm not trying to blame the audience or the readers. I think a lot of it, why it's misunderstood, is it's the fault of the industry. And I think specifically the set of people in the industry, and you see this on crypto, Twitter and just generally, that are just endlessly focused on prices and kind of speculation and making money. I actually have come to think the biggest risk to the space. I think of it as we, the people that care about the movement, are sandwiched between on the one hand, I think a regulatory. regime that is basically just misguided. And on the other hand, a set of people who are just interested in speculating and I think are crowding out and frustrating a lot of the good people.

I think the crazy thing about the regulation is I think that the regulation they're doing actually promotes the speculation and hurts the real use cases. I could talk about that. I mean, so, for example, Dogecoin is highly legal. But if you do Dogecoin and then try to actually give a utility, that's when you trip up. securities laws. So true. It's this insane kind of approach to it. But anyway, so just to be clear, I think the onus is on us.

And I think the industry to fix this and explain it, I don't think the average person who's busy with their job should have gone and investigated blockchains and everything. I do think, I do hope that having everything contains a nice little 230 page package of a book might make it a little easier to have an on ramp. As we progress in the whole web one, web two, web three. conversation and also the read right own conversation it very much gives an aesthetic of like evolution like we're layering on new abilities onto the internet and as a result the internet expresses itself uniquely based off of the skills the abilities that we have during the particular phase of the

internet yeah and so like you know own doesn't imply not having read and right right it's like a new skill on oh yeah no for sure no definitely it's additive yeah yeah it's definitely additive but also at the same time the blockchain world, we're not trying to take all of the properties and the characteristics of corporate networks into our future internet. Like, we are actually intentionally trying to leave some of the properties behind. So while it is like an evolution, a progression of the skill tree of the internet, we are also not totally taking everything with us. Do you have a mental model for us for as we develop more abilities as the internet grows in sophistication, each one of these abilities is layered on the others, but we're also leaving some properties behind.

How should we think about understanding this arc? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. Like I would say, like, there's some clearly great things about the Facebook's, Googles, et cetera, right? Which is they brought mostly free, generally free services to five billion people. Right. And, you know, they're very high performance. They have great user experiences.

As I said, they're mostly free. You know, they're just very high quality software design. A lot of those things are important and should be maintained. I think it's very important. I think one of the things we're kind of missing in Web3 is feature and functionality parity with Web2. I think we need to get to that. We can talk about that at some point if you want. And that means transaction costs and user experience and finality time and just all those kinds of things.

So they've done a lot of good stuff there. I think that to me the big problems with the Web 2 model is one, that these five actors in the middle take all the money. and don't share it with the people that actually create the content and do the work. Just to give you another data point, Spotify, there are, I think, by their own stats, 14,000 out of 8 million musicians make $50,000 a year or more, which is roughly the average American salary. So, you know, it's like 99 plus percent don't make enough to live on. And is this a problem because people don't like music?

No. Is it a problem people don't like to pay for music? No. It's a problem because you have these giant intermediaries in the middle, Spotify, the labels, everyone else taking all the money, right? And so I think this architecture of all the money and control, look, I also think I don't get much into politics and I'm not highly political myself, but this idea that, you know, a bunch of product managers in San Francisco should make decisions about who has access to these critical global infrastructure. To me, it's like imagine if AT&T decide who got to make phone calls. Like it just sounds like a really bad fucking idea. Like shouldn't that be something that's done by the government or by some kind of like democratically controlled system? You know, so just the control and look and there's all sorts of other like there's a thing going on on ticot now i have a friend who's a ticot creator and you know what ticot is aside is a few people got too big they got like a

hundred million followers and so they're deliberately dialing down their reach and then dialing up right because any business doesn't want to get too dependent on a few quote unquote suppliers and so they're constantly playing games or they're turning dials someone builds a business and they turn the dials and they take away that business so they make them pay more to kind of promote themselves to get back up you know a lot of the social networks i think the next wave we're about to see now is basically you can't link out from social networks. We're already seeing someone on Twitter and Facebook. They're trying to keep you there, like completely siloed in this network. So if you link out just a web link, like if I tweet something right now and I say,

hey, and you know, click here to learn more, that tweet will get demoted. And that happens on most social networks now. And I think that will accelerate and you'll basically end up with these five silos that don't link out as an example. And so anyways, to me, all these things should be, these are very important decisions about how our online lives are structured and controlled. And should not be controlled by five companies. They should be controlled by communities the way the first year of the web was. So that part we definitely got to get rid of, I think. What we shouldn't lose is the wonderful user experiences, you know, ideally, you know, very low cost or free or, you know, freemium or whatever the model might be for these things, keep the internet accessible.

Like more people have internet access now than access to running water. I think that's a testament to the amazing success of these free services. A lot of it, by the way, is due to open source software. The fact that all software is essentially free to. day. You can get an Android phone for $10 because all the software is free. It's Linux. We don't want to lose that. It's very important to keep the internet accessible. But I think all of these, essentially the way the money and the power is allocated is just horribly wrong. And look, it's going to get more and more acute and people are going to figure it out. And by the way, AI is going to accelerate this. I'm a big fan of AI. I'm very excited about it. But it's a centralizing technology. It rewards

companies with big stockpiles of data, capital, and compute. And it will further entrench this and further accelerated. And I don't see any other counterbalancing force on the horizon but blockchains. That's exactly how I see Web 3 as the next step from Web 2. And I'll throw this to you is maybe Web 2 was also a reaction to Web 1 in the same way that Web 3 is a reaction to web 2, whereas Web 1 was like clunky and for nerds and for people who could deal with the U.X limitations that the Internet had. And then we made Web 2 in order to deal with those problems, giving us a new set of problems. And now maybe Web 3 is trying to solve the economic problems of Web 2 or the value capture problems of Web 2.

Is it fair to say that each phase of the web is a reaction to the previous one? Yeah, I think that's a great way to look at it. I mean, with Web 2, you know, like the kind of move fast and break things. Like it was very hard to move fast with protocols, right? Protocols, you require consensus, you have committees. It was very, you couldn't do subsidization, you know, so just like the example I gave with video. So like, you know, 2005 was an important year because that was the year that broadband penetration in the U.S. started to surpass, you know, narrowband penetration.

and so people could use video. And the protocol versions of the open internet versions of it were clunky and they were expensive. And so it seemed like a great, like I was for it at the time. I was like, well, of course, why don't we have a company do it? And they can subsidize it and they'll get paid later because they'll be a big network and they'll be able to run ads or something. And it seemed like the right trade. We just hadn't seen how the movie fully played out, right?

We didn't see how as they got bigger, they would consolidate more, they would extract more, they would close down more, right? And so I go through this in the book. There's a section I call the attract, extract, cycle, which I think every network or I argue, I think, pretty strongly, and evidence suggests it's true that all networks kind of go through this life cycle where they start off kind of attracting users and what I call compliments, which are, you know, creators and developers and others.

And then over time, once they get to a certain kind of level of market share, their incentive switch and they start to sort of squeeze more and more out of those participants. And so, you know, I think in the mid-2000s, it seemed like. a good idea to make these, you know, to have companies step in. They could move much faster. They could subsidize. They could rapidly iterate on the products. But then I think once we saw the issues, you know, in the early 2010s, I think people in the tech community should have reacted to that and sort of said, hey, this isn't the right thing. You know, my view is a lot of people in the tech community just, you know, we're benefiting from it. As Mark Andreessen likes to say, we used to be the

pirates. Now we're the Navy. Like they became the Navy. And it was a good system for them. And, you know, but to me it was like, is that worth the trade? We lost all of the kind of original ideals of the internet. It wasn't worth it to me. Are you launching a token? Is it already live? How are you managing the legal and tax for providing token awards for your team? Toku simplifies everything about managing token grant compensation, and you can get started with them for

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So, you know, we talked about kind of the 90s internet, which was the Reed era. And the great thing that did for us is it democratized information. And then we moved into the 2000. We had kind of a fork in the road. We could continue doing our publishing verb on like protocol networks, but instead the corporate networks took charge, right? And so we democratized publishing, but at what cost in the Reed White era? The cost was monopoly. The cost was rent extraction. And so now you're painting a picture of own, which is the last verb of Reed White. right, own, right? Which is maybe the 2020s internet, this blockchain internet and these blockchain networks. And your model for blockchains and networks and tokens, all of these things is different, I think, than some other people's, right? Some people talk about kind of a general ledger and all of these things. I think you would agree to that. But your main model, it seems to me, Chris, is this is a new type of computer. Yeah, tell us about that. Why the computer lends on it. Well, okay, so, you know, what is a computer? A computer is, you know, going back to Alan Turing's famous. paper that defined it, it's something that can both store information, but also act on that information,

right? So I kind of, the analogy I like to use is both nouns and verbs, right? So the nouns, you know, you store, the nouns are the things in the world, the things you store, your Bitcoin balance, your Ethereum balance, your state, and the verbs are the code that let you operate on that, right? That's what a computer, you know, so you look at your iPhone, you have the two main things, right, of the processor, which is the thing that processes the verbs, and then the hard drive, which is the storage, right? So to me, I just think ledger undersells it, right? So I'm not saying blockchains aren't a ledger, but to me, at least, it suggests the hard drive, not the hard drive plus the processor. And so, you know, I think a stronger formulation is to say, no, it's both,

right? It's both in just in the same way. And that's important because there's a very important feedback loop that computers have. I call it the platform app feedback loop, the platform application feedback loop. And I believe that this feedback loop is, you know, people talk about things like Moore's Law, which is that you can pack more semiconductors on chips. It really, there's a broader kind of economic phenomenon at work in the history of computing, which has made computing evolve so quickly. And so if you take a look at your iPhone as an example, my iPhone today that I have is much better than the iPhone I had in 2007, but also the apps have gotten much better, right? And those two things have mutually reinforced each other, right?

So the first iPhone came out, and then somebody created like a fun game that popular and that sold more iPhones and that gave Apple more money to make the phone better and the camera got better and then someone created Instagram and then Instagram took advantage of the camera and so you had this back and forth kind of flywheel right and to my knowledge you don't have that with ledgers you have that with computers computers because computers are anyone can come along any of the eight billion people on earth who were let's say the hundred million subset who like to program computers can come along and write an application for the Ethereum blockchain and one of those applications might become popular and if it becomes popular, that puts more money back into the Ethereum world. That indirectly lets Ethereum get better. That in turn gives people the ability to write more apps. And so you get these flywheel feedback loops with computers that I don't think you get with ledgers. I just think ledgers undersells it. I'm not saying it's not a ledger. Sure, you can store balances like a ledger on an Ethereum blockchain or a Bitcoin blockchain or, you know, almost any blockchain. But, you know, the fact that you can write arbitrary code and write arbitrary apps, to me, makes a much more accurate

term is a computer. Now, by the way, people think computer, they think of a physical computer. I mean, we've had virtual computers for decades. I mean, so VMware is this huge company that built on virtual computers. A computer is defined both historically and, you know, whether it's Alan Turing or just the usage of the word before that through its functional properties, not its physical properties, right? So like, of course, Ethereum is not a computer in the sense that you go pick it up and it's a physical device, but it's a computer and function, right? It's a set of computers network together that come together and, you know, every block do a state transition and change the state according to computer code, which is exactly what a computer does,

right? So the interface that the end user or the developer interacts with is a computing interface, even if it's sort of at a layer of abstraction above the actual physical devices. The other thing I find with this analogy where maybe tech people get thrown off is that they look at this and they're like, that's your computer, you know, 15 transactions per second. What are you even talking about it? Yeah. Look, if you're an employee, at Google, you see the world through the lens of let's optimize performance. How can we pack more performance into the CPU or the GPU or the storage or the networking, right? Blockchains are designed in many ways to limit the power of those companies. And specifically, one of the things you can do

with the blockchain, I mean, what I describe a blockchain is is a computer that can make commitments. So you can say, I can write code in the blockchain that says, I, you know, internet service, I'm never going to go take your data and do bad stuff with it. Okay. People at Google like the fact that they have a 35-page privacy policy, which nobody reads, which they can change it will, and do whatever the hell they want with your data. That's the state of the internet today. The state of the internet today, like the assurances that you have from internet companies, it's the most absurd system in the world, is you get these pop-ups that have literally 50-page legal agreements, which I bet you nobody in the world has actually read, nor could

read, nor could understand, that you click, I agree to, and then you panned over all of the power for these companies to do whatever they want. So somebody who's sitting in a that position, like someone at Google or meta, and they say, like, this is how we interact with users, this is how we make promises to users, these 50-page legal agreements that we unilaterally control and no one understands, why would they want a computer that undermines that power, right? So, like, look, it's a tradeoff. Yes, blockchains have worse performance. Like, you pay for the consensus, right?

These properties that we like, that this group here speaking likes about blockchains, that they can make strong commitments, that they can guarantee digital ownership, that you can create, you know, tokens and other kinds of things like that. that does come at a cost, and that cost is performance generally. But if you believe that there's value in having internet services that can make strong commitments to users and can't just sort of arbitrarily control how all the money flows, the data flows, and everything else, that may be a tradeoff worth making. Right. So these computers that can make commitments, they're different than other computers. Like they aren't great at a lot of things. Maybe they're not as good as kind of

at the read and write verb, but they're really damn good at the own verb. Because ownership is basically a commitment. And that's their superpower is this last ownership piece. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about tokens here, Chris. So you start this chapter on tokens, which are basically an expression of ownership on a blockchain computer. And you talk about this difference between single player and multiplayer technologies, right? Yeah. The idea that tokens are maybe a social technology in the way that money is a social technology. Say more about that. Yeah. So single player technologies or technologies where, you know, a simple way to think of it if you were stuck on a desert island, you know, would you want to have a flashlight, would be pretty useful probably or a lighter

or something like this, right? Those are single player technologies. Would you want to have money on a desert island? Like, that would seem kind of silly because if you're the only person there, like, how are you going to spend it? It's a social technology, right? It has value to the extent of the role it plays in social interactions. And so tokens are very much social technologies, right? If I make a blockchain and I'm the only user of it and I'm the only one who has tokens and there's no other users, like it's just utterly pointless, which by the way is why these sort of private blockchains, these corporate blockchains, never really made sense because it was essentially, you know, taking a multiplayer technology and making it single player mode.

Yeah, so tokens are very much multiplayer technology. And specifically the way I think of tokens is they are a kind of a way to simplify and encapsulate a very, a kind of complex idea in a very simple package. And encapsulation is a very important concept in software and the internet. And so, like, to me, the canonical example would be a website. So you think about the early vision of the internet. And if you're Tim Berners-Lie, you're saying, okay, I want to have this giant ocean of information. And anyone can contribute to that ocean.

Like, how the hell do you keep that organized? How is that not just total chaotic mess? But we'll have this simple thing called a website. And the website, you know, you can go, anyone can go and put up that website. And then we'll have this method by which you can connect the websites together through links. We take that for granted today, but that was a very profound insight, profound, profound, simplifying insight that made this very, very ambitious. you know kind of what could have been an overwhelmingly complex idea into something understandable and tractable.

And so in the same way, you know, what we're kind of proposing today is imagine an internet where people can own objects in the way they do in the physical world. So I own, you know, this laptop I'm using. I own my house, you know, I may own a piece of clothing. I own, you know, whatever you might own, right? And today on the internet, you don't, you may own your domain name. You basically don't own anything else. Everything else is owned by maybe your email address.

everything else is owned by these big corporate services. They can take away. You know, you have, I'm C. Dixon at Twitter. They can take that away from me at any time for any reason. They can take away my audience. They can, you know, the virtual goods and the games I have, they can take it away or the game goes away or whatever it might be. So what to me, what tokens are is a way, similar to the website, a way of encapsulating

ownership. So a token is the atomic unit of ownership in this blockchain world. And therefore, it's a very general concept. And you can have tokens that are, you know, the kind of broad breakdown, of course, is fungible and non-fungible. Fungible, they're interchangeable for one another, like money or something. And non-fungible, they aren't, right? And I think the big mistake that a lot of, like, critics are making today is they're focusing, you know, they'll say NFTs are stupid or something. And what they really mean is the thing I saw in 2021 I didn't like, which is a very different statement than an atomic, a way to encapsulate ownership on the Internet is a bad idea, right?

I liken software much more to something like writing a book. It's an extremely expressive medium. I think the phrase software engineering throws people off. They think of it like bridge building. Software is as expressive as, you know, C++ or, you know, Python is as expressive as the English language. And this is, you know, something philosophers and mathematicians have talked about. You can basically either, you know, turn complete languages or, you know, really anything you can imagine and think about, you can design in software. And so when people invent these new primitives like a website or a token, a very dangerous trap to fall into is to confuse early embodiments of that with the actual possibilities of the technology because software is so expressive. It's sort of like saying, you know, a new genre of books comes along and, you know, the first science fiction book comes out and you didn't like it and you're like science fiction is stupid and you're really just like shorting humanity. Even more broadly, you might be saying, like, all books are stupid because you read one, like, book you do like.

Yeah, no, exactly. Exactly. I mean, like, the way I think of it is like the, I mean, this is like, I think a core thing about the business I do and like venture capital is like we're long humanity. Right. If like if you, if you have these open computing platforms and that five billion people can, you know, like when people say something like they'll never be a popular blockchain app, to me that's like saying they'll never be a great novel about a whale. Like, it's just a bad, you're just betting against humanity. Like there's a lot of really, really. really smart, creative people. And it's a really, really, really malleable plastic medium, right? It's an art form. And in this art form, when you introduce these new genres and primitive, in some ways, you can look at blockchains as like a new genre. It's like someone just invented mystery novels or science fiction or whatever. I'm using obviously analogies.

But, like, of course there's going to be a lot of, it's going to cattle, it's going to excite really creative people and they're going to come up with some great stuff. I've seen this throughout my career where people are like, they're like, oh, this category will never work. And it's like you're basically saying no, there's some genius won't come along in this incredibly powerful medium and put the pieces together an interesting way. Like you're, you're saying this entire idea maze, which you haven't explored because nobody's explored it, because it's this really vast and interesting maze has no treasure in it. Like I'll take the other side of that bet every time. And so that's, you know, the same with tokens. Like tokens is just

this massive unlock of this new idea maze. We don't really know exactly where it's going to go. But, But certainly don't confuse. Like, granted, there were some dumb stuff done. I mean, look, there's dumb stuff done with tokens. By the way, I've been on the internet my whole career. There's been dumb shit on the internet my whole career. I mean, it's dumb stuff. It's on the internet.

Like, this idea that, like, there's dumb crypto stuff, therefore crypto is stupid. Like, welcome to the internet, my friend. Like, I don't even know where to begin to tell you all the dumb stuff I've seen, being on, like, boards and other things involved with internet companies. So, I mean, look, it's just the nature. of putting five billion people together and you know in chaos and everything else as you get but you got to look through the kind of accidental trappings of how things arrive i remember early social media i like i've been on twitter and all these things since the very beginning and i remember you know

all these mocking news articles and things about these nerds and Silicon valley talking about what they had for lunch why do i know you had a burrito for lunch and like a lot of it was that kind of silly stuff or whatever and just we were fucking around and fighting over text whatever i don't know what was going on but it was mostly silly, but you had to look beyond that. What it really was was this is a new global protocol for micromessaging, right? It just so happened that the early people were doing X, Y, and Z with it. It happened that the early NFTs did X, Y, and Z with them, and some were interesting and some were not interesting, and some were stupid and, you know, et cetera.

But you got to look through that and say, what is it fundamentally? And fundamentally, what it is, the token is the atomic unit of ownership. In the same way that the website was for Web 1, the post, the social post was sort of this encapsulating way to make publishing something that was kind of able to be groked by mainstream people and tokens sort of nicely package ownership. And now we're in this phase where developers and creative people are exploring that idea maze. And to me, this is the really exciting time is we're going to have a number of years where we're seeing like kind of all the different unlocks and creative ideas that people come up with when you have this really powerful new

primitive. Yeah, Chris, I remember being in 2021 when me and Ryan started bank lists and we were so focused on defy finance. We're going to reconstruct the financial system, which, of course, is still on the table. But really what happened in 2021 was NFTs came and took over and it was actually more artistic and creative and cultural expressions that really took Ethereum and crypto at large mainstream. I think if you came into crypto at that time, or really any time in crypto, you'll come in and you'll notice that there are pockets of tribes everywhere. And tribes come in so many different flavors and different communities with, you know, that look different because they have different profile pictures on. And something I learned is

like, oh, like if crypto is going to go mainstream, it's going to go mainstream because of some sort of social technology that it unlocks. And I think if you go back to every single phase of the web, both in Web 2 and Web 1, that was also true. Like the Web 1 forum was an extremely popular place to be for niche interests. And what did Twitter and Facebook and messaging do? The whole like read and right side of the internet was like, oh, more people can come and be social. on the internet. And you can't really understand crypto without understanding the role that communities have when they play in this world, especially with tokens. Tokens is like a binder for communities to come together. How would you say this social arc of the internet is being expressed with, you know,

this very expressive technology that we have now in Web 3? Yeah. And just so, you know, I know this, your audience might be a little more finance focus. I'm very excited about the financial aspects here of blockchains. And we know we have a number of investments. around this, including a bunch of the big DFI protocols. And I think with financial applications specifically, you have specific regulatory challenges that make it trickier. But like I'm very excited I have a section on the book on finance and payments. But yes, I think that to your point, David, that probably tens of millions of people

are getting excited by finance, whereas hundreds of millions or billions of people get excited by games, social networking, you know, media. culture. It just has broader appeal. I have a lot of just personal friends who aren't in the business who just, you know, they're into NFTs and other kinds of things like that in the way that they aren't into finance. I think we all probably find that if we go and hang out in broader circles. And look, a lot of our investment, we try to kind of be, you know, somewhat agnostic in our investing, in our application investing and invest across these categories. But we have done a lot in media, social networking, you know, to things like Farcaster and. One idea I'm really excited about I have a section of the book on is collaborative storytelling. So we have a few investments there. So that's the idea that, you know, so you think about these communities that get really excited about Star Wars and Harry Potter and you read the forums and they're, you know, diagnosing how the story should have gone.

And I just saw one that was on YouTube. It was like a remix of one of the recent Star Wars TV shows that a user did. And it was just clearly better than the actual show. So just that power of fans and the excitement level. Imagine if you had a token community where users could come together and create narrative worlds and they could create a new harry potter a new marvel and they could get rewarded for their contribution to that corpus through tokens and then have an incentive to go you know sort of spread the word and evangelize that why do we have only sequels today and you know and kind of old

IP rehashed in hollywood it's because it costs too much money to market a new narrative universe what if you could take the power of you know think about how much marketing power you have embedded in things like Dogecoin. I'm not, like, I think Dogecoin is kind of silly and there's not really a point to it, but it's a really powerful community. Now, what if you took that powerful community and combined it with like a really cool new narrative universe as an example and that actually, you know, had some kind of value beyond just the token.

That's just one example. I think there's a lot of interesting stuff happening with games. I'm personally involved with one. Proof-Play Pirate Nation. It's really interesting. It's a fully on-chain game. You know, it's a bunch of Ex-Zinga folks. And it's sort of taking some of the ideas that were pioneered by the lattice, you know, Dark Force kind of crew.

And if like that style of on-chain gaming had a baby with, you know, Zinga games or something, like kind of combined the two, sort of a little more mainstream, but a lot of the cool ideas. And so you get the composability. And it's really cool idea because you could have literally all the back end runs on chain. And then that means that other people can fork the clients and kind of build on it, you know, kind of build around it and extend it. and it's sort of this infinitely extensible system. So I guess maybe some easy way out, but I kind of think all of the above, like all of these things are interesting and important. I think finance is clearly important. I think media is clearly important.

Games are clearly important. Like, games are not the end all. Like, I wouldn't be doing this if I thought the only outcome were blockchain games. But there can be very important, historically, games, very important kind of on-ramp into new ecosystems. Games were, you know, an important driver of early PCs and an important driver of early mobile phones. And so I think these things kind of all work together, you know. You kind of, the game might get you to 100 million wallets, and then maybe some of those people will start to use payments once they have those wallets, right?

Like, I wish there were less tribalism. Like, we're working on the same team. There's enough people that are actually out to get us. So true. Yeah. And like, by the way, I hope you saw them in the book. I tried to be really kind of broad and ecumenical. I'm for those, if any, Bitcoiners are listening.

I'm pro Bitcoin, even though they seem to think we hate them. and they all are people out to get you. I'm not one of them. I'm on your team. I'm pro-tech. I'm pro-tacelcatch. I'm pro-decentralization. I mean, hopefully that is the crypto-metaclass, meta-tribe is like pro-decentralization.

Pro-descentralization, pro-new, you know, kind of rebuilding the internet, creating better systems, returning power to the edges of the network is another way to kind of say decentralization, right? And there's different ways to get there. And there's different blockchains and there's different this and that. But I think we all have mostly overlapping. values. Right, so let's talk about this. So I feel like we kind of established what blockchains are, what tokens are. And of course, outfalls these things called blockchain networks. And recall, we had these three eras of the internet. And now this is kind of the own era. And we saw protocol

networks. We saw corporate networks. And now we're in kind of the blockchain network phase. I'm wondering if we could, like, high level. One thing that we established earlier, the problem of these corporate networks is this rent extraction. Okay. And it was the Bezos, quote, your take rate is my opportunity. How does crypto solve the rent extraction problem? I mean, you were talking about these corporate take rates of Facebook takes 100%. YouTube, they take 45%. Apple store takes 30%. And they're in charge. Like, they own the monopoly. There's only like five of these companies doing all of this. Contrast that to blockchain networks. How can we kind of like squeeze the balloon a bit more towards users? Yeah. And so, you know, I have a chapter on take rates. So I specifically go deep into this,

including kind of an analysis of the take rates of all the existing Web 2 networks and then go into the Web 3 side and then talk about exactly your question. What about the architecture of blockchain networks constrains the take rates? And there's a couple of answers. Like one is that, you know, with blockchains, you have to commit to the take rates up front. So you create a network and the network says the take rate, you know, I'll take X percent. And, you know, there's nuances here. It depends on how the network is governed. but in any decently designed blockchain network,

it will be either community governed or fixed to the take rate, right? And community government means you need a majority of the community to change it. So number one is you set it up front and you have to stick with it, right? So you can't kind of bait and switch and change it. And that means also people can shop around. So if there's three different payment networks that are built on blockchains and one charges 3% and one charges 1%, you know, the 1% one will win, right? So you have actual price competition.

So, you know, that's an important thing. you have the ability to exit for users. So if somebody gets too extractive, right? So if you think about like lens and farcaster in this new wave of blockchain-based social networks, right, your name, as I was just discussing it earlier, which is sort of your critical thing and your following list, you own it and you can exit. If a specific client or if, you know, or one of the pieces of software are using decides to jack up the take rates, you can leave, right? So the ability to exit, having a low switching, I mean, the high take rates of these corporate, networks, it's all predicated on the fact that you're stuck, you're trapped. You know, I've built my audience on

Twitter for well over a decade. You know, I may or may not like some of the stuff they're doing, but I don't really have a choice. Like, I'm not going to build that audience again somewhere else. Like, it's going to take too long, right? And so you're stuck there. And so the ability for the user to switch and to take their audience with them is a very, very powerful force that forces these businesses to compete on prices. And the price, in the case of a network, when you compete on prices, you're competing on take rates. I go through. through a few other things. I kind of go through a list of them of sort of these things that constrain the take rates and blockchain networks. And also just empirical, I have a couple charts that

show empirically. This is also the case. Yeah, I mean, some of those numbers from the charts, like OpenC take rate is like two and a half percent, right? That's where you buy NFTs. Uniswap is like 0.3%. I mean, it depends on the pool, but around 0.3%. And Ethereum's even cheaper. And you can have things like Blur come along that compete with OpenC and they're able to because users can exit. Because all of the usernames, the NFTs, they hold. And those are all held on a blockchain and they can switch. Another unlock of the like own phase and the you know blockchain network phase I think is token incentives.

So we talked about tokens and the benefits of ownership, but how about incentives themselves? I mean, the skeptics see like token price go up and they see speculation, they see casino. But I think you see some solutions around like the cold start problem. You see some solutions around a model for open source development and making users owners is like a good thing from your lens. Can you talk about that? Yeah. And so, you know, as I mentioned before, like with an example of YouTube, corporate networks, I mean, web services have been subsidizing for years. Like, this may be lost in people because they don't see the kind of how these companies work from the inside. Like, I've had the chance to see that in my job. I mean,

why do, like, again, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, they all raise billions, if not tens of billions of dollars of money. Where does that money go? Some of it goes to salespeople and this and that, but a lot of goes to subsidization of hosting and everything else, right? And so subsidization is not new to web, you know, people accuse, oh, you shouldn't spend money to acquire users. Like, guys, Web 2 has been doing it for 15 years. They just do it in this way of like, you don't actually offer the money. You offer them free hosting. And, you know, because they don't want to actually share the real thing with them, which is the actual ownership. And so, yeah, and so, you know, I think one, there's a bunch of really interesting things that you can do. One can do with tokens as a way to sort of subsidize. I think one really

interesting one example that I walk through in the book is this idea of using it to overcome the so-called cold-starred problem of networks. So the cold-start problem is essentially networks, once they're at scale, you have kind of the network effects working on your behalf. So think about a dating website or something. Once you have a lot of people, you know, who want to date on your website, it becomes almost on the autopilot because that's just going to naturally attract more people. But when you first start off that dating site and there's two people on it, no one's going to come there. And that's the cold start problem or the bootstrap problem people call it right sort of how do you get enough people on your dating site that it starts to be attractive to other people to come to your dating site right and so this

cold start problem is not new my partner Andrew chen wrote a really good book on it it sort of goes through it it's an old problem of creating networks and a lot of networks that i think have been really valuable in the world have not gotten to scale because they've kind of gotten trapped in that cold start phase right so i think of it is like electric charging you know a community own electric charging systems around the world would be useful for the world. But how do you get there? Maybe Tesla will do it. And Elon Musk is an N of 1 and maybe we'll pull it off.

But how do you do it? Another interesting example that I talk about in the book is community-owned kind of grassroots telecom companies. So this is an idea. I've been thinking about this idea for 20-something years. I remember visiting MIT once and there was a thing called roof net, which was a bunch of students putting networking equipment on their roofs and building the Zemesh networks, which where they could get on the internet, you know, sort of like we would hop to one to another

to another to get on the internet and they wouldn't have to go through like Verizon or something. And it was this cool idea and like, what if that spread virally? And in fact, the people that were working on that eventually created this company, Maraki, which got by Cisco and then Sam Cera anyways. So it was a cool idea. There was a similar attempt in New York City called, I think it was called Mesh NYC. There was a European company called Phone that tried to do it with Wi-Fi Hub. There's been a bunch of attempts.

Like how can you create kind of a community-owned, let's call it, you know, Verizon competitor, right? which would have all these cool benefits, including the fact that you wouldn't have to, you know, pay all this money to these big kind of corporate gatekeepers. And so, you know, then you have this blockchain network called helium that came along, which has basically done that using, you know, token incentives. And I would describe it as, you know, they're not there yet in terms of having succeeded as a global network. But I would say they've gotten half of the way there. So they've really used the token to successfully build the supply side of the network,

the kind of the networking hubs. they're in the process now of trying to build up the demand side. But even getting halfway there, in one of what I consider the most ambitious ideas, you know, kind of in the history of the Internet, is an impressive achievement. And I think we're going to see more and more people think about ways to kind of take old networks.

I think you could almost go through like old Internet magazines and look at all of the kind of cool ideas people had that didn't end up working. And I bet you a lot of them with the right incentive systems might work now. You know, one thing where I see traditional investors still get caught up, though, is on kind of the value accrual of these tokens. So, like, you have, like, Warren Buffett called crypto rat poison, right? Michael Burry called it magic beans. But, like, from my perspective, I think tokens can be valued using totally

traditional financial mechanisms. Yeah. I have a section on this. It's very, like, I think the only way to explain it is they simply just haven't done research because, like, Ethereum is a productive asset, which has a PE ratio, as you know. And so it's just, like, they literally don't know. The I've spoken to these people directly. Look, a lot of people, they heard about Bitcoin like six years ago. Yeah. They read about it and they literally stopped doing research. I mean, I have to say, like, because they're just so clearly wrong.

And in the mainstream media does this too, like, they just are so clearly wrong and they just keep saying it over and over. Yeah. Look, are there stupid tokens in the world? Yes. Does Bitcoin have cash flow? No. Like, but it, again, it's software. It's a creative plastic medium.

It's, you know, because you didn't like, one mystery novel doesn't mean all mystery novels are bad. Okay, like you have to actually go do work and look at what these things are. And many of these tokens are productive assets. Ethereum being the most obvious example. Like it literally generates cash flow. People pay to use a network. And that cash flow indirectly goes to the token holders through the various mechanisms. And you can value it by traditional financial methods. You can say, I think it's stupid. I don't like Ethereum. Okay. That's your feeling. But like it's, you know, the same way you can say, I don't like a company or I don't like your house. I don't like your house. Fine, but I,

my house charges rent and I, you know, make a capital asset, man. I'm sorry you have feelings about it. It's a capital. Look, that criticism is just so wrong that I just have to assume they literally haven't done the work. And unfortunately, we live in a, you know, the sentiment against crypto is so negative today that you can get away with saying statements like that that are just clearly, just frankly lazy and false. So anyways, you know, I try to disabuse that myth in the book. I think people on that should just kind of do their own research about the different models for valuing various assets. It's like one piece of controversy that seems to have stuck a little bit that you also address here is some people have heard your lens on crypto.

And they're like, yeah, Dixon, crypto's a computer. Cool. That's not what we see. What we see is a casino, you know, the speculation thing. They can't get their head wrapped around that. They can't get their mind wrapped around that being good for the world. And I would say in the industry, there's this polarity. I think you mentioned this earlier in the episode. There's a notable VC firm who talked about crypto as like the casino on Mars. And that raised some eyebrows. Yeah. What do you think about this? Are we a computer? Are we actually just trying to make a casino here in crypto? Yeah. So look, like I would give it the analogy to real estate, which is there are real estate speculators, obviously. There's people that trade real estate. There's real estate, you know,

I don't know what financial products where you can speculate on real estate. But the reason we value ownership in real estate is not, the speculation is a side effect, right? The reason we want people to, like, for example, we value things like home ownership is homeownership is important to people from a, you know, from a personal wealth point of view, it's important from a psychological point of view, it gives you satisfaction to raise your family in a home you own. It's an important from an incentive point of view. Lots of studies show that people that own homes are more likely to improve their home, improve their community. There's a bunch of things. There's a bunch of of reasons why homeownership is valuable. As a byproduct of that, there is speculation around

real estate. And the speculation does play a role, like it provides liquidity. It makes it easier if you want to sell your house to know what the price is and get the Zestimit and all these things because there's active markets. So it plays a role, but it shouldn't be the main thing. It should be a side thing in my mind. And so I'm not anti-people predicting Bitcoin. If they want to invest in Bitcoin, it's going up or down or whatever they want to do. in the same way with the stock market. I'm not, I don't lose, you know, I'm sure there's, obviously there's whole industry is people betting on stocks going up and down.

But that's not the point of stocks. The point of stocks is to get money to companies to go build products, right? So I just think it's putting the cart before the horse, you know, to think that the casino is the main thing, right? To me, speculation is a side effect. And by the way, I think you need guard. And, you know, historically we have, and I believe with crypto, you need guardrails around that speculation. You don't want that. there's a lot of ways that can go wrong.

And we've learned that through hundreds of years of history, and there should be guardrails around it. But the problem right now, from a policy point of view, is they're kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And they're saying because there was speculation, let's ban digital ownership, which is what is effectively going on. And that's just a really, and especially, as I said, in a time when we now are very close to having five companies control the Internet, and digital ownership is really one of the only credible counterweights to that. That's just a really bad idea. So we really need to separate the two. And look, what I'm hoping in the book is to, like, obviously, we've seen the bad side of crypto. Everyone's seen it very visibly with things like FTX.

I'm trying to lay out the positive vision. I'm sure there are other positive vision. This is my positive vision. This is a full, complete, comprehensive, positive vision of the future of the Internet that involves, you know, sort of blockchains at the core. And now it's out there and people can critique it. And I'm looking forward to good faith. I'm sure there will be a lot of bad faith critiques. I'm looking forward to good faith critiques and plan to respond to them and hope to learn from them.

but that's kind of the point to me. By the way, I don't know, these other VCs to talk about the casino as a bootstrap thing. I think they probably, I haven't spoken to them about it, I think they probably kind of agree with me that in the end they are looking for the utility.

So I don't know, I think it might just be more of a difference in phrasing. Yeah, and just maybe phrasing and other things. I think we probably all, a lot of us agree more than it might first appear. So, Chris, this has been awesome. We've talked about the read era of the web, the right era.

And now we're in this ownership era of the web. And it seems like it's a chance to reinvest the internet, and that's kind of what you're arguing. You say this in one of your concluding chapters. There are only two network architectures that preserve the democratic and egalitarian spirit of the early internet, protocol networks and blockchain networks. I think that was really well said. And maybe we're coming full circle. The pendulum is swinging the other way towards more democratic and egalitarian internet architectures. And I think that's pretty bullish. And I want to ask you as we close out a kind of a two-part question, right? So just from a,

what's next perspective, right? So we talked a lot about a lot of the crypto infrastructures being built. Now we have kind of cryptos hit its broadband moment so we can do cheap transactions per second. That's all great. We still haven't had our iPhone moment, I would say. We have a store of value of stable coins. Is the iPhone moment coming? And like in general, what has kept you optimistic about this space? Yeah. I mean, look, I think these tech movements can just take a lot longer than people think. So, you know, like as I mentioned earlier, I've started an AI company in 2008. I thought it was sort of the time and I was early. First neural network paper was 1943. You know, Alan Turing wrote a paper in 1950 where I think you predicted, you know, AGI or something in a few decades.

If you speak to long time AI people that read history books, there was all these talk of like different AI summers and winters. There was a big investment bull run in the 80s. And then boom, you know, 2020 was a 2023 chat GPT and I think that was the iPhone moment. And if you look at that, you know, I mean, look, this is no way to diminish all of the amazing. research work, the Transformers paper, the stuff that Open AI did. But a lot of it, I think, is driven by, you know, fundamentally by GPUs, right, by Moore's Law. Like a lot of, you can go back in history. You can smartphones, like Steve Jobs is the greatest, I think, genius since Thomas Edison, by no means taking away from him. But like, if you tracked the growth of processors and

capacitive touchscreens and modems and things, like, you would have seen that somewhere between 2007 and 2010 that like smartphones would go mainstream like the underlying tech gives you at least kind of error bars as to where something will probably happen you know it's like I remember reading a deep learning book a few years ago it's the Ian Goodfellow deep learning book and has a chart how many neurons in different types of animals right and you could literally track out each year how fast GPUs get and how many neurons you could have in your neural network and it was like roughly around 2023, 24, whatever. It's like, you know, you started getting the GPUs that could get, you know, close to humans and whatever, some kind of much smarter animals.

So this is not to take away from any of the individual contributions, but there is this sort of, I think there's just infrastructure. I'm somewhat of an infrastructure determinist maxi that like, it really does matter how performant and how, you know, in the case of blockchains, how expensive and usable and performant these things are. And I think we're pretty close. I wouldn't say we're there yet. Like, it's still going to be clunky. There's, you know, we need a lot of these 4844 on these upgrades and DA layer kind of like cheaper storage, you know, bridges, the wallet experience. So I don't know if we're quite there infrastructure-wise, but I think we're a year or two away or close to it. Like, it's pretty close.

It's getting a lot closer. I hesitate because, you know, I think it's easier in tech to predict what happens and harder to predict exactly when it happens. Like, at least I found that to be the case. And so, you know, that's one part of it. And then the other part is, like, you know, people building on top of that, the application layer. And there I feel good. I mean, we have a lot of very good entrepreneurs in our portfolio outside of our portfolio, also who are building a lot of really compelling apps. You know, we've probably, I think we're going to have 50 to 100 kind of credible shots on goal of, like, compelling applications that are built, which is kind of what I think you typically see, you know, it's the rough number you see in these kinds of new venture movements to have a few breakouts.

You know, it's like I remember early mobile. I was involved then. I was, you know, investing in things. And you had sort of, you know, Instagram and Four Square and Angry Birds. And, like, you know, you got and there were like 97 others that I can't remember the names of. But, like, you need that kind of scale of experiments to get run to kind of fully run through the IDMAs. But, like, it's very hard to predict the specifics of, but I agree. We have not had our chat GPT moment.

I think we've had a lot of interesting stuff happen. I'm very bullish. But I think, you know, we haven't quite had had that breakout moment. And I think when we do, it'll be a great thing because it will, it will. it will immediately help explain all this stuff to people. It'll help on the policy side. By the way, all these people debating, like, what should we call it? NFTs, Web 3, like, none of that's going to matter.

I remember having these debates about AI, and it was like, we used to call it machine learning. And once you have a chat, you can call it whatever, you know, AI. Well, people now just call it chat GPT. It's not even a name we would have selected. Yeah, it doesn't matter. When the stuff works, it doesn't matter. Like, in tech products are the marketing, not names, not, like, the products, market themselves, I believe in tech. And so that is the North Star. We literally have it as a

KPI, like inside of our fun, North Star, like getting the infrastructure and everything else into, you know, so that we have that kind of breakout iPhone chat, GPT moment. And like, what can we do? Like we have a research team. And the goal, the North Star, the research team is like making whatever contribution they can to getting the space closer to that moment, right? I said Chris. And I know as we're in the infrastructure phase, it's harder to explain to the world what it is we are doing over here in crypto, but this book does a fantastic job of that. And I hope it propagates far and wide. The book, Bankless listeners, called Read, Right, Own, will include a link to it in the show notes. And Chris, thank you so much for coming on.

We should have you back and talk about the current state of crypto pretty soon. Yeah, I'm happy to come back and just, you know, riff on what's going on. Thank you guys so much for having me, thanks. Bankless Nation, a few other action items for you. We've got some previous Chris Dixen episodes from the archive that you got to check out. Mental Models for Web 3, one of my all-time favorites. We also had Dixon and his partner Mark Andreessen on a time or two. Gotta end with this. Risk and Disclaimers. Of course, crypto is risky. So is this ownership era of the internet. You could lose what you put in, but we're headed west. This is on the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.