Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Is Blockchain Still a Revolution or Becoming Another Upgrade? Ep.621

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

As blockchain tech gets co-opted by legacy players for efficiency gains, has the revolution lost its edge? Crypto philosopher Paul Dylan-Ennis and Jito's Head of Governance, Dr. Nick Almond, join Friederike to probe this shift from 2017's visionary DAOs to today's Telegram-negotiated votes and whale capture. Rooted in philosophy and complex systems, they unpack mind-hacking risks via data micro-targeting, the polycentric bulwarks (full nodes, prediction markets) shielding against cultural flips, and why epistemic tools could fortify crypto against real-world censorship. Their call: Reclaim the ethos through event evangelism and normie outreach for grassroots empowerment.Topics discussed in this episode:0:00 - Introduction1:32 - Nick's journey: Physics to DAOs3:59 - Paul's path: Philosophy to crypto counterculture5:54 - Crypto's shift from niche to incumbent tool7:37 - Governance as crypto's "soul"10:54 - Early DAOs vs. today's backroom reality11:45 - Diluted ideas & human workarounds1:03:44 - Elevating better leaders & social consensus tools1:05:05 - Hacking minds: Post-ideological vs. cypherpunk1:07:21 - Polycentric defenses & full node bedrock1:10:50 - Advice: Evangelize at events & outreach to normiesLinks mentioned in this episode:Dr. Nick Almond, Head of Governance at JitoPaul Dylan-Ennis, Crypto PhilosopherSponsors: - Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at gnosis.io This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.

When I think about, say, cypherpunk, when I think about decentralization, I'm more focused nowadays on the chains themselves, the protocols, that the real ineliminable core, as I like to think of it, of cypherpunk, is primarily to be found on the chains, and that's where it really matters. And then you're probably fighting a losing battle if you want every application, every doubt. To have that same degree of commitment to these traditional values, I think those days might be coming to a close. How do we stop Web 3 from merely becoming an infrastructure upgrade for Wall Street?

I think we've seen a lot of this. I think that's already happened. If they understood more the level of micro-targeting and corporate surveillance that's happening under the hood, I think people would be more worried about it. Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Frederica Ernst and today I'm speaking with Paul Dylan Ennis, who goes to. bipolar on Twitter and Nick Allmond who's also super active on Twitter. Paul is an independent crypto philosopher and a lecturer at the College of Business at University College Dublin. And

Nick thinks very deeply about governance and other aspects at the Gito Network as the head of governance there. And today we want to be having a conversation whether we might have to adjust our intro in due course. So is the blockchain revolution really still a blockchain revolution or is it becoming an upgrade for more legacy players? Before we dive into it, we'd like to tell you about our sponsors this week. This episode is brought to you by NOSUS, building the open internet one block at a time. NOSUS was founded in 2015 and it's grown from one of Ethereum's earliest projects into a powerful ecosystem for open user-owned finance. NOSIS is also the team behind products that had become core to my business and that are so many others,

like Safe and CowSwap. At the center is NOSIS chain. It's a low fee layer one with zero downtime in seven years and is secured by over 300,000 validators. It's the foundation for real-world financial applications like NOSIS pay and circles. All this is governed by NOSISDAO, a community-run organization where anyone with a GNO token can vote on updates, fund new projects and even run a validator from home. So if you're building in Web 3 or you're just curious about what financial freedom can look like,

start exploring at nosis.io. Hey, Paul and Nick, super nice to have both of you on. Hi, yeah, nice to be here. Cool. Maybe for everyone who doesn't know you, kind of who doesn't spend as much time on Twitter as I do, can we get brief backgrounds of who you are, you are here and what you came for. Yeah, okay, I'll go first. Yeah, so I'm a physicist by

background. I was actually an academic for a good chunk of my career. I sort of sailed from physics through to learning theory and governance research over about a decade or so. And then in 2020, I jumped into crypto full time because I was obsessed on Dow's and what wonderful things this technology could do for the world. And I worked on prediction markets, Dow Tool, and now sort of govern a large Dow in the Salonar ecosystem. Cool. Thank you, Nick. It's interesting to have a fellow physics PhD on the show. Just mostly for my benefit.

Tell me what you did research on. I ended up doing a PhD in biophysical surface science. So I was interested in, I was working on sort of photonic probes to try and understand how biological molecules and biological systems ordered at surfaces. So I was very interested in, yeah, the emergence around like how life started, how sort of self-organized systems begin in biological systems, that kind of stuff. That's fascinating.

It's also not that much removed from governance and kind of like how it is. It is. I think I got very, very obsessed on complex systems and self-organization. Yeah, for the last 20 years or so, it's been very much a, there's, there's a lot of parallels. 100%. So I did my PhD in low dimensional complex quantum systems, which is actually, it's actually pretty, it's actually somewhat similar to what you did. So kind of like, I mean, work on surfaces and kind of, I did, I mostly did carbon nanotubes and graphene and kind of like these sorts of systems. Yeah, so condens matter physics thing basically. Yeah, yeah.

Basically, I did simulations and experiments, so it's, yeah. Lovely. Super cool. Paul, we've kind of bypassed you so far. But I'd also very much like a short intro on you. I think many people will recognize you from Twitter as post-polar. Yeah, it's one of those situations where I've reached a point where that has become. my name in real life, even at conferences.

And by the way, P-O-L is Paul in Irish. So that's where the origin of the name. But yeah, so a similar situation, another academic. So my PhD is in philosophy. So I guess the other side of that spectrum, so the physics, materialist, the philosopher who's maybe in the clouds a little bit. And then really I was interested in Prypto before. I got involved in terms of writing about it in an academic context because I had friends who were involved in WikiLeaks early on.

And they were telling me about, you know, Bitcoin, the embargo. That made me curious. And then I heard about Silk Road. And I've always had this attraction to countercultures, subcultures, that kind of thing. And then I never thought about it of being something that I would actually write about in an academic context. And then just by chance, I saw a job ad while I was doing my bits and pieces of teaching across Dublin. So I was like teaching philosophy and theory and so on. There was a job ad for a blockchain researcher at the university I am now.

This is 2015. And because nobody else in the country was really had a PhD and also an interest in crypto, I got the job. So I just kind of lucky. And then since then I just said, okay, this is a unique opportunity. I'm looking at a research area where there is nobody else. really working on it. You could count the amount of academics at that time on one hand.

So yeah, and then just ended up writing op-ed articles and then accidentally my Twitter account, which I don't really understand its popularity as such, kind of took off as a, my student, one of my students called it a micro-influencer.

So, which I quite like. I like that too. Maybe she got a T-shirt, kind of like micro-influencer. I think that's, yeah, I think kind of like there's, you already kind of led us into why we're having this episode.

So you said kind of like you are always interested in counterculture. And kind of in a way, kind of the crypto ecosystem is very much shifting out of that niche. I would argue that that segment of Web 3 is still there, but it's becoming increasingly marginalized. So if you look at a lot of the things that currently, happen on Web 3. It's more or less kind of technology being appropriated by the incumbents to kind of increase their efficiency rather than kind of turning this agency and ownership narrative into a

reality that a lot of us kind of came into the space for. And kind of I want to explore with you guys how you see that, how dire you think the situation is, whether it can be turned around and if so, how. Maybe I'll start with Unic because kind of like you've you've written about governance, which is your core focus as the soul of crypto, right? Yeah. What values do you think it was meant to protect? Yeah, I think so I was super obsessed on governance in my academic.

career, in fact, decentralized organization in particular. So I kind of built a decentralized organization inside a institution as a means to help the academics self-organize around improving the university. And kind of got pilled on that and realized that decentralization and decentralized organization was a powerful force for good in that it sort of distributed power more evenly across systems at scale and then when the sort of Dow happened I realized that you could like really scale decentralized organization and it was a potential real force for good in the world because I see a lot of the frailties if you like the conventional

governance order is due to centralization there's you know power concentrates around very small amount of people that limits decision-making capability The decision makers get increasingly divorced from reality and people that they're governing. And that was 20 years ago or 15 years ago, and it's way worse now. So I was kind of hoping that this would be a huge force for good in the world. Sadly, we haven't really focused on governance as an industry yet. I think it's one of the – it got very lonely in the bear market last time round, sort of still being a believer in DAWS and decentralized governance.

A bit sad that it's not really manifested as yet as a kind of broad influence on conventional governance systems. My sort of belief was that, you know, crypto would almost by like osmosis influence the global world order by just like distributing decentralization around the world. And yeah, I've got both kind of optimistic and deeply pessimistic views of where things could go based on how things might play out.

And yeah, both of them involve like crypto and blockchain as like potential accelerators of that, if you like. If you look at governance in particular, it is one area that kind of we were extremely optimistic about in the past. kind of and I mean we were we as noses

were up there with kind of the best of them and the earliest of them right if you look at DX Dow for instance

which was possibly one of the very early kind of actually Dow said actually kind of governed a protocol and then

you look at the Dow infrastructure that kind of we've seen over the year so kind of in a way kind of I feel in 2017, 2018

thoughts on how Dow should work were actually way more advanced than they're actually today. So kind of if you look at, for instance, the Dow Stack protocol, kind of, they kind of like, I mean, it was founded by two physicists. So of course I liked it, but kind of like it had very good mechanism design in terms of realizing that attention is really the scarce resource and kind of you need to make sure that you can't spam a Dow and kind of. like if you look at how governance plays out today for the large DAOs, it's mostly backroom telegram groups that kind of,

where kind of you don't really have access to if you kind of just come in and you and then kind of like deals are negotiated there. And then kind of the, a lot of the votes are just kind of are full gone conclusions because kind of like they've already kind of been negotiated in some backroom telegram channels. right? Yeah. I think so yeah, we, in many cases, both in things like token economics and governance, there was a much more advanced thinking, or rather the thinking that was sort of deep

and interesting was more prevalent in the space at that time. I think maybe an equivalent amount of it exists. It's just diluted by, you know, the rest of the industry. But also I think there's the reality of governance systems is exactly what. what you described is that we have this lovely public mechanism that we should be using, but the reality of it is people don't want to use it because it's public and they want to conduct things in backroom telegram channels because it's easier. So yeah, there's the reality of the way humans interact with technology, they're kind of socio-technical systems. So how a technology is used is only really manifested as people start to use it.

And that's the kind of reality. Humans don't tend to bear. behave in the way that you want them to. And so we kind of built these quite idealistic mechanisms, assuming everyone would like conform to the mechanism when in fact you can just choose not to use the mechanism and work around it and people will. So yeah, I think there was a, you know, and largely people at large just haven't done much governing, right? It's not, you only get into governance if you end up kind of supersede.

in a large organization, or you go into politics or something, right? And like 99% of people just are not in that position. So it's really quite an alien sort of thing to do. And I think that's been one of the really large challenges is that, yeah, people just don't sort of tend to want or know how to govern stuff. So it's just a, there's a big distance between people and the tools, I think. But I'm still optimistic we'll close that gap. But it's definitely one of the most difficult things that you can work on.

And just so the other thing is it's not easy to productize. So the kind of contemporary paradigm of technology is you kind of hyper focus on a very specific niche and then extract rents from it and build a very tight revenue model out of it. Whereas governance is completely context dependent. So you just can't build a really. tight, neat product out of these things. And that's just made it very uninvestable for the most part over the last several years.

So we kind of got a bit stuck, I think. It's uninvestable, but kind of like full DAOs that actually have treasuries. It's also extremely important, right? So kind of like, in principle, there should be funding for this because misallocation of funds is such a huge risk for these DAOs. I would very much take the position that, having some level of transparency and also the ability of new people with new ideas kind of enter into an ecosystem openly and being heard.

That's really high value. But one belief that a lot of people, I think, mistakenly hold in the space is that everyone's voice should count equally. And kind of as someone, I mean, maybe this is somewhat arrogant. But as someone kind of like who is built medium-sized organizations V4 and kind of whose voice usually carries a lot of weight, having people come in and expect to kind of be given the same amount of reverence or kind of attention. It's sometimes jarring, right?

Because kind of like, I want to appreciate people who come in and kind of people who kind of bring opinions. and want to seat at the table because obviously you need fresh blood, right? Kind of like this is why you want a DAO. This is what can elevate DAO's into kind of this paradigm shifting mode of organization akin to kind of like when we got joint stock companies

or something, right? But at the same time, not everyone in a DAO is created equally. And I think that's, I mean, obviously, You should be able to kind of move within that framework freely, but it should be, in my eyes, extremely meritocratic. Couldn't agree more. That's very much what I've been kind of chasing for many years is that paradigm, like exactly how you can shape a consensus by merit.

So, yeah, I think there's a, we came to this, these very idealistic framing. You know, there was a lot of the early Dow thinking was very flat org. You know, we want to get rid of hierarchy completely. We want massively open, porous organizations, you know. And the reality of it is that's a terrible idea. There's just you can't, there's also a sort of feature I call a public governance trap, which is if you do everything completely open, there's always someone hanging around.

who's going to just nitpick on absolutely everything that you're doing in public. And it just creates, and I know this because I've done this for like over the last five years, right? When I used to do, we used to have team meetings like openly on Discord and everyone would just, you know, and you'd have like 20 people just sitting there watching you, not saying anything. And it just, it changes the dynamic for how you make decisions, right? And this was a time when you're like, you know, this was a quite risky thing to be doing in terms of like global regulatory sort of environment and things like that. You know, dynamics changed a little bit. You're like, who are these people?

It makes you more guarded. You know, it's difficult to make good decisions in a radically open context like that. And then occasionally you get someone who's got nothing better to do who will just hassle you all day every day. but they're like don't know what they're talking about. And that's just not a tenable sort of system for governing sensibly. So there's a middle ground somewhere, right, where you need to have decision making, you need to have a path that for people to walk into an organization

and be elevated into a position of status and power if they are capable of doing it and have a material influence over the project and be rewarded for their participation. That sounds almost like a kind of. A company. A company is kind of like an interpersonal fiction, right? Kind of like it's historically that kind of we as humans kind of tell themselves. It's nothing you can kind of, it's nothing you can touch. It's nothing that's physically there. It's just kind of like a set of

rules and abstractions. Exactly. Like a legal fiction. Exactly. It's a legal fiction. So, and in some ways kind of it was, it was created to kind of do a lot of the things that you just talked about, right, kind of like to allow new people to kind of come into it and kind of like if they're useful, they can kind of rise within the structure, kind of but it's seen as kind of like one large entity that kind of like acts as an entity and so on. How kind of like if you look at kind of like the kind of a an idealized corporation that kind of is that where there's no politics and there's kind of like it's purely meritocratic and kind of has a structure. leadership and vision and kind of, but it's fully permeable. How would that differ from kind of your ideal vision of a DAO? I think there's a few sort of key differences. I mean, for one, these structures are very centralized, right?

They're very centralized. They adopt this very sort of pyramidic structure of power. And they start to degrade in effective function as they scale very big. Are we talking about DAO's or corporations here? Corporations. corporations large centralised I mean the same is sort of true I mean it's kind of it kind of that's so my theory on this is that largely we've projected the and I think this is back to your central point of this episode right

which is largely we've projected the old world onto the new so a lot of people rather than try to explore this new paradigm of decentralized organization we've just effectively tried to rebuild centralized organizations in in this new world right so like really if you look from a governance perspective like like max Weber's sort of bureaucracy theory of bureaucracy has like revolutionized the world's organizations of the last 100 years and it's created these kind of like very hierarchical structures and in reality the they're not that meritocratic in the end right the theory is they're meritocratic but actually the people that end up at the top of these organizations, stay at the top of these organizations, whether

there should be there or not. Finances tend to be very untransparent, right? So the radical differences in DAOs is that we have this, people can contribute to the organization and there's a degree of consent that spreads out across every participant, which is also not the case in conventional structures. So it's somewhat subtle in a sense, but a decentralized organization is more about local autonomy. Centralized corps are more oppressive generally, right? There's systems of power in there with managers who enforce people to, you know, codes of conduct and contractual form.

And it's trying to find a new organizational mode that deviates from that effectively. more about radical local autonomy, distributed decision making, where in theory, people at the lowest levels of the organization could influence the global structure, which tends to not happen in more democratic, if you like. Yeah, I hear that. Pola, you've been pretty vocal about crypto drifting towards corporization. So kind of, and would you apply that to kind of, um, um, um, would you apply that to kind of, um, um, um, the Dow landscape of crypto-native projects, or would you apply that pre-nobinently to kind of Web2 players

kind of coming into crypto-new? Yeah, so I think it's really a story about, it's actually an old story, you know, geeks, mops and psychopaths, as the old article goes, that you start off with this culture, which is, at least when we think about Bick, It's a combination of libertarianism and cypherpunk.

So we have this very unique mix. That's actually really the story of why it kicks off. It's the fact that it's cypherpunk and libertarian. And then over the years, we drift into Ethereum land. And Ethereum in the beginning actually isn't the cypherpun I think as people tend to talk about. But if Ethereum inherits anything, it inherits cypherpun and basically drops the libertarianism.

at least in the Bitcoin gold bug kind of variation on that. And then there's a little bit of an issue when it comes to Ethereum culture, which is that it's not quite clear what Ethereum is for. So it's a big question mark in the middle. The white paper tells you that it's, you know, it's not like it's going to be a general purpose blockchain. So you can build whatever you want on it.

So, you know, essentially it's for anything, which is great. That's a pluralist perspective. and then that's where we get all of our different narratives. They're actually really often technical narratives, Dow's, Defi, NFTs, prediction markets, I guess might be the current version of this. But that question of, say, what is Ethereum for

has always been a little bit unclear. And then, okay, maybe we could say things like decentralized accelerationism, network states, that's like the attempt to answer the endgame social question of what the Ethereum society is for. And I think that that's worth mentioning because if you compare it to what the Bitcoiners believe, they know what they're for. We're going to transition over to hyper-bitcoinization. If the Fiat system is going to collapse, then you're going to live in the Citadel, right?

That's their vision for society. Whereas knowing what you end up with in the Ethereum is a little bit more, a little less clear. And I think over the years, this has led to people becoming more pragmatic. So in Dow's, you can actually see this. So in DAWs, so every decision has been made in the DAO before anybody votes. So that's something I think, that's something I always tell my students. Like there's never a decision made in a DAO that hasn't already been backroomed before you get to it. And there's a lot of insider dealing and pressure.

It's a soft pressure, I would say like a social pressure to kind of conform with the group. And then also the fact that foundations stick around. So like the company progressively decentralized. but they're usually the foundation is kind of like the surveillance state of the of the company in the form of the transition over to the community or something like this and then you also have the the founders themselves the team having huge amounts of tokens so and the this this doesn't really surprise me in the sense that the in terms of cultural evolution because more and more if you look at what I call the CTVC podcast industrial complex or sometimes I call it the block works. extended universe. So this is, let's say, people who emerged into crypto, so they're emerging into, say, Ethereum culture or into Dow culture, but they're from the business school, so they've got a business school kind of mindset. They're primarily interested in markets and primarily interested in like what's happening in the previous week, not what happened 10 years

ago, what happened five years ago. And they're forward-looking as well, which can be quite good. but they are generally speaking post-ideological. So one of the terms that I took from one of their podcasts, so this is a term that they use themselves, like not as a critique that I'm giving, post-ideological pragmatism. So effectively just looking at, it's not really important whether Ethereum is more decentralized

than Solana. It's whether people's perception of Ethereum being decentralized matters relative to whether it matters to say to someone in Salana that it's centralized or decentralized. Like it becomes a part of the market discussion. It doesn't actually matter as a value or an ideology. So I think we're deep into this. Like we're maybe a lot of people haven't accepted this

that this transition has happened. And so cypherpunk and the values of cypherpunk like decentralization, permissionless this, credible neutrality, etc. This is a minority sport. And it has its representatives. But actually the representatives have even themselves given way to a certain extent. So we think about the transition

that happened with the Aterian Foundation. So there's basically a populist revolt from people who want ETH to be the primary focus who want the Aetherian Foundation to be more hands-on. So not the Aetherian Foundation

should subtract or disappear or be decentralized, but should take over. It should be like the entity which directs Ethereum going forward. The response to this was essentially to bring pragmatism front and center into Ethereum

in the form of like a kind of dual dual approach where a dual power approach so you've got Thomasism, Dankradism I kind of think of it, the pragmatist approach and then say civil culture council Vitalik, Defi Punk representing the OG part but I think that was the admission

that the culture is sort of this dual complicated situation and maybe it will work so one way that I think it can work is that The pragmatists are probably the people who look at the near term. So they're thinking in two, three years. That can be a good focus. And then the cyphopunks are thinking in like 10-year terms.

And then the other question, yeah, is whether these values, I guess, are supposed to be also found in the delus themselves. I'm not so sure. So I am more and more inclined toward when I think about, say, cypherpunk, when I think about decentralization, I'm more focused nowadays on on the chains themselves, the protocols, that the real ineliminable core, as I like to think of it, of cypherpunk,

is primarily to be found on the chains, and that's where it really matters. And then you're probably fighting a losing battle if you want every application, every doubt to actually look, to have that same degree of commitment to these traditional values. I think those days might be coming to a close.

I mean, decentralization, to me as someone who's been in this space for really long time, decentralization itself is not a value. So to me it's kind of like what it empowers. So kind of the fact that kind of you can have permission as innovation, so kind of say you're on base, kind of ultimately you are at the mercy of Coinbase, right? Kind of like, and this is kind of like they run the sequence.

So they can cut you out. And kind of like same goes, kind of like if you build an application on that, right? So kind of as so kind of the fact, usually kind of decentralization is not something that you need in an everyday situation. It's something that you need in a crisis. So kind of you don't need it until you need it. You don't need it until someone kind of shuts down your AWS server or kind of unbanks you or kind of. It does whatever else kind of like centralized entities can do to you and your business offering. And kind of the decentralization kind of fosters the resilience that underlies that.

At least that's kind of, that's my take. And I think there's now kind of these kind of some of the second group that you kind of talked about kind of within the Ethereum Foundation. And kind of there's a lot of people who kind of almost, kind of almost are in this as a cargo cult. So where kind of kind of decentralization is kind of the one thing that matters. And I would argue there is such a thing as decentralized enough. And kind of like what level of decentralization that is very much depends on what it is you're doing. So kind of like if you kind of have on-chain candy crush probably don't need a lot of decentralization. If you have your identity on-chain, your reputation and so on, should probably be very decentralized.

And I think it's a spectrum, right? And I think kind of having this almost purity trial-like mindset where you say, oh, this is not decentralized. I mean, it kind of depends what you do. with it, right? Kind of like, it's just like I am adamant that my car has a better security than my bike

does because kind of I typically drive my car faster than I ride my bike and if I kind of don't wear a helmet and I kind of crash in the park on my bike probably the kind of the potential spectrum

of outcomes is not nearly as bad as if I wear to kind of crash my car at 180 kilometers an hour on the Autobahn without wearing a seatbed, right? I think there's different lenses on decentralization, I think. I think it's absolutely true that we've moved from an extremist view of decentralization in the early sort of era of the, I think, you know, the sort of first year of the industry was basically,

you know, it was all Bitcoin and, post-Etherium sort of second era, we hit this very ideological position of decentralization. I saw people making completely on-chain to-do lists, you know, and it was caught even with, you know, low gas fees, it was like 50 bucks to use, you know, make a to-do. And we discovered that, yeah, with this kind of like on-chain everything, decentralization, maximalization sort of stuff, it just didn't work because it's completely unfeasible that everyday people would pay for it and accept the UX pain points for it

and I think we're moving out of that now I think there's a kind of pendulum swing-like revolt against it where now we're starting to get people to say you know forget it altogether no one cares right and the problem is is when you swing that way the failure mode is that something disastrous happens, right? I think we saw this with like FTX where, you know, who cares about decentralisation anymore?

Let's just give all our money and put it in this black box and trust this guy. And we saw what happened very publicly when that happened. In fact, that whole sort of explosion in the last cycle was largely just due to centralisation. It was just due to poor trust models, people putting their money in centralised boxes. So I think we've seen firsthand why it matters, right,

and where it matters. And there is a kind of philosophical dimension to it. In the Tao world, we were talking earlier about what's the difference between corporations and Daos, and it's largely it's about more bottom-up approaches rather than top-down. That's a philosophy and a value, I think, that does manifest in decentralisation.

It's just generally about distributing power more widely. I think the world needs that. But it is, as you say, is it's a just good enough kind of paradigm. Like one of the things I'm trying to push out at the moment I call governance realism, which is like let's use the things for what they're actually good at. Rather than presume this Dow can do this stuff that it can't, what is it actually good at? It's not necessarily good at making complex decisions.

You know, is it basically a multi-sig? you know let's like let's really look at um brass tax what this thing is and what it's good at um so i think yeah i think it is that pragmatism i think there's also as pola was saying about the sort of mbaification of a lot of this stuff that we're starting to see you know the revenue narrative revenue meta as people are calling it is you know picking up a lot of lot of steam so i'm hoping we find a kind of sensible middle ground rather than just this massive pendulum swing the other way and we just stop caring about decentralization altogether.

Just on that, yeah, so the reason why I think like considering a value is sort of important of like political decentralization as opposed to say architectural is because of that threat. There are people who quite clearly, and I've seen this on Twitter in that MBAification kind of school of podcasting where like centralization or like decentralization itself is like up for debate as in like it's not that important. And I think the this idea of realism is quite

important because my thinking on decentralization is it's to distribute power as widely as possible. So as much as you can is sort of the value or principle that the crypto community goes for. So when we're talking about a chain, we want it to be like truly polycentric, right? We want Bitcoin and Ethereum to be multiple decision-making centers that take each other into account where like no decision can actually be made without basically convincing all of those parties very slowly over the course of, say, months. We actually have an example of that in Bitcoin at the moment between Bitcoin Core versus Nuts, which is actually a really nice example of populism versus expertise and so on. But I do think that's, that's, so like I would say like decentralization

as much as possible begins then to kind of soften a little bit when you are talking about, say, applications that are built. So you want, say, Falvers to be decentralized as much as possible, but I don't think people should be policing, say, an application built on Ethereum as harshly as, say, the consensus, like on-chain

consensus itself, you know. FIVAS actually does a really good job in kind of having almost Web2-like user experience and still being fully decentralized and end-to-end in

So kind of I'm a diehard fiver stand. Yeah, me too. We're all fall over. Yeah, we're all on side there. Yeah, I mean, it shows you that a world of software like that can exist, right? It shows you that you can have, this kind of stuff can be realized. You can make a good application that protects user privacy, data sovereignty, all of this sort of stuff. And I think we just need to see more private.

practical real-world use cases land for people to really get why it's important. Do you think they'll get why it's important without anything terrible happening? So kind of like if you look at, if you look for instance, kind of like at a web tool example. So if I look at my non-crypto friends, almost everyone uses Gmail, right? Despite the fact that proton mail is much better for you. kind of it protects your data and your privacy and it's kind of it's functionally equivalent so kind of there's no big kind of user experience drop off and still people don't mind being data farmed by google yeah it's it's crazy i mean like terrible things happen all the time i mean you know

they people i think it's almost worse than that in that people are so used to having their information on the dark web and that they've just given up, you know, it's like almost everything that you, almost all data that's put online ends up being hacked. And I think we're almost post people caring about that anymore. And they've sort of capitulated to it. I think the scary thing is we're kind of close to something terrible happening. But it's more than to kind of just strad actors, right? Kind of like you're giving your data willingly to kind of the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the five corporations whom it's impossible to kind of bypass on the internet. So kind of like if you kind of actually made it a challenge to yourself, how do I do anything

on the on the internet without accruing revenue to Google or Microsoft or or AWS? It's impossible. You can't you can't do anything. It's very difficult. I lost a year in a Dow about three years ago trying to on Google. It's a nightmare. It's really, really difficult to separate yourself from these entities.

And largely people just, I think if they understood more the level of micro-targeting and corporate surveillance that's happening under the hood, I think people would be more worried about it. But do you think people don't know? Because kind of like, I think, I mean, we've had kind of like the entire Cambridge Analytica kind of fiasco come out. And kind of like, people were outraged about it for a hot minute. And then they went right back to using Facebook. It's way worse now.

There's a really nice Gijer quote. It's like they know what is happening, but they're doing it anyway. So like that's modern ideology. Like you know exactly what's happening, but you just continue to practice is like the nature of contemporary ideological life. So how do we get people to care? How do we get people to kind of embrace the, in my eyes, incredibly appealing kind of co-tenants of Web 3 as kind of, they emerged kind of like in in the early 2010s. I mean, it may need, I think we're starting to see, you know,

fairly public revolt against things like CBDCs and digital ID. There's very coordinated global strategies converging on very, like extreme surveillance practices. I'm kind of like, I mean, are you guys in the loop with chat control? Yes. The EU measure. It's terrifying. And kind of they are voting on it next week, so on October 14. So kind of like by the time this episode has come out, the vote will be there.

And as far as I know, kind of, there are quite a number of states who already said they will vote in favor of it. And currently it kind of hinges on Germany, whether they kind of vote for. against this. And I mean, basically what it entails is kind of it basically builds in a backdoor into every communication channel and kind of bestows

access to state actors on unencrypted unencrypted messaging. And I mean, it's terrifying. It's terrifying. It's terrifying. And you don't see a lot of it in the mainstream press at all.

it's um i mean that we have the equivalent in the UK the online safety bill um which explicitly has a carve out for exactly chat control like functionality um the danger is they're being very over about what it's for um you know it's the it it will allow the intermediation of all communication by the state um and i think this might be the thing that that that change changes people's attitudes about the requirements of things like privacy and decentralization. The question is, is does it need to be installed first and for people to be oppressed by it and for it to backfire? And, you know, ordinary good people be targeted by the state through surveillance and by mistake getting rounded up into, you know, for people to start getting seriously worried about it. or will people realize beforehand?

But eventually, you know, they will realize. And it's just a question of like, will, can we do anything about it beforehand? I mean, I don't know. Like, this is what's worrying. It's kind of scary. I've been one of the things I realized after a few years of research into these technologies is that, oh, actually, these could be used for really terrible things. things. And specifically in the realm of digital ID, you know, the convergence of that and

blockchain is like deeply scary. You can build very scary systems using this kind of stuff. The affordances we understand around token gating and permissioned access and things like that, that as it embeds into society is really, really scary. It's kind of like socialismaring on steroids. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Um, we've, we, so certainly in the UK, there's, there's actual policy emerging. There's a campaign that was launched by one of our MPs called, we'll take away things that you love. Um, and it was explicitly talking about, um, targeted sanctions on people, such as like, we'll stop you from going the pub or getting on a plane or going to the football match.

It's a social credit system. That MP is now the home secretary. And we've just announced that we're rolling out. digital ID and in fact we're forcing everyone in the UK to adopt it. So eventually revoking people's citizenship rights, the right to live and work, unless they install, unless they participate in and adopt this technology. This is happening. I mean, we're just there.

This is the thing that we've been worried about. I was talking to Polar about this the other day. These are the things that we've been theoretically worried about in this industry for many years, but it's happening at a scary pace at the moment. I'm really quite worried about it. Yeah, it's kind of like the dark version of the it's happening kind of like guy getting it. Yeah. But yeah, just on this, I mean, this is one of those things I think is like really like the heart of what crypto culture is really about.

And going back to that quote that I mentioned there from Xijak, like the idea of they know what they're doing, but they continue to do it anyway. I think that that's true of people in society. They know that these, like the, I think at this point, even your, like, not very technical mother or grandmother, maybe my grandmother, but your mother might have like even some sense that, like, the phone is spying on them, right? Like, everybody kind of knows this. That's general knowledge. It's not so obscure privacy nerd thing that people used to have. And there's a sense in which I don't think you can really always, what one of the things is. things that is maybe difficult for crypto people to accept is that, and this is something I've

argued before, is crypto is a subculture that can't accept it's a subculture. So it always has this idea that it can be the savior of everything. Like we're going to solve X, Y, and Z, like, sometimes very dramatic, expansive areas of society that we're going to, you know, suddenly find a situation. You don't think that's going to happen? No, no, no. I think we have a cap, you know, like, and I think, I think, actually, I'd say now we've kind of learned that lesson, maybe. Like, maybe this is the time that we've learned that lesson a little bit. And then there's also another part of this where it's like they know what they're doing, but they do it anyway, which is us.

Like we ourselves use Web2. So we're on Google Docs instead of FileVers. We're on Twitter instead of Farcaster. So like why would anybody use our apps if we ourselves don't use them? So like we're just as bad. You know, it's just at a different level. But we do use like kind of like sending and receiving assets and using perps. So I guess we are a bit more crypto, but not by much.

So I think that that's a part of it. And there's a quote that I like from Neil Postman. He says, the clearest way to see to a culture is to see to its mode of communication, like what medium does it use? And I think, you know, our obsession with like X, like reveals a lot about us, which is that ultimately we are just kind of like, our ultimate desire is just to kind of communicate with like-minded people about this very obscure technology.

And then one other things that I just wanted, a couple of other things, one is the UK is the crypto marketing department. So we can kind of rely on there. with their increasing bobbies turning up at your door. You can't have a beard, you say X, Y, and Z. This is actually the thing that could radicalize normies. There's nothing we could do that could ever be better propaganda than just allowing a government to become increasingly authoritarian.

And we're going into that age. This is the dystopian apocalyptic reading of crypto I have, which is that the way crypto succeeds is that essentially things go so bad that people suddenly realize the importance of like non-state digital currency. etc. So in a way it's an accelerationist argument, just allow the society to collapse and we'll be fine. Yeah, I

hear that. I also think it's hilarious that apparently the worst thing you can threaten an English man with us, you won't be able to go to them up. I mean, take away footy and pints is the thing that's going to start

the revolution. I mean, crazy. There's also a slightly less dark, but in my eyes, a pretty dark future, where Web 3 is not primarily appropriated by state actors to kind of ensure absolute compliance with stupid rules they kind of arbitrarily set. but extractive incumbents

appropriating the technology to kind of do the extracting they already do in a more concerted and efficient way and I think kind of like this is what we're currently seeing with the revolutes and stripes and Robin Hoods and so on

moving into this space so how do we How do we stop Web 3 from merely becoming an infrastructure upgrade for Wall Street? I think we've seen a lot of this. I think that's already happened over the last few years. I think, you know, instead of, you know, again, in my early crypto idealism, I saw utility tokens has been a real thing, you know, these like digital assets that mediated access to decentralize systems and had a use within those systems and opened up new kinds of incentive engineering capabilities and actually we just used them as a form of non-dilutive equity and largely you know the

amount of this so you end up with this dynamic where you've got quick liquidity and a game that's largely you know pre-market and post-market and the private market took over and largely that has manifested in a case of, yeah, private equity game, but worse, right? Because what we've had is people just like accumulating tokens in private markets directly from founders and their proprietary deal flow. And then a token launch, which allows them super quick liquidity, some like sub six months sometimes. And the retail market just gets butchered every time. And that's just what we've had for the last few years. So, A, that's sort of, happened. But yeah, there's a whole new realm of that when we've got, you know, these

massive corporate actors have just been waiting in the wings like, you know, the likes of Google, Stripe, all of these lot of, and yeah, they're just setting up their own L-1s. And, you know, and I don't see this is good for Ethereum and or good for the industry at large. I think they'd just been waiting for the right time to come in and plunder everything. So I think thinking more defensively and cautiously about this is probably a good idea at this point. I mean, I think kind of like part of, part of, I mean, I would very much take the position that kind of like, we can't stop kind of Google from launching its own L1 and, I mean, who are we to do that? But we should make sure that the L1s that kind of you want to build on are not Google's L1.

And kind of like if you kind of look at their press release, kind of like when when they kind of announced it, it said kind of we're launching an L1 so that there'll be a credibly neutral one that other people can build on. It's like, do you guys understand what credibly neutral actually means? So it's how do we how do we sway people, entrepreneurs and builders into the right direction? kind of how do we make them see the light? I don't think you really, there's no way you can really force these things. This is, I think, it's the nature of the culture where you just have to hope that there are, there are enough of you who are interested in these traditional, say, cypherpunk values. Say, Crops is one version that I've heard of put other censorship resistance, open source, privacy,

and security. So, defy punk, all these different kind of ways of thinking about it. it really comes through just the practice of people attending conferences, giving the talk and sort of stressing these values. And one thing I will say about this is you can actually get surprised. So the recent trend of Mert and ZK Cash and sort of Zolana, all these things that I never would have expected. I'm giving a talk on Friday to the Salana super team about cypherpunk,

which is something, you know, if I just listen to kind of crypto, Twitter, I never would have taught was a possibility like that they would be interested in it. And so it is just a consistent application of people talking about the ideas that secures it. Because I don't think you can really resist them at any other level. We can compete in markets. We can compete in the technology, but that's like a complicated story that most people aren't going to get. And it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter because they'll just use your term anyway, even if they're exactly.

They'll take like a credible neutrality and say, okay, well, that's a term. And you know, they'll use in some very ambiguous way. in terms of the this is, but there is a bit of a deal with the devil situation when it comes to the institutional adoption. So people want eat to go to 10K. They know that the way in which this happens is going to be

onboarding the institutions, but you know, one day you will wake up and essentially the institutions will be in this very powerful position. And in a strange way, I think that this might be a good thing. So what I think is maybe the great reminder or renaissance

of traditional values, like what exactly a blockchain is or what credible neutrality is will only come about when we get a situation where some institutional player, maybe like a Tom League on rogue, actually try to in some way interfere with, say, Ethereum governance, or else we just have some kind of bug or, you know, something like strange happens, which requires a state of exception, like a Bitcoin Civil War hard fork type situation or the Dow. We haven't had one in such a long time. And I think that's probably why a lot of the younger people are simply unaware of the structure and why the structure is in place. So it may require a little bit of the, like maybe the best way we can do this is sort

of push ourselves closer and closer to the institutions until something causes, like, forces a little bit of a battle so that people can see why it's important to be decentralized or permissionist. That is quite accelerationist. I think, I think, um, I think I said this the other day, we can't stop them, but we should be thinking of counterattack strategies. And the thing that I'm most worried about is, you know, these incredibly well-capitalized players just poaching all their talent and that being a kind of massive brain drain across the industry where everyone just worked for a bank. I mean, like the most tragic end to crypto is all the cypherpunks work for a bank in the end. And so, yeah, I mean, like we need to be doing. something about stopping that from happening.

So I think things like the finding ways to, like we need to find what those apps are. You know, we need a lot more file verses. We need a lot more like real world applications. We need Dow's to start hitting mainstream and solving real problems for real people in real communities that aren't in crypto. I think we need to start looking out into the world

and hitting adoption vectors that Stripe won't do. And we need to be funding it. We need to be like raising dows and like locking in the talent and making sure it's very difficult and it's going to come down to money. Making sure people like taking the... At the moment there's a lot of people

who will end up working for a bank because they're poor, right? And that's one of the things that I think we need to get better at as an industry is like supporting independent developers, grassroots applications, and like real world use cases that are outside just basic payments.

At the moment, it's just payments infrastructure that's rapidly accelerating in that. And yeah, I think we need to start working, like I sort of got a lot of stick for defecting to Solana after several years of Ethereum. But Salana's like more aligned than you might think. Like Polo was saying, the cyphorpunk mentality is there. I'm trying to push them into adopting a values-based governance system at the network level at the moment.

We need to start thinking more as an industry about there is a, you know, we've been having these kind of internal microculture squabbles for many years between different blockchains and even L2s within Ethereum and stuff like that. And it just doesn't make much sense. I think we've got, there's an abstracted value structure that sits at the level of crypto that I think is somehow we need to find the kind of unite the tribes, if you like, across the crypto industry. Do you think, like, sorry, his way.

Just briefly, I do think, like, Cypunk is kind of the unifying principle of crypto. And like, one of the jobs that we have in that battle is to keep using that term, to keep using those that terminology because nobody else will use it for us or if they are using it, they'll be using it in that sort of like a credible neutrality but not really kind of way. But yeah, I think that that's, yeah, so that we are more similar than we think and we need to get to that that mindset at some point. I am 100% with you that kind of like there's tribalism and kind of interfaction warring that that's kind of like it just creates a lot of friction that's ultimately

A, unproductive and B, trans people like nothing else, kind of. And, but I wonder, how much is the decentralized nature of crypto kind of working against us here? Because kind of like people are somewhat reticent or kind of resistant to kind of having one kind of leadership figure

that kind of speaks for a united ecosystem and kind of speaks for cyphopunk values at large. And I think kind of like this is also something that that kind of ethereans have felt over the last couple of years kind of with respect to Solana, which I think is also why Sulana kind of rankles the Ethereum people so much. Because Solana kind of has a much more vocal and centralized leadership. that in some sense kind of is the voice of Solana and kind of does the kind of marketing

that the Ethereum Foundation doesn't do and that we don't kind of have as an overarching structure across all layer one ecosystems. How do you think we can get to kind of like a consensus figure that everyone can kind of. of rally behind? That's a really interesting question. I think that a lot of the rangling against the Ethereum Foundation last year, earlier

this year, was almost a, it was a reflection of looking at the likes of Solana, which had a more unified voice. And I think they said, like, we should be doing that, you know. And so, I mean, nothing about decentralized system says you shouldn't have leaders. Like, there's, like, they, I've heard the term, they should be leader full, not leaderless systems, as in what a good decentralized organization system would do is elevate good leaders.

So, like, find ways of discovering people who can lead people. And the sort of leadership paradigm I see is what's, like, if management is effectively about control and conformity, leadership is about getting people to follow you, with soft power, right? So there's nothing around like influence through just by adopting a leadership position is exactly the kind of thing that we need to be elevating people towards, right? It's what isn't congruent with these systems is people being forced to do things, right?

And it's that kind of, so I think there's different ways into this. I think, yes, you can elevate more leaders across. the industry that are good ones. We went through a phase of elevating absolutely the worst people in the industry to almost like godlike status, which was disastrous. So we need to find people who are like genuinely represent the industry, the best of the best, if you like, and that represent what differentiates us from, from and embodies the principles of the technology and what we want to see in the future.

but also I think we just need better social consensus machinery. Like one of the things that I got very excited about DAOs is that you could use things like voting systems and this gets more possible with things like AI Dow crossover stuff of synthesizing the views of many, many people and actually innovating in sort of democratic tooling, which is one of the things that I found very exciting about this industry and its potential to do is democracy. is democracy in the conventional world is like failing, you know, representative democracy and things like, you know, is leading us down into chat control, you know, and like, so how do we find better systems for genuinely connecting with people and having them influence the system as a whole? I think that's what we need to discover.

maybe kind of a final question kind of kind of kind of building on this so in a way kind of philosophically we kind of think about people as unhackable and kind of I think this is also what kind of a lot of the governance mechanisms that kind of we've built in the past kind of kind of take as a prerequisite but we have have seen that people's minds are supremely hackable. So kind of, I mean, we just talked about the micro-targeting that kind of like all our data allows kind of to kind of to happen, right? How is, is there a shift needed in how we think about people's minds? And I think maybe this is a question for Polo. Yeah. So this is one of the debates that I've been seeing from the Blockworks,

expanded universe, my friends over at Blockworks, where they had this idea about Tom Lee recently. This is this debate that's kind of really in my mind. They have very instructive of the current culture, post-ideological versus traditional cyphorpunk. And the idea was that, say, someone like Tom Lee could come in and hire various different devs. You know, we saw the report, the EF, like the, like Ethereum core developers

and how much they're making and how distant it was from, say, just being out on the open market. And so I think from their perspective, they are thinking in that kind of way that we're probably entering into a world where, with enough resources, you can essentially buy people regardless of values. You could maybe even shift culture over time. This is something actually, I think,

is probably the secret Danish. of the social error of governance is actually just the idea of wide body with any kind of attack, just simply seed new core developers over a 10, 20 year time frame who aren't cypherpunk and now Ethereum is no longer cypherpunk. So, like, I do think that this is like a, yeah, the ultimate frontier, the great repressed of like, you know, kind of blockchain truly be, say, credible neutrality or permissionless and so on, so long as it has an open governance process, which is populated by people who themselves can be, hacked culturally over time.

So this is why I think where you get to the importance of the polycentric or non-monocentric was actually a term I heard someone use instead recently, just meaning that there are multiple decision-making centers that are supposed to take each other into account. So if you're trying to take over Ethereum today,

you know, you've got to take over the ACD call, right? You've got to somehow get Tim Biko and you've got to like flip him. You've got to infiltrate the Aetherian Foundation. you've got to think about the independent researchers, you've got to think about the car herders, you've got to think about the Ethereum Foundation itself, like trying to flip now two different sides of it,

the pragmatist side, and then also like Vitalik and Shawa, etc. And then you also need to think about the infrastructure, so RPCs, Lido, Rocket Pool, each of which have their own sort of mini-miculture. Famous figures, Kobe and Hasu, like those kind of, figures as well would have an importance way, I imagine. But then even beyond that, right,

you've got the client team, so they are all working on different client software. So you've got to hope that all those teams will flip as well. And then ultimately, probably the reason why we could do with a state of exception, a Dow hack, a Bitcoin Civil War, is people need to see the idea of the power of the full node as the last defense. Because at that point, you are talking about the ultimate bedrock of cypherpunk culture. You're running a node, right? Like you're a non-economic node, as the bitcoins would call it. So you're not doing it in order to be a validator, etc.

Like you are a pure, true believer. And that's a group that's distributed all across the world. To me, that actually is the real essence of the social layer. That is the cypherpunk bedrock of Ethereum. So the way that I would be thinking of countering this is what we need to do is we actually should be thinking about more distribution. and getting across to people the importance of just how everything ultimately comes down to the polycentric nature of the system and making it so that you can sway some part of the culture, but that will take you a long time

and then to get another part it will take you more time. So now the proof of work or proof of stake at the social area is actually time itself and you're kind of making it expensive culturally for somebody to flip you. I think that that is brilliant. It's sort of look at how crypto is actually more resistant to these kind of mind viruses that can take over people than potentially the real world system. And I don't think there's a government in the world at the moment

that's not scared about a populist uprising. Like with, you know, attitude changing radically because of social media. And yeah, I think. think there's this is a very real concern right and i think it's one of the reasons why we're seeing um you know a real rise in in online censorship because they're worried about um um you know effectively populist uprisings by i think just like ideas going viral and people's minds being hacked and so on um and i think there's like crypto potentially has a space in this you know

we sometimes refer to this as epistemic tooling um but things like prediction markets and um you know, decentralized sense-making systems and stuff like that have a real potential to add a layer of polycentric decision-making that can lead to good decisions. That's one of the things that I think we should be focusing on as an industry to actually influence the world in a good way. if each of you could kind of could suggest one way kind of we as kind of

players in this ecosystem can improve on the culture or the kind of permeating the culture further how would you suggest we go about this? I think the the most important place at the moment is the conferences and the events. So if you go to say DevConnect or you go to ECC, etc., then you're more and more going

to encounter people who are new to Ethereum, maybe new to Solana, whatever event you're at. And you can't presume the familiarity with, say, the values, the importance of cypherpunk. And so even though it's sort of like even though it's kind of boring if you're giving a talk and you're talking about cypherpunk and you look out in the room and you see other people who obviously know about it, I still think it's really important to run through it for the benefit and the service of the, say, small part of your audience who came who are fresh and new. Because the way that I've tried to think about this recently is, yeah, if we don't say it, nobody else will. So it now becomes more and more incumbent for it for those people who are. who go around and give talks and even if it's just like a local event to ensure that these things

are actually mentioned and to not presume them. So yeah, giving talks, if you are thinking of getting into giving talks, promoting that. And then also the promotion of the apps, I think is going to be a crucial thing. So Ethereum's big focus, recent years, all the infrastructure.

And in many ways, the Solana issue plus the revolt against the EF is also about the lack of focus on apps. that we have this, we had this hyper emphasis on the layer two roadmap and then say Beam as it was called at the time where you're thinking in 10 years and people are like actually know we should be thinking in now

and what people can use at the moment so yeah that idea of like promoting file versus promoting farcaster I think becomes a small it's a small thing but these add up culturally over time okay beat the drums we already have is Polar's kind of

advice. Nick, what's your what's your advice? I think we need to go to real people. I think we need outreach effectively. There's a magic moment that I certainly experienced when first discovering this technology that was this kind of hopefulness about how this could be used to like make things better and I think and then experiencing several several waves of being completely jaded. as the reality of the industry sort of beds in as you learn more about it. But that moment is still waiting for people out in the real world. And a lot of the times, right, I think we need to be going out to real people and explaining why these technologies are important

and developing real use cases that can improve their real lives. I still think things like DAWs and social coordination tools, are what could enable real grassroots communities and empower them. I still do a bit of teaching work at the Architectural Association in London, which is taking, I'm trying to basically dow-pill people in the real world. It's very challenging, but it's incredibly interesting to see real everyday people, like understand what is possible here. And I think we somehow need to, like, do that more.

at scale. So go to a normie. Yeah, let's go to the normies. It's time to, we're an echo chamber. And like, I think two sides of the coin there, Pola thinks we should make sure the inner chamber, if you like, stays on message. But we need to be taking the message outwards at the same time.

Fantastic. I think in this regard, so just in this regard, Jesse from Bays, who gets a lot of abuse for going out there, like he is actually doing that, which he shouldn't get a, much abuse for trying to go out and talk to people, I think, about these things. Cool. Thank you both for coming on. We'll include your Twitter profiles and where else to follow you in the show notes. It's been an absolute pleasure. Likewise. Thank you very much for

having us on.