Pirate Wires - Chris Dixon On Crypto, AI, and Why We Need Blockchain More Than Ever

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

EPISODE #34: Today's guest is Chris Dixon, Founder and Managing Partner at A16z Crypto. Chris is here to discuss his new book "Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet". In this episode, we get into open source internet, ownership of digital property, why Bitcoin is important, regulation in the United States, fear around centralized A.I. and the future of blockchain Featuring Mike Solana , Chris Dixon Buy Chris' Book! https://a.co/d/275aNPl Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/crypto-choke-point Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Chris Twitter: https://twitter.com/cdixon TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Chris Dixon To The Pod! Like & Subscribe 1:20 - Chris' New Book! 3:30 - A History Of The Internet - The Miracle Of The Internet Protocol 7:50 - Digital Property 13:00 - Web 2.0 - Companies Built & Accrue Power 21:15 - RSS vs. Corporate Power 27:00 - Fears Of Controlled Future - Getting To Web3 36:00 - Politicians Who Want More Power 44:30 - Can We Get Out Of This Regulatory Environment? 47:15 - Blockchains Turn 'Don't Be Evil' Into 'Can't Be Evil' 56:00 - Fears Of AI - Centralized Power 1:01:00 - Why We Need Blockchains & Open Source 1:05:00 - Thanks For Joining Chris! Buy His New Book!

Open source is a miracle. A crazy bunch of hackers on the internet have built the greatest operating system in the world, the greatest web server in the world. Social networking became owned by companies. In my mind, that money would otherwise be going to the edges of the network. I'm not sort of a blockchain maximalist.

I'm an open internet maximalist. Bitcoin is a community-owned financial service. It figured out a way to self-fund its services. That idea appeals to a lot of people. We've had something on the order of 20 companies who have been debanked. You see the word blockchain. They will call you and say, hey, we're not banking you. The next battle in crypto that hasn't really fully started yet will be about whether you can have your own wallet.

And this will affect Bitcoin. The new line of attack is terrorist financing, which none of the data shows this. It concerns me how much power it's putting in the hands of corporations that have already proven they do not necessarily have my best interest in mind. It's just bizarre that we would let somebody who happened to build some technical infrastructure have the power to control global politics, global business, and global culture. Part of my point of the book is just to say, like, don't ban this. This is a credible branch of the tech tree. We want to work on it.

Is there room for hope here? I mean, what are the odds that we can make it out of this regulatory environment? Hey, guys, welcome back to the pod. Today, we have with us Chris Dixon, the founder and managing partner of A16Z Crypto and the author of this fantastic book, Read Write Own. Also a friend of mine. I'm super excited for this conversation. Obviously, I'm aware of the kind of role you've played in Silicon Valley and investing and certainly crypto, but the book is awesome. And I really, I was kind of worried kind of going into it.

I was like, oh man, I hope this book is good because I'm going to have to talk to you about it. It would be awkward. And it would be really awkward if I didn't like it. I loved it. There are, I guess, just high level. I think that there are not enough great like history books of the internet. And this for me, I guess guess as i was reading early early on

um that was the very first like you know page in the introduction even that that the really chapter one when it started for me i was like wow this is um i don't there's probably a history book out there of the internet that is comparable but like this for me felt like the first thing that I had read that really took us to the beginning and the internet protocol. So sentence one, network architecture is destiny. First of all, fantastic first sentence. I think it is absolutely true. It's evocative of Marshall McLuhan to me. sentence. I think it is absolutely true. It's evocative of Marshall McLuhan to me. You're kind of trapped within the systems that are created by people a long time ago. And you have this opportunity inherent of new networks to create new rules that influence the world in perhaps a better way or a worse way, depending. I have a lot of questions both on the history and I want to

really lay that out, because I did think it was so exciting just to read through. We're going to talk about the three different networks that kind of exist, as you've illustrated. We're going to talk the three different types of networks, and we're going to get to blockchain eventually as an answer to this current moment that we live in, which is dominated by corporations. The very first thing that I want to do is begin with the miracle of the internet protocol, which feels to me, as I was reading you lay down that history, it reminded me of the founding of America in that it was really weird and almost shouldn't have happened. like like hippie libertarians 40 years ago like a 23 year old like hippie deciding the the future of uh the structure of the internet um it felt like a precious gift and i think people don't understand

that and i was hoping maybe you could just start with uh with with that like could you take us back to the history no it's a great question and And just in writing the book, I think that there are some good histories of the internet. I think it's Katie Hafner, Where the Wizards Stay Up Late is about sort of the early kind of vent surf and IP stuff. There's a few other interesting books. I don't think there are books that look at it through the lens of kind of economics and power, which is really kind of the lens I look at it through. How was it built and why did the way it was built affect how the money and the power flowed? I do think that, I believe this is, at least to my knowledge, the first sort of attempt to do that. I think, by the way, when I wrote the book, I was kind of like, this is both good and bad. It's good in that I have an opportunity to say something I think that hasn't been said. The risk is I'm sort of asking the reader to buy into a bunch of new things.

Like I'm sort of making, I sort of described it to my editor as like, I'm asking you to believe not one big new thing, but two big new things, right? And maybe that's too far outside of the Overton window. I guess we'll see when people read the book. But the first new thing you have, I'm trying to argue, as you said, is that sort of network architecture is destiny. That essentially, or network design is destiny. The way to think about it, and by the way, the things I'm about to say, I would say are kind of standard knowledge among internet veterans, but not among the masses.

And I always found when I went out and tried to explain blockchains and things that in an hour conversation conversation it was very challenging because people didn't have that that prerequisite knowledge and you know i was a long-time blogger and i'm a big believer that like don't write a business book if it's going to be if it can be a blog post but i just felt really strongly in this case that like you just had to have 200 pages ish to like make this to make this case yeah i this is why i wanted start. I know it's blockchain and obviously you founding part of ACC and crypto. You do need it. You like actually need this to understand why it matters. I think you do. I think you do. So yeah. And so, so the, the kind of simple way to think about it

is the internet is a network of networks. So there's sort of a base layer and this is part of the genius of the design. There's a, there's a base layer it's called, and There's a base layer. There's a protocol called Internet Protocol IP. You see it when you type in a number into your browser. That's an IP address. And that's the base layer. And one of the genius things in the design is the base layer is unopinionated. It just moves bits around. And anyone can add a computer to the network, and it doesn't care what the bits are. And in fact, there's a very interesting history. I didn't write it here. There were a lot of alternative proposals back then, if you go back to the 80s and 90s, which were highly opinionated protocols, which had things like the ability to censor and do other things. And in fact, a lot of smart people

thought those were better in a lot of ways because they were sort of fully featured and did all this stuff. And there's a whole interesting history as to why that didn't win how didn't i mean how did so you gave the birth date of the internet which i didn't even know january 1st 1983 so i think it's 81 i believe i think maybe i'm wrong i thought it was 81 but yeah but it's uh that was sort of the day that ip became i mean there were all of these so what happened in the 70s and even some yeah in the 70s essentially there was darpa's arPANET and it would they connected a bunch of universities but they still had sort of it was a little bit of tower babble there were different protocols different and so 81 was when they when they said okay let's all um let's all

standardize on IP internet protocol and have that be kind of the lingua franca so that we can all speak together right and so that that some people would say i mean you could debate it because this is one of these sort of bricolage things well how did that happen i mean how do people decide on what is it i guess so what people for people who i have a my audience is both technical and non-technical like we're talking about the thing that allows us to have something like yeah um anyone can have a website and anyone can have an email address and it can't be taken away from you. Yeah. Um, like, I mean, that's like the sort of distilled version of what we're talking about here.

Uh, how is that allowed? Like how is that? So, so the, and this is something very important in there. So you had IP and then you had this thing called DNS, which we still have, of course, which is, you know, if you have a domain name, you're going to DNS and DNS was a very, very important thing. So it began actually in a lot of these, it was if you have a domain name, you're going to DNS. DNS was a very, very important thing. It began actually in a lot of these things. It was a very bottom-up thing. There was not a set of committee. I mean, there were committees and things, but really it was bottom-up. It was software developers coming together in an open source way and saying, hey, this is cool, this

works. For a long time, you had this problem on the internet in the 70s and 80s where it was really hard to know, to remember. Every computer has a number. The numbers people have probably seen, they're 256.122.7.2 or whatever. They're four numbers separated by periods. That's sort of your address. Every computer has an address on the internet. But those are very hard to remember and so people started um keeping what they called host files which is a file on your computer that's a mapping of like mike solana is this number right that was

just sort of what the hackers did because hackers are the type of people that you know if you got a problem you write you write some software and like and then the problem was sync how do you sync the host files right like i have a different set of host files you change it so then of course they wrote syncing software and did all the things hackers would do and then eventually they said hey we should all get together and have a system and they called it dns and it was basically a system where you they you know today it has these what are called root servers and those servers kind of keep a master host file and then that propagates down to all the other machines and it makes sure it keeps it all synced it actually is not perfect like for people to know this they have a domain

if you change your domain sometimes it takes a day or two to propagate right but that's what's happening is the machine is copying those files but the very important there's a very very important thing here which is not technical it's really economic and and it's really about power and money in the end which is that it in that, and this is just the hackers doing it, I don't think they were thinking long-term about economics and things, but they said, of course, the user, Mike Solana, should control his mapping, right? You should control your mapping of your domain name. So, you know, PirateWires, you control the mapping to the computers that host that, right? And that, I think,

initially was done just because it seemed like a natural thing to do, you know, and it was sort of like, this is a network owned by the user, why wouldn't the users control this? And there was no centralized entity to really control at the time anyways. But what it ended up meaning is that it shifted power to you, right?'s say you hope today you host your files at you know hosting provider and let's say that hosting provider decides they want to they don't like your content or they want to charge you more money or think about all the things that social networks are doing today we don't like that you're linking out of your out of your blog posts mike yes like i know no're going to talk about Twitter.

So imagine if that happened with your web hosting provider. You'd say, fuck you. I'm going to switch. So we're talking about companies. You would not be able to build a company in an environment like that. That was the thing. Downstream in the 90s, what happened is because of this little architectural thing that you controlled, you had this little plot of land. Okay.

Everyone got a little plot of land and you could do whatever you wanted with that land. And that is ultimately had, I think, a bunch of profound downstream consequences. You described it in the book as property rights. Yeah, it is property rights. I mean, you have that. I value that. I have cdixon.org and I know I will always have that. And no matter what rules they make on the social network.

Now, maybe no one will ever go there anymore because, you know, if the internet becomes five companies and no one allows you to link out or something. But at least you have it, right? Yeah. Thirowires.com is mine. And I bet you value it, right? I do. Business people do value it.

And you value that you have your email list, for example, probably, right? And things like that. Email, by the way, also, of used as dns and uses the same system and so yes this is and i guess i was as i was reading it i was getting excited i was remembering just this this like this precious gift that we were given in the book there's a passage i want to read um a broad community of researchers and developers spearheaded the internet's development through the next couple decades these academics and tinkerers brought with them a tradition of open access. They believed in the free exchange of ideas, equal opportunity, and meritocracy. In their view, the people who use internet services, the users, should have control. The structure and governance of their research communities, advisory groups, and task forces embodied their democratic ideals. It was like, we were lucky that these people were the ones who built the internet, which nobody cared about back

then, but then became the most important tool in the world. Now, I think to bridge to the next piece, so this is kind of the Reed era, right? To bridge to the next piece, the Wright era, when you have a system that's open like this and you can build companies uh that have value that happens and they they emerge um that brings us to the next era the web 2.0 era yeah a couple questions here but would you want to just kind of introduce that concept i mean so so the way i think about it and the reason the book's called read write down is i think of the and by the the way, I think of the internet as sort of going through three eras. The read write part, by the way, is a common, it's not mine. It's a common way to describe it. In fact, the so-called web two movement in the 2000s, like an alternative name for was the read write movement. There were

conferences, there was a famous website, read write, or there is, you know, read write web. So that this was a common term. And I actually quote the opening manifesto of read write web so that this was a common term and and the and i actually quote quote the opening manifesto of read write web is like 2003 um but the basic idea is that in the internet of the 90s so there's there's sort of multiple threads here there's sort of the architectural like the sort of the things we were talking about protocols and things but it's a separate thing of sort of how did we use the internet and in the 90s what happened is what happens with a lot of forms of media when you have you know when films when when films started in the early 20th century right the early films were just sort of people taking a camera and filming a play right yeah and it took a lot you look at a modern film like

oppenheimer and there's all of this elaborate grammar that goes on right there's close-ups and establishing shots and i wouldn't even know half of it but you know there's just there's just there's this language that's developed over time. The word you used, schemorphic? Yeah. So the phrase I use, this comes from Steve Jobs. So Steve Jobs had this phrase, he likes schemorphic, which refers to, if you remember the original iPhone, it had a book app that had a grainy bookshelf look. He used to like to do things like design that kind of reminded you of the last era, so they would make it accessible and and skeuomorphic i i've come to use and other people have as a broader term to mean whenever you have sort of a new wave of tech the first thing people often do is they sort of import things from the prior former media um and so for in the early 90s sorry in the 90s a lot of the web

was essentially brochures catalogs people took kind of ideas you know things that you would exist in the offline world and they sort of made versions of them there's probably these retro websites you can go to and look at it they look like these like flashy brochures with like these big you know ridiculous things um it was it was it was charming but but it didn't look i think what then what happened in the 2000s this is when i really got involved and i started my first company and i was in you know sort of an active participant in the Web2 community. The exciting idea then was, hey, we haven't really tapped into the power of this medium, right? The real power of this medium is it can be read and write, meaning you cannot just sort of, you can't, it's really

cool that you can type a word in and, you know, instantly read about Abraham Lincoln, which is what you could do in the 90s with a search engine and, you know, and all these information sites. But what if anyone could publish too? What if it was a two-way? It was both you could read information, but you could write information. That read-write is sort of a nerd phrase, sort of alluding to file systems, but that was sort of the phrase people use. And so the idea was that began with blogging, right? So there was a little bit of that in the 90s, but really in earnest, like Blogger and these other kind of websites popped up in the 2000s. It was still very nerdy and hard to use. And you typically had to configure your own website and fiddle with HTML and do all these kinds of things. Very interestingly, by the way, I was there,

I remember sort of the primordial soup of modern social media. So you had Tumble blogs, which became Tumblr. You had short, you had what are called link blogs, which became Twitter. You had, you had photo blogs, you know, which became Instagram. So I think, I think you sort of said all of the kind of original patterns were happening in the blog format. And then what of course happened is entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and these other people sort of took, they took these kind of primordial ideas and they packaged them in more accessible forms. And they raised funding. And they raised funding. And yeah, a very important part of this, and I think an important, so,

and part of this, right, is there was a, there were two, there were sort of two paths we could take at that point. There was a, you know, there is a protocol called RSS. People know about RSS, but RSS today is used in podcasting and a few other contexts. But at one point. There is a protocol called RSS. People know about RSS. But RSS today is used in podcasting and a few other contexts. But at one point, I would say up until 2008, it was a legitimate... The data shows that it had as many users as Facebook and Twitter. It was a legitimate, there was a legitimate horse race going on. Which is effectively free and open feed. It's a free and open social networking protocol. So the way that we have free and open web protocol, free and open email protocol, we could have had a free and open social networking protocol. So like the way that we have free and open, you know, web protocol, free and open email protocol, we could have had a free and open social media today. In my view, we took a fork in the, we could have taken a different fork in

the road and we could have free and open social media. And that has, by the way, the- 2010 is like the pivotal, was that the pivotal year, 2009, 2010? Yeah, it was around then, 2010, I i think maybe 11 12 was a year that that twitter turned off rss that google reader shut down so that was sort of the final end of it but it was happening for a couple of years um you know when it sort of you know look what happened so yeah so basically you had these new services come up like let's talk about subsidies so you know i the case study i use in the book is youtube so and i remember this very clearly in 2005 youtube came and started actually the dating site and they pivoted to the video site.

And at the time, a lot of people wanted to start having video on their blogs. You had two choices. You could use OpenRSS. And that means you had to actually install some video software on your server. You had to pay for hosting. It was very expensive. And YouTube came along, and they said, look, all you have to do is click a few buttons and you can embed it in your blog. And by the way, that was the original pitch, was embed it in your blog, not because no one went to youtube.com.

You just want to embed it in your blog. And that was their killer feature that they had this embed HTML code right at the top. But the killer thing was they subsidized it. They paid for it, free hosting. And the trade they made is, but we're going to also show the video on youtube.com, which was like, okay, why not? Like, I don't care, right? It's like more traffic.

But then of course, what happened later on is that youtube.com became the place everyone went instead of the website. The powerful network effects. And that was the calculation the VCs made. They were smart and they understood this. They understood that if they put in billions of dollars to subsidize the hosting, that someday, like today, you know, Wall Street analysts say U2's worth $140 billion,

it might even be more, you know, and they probably spent $10 billion in the initial subsidies. So that was the trade, the kind of economic trade. And RSS just couldn't keep up with that. Like, why would you want to use something where you, you know, as a blogger, you're cash strapped, you're not going to do it, right? So that, so that's one reason. So anyway, so, so, so at the time there were sort of a real question. And so as we had this sort of web two movement happening and the, the web became interactive and publishing became

not just consumption of information, but the publishing of information became democratized. There was a question as to how would this be architected? Would it be done in the open way of the early internet where the users and the creators and the software developers and the entrepreneurs are empowered, or will it be done in this sort of centralized way? And of course, fast forward, it was done in the centralized way. And I believe this is sort of the key moment to understand why the internet has now become essentially consolidated around five companies was that that was the moment and it's a huge like the economic it's a little bit surprising to me like i would hope people could read this book and even if you don't believe any of the blockchain stuff just understand that like that that swing of of like that the fact that that that social

networking became owned by companies in in my mind, that money would otherwise be going to the edges of the network. Swung it to five companies when it could have been swung over to the kind of the users of the network. So it was a very consequential, I believe it was extremely consequential. And I think it's overlooked. That's why I felt like even though it's a little bit kind of nerdy and everything else, I felt important to put in the book because I really think it has profound economic consequence. Yes. Now, this shift from, you know, the RSS style of things to the Twitterification of the world is, it happens because Twitter is better, right? It's like, it happens because it's more, it's got tons of

funding. You're hiring tons of developers. You make it easier for people to use and then you have the network which becomes inescapable and that's i mean that's the thing that you you stick around for yeah i think what's interest one of the interesting things about this to me in in the the difference between the two models the sort of uh the rss model versus now the corporate model that is owned and controlled by a central group of players who have all of the financial gain and also critically control. So fast forward to the elections and things like the election and COVID. I mean, everything that you've not been able to say or share online has had to do with this pivot in the road. It is overseen by someone who I have tremendous... I love Jack Dorsey. He is someone who seems to care about these things and not even

he can really resist the market forces that lead him to you characterize this question for companies young founders who want to maintain sort of free in this environment uh as like you can either adhere to your values or succeed as a company is basically it like there's not really a way to succeed as a corporation um unless you play to win and that inevitably places us in competition with uh the corporation like it play my us i mean it inevitably places corporations in competition with the users on the platform. There's not a way out of that. Yeah. I have this section of the book. I call it the attract-extract cycle. And I argue that every corporate-owned network goes through this cycle, which is they start off in the

beginning. They don't have network effects yet. They want to build network effects. And so they do everything they can to solicit users, know comp like media sites content sites you think about like early youtube and they were out like vd teams were out pitching the new york times and cbs and things like this and then um and and then over time what happens is you know all technology this is not unique to my to networks but all technologies sort of follow an s curve right they start off they they grow a little bit they hit their it's their successful they hit their kind of ramp and then at some point the growth you know slows down just inevitably because there's only so many people in the world um and when they get to the top of the s like you think about the logic of a google

or something like all of google is based around 20 revenue year-over-year growth like you go read the wall street reports like the whole machine is based around getting 20% year over year growth. Right. And, and, and to be clear, I'm not in the book and nor ever critiquing the individual people here. I'm critiquing the system. Okay. So like, I like a lot of the people and I think they're well-intentioned, including Jack Dorsey and the people. I think it's the system that's the issue, this, this system of having these companies on these networks. Anyway, so let's just take the Google. So like you're, you're growing 20, you know, you need to grow 20% year over year. All of your employee compensation is mostly stock options. They all expect 20% year over year. Wall Street expects 20% year over year. They're not getting 20% year over year

anymore from organic growth. So how did they get the 20%? They squeeze more and more juice out of the stone. And that's if you go to your mobile phone now and search for, I don't know, a restaurant or travel or something, the entire first page will be either Google-owned properties or ads, right? You see this on Amazon, there's more and more ads. You see this pressure that on Twitter and Facebook, the big thing now is time spent, right? They need to keep you in that ecosystem. It's not enough to have a bunch of users. They can't be clicking out you know they start to view things like substack as economic leakage right because you know in some ways substack patreon there's a whole ecosystem of of uh websites who are basically are kind of off ramps from from the corporate owned network back to the freedom the haven of protocol networks right i mean why it's not a coincidence that this sort of substack patreon's built on websites sub sex built on email right like there's all this sort of trying to say hey you could still build your audience on twitter but you can monetize on the good old-fashioned old-fashioned internet it was like a brief window before this clamped down now there's a crackdown going on it's not just

twitter right it's all i think all the social networks now i think i think in three years you're going to see just very little linking out these networks elon is blamed for the link apocalypse um and it was awful i mean personally i it was terrible i hate it uh but he what he was actually doing was he he i think dorsey had allowed something to persist for a while that was not in the best interest of the company and it was weird and uh elon came in and immediately just did what everybody else was already doing you're not linking out on instagram yeah i think tiktok and instagram i don't use them a lot but my understanding is you can barely link out and no it's awful yeah yeah it's awful you i want to cap this really quick because i want to get to

blockchain stuff um you're a part of this like history. You're there while all these shifts are happening and you're calling shots. And it's got to be, to a certain extent, frustrating for you looking back. You share a blog post and I want to just quickly read from it. I think it's 2009. The problem is Twitter isn't really open.

For Twitter to be truly open, it would have to be possible to use Twitter without in any way involving Twitter the institution. Instead, all data goes through Twitter's centralized service. Today's dominant core internet services, the web, HTTP, email, SMTP, and subscription messaging, RSS, are open protocols that are distributed across millions of institutions. If Twitter supplants RSS, it will be the first core internet service that has a single for-profit gatekeeper. At some point, Twitter will need to make lots of money to justify their valuation. Then we can really assess the impact of having a single company control a core internet service.

And in a sense, I feel like this book is that assessment. Maybe like the first assessment of this kind. And interestingly, like you said like you're calling these shots but you're also building on top of twitter um and that was your company uh oh i had a hunch yeah it was an ai company i saw that started in 2008 and sold ebay in 2011 so you got to take me now to the new era because we are living i think this like maybe like set the stage we're living in a world now where everything that we do on the internet is controlled by a small handful of companies. I, at this point in the conversation, want to lay down my cards on the table.

I feel like I'm Fox Mulder here. I want to believe. I am desperate to believe that there is a new era. It is possible we're going gonna get out of this situation i'm a little concerned that you have foreshadowed the core problem here when you talked about rss you said um rss expected too much from users and that is i read that and i thought this is like how this is how i viewed the last wave uh the last bull run in in crypto it's like it really felt like way too much was expected of the average person and in that

environment it's just so complicated versus the ease of the corporate tools and i didn't see a way to win um i wanted to win i want to hear I have a lot of questions about this, but first, could you just kind of like break down the revolution that was Bitcoin and what that made, what the blockchain network made possible? Yeah. I mean, so sure. And so, you know, the Bitcoin started with a Bitcoin white paper in 2008 and written by, as everyone knows, a pseudonymous person, Satoshi Nakamoto. And I think like a lot of people, I thought it was sort of interesting and was curious about it.

I got really into it probably 2012 and then started making investments like Coinbase and Bitcoin mining. Actually, apology, apology, Shrivasan's Bitcoin mining company was my first investment in 2013. And so, you know, I kind of got into that world and thought it was interesting. And, you know, and for me, like I came to it from this lens of, you know, what I write about in the book, which is I was frustrated that protocol networks, which I believe, like, by the way, I say this in the book if there were a way to bring rss back and we didn't need blockchains like i would be the first

one in line okay like i'm not i'm not sort of a blockchain maximalist i'm an open internet maximalist okay so um i just have seen that look it's been 30 years and the only two there's only two protocol networks at scale and they were both started in the 1980s. And I think they succeeded partly because they were kind of incubated in a hatchery fish environment. They didn't have to compete in the rough ocean of corporate competition, right? And since then, protocols have not been able to compete. So when I saw the blockchain, I was like, oh, this is interesting. Because you get a lot of these properties of protocol networks, but you can also do more things. And specifically, it's a way to, it's a way, I think of it as now the way to address the

two shortcomings of RSS, which are features and funding, right? So, so blockchains, one of the interesting things with blockchains is they have their own internal funding mechanism. So this is with Bitcoin, like a lot of people think of Bitcoin, you know, digital gold, and that's interesting. And we can talk about that if you want, but there's another really interesting thing, right? Which is it figured out a way to self fund its services, right? So basically there's a system called mining where, you know, people may know about this, where essentially the Bitcoin using Bitcoins itself in kind of a circular way is funding its own, its own kind of hosting costs. Right. And that, you know, so that was sort of a route into kind of

subsidization and you know if you going back to the youtube rss thing right like okay wait this is interesting because maybe you could do a variation of this where like it's actually funding a bunch of other things right um and then on the feature side i mean look going back to rss one of the big shortcomings feature-wise of these open systems was the fact that you had like in the flow in the signup flow for rss it said hey go to go daddy and pay eight dollars and buy a domain and then twitter said click a button and get a get a name for free okay and that was a killer that that alone probably killed rss i mean i think a lot of tech people don't realize this but domain names are not consumer products like i have one

you have one businesses have them go stop somebody on the street and they'll be like why would I have that it's not like it's not I think a lot of people that like RSS people who are my friends and I like them I'm like guys like it's not a consumer product like most people are not going to pay eight bucks a year for this thing that's like you know there are these people too who are still clinging to RSS they are and look there are a few of them left just like and I love them and I do I really do root for them. But I just don't think it's realistic to ask people to pay $8 a year and do all the little, you know, the setup and all the other kinds of things. And so one of the other interesting properties of blockchains, right, is they have their own storage space.

You can store names and things and all other kinds of stuff on a blockchain, right? So it's got, so it's a protocol and in a way you can think of a blockchain it's not a protocol like rss but with its own internal source of funding and its own way to store information which lets you get to better features now to your point i agree with you completely that like a lot of both in the last wave of blockchain crypto but also today the features are not there yet and i think and i say this in the book, I think at a minimum we need feature. I don't think we'll ever beat web two on features because it's really nice on features. I think we should get to feature parody. And I do think that we

will get there. So just sort of like, you won't feel like it's different, but then you'll have, but then why would you adopt it? Because instead of getting 0% of the economics or 2% of the economics, you get 98% of the economics. And there's a whole – so I think like the way I think about it is the way the path to victory is feature parity at a minimum. And again, I'm sort of deep into the infrastructure and all this stuff obviously in my day job. And I do think we'll get there. And I think it'll be in the near future. And we'll have feature parity.

And you won't know – I mean, yeah, look, if you go to farcaster today it's getting pretty it's not quite there but it's getting pretty close to future parity um with a with a centralized social it's a social network built on a blockchain um it's not quite there but but i think that it will get there um and and so and and then the so the way i think is you get feature parity and then you get all of these other things, specifically economic things. I think, I think, um, going to people like you and, you know, if we, if we can get a, for example, a blockchain social network to scale, um, and, and the pitch to a creator is that you get to keep most of the money. Like that can be an interesting pitch, right? Well, one other thing I'll say is like the, like the point of the book though also is not to i'm not expecting to completely convince everybody that like this is the answer i'm just like let's just talk about the state of the world right now there are very powerful forces trying to ban all of blockchains um and so i'm trying to and and like and i don't completely blame them because

their view of it is is is jaundiced by the casino stuff that they see ftx i don't think so i i don't think that's the reason let's i was going to say that say this for the end of that interview we can get into it now let's talk about elizabeth warren i so this is one last thing i just like so part of my point of the book is just say like don't ban this this is a credible this is a credible branch of the tech tree. We want to work on it. Put guardrails around it if you want. So I'm not necessarily expecting everybody to read it, to walk away and say, oh my God, I'm quitting my job and doing this. But I hope they would read it and say, hey, this is actually a credible, valuable thing. And I can see why some people

are excited about it. That's all I'm asking of the reader. I'm now worried my views are perhaps a little more radical than yours. So I'm looking at this word. I learned the word skemorphic from you. Never heard it before. Great word. Am I pronouncing it right? Skemorphic? Yeah, skemorphic.

Right. So skemorphic versus sort of native is what people will say. Native is sort of the you know the pure form this comorphic technology or application of blockchain is money right it's like that's what bitcoin is that's the first thing that we we use so blockchain essentially introduces um scarcity into the digital world for the first time ever uh you can't clone a thing a million times and you talk about the difference between fungible and non-fungible tokens but just the idea that something can be scary there can be a limited number of things that are digital is really important it means

that you can store value all of a sudden and so the first thing that we use uh it for the reason the blockchain exists was so satoshi or satoshi's however many of them there were um can create a form of money that is free from the rest of the world can't be inflated artificially by government can't be taken away um will always exist invincible and so far you know what is it uh 15 years later like still going strong the value of it i think people always focus on the value of Bitcoin, like the number, the dollar number next to it. What's important about Bitcoin is they still exist, right? They haven't not been destroyed. They have not been taken over. Your Bitcoin is your Bitcoin. I think that that concept, separate from the entire other world of potentials,

the entire other world of potentials like the when we get to the sort of ethereum world and you talk about um the blockchain network as a layer on top of which whole metaverses exist and whatnot like before we get to defend all of that possibility there's just this one thing that already exists that is itself very threatening to a government that controls the money supply. It places it at sort of in opposition to people like Elizabeth Warren, who really want to control the money supply because they want to control the country. I think it's like, it's just a hard sell for an authoritarian. Like, how are you going to make that? I'm the authoritarian. I'm Liz Warren. I want to control the world.

What is your pitch to me to keep it free? Well, I don't know if Elizabeth Warren can be convinced that this should be kept free. I mean, like there is this sort of big debate. And for those who don't follow it, there's a thing called the CBDC, Central Bank Digital Currency, that has been talked about a lot. And I think in the next couple of years will become a big political issue, which is essentially this idea that you would have a digital currency that is issued by the government and fully controlled by the government. And that means, for example, the government can revoke your money or put controls on your money. And that is, for example, the government can, you know, revoke your money or put controls on your money. And that is a looming, I think that will be, you know, in the same way that what you can say on a social network was a hot topic the last four years. I think that a lot of that, I believe a lot of that will shift to money.

Of course, this is so much scarier. We saw it in the trucker protests in Canada. It wasn't our government. It was the government right up north. That's supposed to be the better government, the nicer government. When you threaten to revoke banking, or you actually revoke banking privileges of people who are protesting your government, that's very scary. Giving them power over that is scary. Yeah. And look, I don't, you know, I'm not a sort of a hardcore libertarian,

but I very much believe that people should have control of their money. You know, you obviously need safeguards for, you know, terrorist financing and money laundering and all those other things. But, but like, like, like I just tell you, like in our portfolio, we've had something on the order of 20 companies who have been debanked. Um, meaning like JP Morgan's went to their website and literally if you see the word blockchain, they will call you and say, Hey, we're not banking you banking you. And that's legal, believe it or not. And we have kept meticulous records. We expect at some point that that will be like- What is their justification? Is it like a sin thing? It's like they're worried about gambling.

They don't even need to address. And by the way, these are not Coinbase. These are literally companies that get US, we wire them us dollars to their bank account and then they go build some blockchain infrastructure and many of them don't even have tokens involved in their thing right like they're working on the stack so there is no risk of like volatility they have no exposure to um to any crypto assets they are they are like building wallets for like literal software yep um they don't need that this is the crazy thing is that the banks don't need a justification they can just do it and you have no recourse um and they don't need to tell you why um it's just it's i i was sort of

stunned to learn about this whole world um yeah there's this i think you had a you i think it was nick nick carter i think from on your uh site had a Chokepoint. Yeah, Chokepoint 2.0. I think that's very real, the Operation Chokepoint 2.0. I mean, look, I just can tell you because we've had 20 companies. And this is literally like we will sign a term sheet, right? We're a big Silicon Valley venture firm, and we'll sign a term sheet with a bunch of kids out of MIT or some top engineering team, and we'll say,

okay, great, where can we wire the money? And they're like, well, we can't get a bank account. That's what we're talking about here. We're not talking about some people in the Bahamas running crypto exchanges or something. It's pretty crazy. This is where people do want to focus on SBF and whatnot. We talk about the casino of it all. And I think these are basically distractions because I don't believe that the push to ban this stuff exists because Elizabeth Warren is worried about SBF stealing somebody's money. I just don't think that's true. I think it's clearly about power. She wants it. And Bitcoin, a decentralizing or the blockchain and decentralizing technology is fundamentally a threat to power as all decentralizing technologies as most technology in general is other than it seems like increasingly

by the day ai which i want to end with yeah we could talk about that too i think it's similar things are about to happen in ai with the executive order but the um look at the big thing is going to happen i'll tell you like so right now a lot of the focus in crypto has been on securities law the sec there's a you know coinbase just yesterday they started a law, the SEC. There's a Coinbase just yesterday, they started a trial with the SEC. And that's a question of like, are certain token securities, which just briefly, securities are a subset of assets in the world where there's asymmetric, there's a management team that is working to improve the value of that asset. And therefore, there's asymmetric information. And the SEC's job is to make sure that if there's asymmetric information that it's disclosed properly. And so the question

is, and by the way, the SEC has said that Bitcoin is not a security, Ethereum is probably not a security. The next battle in crypto that hasn't really fully started yet will be about whether you can have your own wallet. And this will affect Bitcoin. So right now you can have Bitcoin at Coinbase or a lot of the more hardcore people will- I have my own. Yeah, you have your own wallet. That is going to be under threat.

How is that under threat? You see the new line of attack is terrorist it's terrorist financing, which none of the data shows this. Chainalysis said 0.2% of all crypto transactions, this is a firm that makes their money selling software to law enforcement. And they said 0.2% of crypto transactions are illicit, and that's actually lower than the fiat number. So it's just simply not true. And in fact, there was a journal article about alleging that some crypto some bitcoin or something was sent to amos and it just was simply literally false and the company they cited came out with a blog post saying it's false so it's just not the case in fact if you talk to law enforcement it's a blockchain it

literally has a permanent audit trail of every transaction yeah this is a terrible way to do money laundering it'd be like the worst possible way so it's just not true but that's the nature of it. It's a terrible way to do money laundering. It'd be like the worst possible way. So it's just not true, but that's the line of attack. And the attack is why would you need to keep the Bitcoin on your computer and hosted here and not with a registered authority? And so therefore that should be illegal. That is going to be the next three years. Just mechanically, how do they stop you from having a wallet? Because I don't host, nothing's on my computer, right? It's like the blockchain is not, I don't control the blockchain. It exists separate from me and separate from my hardware. All I need is a code that-

They already control, like if it's over $10,000, you have to register the IRS, you have to do Patriot Act, like you're moving money, money laundering laws, like you have to KYC everything. You go to Coinbase is KYC. By the way, there's a lot of misunderstandings about they've been KYC'd since 2013. Every user goes through KYC. This is just a myth that it's not. They've always had a big compliance group. But then if you want to send money, how do you buy your Bitcoin? Let's just imagine this world where you have to go Coinbase, you KYC, and then

they say, hey, if you're sending more than this, you have to register it out like how do you get it right um and so they look it's the U.S. government is omnipotent they'll do they'll if they decide to do it they'll do it you know look there's a lot of um um but but it's not at all you know there's there's a lot of people that don't agree with it and including people in power um that we had a very similar uh uh kind of debate in the 90s over cryptography for those i guess the probably most of the viewers are too young but the um there was a very serious and legitimate attempt to ban cryptography in fact netscape 128-bit netscape was classified as munitions it was in the same government classification as cruise missiles 1999 so they had to have a 32-bit, basically one that was easy to crack.

If you were outside of the US and you went to the website and you tried to download it, you say, hey, you have to go to the 32-bit because 128-bit is export munitions. Which by the way, I think is what they're going to do with AI. I think that frontier models are going to be munitions, I think. Well, so, I mean, is there room for hope here? So we're talking about this thing that seems pretty threatening to the government. Before we can even get to the potential of blockchain, I mean, what are the odds that we make it out of this regulatory environment? Well, so, I mean, you know, it's interesting. I've gotten the crash course. I spent a lot of time, you know, and I might be spending half my time on policy now outside of

like the book stuff and then sort of day job investing. But, you know, the three branches of government are very important. So the, you know, for example, with the securities lost up, the SEC has lost a number of cases already. I think there's an important Supreme Court case coming up on this. I don't know if you follow the Chevron deference. It's a very important case. It has to do with the power of the executive branch and the regulatory apparatus. Essentially, there was a – I'm not a legal expert, but there was a decision at one point to give them very wide berth in what they can do, and this could limit that.

So there's this meta thing going on, which I'm not part of, but there's this sort of Highlander 50-year battle going on between the different power, relative power of the different branches of government, so legislative executive um judicial and basically the executive branch has sort of exerted more and more power um i would argue the ai executive order i mean look at that that's a complete the the executive order is just a complete plan to regulate ai and it's never gone through anyone elected officials really i mean you know in the legislative side at least like it should be my view a lot of these things like should blockchains be legal should open source ai be legal like

that's a question for democracy and the way you generally do that is through passing laws right um and then that's and look if we lose and by the way and so to your question like if there if i believe if congress had a vote today that we would win a lot of these crypto issues like i'd say this having gone there a lot the challenge a lot of congressmen have some exposure to bitcoin i think and they look they're sympathetic to it and they and i think they you give them this the like i'll tell you my experience like meeting with elected officials is like a lot of their they're well read they're smart they have smart staffers like they get it um uh you know some set of them do um and and i think if there were like a vote today uh that would actually be quite positive for blockchains i think also probably for ai

but the activation energy required to get legislation passed is very high and so what happens in the kind of void is that other entities step in and end up de facto regulating which is what's happening today let's say we make it out of this environment, right? And there are some signs of hope here. You just listed them. I want to talk a little bit about the future of the blockchain network. You have a quote in sort of contrasting the second world and this new third potential um blockchain networks turn don't be evil into can't be evil their architecture provides strong guarantees that their data and code will forever remain open and remixable this immediately it's true and yet immediately strikes me as something that is a weakness of the network. Because corporations are doing the things they're doing, not because they're actually evil, but because they want to

win. And if they can do whatever it takes to win and a blockchain network really can't, aren't blockchain networks fundamentally at a disadvantage to the corporations? Well, you just said yourself, why do you like Bitcoin? You like the fact that there's 21 million Bitcoins and it can't go up. That can't be evil, right? I mean, that's what I'm saying. I think that we've seen, I mean, some people say, oh, it's been 15 years, where's all the applications? I would say it's 15 years. And there's a lot of people who really like the idea of Bitcoin and Ethereum and these other things that we can just see by the energy and everything else. And the idea that you can have a neutral, a digital service that makes strong commitments,

that's truly owned by the users. That's what Bitcoin is. Bitcoin is a community owned financial service. That idea appeals to a lot of people, including you, I think. No, it does a lot, but I don't... lot of people, um, including you, I think. And so, no, it does a lot, but I don't. So let's just talk about social media, for example, let's just talk about like a version of this that we can. So Twitter, for example, all of the content on Twitter is generated by a small fraction of the people there. And that's not, I mean, the value is the number, the enormous number of people going to Twitter to see funny shit or whatever it is, information like that's who you're selling ads to. So you need a lot of people involved on this. You need a lot of people bought into the concept who are not necessarily creating anything. You have to kind of convince everybody

all at once that this is more valuable. And what you've seen, and I wonder what you think about this. So as crypto, for a long time, I've thought about the change in the creator-friendly, the softer side of corporations, the creator-friendly thing that was happening a couple years ago as a response to Substack. couple of years ago as a response to like Substack. You saw suddenly a real aggressive pitch for creators, even on Twitter. And now under Elon, the rise of subscription revenue and things like this, which is pennies. I think maybe actually what it was a response to was crypto. It was a response to the Web3 thing that was happening because they were scared of potentially a future where a significant number of creators would actually leave but the corporations are there's corporations are smart they're run by smart people who want to win they immediately give just enough like on youtube they give quite a lot so like the main the main the main players are like mr beast right now

um he's pretty happy on youtube uh it's going to take a lot to get him to sacrifice all of that to go to a new network and you kind of don't you sort of need that don't you need all of these people to maybe even take a short-term hit for this long-term gain yeah like i think of it as i mean it sounds grandiose but like we're 30 years into the internet and it sounds grandiose i mean i think of the internet as a you know i think it will be a thousand plus years like it's going to be one of these things like the printing press, right? I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that. And we're at the very, very beginnings, right?

I think. And there's going to be like, and whether like, and maybe, and maybe in some cases, to your point, like there are like people still, Excel is still very popular software, even after whatever it is, 40 years and Google Docs. And like, yeah, like a lot, a lot of, a lot of technology just has a, just has a really long life cycle. And it may be the case that social networking is so entrenched, as you say, that it's not a good place for blockchains to try to,

to try to go. And, and that may be, you know, but look, there's, we're 30 years into it. There's going to be a thousand new networks created. There's going to be AI networks and, you know, and, and, and network metaverse stuff and video games and just like, there's going to be a million new networks, I think. Um, and so there's like, there's a distinction, like they talk about in enterprise software, Greenfield, Brownfield, Brownfield is, do you go and try to redo the old stuff? And Greenfield is your, do you go to the new stuff?

So like, there's a, there's a fork in the road here. And like, I'll grant you that maybe it's too tough on the older one. Like I still want to give it a shot and we're investing in people that are sort of going at it. Right. But it may be that just sort of the real opportunity is in the new stuff. So we have like a bunch of people doing like cool kind of AI meets blockchain stuff as an example. Financial services, developing world. Like there's a bunch of kind of more, you know, kind of frontier areas.

So like I'm some, you know, of frontier areas so like i'm some you know i think you're making very good points now i'll also say like when you you know going back to my my putting my web 2 hat on or something there's a whole kind of theory of how you build um market you know marketplaces which what is what youtube is a marketplace meaning a network where there's two sides to the network right so there's sort of the creator side and the and the user side and I think the general view would be that the way you go and and build a new uh like video network like that is you go and and get the creators right you get like the top 50 creators you sort of get the supply side so to speak and demand follows right um and look a lot of times a lot of times like you know I loved it when

Stripe raised their first round of funding the the vcs asked them who are your customers and they said they don't exist yet um you know which is uh youtube was by the way youtube i've said another give you another youtube story at the time there was two two sets of companies there was youtube which was like this crazy wild west a lot of people accused it of just copyright infringement and it you know i mean i remember there was a huge lawsuit i remember yeah um and then there was this sort of the there was this other set like bright cove and a bunch of other companies that said you know that's crazy what we're going to do is we're going to go to cbs and we're going to put you know whatever

whatever the cbs tv shows are on on the internet right um so sort of skeuomorphic native or something um and so anyway so to the point about social networking it may be that look mr beast may be in youtube forever but there's going to be a new way there's 10 years ago 10 years from now there's going to be a new thing and you know there's always a new set of people coming in and can you build systems where some of those people are attracted to it and particularly on probably on the supply side you know kind of the new creator wave and look they may be some weird fringe thing maybe they're bitcoiners or they're you know they're interested in manga or they're maybe they're ai bots or something or ai avatars i don't know there's going to be all sorts of crazy shit right

and like how does that new crazy shit like organize itself that's what that's what networks are is like how do they decide to organize themselves and do we offer them we meaning people like me and the entrepreneurs we invest in like hopefully we'll be there with compelling tools that they might want to choose to use right yes um i want to kind of round it out with artificial intelligence um so maybe the first person who actually framed this for me in a way that i found shocking and like alarming uh was my boss uh peter teal at founders fund he he he said um crypto is libertarian and ai is communist yeah um and as i was reading your book it's like it's all kind of right there i think you even used you talked about that did you talk about the centralization of of yeah i would i think i would slightly reframe and say that ai centralizing crypto is decentralizing like and right well and that's

what i mean i think that's what he what he means he still talks about it um and i think he's absolutely right that is i mean it's a it's alarming to me it's it's like it and i guess i had i'm gonna be honest i i think um i i was i've been excited about bitcoin uh little after you. 2013 is when I finally was convinced by my hardcore anarcho-capitalist friends that this was the future and I was stupid for having dragged my feet. And I became enamored of it or by it. And I was soured during what you'd characterize as the casino kind of stuff, where people were selling tokens, a lot of scams at that point, even while I understood that there were real things being built at that time and continue to be real things. By the way, I agree with you.

I think that don't blame me for being soured on that. But what your book did was it reminded me, in the context of this AI, the looming AI thing, which you don't really mean to. I just kind of maybe come at it with, I think it's a powerful, amazing tool, but it concerns me how much power is putting in the hands of corporations that have already proven they do not necessarily have my best interest in mind. And it's like, as I'm reading this book and remembering what blockchain is and what it promises, it's starting to seem to me like really the only hope of, well, really just sort of like the only hope, the last hope. It's like, help me, Obi-Wan.

Like, this is it. Look, I mean, so AI, like Zuckerberg said yesterday that they have 350,000 H100s. H100s is advanced GPU by NVIDIA. They have 350,000. People were saying, I'm estimating that costs $10 billion. That's just, that $10 billion, that's just literally just the gpu doesn't count the electricity cost and no by the way they're they're making it open source to their credit to their great credit i think they're not getting enough credit facebook with the with llama 3 but um but um but generally like it's just really

really expensive and and the data like who has all the data in the world like you need data like all of the the best ai models, they all have the common crawl and all the other kinds of basically the entire internet. Although that's going to be litigated now. It's like the New York Times opening a lawsuit and things of what can you use. How much data does Google

have? I don't know exactly what the terms are on service, but they have endless data. The clicks and all that stuff they can use. I don't know about the Gmail and things like service, but like, you know, they, they just, you know, they have endless data, the clicks and all that stuff they can use. I don't know about the Gmail and things like this, but they have just mountains and mountains of data. They have mountains and mountains of compute. And, you know, the open AI has done an amazing job and they seem to sort of put themselves in

a place of an incumbent, but it's very likely that they'll basically be, you know, let's call it five, maybe 10 companies that really have kind of control this. And the nature of the technology, right? You go to chat GPT is like, you say, hey, what are 10 fun things to do in New York City? And you don't really need links anymore. So you don't need to link out to the web. And so again, you're going to have this sort of silo effect, right? So I think a very likely outcome, I think this is actually, sadly, the likely outcome right now, is that five years from now, the internet will essentially be five to 10 applications.

And there'll be sort of five social networks where you're totally siloed and you never leave and you never link out. And there'll be a couple of these chatbots that just give you the answer. And yes, and to your point, look, and I don't think this is a left-right thing. I really feel like this is just anyone who thinks about a thing. The idea that putting a product manager in Palo Alto to decide, it's like if we let AT&T decide who could make phone calls. It's just bizarre that we would let somebody who happened to build some technical infrastructure have the power to control global politics, global business, and global culture. Like it doesn't make any sense in a democracy, right? You should either have it be done literally through a democracy, through laws and things, or through democratic computing systems like the way we did with the early internet, right? It worked really well. By the way, people are like, oh,

this is fantasy, utopian, blockchain. We have existence proofs. The web and email work really, really well. And they are democratic systems, right right and is there bad stuff sent by email on the web yes there's bad stuff but overall the system works when you do something illegal it's taken down right if you do something crazy you know probably you won't get promoted as much or something maybe it exists like the systems work we have democratic computing systems that have worked incredibly well for 30 years email and the world wide web um and so you know and and they've and the world hasn't ended there hasn't been some horrible rise in criminal activity and terrorism all that stuff was predicted by the way i mean this was the huge debate in the 90s about whether you can have ssl ssl was considered this

like if you ask somebody in the 90s i mean this can have SSL. SSL was considered this, like, if you ask somebody in the 90s, I mean, this was, this happened where you had Senate hearings where they said, why would you need to encrypt the information unless you're a criminal? And the answer of course was because someday people will buy stuff on the internet, which sounded fanciful and futuristic and turned out to be absolutely fucking true. Right. So like, um, anyway, so I just think it's a terrible, terrible idea. So you're going to have, I think you're going to have these five companies that, you know, or whatever, some small set, and they're going to have the AI bots, which is sort of the search use case. And then you're going to have the social networking use case.

And so I feel like, by the way, I feel like the AI people aren't thinking this through fully. I'm a, by the way, just let me say, I'm a fan of AI. I'm pro AI. The firm's pro AI. Yeah, that comes across in the book. You are pro, I mean. I'm pro AI.

I'm typically proAI. The firm's pro-AI. Yeah, and that comes across the book. You are pro, I mean- I'm pro-AI. I'm typically pro-open source AI. So I'm pro all this stuff, but I do anything we need to think through these systems. Take the Stack Overflow example. I think that you're eating your seed corn. If you go and kill off this community, well, okay, well, what happens when a new programming language comes along and you want to train on that? The community's not there anymore, right? Right. So you're basically voicing my concerns i mean this is like my last question is is hinting at this i bring up the ai thing i'm like i am i see that i think about this future makes me very nervous um i would love for you to please give me some hope let's if you could you could just, if you could just give me hope. Two big policy battles are, I mean, there's the blockchain stuff,

which we've talked about. And I think, look, and it's not a, you know, it's not a certain certainty by any means that it will work, but I do believe there are a lot of really smart people working on stuff. I think there's various kind of flywheels

in effect, which is what you need in computing where sort of things get better at an exponential rate. And so the last section of the book, you read it as causes for optimism. And I sort of go through those things, but it's like, it's none of these things are determined. I do think the policy thing is the most important thing because right now it's just, it's such a burden on the companies we're involved with to have to spend probably half the funding they raise on legal

stuff. I think the other big thing will be open source AI. If the best models in the world are open source software, that will have an incredible democratizing effect. Look, you remember there was all this talk in the 90s about digital divide and how people wouldn't have internet access. 5 billion people have internet access today, more than they have running water. Why is that? Because of open source software. You can buy a phone that's basically the price of the physical materials today. It's like $10. And that's because all of the software on the phone and on the data center, it's all free. Open source is a miracle. It's a miracle that a crazy bunch of hackers on the internet have built the greatest operating system in the world, the greatest web server in

the world, all of the entire stack. I think it's the most underappreciated miracle in the history of computing. And it's what lets startups exist. Why can you go and just throw together some amazing thing, do what you do? How much open source software do you... It's just everywhere. It permeates. It's the oxygen that supports the open internet. And so whether AI is controlled by five companies or it's open source, I hope Facebook keeps doing it to their credit. There's also a bunch of startups doing it. I think that is the key. If that is open source, then look, yeah, sure, someone can have their model that tells you how to think.

But there's real competition, right? Someone else can come along and do it. And I don't like the executive order had basically i think effectively looks like it they want to ban open source ai but i think that that woke up a lot of people and and i do think there's going to be a counter movement to that and you know and i don't know i like it's like the old saying of what is it america event always gets it wrong until eventually gets it right i'm butchering the phrase, but like I do, I am optimistic that we will get to the right, we did get to the right place on the internet.

I think we got to the right policy wise. I think, I think the policies around the internet were pretty good. Um, and it was generally kept open and cryptography was kept open. You can use cryptography today. And so I think it's going to be a battle and I would encourage your listeners to the extent they agree with this to be part of that because we need all the help we can. But I do think like kind of fighting for open source software, for open services through blockchains, for a democratic internet is a critical issue and will be, I think, a defining. By the way, I think the other thing that's going on is, look, I think you talk about this, Mike, in your blog post. Look how hard it is to build in the

offline world. Look how hard it is to build a train, to build a, you know, why is there no train in California? It's because of all, it's because you now have a thousand people who can veto anything. Right. And I really worry we're headed for that in the digital world now. And I think that's sort of the mega trend, right? A lot of, a lot of the digital world kind of grew, you know, as sort of, Oh, look at those nerds doing their thing we don't need to worry about that right i think social media and elections and things change that and now everything immediately is under the spotlight and there's everything i think every i like maybe i'm biased but i i feel like crypto we're just at the tip of the spear the first ones to experience it i think it's going to

be just the narrative for the next for our lifetimes is going to be just a constant battle over every email i worry about the internet protocol that foundational i mean like that itself seems more threatening today than it did 30 years ago yeah unfettered unfettered conversations you can send anything you want you know um it's like it's i i think there's a lot yeah so i i think it will be a defining issue just going forward is that we're going to have these debates over all of these uh kind of internet issues and i think it's going to be the primary divide will be between people that want to keep it open and democratic and people that want to consolidate it um and then you know well thank you for coming on is a really fantastic book read write own um i highly

recommend it i do think it's the first important history book of the internet i think that you guys have to check it out i don't think that we're able to do anything in the future i think at this point we kind of have to know the precious elements of the internet that exist in order to defend them moving forward as you just mentioned in this environment that is increasingly hostile to everything that has made the internet free. It was an awesome book. Thank you again. And Godspeed.

Go buy the book. Check you guys out. Thank you, Mike. Thank you. Appreciate it.