Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) a16z's Chris Dixon On His New Book And Web3

Episode Date: February 3, 2024

Our friend Chris Dixon is back to talk about his new book: Read Write Own! How Web3 and the blockchain can save the web as we know it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Tech Meme Ride Home. I'm Brian McCullough, as always. We're actually going to talk to somebody that has been on our show, I think, three or four times now.

So an old friend of the pod, as folks like to say. Chris Dixon, how are you doing, sir? Good, Brian. How are you doing? Thanks for having me. Yeah, well, this is an exciting time to have you back on because your first book is out. read, write, own, building the next era of the internet. Congratulations on writing a book.

Thank you. Thank you. I'm very excited. You and I have a connection now because when my book came out, you were the interviewer when I came on the A16Z podcast. So I love your book. I recommend it often. Thank you so much.

I think it's the, I think it's a very, it's a shockingly accurate as somebody who was who has experienced much of that history of the internet. You were very accurate and your business analysis was right on. And I don't think, I feel like it really filled a gap. There wasn't a book that kind of did it from that perspective. So I think it's a great book. Well, thank you. That was the idea.

But this is about yours and this is about me turning the tables on you right now. Okay. Read, write, own. There's a couple different theses that are right in the title. And again, if people have heard Chris and I talk before, this has been something that we've discussed before, sort of the different eras of the internet. And so like implicit in that title is, you know, the web 1.0 era was read. You go see content produced by others, go to websites and things like that. The right era was sort of web 2.0 and sort of the social media era, which, you know, is still going strong today.

And so the third era is own. What will happen when we get to own? Yeah. Yeah. And so as you said, so, you know, I've been working on the internet for 25 years now and got involved in the internet because I was excited by kind of the promise of the 90s internet of being of this open, permission list, decentralized network where anyone an artist, an entrepreneur, just a, you know, a creative person could go and put up a website

and be sort of an equal participant in the network. And as you said, the Internet's gone through multiple eras. One of my kind of great concerns is that the Internet has gotten increasingly consolidated and that there are essentially four or five companies that, you know, that control the vast majority of the services that we use on a daily basis. And that gives them immense power to control both, your access to these services, how your data is used, and how, very importantly, how the money flows around the internet and who gets that money, all of the kind of money spent on advertising

and purchases and everything else. And so I, the book is about sort of the, as you said, read and write, these are, I think, kind of widely acknowledged sort of two eras of the internet. In fact, you mentioned the Web 2 era in the 2000s. A lot of people actually at the time called it the read-write era. The book is about what I hope will be the third ear of the internet. the own era, which is a, would be an era built around new technologies, specifically blockchain technologies that allow us to build a new wave of internet services that return us to the architecture and a lot of the ideals of the 90s internet that return power to the edges of the network, to users, creators, entrepreneurs. And I go through in the book in kind of great

detail. I, you know, I'd spoken on this topic. I've spoken on it for years, talked about, you know, blockchains and new kind of internet architectures, new services like this, but found that it was always hard to explain it in an hour because it required all this historical context and all these other kinds of this background information. And so finally decided I needed to write a book and that's what it is. So it really kind of goes through in detail, goes through the history, as you described it, the kind of the reader era and the right era and the kind of the particularly important points there. I try to weave in stories from my own experience and from research.

And then I go through in detail and talk about how we can build new services using blockchains that give us a lot of societal benefits that we sought in the original internet. I also, one of the important part of the book is a lot of people think of blockchains and tokens as being these speculative assets and they think about FTX and, all of the other, you know, Bitcoin and all the kind of trading and speculative behavior. I talk about this a lot in the book. I think of it is there's really two cultures around this movement. There's what I call the casino in the computer. The casino is this speculative

culture. And I agree with the critics that say this has led to a lot of negative outcomes. I think there's this other side to the coin. There's this very positive way to use blockchains. And that's what I try to really spell out in detail in the book. I think that, you know, another topic I touch on is that we need to, as a society, from a policy point of view, where we put our energy, where we put our money, do things to mitigate the negative effects, but encourage the positive use cases. And so that's, that's another major theme of the book. I want to obviously come to all of that, but let me, let me come back to own, to talk about something that I've been thinking a lot about recently. I mean,

the idea of the creator economy is not new, has been very big for, you know, more than half a decade now. But it's becoming increasingly, I think, the way that people experience the internet first in terms of that is their primary. When they go on the internet, they're creating that. Like, you know, Capcut being the top of the app store for all of 2023 and things like that shows you that more and more people, it's not new that people are sharing on the internet, but they're sharing in a way now where it's like it might be important for them to own their content, to own how it's distributed, to own the ways that it's produced and distributed and things like that. So how does your vision for sort of Web3 play into if we're all going to be

tiny little experts in this niche or that nature, that topic or this topic, and that is part of, it's not just having an identity on the internet, it's having a brand or having a voice. How does Web3 play into that? Because that to me sounds like owning. Yeah, so exactly. So look, I think to your point, more and more sort of the line between, you know, in the old days we had this idea of like you're a professional creator and you're and you're not, someone else is not. I think that line has been increasingly blurred and that will continue over time. Right. So everybody, in some sense will be is is an influencer to some degree and I think more and more people will

will you know will earn a living that way today when you go and sign up for a service like TikTok or Twitter or Instagram you don't own anything right you don't own your name and in fact I go through the book there's been many cases where people have literally had their their handle taken away from them for for capricious reasons you more more subtle and more common is your reach is algorithmically determined and is often dialed back you'll hear this a lot from creators, you know, influencers on places like TikTok and other places where they'll build up an audience. Maybe they'll get, let's just say, millions of followers. And then one day, suddenly they'll get less and less engagement. And that's because

there's a deliberate strategy within these companies, as there should be, by the way, for profit maximizing social networks, which is they want to turn the dials and do other things such that people have to essentially pay to, you know, that they can increase their advertising reach, that they don't, they aren't too dependent on a few suppliers, right? They don't want, YouTube doesn't want to have five people that produce 70% of the content, right? They want a really wide range of people. And in fact,

TikTok, for example, has very deliberately lately been doing this where they had a bunch of people with 300 million followers and they've been, they've had an active program internally to diversify that kind of quote unquote supplier content. Right. And so you're completely at the whim, not only for your very

existence on these networks, but also, I think much more subtly and more impactfully for your reach and your ability to make a living. By the way, it's almost all of these networks outside of YouTube. YouTube is the one exception. Don't share any of the revenue with their, with their creators. They have these like little creator funds, which are sub 1% of their revenue.

And of that outside of YouTube paying out $20 billion, the rest kept basically, you know, 99% of that money for themselves, which what that also means is that these influencers are forced to kind of go through these gymnastics to make money. So you spoke to speak to an influencer on TikTok and they're off selling, you know, things merchandising and Walmart or they're trying to get sponsorships because they can't make money directly on the platform. So contrast that with email, which is a web one, right? It's sort of a holdover, a leftover from the web one era. If you have an email audience, you can do whatever you want with that audience. You don't pay a middle, middleman to, for, you know, for that ability. You can chart, you can sell them products. You can run advertising.

And whatever you make, you keep. I mean, you may pay a credit card company 3% or something. something, but with TikTok, you're paying all the money to the platform, right? And so that's how the first, the Web One platform, so the Web1 protocols, platforms that still exist today, right, are the World Wide Web. So if you have a website or domain name and you control that, you have a direct relationship with your audience. With email, you have a direct relationship with your audience. And with these Web 2 networks, although they did a lot of good things for the world, in the end, they're very, very extractive. They're very controlling. They're very extractive. And all trends point

to that becoming even more so. You know, go go look at your Google search results today. it's very, very different than your search results 10 years ago in the sense that you now get mostly either Google content. They're promoting their own content or sponsored content, right? 10 years ago, it was all these kind of nice organic links. And that has all sorts of that. I think it's a negative effect on the user. I think those are worst results. I think it's almost, I mean, my personal view, I don't even use Google anymore.

I think it's gotten terrible. And I think it's going to continue, by the way, because all the kind of corporate incentives will just continue. They need to layer on, you know, sort of the whole thing is around, can we grow profits, revenues 20% year every year. the only way to really do that right now at their scale is to keep kind of squeezing more juice out. But on the flip side, if you're building a, you know, if you have a website or you're building an e-commerce business, the effect is instead of getting, you know, X percent of your traffic for free, organic links, more and more of that's coming through sponsors. So it's a way of squeezing both sides, both sides. Both the user gets squeezed and having a worst experience, having more data extracted, et cetera.

But then on the supply side, so to speak, the entrepreneur side, which is, you know, of course, my job, I invest in entrepreneurs, I interact with those. I see it from that side. They're all getting squeezed as well. Look at Amazon. Amazon now, I just, when I use Amazon, I think it's a great, they have a great product. But I now, by default, scroll down two-thirds of the way every page, because they're layering more and more sponsored links on. It's fine for me. I can scroll down. What it's not fine for are all the businesses that have built a living on Amazon, who now are getting far, far, far fewer clicks or they have to pay more to get kind of, you know, listed higher in the page because, of course, Amazon knows that the higher ones on the page get clicked on more.

And so you basically have a situation where, and then like layer on AI, AI is awesome. It's an amazing technology. I'm very excited about it. But the reality is it is a technology that favors large incumbents with big stores of data and capital and compute. And so I think AI, for all of its benefits, will further accelerate this. think we're very close to ending up of an internet that's sort of like the old broadcast TV of like ABC, CBS, and NBC. And they control everything. And they make all the money. And we lose everything that's wonderful and, and I think was originally beautiful about the internet. And why, frankly,

I, why I spent my career on the internet. I fell in love with that vision, that early vision of a open decentralized network. And I think we are at serious risk of losing that. And so, you know, And what I write about in the book is this idea that you can, you know, the way I think, what I think a blockchain is essentially is a new building material for building networks, for building networks that have, as I describe it, the societal benefits of the early Web 1 networks. But a lot of the competitive advantages, advanced functionality and other kinds of things that we expect from modern internet services. So to let you create sort of, and I think of it as sort of the best of both worlds of having advanced features and functionality, but also. also the kind of open, decentralized aspects of the early kind of Web 1 protocols. We've done three examples. So like the users as increasingly creators, higher power creators than even 10 years ago.

You mentioned commerce, e-commerce and selling on top of platforms. We didn't even mention things like startups and app developers and things like that. Oh, yeah, yeah, well, developers, I mean, so developers, as you know, from being a historian, there was this sort of developer apocalypse of 2011 to 12. So what happened just for folks who don't know is essentially, you know, social networks kind of came along in the 2000s. It was the belief in the startup community that these were the new platforms in the sense of like the way operating systems were in, let's say, the 80s, 90s. And so there was a huge wave of startups building on Twitter and Facebook and other platforms like this. And the understanding was these platforms similar to the web and email would remain relatively, even though they were run by companies, they would remain relatively open.

And so, for example, Twitter didn't have their own client, their own app that you could download for the first, I believe it was five years. And they just relied on third party. So there was, you know, Tweety and Twittalator and like 50 others that you would just download. And the idea, and same with email. Like you don't, there's no email app, right? you download, you use Gmail or you download Outlook, like email is just this sort of protocol that exists in the cloud and there are other clients for it. And that was the attitude that Twitter

as an example had. And then it was around 2011 and 12. And I think by the way, there's deep reasons why it was around that time. And I go through that in the book, but I won't go into detail now. But essentially all of these large social network platforms started to change their policies and became much, much more restrictive. And, you know, Twitter bought a, uh, uh, one of their client, one of the apps, and then shut down their, essentially, effectively shut down their API. And they all went sort of siloed. You know, fast forward today, it's even, today on X Twitter, even having a link in your tweet will severely, um, uh, decrease, allegedly, supposedly will, will seriously decrease the reach of that tweet, that the,

this is happening more. It's getting so, these, these platforms are becoming so siloed now that even linking out is, is a punished behavior. And that they really just want you to live and spend all of your time in one of these four or five silos. Well, that's almost like that's antithetical to the creation because it's like they just want you to be consuming. It's like we're almost coming back to the television model of things where obviously they

need the cheap content. Yeah, well, they want you to create enough content that they don't have to pay for the content. But don't get too successful. Right, exactly. But they basically what they want is sort of 10,000, 10 million worker bee. creating their content for them without paying for it, but not like 10 really powerful worker beings

who would actually have the power to start negotiating and switching platform. Long tail but not stars. That's right. That's right. So okay, given those three examples, and we're talking about blockchain as being a solution to that. So either if you have an overarching,

but I'm looking for a tangible way that blockchain is a solution for a person creating a person selling a start, up trying to gain traction? I'll give you an example. So like music's an interesting example where so today, most music will go through platforms like Spotify. Spotify's own stats.

I think they say they have 8 million artists on the platform. And of that, I believe the number is 14,000, make $50,000 a year or more. So a very, very small percentage make sort of the average American salary. And if you just, for folks listening, if you ask your musician friends, if they make money on streaming, they'll basically say no. And that's because money, the labels take money.

but also the platforms take money. And basically all these different people take money along the way, and the musicians are ended up for very little. So you can use blockchains, for example. There's a bunch of projects that sell tickets and digital collectibles and art directly to their audience using blockchains, using NFTs, using other kinds of, you know, tokens as just one example.

And so, you know, even though now everyone's saying NFTs are dead, this year when NFTs are quote dead, there'll be about $2 billion with a B of sales of NFTs, of creative people selling NFTs to creators, which is, like I mentioned, because these Web2 platforms basically don't pay out is already a really meaningful number. But the key point there is you're selling direct, right? Anything you sell, if you sell a ticket or a merchandise or whatever you're selling via a blockchain, there is no intermediary.

A blockchain is one way to think of a blockchain. It's a way to create digital services with no intermediary, right? And so you can create. There are also very interesting examples where people are building social networks. People are building, you know, collaborative, I talk about, I have a chapter in this the book, what I call collaborative storytelling, so people coming together and creating narrative worlds together and they get rewarded with tokens in proportion to their contribution to those stories.

People are creating video games where their kind of community-owned video games with no company behind them and the digital goods, which have been a model in video games for years, you know, video games will sell about 60 billion with a B dollars worth of virtual goods this year. It's bigger than three times bigger than the music industry is just simply the video video game digital goods industry. And people are now doing that without, but today there's done through a company like Epic, Fortnite, sells those and is the intermediary and takes most of the money. So people are building a new wave of games where you're just essentially removing those companies. And the money is going directly peer to peer. So one user creates something. The other

user gets that. These are just a couple examples where, but basically what's happening and the way I see it is, and the reason I think it's a full new era of the web is it doesn't, it isn't going to happen overnight. Like, you need to go and build out new services. And these are new services that have new architectures, right? And that's what, that's what the entrepreneurs that, that I work with as an investor are trying to build out. And what I'm trying to do in the book is explain what they're doing, because I think there's just a lot of misunderstanding around it, exacerbated by a lot of the things I mentioned earlier, FTX, you know, speculation culture, et cetera. And so that's created all sorts of confusion.

And that's what I'm trying to clear up in the book is, hey, there's this other vision. This is productive vision of these things. It's not about gambling. I'm going to let you do that real quick. But I don't know if I've ever said this on the show, but one of my formative gaming experiences was on the prodigy bulletin boards where I got involved in Star Trek role playing games where, you know, we're messaging back and forth doing roleplaying. So to use your example of gaming there, like imagine a situation where everyone say subscribing to participate in a given game.

And the more you participate or whatever, like we literally, I became a captain of a ship. We wrote a whole constitution for our, but imagine that we are, we're playing the game and we're also owners of the game and owners in relation to how much we're participating in the game and things like that. Yeah. Yeah. And in fact, you mentioned space games, you know, Eve Online. is a very famous space game, which it's been around about 20 years. It pioneered a lot of these kind of virtual world ideas. Many millions of people have these space battles. One of our portfolio companies is Eve Online. They've done a spin out where they're creating exactly

kind of what you're describing. It's like a space world where all of the, you know, it's all created by the community and it's a fully kind of peer to peer world. And it's built using blockchains. And that's exactly the kind of thing you can do. So let me give you the opportunity. to do what you've tried to do a couple times now. Explain to me the distinction in your mind between crypto and Web 3 in the sense that both are using blockchain, but there's different underlying assumptions to how and why. Well, I'd kind of compare it to something like, like think about real estate in the real world, right? So, you know, you have real estate. And a key aspect of real estate is that you can own a house, that there's ownership, right? And I think we all realize

that why that's valuable, right? You can own a house. It's important for a couple, like, why do I want to own my house instead of renting my house. One is financial. Like once I own it, hopefully it will appreciate over time and that can be a source of personal wealth. But it's also psychological, right? I just satisfaction knowing you own the home and you can live there with your family. And then it's also an incentive. It's an incentive question. The fact that I own it gives me an incentive to improve it. There's lots of studies that show the people that own things improve them and contribute more to the community. Right. I have an incentive to build not just my home, but my community. As a byproduct of real estate ownership, we have

real estate speculation, right? So you have people flipping houses and there's all these reality TV shows about it while they watch them. There's, you know, hedge funds involved in it. There's a whole, you know, reed market and there was all the stuff that happened in 2008. And so there's speculation is a buy, any, any, any market where you have ownership, you have speculation, right? But I think in a healthy market, the ownership for kind of incentive, psychological, you know, personal kind of wealth appreciation, all of those kind of good things come first. And the speculation is this byproduct that happens. And look, it plays a role, by the way.

Like people generally don't like speculators, but the reality is they provide liquidity. They make it so it's, you know, you have good price discovery. There's, there is a kind of a role. But, but again, it's about proportionality, right? It's about, it should be a relatively small aspect of the whole real estate market and all the activity. I think in, you know, so blockchains, one of the cool things you can do with blockchain is you can create tokens. And tokens, I think of those, the atomic unit of ownership. A token is how it's kind of the encapsulation of ownership.

And so if I own a piece of, I can own a piece of Bitcoin by owning a Bitcoin. I can own a digital collectible by owning NFT or a video game good by owning NFT, right? But the actual mechanism by which you own it is a token. Now, there are people that take those tokens and put them, sort of take them out of their proper context. Like they take that virtual good that we were describing that spaceship out of a video game. And they make a website like FTX or something and they start saying, hey, you can bet on the price of spaceships. And then that ends up getting all the, what's basically happened over last like, especially 20, 21, 22 is that happened a lot. People took these things that had a certain intended

use, took them out of context, marketed and hyped them up. And that created this public image of what blockchains are for and also created a regulatory and policy kind of backlash. And so I'm not saying that stuff doesn't exist. It does exist. And I actually, I believe very strongly that we need regulation to tamp that down. But I also am trying to make the point of the book to not, let's not allow that to let us lose sight of the primary goal. Like home ownership is still valuable even though there's a real estate bubble, right? And we need to kind of come back to that understand that. And I think a smart policy approach would be one where we look at the technology holistically. We say, what are the good things you can do and what are the bad things you can do?

You can build a house with a hammer. You can destroy a house. You can destroy something with a hammer, right? There's lots of technologies that can be used for good or bad. And a smart policy approach would be to understand the good and bad. And then to design a policy that maximizes the good and minimizes the bad. And I don't think that's the approach that the U.S. is taking right now. I think instead it's a much more reactive. approach. A lot of it's getting settled in messy legal disputes. And so that's another kind of theme of my book is once we understand what the good things are, how can we, as a society, if assuming we choose to embrace those good things, design policy, investment, all other kind

align our efforts around that and make sure that the best, that we get the best outcome. And by the way, all this stuff I'm saying, you can say about AI, you can say about VR, about self-driving cars. Like these are all, I think, going to be more and more top of mind questions as technology continues to march ahead. Well, for sure. And, you know, sort of final one, you just mentioned it is AI. And you go into this in the book that the blockchain will have maybe a bigger role to play potentially than a lot of people are thinking right now. In the AI moment in terms of things. Like, again, it comes to ownership and things like, you know, copyright and, you know, identity. even. But so give me, give me some views on how you think the blockchain will play in sort of this AI moment. I'll give you one simple example. I mean, so Sam Altman created another company besides Open AI called World Coin, which we're the lead investors in. And the idea there is that in the world of AI where bots can pass the Turing test, you can't rely on things like CAP shows. You know,

if people know those CAP shows, right, the things that pop up that tell you to find all the traffic lights, you have to click on all the travel, whatever. Those things aren't going to work anymore, right? right, like all the mechanisms we've used on the internet to detect if somebody's a person. I mean, you're going to get such sophisticated fishing attacks now, people on Twitter, you know, misinformation. Like, it's just, like, again, I'm pro-AI. I think it's mostly good, but it's going to break a lot of the systems that we use today. For example, detect if somebody's human.

And so what World Coin, Sam Altman's other startup is doing is creating a new system for basically basically the idea is that everybody would have kind of a cryptographic signature that lets them prove that they're human. And that's something that you use a blockchain for. A blockchain is a great way to store things like cryptographic signatures that prove you're a human. Or for example, a cryptographic signature that proves this video is real as opposed to being a deep fake. That's a section I have in the book, talking about deep fakes, right? So the right way to do kind of deep fake authentication is to have some kind of public record, some auditable public trade. which is exactly what a blockchain is that says this piece of content was attested to you know was was signed by the new york time signed to this piece of content and said that we you know we attest to it that we actually you know believe it's real video and there's a public auditable trail that that's that's what a blockchain is is a you know perfectly designed for another another i think interesting use case is um i talk about in the book is a around um sorry the the sort of the business model

for content on the internet. And just to give you a little bit of history on that, there's what I call a sort of an implicit covenant today between quote unquote distribution like Google and social media and content, meaning if you have a website, you're an artist, you're a news media site. And that covenant essentially, like for example, with Google, is you let, if I have a news site, I allow Google to crawl my content and to take snippets of it

and put it in their search results. in exchange for them sending me traffic back, right? That's sort of how the internet has evolved over 30 years. It's sort of this quid pro quo between content and same with social media. Like you're allowed to, you know, hey, it's okay if Facebook takes a little snippet of my headline as long as they put a link back, right? In an AI world, when you can just go to an AI system and say give me the 10 best restaurants or something, you know, no longer need to click through and go back and read the original source. it just gives you the answer, right? And so that will, you know, effectively break that covenant, right?

Or let's say with art, like, hey, just give me a cool picture that looks like this and a, you know, a system like mid-jurney that's trained on a bunch of images just gives you the image. You don't need to go to the art. And so unfortunately now, of course, the content sites are responding by putting up paywalls, Reddit just, just deprecated their API. Twitter's done that. I think you're going to see a lot more, you know, I think you see a lot of artists take

their content down. I think it's really unfortunate, right? What would be the right outcome? I think the right outcome is to essentially have some kind of collective bargaining system, a network between content providers and content distributors. Because there's a chain of providence so that wherever it goes, however it gets remixed, whatever it gets put into a new container, there's still, you can trace it back. You can trace it and you can set terms, like a blockchain unless you have code and lets you set terms. So I could be an artist and say, I'm going to put my content into this repository. You can, if you want to use it, you hear the terms and here's how you have much you pay me.

If you want to train your AI system on it, you have to pay me X percent of the revenue of your system or whatever the terms might be. And you can set the terms, right? So it's essentially, it's an engine for doing economic kind of negotiation and term setting. And so that's what a smart contracts are and things if you've heard these terms of what blockchains have. And so it's a way, another way to think of a blockchain is a collective bargaining system. We're like a million people. I mean, one of the reasons why do content providers kind of get the short end of the stick against content distributors on the internet?

It's because of, it's because of fragmentation, right? You've got 10 million content providers and you've got five to 10 major distributors, right? So if I decide, if I'm one artist and I decide to opt out, you can opt out, right? you can put like a no robots, presumably you'll have some way to opt out of training if you don't already, AI training. You can opt out, but you have no leverage if there's 10 million of you. You need a way to get together and collectively bargain. And that's a blockchain is literally a machine, like a software machine decide for this devise to collectively bargain. Like that's one way to look at them.

And so they can come together in a system and say, hey, us 10,000 artists are going to get together and we're going to put our art here and you can train on it or you can copy it or you can use it. But you've got to follow all of these terms and pay us this. much money as an example. And so it's a way to design new economic covenants between different participants in the network. Yes, that to me from day one has been what I thought that the blockchain was going to deliver to us. So even though it's taken a little bit of time, you know, it's almost like you need, you need the, maybe sometimes you need the outside impetus to bring the use case to the forefront that was sort of like theoretical before there was oppressing. I think AI, I think if, I think if we're smart about it, that in a lot of ways,

the counterbalancing force to AI, the centralizing nature of AI are, are blockchains, right? They are the counter, they are the counterweight, I think. I say if we're smart about it, because I think that unfortunately, blockchains have now, you know, just become, just politicized, and there's just a lot of emotion around it. And so, but I think if you look at it dispassionally, it's a very powerful tool for counteracting a lot of the centralizing effects of AI. Well, in an effort to do that, to demystify, depoliticize, Chris Dixon's book is Read, Right, Own, building the next year of the internet available now.

If you're watching this on YouTube, you'll see the book cover, and you can go order it immediately. Chris, thank you for allowing me to square the circle six years later. You interviewed me for my book. I'm interviewing you for your book. It's a fantastic book. I hope everyone gets it. Thank you, Brian.

Thanks for having me.