The Pomp Podcast - #372: Mark Nadal on Decentralized Network Infrastructures

Episode Date: August 29, 2020

Mark Nadal is the founder and CEO of ERA, an innovation lab focused on bringing the decentralized web to life across infrastructure, applications and security with an open-source mindset.  In this conversation, we discuss the issues with a centralized internet, the prospects of the decentralized web, handshake theory, resilience vs efficiency, edge computing, and building a database for freedom fighters. =============================== Athletic Brewing is re-imagining beer for the modern adult. We love beer. But we also love being healthy, active and at our best. No matter your motivation, if you want to keep a clear head and drink healthier, we are here for you. Athletic makes non-alcoholic beer that you don't have to compromise to enjoy. The beers are fully flavored, clean ingredient, and a fraction of the calories of full strength beer - they fit in any occasion. Check out www.athleticbrewing.com for more details and free shipping nationwide. =============================== BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. https://www.blockfi.com/pomp =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Mark Nadal is the founder and CEO of ERA, an innovation lab focused on bringing the decentralized web to life across infrastructure, applications, and security with an open source mindset. In this conversation, we discuss the issues with a centralized internet, the prospects of the decentralized web, handshake theory, resilience versus efficiency, edge computing, and building a database for freedom fighters. I really enjoyed this conversation with Mark and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode though, I want to quickly talk

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and a very happy customer. So go check out BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Again, BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at Pompletter.com. Again, Pompletter.com. All right, let's get in this episode with Mark. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek

Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Mark here. Thanks so much for doing this, man. I'm super excited. Thanks for having me on the show. So I'm Mark Nadell, and I'm the founder of Aera, which has about 30 million monthly active users on our decentralized database and cybersecurity protocol called GUN. We got some pretty legendary investors behind us, Tim Draper and Mark Benioff of Salesforce, as well as others, and a sweet OG team from the old school days of Marti Sirius

Malmy, who was Satoshi's first contributor. And my job here today is to tell you about the evolution of the decentralized web and how over the next one or two years, 100 million people will be onboarding into decentralization and its impact to our lives, people, and the market. I love it, man. Before we get into the decentralized web and kind of all the nuances and intricacies there. Let's talk about your background and kind of where did you grow up and then how did you eventually get into technology and what you're doing today? I've had the bountiful privilege of growing up in California, San Diego. So I've never known what bad weather is like. And that has given me a very different view thanks to just the affluence of the

area of post-scarcity. So I do look at all of the existing models of money, finance, Bitcoin, blockchains, debt, government currencies, with a lot of skepticism because I'm an internet baby, right? The internet is a fundamentally transformative technology that takes people out of the environment that they were in before. So if you were scared of the school ground bully, you don't have to deal with that anymore. Unfortunately, centralization has led back to the school ground fully, which is Facebook just wants to recommend your high school friends. But the power of the internet is to connect to people who need to be connected, ought to be connected, and should be connected, but are distant and apart. So the internet is this kind

of vital transition. And that's kind of the evolution I went through myself personally. I was focused on ideas and philosophy and mathematics, but without being able to apply it, I couldn't have any impact on the world. And so I jumped into learning how to code. And very quickly, we got some publicity in press and my centralized servers fell apart. They caught on fire like the classic Silicon Valley TV show. It was just like, things are not working. And the analogy here is that it doesn't matter, some nerd words, if your application server, if your CDN, if your front end code is all working, the database is the heart to your system. It pumps the blood to your whole system. So if the database is centralized and it goes down, it doesn't matter if your brain is working fine. It doesn't matter if your arms are working fine. You don't have blood to power that system. And so I got interested in decentralized technology for the sake of resilience, efficiency, and scalability. But it's also been a wonderful journey of discovering all these other perks and benefits and censorship, resistance and components. So that's kind of in a nutshell. I could do hours of talking on just that transition and growth. But it's why I'm passionate about the internet. I think it can impact humanity and why it's extremely important, not only for financial reasons, but also for humanitarian reasons that we make this transition into a more resilient future that is better for everybody and brings people together rather than connecting them with yet another advertisement, school ground bully, or toxic news feed.

Absolutely. And so maybe let's talk a little bit about what was the centralized service that you'd built and kind of, you know, took off and really drove you to the ultimate conclusion that the decentralized database would be an important piece of infrastructure. That was about a decade ago. It was a collaborative web design tool called Excelsior. There is an old all things digital interview of me showing off the technology. so you can see my transition from then to now and these days it's called low code no code um it's a very popular movement and i'm kind of a little bit jealous because it's like oh like that that is actually one of the the passion points i'm interested in solving is creating tools for

amateurs that outperform professionals because i want that type of empowerment for everybody i don't want people to have to pay for things in order to be a professional that can create an impact. I want tools that enable the everyone. But unfortunately, there's a rabbit trail, right? Well, then you discover that it's 2010, 2011, and you would think we can auto scale, right? No, no um just having 300 signups on our website crashed our mongodb database instance web scales developers call it and uh you know i just i just spun up a huge machine um for the in-between to make it last but those sleepless nights of getting pager calls at 3 a.m and debugging what's going wrong, just led me to a point where it's like, I think using my math background and my understanding

of physics and distributed systems, I can build something that's a little bit more resilient, a little bit more powerful. And hey, so far we're doing it. I'm handling 30 million users a month rather than 300 signups. So lots of details there, but it'll start to bore people on the technical side. Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about the centralized internet. And I couldn't agree more with you in terms of the positive impact and kind of net gain that the world has had because of the internet and kind of the everything from increasing the rate of communication, increasing the connectivity of kind of the human nodes in the globe, to literally just making us more efficient and kind of better informed and all these things. But there are

problems, right? And so maybe talk a little bit just about how you see the, I'll call it the legacy centralized internet and what those problems are and why really the decentralized web can address them. I'm going to back up for a second. My last explanation was pointing more towards developers and engineers. This, I want to really point towards markets and investors and transition that we're going through. I always start, if you are doing day trading, you should be doing a lot of math. And one of the most exciting algorithms I've found is called the handshake problem. And the handshake problem, this is a step back and then I'll apply it to the internet in your question, is when you're at a business meeting, how many individual

business cards get exchanged at that conference? Such that you're only exchanging one business card for each person that you're meeting. And most business people will know there is a high advantage to kind of speed dating right you want to get as many cards as possible to see what the opportunity is that way then later you can follow up with a particular value add or proposition but if you only chat with one or two people at the conference the entire night you don't know what you missed out on so that that's represented mathematically in graph theory is what's called the handshake problem and this winds up being like the fundamental equation that i'm arguing drives value add for the internet and people into the future. And here's why. You don't get

startups. You don't get innovation unless you get recombination, unless you get people who bump into each other and they discover they have similar competing ideas and they're able to engage with each other. So before the internet, you only could bump into people in physical meat space. right? And that's why a lot of people are attracted to cities. In fact, like you literally have geographic density in order to increase people as particles bumping into each other to get this type of spark. Hopefully that rather than here in California as elsewhere in the world, like, you know, you don't want a spark that starts a forest fire. You want a city that people interact with each other and sparks and creates a startup that then drives innovation because

those ideas are transformative and it can be executed on. But now we can move this online, right? In fact, we can algorithmize all of it. And this is where I think the transition from prior services like Oracle, IBM, the old industry of what computers were supposed to be into things like Uber and Airbnb is happening because Airbnb is saying the value add is not in the taxis that we actually own. It's in our ability to do a matchmaking algorithm across the network. So there's kind of two trade-offs. You have venture capitalists who have a large network that's very deep that they can reorient. And then you have very shallow networks that are huge, like Bitcoin, AT&T, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber. What's odd is that the centralized companies like

Google and Facebook don't understand the value of the shallow but largeness of their network because they're just using that to control information flow from a censorship or moderation perspective but the companies that are really like going through these very quick rapid economic transformations that you know different markets uber compared to facebook but um that are almost a threat to the overall capital um allocation is is the companies are saying hey what if the value is our network itself and how we recombine it to find and produce more value add for everybody in the community. And I predict, actually, and I'll end my ramble, is that you're going to see money itself evolve into a network system. Bitcoin is extraordinarily important because it takes

the existing debt model, the scarcity model, and removes middlemen like banks. But I'm here to say that that is a very important but tiny transition step towards this overall decentralized movement that's happening and i'll leave it there for and all the rest of my thoughts and yeah so as you kind of think through that right um there is an argument that uh the lack of ownership by a single individual organization is no longer a nice to have, but has become a necessity in this new world across different applications. And what I mean by that is I continue to think a lot about this theme of centralization is a business risk, right? And you can switch out the word business risk for other things like an individual risk or whatever, but centralization has no longer become

this thing that you need centralization to get efficiency, and therefore you can give up the resiliency, right? Decentralization can actually now ensure you have the resiliency. And also, we're now getting to the point where you can have efficiency as well. How do you think through that? Yeah, so first of all, right, there's kind of three levels to the market. There's the consumer market, there's the lobby market, and there's the nation state market. So depending upon where you care to invest or put money or think about, they definitely have different scales. So I want to first state that we're still transitioning into the internet era. And that means that any money and investment still put into FANG, there's still a lot of the world that we're transitioning just

onto the cloud and centralized internet style efficiency. So I don't think you're really going know lose money long term over even those investments even though it's against kind of my philosophical view um and then there's the government scale stuff which i let's not we can discuss that later but in terms of like consumer market yes um especially with covid accelerating stuff you already saw a lot of fortune 500s moving on to what's called edge cloud and that's like Kind of this latest bleeding edge, pun intended there, transition that only innovative organizations are thinking about. And it's important because you got consumers all around the world and you did get the coordination consistency of having Google being able to centralize things. But now most of these companies are realizing, hey, the only way for us to compete in the market now is to just have slightly faster websites than our competitor.

because that's going to explain this because i think there's a lot of people who are listening who when you say edge or you talk about pops or any of this stuff they're going to have no clue what that is so just like what in plain english like what is edge computing or edge cloud computing yeah so imagine you have a billion users spread across several different continents before it was easier to just manage all of that by having them point to one server in Amazon East, you know, Virginia or San Francisco or London, let's just say you had one server and all 8 billion users eventually trickled back to that server that then processed the information, saved the data and pushed it back out. So this can be seen incredibly with big frustration when

you're traveling at an airport, you go up to, you know, TSA and, you know, to print your, ticket. And it's like, oh, you know, enter your flight number. And it's like, oh, let's wait 30 seconds. And you're like, oh, shoot, good thing I have, you know, Global Pass or whatever, because it's like, my plane's going to take off in one hour. But the stupid machine is taking 30 seconds to look up this information. And that's because even though the airline should know that you are going to be at that airport, they're still having that machine talk to some server on the opposite side of the world. And that's ridiculous. That's dumb. And then they're doing what's called global consistency on that data. And there's all sorts of like terrorist and security reasons why you

might do that. But that doesn't mean you can't say, hey, we know somebody who's going to be faking your passport is not going to be coming from Australia if you are flying out of JFK, Right. So edge systems is about saying, hey, well, we know that we can actually push that processing, that logic down to that terminal in JFK itself, or let's say a data center that's running in the backpipes somewhere on JFK or nearby. right? So then when you show up at the airport, rather than the stupid terminal talking to London or Australia, some computer far, far away, you actually get instantaneous results because the data is there. It's literally physically present with you. So when you type in your number, the response can be instantaneous. And that's now how these Fortune 500s are realizing that they have to compete. They have to make the experience be just slightly faster than everybody

else in the market that they're competing with. And they have slightly faster experiences that whether the user is cognitively aware of it or not, psychologically adds up over time to creating the retention that sticks them on that app rather than others. Would it be fair to classify or kind of describe edge computing has obviously got some aspects or elements of decentralization to it, right? You're literally pushing it away closer to the end user for performance reasons. But is it a kind of a balance between there's still centralized ownership of the system, there's still centralized design, but the implementation is not decentralized, but it's less centralized than it previously was? Is that like a fair way to talk about what's going

on there? Absolutely. However, in the blockchain world, it's easy to start getting some things conflated, right? So while blockchain is decentralized in ownership, it is not decentralized in operation. Effectively, every single block, there's the winner that controls that block. And so that means you still have to be connected to the internet, to the network, to the blockchain in order for things to resolve. So blockchain doesn't necessarily resolve that airport example that I was giving. However, it does resolve the ownership or the equity or the financial side of the equation, which is incredibly, incredibly important. So there's decentralization with respect to operation, you know, performance, which yes, is what more edge

computing is about. And it's more of the side that I'm dealing with. And then there's decentralization around ownership or equity or property. And there's a whole interesting like transition there, which I'm, because a lot of your users are from that space. I want to quickly note that before it was intellectual property, you owned the code and that was the value add. Then it switched to like, oh, wait, like IBM Oracle, like these SaaS services, these internet as a service, these are just taking our code and racking in millions of users and making money. And so then it transitioned to, oh, like we own the gateway, right? And one of the brilliant thing about satoshi is he came along and said actually if you own the seed to the network you get the

benefits of both without the operational complexity of either right and that's like fundamentally profound from um an ownership perspective it's separate from the monetary or financial side it's saying actually what exists that is valuable is not the intellectual property of the code itself that you're trying to sell it's not the gateway or the server that you're trying to sell it is actually saying, what is the authority of the network itself? Because that is the network effect that everything builds on top of. And if you own the seed, the authenticity, the origin to that network, then it doesn't matter if people fork your code or spin up a competing Bitcoin. Nobody's going to use it. It can be completely open source. You can literally

shovel the source code to your competitors. And it doesn't matter because it's the network that is valuable. It is the network that's valuable. So talk to me about this idea of resiliency versus efficiency. Chamath Palapatiya came on at the beginning of this pandemic. And one of the main messages he had was the US economy has chased efficiency over resiliency. And therefore, we basically scoured the globe, found all these places where we could go put our manufacturing facilities, our supply chains, all these different things that led to greater efficiencies, which ultimately led to more profitability, or at least the allure of more profits. But what it did was it exposed a US-based company to less resiliency, because obviously

when a global pandemic happens, the second that other countries are affected, you now don't have control over your operations. There's all these kind of issues. And so one of his main messages was, hey, we are going to go back to a more balanced view of we need efficiency, but we also need resiliency, right? It can't just be all efficiency, no resiliency, or all resiliency, no efficiency. There's got to be some balance there. And so how do you think about that when applied to the decentralized web? And looking at your reaction right now, you may not even agree with that framework that he used.

Yeah, I mean, I'm not saying he's wrong, but I think there's a conflation between the consumer market and the government market there, right? So a lot of, take Apple's recent move, which will date this episode, to using India as a manufacturing plant instead of China. I don't think that's necessarily, I think it's because of regulatory efficiency, not even necessarily product efficiency. It would be a lot more efficient, right, to have the market that you're selling to, let's say primarily the U.S. historically and London, Europe, selling the market, but the product's already there because then it's just more cost efficient in terms of you don't have to ship the items or the damage that happens in that logistics process. But that was the kind of the win for Apple is they realized, oh, India's is growing market. They're selling higher flagship phones too, but also has probably unethically, right, a comparable level of sweatshop operational stuff.

But they're going to have to figure out quality control there as well. But Tim Cook is the king of that. He made that transition for Apple in the first place. So I don't necessarily know we can peg global operations purely as efficiency versus resilience. I would say that playing the regulatory game, that lobbying market and the kind of government level is more about resilience than it is about efficiency. But that kind of just depends upon what scope you're dealing with. So maybe I should just skip past it and tell me the question again.

Yeah, so talk a little bit just about the tradeoff between resiliency and efficiency, especially when it comes to the decentralized web. And the perspective here is there's a lot of people who say, hey, it sounds great to have a decentralized internet, but isn't that going to be slower or less performance than the centralized version? I think you actually think the opposite, but kind of help people understand that tradeoff between decentralization and resiliency versus efficiency. I am so in the weeds on this, right?

So I apologize. But it's like, if the goal in going for is power and control, then sure, centralization is more efficient. But like, if you want authoritarianism, if you want totalitarianism, if you want a master-planned economy, like, okay, I can't argue against that.

But in all other categories, like down to the physics of biology ecosystems the universe mass distribution markets free markets business operations and and that the efficiency and resilience is just the way that the universe has played out and how humans like even your brain distributes your memories across um your the neurons and so it's like i mean they don't even know whether it's in the neurons or not but So I don't know even where to start because the statement that efficiency and resilience is a tradeoff between centralization and decentralization is from my universe. Would you agree that a centralized social network or centralized company is more efficient and less resilient? So what is the end goal? It only has to do with what the goal we're trying to attain is. So if it's profit, no. Hiring engineers in San Francisco is expensive. And the COVID transition is certainly showcasing that.

There's plenty of extraordinarily talent that's been around for a long time that is at, you know, a third or a fraction, you know, a fraction of that price. Now, obviously, there's ethics around how you wind up, you know, paying employees and stuff. But the only, I think, efficiency about centralization is around, like, mindshare, tribalism, and, like, cult signaling. And those cults could be very, very, very big, which means they're definitionally not a cult. But I, sorry, I'm probably throwing you. I love it. now um so yeah the question i i don't even know how to start because i i so fundamentally disagree with the basis of the question that so tell me about in terms of the decentralized web right

why is this important okay um first of all i want to start with the humanitarian reasons right which is hopefully we view humans, whether it's for moral reasons or economic reasons, as potential contributors to an economy or potential contributors to this planet. Unfortunately, industrialization has kind of changed the view of humans from something to extract from and are extractors rather than value add or creators. And that kind of creates a lot of like political, ideological, and religious division between people, which we can go into if you want, but that's very philosophical. I think what's going to be more applied is talking about the market transition. And the internet originally was founded on this idea of academics being able to collaborate from afar, which think about that, like that's almost a dangerous idea, because a university's entire IP and its entire ability to control and productize and profit is by taking minds bringing them inside a literally walled garden campus and and selling external access to

that and the internet was then those scientists being like hey but like i really know somebody over at mit or caltech that i want to talk to and and do research collaboration on and so that you know they got that going thanks tim berners-lee um but but suddenly that exploded right suddenly had exploded to businesses realizing that they could collaborate online and then humans realizing a corporation is just a body of human literally from the latin um so then people from a social standpoint realized that like they might get along with friends on the other side of the planet rather than in their neighborhood um that goes back to my my kind of bully comments from earlier and again that transition is right out of the cold war too so there's there's even that legacy of

like the nationalism of like you know you're american you're not american and it's easy to issue propaganda when the nation states control the telecommunications um they control the radio tower so then you don't have friends or you don't hear stories to empathize with people outside of your nation state so they are the other there's this really great talk called the empathic civilization about this evolution uh over history um there's like a rsa animate like one of those ted um really cool i recommend people watch it so but again that's like more the philosophy stuff and the transition between um ideologies and nationalism and religion and philosophy over time um but now right like we just take this for granted which is uh we have friends from around

the world because we might get a better relationship with them because we vibe with them better. So then how does this impact the transition in the market itself? I'm trying to make this historical. In a lot of my comments around money and finance and markets, I'm trying to say, hey, you can do your day trading where you're doing math and checking up variables and down variables and the calculus for what you're going to do for this next week or the next month. But you're always going to get a return if you understand the historical trends and the larger and larger trends and how there's these onboardings that happen of larger and larger populations anyways. So I'm always trying to appeal to this historical narrative and understand these transitions. So the importance of the decentralized web is the exact same thing that's playing out in the case of the governments and the corporations and individuals.

Okay. Where value is going to accrue and build and develop that will return investments is increasingly in individuals like you, Joe Rogan. Like Joe Rogan is doing more traffic and podcast downloads than CNN. Right? Like, sorry, maybe it's like half the size. I forget the number. And it's incredible that an individual, right, because the internet can amass a network effect that rivals mainstream systems. So the importance is primarily the humanitarian transition of us being able to empathize with more and more people over time rather than bipartisan byproduct competition that capitalism and socialism kind of drives this forcing function, this winner takes all, which then ultimately boils down to two competing factions that then drives I'm rambling here. I'm just going to go with it because it's one of my more important longer-term things I'm trying to talk to people about is that, look, fundamentally, capitalism and socialism are zero-sum games, which means in order for that zero-sum game to play out, over time, there's what's called parallel efficiency, an 80-20 rule, in terms of how wealth-income divide is going to happen and resource allocations are going to develop. And once you have that, there's always going to be a monopoly. But at least in capitalism, there is competition of that monopoly, and it boils down to two companies. And then also, same thing happens in politics, boils down to two sides, because that's the fastest way in a zero-sum system where you have this kind of balanced lever going back and forth. They can duke it out with each other. It's the most efficient way. But unfortunately, both sides are fundamentally playing the same game. They are on the same side. If you can tribalize people's emotions to vote based off of fear, then that's how you get better voting power. If you can tribalize people's dollars to get them to pay for a product, you know, Starbucks versus Seattle's Best, but they're both owned by the same parent company. Like, you want people to think that there's competition, so that way, from a market standpoint, the people who do want to go against the system flip over to whatever the opposite is.

But what a lot of people don't realize is that the opposite side as a company is usually owned by the same parent company as the monopoly. And then the same thing with the government and politics stuff. It's all voting extraction in the same way that money is money extraction. What's the answer? What's the solution? Yeah, the answer is these network effects, which is you don't want to reward people based off of scarcity, because most people don't even value scarcity anymore. That's a dangerous statement to say on a podcast with investors. We spend so much time scrolling through these toxic news feeds that clearly we're getting some sort of value out of these toxic news feeds. And I have a whole blog on this, free.eco, which explains this transition into what I call a post-scarcity or non-zero-sum economic model. And honestly, this happened with the internet, but nobody knows how to measure it. And the way you actually measure the EBITDA or the value of a company, I argue, is looking at the handshake problem and calculating the handshake of that network effect. That is the maximum potential value that can be unlocked from a network if it is utilized. However, most of these companies are still busy trying to productize and scarcetize their features that they are not looking at the network for the sake of recombination and opportunity. They're looking at the network for extraction.

And that creates these dystopian centralizations, these dystopian, feigned privacy violations. Now I'm really off topic. So the importance of the D-Web is across financial, humanitarian, efficiency, resilient. It's everything. Like, as a young kid growing up in the 90s, I was sad that I wasn't born a little bit earlier to partake in the internet revolution and be one of those pioneers. but now I'm realizing that the most exciting transition that humanity is going forward was that the internet was just a base nervous system for us to start with. And now we have

the opportunity for the first time in like 2000, 3000, 4000 years to change the economic model. Well, okay. Sorry. Capitalism and socialism has only been around for 175 and 300 years itself. um that's gonna start another ramble about just how quickly people transition but i gotta i gotta stop because i think i want to come back to more applied uh things for the audience to rather than ending with like this philosophy uh stew i want to come back to like practical implications so i'm gonna i'll stop there so so help me understand what exactly you guys are building and um also let's talk a little bit about why this is like a integral part of the decentralized kind of tech stack.

Cause I think one of the unfortunate things is there's a lot of people running around saying that they're building decentralized products or networks. And then you're like, wait a second, you just run it on like Amazon AWS. Like how are you decentralized? Right. Or my, my favorite way to to pinpoint decentralization is if I asked somebody if the government came and told you to shut it down, could you, nope right well no but but i'm saying when somebody is not fully decentralized it's like look if they if they threaten to put you in jail could you shut it down and they say yes it's like

okay then you're obviously not decentralized right um and so help us understand kind of what you guys are building and why that's important so that's a good metric um i do want to note that that is because of the transition from ip to services to um like the the blockchain chain initial. So theoretically, a government could shut down, you know, Bitcoin by scanning the old IRS channel for all of the IP addresses and URLs of peers saying like, hey, we're part of the Bitcoin network. Those lists you can get pretty easily in blacklist, which is not good for the network. And then you could theoretically also shut, you know, Bitcoin down and dangerous ethereum comments here by contributing code to to bitcoin core right and creating some sort of

breaking backdoor change that then eventually gets propagated out to all the machines so there's still points of centralization even in um a lot of these tools but i do think that the most pragmatic way to look at it is from a network standpoint which is yeah like are there enough machines pointed to a single amazon server that you shut that down it shut down the network so what we're building i let me explain two layers here there is blockchain right actually i i care about providing like comprehensive understanding so the the decentralized world is actually broken into three, this microcosm is broken into three camps, blockchain, crypto, and D web. Now, most people apply crypto to cryptocurrency, but no, crypto is really

cryptography, the old cypherpunk movement, that's privacy. So the value, the values of crypto is, is privacy. And that's the kind of signal telegram world. And as to whether they're actually private or not you know that's a debate on its own but people know about telegram and signal then there is blockchain and its values are an ayn rand sense of greed so i'm not saying that negatively i'm saying that like that the selfish individual can then contribute back to society and build up um profit which then is reinvested into um the larger now but but like the values of blockchain really is greed oriented in an ayn rand sense that they should have used a better word than being selfish. And then D-Web is honestly about freedom or inclusivity. It can

kind of go both ways. Let's say that those are fundamentally the same value at the end of the day. It's hard to have freedom if you're exclusive and you're creating yet another walled garden. So my technology in my company has kind of quickly evolved from people talking about it in this intellectual, decentralized kind of Bitcoin narrative that all the rest of the market is caught up in to actually, okay. But the applied use of this technology is actually extremely beneficial for companies, existing enterprises, as well as individuals, nonprofits, and governments. So from like a business perspective, I'm saying this cloud edge market is a larger bubble. It's a larger market share to attack than necessarily this ideologically purist view. I am an ideological purist, but I have to be a ruthless pragmatist. And unfortunately, my goal is adoption, right? Not necessarily who's got a larger market cap on their crypto coin. So for me, we've already onboarded 30 million monthly active users, and over the next one or two years, with the existing companies and enterprises I'm working with, it'll be growing to above 100 million monthly active users.

And so I'm just desperately trying to keep up with these nonprofits and enterprises that want to get that type of radical efficiency gains. And underneath, I then feel ethically okay that while maybe I'm transitioning an existing centralized service into being increasingly more decentralized and resilient, that that also onboards all of the users of that service slowly into decentralization without them even knowing it. And that's because the value add of privacy alone, while extraordinarily important, only resonates with a much, much smaller market size than the value add of convenience. And because I care philosophically about this transition of humanity towards a better, more empathic, humanitarian, less controlled, less dystopian dictator type internet, I have to then be practical in saying, hey, you know, we're actually going to give you 70% cost savings on your existing infrastructure by switching over this technology. But that means the bar is much, much higher because now my technology is and has to be continuously battle tested at a scale that's significantly, significantly larger than what most blockchains are testing against. That doesn't mean I'm anti-blockchain. It just means I have a very industrialist view of how to go about humanitarian transitions. And I will make those in between steps, if necessary, rather than being entirely purist. who or what are the types of organizations and people that kind of are first adopting this right like what is there certain verticals is there certain types of businesses or individuals

that you're just like this is where we're finding the the receptivity is an interesting one so it's it's definitely a power rule um you get thousands of people that come into something and then honestly you know it's the one the ten the hundred um that have the impact so internet archive is this incredible non-profit please go donate to them they they did the pandemic response where they opened up their library um for like medical textbooks and other things to to effectively everybody and then the publisher sued them but they're like there's this non-profit that's just like literally has the internet backed up um so they are decentralizing their backup of the internet a historical record of our cultural evolution and our times it's important transition

that's happening in humanity, they have it all backed up in two data centers, both in Northern California, up near the Presidio, and then one over in Richmond area. So AI, as well as some of the other D-Web protocols, are helping transition, ideally, the backup of that data off onto just random laptops running around the world, even phones in our case. Now, there's certainly a different reliability guarantee, but it's increasing the resilience. And so I'd say that reliability can possibly go down in decentralized systems if your network is not large enough. However, efficiency and resilience goes up in a decentralized network. So I'm going to archive, go donate to them. They're incredible. They're a great example. And initially they were

using us for metadata? What is the small piece of the data to coordinate all the information in the system? However, I started working with some people on the team about a half year ago on taking their video archive of public domain movies and decentralizing that as well. My technology was not, I did not originally intend to build it for video services. Gun, as a database was intended for small data points like GPS coordinates that are updating hundreds of times a second in a decentralized network, or tweets, small pieces of data, metadata-like information, and syncing that in a network. However, Mozilla just came along and sponsored our Zoom alternative. I can send you the link to that. It's called MeetThing. And we are literally,

I would have offered to do it unless you already have Zoom as your kind of process for recording video, that we're literally live streaming video through our network, through our decentralized technology. So Mozilla has helped us with sponsoring that. So Mozilla is another organization there. And then there's a couple other teams that are doing kind of video-like stuff. So lately, a lot of the use case has been around video. I think that's important. It's not what I'm in-goal passionate about, but it's helpful. The next company that's using, or I should say startup, is a YouTube alternative. And they are where probably a big chunk of that 30 million monthly active users are coming from. I don't really want to say their name because being a

YouTube alternative that is censorship resistant leads to some pretty bad marketing stuff. I'm going to skip on to the next one, which is Hacker Noon. We were experimenting with Hacker Noon, which is the tech journal. They have about 4 million monthly active users. They pitched it as storing annotations and comments on our blockchain technology, which is accurate, but not entirely accurate. it. So we were testing with them like, okay, how do we manage 4 million monthly active users and distributing their load and their costs, which I think that they were open about that I can't disclose. It's like they have credits with Google for about $4,000 a month that are getting charged for 4 million monthly active users. And we were benchmarking comparable performance where we're running on effectively $4 of, quote, infrastructure costs because we're able to actually spread the load across that many users on their network. But again, I want to be clear, if you only have

four users in your network, it's going to be very hard to get the sort of efficiency and scaling gains. And most, unfortunately, blockchain products only have like four or a couple hundred users a month on it, which means they have to run these server-side backups. But when your network is very large, the value is in your network, and you can then spread the load across the network. But you have to have a priori a large network. And there's plenty of other examples I could talk about, but those are the four biggest ones. Again, usually it's a handful of users that represent the majority of the traffic, even with 12,000 developers have started our project. There's lots of interesting one-off developer projects, but they are definitely not the scale as these subset of companies.

Can the entire internet be decentralized? Is that the ultimate endgame here is everything is decentralized? This comes back to technical explanation of what decentralization means. And there's fundamentally two modes, right? One mode is what's called broadcast or mesh-based communications. And broadcast or mesh-based communications do not scale well. They're great for things like Burning Man protests, your local area Wi-Fi, and actually even probably larger stuff, because IoT is going to be very important with mesh. You have self-driving cars that should literally be bypassing cell towers and emitting

on their signals or gps coordinates for doing things called dead reckoning for pre-calculating where cars should drive and to not collide with each other as self-driving cars start to talk to each other like that is all mesh based and that is geographically and biomass uh um concentrated so mesh systems are good for physically um physically dense areas however across the pond communications from San Francisco to New York, like with us, or to London, decentralization does not scale in terms of mesh communication. But you can still achieve decentralization at a global scale. And that's part of the reason why our technology is able to scale so well, is you intelligently kind of detect whether the packets or messages in the network are intended for an

external network in which case you don't rebroadcast it to everybody in your local area you you discover you do a pathfinding algorithm to discover what is the fastest and most efficient way of communicating that information um and that keeps it scalable because you effectively have federated or centralized like routing but it's distinct from the algorithms themselves being centralized with respect to ownership, right? Because if that's all running through Google's network or Verizon's network, that's bad, or Comcast's network. But if you're able to figure out this routing,

a good analogy here is you have the United States of America, you want to drive from San Diego to New York. There's many different states you could drive through. There's many different combinations, and there's a more efficient route they could drive through. But what if there's a big, massive toll, right? Like smack dab on the most efficient route, there's this wall there. You might want to take a longer route and drive around and see different countryside. So you can think of routing communication internet as being the same thing. And the goal is now free market competition of available routing. And as long as you keep that highly available, then it's decentralized, even if most of your packets are being sent through Google's fiber optic cables or AT&T's cable. Because if that cable goes down, whether physically or financially, regulation or something, you're able to route around it. Maybe it's not as efficient, but decentralization is all about getting all these people in a network to agree to the same protocol to have a more resilient system, but achieve the same efficiency as a centralized system where it is optimally possible.

Got it. And so help people understand, like, what is the best way for them to think about, you use this terminology, like database for freedom fighters, right? And kind of like, before we kind of get into the rapid fire to finish up, explain that a little bit. Like, what does that mean? danger danger danger you're gonna turn into a much much longer territory so um our psychologists our team our behavior analysis and our marketing analysis has kind of looked at different cultures across the world and been able to consolidate um down to three fundamental values there's a lot more than that and there's all sorts of interesting talks from um jonathan height to others i can send you to. But the three cultural values are freedom, fairness, and fusion. I never really thought about fusion before because I'm Western and fusion winds up being strongly Asian. And I honestly don't know enough about it yet, but I know that that's something that has to be on the table. And if

I ignore it, I'm not being appropriately objective. Freedom is just like classic, right? American. um fairness is where you get a lot of um european values as well as progressive left values which is like we're focused well i shouldn't say we but those people um whether that includes you or me or is focused on on care over justice and this plays out in all sorts of interesting ways especially with the justice versus the riots going on now. Um, and capitalists, people who focus on freedom usually interpret fairness from a equity perspective rather than a, um, uh, is a danger. Um, so if somebody works hard and builds a company, they believe that the merit and the reward should go to that person, not distributed across the board. That what is fair, what is just,

what is equitable as the person who did the work gets the results. And the same thing with respect to crime, right? If somebody commits a crime, then that person should be individually punished for it, not society as a whole, okay? And unfortunately, most humans kind of want the rewards to be distributed across everybody and the punishment to be isolated to the individual. That would be like probably the optimal balance of everybody's philosophical and ideological views. While fairness, if you don't take it from a justice-oriented view, is, oh, it's not fair if there's this scarce pie and only 1% or 20% of people have it and 80% have this wealth divide. But where this gets like particularly intersectionally toxic or fascinating is then around like justice. Police brutality is terrible. We need to immediately stop it.

But then how do you reconcile, like, oh, is burning down other people's houses or businesses or government buildings, public buildings, justified in distributing justice across? And we don't really, as humans, we don't really want to talk about distributing justice. We don't really want to talk. That makes us uncomfortable. So if you want to skip this from your podcast, feel free to edit it out. But those are like the values that we have to struggle with. And now I forget your question. That's not even talking about fusion. That's not even talking about the conflict of governments of, you know, of the United States perspective relative to China and Russia, which are the other kind of driving cultural influences. But yeah, okay, sorry, what was the question? Um, the idea of the database for freedom fighters, like where exactly, um, that is, uh, kind of prevalent and, uh, kind of what that means. I would, I would argue it is hard to have

justice and fairness. If there's always a middleman controlling what that justice is. And so that means, because of my American view, my more capitalist-leaning perspective, while I understand that there are particular flaws and loopholes, that I do see freedom as being foundational in order to reduce—it goes back to this resilience idea. In order to maintain fairness and fusion for larger scales of people without it becoming corrupt, you need freedom as a foundational component. And ignoring any political process of that, just technologically, that's a nuanced detail that impacts all humans. So yes, if we all were using Apple computers or IBM servers or Amazon servers, it doesn't matter our political affiliations or our political view. If all internet has to be trafficked through a particular machine, then we are fundamentally at risk to the interests of that individual, whether we agree with it or not, from cutting off everybody else. um we just hope right that the people that were trafficking our internet through um and our technology through we agree with and the same thing that's playing out with like usps and the post office system right which is like well i want options of being able who can i mail through

right um the more free market competition that exists so so the reason why i called it gun is because historically, and yes, still in the present day, wars were fought with bullets. And the danger there is around who can amass the most guns, the most bullets, and coerce a population. But what we have seen with the rise of Google and Facebook and the privacy violations and even Zoom doing all sorts of nefarious stuff is that this transition has moved to digital warfare, which is taking people's personalities and their minds and their psychology and their behaviors and their purchasing powers and their voting powers and using the database as a gun to coerce or manipulate people. And programmers love power.

It's dangerous for us people. And so I want to constantly remind developers, whether they're at Google or corporate or at a government or the individual developers in our community, that the database, how you manage people's information is a loaded weapon. You have to take as much caution with how you use that data as you would with real physical walls and boundaries and guns. And once we kind of get the Googles and the Facebooks of the world to realize the real danger of the information that they have access to, then maybe we can upsell them on transitioning to something else, which I'm all for win-win systems. So I don't really want to burn down governments. I don't want to burn down corporations.

I don't want to burn down the individual. I want to figure out how to align the incentives between governments, corporations, and individuals such that at the end of the day, yes, my communication with anybody in the world is end-to-end encrypted, which we have the technological tooling for. And there is some sort of middleman or government, sorry, middleman corporation that is trying to deliver my data at faster and faster rates, as well as in governments that see the value add in information propagation rather than disinformation. And I'll end it there.

If you're interested in where I'm going with all that thinking, it fundamentally requires post-scarce economic models beyond debt-based models. You still have to be compatible with the existing system. So I would encourage anybody to check out my free.eco, and then I have a talk called Opt Out of Money for Fun and Profit, and it discusses how you can actually combine both of these worlds to create and evolve people into more pro-social settings, more humanitarian settings, that are also equally as profitable, lucrative, and financially incentivized as existing debt-based models. So we can send people first to free.eco. They can go read a bunch of content that you've created there. And if they want to check out the product, they can go to gun.eco, right, is the best website?

Yes. All right, so people go check out that. I think that obviously the importance of decentralized infrastructure in the future world could never be more obvious, and I'll kind of leave it at that. Before I go to wrap up, Mark, I always ask the same two questions, and then you'll get to ask me a question to end it. The first one is, what is the most important book that you've ever read? I might be an outlier here. I've probably read less than 50 books in my entire life. um I I'm actually pretty anti-book so I don't have a good answer for you what do you do instead

of read books write books so what's the most important one you've written um depends upon whether you want a fact or fiction in fact I would say the the free.eco um blogs because because that's the most important relevant relevant to to humanity at this time and its transition um but i would encourage people to independently go and write about this stuff before being influenced by my writings i don't i want people to rederive these things separately not be manipulated by me so um if you want to read it go ahead uh please do but i would encourage people to write books rather than read books not that reading books is bad it's great it's just you learn more by teaching than you do by being a student so i love that answer uh second question

a little bit more fun is aliens believer or non-believer um okay uh i i think that i think that information is the most alien thing and so with with elon musk's neural link and uh mary lou jepson's um uh non-invasive in infrared or whatever um read write brain stuff we're going to be thrown into an informational universe and if you watch tron 2 i do think that that there is possibility for the emergence of alien entity or information whether that just be AI okay or whether that be like some alien that existed from millions and millions of years ago that like got sucked into a black hole or something like like so no I don't I don't believe in aliens because I haven't seen scientific evidence of aliens existence but I do think

that alien information or alien entities can arise or emerge um in which case it's just a question of locality do they exist in information space do they exist in physical space um as to whether you bump into them and there's a big probability that when we throw ourselves into information space universe that we're never going to bump into them because all of our information space systems are currently centralized to earth right so um i would actually argue that like trees and um the texture on the back of my wall are just as important from an alien searching perspective because from an information theory in order to preserve larger and larger amounts of data so take the internet archive right taking a picture of of cultural history on the internet

and making that available, ideally, to people hundreds, thousands of years from now, you want to compress that information. However, as you compress information, it becomes increasingly less readable and looks increasingly more natural. So it is possible the answer to life, the universe, and everything has actually been encoded into the wood grains on this paneling here. And I, as a human, would not even notice because it just looks like chaos or noise to me. um so hopefully that kind of plays around with ideas of aliens and information i love it you could ask me one question to finish up what's the one question you got for me next 10 years where do you think humanity is going to be at alive so we're not going to die what what uh what do you

mean where is it going to be at in what sense um population levels as well as market levels right a sign that's hidden two questions but i for me right like i'm always curious about the end goal that you're trying to achieve versus short-term goals so anthony over the next decade um whether it be you individually or your philosophy where humanity should go where do you or humanity uh you think humanity ought be in 10 years and whether that's achievable or not it sounds like you're kind of pessimistic that yeah no i think it's um i always say like my goal is just to be happy. Right. And like, that's like a super unmeasurable goal that is, you know, uh, kind of individualistic in, uh, in, um, kind of evaluation. But to me, like, as long as you're

happy, then like you've won, like, I don't know, I've got a very unique view on this. I think in that, like, I just am constantly reminded, like, we're all going to die. You're not, you're not getting out alive. So like, enjoy it. Right. And, uh, it's one of these things of, uh, every morning when I wake up, like this sounds really weird, but literally it's just a shot clock. Like today's going to tick by tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. And when today's over, you don't get it back. And then tomorrow you're gonna do it again. And you're going to get, you know, thousands of those kind of days. Uh, but once it's over, it's over. So, uh, you know, everything else kind of against that backdrop is, uh, is pretty, uh, non-important, uh, from, uh, from a high level.

And then when you dig into the weeds, like, are there other things that are important, of course, but I think it kind of refocuses you on like, what do you want to actually spend your time on, right? The science is behind you. Happy people wind up contributing happiness back to the world at larger and larger profit. That is very, very true, my friend. All right. So listen, anyone who's interested in decentralized infrastructure for a future world, if anyone agrees with my general thought process, that centralization is a business risk. please go check out uh gun.eco where you can find out more about uh the database uh technology and decentralized decentralized technologies that mark and team are building um and then if you

want to learn more about the uh philosophy and kind of thought process you can go to free.eco anywhere else you want to send people are you on twitter anything mark nadal at twitter i tweet about all these subjects quite a lot so it'll be easy for me to engage in dialogue conversation the lovely twitter um debates and route you to other interesting articles whether it be the empathic civilization or the economics stuff awesome man well let's thank you so much for doing this let's do it again in the future have a great one thanks so much for having me on