The Pomp Podcast - Bill Ottman, Founder & CEO of Minds: An Entrepreneur and Free Speech Activist Talks Crypto and Censorship

Episode Date: April 8, 2019

Bill Ottman is the founder and CEO of Minds.com. In this conversation, Bill and Anthony Pompliano discuss free speech, social networks, censorship, crypto as money and an incentive, and what Bill thinks about Aliens. ---- Totle is a rare blockchain investment opportunity, one that offers a live product, active customers, an established revenue model. Totle solves three significant problems with blockchain asset exchange: 1) Security 2) Complexity and 3) Pricing. Over $4 trillion of blockchain assets were exchanged in 2018 and growth is forecast for at least the next 10 years. Totle’s sophisticated platform powers the blockchain economy with safe, simple decentralized asset exchanges at the best price for traders, wallets, businesses and other financial apps. Totle’s B2C Web App and B2B API are live and serving customers today. Visit totle.com/pomp for more info. ----- 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. ----- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Bill Ottman is the founder and CEO of Minds.com. In this conversation, we talked about free speech, social networks, censorship, crypto as money and an incentive, and what Bill thinks about aliens. This conversation is wide ranging and I really enjoyed recording it. I hope you enjoy it as well. I'm sure a lot of you have used Kayak to find the best flight. Total's kind of like Kayak, but it don't find you no flights. It helps you find liquidity on decentralized exchanges and it optimally routes your trades for execution. So Kayak, you find flights. Total,

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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. Bang, bang. All right, guys, I got Bill here. We got a lot of weird shit to talk about. Let's do it. Dude, thank you so much for coming. thanks for having me dude all right what the hell is your background i used to organize music

festivals like fire festival gathering of the vibes have you heard of that no what is that connecticut it's four days grateful dead james brown oh that kind of stuff all right and i was always into crowds bringing people together harnessing crowd energy that's just been fascinating to me and then i mean i studied english at uvm and i studied english in second grade but i got you i know your english sucks so then i i actually hated facebook and social media when it first started i was almost like anti-tech because i just saw people like looking at their phones i'm like this isn't i was living in vermont i was like in the woods all the time but yeah it was it was having a destructive behavior i was just i was i was not interested

in getting involved and then i started to understand that there's two different types of tech you have like this proprietary surveillance based tech that's exploiting people and doing all of that and then you have free and open source software decentralized technology that is actually trying to empower and so the fact that there's that distinction you know i was all obsessed with local organic food and you know sustainable energy and this kind of stuff and i started to see that oh in technology there's this distinction yep i didn't realize that it's the idea that technology is not good or bad it's how it's applied right uh all right so you are uh organizing music festivals the organic food hate technology and they start tech company how the hell does that

happen yeah i mean it's about bringing people together we originally started doing live events and we had we would do these forums sort of fuse it with music and so you know social networking is live too it's not just online and that's how we were approaching it and then we're like okay let's embrace the internet of course the internet's like the central nervous system of humanity it's basically our i started realizing it's it is our biology almost it's an extension of us technology so let's embrace it let's do it the right way okay and you start minds in 2015 that's when we launched our apps we actually incorporated way back in 2011 wow we're building out something scalable like we had to rip apart you know databases and pulling cassandra and

bring together open source frameworks to build something that could yeah and during this time you know about crypto or don't know about crypto i knew about crypto in 2012 2013 that's when i first started getting into bitcoin but no we were interested in like building an open source social network before i mean we were into cryptography so we had like encrypted chat but not cryptocurrency as much yeah and in 2012 2013 really it's just bitcoin right there's not too much else to talk about at that point um you start building a bunch of different stuff and you end up on minds as uh one of the applications that really starts to take off maybe give us an understanding of what that is and kind of what the early versions look like and then we can talk about

where it's evolved to we first got like a quarter million users in like a week when we launched and we believe in the right to anonymity and privacy and that was when the snowden nsa leaks were happening and so people were freaking out about that it was like okay and we got a bunch of press and people saw this alternative and there were a few alternative social networks emerging like diaspora which is a decentralized social network as well so in 2015 or whenever the this was all going down uh you guys were doing decentralization and anonymity and privacy were kind of the three core tenants is that fair to say yeah got it and uh what's your take on snowden i like more information i want more information about everything that's going on so you know in

terms of the ethics of of everything you know i'm not trying to compromise national security but i also think that a lot of the excuses for not being transparent in government and saying that oh it's for national security, that's BS. Like we need to know what's going on. They were violating the constitution. You know, it's, it's, it wasn't, it wasn't really legal. And now that I think they quote unquote just ended the Snowden program. I saw some press releases about that, but you know, I don't buy it. So you're more of the belief that there's some things that are going to be done under national security kind of cover. And there's an argument that that stuff should happen, but 80% or some majority of the things that happen under the cover of national security

shouldn't actually be hidden and they should be more transparent about what they're doing, how they're doing it, how it affects citizens, et cetera. For sure. Let's not open source the nuclear launch codes, but I think that there's so much that we should have access to that they're making excuses for. Any examples of things where you're like, no brainer, this should be more transparent and shouldn't be behind the national security uh veil energy technology i think that there there's certainly the surveillance stuff i i think that there's energy tech that they probably have you know maybe there's alien stuff let's let's go there right away we know all right here's the

thing we know there's crafts that they have whether that technology is government technology or alien technology you know that's up in the air what do you mean that we know there's crap so have you heard of the phoenix lights incident uh i've heard a lot of lights in like the southwest of the united states so what is the phoenix lights fife symington who's the governor of arizona at the time of this fully admits and there's footage of it a monster triangular craft hovering over phoenix for hours and you know hundreds of thousand people saw it the governor had on cnn said that he thinks it was an et vehicle the governor of the state this isn't just you know speculation yes oh man let's go so we know that happened honestly most likely it's a

government craft but what the heck so so basically there's an un a literally unidentified flying object right that a bunch of people see the governor thinks that it could be something that's extra extraterrestrial i think that's how you say it um i would agree with you that it's probably a government associated thing if there if there was something there um and you think that there's a ton of that type of activity where they're testing things there's communication there's telescopes all that should be much more transparent secret space program you know all sorts of what's your take on the secret space program man i love this conversation we're Jumping right into it, right out of the gate.

Let's go. We know that it's there, but we also don't know what's there. So FOIA, Freedom of Information Reform, that's where the focus has to be. And then that goes along with, in the corporate end, advocating for free and open source licensing within corporate giants. And we're seeing enterprise companies understand that open source can win. So WordPress, Docker, MongoDB, all these companies are killing it. with an open source model bitcoin not a company but it might even be bigger than all of them and yeah and not being a company may be an advantage so you know the government what do they

they're so incapable of developing good technology and they're but simultaneously they're keeping it so secret it's just a it's a strange dynamic i would argue that the government is actually incredibly good at developing technology insert like highly innovative technology in very specific use cases right like the internet for example um you know it is many would argue created by the government right there's tons of um darpa darpa i mean all this robotics right all of this and so i think uh it's actually the most innovative things they're really good at it's anything below that threshold of innovation healthcare.gov not so great i mean But how does that make sense that simultaneously they're creating the most brilliant technology but also healthcare.gov, multibillion-dollar to put up a basic website?

How? Well, I think that's probably less about their ability as technologists and more about the government process of, hey, everyone should have equal opportunity to come and build this website. And we all know that it's like the prisoner's dilemma, right? I know that if I bid high enough, right, and you bid high enough, they're going to pay one of us some ridiculous price. And so everyone just keeps bidding higher and higher and higher and the contracts get out of control. Right. That's more of a contract process problem as opposed to not having access to incredible technologists. Yeah. Like there's people in the government who could build a way better website. There's doing other things, right?

It's the, oh, we're going to outsource this, right? I would actually even make the argument that the government outsourcing things in some cases hurts them. They would be better off doing it internally and actually not being so bureaucratic and just saying, look, I know that you're a really talented developer. You and three other people get in a room. Go build this website. That product is probably better than going through the contracting process and outsourcing it to private companies. there's another argument that i also would agree with in certain cases where the government should outsource a lot of things to the private market right um so i think it really is case dependent

on what we're talking about right building robotics is very different than building health healthcare.gov completely agree with the nuance there yeah what um so let's go back to minds.com uh as you're starting this thing privacy and anonymity are at the forefront why was uh anonymity so important well because you forcing identity is it affects the way that you communicate with the world you know you if you're not allowed to potentially be anonymous i mean the way that you post the psychology involved when you're not worrying about your reputation it there's a chilling effect that happens when identity is forced and it has to do with anonymity and privacy are sort of intertwined so it's not that we think that everyone should be anonymous

it's that you need to maintain that right because otherwise it sort of becomes a dystopia it's interesting because i think that a lot of times when this conversation comes up with friends there's a very black and white distinction between you're anonymous or you use your identity right and twitter's actually a great example of there's a gray area there's true anonymity there's pseudonymity and there's identity right and some of the biggest accounts on twitter are actually pseudonymous accounts they're not anonymous right they're pseudonymous and those pseudonyms taking a life of their own right and so you kind of get into this world where some people want to have an identity but it's an identity that's not their own right and like i've always been

fascinated by the idea of uh being anonymous in situations uh there's a lot of power i think you're talking about this chilling effect how do you see users acting differently when you give them that option versus if let's say you guys didn't give the uh anonymity as an option you see both you see some people abusing anonymity in the worst ways i mean you know vast majority of trolls are anonymous yep not not not nearly as many uh self-identified trolls but um most people identify themselves you know people still choose to use identity even when they have the option for anonymity why do you think that is i think people have a eagerness to be heard and be recognized and to share their thoughts and connect with other people

and you know they're not necessarily trying to hide but just because you don't have anything to hide doesn't mean you should uh be forced to share everything about you some a lot of people be like oh you know i don't care if the government's surveilling me because i have nothing to hide well that's ridiculous that's like saying um you know you don't need freedom of speech because you don't really feel like you have anything to say. Like you still deserve the right to privacy, even if you have nothing to hide. It's a principle. And do you feel like it is the responsibility of companies to police the actions of the

community? Or do you think it's the responsibility of the community? And the reason why I ask that is when you talk about this, most of the trolls are anonymous, right? At some point, there's an argument to be made, hey, we want a community that avoids that or kind of punishes those people. And then there's the other argument, which is kind of like the gab audience, which says we're not going to stop anybody from saying anything and just have at it. Where do you guys fall on this scale? And then also, how do you think about the policing?

Is it a community-based company, a hybrid? Yeah, it's hybrid. So first of all, our policy is that if it's legal in the U.S., it's okay. So we are moderating for illegal content, obviously no inciting violence or, you know, crazy harassment or like spamming, that kind of stuff. And so we do both. We actually are about to roll out a juror system so that when there's appeals or something, a group of 12 users will actually vote, not us, on the outcome.

Because I don't want to be in that position. That's a horrible place to be. Yep. But us subjectively deciding the outcome of of these decisions is really dangerous. And actually, it also takes off overhead to have the community help with moderation. And so how does that work? Let's say I get on there and I go wild. I say a bunch of crazy stuff.

Somebody flags it and says, this guy shouldn't be here. Right. What do they do? Take all my content, kick it over. There's 12 people who review it and they like vote. Yeah. Yeah. So this will be rolled out in beta at the end of the month. And essentially, it's within the terms. So it's not just 12 people saying, oh, we like this or we don't like this. They're in charge of enforcing the terms. Got it. So kind of like a true jury, right? Like, hey, here are the rules in which the terms of service provide. Did this person step out of bounds on the terms or not?

Yep. And you have every user, uh, can, you know, just go through this quick test to make sure they're not trolling it. And then you have a queue that a user can step into and hop in the queue anytime they want. Ah, so really you are truly like open sourcing the process of which the judging of the content comes. Did you see the recent article about, um, the folks at Facebook, uh, who, um, sit and watch all the like really bad content. Yeah. With that weird cartoon thumbnail. Yeah, yeah. So I read the article and it was fascinating to me, right? Like the claims in the article and I'll get to what I think about it all in a second. But just for those that don't know, there was an article that was written in one of the service centers. Think of it kind of like a call center, but rather than being a call center, Facebook has employees or contractors, I think, sit in these places and they look at flagged content. So content has been posted on Facebook that somebody has flagged as either dangerous, abusive, you know, not the right thing for Facebook.

And these people sit there and they look through and basically approve or deny whether that content meets the rules or not. Kind of like your jury system, but rather than be open source, this is more closed source. And this article was articulating the things that they see are crazy, right? They see people killed. They see people beat up. They see, you know, just nasty stuff. And the mental impact or the psychological impact on these people of just sitting all day long and looking at this content, the claim in the article is it's pretty severe. PTSD.

Yeah, exactly. PTSD, I think, was like that was one of the claims. There's a bunch of them in there. People have a hard time sleeping, et cetera. i've got to think that i'm not a scientist right but it would be hard to argue if you can get ptsd from seeing content events violence etc if you then sit and watch it all day long there's a high probability that you could get ptsd from just watching it even if you're not involved right so i think that's not too hard of a line to draw um but what do you think about the idea of it being

closed source versus open source? Like you guys go to this juror model, right? They have that more of like a closed source model. What are the big differences or advantages you think that you guys get from the open source? When you're looking at such a high concentration of that content all day long, I mean, that's going to become your reality and your experience. So that's really dangerous. And I think that we need to look at ways to make sure that people, especially moderators or jurors or whoever doesn't have too much screen time with that. But the issue is that the research that we have put together with dozens of studies that show that the policies,

our policy is open source too. So it's all on GitLab, gitlab.com slash minds. Anyone can comment on our terms. We're evolving them as we go. But the censorship research shows that you make the problem worse when you censor it, Especially if it's in these subjective areas with like offensive comedy or, you know, that round thing on your chest that, you know, isn't allowed on the N word, nipple. Oh, got it, got it.

I was like, wait, I could have gone a lot of different ways there. Nipple is okay. No, I mean, Facebook is banning old pieces, old statues. I mean, come on, that's not helping society. That's not the direction that we need to go. But do you think that there is nuance to the rules? Because I think with the argument that a lot of these folks have, right, that are participating on the side that maybe you and I probably don't agree with, right? But I always try to put myself in their shoes is the rules are the rules and you have a rule that is black and white, right?

No nipples, for example. But you are then selectively approving it by saying, oh, it's okay in this situation because it's a historic photo, right? Like, how does any company, Facebook or any other content platform, provide the nuance of the rules? Just keep it simple. I mean, provide filters for the content so you don't have to see what you don't want to see. So you basically give the users the right to say, I don't want to see this. Yeah, I don't want to see any sort of NSFW content. But to say that you're going to ban all of that from the platform entirely, this is where you see the hypocrisy.

because for instance google you can google anything google is deciding not to ban a bunch of content from google search but when you're on youtube or a bunch of other google products they do so wait a second where why if what type of content i actually am unaware of this so if i google um do you know something that falls if you google nudity uh-huh you're gonna find websites that have lots of nudity yep now you can't but i can't go to youtube and see videos with nudity in right where's the consistency there so they're understanding from the perspective of google search that censorship doesn't really make sense i think that you know generally speaking internet companies in the u.s know that we don't want to completely censor the internet otherwise we're

turning to china okay so but why are we not applying that consistently across our apps why are we only applying it to search it's it's this strange compartmentalization of information could could it be something where the regulation and law ends up separating like you found a website and even though the website has nudity the website is just a website and they're all treated the same versus like the video is then porn i'm trying to think through like why do you mean like where it's hosted yeah i don't know what the answer is right but like i'm wondering if there's just and this would go to being the rules being dumb right hey if somebody else hosts the content and you help people get there that's not bad but if you host the content

then you're bad right like like stupid stuff like that i'm sure is all over these censorship there's nothing illegal about i think if the content's illegal you're probably not going to finding Google search, but they're, they're basically choosing to not have that on YouTube, even if it's legal. And I think a lot of it comes down to payments and payment processors. Okay. And so I think that there's a, a force coming from the payment processors to not, there's legitimate reasons. I mean, there's high risk content. So if you have like super explicit content, then, you know, a lot of payment processors don't want to be involved or there's going to be higher fees associated with high-risk content.

So I think those are reasons. I think that there's just PR reasons for the censorship. But it's getting out of control because now the AI and the algorithms are just sweeping all the content on the network and banning it just by default. And they're just letting the blowback for people appealing it. And then they'll say, okay, you can have it come back. But like, for instance, thousands of creators on YouTube are just getting demonetized out the gate because there's certain keywords associated with their channel and it's just, it's blowing up. So it actually helps the creator sometimes, right?

Like, I mean, look, we had a podcast episode get taken down from Apple that, uh, ended up not having anything to do with the content, but we didn't know at the time. And I tweeted it to, you know, all these followers. And when it came back, the episode exploded. Now the content was good. Right. But everyone was basically saying, oh, my God, what was that content that got banned? Right. Streisand effect. A perfect example.

Yep. That's it. And that's why the that's a lot of the research that works against censorship logic. It doesn't even work. Even if your goal is to say, get rid of offensive speech or super controversial speech like we want to make a safer community. Censorship doesn't even achieve that goal, because when you ban all that content, everyone's like, oh, my gosh, I have to go see. what that band content is and you're creating these sort of infestations of uh you know sort of like digital ghettos of content that just make the problem worse in some other dark corner of the internet it's super fascinating um you're on joe rogan's podcast recently how's that it was wild

it's uh crazy studio um wait why so studio crazy just archery range and you know fitness and just you know ultimate media center and just it's it's so cool the the environment i think having an environment to do the things that you love do everything that you love in one place that's just a cool thing to achieve yeah how was uh how was he he's great he's he's super balanced trying to bring in all sides of the story. And that's what we need to do. We need to not just fall into our own echo chambers. We need to constantly be talking to people who think differently than us. And, you know, he's, he's pretty good at not letting the crowd dictate what he talks about. It's, you know, when you have a lot of people yelling at you to,

to talk about different things, like you just, you want to be true to your own principles. And I think he's doing a good job there. He he strikes me as a as a pretty fair guy. Right. In terms of the questions he asks and he pushes back on people when when he wants to. And he plays devil's advocate a lot, which is which is a very important strategy. I think, though, that while doing devil's advocate is important to also steel man. Are you familiar with that? No. What's that?

So steel manning an argument. So, you know, straw man. You're basically creating a false argument of someone that isn't even what they actually think to make them look worse. And it's just a horrible way to communicate. A lot of lazy people. Twitter's full. Yes. Just creating these fake arguments of people.

So steel manning is when you're having a conversation or debate with someone trying to create the best version of their argument as opposed to the worst version. And then it's such a more honest basis for having a conversation. So it doesn't mean that you're agreeing with them. You're saying, OK, let me get this straight. this is what you think. And you're trying to be totally sincere to represent them well. So I think steel manning while simultaneously playing devil's advocate is, is really effective.

I think he does both. Yeah. Yeah. He, he, he fascinates me because he talks about weird shit. He is pumps out a ton of content. And I think that he has a variety of life experiences and the people he

brings in there. um he's just able to pull on so many different things that the the conversations are wide ranging i listened to one recently with uh killer mike i don't know if you uh if you heard this one they talked for like two and a half hours about everything right and i just said that like how the heck does all do these two guys know that much about that many different things right yeah why and why are we limiting ourselves and sort of just creating these limited perspectives of of what we're actually into it's it's so much more interesting to see how everything's interconnected and to hear random people's takes on on different things

it makes it more human i uh the reason why i'm asking is uh somebody recently tweeted at me and said uh uh you know what i think about it and i said i'd love to interview like he always interviews everybody else i'd love for him to be the subject and just see like you know he doesn't get to play devil's advocate right like he actually he has to be the respondent to devil's advocate i think would be super uh super interesting uh because he is so fascinating based on all these conversations and he's had you know a thousand at this point uh it's uh it's pretty incredible yeah and just being able to search for the truth about so many different topics i mean what else are we doing here that's why we're on this planet to figure out what's going on so it's sort of it feels like

an exploration into what the hell is going on on this planet right now. Let's yeah, let's figure this out because it's pretty insane. It's incredible. Um, all right, let's, uh, let's get back to, uh, social networks. Um, I worked at a Facebook, uh, ran, uh, one of these growth teams that, uh, um, obviously the Facebook, uh, approach has worked very well in terms of, uh, growing social networks, you run a social network that some of the core components or beliefs are in direct contrast with what I think people would argue was so successful for Facebook, right? So if you think of MySpace versus Facebook, one of the things was Facebook made you have your real identity, right? Versus a MySpace that didn't necessarily say, hey, we're a proponent of

anonymity, but they allowed you to have some pseudonymity with the profiles, etc. And the second thing is their growth hacking. Right. And so maybe talk through, you know, your perspective as to let's do like Facebook, Twitter and Google. Right. Walk me through if you're running those companies, what you would do differently first. I mean, I'm into growth hacking. It's more consensual growth hacking, though. And so that's where they've broken everybody's trust. They've they've not been clear about consent of what they're doing and, you know, pulling in your contacts and you know basically tricking you into betraying not only your own privacy but all your friends privacy so you know when you feed them all your kind your friend didn't tell you you could

give your number their number to whatever app okay so let's talk about this right because what you're basically talking about is uh i signed up for facebook right and uh and one of the things they do is they ask you for your contact book right now from the facebook perspective the reason why they're asking you for that contact book is that is probably some of your most close friends, colleagues, acquaintances, except you have their phone number in your phone, right? Uh, if you give me that, it usually has their name and it has their phone number, their phone number. They've also put into Facebook, right? And as have you. And so now all of a sudden I can very quickly map who you are friends with or who you know on Facebook based on that contact book, right?

So it's a way for them to quickly figure out, do you know, friend recommendations, content recommendations, all this stuff. Very effective. Effective. And honestly, you can achieve the same thing. They're just missing one step. Okay. What is that? The one step is if I want my number to be shared by my friends so they can find me on whatever app, why don't I just say, hey, look, everyone, that's okay. And so my number now goes into a pool of numbers that it's okay to do it with. So what you're basically saying, and so people at home understand the nuance here.

If I sign up for Facebook and they ask me, do you want to share your contacts? They ask me the user number one, and I do have to agree. Now, one of the arguments that detractors have is they may not make it as clear as what they're going to do with the number. They could do things that would improve that experience. But they do ask, and you do have to consent that I am going to give my phone contacts to Facebook. You are user number two. User number two's phone number is in user number one's phone book. You're making the argument that user number two owns their phone number.

Do you disagree with the idea that user number one owns their phone book? Like, how do you, and it's really nuanced. They own it for themselves. But I think that user number one, you know, if they could have the information of which of their contacts are cool with that or not, I think that they would be more than happy to respect their friend's privacy. I would agree with that. What do they care? Yeah, I would agree with that. So, like, the idea is basically there would almost be a third option.

Like, yes, I want to share my contacts. No, I don't want to share my contacts. Or, yes, I want to share my contacts as long as my friends agree that their numbers can be included. Yeah, that's the type of thing we want to achieve in every little feature like that. Every invite feature, the types of information that we're keeping and whatnot. So, look, I worked at the company at Facebook, right? I know a ton of people who work at the Googles and the Twitters, etc. I don't think that 99% of the people are malicious in any way.

Agreed. Like, I actually think that they are good-hearted, well-intentioned people who are doing their job. And most of them are brilliant. Super smart. I mean, the whole thing, right? Like you couldn't be more, you couldn't speak more positively about the individual people. What tends to happen, I think, across all of these companies is there's metrics and they're trying to do things to increase the metrics because that's how they increase their

business, right? Metrics can be revenue, users, connectivity, content, you know, frequency, all this stuff. And the way that they do it, they're basically pushing new frontiers, right? The idea that I could ask you for all of your contacts before cell phones was almost impossible, right? What are you going to do, send me your phone book, right? Like it wasn't a thing. Now, all of a sudden, we have these mobile phones. We actually have a digital version of all of my contacts.

And with the press of a button, because of the way the phone is set up, I can immediately share my entire phone book with somebody else. If I share it with a friend, not that big of a deal. Share it with a company, now we're getting into some of the nuanced arguments. here how do we do you think we should reverse some of this stuff or do you think it's okay from now on we've got to address this stuff moving forward like how would you go about kind of addressing what's already happened yeah damage control is positive i didn't want to call it damage control but you said it so what the damage control how would you address it i i think that they can't they are pushing new frontiers and so i understand you can make mistakes along

the way because you're just you're pushing and you know you didn't realize that you know maybe this well and it might not even have been a mistake at that time and now we realize right it's like cigarettes at first no one thought they were actually bad right and then also hey this is actually really bad for you yeah in hindsight mistake at the time with the information everyone had not a mistake it's been 10 years since facebook knew it was a mistake at least and all the others so you know there is a clear consciousness of this situation um and there's you know the conversation's starting to be had so this is why we see you know dorsey talking about bitcoin more and zuckerberg talking about blockchain and decentralization and more

privacy and encryption but like you know whatsapp co-founder brian acton left whatsapp because he knows that they're betraying all of those people's privacy he feels horrible about it that's why he invested 50 million dollars in uh open whisper and um signal signal or yeah and the instagram founders left the oculus founder i mean they're all there's something going wrong where there's a disconnect so i will say that um that happens at every company right and the reason why i say that is like if you look at apple google etc the founders stay for a while and eventually they go to leave yeah but these were explicitly stated reasons so i do agree with that right so like the founders leaving to me isn't as big of a deal as it is the reasons why they're saying for sure

yeah you move on you do new projects yeah yeah yeah and the part to me that is uh is interesting I think so like go to the privacy stuff right I don't know if there's a right answer right in the sense of what you think is privacy may be different than what I think is privacy we're both technically right right like my my self privacy or my personal privacy may be different than what you define that as for a platform with three billion people it's it's damn near impossible to get the solution for everyone right now what i think you have to do is you got to do the trade-off of from an ethical standpoint right what do you what does the content owner believe what does uh what serves the purpose for the most amount of people right and then also there's probably some kind of like downside the

extreme protection of like if you're doing something that serves the most amount of people but then like somebody can die you know you might have to address that but i don't know i'm not even saying that sharing all your information is necessarily ethically wrong. Some people would all agree, I want to live stream my whole life. I want Facebook to have all my data so that they can feed me the best stuff. And that should be an option for people. But also, have a toggle of options across the spectrum so that the user on the onboarding can decide. And yeah, it's going to be a rougher UX if you fully lock down your privacy. That's just the reality. So I'm not taking it from a purist perspective. We're only going to do the hyper privacy focused option.

I think that we could get into options where as long as consent is there, sure, there can be open data. There's so many amazing things you can do with analytics and AI and open data. None of those things are inherently positive or negative what what is uh other than the privacy stuff right like like what do they do with your data what do you consent to what do your friends give them all that stuff what are the other big areas that you think are are important for the large social networks to to address i mean i think they all need to free all their code okay explain explain that more so you know i think we all agree that we want to know what is in the food that we eat so that you know there's not gonna we're not gonna get poisoned okay uh why wouldn't

you want to know what is in the app that you're eating that you're buying that you're that you that you're installing you're you basically you know and you want you want to talk about transhumanism and and you know extensions of our biology our phones are they are extensions of ourselves they're they're they're streaming out information about us they're pulling in information they're they're they're how we're downloading information and processing it okay So, why would we want to be installing things that are abusing us? Because when you don't have access to the source code, it doesn't mean you're going to go and inspect the source code. There's a tiny percent of people that are going to be interested in doing that.

But at least the peer review community, the experts have the ability to do that for the people. And this is why the labeled food movement got huge. I was just going to say, some people would argue that we don't know what's in our own food. Yeah, it's the same principle. And, you know, we are seeing that industry explode. Yep. We're seeing Bitcoin open source crypto. It's exploding for that reason.

What do you think comes out of? So let's say Twitter says, all right, you know, we believe in all of this. We're going to open source the code. Is it more of having the ability to verify that they're not doing nefarious stuff with the data? Is it more of being able to understand if they're doing something bad? That's one major component, but there's also the innovation component where if they do it, open source the code, then we can move towards decentralization. We can have everyone set up their own node.

We can have everyone building on top of the beautiful platform that Twitter's built. It's epic software. Why force companies like us and these other emerging alternatives to reinvent the wheel? it's like what's our actual mission here and so and with certain licensing you know companies can still protect themselves it's not like you're just giving away all your secrets and you're screwed i mean how does the open source enterprise software business thrive by sharing because you know you're going to achieve network effects by sharing it is uh it's very interesting to me the psychological elements of uh capitalism versus collaboration right like a lot of times those

two things are in direct conflict where i actually can gain more my entity my organization by not working with you you think that well here's my argument is in some situations that's definitely true right in very binary situations you and i are both going after a customer i'm not going to help you because i want the customer if i get the customer and you don't i make more money you you don't make that money right i think your argument and what i want to hear you elaborate on is there's a whole nother part of business where collaboration actually can be more profitable than the capitalistic kind of binary type approach. Yeah. And I don't want it to get confused as if like, just because your, your, your software is publicly available, that means

that you have to, you know, live stream all the secrets of everything happening within your company so um yeah it's um there's the innovation benefit there's the ability to inspect for malicious stuff argument and you know i'm just trying to contribute to you know evolution that's that's why i'm here personally so and i think companies think they're doing that too and They are in certain ways. I mean, it's not as if mainstream social media is all 100% evil. I mean, they've facilitated revolutions. They've spread information.

Do you think that Facebook and Twitter are net positive to the world or net negative? Like all the good stuff, all the bad stuff, you put it down, you write it on a piece of paper. Are we net positive or net negative? I think we're fluctuating somewhere in the middle. Really? You think it's neutral? Yeah. I mean, I think, are you familiar with Richard Stallman?

I've heard the name before. Why do I know that name? He is the founder of the GNU Linux. Yeah, open source. So I saw the documentary. Rick Burton from Balance sent it to me. I watched the, that's why I know what it is. Yeah.

So, you know, he is like fully hardcore. You know, he won't even interact with anything on his machine that is proprietary. You know, he wrote the general public license. He, you know, co-authored GNU Linux. So, you know, epic dude. But his argument is convenience over freedom is just not it's he's he'll never make that decision for convenience over freedom. Just never. It's just his principle. You know, I'm not I'm certainly not that hardcore. But I think, you know, the Internet existed and you can't change the past. So I don't even know what to say. If someone else would have popped up and we still would have a social network, you know, it's not like just because Facebook and Twitter came along that no one else would have. So it's hard to say. I think that we need to be focused on making decisions that align with our principles. i think that it is a fair argument i probably disagree in the sense that i find it hard to argue it's not a net positive there's still tons of issues right so it's not

like it's 100 positive stuff it may be it could even be 51 49 positive the negative right but it's the the positives outweigh the negatives in my mind in impact on the world now there's an argument to be made if you take that same debate and i say is it positive or negative to an individual's psychological state there might be a bigger i'm weighing a lot of that in yeah right like that actually may be more negative than positive for certain people for information flow it's undeniable but i'm not going to give credit to or full credit for you know the the information flow of you know breaking events and you know everything that social media has has been amazing for i'm not going to give that all to facebook and twitter i'm going to give

that credit to the internet i think that's fair like you like you could you you have to share the credit right it's not the internet doesn't internet doesn't get 100 credit facebook and twitter don't get 100 credit there are there are just a lot of different platforms and everyone contributed something and what bothers me is that they know about open source they contribute a lot to open source. I mean, React, Angular, you know, we use Angular, Google, you know, these companies sponsor amazing open source projects. And so they're so well aware of this rift in what they're doing. For deep infrastructure of applications, they're there. You know, they know they want those open source developers helping them out. They want that adoption. And they know the only way

they're going to get the adoption with like the, you know, server level stuff, database stuff is if they open source it but with the you know super competitive edge the front ends fancy stuff you know even a lot you know well look neither the back end nor front end of facebook is fully open source so what do you think about um part of the blockchain space or crypto space is this idea of like on-chain businesses so the idea that uh if i'm getting paid on chain and i like fully decentralized i fully with full transparency so what i mean by that is uh you're able to see as anybody out there in the world can see what all my expenses are what all my revenue is my profitability what i actually paid people yeah everything too extreme do you

think we're actually going towards that where are you on that i'm i'm into that i'm into it i'm into moving in that direction i mean so we did our first funding round was equity crowd funding round okay so we had to publish our financials financials with the sec yeah which was which is cool um and you know more more transparency with how the company is operating yeah yeah i mean we're not paying everyone in crypto yet but you know we're basically trying to educate people about how to go on chain so the way our system works is you can you we distribute rewards off chain but we're incentivizing people to go on chain so you can like boost your posts on chain or off chain you can send uh tokens in between users on chain or off chain and we have these

tutorials for metamask and you know how to do it but you know fully on chain social networks you know you're paying gas for everything it's just not it's not gonna go mainstream it's yeah it yeah we're moving towards that but also you know blockchain is probably not going to solve all of our problems for decentralizing the social network we're also we're working on a side project called nomad which uses your ethereum address from your mind's wallet as sort of your username verified entity in in nomad and then we're using react native and node and then have you heard of dat protocol or ipfs oh ipfs yeah they're similar and so these are like fully peer to peers you know no central server networks torrent style and you know those types of tools

are much more scalable in a lot of ways you know more there's more ephemeral data you know you don't need everything on the blockchain i think we want a lot on chain we want other decentralized protocols to help us out too so we're sort of trying to mesh them together what about uh do you think telegram actually doesn't keep everything they're we have no idea they're proprietary and that's where per example if they open source we'd know yeah yeah i don't see the loss like i remember when we first were releasing all our code it was scary because you know because you have that feeling like oh shit is someone gonna come and steal our steal our secrets and compete with us and get bigger than us and we just put four years of work into building the

scalable infrastructure and oh my god what's gonna happen it's so anticlimactic and then you're just like oh i feel so much better we're abiding by our principles the code's out there the developers start coming in and helping out and you start to feel the benefits of it and so there's just so much fear involved in people not sharing it they because it's new or because there it's the unknown it's the unknown you people you know when you invest all your time money into building a business and you know you have this fear that someone's just going to grab what you're doing and compete with it it's scary but that's what's cool about copy left free software licenses like agplv3 is that if someone takes your code and makes changes to it they have to share those

changes with the whole community so it's it's self-propelling and you know then there's like apache license and uh you know mit and stuff where uh forks don't have to share their code and i think that there's value for that too but ag you know free software agblv3 is um it's it's really powerful facebook has a blockchain team what do you uh what do you what's your take on um them going into blockchain zuck talking about potentially like decentralizing facebook connect uh this reported stable coin it's proving the value so i i love that they're talking about it it's just it's validating everything about the industry so great let's go there but likely it's gonna be proprietary it you know just they should just do it the right way

so here's my take this is my hot take okay yeah i think they are you think they're gonna i i think there's a more than 50 chance that they come out with like a decentralized offering i don't know exactly what it's going to be but like i know some people on the team and they're in these telegram chats and like they're doing their work yeah the big question is can the people on the team who understand the ethos believe in the ethos uh are attracted to work on that team because of the ethos right all that stuff can they get the approvals right right so like the team i actually have a very high degree of confidence in it is that's the showdown and i bring that framework up because uh i know many of the people at the wall street banks working

on the blockchain stuff and the teams actually want to do the thing the right things right and then they're like yeah we walk into the board and like you know unnamed ceo at whatever bank is like no way like they're non-starter and so they got to go back to the drawing board and they get frustrated right and so like to me it is the separation of people who grew up with one type of approach to building companies in direct conflict with people who actually understand and believe in the things that you and i believe in yeah yeah i think that boards get in way and that is possible but i you know with facebook look if suckerberg wants it to be an open blockchain it it will be that's his decision if this is done the right way or not i agree with

that the the thing that um i'm hoping is a saving grace right uh maybe it was naval or somebody on twitter had tweeted uh after bill gates said you know something about bitcoin like helped kill people or not i don't know what the hell he was talking about um but somebody tweeted and they were like you know don't get it confused if bill gates was still a teenager he'd be working on crypto right like you know basically you rage against the man and when you're successful you become the man right that type of stuff uh zucks very well off and he's been very successful uh i actually think he deserves a lot of you know what he's gotten because of what he built but he's still young enough where i think that he's not the 50 plus year old like like he's like

over the line and we'll never get him back like that's the one thing that i'm hoping right i think jack dorsey similar like i think jack's a little bit older than zuck but they're still just young enough where i think that they will be attracted we know jack obviously is yeah they're listening to the people a little bit i mean that you can't deny it they're aware of cultural trends and means sure so you know and the constant uproar over all of the abuses of of i mean how can they not be listening it's good it's a you know they're losing active users people hate it they're freaked out so you know i'm not you can't pat them on the back too much for i i just think that they have a lot of work to do to regain trust okay so go down this uh line of thinking though do they

need to regain trust because if they just decentralize things and start being super transparent is it less about gaining trust and more about just giving people the ability to oh yeah make it make a trust list yeah i mean because that's the best they can do that's the chess move right is it's the judo move of cool uh facebook 2010 everyone's yelling and screaming about your desktop focus you guys don't understand mobile chess move we're going all in on mobile ban become one of the biggest you know mobile successes in our lifetime now all of a sudden oh you're centralized you're you know you're too centralized you're abusing data all stuff can they do it again right so facebook specifically could twitter do it could

google do it chess move we're gonna actually go the exact op we're gonna go all in on decentralization we're gonna go all in on transparency all in on blockchain tech like that's a pretty big bet uh and it's very much 180 degrees from what's working today like the thing with mobile to desktop is like it's more of a shift right and and your mobile usage doesn't necessarily cannibalize your desktop usage like you just there's some people who have mobile phones who don't use desktop right and vice versa right this would be a much more extreme bet i think i don't think it needs to be so extreme like it's not like it's not like everything needs to be a hundred percent fully decentralized like we need you know decentralized

with parentheses around the de like you you need central servers are going to be important for certain jobs that's just a fact and it's not like we but we want the option to go fully peer-to-peer you know maybe oh so you think that really the solution could just be give people the optionality yes and literally if you just say 90 of our users continue to use our centralized product but we do have the option if you'd like to operate on our decentralized facebook product then you can opt out and go to that product that alone would be a huge milestone yeah you yeah of course i mean and the thing is with immutability that's an extreme view no it's really not it's actually balanced yeah i mean i actually i actually like that idea that you're the person

who's told me that but like the idea of you don't have to go 100 either way you can provide optionality like i like that because that is very much in line with a lot of the ethos of like you have the personal freedom to choose do you want to operate and use the product that's on centralized service or do you want to use them a decentralized service yeah different benefits to both you know you can't delete from a blockchain maybe you want to delete your photo you know you probably want a server a central server if you want to do that so what why don't i have the choice when i'm posting if i want to unleash it into decentralized you know cosmos or you know put it on a server the uh the idea of not being able to delete photos i don't know why i just thought of this but like

every you know young college couple who like hey we're dating they post a bunch of photos and then like three months later they go delete them all right like it's like uh the old school like get a tattoo right of like a guy or girl's name and you can't get rid of it yeah it's like post the photos on the blockchain can't get rid of it well there's there's all these weird uh paradoxes between privacy and blockchain because you know gdpr is actually not even compatible with blockchain blockchain really so because you know the this this right to be forgotten well guess what when you're like cruising around the internet writing to databases you know whether it's decentralized database or centralized you're having a footprint you know even deleting from cassandra which is a

you know no sql centralized database it's hard to delete stuff from there like you have footprints and tombstones of interactions of data so saying oh i want to you know i have the right to be able to delete every trace of myself from the internet well it's like well i can't delete the fact that you know i just walked by that guy five minutes ago like our paths through the internet are not it's not that simple from a technical perspective what's your take on um users outside the united states like do you think they actually care about this stuff oh for sure don't you you think so i i my take is that facebook specifically because they're more probably international than most uh i don't think that anyone outside the u.s is really

aware or paying attention to a lot of the privacy stuff like i think that it's the the tech media north american users like everyone's really rallied up right now in those other in a lot of countries around not not i don't even know if it's most but a lot of countries around the world facebook is the best option hands down period like that even close well we just about four months ago got within 248 hours got 150 000 users to sign up from vietnam randomly our site's not even it wasn't even translated to vietnamese yet and that was because there's a new cyber quote unquote cyber security law coming out in vietnam which is essentially revolving door between google and facebook and the government to censor and surveil people so all that you know some some

really big name journalists from over there signed up and brought you know their followings over and so people can't be passionate about what they don't know i think that once you have options before you like you know more options the better look if i have the option to have internet freedoms respected and the functionality is equivalent let me ask this would you ever sell your company to facebook no no why because there's no point it would unless

they literally I would buy them I mean not that I ever could but they do everything wrong unless they started doing everything right and unleashed all the code and it wouldn't no it's not it's not possible

they just take our code they don't need our code though what what if they created the optionality so they said hey you know what we hear the people we're gonna have a centralized option decentralized option for facebook you get to choose personal choice yeah we want you to come help us build it yeah no no no no i'll come help them build it without buying the company so i'm here to help i want to help them i want them to transform but i don't it's not the reason why i ask is uh i'm very interested to see how talent starts to look at a lot of these internet companies and the decisions they make and should they go work at them should

they not are there startups that are better or worse right some sort of actually maybe worse um it's just uh the impact on the ability to hire talent it's going to be very interesting as well oh for sure i mean i think that the best developers are starting to not want to work at these companies because developers care about these things they you know they're into crypto ethos why do they you know it's so they get tempted with you know huge salaries and but you know they don't get to share their code that they just spent four years working on with everyone that's why developers like to go work for crypto companies because a lot of them are open source and their work gets to get shared. It's crazy. Yeah. What, um, explain to everybody

how you guys use crypto as an incentive on the platform. So we launched the ERC20. We didn't give founders any, or, you know, and we had the product on day one and we went through all the variables that, you know, most people hate about a lot of ERC20s and made sure that we were doing it as right as possible. Basically for all the engagement you receive every day, your engagement is divided by the total engagement in the network so that's your percentage of the daily token reward pool and that just runs every day and we have a supply and it basically we increase the supply in parallel to user growth and you can use your tokens like one token will give you a thousand extra impressions when you boost with it so you earn virality essentially we want it we're never

going to bring in the crazy newsfeed algorithms and you know our whole thing is we want creators to get heard. I don't want to take your reach away. I mean, I had pages on Facebook with like 5 million followers and we were driving crazy traffic from Facebook to mines. And then now you're only reaching like three to 5% of your own followers on Facebook. I mean, that is the ultimate bait and switch like, Oh, okay. Yeah. Let's build a social network so people can post their friends, but then only let them reach 5% of their friends. All right. So I have to defend Facebook. Cause I actually, uh, ran along with a engineering colleague, the growth team for Facebook pages and our job was to get people on. And so the one thing that I will say in their

defense is some of it is not their decision. And here's why, if you get, let's say you start a right and you get 10 followers and you post content right and those 10 people reload their news feed those 10 people will have uh let's say uh i don't know eight slots for commercial content in that news feed load but they only like or follow your page so they just signed up for facebook you're the only page you have a very high probability of getting in one of those eight slots with your content because you're the only page right actually you might fill all eight slots depending how much content you have they then go in like 10 other pages over a couple of months then they like 100 at some point they like 250 other pages now you plus the 249 other pages

are all competing for those same eight slots so there's some like natural decay not in facebook changing the algorithm just in that the longer users been on the platform the more types of content have access to their platform now what facebook does do right or did do at least when i worked there is they'll do things like if you're a new page let's get your content a lot of distribution because what we know is if you get a lot of engagement early on you realize that people are there so you stay right if you start a page nobody's there after seven days you're I'm out of here, right? So they do things like that

because it actually keeps you on the page. Now, there's two ways to look at it. They need to do it to get you to stay retained, right? To actually use the platform. People want your content. They subscribe. They help you build an audience. They're helping you build your business.

The other way to look at it is they gave me a bunch of reach and they took it away from me, right? It's such a complex problem that I am glad I don't have to deal with that anymore. No, I understand. And I actually think that there's lots of benefits of algorithms and having that as again as an option but i think that the default news feed

should always be 100 raw chronological okay so your argument is basically don't have the ranking algorithm instead just do reverse chronological order basically as default have the ranking have an alternate but the reason obviously they do the ranking algorithm by default is for all these reasons of retention and whatnot so yeah the ranking algorithm is absolutely better on almost every single metric other than the content creator getting their distribution well let me do two things unless you're one of the highest rewarded content creators so the very best content creators get the most distribution because they get the most engagement you know it's a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy the argument i think they would have

is well shouldn't the like we let the audience decide the audience so i want to hear your your responses but their argument would be we let the audience decide who the best is we use engagement as a proxy for their votes and therefore engagement leads to more distribution right you would argue well what do you actually think so what would you prefer for your default news feed it's different actually on facebook i like the fact that it's ranked and the reason is uh on facebook the way i use the platform right and you could argue actually i use the platform this way because of the algorithm right so there's kind of a chicken and egg type thing causation um but i use the platform because i only want to see the highest quality things

like i actually don't want to see my 20 friends who posted something stupid i don't care right i want to see the highest quality things and usually because those people are it's a much more curated list of people, right? It's family, it's close friends, et cetera. Twitter, I got 190,000 followers. I got, you know, I don't know, two, three, 4,000 people I follow. I follow those people, not because I think they have the highest quality content. I follow them because I know that the content is almost always in some version of reverse chronological order, right? Or relatively near time and i'm curating the list of people to benefit from that so i follow a bunch of reporters why because they have news right like all it's very different i don't follow those

reporters on facebook so it's almost like there's not a one size fits all it's the different platforms actually want different algorithms yeah and i'm look i want different algorithms i just think that reach matters. You, you know, if you, you work years and years building up a following under the notion of, of an algorithm, like reverse chronological, you just worked on that platform for years to build up your following under that preconception. So when that is taken away after years of work to build a following, and then suddenly the default feed is no longer that, and your business is destroyed, a whole industry was destroyed when Facebook started killing organic reach, you know, people who were driving traffic and surviving. I have so many friends

whose businesses are gone because of that. So I think that the agreement that you, and again, consensual agreement, you know, a contract that you're creating with an app that you're signing up for, like if that's how it is when you sign up, I mean, yeah, they look, they, they can do it, but I don't consider that cool. You're more in the camp of they shouldn't change the algorithm unless there's a vote or there's some sort of consensus agreement

that this is good for majority of the people involved. Let the user decide the feed that they want by default and don't, you know, on Twitter, actually, they no longer do. In the upper right of your newsfeed on the app, you can put it to reverse but they always put you back you have to do it every day to go to chronological so because it's better right better in the sense of uh increased engagement or like it it drives all the business metrics right it drives all the user metrics it dropped like

but it doesn't drive the metrics for the users of the platform the the metrics the metrics well it drives it for the best the people who are the best right so like right my twitter when they went to the algorithm i got way more engagement because my content continued to get engaged with and it was at near the top of the feed right so i actually benefited i was a beneficiary of the algorithm change right so i'm sitting here as a self-serving you know individual saying i love the algorithm right reverse chronological the switch to ranked hurt a whole bunch of other people right so it's kind of like it has different impacts to different people depending on how the algorithm affects you are you sure that if your posts were going to see you don't know who your

posts are you don't actually even understand the algorithm and this is the problem like you don't know the numbers of comparison right now if you were to post to the chronological or yeah there's no way for me to be tested no you can't so we actually and and that's we need to see the algorithms i mean oh you think that they should open source what those algorithms are everything oh man people would game that so much yeah well but that's okay i mean just people want i subscribe to somebody i want their stuff it's just become so over complicated if i don't like you if you're bothering me like okay i'm gonna i'm gonna push Can you imagine if people knew what the Facebook ranking algorithm was?

Like exactly what it was. You know, you get this many likes in this many minutes and everything. But I think it would make users just be so much more careful about who they're following. And, you know, it has a lot more to do with the relationship between the subscriber and the person getting subscribed to. You're not going to spam if the people who are following you are getting pissed at you because you're just trying to game the algorithm. Okay, that's fair. I don't know.

I just want options. I'm not an absolutist, man. I'm not trying to come at this from like- I love it. I love it. I can talk to you for hours. All right, before we wrap up, what is the most important company in crypto? Rapid fire questions.

most important company in crypto is um i i can't i can't i can't i i can only talk about bitcoin and ethereum i i i can't pick in a corporation right now oh perfect yeah that's great that's my answer yeah is i always hey you either pick bitcoin or i pick facebook and the reason why i pick facebook is because whatever they create they will probably launch to more people than have then all people who've already been exposed to crypto and bitcoin and blockchain to date so let's say there's 50 60 million people whatever if facebook turns something on they could hit 100 million people and all of a sudden that's the first interaction that a wide majority of people will have had and so it's really

important whatever they create totally agree right and then bitcoin just because no no one's taking out the king i just hope that they're smart man i i hope that they do it with principles because i got faith but i'll be the first one if they mess up i'll be the first one to admit they messed up cool what uh what one regulation would you change or improve if you could any regulation any any government any law yeah um i want i want access to all the the black projects i want to know the secret technologies the secret tech yeah i think that's a legitimate ask yeah i'd never do it but yeah that's fine what uh what's your most controversial thought in crypto

what do you believe that the highest majority of other people would disagree with you i believe that i mean we've sort of already gone over it i i think that if you're doing a proprietary closed blockchain product project it's just like you're wasting your time i i it's it's maybe better than other things you could be doing this life you could be going around killing people that's worse but just put it into the ethos that bitcoin was founded on let's stay on that train why are we trying to distort it do you think it's fair to encourage experimentation even if it's experimentation with things we don't agree with open experimentation okay explain that okay so do

like let's say you can start new blockchains okay sure okay of course tokenize all sorts of things yep equities points you know even even if they go against bitcoin's ethos as long as you're being transparent and sharing the results of your experiments i am for experimentation with blockchains you're less about you have to do x y or z and you're much more about no sacred cows do whatever you want but the process is the most important thing around transparency testing publishing those results etc yeah okay i think that's what's yours what would i which is most controversial almost controversial uh bitcoin's gonna become a global reserve currency and i say it's the most controversial not because i think people

in crypto think that like don't think that uh i think that like maybe one percent of the global population believes that um but i put the odds at like over 50 at this point i want that yeah and it's just all predicated on a single idea of um as time goes on people will learn to trust the algorithms over the humans like this idea of human-led central banking and just all of the bias and kind of decision making just it's all flawed when we have algorithms with transparency and the inability to corrupt them right um so yeah i think that's probably the there's actually a lot of people in crypto who don't even believe that yeah i'm happy to have algorithms guide me around or drive my cars but i just want some crazy computer scientists to be

able to go in there and make sure that all the cars are not going to get simultaneously hacked and you know 500 000 cars go off the road at the same time think about these uh you can pay attention to the uh boeing 737s that recently got grounded like that that's literally computer glitch right it's got something i don't even understand the full thing but it's something about uh the software pulls the plane into a nosedive and the pilots are reporting that they're basically pulling on they're like what the hell what the hell what the hell and there's been two crashes and it's because the software uh something about it it believes that it's like the nose is too high so it pulls it in it tries to like put it

pull it in equilibrium but actually pulls into a nosedive and they crash like what happens if that's in cars crazy stuff we got it we have to maintain the humanity like if you because if the profit motive causes the software to become corrupt and all of these problems like we need when if machines are going to take over the world and our biology we just we need to remember that there's humans and if if the ai can just take over in a secret database somewhere that no one has that's why open ai exists you know that the smartest people in the world know that open systems work better i agree with that uh favorite book or actually not favorite most important book most important that you've ever read um i am going to say

the most important recent book i've ever read was this uh truth in anthology called truth by orwell and i'm not gonna i'm not gonna say it's number one just what came to my head but it just talks about who controls information flow is controlling the planet's perception of reality and so you know the back in the day the newspapers were controlling thought you know if you control thought and information flow you control history and so when people look back on history this is their interpretation of history if information flow is totally centralized and and lock down so yeah what about you guns germs and steel the jared diamond book about evolution of humans uh before i end um i usually let you ask me a question but aliens real or not real

real yeah 100 yeah they have to be all right now everyone usually comes in here prepared for the alien question so i've been asking the depths of the ocean scare the hell out of me we don't know what's down there like we actually probably know more about space than we do about our own ocean would you rather go to space or go to the depths of the ocean space i'm with you i'm with you the the the alien question is is so present because and it's not even it's taboo but it's not taboo anymore like it's so mainstream oh they're real it's yeah come on and so like dude i saw what conversations do we have to have who do we have to get in on the call or in a video conference to have the conversation to just declassify this stuff like how can we there there are basically

two civilizations on this planet right now there are people who have access to the classified information about what's going on and there are people who do not have access to it so there are two levels of consciousness happening on earth right now dude i'm gonna blow your mind i just read an article this morning i don't quote me exactly on this i'm gonna get some of the numbers

wrong but a really fucking far way away like four billion miles away or something i think it is there are two galaxies colliding right now i don't even know what happens with two galaxies collide but and they're named like urh 372 is colliding with urh 373 or something right and they're colliding

now i was like oh that's pretty interesting like i wonder what happens when two galaxies collide then i kept reading the article reading the article and maybe it was in four billion years our galaxy is going to collide with that bigger one i was like whoa like what the fuck four billion years from now they're saying that our galaxy is going to collide with this other one what happens gotta become that spacefaring civilization it might not matter being a multi-planetary species if the galaxies collide i don't even i don't know what happens i'm gonna go that's assuming that you know physical reality is even you know the basis of things so we don't even know if consciousness is is actually the fundamental force of the universe so it's actually

irrelevant if you know galaxies collide we you know the the debate between the nature of consciousness that's really where this ultimately goes because you know things aren't going to end necessarily just because two two galaxies collide yeah wild things to think about i'm uh i'm going from the aliens now i'm literally going to do some research this weekend on what happens when galaxies collide i'm like scared of what i'm going to find uh what one question you have for me to uh to finish up when was the last time you sat alone with your own thoughts for an hour just focused not like fully being present meditating how do you ever do that have no i'm not big on uh meditation necessarily um my girlfriend uh tries to do it every day and like she swears by it um

I do, I've gotten lazy. I don't walk to work anywhere. I live about a mile, like 1.3 miles from the office. And so there's been a couple of times where I've walked, but I try to walk home every night. And I can't say that it's quiet with me with my thoughts because I walked through Times Square. Right.

And I do always try to remind myself, like, it's pretty cool to live here where like you're literally watching people who have like dreamed about coming to this one location in the world that they consider like the center of the universe and they're like walking around just looking at lights and just you know their faces are in awe and most new yorkers walk by they're like yeah get the hell out of my way like yeah like stop stopping in the you know in the sidewalk um and so it's just like a reminder of like we're all pretty lucky uh and so i think it has some of the effect of that but uh but never somebody to like really say i i just i got things to do right like i i yeah if i sit there for an hour i'd either get antsy and go try to do something or

fall asleep fair enough yeah walking through the streets of new york city i'm always just feeling like we're in the the blood veins of of a super organism it just it's crazy you zoom out and you're you know when you fly into new york you're just like that looks like veins of a of a body and it really is that that i mean it's crazy earth's an organism and we're just like these little little flying around metal tubes all over it man all right thanks for having me brother thank you uh thank you so much for coming this is a uh ton of fun um after i do my uh my galaxy collision uh research maybe we'll have you back and we can debate the finer points of uh space travel but uh i appreciate it very much thanks for having me another word from our sponsors at

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