The Pomp Podcast - Santiago Siri, Founder of the Democracy Earth Foundation: Blockchain and Democracy

Episode Date: May 20, 2019

Santiago Siri is the founder of the Democracy Earth Foundation. In this conversation, we discuss what democracy actually means, how technology can improve governance in different ways, why he started a political party, how he helped implement quadratic voting in a US state, and where blockchain technology can create real world impact in the short term. ----- 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. Santiago Siri is the founder of the Democracy Earth Foundation. In this conversation, we discuss what democracy actually means, how technology can improve governance in different ways, why he started a political party, how he helped implement quadratic voting in a United States state, and where blockchain technology can create real-world impact in the short term. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. 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'm here with santiago uh i'm super excited about this you have one of the most interesting jobs and lives of probably anyone who's walked through this door so thank you so much for coming hey thank you for having me it's it's really getting myself into trouble it's not the job absolutely all right so uh let's start right from the beginning you're born in

Argentina, just to kind of walk us through life pre worrying about democracy, governance and politics. So, you know, I grew up in Argentina, in Buenos Aires, in South America. My whole life, I've been into programming and computers from an early age. When I finished high school, I began my career as an entrepreneur, as a game developer. Actually, my dream was to be a video game developer. So early on you know I built a startup doing that in Buenos Aires which led to it was actually a soccer game which is a very popular sport in Latin America. After a career being an entrepreneur then I did a second startup where I worked on big data analyzing data from social media. That one got acquired by a Brazilian company. And then I evolved into this idea of

trying to understand how to contribute to the betterment of my society through politics. And back in 2012, I started a political party. And since then, I got myself deeper and deeper into understanding the role of the internet in our modern day democracies. All right. So hold on. You started a political party, right? So tech entrepreneur, you've got all this success. How do you start a political party? It's a very good question because starting a political party, and especially in Latin America, you cannot do that with money.

In the U.S., maybe you can. Yeah, yeah. Although starting a new party might be a bit harder. But in Latin America, the challenge of starting a party requires really a big part of society or a big community that is very much convinced about some new ideas. And in Argentina, we were having a populist government. There was a lot of disenfranchisement with power, with the politicians, a lot of frustration coming from society. And my generation, I'm a generation that is the first time that is a generation that grows up

with the internet, but also I'm a generation that in Argentina belongs to a generation that grows up for the first time in a democracy. So when I started talking about this idea of this party, we figured, why don't we start using the technologies that defines us as a generation, the internet itself, to improve our democracy? So we started Partido de la Red, which in English means the net party, and that it's a party that has candidates that always vote in Congress according to what people tell them online how to vote. All right, so this is a wild idea, right? But basically, the whole premise of the political party is a candidate gets elected.

They become the representative of some area or group of people. They do not have the ability to vote how they see fit. They are merely serving as a proxy for the wishes of their constituents. And then through technology, every time there is a vote, they basically ask their constituents and say, what do you guys want to vote? They say, you know, yes, no. And the candidate carries out the wishes of their constituents. That doesn't sound that ridiculous to me. That's what they're supposed to be doing anyways. Exactly. It's one of those ideas that, you know, at the beginning might sound strange, but actually when you dig deep into it, it makes a lot of sense. The democracies we have today are basically an accident of the information technologies of 200 years ago.

That's why we have representative democracy centralized in Washington or in a capital city. The Internet definitely allows for better ways of doing representation. There are major challenges in order to understand how to do democracies over a digital landscape. That's where blockchain technology becomes relevant. But we started like that, doing an open source software for people to start voting. We were the first political party that we know of that was actually building software. We actually, you know, we called our candidate a Trojan candidate because it's not a real politician like all the others. It's actually someone that has in his representation the voice of potentially millions of people that will tell him or her how to vote.

We ran for our first election in 2013. We needed 3% of the votes to get a candidate elected. We got 1.2. It wasn't enough. But it really kickstarted a movement where we started seeing similar parties in Uruguay, in Mexico, in Chile, in many different countries where also a new generation growing in democracy, growing with the Internet, starts to think politics under a new light. a new light. Got it. And so this is an interesting idea in that I think that there's been a lot of people who have pontificated on the idea around why don't, rather than have the representative model that we have today, where basically there's elected officials, why don't we just let people

vote every time there's a vote, right? And so just kind of let the masses vote. What it seems like to me is that you're basically saying, let's take the ethos of that approach and fit it into the model that we have today. So we're going to have elected officials. Let's actually get an elected official in office. And then rather than them vote, we'll just have the constituents tell them how to vote. How is this received or how did the other political parties react to it? Do they just laugh it off? Are they scared of it? What's their reaction? Well, engaging in politics in a country like Argentina, it's not for everyone. It's very tough. At the beginning, it was one of the most powerful experiences in my life because it was my first time doing activism when you are you know

work believing you know work hard for an idea that you believe it's really not for the money it's really for some change that you want to see in society and you meet a lot of idealists like yourself especially young people that are willing to to push this change so it was a very incredible experience just to run for the election do the campaign we literally built a you know a 10 feet tall Trojan horse that we paraded through the streets of Buenos Aires, we got a stadium of votes, 22,000 votes. That's insane, counting the votes. But then there's a dark side of politics. And that dark side, it's also very tough. We found ourselves infiltrated in party meetings by Secret Service agents that wanted to sabotage these meetings to identify party leadership and

to ask the party leadership to pay a bribe to a federal judge in order to run for the next election. And you start seeing these things that, you know, there are rumors, there's gossip. And suddenly you find yourself in a situation of being asked to bribe a federal judge, you know, and you start being disgusted by the system that you are trying to change. And you face this point where, you know, if you really want to move forward, you start to have to play under the rules of this very corrupt system. So I started wondering, sometimes you believe you can change the system from within,

but these systems have been in power, and their legacy is so powerful that it's much more likely that you will end up being changed by the system first. So what was a lucky thing for me on a personal level, and also from a professional perspective, was that Y Combinator noticed what we were doing back in Buenos Aires. They thought that we were really trying to change or think the problem of politics from a completely different angle.

So they invited us to go to YC, do the YC program. This is four years ago. And there we started focusing strictly on the technology. And we shifted from a view of trying to change the system from within to a more Silicon Valley-esque review of build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. And that's where I think blockchain networks

start making a lot of sense. And so let's talk about first the technology, then we can talk about the YC experience. It's not like people are going to use paper to say, hey, representative, I want you to vote X or Y way in the upcoming vote on a specific bill, for example. How does the tech work that actually would empower the candidate with the information necessary to know which direction to vote on certain issues? So our first approach, and looking back, this was a naive approach because the deeper you go into the problem of voting on a digital environment, the harder it gets. You'll find more and more challenges. But our initial approach was to be open source. Let's do an open source software, make it free, allow anyone to audit the code.

And this software allowed us to make our first trial runs. We saw very quickly this software being forked and implemented in other contexts. I remember the first day we saw this software being used in Tunisia by an NGO to debate each article of the Tunisian constitution, and they translated the whole software to Arabic, and suddenly finding this open source creation being used elsewhere in Arabic, and for an important process like the new constitution after the Arab Spring of Tunisia, which is the only country of that process that ended up being democratic, it was an incredible statement of the power of technology today. and especially how new generations look at technology. In Argentina, we actually never got the candidate elected, but we did see some candidates that were willing to use the software for crucial decisions. Oh, interesting. So not only did somebody have to be a candidate of your party to use the software,

there's actually candidates from other parties who said, you know what, I don't want to use this for every single issue, But when there are really big decisions that need to be made on issues that my constituents really care about, I would like to almost be able to poll them, right, and get their feedback and then go vote. I think the most, you know, that's how a political idea wins. It's not, I don't believe so much in our own success on an individual level, but really about spreading this new way of looking at politics and thinking about politics. And in 2017, a congressman of Argentina, we were having the most important bill, I think, in the last 30 years being debated, which is legislation on abortion, making abortion legal. And this was a congressman from the party that is in power at the national government that decided, I'm going to put my vote open to whatever my constituency tells me how to vote. And they used our software.

They had 14,000 voters. It was a very noisy implementation because obviously there's a lot of interest and we were civil attack. We had all kinds of infiltrations. But this candidate decided it was a critical vote in a parliament of 300 members or something like that, 250. And this was one vote that was being subject to the will of the people through the use of software. and on the most crucial law for Argentina. And, you know, those are the little home runs that you can achieve in a big machinery like a political system.

And so as you're thinking through this, it feels to me, and I'm just thinking out loud here, there's technology that would empower the ability to poll the audience, right, or kind of the constituent base. There's technology that's around security, right, and preventing the tampering with any of this. And then the third is there's probably some kind of feedback loop, right, of the candidate being able to say back to the constituents,

I heard you, I listened to you, and this is what I did, right? Am I missing anything in there? No, that's pretty much the process we thought out. When it comes to, you know, when it comes to doing a democracy, if you do a server-based model, let's say a traditional web application, we found attacks like and we have actually coming from democracy earth we have implemented every version of democracy that you can imagine we have done direct democracy liquid democracy uh ranked choice participatory budgeting quadratic voting and we have done implementations with

political parties senates congresses blockchain based networks uh so all kinds of environments all kinds of different democratic models in every single – when you do democracy, you really – for a democracy not to be a survey, it needs to be done in a context where there is a real decision at stake. And it needs to be – usually when you reach the part of the process where you are going for a vote, it means that you are in a deep disagreement where the constituency is really struggling to make a decision and a decision needs to be made. So identifying this context is not easy, but we have been able to identify in the last six years, I would say, seven or eight real high stakes contents of organizations that were facing a deep disagreement and needed to make a decision. And one of the decisions that I remember very well was when we did a server-based implementation of a democracy for the party. Actually, this was a decision that the party made in 2017. The party had to decide whether it would allow for the election that year

to make alliances with other parties or not. My position there was that I didn't want to make alliances. So we had a very deep disagreement among the members, the affiliate members of the parties. We went for an election using the server-based model of our software. And the interesting thing to me was that the person that was in charge of the identity registry of controlling the voter rights, who gets to vote, who does not get to vote, had his own bias on this decision. So he started accelerating certain members from getting registered and being able to vote and their family members and delaying certain others for getting access to vote.

So one person, that single point of failure, that person that controls the identity registry, could move the election on his own interest. And that was happening. We were seeing that. And actually, the other side won that decision. We accepted the result, of course, with complaints. But then politics moves on, and we ended up doing a much more interesting alliance on our end. But those things, you know, help us understand what are the crucial challenges of doing a democracy that can be deployed anywhere there is Internet access and that can be censorship resistant and this kind of tampering and prevent this kind of tampering. So this is where we really believe in the nature of working with decentralized networks that are starting to put these checks on preventing these kinds of attacks by decentralizing the authority and replacing the authority component with a consensus mechanism.

OK, so there's a whole lot here to discuss in terms of, you know, look, whether it's the United States or other countries around the world, there's tons of issues around manipulation of voting, the kind of what I'll call the propaganda machines, right? Just how do you actually educate people so that they have the information to vote and the security and the kind of the sanctuary of the vote itself, right? What I mean by that is the fact that if you have one vote and you vote once in a direction, that vote counts in the direction that you want it to count. And then therefore no one is manipulating the vote, right? How – it sounds like what you're talking about is using algorithms and machines and technology to start removing humans out of this process and really starting to try to drive more confidence and trust into a system where – today I don't think a lot of people have confidence or trust, right? I think a lot of people actually look at it and they say, you know what? eh, a lot of this stuff actually seems pretty crazy to me, and it seems like there's probably manipulation going on, etc. How do you drive the trust? How do you actually get people to

look at a screen or look at a piece of technology and say, I trust that machine or algorithm over those humans? Well, I think when you think about political systems or political economies and voting specifically, there are these elements of the integrity of the vote, making sure that What you vote is what is being tallied and guaranteeing that integrity. Then there's the verification of the vote, being able to actually verify the integrity. And then there's the elements of preventing coercion. You know, if you can verify your vote, someone can ask you about that verification. So your verification has to somehow disappear after a first try.

So there are different elements. And sometimes these elements go in conflict with each other. So it goes into the wider realm of the problem of governance, how we allow for communities to make decisions and trust the systems that these decisions are being made. In the case of national elections, I think that there's fundamentally a big gap, which is a generational gap, which is digital access

and understanding how digital machines work. Our generation, the millennials and those of us that grew up with the internet have more trust for machines. The older generation do not trust machines as much, and they did not grow up in that world. So for national elections, I think the use of paper ballots is obviously very important. I would say that the ideal solution in national elections is combining paper with electronic means so one can check on the other.

But yeah, trust matters a lot in these kinds of systems. That's why today, coming from Democracy Earth, We're pretty much focused on building governance solutions for decentralized networks where there's already an educated constituency that has real economic interests on how these networks perform or how these communities evolve in their decision making. We do obviously sometimes work with governments and universities or NGOs or political parties. When we see relevant context, what we have to identify is moments of deep disagreements. But yeah, I think we're still a long way to see this implemented by governments. Although our philosophy is really what happens after the nation state. You know, the Internet is an idea that is really eroding borders.

We have been living in a world that has globalized finance, but has not yet globalized politics. And we're facing global challenges more and more. So we are also trying to push this idea of what would it take to do a democracy that is for Earth, not just for a country. Yes. So there's two things here. One is when I worked at Facebook, we actually created a thing that went in the news feed for voter registration. basically around voter registration dates. You would see this and we didn't care how you voted, right? Republican, Democrat, some other party. We just want as many people as possible to be registered. And I think that your idea about combining paper ballots with technological

means or products, that is part of it, right? It's getting more people to vote, right? We should have as close to 100% participation as people want to, right? I always joke and say that not voting is a vote, right? They're deciding to sit this one out and that's okay, right? That's part of a democracy. Apathy is a big problem, especially in developed nations, actually. Absolutely. So I think that that is a whole piece of it and the combination of, you know, technology and less technological means makes a lot of sense there. But one thing that you brought up is this idea of the nation state, right? And I think that we saw, you know, in the United States in the last election, kind of globalist viewpoints versus nationalistic viewpoints, and just a real big

abrasiveness between the two of them, right? You know, I always joke and say that if you've seen something like Ready Player One or some of this stuff, like when you open up your phone or your computer, you're entering a portal, right? You physically are staying in the physical analog world, but you go into this electronic or digital world and it is a completely different world, right? It's 4 billion plus people. There are no borders. Machines and algorithms run a lot of it. Automation is kind of the default in many cases. I agree with you that the political system in the physical world doesn't line up with that digital world, right? Now, my question to you is, I'm assuming your answer or your solution to the problem is not let's go full anarchy,

get rid of all the governments, and we're just going to end up with like the perfect solution in the digital world, right? How do we evolve, right? And kind of, rather than be super disruptive, how do we go from where we are today with a very nationalistic view around politics to something that looks more global, right? Doesn't even have to necessarily be global,

but how do we get closer to that view? I think that the right word is what you said, evolve. Revolutions didn't work very well in the 20th century. People keep trying. In the 18th century, probably they did work very well. In the 20th, not so much. We'll see in the 21st. But we need to evolve.

I think it's important to have a respect for the legacy institutions that we have inherited that costed blood, tears, and I know the saying in Spanish, but costed a lot of pain. Blood, sweat, and tears. Blood, sweat, and tears. Sangre, sudor, y lagrimas. But we need to respect that history, that legacy. The nation state is really a modern idea that has 400 years. It emerged after 30 years of war in Europe, where the Peace of Westphalia led to this principle where the kingdom said, no domestic intervention. I will not mess with your domestic affairs, you won't mess with mine.

And that scaled the peace through Europe and then through the rest of the world through this concept of my domestic affairs, I deal with them, you deal with yours. In the 2016 election, which is one of the most important ones ever in history, I think, we have seen for the first time this huge shadow of suspicion about the tampering of a foreign power in the most powerful election in the world. So this shadow of doubt cast over the American process in an electoral decision like the presidential race of 2016, where did Russia interfere with the American election through the use of fake news in Facebook, yes or no? It is breaking that very concept of domestic, non-domestic intervention. Is the nation state still in place when Russia or any other foreign power can tamper with the elections of the most powerful nation in the world? Which I come from Argentina. I know how the U.S. mess with elections of other countries. But if not even the U.S. is immune to that anymore, then it means that we are entering a new political reality, a new political reality where you can have this rhetoric about building walls as much as you want.

But, you know, the real windows and the new architecture of information does not care about those walls. Yeah. So I want to talk about this because it's a very sensitive topic. Right. But I think it's an important topic. The idea of meddling in elections. Right. And I think that we saw in the last election, the United States, there was a whole bunch of and still is ongoing concerns about and conversation around the idea that Russia or other foreign governments could have meddled in our elections. Right. Now, as far as I know, the accusations of the people who believe that this happened is not that they hacked into the electoral system, that they changed votes or anything like that, but it's more of they used different marketing or propaganda, which is the same thing, right? It just depends on who's doing it. They used different means to influence the way that people voted, right? And so the reason why this is important is let's just stick with the U.S. being on the receiving end of a potential meddling from a foreign government. Right. Talk to me about good, bad. Should we care? Should we not care? Do we think it happened? Just just walk me through this. I think the Russians, let's let's it's a big if. Right.

But hacking the voters, not the machines, is a much smarter approach. And it's the approach of propaganda. There are two ways of subverting a democracy. One is controlling the identity registry, like I talked before. The other one is through gossip, through fake information, false news. So, and just so we're really clear here, you're saying there's two ways to, quote, unquote, attack an election, right, or to influence an election. One is you can go into the technology, right, whether it's you change paper ballot votes, you actually get into the registry and change people's votes in the computer. Or what you're saying is a second option, which is you can basically use psychological means to change the way people think, inform them of things, whether it's true or not, get them to actually make a different decision than they otherwise would have. That would be effectively an attack if you are trying to persuade people with false information.

Okay. So, obviously, people can be persuaded. I can change my opinion about the candidates. But if I'm being lied, if I'm being told lies, and that is the basis of my change in persuasion, then there's definitely a propaganda attack. And these attacks are extremely common in every democracy. The higher the stakes, this is something that we know also, the higher the stakes of the decision being made in a democratic context, the system will be attacked. Attacks are to be expected. because the interests are so high.

Meddling with the ballot probably usually leaves a trail that you can detect those attacks. Even in electronic machines, it's very hard to hide those type of attacks. But if you are doing it through propaganda, then you can really disappear. You are changing the voters' perception. Yep. So this is why one of the challenges is not so much about the ability to scale participation. It's about the ability to scale the understanding of what is being voted.

And this is why I think when we think about institutions using blockchains, blockchains can be very helpful for those means. Because at the end of the day, when we think about blockchains, they're really entities that store promises. And we can have direct auditability, direct, you know, we can scrutinize what these decisions or these transactions in a permissionless way. When I want to understand what's happening within a bank or within my own organization in a traditional context, you require the permission from the authority to see how, or in an election, you require, you have to be a party authority to be counting the votes. And only the party authorities are the ones that are doing the counting and computing and tallying the votes. And if one of those party authorities is actually working for the other party, then you really are not that sure about what's going on. So this idea of empowering the individual or empowering the users to have this ability to directly see the tally or directly see how the votes are being processed without any requirement for authority, that's a very promising property of how these networks work out for governance. um so one thing that i want to clarify right is i think a lot about the vernacular we use

drives the way that we react to things that happen right and so uh the comparison between marketing and propaganda right i always think of it as uh let's take two u.s candidates uh there's a set of facts right these are things that are very objective you've two people look at them they have to agree this is a fact. The way that they use those facts to tell a story changes drastically, right? And so usually what happens is one side says, this is correct. My opponent is incorrect, right? Or is lying or, you know, there's all kinds of different ends of the spectrum of just they're wrong. We look at that, I think, usually as marketing. Both sides are marketing to a constituent base and they're trying to get them to agree they'll be the best

representative they want them to vote you know all this kind of stuff so that marketing is okay when an outside force does it when it's something that we don't want to happen we call it propaganda it's actually still marketing yeah but it's still trying to influence the psychological uh state and the decision making of an individual now there is a very gray area or blurred line between the use of facts and misinformation right because literally you can take the same set of information and ask three separate people, three separate parties, and some of them will say they're facts and some of them will say it's misinformation, right? So you kind of have to accept that you will not reach 100% consensus on what is fact and what is misinformation.

But I do think that it's really interesting that when, again, in the US election, you see this idea of, oh, they meddled in our election. Oh, there's propaganda. Oh, there's all this stuff. It's exactly what the candidates are doing, right? The candidates are actually taking very similar sets of information, then they're manipulating it in ways to try to have psychological impact, right? And so where's the line? I think, you know, trying to put myself in the shoes of Vladimir Putin for a little while, the goal is to just generate within the American population doubt over the legitimacy of its own political system. And this is the problem that we're facing in this new reality we're living in today, where it's a war of information. And in this

context of, you know, espionage and misinformation and manipulation, as we become ourselves a society that is more and more mediated by digital consumption of information, we need to really understand and educate ourselves as voters to check the facts, check the sources. And if the facts and the sources are in an accessible way through the use of a distributed ledger anyone can audit transparently, we have better chances to understand what's actually going on than if we rely on the promise of authority. And that's why I'm, you know, extremely skeptical of traditional politics. I think traditional politics is a very corrupted game across the whole world. It's a very nasty environment and already, you know, it's very hard to know who to believe in that context.

And what I like, what I'm being, you know, I think that one of the biggest transformations of this century, the narrative of this century, is the transformation of the internet. You know, the first 25 years of the internet, the internet changed the cultural landscape. It made us all broadcasters. It made us all have a voice. The next couple of decades of the internet

is the internet going for the institutional layer of the world. And this institutional layer is, thanks to technologies like blockchain, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and all of these new networks, is a whole new parallel reality, a whole new parallel political environment to established political institutions. So the experiments that we're seeing in governance happening across all of these networks

today are very niche and very small, but in some cases with a lot of capital at stake, but are very real. And I look, for example, at a project like MakerDAO, and it's really thinking about the problem of how to allow society to decide about the interest rate of a banking institution. I come from Argentina. We all complain about the inflation rate. We all complain about the central bank and its policies.

What if everyone could actually vote on the rate of the central bank in Argentina? This experiment of Maker Law becomes very relevant for a country like mine. So these are the things that keep me hopeful. I think that technology, at the end of the day, we should not even look at it from a political or economical point of view. We should look at it even from a biological point of view. It is changing us as a collective species. And, you

know, at the end of the day, politics is understanding how we adapt to these changes. All right. I want to flip it on its head now. So that was, we just discussed the idea that somebody could have meddled in the U.S. elections. U.S. can't throw rocks in a glass house, though. Yeah. In the sense that, uh, I was in the military. Um, there's literally units in the military, the psychological operations team, right? Psy ops. Uh, there is no secret that the U S has specific views on political elections abroad in other countries. Uh, there is no secret that they back certain candidates that there's capital or resources committed, uh, whether directly or indirectly in seeing certain outcomes occur. How how does that look from a non-American's

view? Right. What I mean by that is it's easy for Americans to sit and say, woe is me. Right. Oh, I can't believe somebody meddled in our election. There's pretty much not a major country elsewhere in the world that doesn't think the U.S. is meddling in their election. Right. To some degree. And again, that's not to say necessarily that's a bad thing. Right. If everyone is doing it, then it's almost just this is the cost of politics on a global scale. Right. You know that if you're a major country, everyone, every other country is going to try to meddle in your election. Right. It's the nature of power. Yeah. And so it's not to say that it's unethical. Right. Or it is incorrect to do. But it is probably, I think, where the questions of ethics come in is if you're doing it and denying you're doing it. Right. Or if you're doing it and there's misinformation involved. Right. Those types of things. So I don't want to go down the path of is this ethical? Is it not? I want to just understand, like from the viewpoint of somebody who's not from North America, what is the response to that?

Right. Is it just an expected thing that the U.S. is going to meddle in every election internationally? It is expected. You know, in the 20th century, it was even worse. it was in the installment of dictatorships, especially in Latin America, in Africa, dictatorships that were very violent. In my country, there were 30,000 disappeared individuals because of the last dictatorship we had in the 70s, and it was a dictatorship by the US. Now, I will say something as a disclaimer. I love this country. This country has given me so many opportunities. I'm an immigrant in the United States, and we see a lot of things in the news. My whole life, since I was 18 and I started my career, America has given

me an opportunity to do something. So it's an extraordinary country by all means, even to immigrants like myself. That said, in Argentina and in Latin America, politics is pretty much divided into big bands. I would say the establishment that works for the interests of the United States and the anti-establishment, which would be aligned to Cuba or Venezuela or China, maybe Russia, probably, which are trying to resist the advancement of the United States. And this is, you know, all of Latin America is crossed by this division. Either you are pro-American or anti-imperialist.

And it's these things, you know, it's the big influence that is just assuming the reality that we have this very huge, powerful sphere of influence of America across all of our countries. And we need to understand how we position ourselves with that. And in Argentina, you will find a lot of people, because of this legacy of dictatorships that we have in the 20th century, there's a very strong anti-American feeling among the population. And it is really sad, because the alternatives, I would say that communism, like the one we see in Cuba or in Venezuela, are far worse. These are narco dictatorships that are funded actually by the cocaine money that gets consumed in the U.S. So it's a very complex problem that keeps the region divided. And at the end of the day, that's to the benefit of the influence of America. It's really interesting to me.

My girlfriend is from Bulgaria, right? And so I've I've gotten to see a side of the immigrant viewpoint and story that I've just being a white American dude, you just don't see. Right. And I do think that a couple of things stand out to me. Right. One is I have never met an immigrant who is not thankful for the opportunity that the United States, right. The ability to pursue the American dream. Right. I think that the that dream is alive and well in people around the world, understanding that under a democratic regime and a capitalist focused society, you can go there. And regardless of where you're from, what language you speak or how you get there, you got a shot. Yeah. Right. And I think that that is very powerful.

Just that one idea, too, is I actually think many immigrants believe more in the ideals and the ethos of America than many Americans. Yeah. Right. Because it's almost like they've seen what it's like to not have that stuff. Right. And so that's always caught me off guard. I think that actually people who are not from America could believe more in America than Americans themselves. Right. And then the third thing and probably the thing that is most interesting to me from just a mental exercise. Right. Is this idea that if you were to go ask, especially older people who did not immigrate to the U.S., maybe they came at some point left or they just never came, and you said to them, talk to me about a time that things were great. A lot of times it's under communism or it's under socialism, right? And they will actually talk about people like Gaddafi or so-and-so who had these socialist or communist-type regimes, and they will talk about them with nostalgia. They all talk about, oh, the good times, right? And it's because actually for them as an individual person, those were better times, right?

Is when they had everything provided for them or communism and socialism, et cetera. And so it's hard to, I think, break people who their personal experience was positive under a certain type of governance away from believing that that governance is good, right? If you had a lot of money under communism or socialism, you'd think that's good. You're like, wow, I was rich then. The 20th century has the resistance to the capitalist, liberal, democratic agenda that came from the US. Every country had their own resistance to that, embodied by some kind of demagogue, dictator. I don't want to use that word exactly. In Argentina, we had Juan Domingo Perón. All of the 20th century in Argentina is divided by those who support

Perón and those who are against Perón. Undeniably, he was a very powerful figure that represented the national ethos against the international influence and this is the pattern everywhere spain had franco um yeah i don't want to go to the germans but they had the worst one of all which is adolf hitler but even if you go today to china china i find it very interesting china is the one example that is one of the few countries where i actually feel a foreigner Because if I go to Europe or I go anywhere in Latin America, the influence of America is still there. Everyone watches The Simpsons everywhere.

But if you go to China, you are really in a different country. And there's the country that was led by one of these figures, Mao, that installed communism. And a terrible dictator, Fa Mainz. A lot of issues happened during his government. But I'm not here to judge Chinese history. But it is today in modern day world, There are really three big nations, I would say, the United States, Russia, and China.

Russia and the States compete militarily. China and the U.S. compete on the commercial side of things. And both China and Russia are led by very strong leadership and have very different views to the concept of centralization and authority. uh and um you know it's you know china has become the most capitalistic country out there with the best capitalist managers uh with incredible successes uh and they were able to break out from ideology and be extremely pragmatic and become a very successful nation the highest growth nation of the last three decades um and um you know it's it is it's you know i i it's really strange to understand. These national feelings are a very, very strange thing because

we cannot explain them, but they are very real. Clausewitz, this was a mercenary general that fought for the royalists against the French Revolution. In his papers, he wrote, I cannot deal with the French. I'm a mercenary. I've been hired to fight against the revolutionaries, but I cannot beat them because they are willing to die and give their life in their battlefield for this greater cause of the French nation. So nationality is a powerful feeling. It's a very, I feel it all the time in the World Cup. I'm Argentine, I love football, I love watching the games.

And when Argentina plays the World Cup, reason goes away and I'm like an insane fan of Leo Messi and all of that. And I think that those are very real elements to how we connect with our nation. It's part of our identity, it's part of who we are and it's a beautiful part of who we are, But it shouldn't be this irrational part shouldn't just take control of everything. And we should start as a global society to understand what's happening on the other side.

For me, being able to visit China and see from the inside and learn from their culture and just break some of the prejudice that I might get from propaganda in America, and probably in the Chinese is the same way the other way around. we need to start understanding each other more because this polarization and endogamy that happens where we all have our echo chambers and we keep reinforcing our own ideas about how the world should be and we don't listen to the other side, that's definitely not going to lead to anywhere nice. And we have to learn from history. The 20th century, early 20th century was a moment of incredible technological progress that led to Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin. So there's nothing

you know, preventing from that happening again. So luckily for us, we have much wider communication through information. We can scale to the whole world and we need to understand how we can connect, you know, our global society more and more. It is, it's fascinating to me how much travel can break down the psychological predispositions we have, right? You know, I've been very fortunate in my life, uh, to travel to a lot of different areas, right? So it's not just the frequency of travel, right? Being able to travel a lot is good, but also having the diversity of experiences, right? So being able to go to India, to Nigeria, to South America, to Central America, right. To go to all these different places around the world. Um, and again,

just see how people live, see how they think, how do they view each other, right? One of the most, you know, one of the most fascinating things to me is you get in a, uh, in a cab, right. Or you're sitting at a hotel and you ask the locals, you say, Hey, what do you think about the United States? What do you think about this other country? What do you think about that leader? Right. And you start to see that, um, although it's anecdotal, right. And it is not a full picture of what everyone in that country believes you start to become less rigid in your thinking, right. It's not so binary, you know, India is good or India is bad, right. China is good. China is bad. And you start to realize there's a whole bunch of different people, right. There's a billion people

in each one of those countries and some of them you'll agree with some of them you won't some of them will like you some of them will hate you right yeah and there's everyone in between and so to me it is um you know this idea of empathy like global empathy especially in politics um we actually need to drive more collisions between people right and i think technology now today actually allows us to do that in very interesting ways right you can message people you can talk to them via video um you can see them you know presenting doing all this stuff And I just think all the time about how do we create more of those collisions? Because I think that that empathy drives a more rational and intelligent conversation.

We need to start talking more about bridges and less about walls. We, you know, in democracy in the old days or in the past centuries is really a serial democracy in the sense that you are bounded to a geographical region. and you are suffering the ideology of one party and then the alternation of the ideology to the other party and then you just go through one ideology to the next one through the limits of having democracy limited to a geographical area. In the digital space, we can choose what ideology we want to live in. Let's say you are a believer in Austrian economics,

then you will go on full-on Bitcoin because the protocol of how Bitcoin behaves seems to be very much compatible with that ideology. If you are much more for radical experiments on different societary designs, maybe you want to try something like Ethereum that is having all these broad experiments on governance and decentralized finance. So the interesting thing about the digital spectrum is that you can emancipate yourself. I'm an Argentine guy that completely decided to opt out from Argentine politics and Argentine economics in my life and embrace the use of protocols. And even you can live with your own contradictions. There are aspects of mine that I like about Bitcoin and there are aspects of mine that I actually believe in the two protocols, in Bitcoin and Ethereum. And it's a democracy in parallel.

You know, it's not a serial experiment, but it's a parallelization of the different ideological possibilities that we see in the world. And I think that's kind of the new reality that the Internet is allowing on how we engage ourselves with institutions. If you want to put your money where your mouth is, you can now literally do that with the emergence of these new protocols. At the same time, we're seeing a new kind of, quote unquote, nationalism emerging from these protocols. People are bounding their nationalist feelings to the protocol itself. There's maximalism. Bitcoin maximalism is, you know, Ethereum maximalism. And so we need to understand how these new boundaries that are emerging, what do these boundaries mean?

The idea of nationality or the idea of nations is actually a consequence of an information technology, the printed press. When the printed press appeared, printing books became really cheap, so anyone could start printing books in their vernacular languages instead of Latin, which was the language of power. So Spanish books appeared, French books appeared, English books appeared, and this led to the nations that we know today. This imagined communities that got tied together by an information technology and sharing this common language. Now with protocols, we are seeing societies or communities being bounded together, not by geographical or common language, but by ideology. So we have these new boundaries that we're exploring on the Internet. And sometimes it's clashing. I troll all the time on Twitter sometimes, and you see people from one community throwing propaganda against the people of other communities, and we learn from these exchanges.

But I think we need to start being less dualistic in our thinking, less binary, and embrace the fact that we are living contradictions and we can actually live in the paradox of supporting one asset and another asset in the crypto world. Why are you working on all this? So, the little thing that, the voice that reminds me why I got into all of this trouble in the first place when things become hard is remembering that, you know, the bottom line for me is let's build systems of governance that are less corruptible. I saw corruption in my country. I saw it firsthand. I saw how it leads to violence, how it leads to my country never being able to succeed in the last century, consistently failing in a spiral of decadence. And it really boils down to systems of governance that allow corrupt behavior. So how we can prevent corrupt behavior? Well, information technology has this tremendous potential of setting very clear rules, very clear boundaries and, you know, improving the quality of the users as we have to learn about how these information technologies operate. So in the back of my mind is let's build something that can be far less corruptible to what we have in place and then try to, you know, make this take power. Absolutely. What's your hope, right?

Kind of what, you know, where's the finish line, if you will, or what is the kind of when we reach X point, you will say we accomplished our goal. Well, democracy is always a work in progress. It's not a complete idea. If it were a complete idea, it would be a totalitarian ideology like all the other ones. Democracy is the one exception. So I don't think that, you know, I will see an end goal or, you know, we reflect back and we have some achievements that are very impressive to us, like having a congressman using our software for a critical decision or, you know, seeing systems of decision making. We recently did the, we implemented quadratic voting in the state of Colorado, and that's a huge achievement because it's a very novel idea on how to make votes, tally it in a more legitimate way.

So, you know, I'm very, I feel satisfied when we're able to have these breakthroughs, but we know that this is, you know, we're just trying to make a contribution on understanding what democracy means in the 21st century, in the information age, and just try to ship some softwares, ship some political ideas, engage a community that wants to support these ideas out there and hopefully keep this thing going for generations to come because I think the world needs it. The world needs to be more connected. The world needs to be less, you know,

we're on a mission to make a more peaceful and a much more sustainable world in the long run. Absolutely. Explain quadratic voting real quick, and then we'll get into the rapid-fire questions. So quadratic voting is an idea by this researcher from Microsoft, Glenn Weil. He's the founder of the radical exchange movement, close collaborator of Vitalik and vice versa, which is a very interesting idea where you have, let's say, every voter gets 100 tokens, and you can vote on any decision and allocate as many votes as you want on that decision.

But the more votes you put on a given decision, it will cost you an exponentially increasing amount of those tokens. So if you put three votes on a decision, it will cost you nine tokens. And this increasing exponential cost means that at the end of the day, the winning option will be the option that has more votes or more preference from the community, but also the most diverse amount of voters. You will have more legitimacy in the option winning. So it allows for more consensus on the decision-making process. And the state of Colorado, the lower house of the state of Colorado,

implemented this with 41 legislators deciding over 107 bills for a budget of $150 million. And they did a quadratic vote. And, you know, the interesting thing is that from the 107 bills, only five did not get votes. And the winning one was equal pay for equal work. And it was an incredible precedent to set in American politics. Yeah, it's pretty cool how you can basically try to find better forms of consensus and governance. First Past the Post, which is the traditional 51% voting we have today, is actually an idea from Condorcet from the late 18th century.

We can do way better now with the technology we have. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. All right, rapid fire questions. I'm going to skip over the crypto ones and go to the more intellectually stimulating ones. What's the most important book you've ever read? Holy shit. Coming out, because I know you read a lot, so I'm coming at you real hard. I will tell you the first one that comes to mind.

That is Gedel Escherbach. This is a book from the late 70s by Douglas Hofstadter, a Stanford professor now. It's a book on artificial intelligence and recursivity and trying to understand what consciousness is through the lens of digital AI. And it's from the late 70s, and it's like the Bible of every technologist. Is it in English? It's in English. Godel was a mathematician that proved the inconsistency of logic by using logic against itself. Bach, the musician from the 16th century

that had procedural music, that music that composed itself based on the previous part of the composition. And Escher, the famous artist that drew these hands, that drew itself. So this idea of recursivity and thinking about recursivity that leads to the emergence of the self.

Great book. Godel, Escher, Bach. I love it. I love it. We've got to talk about aliens. Believer, not believer. I think we need to redefine the conceptualization of what an alien means. I would argue... This is why I know that you're smart,

is because most people just jump to answering the question. But the idea that what are we talking about around aliens first, then we can decide... You know where the computers come from? Computers... There's a biographer of Alan Turing, the father of computation. This book is called Turing's Cathedral. And when you are in page 300, the biographer goes crazy and says this theory that I really like, that when they were building the first computers, they were really designing them to understand the first information we were getting from the first electromagnetic telescopes that were looking farthest in space for the first time in civilization.

So computers were built by this information that came from the most remote areas of the universe. so he argues you know in every creation myth things either come from heaven or emerge from earth in the computer revolution software came from heaven hardware came from earth and the idea if you're an alien intelligence and you have to travel through space the most efficient way of traveling through space is in the form of information and light is a carrier of information We are living in an information based universe. So if there's if we make ever make contact first, we probably will be making contact through receiving knowledge in the shape of information about how to create things that interpret that information. So maybe computers came from outer space. Maybe, you know, Satoshi is an alien. I think that might be the best answer we've ever had.

I've been thinking all this for a long time. Yeah. All right. So as a tangential piece of this, the ocean, we know much less about the ocean than we do. Oh, yeah. Moon, Mars, et cetera. Would you rather travel to the depths of the ocean, the absolute lowest point in the ocean or go to space? I'm a I'm a space nerd. I really want to go to Alpha Centauri or to the black hole we saw last week and see what's going on there. What is up with. So there's two pictures I've seen right now. Everyone knows I talk about the alien stuff. I send me all this weird space stuff on Twitter. The picture of the black hole, pretty wild. Like, you almost don't even know what you're really looking at, right?

It's just like, that's nuts. And then also, did you see the picture of the two galaxies colliding? Yeah, yeah. Like, I don't even know what that means, right? And then the fact that they think that we're going to collide with another galaxy. You know, what does that do to humans? I'm actually reading to my daughter stuff about space. And I read her about this stuff.

And it's really interesting. You know, when people study galaxies, every possible shape of how galaxies can look, there's some galaxy out there that looks like that. And then we can build a picture by combining these stories. So really, when we're looking at the universe, we're looking at ourselves. I think that it's really a question of understanding our consciousness when we talk about the universe. I always joke and say, when you think about space, when you think about the ocean, we're not that important. Right? Like, we're smart, and we've figured some stuff out, but in the grand scheme of things, over, you know, thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, we don't matter.

Yeah, yeah. The more I think of it, the smaller I feel. Absolutely. All right. I usually wrap up letting you ask me one question. Any question you have? Oh, so many questions. So many questions.

You only get one. Well, I would ask you, what do you think is going to be the future of politics in the world of crypto? I'm going to cheat and I'm going to answer in a little bit different way, but I'm going to talk about two key things. So one is I constantly think about a single phrase, which is he who controls the meme controls the message. i really think that we're starting you know we saw in the last election in the u.s i think that we're seeing this uh in crypto they were seen in traditional politics i think we see it uh even in the corporate world right if you look at like what things what elon musk is doing um it's this idea that uh marketing propaganda you know whatever you want to call it that the uh distribution of

information right has always come down to those who can uh articulate it clearly concisely and can actually get virality in what they're talking about right so if you think of you know 100 years ago it was who could get the news in the newspaper and everyone talk about it right it was virality but it was word of mouth now with technology on a global basis who can get a message out there that is memorable that is powerful that is uh clearly articulated and can get the virality right um and so i think that's one it's just he who controls the meme controls the message now tangentially related to that is the algorithms are actually meddling more than foreign governments right and what i mean by that is the things that you see on twitter.com are actually driven by an algorithm

right now i don't believe that anyone at twitter or facebook or google is uh intentionally going rogue and not putting, you know, left or right leaning folks content into your feed or they're trying to insert other types of content. Right. I actually think what happens having worked at Facebook is there are decisions that are made and the full ramifications of the decision are not understood. Right. So we're going to try to get people to spend more time on Facebook. Right. And so here we're going to tweak the algorithm. Oh, that happens to lead to more Republican content being shown right it wasn't chosen because of the relevant content shows because more time on facebook right so there's that type of stuff that happens but i do think this idea that the

algorithms actually have much more to do with the information you consume than any foreign government right uh again it's really easy to kind of dismiss oh twitter you know the algorithm uh on the feed or facebook or whatever that's not as big and scary of an opponent as the russian government that is trying to screw us all. Right. Um, and so, you know, we probably will never know the full extent of this stuff. Um, we probably will never get all the information. Um, but this idea that, you know, he who controls the mean controls the message really important for politics. That's a great insight, great insight. And then the algorithms actually can help somebody control the meme and not. Right. And so I really do think that, um, you know, it, it all leads to this kind

of rise of influence, right? And I think that previously politicians have thought of influence in like, I'm going to go to this, I'm going to go to Iowa, right? And I'm going to go do my stump speech and, you know, get everyone in an airport hangar and, you know, yada, yada, yada. That's great. Well, look at what Andrew Yang just did, right? I'm not necessarily like a huge political guy. I actually couldn't even tell you what Andrew Yang thinks about 99% of different topics, whatever he's just the one who i i've seen a couple of things that are interesting to me i don't even necessarily agree but one thing i saw him do recently um that just blew my mind because it was so simple yet i hadn't seen anyone think about it he was basically showing an example of

him as a hologram and say i'm going to actually be a candidate that's in multiple places at once i'm going to use the hologram to campaign at five or six different places all at once well that's just using technology to be smarter and more efficient than other people and it's so simple of an idea yeah yeah but they're that that type of innovation has not happened in politics right and so it's it's the idea of you can robocall every you know constituent till you're dead or could you actually humanize a very similar type of thing where you're getting the message out to these people you're just using a different piece of technology I think that we haven't really seen true innovation in political campaigns. You know, you could argue that AOC or Trump in the U.S. are using social media in a very different way and really helping that to kind of make their messages pervasive.

But I do think that that to me is like the world is changing. Politics are changing. The way we govern is changing, right? I would love to see a candidate get into frankly any office in the United States where they can't make decisions without first polling their constituents. I mean that idea is powerful. It will happen. It will happen. All we know is that things will only get weirder.

Yeah, yeah. That's absolutely true. Soon we'll be able to read the minds of the politicians, right? or they'll be able to read ours. Who knows? All right, listen, this has been fantastic. I could sit here and talk to you for hours all day long. I think the work that you're doing

is incredibly important and I'm cheering for you. So best of luck. And we'll have to do this again in the future. Thanks for having me. It was really a pleasure. Absolutely. Hey everyone, Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off The Chain

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