The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin’s New Economy | Featuring Don Tapscott, Blockchain Research Institute

Episode Date: May 25, 2021

More than 4 years ago, Don Tapscott gave a groundbreaking talk on how blockchain is changing money and business. He believes blockchain is the key in transitioning from the internet of information into a new era — the internet of value. The lessons he shared still ring true today with one of the best analogies suggesting that Bitcoin is the first application of the internet of value as email was the first app in the internet of information. And along this train of thought, Ethereum is akin to what the early web was many years ago, both with incredible future potential. In this episode Don Tapscott explores: Crypto bubble vs Dotcom bubble Cracking the double spend problem The Ethereum flippening Signing a book for Mark Zuckerburg Privacy as the foundation of freedom Blockchain’s radical changes The internet of value Criminals using new technology Bill Maher’s stupid takes Digital conglomerates The technological genie --- This episode is brought to you by Voyager, your new favorite crypto broker. Trade crypto fast and commission-free the easy way. Earn up to 9.5% interest on top coins with no lockups and no limits. Go to https://thewolfofallstreets.link/voyager and download the Voyager app and use code “SCOTT25” to get $25 in free Bitcoin when you create your account. --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworks.co ーーー Join the Wolf Den newsletter: ►►https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen/members

This episode is brought to you by Voyager. Stay tuned for more information about them later in the episode. What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast. Often on my show, I'll have someone who is an expert on a particular project, company, or sector. Today, I have the rare opportunity to speak to one of the world's most profound and lasting voices on technological revolutions and their impact on the world. Known for authoring

more books, frankly, than I can remember, coining popular terms taught in high-level academia, researching cutting-edge technology, and more, Don Tapscott is a living legend. It's my hope today to have him share his thoughts on the bigger picture for the crypto revolution and where it fits into the macro global economic picture. Don Tapscott, it is a pleasure to have you on the show. Well, thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. That was too kind of an introduction. I like to butter you up in advance

so that it'll be a positive conversation. Once again, this is the Wolf of Wall Street's podcast where twice a week I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin finance, trading, art, music, sports, and politics. This podcast is powered by BlockWorks, the fastest growing media company in the digital asset space. You can check them out at blockworks.co and find everything Scott Melker at thewolfofallstreets.io. Now to get in today's episode. So we've heard constant comparisons of late of the crypto market to the dot-com bubble. What do you think of that assessment?

Well, part of it is valid and part of it is not. The part that's valid is the analogy with the first era of the internet is a good one. Because for 40 years, and I'm dating myself here, I go back to the 1970s at Canada's Bell Labs, where we were doing research on how multifunction workstations connected to a vast network of network might change the nature of managerial work and business models. And I wrote a couple of books on that in the 1980s that nobody read. My mother bought most of the copies but um but for 40 years

we've had this internet of information and uh you know as i said in my ted talk um that's it's about information if i send you some information you know an email photo whatever i'm actually sending you a copy i keep the original even with a website i retain the original where when it comes to assets things like money or securities or intellectual property the data in our identities are music cultural assets votes and votes and assets having a value that belongs to somebody copying those is not a good idea so you don't want someone copying your vote or your identity and if i send you a thousand dollars it's really important that i don't still have the money right so cryptographers and called this a double spend problem for decades and that's what satoshi did he cracked the double spend problem so for for the the first time ever, people could exchange, transact, manage, store assets peer-to-peer.

And trust is not achieved by a middleman, as it is with the Internet of Information and all other financial transactions. It's achieved by cryptography, collaboration, and some clever code. So to your question, the analogy with the first internet is not terrible because that was the internet of information. Now we're getting an internet of value. And during the early stages of something as big as either of those, there's going to be all kinds of speculation. It's like I used to say, this is like the Wild West, 1995. It's a place of reckless and calamity and chaos. And sure, all the dot-coms got created and they had all kinds of great value

and then they crashed. But there's some interesting stuff about that. First of all, most of the dot-coms, that idea is now back. I remember George Shaheen quit Accenture and got $200 million to invest in buying a big warehouse for the distribution of stuff. It was going to start with, I think think with pets and food and stuff like that.

The timing just wasn't right. Now the company that does that is the most valuable company in the world. So they weren't terrible ideas. They were just ideas whose time had not yet come. So on the other hand, the internet of information, it's very different. Like the whole FAT Protocols idea that you're not just investing in an application like Amazon or pets.com or whatever that goes on the web.

The Internet of Information was in the public domain. Thank you, Vince Cerf. Thank you, Tim Berners-Lee and so on. This Internet of Value is owned by investors. So this is quite an extraordinary opportunity if you think about it. Like what's the Internet of Information worth? Five trillion? Fifty trillion?

It's a big number. The Internet of Value, if that's even a bigger number, is worth a lot. So what we're seeing right now is just the tip of the iceberg. Now, it doesn't mean that there isn't all kinds of crazy stuff that's being created and that people are investing in. But overall, the arc of this thing is to grow and to get bigger. There's a lot of volatility, but the arc is a positive one. Companies are otherwise. So of course there's the price bubble. But if you have thousands of people innovating, you're going to get the Google and the Amazon

and the Facebooks that you talked about, but most companies are going to fail. Isn't that a positive, a sign of this innovation? Yeah, it's not only most companies charging into a new innovation space that fail, it's most companies. Right. I don't know what the exact number is,

but 90% of all new companies fail. And to compare it to Tulips or something like that, it's really vacuous really. And to me, it's sort of missing the point. And as for the volatility, well, people call it a roller coaster. I don't think that's a good analogy. Roller coaster goes up and down, but then it starts back at the bottom or it ends at the bottom. Whereas this thing, it's volatile, but it does have a trajectory and it's not going to go back to where it started. So you spoke about the internet of value.

Can you dig a bit deeper into what that means conceptually and what the trajectory of that is when we reach the full potential of that concept? Well, imagine an operating system for the economy where people can trust each other, do transactions, and manage, communicate, exchange assets peer-to-peer? What does that do for the deep structure and architecture of our economy and for the firm itself? So we have a little bit of time here, so I'll just give you a little economics on the firm.

And when I wrote The Digital Economy in 1995, I was trying to come up with an economic theory to describe where this whole thing, how the Internet was going to change the firm. And I came across this guy, Ronald Coase, who was a Nobel Prize winning economist. And 80 years ago, he wrote a paper where he asked a deceptively simple question. He said, why does the term exist? If Adam Smith is right, and the open market's the best mechanism for allocating goods, resources, materials, information in the economy, then why isn't everybody an independent contractor at every step along the way in production? And he said, the answer is, and he won a Nobel Prize for saying

this, the answer is transaction costs. And he had these different classes of transaction costs. But the idea was that the costs of doing transactions inside the firm were greater than outside. So we bring all this stuff into the firm. The cost of search, trying to find all the right people to do something. Imagine you want to create a widget or something, and you've got to go find all the people to do that. You've got to find the money to do that. You've got to find the knowledge and the information

and that production capabilities and so on be prohibitive. The cost of search, the cost of information. That was another one. You know, the cost of organizing. So if you want to do something in an open market, there's a big organizational challenge. Inside the boundaries of the firm, you have people, you have org charts, you have structures, you have compensation systems, you have business processes. Those costs reduce things quite significantly. And overall, he talked about the cost of creating trust. So along comes the Internet of Information. And by the way, the vertically integrated firm was the foundational firm of the industrial age. Henry Ford had within the boundaries of the firm, a power plant, steel mill, glass factory, a shipping company. He had

mahogany forests in Honduras to get the wood for the dashboard. Why? Because the cost of transactions in an open market were greater than the cost of doing things inside the board. So along comes the internet, and that starts to drop these transaction costs. You get a company like Cisco back in the day, and the mantra then was focus on what you do best and partner to do the rest. That was our little poem. It wasn't exactly Longfellow, but Cisco created a business web or business ecosystem, as we called it back then, where it had its core capabilities and then it would partner. And it could do that because of the internet. Well, now you have an internet of value. Imagine how that completely demolishes these transaction costs and the cost of establishing

trust. So the cost of transactions, the cost of search, we're going to be able to search for assets, the cost of coordination, blockchain radically drops all of that. So you can start to see a more decentralized model of wealth creation starting to appear. And there's already all kinds of evidence of that. So that's the firm. And then when it comes to the economy, it's a very similar thing because right now in the industrial age, we have all these corporations, but they play a certain role in a supply chain. And you have all these different business partners, you have trains and boats and planes and trucks and EDI and ERP systems managing this and people are phoning each other and sending faxes and emails and paper. One of our friends at FedEx, the client says,

asked me one day, do you know how you know what's in a railway car? You go inside it and you look up to the right and there's a little box on the wall that has a piece of paper saying what's in the car. And imagine you replace all of that with a shared network state, an asset chain, where you have real-time transactions, where there's a single version of the truth. We can have smart contracts, so you can have smart payments. You can have micro payments. So this is going to radically change the whole structure of how industry and the creation of products and goods and services occurs. So I could go on about this, but I'll just give you one example. So in the digital economy, 94, 95, it came out. I said, there's this thing called disintermediation.

I made a joke. If you're in the middle, if you have a name, lawyer, distributor, intermediary, seller, and I rattled off a whole bunch of time to do some career planning. I joked about that. But then I said, let's take an industry. And I picked the book industry. So I said, bookstores are in the middle between publishers and readers. So they're going to get disintermediated. But then I came up with this idea called re-intermediation. I said, I'll bet the opportunity to create new value in the middle is bigger than the old middle. Only the corollary to that law, no one's ever called it Don's law, but the corollary to that law is that the leaders of the old middle are typically not the ones to create the new middle.

So I said, but what could happen is in between a publisher and a bookstore, you could have something new that uses networks that could be bigger than the bookstores. Well, again, that is now the most valuable company in the world. Sure. So re-intermediation, this is not just a big threat and a big danger to the old intermediaries. It's also an opportunity. It's an opportunity, but as you said, they're going to be replaced by superior systems and people who understand better. So what happens in this decentralized future to all of the toll collectors, third parties, and brokers that are in the middle, because those are arguably the biggest systems in place and the ones that probably

larger players have the firmest grasp upon. Yeah. Well, it's the problem of paradigms, and I'm allowed to use that word, okay, because in 93, I wrote paradigm shift. It's your word. i didn't invent the word but i was applied the idea beyond science to to um other things i guess but um i said that that when you have a new paradigm that's what's happening here. These things are received with coolness or worse, hostility, mockery. They cause dislocation, disruption, confusion, and vested interest, those in the old paradigm, are often the last to embrace the new. And throughout throughout history there have been examples of this you know um galileo came along and said to the church the world is not flat and we're not at the center of the universe

we're a planet we rotate around the sun so he had a tough life uh trying to uh actually galileo here's a quiz guess what year he was exonerated? Thousands of years later, right? Yeah. I don't know the exact year. I think it was like 25 years ago. And the leaders of Newtonian physics fought against Einstein's general theory of relativity.

So this is it. Who are the big IT technology companies today? We've gone through a bunch of shifts. There are the big IT technology companies today? We've gone through a bunch of shifts. There were the mainframe companies, the IBM and the bunch, Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell. Gone.

Gone. Then there were the mini computer companies. I could rattle off a dozen of those. Wang, 4Phase, Data General, 4Point. Data General is the hottest company in the world. Oh, Digital Equipment Corporation was the largest computer company in the world for a brief moment in time. And then Ken Olson famously said, why would anyone want to have a computer? He's a CEO.

And then we had the PC. Where are all the PC companies? The IBM PC, that was a big one there is no ibm pc today so you know that this this problem of leaders of old having great difficulty embracing the need so think about these financial companies who are like the masters of the universe they're the greatest extractors of value their executives executives are the richest, pretty much, unless you're an entrepreneur like Jeff Bezos and you create your own thing.

They're pretty much the richest people in the world. You're the wolf of whatever. I've been called worse. But Wall Street, it's an architect. Imagine them trying to completely change their business model, to give up control, to move to a more decentralized model, and to discover new business models. Now, some are doing it.

They're showing, I mean, J.P. Morgan is doing some pretty interesting stuff. You look at Fidelity with their digital assets group. They get a guy in there, Tom Jessup, who really gets this. And Fidelity, that's a big growing operation. So there can be exceptions. Right. So I think it's clear that we agree that blockchain technology is certainly the future and is going to be the underlying tech of quite a bit of innovation moving forward and the systems that will become probably familiar and underlying almost everything. Where do Bitcoin and Ethereum specifically fit into that as assets? Well, I think of Bitcoin as the first app of the internet of value. There was a first app for the internet of information. Can you guess? I do not know. I was using it in 1977, a belt rather than research. It's called email. There you go.

And it's still around. Bitcoin will still be around. It does have use cases. It's a medium of exchange. It's a store of value that has a real role right now in this global economy. Gold is becoming less important all the time. But Ethereum is quite different to me. I view that, if you want an analogy

with the internet and information, it's more like the web in the sense that you can build any app on Ethereum. And so there'll be a whole, there is a whole ecosystem that's growing. It's not just Ethereum, but there are other really interesting platforms that have this kind of capability too.

So they're very different to me. There's a role for both of them. And they're the two, obviously the two dominant ones right now. Now people talked about the flippening back in the day. We're hearing about it again. That was my next question. The flippening has returned, which was a top signal last time, to be quite frank, for Ethereum.

But do you see a world where Ethereum flips it in market cap, but even more importantly, flips it in importance? I think that that's possible because compared to you know, we all use email. It's great. People use Bitcoin. It's great. But the web, when you start rebuilding the firm, rebuilding our institutions, rebuilding our economy on a new platform,

that gets really interesting. Will it be Ethereum? Well, so far, Ethereum looks pretty good, but that can change really quickly too. Will it be MySpace with the internet of information? I mean, is Ethereum Netscape and something that's coming in the future is Google? Yeah, I'll tell you,

because this is a free form thing. I'll tell you something I've never said publicly, but I will. So when we wrote Wiccanomics, which, by the way, ended up being a big book. It was not just the number one technology book. It was the number one management book in the whole year on Amazon.com. It beat out the black swan by an inch in 2007. For the Financial Times, Goldman Sachs Best Business Book Award,

I sat beside the author of The Black Swan, and we were both convinced that the other person was going to win it. And then they gave away this book about investment banking. Because those are two big books. Anyway, so I show up at at the world economic forum davos and people keep saying mark zuckerberg's looking for he wants to talk to you and my secretary says facebook's calling mark zuckerberg wants to meet you and um you know we talked about um facebook in in the book and i think okay fine okay, fine. I'll meet Martin Zuckerberg. So we went and met and he brought along one of the other Facebook founders. And the first thing that happened was he says to me, would you sign our books? And I'm like, okay, I wrote a book. He created a social network with 30 million people on it. And he's impressed by me. So what's wrong with

this picture? But anyway, sending that aside, we had a conversation about where should Facebook go? But one of the requests that he had was on the cover of the first edition, we had MySpace, not Facebook. So to the point today about Ethereum, you know, Ethereum is everywhere in blockchain revolution because it was and continues to be hands down the leading platform for building the new firm and the new enterprise. But there's nothing guaranteed that it will continue to play that role.

And you can have some interesting new players come in orthogonally and diagonally that can do things that Ethereum can't do that can be quite disruptive. If you've been paying any attention to me or have been following me for any length of time, then you know I absolutely love Voyager. Every single time someone tweets me or asks me, hey, Scott, where do you trade and invest? answer is always voyager they offer over 50 assets to trade commission free i save so much money it almost feels too good to be true and that's not even my favorite part of voyager my favorite part is the insane interest that i earn up to 10 of my usdc 6.25 of my bitcoin and 5.25 on my ethereum whether i'm trading or not i'm earning

interest on what's sitting on the platform making money literally couldn't be easier and there are no lockups or limits go to the wolf of all streets dot link slash voyager that's v-o-y-a-g-e-r and download the voyager app and use code scott25 get $25 in free Bitcoin when you create your account. What are you waiting for? Go download Voyager. Is blockchain the most disruptive technology that you've ever seen? Yes. It's also the one with the most confusion that I've ever seen. Why do you think that is? Because you're messing with value, with money, securities, the commanding heights of the economy,

you know, with the institutions that run our world. You know, the internet didn't really mess with that. It enabled new businesses, new opportunities to change the way lots of things happen enables me to communicate with my grandchildren every day on video but now we're talking about changing the way the economy works and that's so you're going to get there were detractors in the age of the internet. I remember in 1994, I would show

some on the web, on Mosaic, before Netscape came out, and it would be on the screen at 9,600 bits per second. People would look at me and they would be like, Don, are you crazy?

That is never going to be anything. And I'm like, no, actually, the march of technology is inexorable. It's going to be really fast. You're going to be able to interact with people and see them on the screen, have video and download movies and do all kinds of other stuff, which all happened. And the funny analogy today, of course, about blockchain is that people look at a wallet and they're like wow nobody's ever going to learn how to do some weird arcane thing like this maybe you put your money on a on an exchange and it goes under and look at all the criminals that use this stuff which was one back then by the way the internet information it's full of course porn and

you know criminals are always the first ones to use exciting new technology. Mark Yusko said the exact same thing to me. I don't know if you know him, but he said that he spent his entire career on the fringe dealing with all the criminals because he invested in the internet early and he was ahead of the blockchain and it was porn for the internet and it was, you it was criminals and drug dealers for Bitcoin. But the real smart law enforcement people understand that something like Bitcoin is the best thing that ever happened. It's not private. Yeah, I mean, we can have a private transaction,

but there's metadata. You don't get that with cash. And 3% of cash is probably criminal activity. That was our estimate. Maybe up to 1% of Bitcoin. And if you're using Bitcoin for illicit purposes, not a good idea. So what do you see for the next 10 years of blockchain?

What kind of developments do you see? And do you think that we're really in the infancy of this or do you think that we've actually entered a serious phase of development i don't know if this is this is a baseball game um we're in the first inning have we had we probably had the first battle um i think alex steps got watched him, has asked that question. He said, I think we've had the first three outs, and we're now into the second part of the first inning. But anyway, we're still pretty early stage.

Where's it going to go? Well, first of all, I'm not a futurist. Yeah, I always find myself saying the future is not something to be predicted. It's something to be achieved. But what we like to talk about here at the Blockchain Research Institute, by the way, I'd welcome anybody from a big company or a startup. We have good pricing for them to check us out at blockchainresearchinstitute.org.com. And what we're outlining is where we think this could go if we find the will to do it.

Do you think that that's the case both for the technology and the price of these assets? Do you think that Bitcoin is so early in the cycle that we're literally in the first inning? No, I wouldn't say that because a lot of things can happen between the assets that change their relative importance. But like email didn't go away, I don't think Bitcoin will go away. That's fair. And I think that overall, this gets bigger, like way bigger.

And it's not very big right now. The entire crypto world is... It's a... Two trillion market cap. Yeah, it's small. So it's not even very big right now. The entire crypto world is... It's... Two trillion market cap. Yeah, it's small. It's not even the price of Apple. Apple's almost three trillion of a single company. So mind you, Apple's a really big company

in terms of its value. Digital Conglomerates, 2006. We wrote a paper. I'm glad I get to say this on this podcast because this is a great word. People should use this word. We said in 2006, we wrote a paper saying there's a new species of business emerging.

We're going to call it a digital conglomerate. We use Apple and Amazon and Facebook and others. No, it wasn't Facebook. It would have been some others. And we said they're unlike anything we've ever seen before because of their control and access to data, the

asset class of the digital age. They can rapidly expand into adjacent or not so adjacent industries. I remember one of the Facebook founders, Larry, said once in a session that I was at, he said, we'd like it better if it's not an adjacent industry. We just got this data and we go there and build a whole new industry. It might be that everybody's there. He didn't say that part, but that's, of course, what they do. So now this, of course, is a huge issue for all of us personally. This is one of our biggest passions at the Blockchain Research Institute.

One of mine personally has been writing about it a lot. But it means that we create this data. The virtual Scott knows more about you than you do. All kinds of various, because you can't remember what you bought a year ago or said a year ago, what transaction you had, what medication, what diagnosis you had, what you got on that test, what dozens of classes of data. You create it and these digital conglomerates exploit it. And I don't think it's, I like using analogies to help people understand stuff. I don't think it's extreme to call this kind of like a digital feudalism

because under feudalism, you had the landlords, you created all the value, they owned the land, and then you had to give it all to them, but you got to keep it there. Well, Scott, you create all this value and you're left with a few digital cabbages. And people say, well, that's a big problem for privacy. Yeah, but that's just the beginning. First of all, you can't use all this data to plan your life. You can't monetize the data. Jared Lanier said of the last Davos that there

are probably a billion and a half people in the world who could double their income if they could monetize their data. All the data is insecure because it's on central service. You know, there's two types of these, those that have been hacked and those that will be hacked. And, you know, JP Morgan, Home Depot, you name it, just asking. It means that in, say, a pandemic, all this data is locked in silos, so you can't aggregate it together. Imagine our health data. A lot of it's real time, you know?

Our temperature, our blood pressure, our heart rate, our, you know, all kinds of stuff that would be amazing if we could anonymize and aggregate that across these, across platforms. And yes, our privacy is being undermined and people say to me well don you know privacy dead get over it got nothing to hide what's your problem this is stupidity privacy is the foundation of freedom you know and it's like i wrote the big book on transparency right i wrote two of them. One called The Naked Corporation. Again, I'm studying bad timing. That was 20 years ago. But we argued that transparency is a new force.

And I wrote Radical Openness as well after I gave a TED Talk called Radical Openness. So it was actually about the four principles of a digital age in which openness is one. But people confuse that. We're talking about privacy. Corporations, governments have an opportunity and a responsibility to be more open.

Individuals do not. Au contraire. You have a responsibility to protect your personal information so that it's not just that it can't be used to manipulate or can't be used against you. This is about the autonomy of the individual. Because ultimately, ultimately, this data kind of becomes smart data and it gets integrated in with software. You're talking about the ability of large organizations to program us into certain kinds of behavior so and the tip of the iceberg

on this is the social score in china you know you don't pay a parking ticket and for some reason you don't understand your kid doesn't get into a good school so um, so that was a bit of a side diatribe, but this is a huge issue for me. And blockchain, of course, is at the heart of solving this problem because we can have a self-sovereign identity that's secure and that we own and that moves around with us and that's sweeping up all this transactional data and you can do all this stuff with it. So all this data represents our digital identities. We've got to get this back so that we can manage our own data all this transactional data, and you can do all this stuff with it. So all this data represents our digital identities. We've got to get this back so that we can manage our own data responsibly for ourselves and the benefit over ourselves and our families. So what are the biggest risks to

actually accomplishing that or threats, I should say? Is it heavy handed regulation? Is it these corporations who are actually more powerful than our governments refusing to relinquish that control? What stops this train? Well, those would be two at the top of my list. So the number one problem in terms of blockchain, not just crypto, but blockchain going forward and innovation around this stuff. In the surveys that we've done, different countries, it's regulation. And you got Janet Yellen saying that Bitcoin is used mainly by criminals.

Now this is, she's a smart person, but this is lacking knowledge and information, okay? The pejorative term would be ignorance but is it ignorance or is it is it is it uh i was gonna say is it willful ignorance or is it actually you know that they're speaking about it that way maliciously because they actually do understand it well that's um explanation number b okay for that. You know, and, but sometimes it's just, I don't know. Who was it? One of the late night shows.

No, John Oliver had so much fun with the little thing I said. I don't know if you saw that. I was like, I did this analogy that the reason it's so hard to hack Bitcoin is, is it's a highly processed thing, kind of like a chicken McNugget. It'd be like turning a chicken McNugget into a chicken.

John Oliver had me, I was on the show and he had so much fun with that. You should just Google it. That would be one bleeped up chicken. What a horrible thought. It would be writing haunting poetry about the experience the things i saw buck buck buck hall anyway um but um i can't think of his

name it's one of these guys has a show rants does real rants anyway he just did a thing on um crypto on crypto. Bill Maher. Yeah, Bill Maher. That was... Absurd. ...breath-taking in its stupidity. Absurd. Somebody isn't... Aren't there grown-ups over there who can talk to him before he goes and says

all this ridiculous stuff that is just so... So, anyway. So, is he willful? Is he threatened by the old paradigm? Probably not. I think he's, on the other hand, he may well have sponsors.

I was going to say he has a writer or a sponsor who was triggered. Anyway, so that's a really big problem. Then you've got the problem that's tied to that of the leaders of the old paradigm in terms of big corporations. So you think about something like DeFi, which ultimately makes a lot of sense. You've got these massive financial institutions.

You've got a whole body of regulations. You've got congresses and governments all around the world that think a certain way about that. You have consumer behavior that is locked into that old model. You've got all these intermediaries that exist because of the old model. So this is like, there's a lot of resistance to change. And people say to me,

Don, is anything really happening with blockchain? Well, the answer is yes. We study hundreds of, not just pilots, but operational implementations. The Internet of Information took a while. It was really a decade, 15 years before it started to take off. That wasn't messing with very fundamental things. You could go put up a website, even today, go to Spotify. I know somebody created a company, went to Spotify a week later, they have a full transactional global business

that has a rich data management environment where they can execute transactions in currency and just all, you can do that in a week. Imagine implementing something that changes the supply chain. You know, Fred Smith, the CEO of FedEx said to me, I interviewed him in ConsenSys, I guess three years ago, it was the opening session of ConsenSys, 4,000 people in the audience. He says, we're rebuilding our company with this technology. But the old days, he said, you create a great new system. You put a FedEx logo on it. You go to market. You change the world.

Today, you can't do that. He says, we have to change the entire logistics industry. We have to change the transportation industry. And we can't do that by ourselves. We need to do it with not just our partners, but our competitors. So for people who say, well, this is going so slow. Oh, it sure doesn't feel like that when you look at crypto markets. But people who say that, yeah, it's going to take a while.

Because unlike the Internet of Information, we're messing with very fundamental things. It's so true. But what happens when those institutions co-opt these technologies and systems and find a way to repurpose them so that they're not cut out? Digital dollar, central bank digital currencies. Sure. Well, the final chapter of blockchain revolution, Alex and I went through and we talked about 10 showstoppers, potential showstoppers. We've been talking about two of them here. Governments are going to crush this.

The incumbents are going to crush this. And then we went through the discipline of looking at each of the 10 and we put them in bucket number one or bucket number two. Bucket number one is reasons why this is not going to work and it's a bad idea. Bucket number two was implementation challenges. And all 10 ended up in bucket number two. So this is, again, the future is not something to be predicted. It's something to be achieved. And this really comes down to people. Maybe it's a good thought to end on. And we said this in blockchain revolution that the old internet was great, but it caused a bunch of problems. We have a fragmentation of public discourse

that ended up with Donald Trump being able to do what he did. People followed their own point of view in these little self-reinforcing echo chambers. I think for many, the purpose of information is not to inform them, it's to give them comfort. Confirmation bias. Yeah, exactly. But once again, the technology gene has escaped from the bottom, and it was summoned by this anonymous persons or persons with unclear motives at this uncertain period in human history. And it's not going to solve our problems, and it's not going to create a better world, but it gives us, as humans,

another kick at the can. Another opportunity, as we had with the internet of information, to rewrite the economic power grid and the old order of things. But, you know, only if we will it. And ultimately, this comes down to leadership. And everyone now in this new environment has an opportunity to be a leader, to help bring about, in many ways, a kind of new economy and a new civilization. And what an amazing time to be alive. I mean, this pandemic has been awful and the economic costs are staggering. We don't even, the human costs are horrific, but we will, the dust will settle. We will come out of that sooner, probably, rather than later, if we can think globally and not just think

nationally. But that's a punctuation point in the history of something much bigger, the rise of the second era of the digital age. What an unbelievable time to be alive to get to participate in something like this. It is truly incredible. And I know you've got to go. So thank you so much for your time. Where can everybody keep up with you, follow you, and obviously, you know, if they're

interested in doing business with you? Yeah, well, blockchainresearchinstitute.org. You can go contact us there. Some of my staff just put up a new website, don tapscott.com. There's all kinds of stuff in there. My, my going back to my role as a radical early 1970s. But also my music, I'm in a band called many seats and I'm a songwriter. It's got a whole bunch of, a bunch of kind of fun stuff.

And you can contact me through don tapscott.com too. Absolutely amazing. Really, as I said, truly an honor. And I hope that we can do this again sometime because I have about seven hours more of questions to ask you. So thank you once again for your time. Okay. My pleasure. Go.