Chris, welcome to the Network State Podcast. Hey, Paul. How are you? Great to be here. You know, you and I have been talking crypto for like 10 years, and it's kind of like raising a child together. So you've got this new book, and it's Read Write Own. You want to hold it up for the camera? Do you have a copy of it? Oh, yeah. Here you go, everyone. Read Write Own, available January 30th. ReadWriteOwn.com has, you can of course buy it at Amazon, but also if you want to support other smaller booksellers or whatever you prefer, it's there. And we have audiobook and Kindle too coming in the same day. Wonderful. So going on, Read Write Own. And you know, it's funny, I'm glad you wrote this book because it's kind of like Crypto 101 2024. I think if people ask me what this crypto thing is all about, I can just point them to this, and this will be sort of a onboarding manual. You said you wrote it for a smart high school student. You want to talk about that one? Yeah, yeah. So I mean, that's exactly what I'm hoping. The book becomes is that it's the book that like, you know, you join your employee who joins Coinbase and your family and friends are like, isn't crypto that thing that like FTX and a bunch of speculate. And I can't, I mean, I've literally heard this like a thousand times. And then I go to DC a lot, you know, and just meet with, you know, press and policymakers sort of part of my job is to, you know, is to do that and kind of work on policy stuff. And literally almost every meeting there's like, what book should I read? And look, there's some great books on Bitcoin specifically. And there's some great books like there's, you know, the history of Coinbase and the history of Ethereum. But there isn't sort of, as you said, like kind of a 2024 onboarding manual that sort of explains what I wanted to do was to look and I wrote it partly to test myself, frankly, because this I wrote it during, you know, after FTX and this sort of downturn. And I was like, let me, you know, I think it's Richard Feynman who said, if you can't explain it to a, I forgot, like a 10 year old, you don't understand it. Right. You know, and like, and like, I've always said, like, this is, you know, that, that or about kind of, you know, decentralizing various internet services and returning power to users and software developers and creators and kind of the edges of the internet, you know, as opposed to these big intermediaries. But like, can I really write it out in detail in a way that, that could convince somebody who's a skeptic, open-minded skeptic who doesn't have a background in technology and the internet. And like, as I said, yeah, someone said a smart, actually, I think, I think I got it indirectly from Peter Thiel. Someone told me he wrote. His like agent told me he wrote it for, he wrote zero to one, which I have a lot of respect for that book. He wrote that for smart high school students. And I, and I thought that kind of was a great kind of God guidance. So I thought about that a lot. And so I don't use, I avoid jargon and except when I absolutely need it and I define it. Actually, when one rewrite too, I went through, you know, the very, yeah, for those who've written, obviously you've written a lot, including your book apology. It's easy to kind of slip into passive voice and kind of. Make assumptions that kind of jump over stuff. And so I was very, like, if you notice there's very few, like kind of superlatives in the book, there's very few, um, very little passive voice. Like every, I was part of the discipline of it. It's like, who did this? You know, what did they do? And I'm going to show you, not tell you, I'm not going to claim something. I'm going to walk through the details. And I was, it actually took me, I mean, it took me a year. Um, and a bunch of kind of rewrites and somewhat painful to like get it to that point where it's just. Really kind of broken down. So that's what I'm hoping is a sort of first principles. You're open-minded, but don't have a background in this. I do a brief, um, uh, history of the internet in the beginning with a specific folk. I mean, and it's very important. Like one thing I realized when speaking to people, um, in the general public and like, maybe like why write a book? Like I'm of the sort of, I think probably the biology Naval school of thought that why write a book when you can write a blog post. Right. And I used to blog for years and I was like, there's no point in writing a book. You know? Why? Yeah. Why, why a book now? And a lot of business books are kind of like filler, you know, I've gotten all these people ask me like, did you write the book? Like they think it's like this ghost, it's like a ghost cause you know, I run a fund. So they assume it's like ghost written and it's like seven, seven habits of, you know, successful people or some kind of like inspirational thing, which is not, it's not at all. Right. And it's yes, I wrote it and yes. And it's like, this is like a, you know, you may not agree with it, but it's like a, it's a book. It's not a, you know, it's not, I mean, you and I are both academics, so yeah, I mean, I'm ghost. Right. Our pale academic reformed, reformed. I think, I think we were, we were smart enough to leave at some point, but we were dumb enough to stay too long and smart enough to leave or something like that. But, um, so, um, I have a couple of questions for you. Okay. I, sorry, I could go on and on. You go ahead and ask your question. I just on, on that actually. So just to digress on the topic of writing for a second, you know, what I found hard about writing a book and right now I'm doing the second edition of the network scene, actually a network save movie. Um, but, um, yeah, okay. I guess I just broke some news there. Fine. That's coming. Okay. What I found hard about doing a book is if you're at a 10 or even 15 page essay, you can read and reread the whole thing. Okay. I think, I think I know where you're going here. Right. Sorry. But the exactly, but the moment it gets to like maybe a hundred pages, let alone 200 or something, you can't reread the whole thing, start to finish before you write page two Oh one. And so you have to have, it's like, it's like. Right. It's like a code base, which becomes large enough that normally you'd factor it into functions and just import them. The only way you can get through something like that is with a really good outline that just sort of decompresses. And even then you kind of need either an editor or nowadays AI to find the redundancies and so on. I think I'm going to have a better tack on that, but I'd love to know what your approach was on that. No, no, no. It is very interesting. You're right. Cause I'd done a lot of blogging obviously, and it really does change when it's longer. And, and so. I'd say. I'd say a couple of things like one, like one of the hardest things was, had I already explained that? I think this is what you're saying with redundancies. Like, it's really annoying when you're reading a book and you're like, they explain something twice or they over-explain it sort of the second time. Right. Like, has it been explained enough? Right. It's so hard when it's in this case, 230 pages. Like when you get to this, you're reading chapter seven and you're like, wait a second. Is this, did I, did I already explain this enough or not? Right. Um, and what I found is I had to take, if I didn't take, I had to take two week break sometimes to clear my head. Yes. I didn't take a two week break. Then I couldn't read, do a fresh read and read it as like, right. And then be like, oh wait, that feels silly that I didn't explain that. Or I over-explained that. And I had to take these two week cycles. And then what I would do in the meantime is I would like work on small pieces of the code base, so to speak. Right. And then I would say, okay, now my brain's fresh and I can do a full read. And then I would do like a two and then that would take me like two weeks to do a full read or something. And at one point actually for my case, so I actually had. Also, I had, the other thing I learned is that with, so with, you think about you're reading like a nonfiction book and let's say they make like three claims in a row. And let's say as you're reading, you know, when you're reading, it's really interactive process, right? You're kind of saying, I don't agree with that. And if, if they keep saying stuff and they don't address your concern, you'll probably quit reading. Cause you'll be like, wait a second. Right. Like it's kind of like the tree fork too far away from the reader or something. So I had like 20 people, really smart people. A lot of them work with me on my team, read it, including like Dan Bonet, Tim Roughgarden, like CS professors, Bill Hinman, law prof, you know, law experts. And they would give, it was amazing. They gave me like paragraph level comments, right? Like this doesn't make sense. This is a counter argument. And then I went and addressed them all. And that took me four months or something. And, but then the code base had to, I read it again. I was like, holy crap, this is just a mess. And it's a mess now. The code base was a mess. I then had to refactor the whole thing. Right. Cause it was like, just like all code, right. It was just like had, you know, kind of metastasized or something in all these different weird ways. Um. So anyway, so yeah, but that, that's the, yeah, go ahead. Yeah. It's so sorry. Finish it. Finish your thought because I'll tell you, but you're right. Like I just had no idea that like the pure length of it, I guess it meant like I couldn't keep it in, in memory on board memory RAM. I had to go, I had to, uh, page to the hard drive or something. That's exactly. That's exactly how I felt. And I think you and I both have actually normally a pretty good memory for written text and whatnot. So this was like a buffer flow. Uh, and the other thing is you can't just import, you, you mentioned, oh, you know, people have explained it too much in maybe by repeating a definition and the chapter seven. The opposite of course is you are very concise and like a math textbook, you introduce five definitions and you use them all back to back to back, but then people are lost because you just use five keywords that you explained, but not used together, you know? Anyway. So, um, I think you did that pretty well, by the way, for what it's worth. Thank you. You know, hopefully this. Also gives like a verbal overview for people. Yeah. I was very happy with like, so I sent it to like, for example, Kevin Kelly, who I have a lot of respect for. He was a founder of wired, um, you know, great writer written many books and he's sort of a real tech optimist for those who don't follow him. You should, he's, he's brilliant. But he's actually, I know him and he's been always a crypto skeptic and actually he's one of the quotes I have on the back of the book. And he's like, and he's the kind of guy he's not going to bullshit me. Yeah. He, he like, he's like, this changed my mind. This is, I think the response I've been happy with overall, but I think it's actually been. More positive, the less into crypto they are. Yeah. So like some of the crypto, like on my team, they're like, well, I kind of knew the first, you know, two thirds of it, Chris. Well, also they hear me. They're like, Chris, I've been around you for six years. You've been saying it over and over, you know, but, um, but I think that that, you know, that, that I'm hoping is sort of how it lands. Is it kind of like the crypto? I hope the crypto people like it. I think particularly like in the token section, like I have this framework faucets and things, which I think is, it's not, it's not my ideas, but I think I do a nice kind of crystallization of a lot of the best ideas. Mm-hmm. So I think crypto people. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Will find some of that interesting. Um, some of the, I do have a treatment of the regulatory topics like securities laws. Um, I have a bunch of application example, application areas. Um, so I think the, I hope crypto people will find parts of it. Uh, so, you know, a lot of the younger crypto people won't know the internet history stuff as much. So hopefully that will be helpful to them. But, but fundamentally I want them to, I really hope they like it, but I really want it to be the book they recommend to the kind of adjacent layer, which I just feel like, cause look, we have, you know, it's, I think you're the PI. I think you invented the. I think you invented the sort of phrase or I think so, right? Like kind of speculation is the bootstrap mechanism. Yeah. Speculation is installation. Is insulate. It's sort of, yeah, it's sort of the, but like what, but like the question then is like, what exactly, what does that mean exactly? Right. Like how do we actually get there? Right. You have to value the thing on the other side, installation, installation of what, and then we'll get to that in a sec. Yeah. I do think by the way that you have something in the book for everybody, because, uh, I think you're right that junior crypto people who are in their twenties didn't live through web one and web two. They were kind of forced into the web and it was like, this is what I'm going to do. This is what I'm going to do. This is what I'm going to do. And, and that's just been around their whole life. So they'll learn something from it. And you know, Kevin Kelly is a good example of like the tech swing vote who is like a rational actor, but just hasn't dug into this or what have you. And now, you know, he's smart enough. He understands it from your, your description, there's something else by the way, the TL writing zero to one for a smart high school student, probably helped him bring Vitalik to the TL fellowship. I'm not sure if the timing on that. Sure. I forgot. I forgot. He has a program that recruits smart. So there's a utility to it there as well. Okay. So why don't we jump into the book itself? You know, crypto is a big enough area. People come at it from different schools of thought. Many come at it as a financial thing. I come at it as a primarily political thing. And you come at it as a technological phenomenon. And of course, those are interlinked. You know, your book is divided into five sections, which, you know, I'd roughly summarize. So you've got read, write. That's your brief history of Web1 and Web2. You have own, which is on the, like the invention of blockchains and the concept of cryptographic ownership. A new era, which I called maybe the basics of crypto economics, but in a nice distilled way, which aggregates 50 different blog posts and heuristics into a nice little chapter. Here and now, the current controversies, which, you know, will be the most, in a sense, timely section of the book. And then what's next, what we can build with crypto. So maybe, you know, tell me if you think that's a correct overview. Oh, that's perfect. Yeah. Great. Do you want to give your overview? Overview of like the book as a whole and maybe drill into those sections a bit? Go ahead. Yeah. So, and maybe just to give a little bit of context, you know, I got into the internet sort of late 90s and have spent my entire career on the internet. I was originally an entrepreneur and an investor. And as you mentioned earlier, I'm sort of a reformed academic. And I actually think I wouldn't, like, I was attracted to the internet because, I mean, it was an amazing, amazing promise of a network that was truly, truly decentralized and owned by the users, right? This was the original internet. And that happened for a variety of reasons. You know, its origins in academia and government. And there were sort of political motivations. But to me, and by the way, that was not a fait accompli. Like, there were alternative visions like Bill Gates and Comcast and Disney had this information superhighway, which is sort of a centralized internet, right? And like, you know, our friend Mark Andreessen was on the kind of the open internet, sort of open source side. And of course, you know, with Netscape and everything else. And to me, that was just... Mark Andreessen, Ph.D.: Yeah. Mark Andreessen, Ph.D.: And I think that's a remarkable thing. I mean, that we would link all the computers in the world and we would do it in a way that there was no kind of intermediary, right, that was taking tolls, money and power and control and that this was actually sort of this thing owned by the people. Mark Andreessen, Ph.D.: And the specific instance, the specific way that we were able to do it was we were able to do it in a way that was not necessarily a very traditional way. So, you know, we had this sort of basic idea of like, you know, you have your own email address, so you have... And that was kind of came... So, like, you know, you had this sort of base layer of the course of the internet IP, but then you had these layers on top like email and the web, and they respected ownership. And they did it... I go through in the book a little bit through, you know, this mechanism of DNS. And, you know, one of the key features just technically of DNS, right, is you have...the user has control of the mapping of the domain name to the hardware, which means if the hardware provider turns evil, you can exit, right? Mark Andreessen, Ph.D.: Right. Mark Andreessen, Ph.D.: DNS gives you the ability to exit. Mark Andreessen, Ph.D.: Yes. Mark Andreessen, Ph.D.: And this was...and this is a very, very...so this, I think, is an often overlooked but profound feature of the early internet. That ability to exit meant that, first of all, you know, creators, political dissidents, activists, whoever they might be, had the ability to go do something, right, and like put up...have their own little plot of land. And as long as you obeyed the law, you could have your plot of land, right? But it also enabled entrepreneurship, right? Like that's why Larry Page and Jeff Bezos and others, they knew they could...if they built something on that plot of land and it was valuable, that they would own it, right? Or that they and their shareholders would own it. But like there wouldn't be sort of an apple in the middle taking 30% or something. Like it was true ownership, right? Mark Andreessen, Ph.D.: An analogy that I think we've probably both made, I mean, the auth code of DNS is very similar to a private key from crypto. Mark Andreessen, Ph.D.: Oh, it's very...yeah, yeah, no. It's because it's all about that mapping, right? It's like... Mark Andreessen, Ph.D.: Right. Mark Andreessen, Ph.D.: It's that one layer...do you control the layer of the virtual to the physical? Mark Andreessen, Ph.D.: Yes. Mark Andreessen, Ph.D.: Right? So who has control of that? Is it Twitter that has control or does the user have control? Mark Andreessen, Ph.D.: Yeah, that's right. And actually it's funny because I remember...actually I'm not sure if this is in the book or not, but I think maybe we've both made this analogy different times. Somebody who's a Web2 person, I asked them, okay, you're doing a new company, are you gonna buy the domain name or are you gonna lease it? Because some of the really nice domain names, they want you to lease it or something like that, right? Mark Andreessen, Ph.D.: Yeah. Mark Andreessen, Ph.D.: And the problem with that is you're five years in and now suddenly they can jostle. You can jack up the cost on your domain name because you just added all this value to it. Mark Andreessen, Ph.D.: That's why every good restaurant in the world goes out of business is they always jack up the rent exactly to the point where they are different. Mark Andreessen, Ph.D.: Because they built the neighborhood. Yeah, exactly. Mark Andreessen, Ph.D.: And they just assume that they can put another restaurant in there because they don't own it. Mark Andreessen, Ph.D.: That's right. And so the smart entrepreneur says, oh, of course I'd want to buy the domain. I wouldn't want to just lease it. And I'm like, and now you understand crypto. That's digital ownership, right? Mark Andreessen, Ph.D.: Whereas they don't own, of course, their social...like you jump forward to Web2. You don't own your Twitter name. You don't own your Instagram name. You don't own all of these different things. You don't own your PayPal or your Square Cash or any of these services, right? You're just there at their discretion and their whims. Yes. And yet your username is becoming as important, if not more important, than your real name. I mean, most messages that come into you are coming into your C. Dixon, not your physical mail, right? 99% of communications online. Okay. So good. So that's kind of...go ahead. You were saying something... Mark Andreessen, Ph.D.: Yeah. So then I sort of give a little bit of...it's one chapter on the kind of Web1. And look, that's really why I got into this, for example. Like I got into the internet is I thought this was just an amazing thing. And then so then Web2 comes along and I talk about the history of this a little bit. But on the good side was this movement to make the web read and write. So in the 90s, the internet was what I call skeuomorphic, right? So it was like a lot of new forms of media. It was sort of porting old media onto the new form, right? Like early films were just like... Mark Andreessen, Ph.D.: Yeah. So it was like a camera on a play. And then later on, they figured out that you could have a close-up and establishing shot and kind of establish the grammar of film, right? And the same way early internet, if you go back and look at these retro archive things, you'll see they're just like brochures, magazines. You did have like online shopping, but it was very primitive. And so the Web2 movement, which I...this is when I became an entrepreneur in the early 2000s, was saying, hey, the internet actually has these sort of native two-way possibilities. You can build...you don't need to make the user just a passive consumer. You can let the user publish, right? And so that was a social media...and it began...the social media movement. And that began with blogging and morphed into Facebook and Twitter and all these other things, which everyone of course knows today. In the course of that happening, what happened is that in the 2000s, kind of two architectures for how social networking would happen. One was an open architecture, most notably RSS, which today still exists. People use it for podcasting. But in 2007, 2008, it was literally had the same number of users as Facebook, Twitter, and everybody else combined. People forget this. It was a legitimate horse race in like 2008 or so, up until that point. Which one? Which one? But RSS did? Oh, yeah. Yeah. RSS was legit. Interesting. Yeah. If you go back...like I was going back and looking at my early blogging. Like my whole blogging career beginning was always this RSS versus proprietary social media debate. Yeah, yeah. This was a...and look, I would argue that this...people say, you know, today the top five tech companies are 50% of NASDAQ, up from 25% 10 years ago. Top 1% of social networks is 99% of social networking traffic and revenue. Like why did we get so consolidated? I would argue that was the pivotal point, was the fall of RSS. Was the fact that RSS...the fact that social networking is...you know, people spend seven hours a day on the internet and like it's like I think four hours of that is social networking or something. Like it was a...had a massive economic consequence. Here's how I think about that and then, you know, give me your thoughts or... You were in bio at that time. I was in bio. Right. So I wasn't... I was in this battle, that battle. That's right. I'm a little bit like Kevin Kelly actually in reverse where I actually tried to stay off of social media because...just like...so Kevin Kelly, you know, I'm just saying because of his remark there, he's relatively late to crypto but he's a smart guy and so on. He's just thinking about other things. I was in bio and I was actually trying to stay off the internet and I actually only started tweeting in December...November, December 2013, right? So like seven years after because I thought it was all tweeting breakfast and so on and so forth. And I have to say, I've been looking for some people who are like, oh, I'm going to stay on the internet. And I've been like, okay, I've been on the internet for so long. I'm like, okay, I'm going to stay on the internet for so long. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to stay on the internet. And that's what I was, that's what I was trying to do, to make sure that I was...I was starting to think about the internet as a whole. That's the equivalent of...that's the equivalent of, oh, crypto is scams and hacks or whatever. When someone's on the outside, that's basically all they hear. But I wanted to say...so Web 1, Web 2, Web 3, at the time Web 2.0 was thought of as AJAX and Google Maps and interactive stuff and what have you. But now in retrospect, we can say that there's a front-end evolution, for example, going from login password to Web 1, social login and OAuth in Web 2, and then connect wallet with Web 3. And there's a back-end evolution where you go from peer-to-peer, like P2P, then MVC, and then what I call CBC, client-blockchain-client. So peer-to-peer, every node is equal, right? MVC, like the Rails pioneering thing, but just the hub-and-spoke architecture around a center. And now client-blockchain-client, which combines aspects of both of them. You've got some of the peer-to-peer aspects because open source and it's open state and it's programmable. But you've also got the monetization and the single global hub of the MVC era. So this is like the best of both worlds. The reason I bring that up is that's why I was a little surprised when you mentioned RSS because RSS was certainly good for static content distribution. But the moment you wanted dynamic content, like a Facebook page or social networking, you kind of needed to have that hub. Otherwise, you'd be... You'd be message-passing social profiles back and forth. You're exactly right. So, no, I mean, I think we agree, but I'm just saying like historic, like at the time, 2008... At the time, it seemed like a horse race and then it passed. Yeah. Yes. And in fact, I have a section, like a smaller section of the book, The Fall of RSS, where I try to diagnose why it failed. And so, and of course, that leads to exactly your argument, which is I view blockchains as ameliorating the things that... The reasons RSS failed, I believe, are two things. Features and funding. Yep. Okay. So features is the ability to store... Or for example, your username. So RSS asked you to... It didn't have any storage. It was a stateless protocol, like HTTP and SMTP. Therefore... And like, I actually quote in this thing, there was a Wired article from 2008 where they tried to build a social network and they said, we can do everything except storing the usernames. We have no way to do that. And there were all these proposals at the time. I was involved in these debates. It was like, should we create a nonprofit that stores a social graph? It could be like Wikipedia. Like, how do we store it? Or like DNS. Yeah. And of course, it was... What you needed was a blockchain, right? You need a community-owned... Right, right. Yeah. And decentralized database, right? And so what... Yeah. So what... Yeah. What actually... The way RSS worked is you had to go pay $8, buy a domain, set it up. And that was just not a consumer value proposition. When Twitter and Facebook said, just click a button and you get a name, it just... That was one thing. And then the other is subsidization. So I think a lot of people that don't work on the internet, that aren't internet investors like me and things, don't realize how much subsidization has gone into the building of social networks. And so the example I use in the book is YouTube. So when YouTube came out in 2005, it was actually originally a dating site. And then it pivoted. I remember it came out. Yeah, yes. It pivoted into a social video site. And by the way, at the time, there were all these video sites. But it was much more of the kind of anyone can upload something. A lot of the other ones were taking CBS content and whatever. And so... That's why they beat Google Video because they're more risk-tolerant. But anyway, go ahead. Yes. So with YouTube, when it came out, they pursued this strategy that I call come for the tool, stay for the network. Right. So when YouTube came out, no one went to YouTube.com. All right. And everyone had their audience on their blog, like I did, right? And I wanted to have video on my blog. Now, to have video on my blog at the time, I would have to... Before YouTube, I would use RSS as the kind of protocol for people to subscribe. But then I would actually have to host it, like fiddle with some software to host it on my site and then pay for the bandwidth costs, which were really expensive. Right. And so YouTube came along and said, you know what? You click a button, you upload stuff, and we will pay for the hosting costs. And you can embed it. Their killer feature was you can embed it in your blog. They actually had... First thing you saw on YouTube was these big HTML at the top that was like the embed codes, right? Mm-hmm. And they said, oh, and by the way, we'd like to also put it on YouTube.com. No one comes here, but what the heck? Why not? Right? Right. And so that was the strategy. And so all the people in the beginning used it as this sort of free video hosting thing to host on your blog. But then, of course, over time, right, it was come for the tool. That's the tool, the free hosting. The single player app. But stay for the network. Suddenly, YouTube had all this great content. I'm not going to go to cdixon.org anymore. I'm just going to go to YouTube. And, you know, fast forward. It's worth... Like Wall Street analysts say $140 billion, probably more as part of Google. But they spent... You know, this is why did Twitter and Facebook and all these guys raise tens of billions of dollars? A lot of it's subsidization. They spend tons and tons of money. What is a blockchain? Like, I think of it as sort of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Thesis is protocol networks, right? I mean, you like these... Yes, I love these. ...these triad frameworks like I do. The thesis is protocol networks. Antithesis is what I call corporate networks. It's kind of centralized networks. And then synthesis is blockchains, right, which is the best of both worlds. You get... But you get... The way I kind of characterize in the book, you get the societal benefits of protocol networks, but the competitive advantages of corporate networks. Exactly. So you get the ability to do subsidization through tokens. You get the ability to store state, right, through the blockchain state. But you don't, as part of that, have, you know, four people in Palo Alto who get to decide the flow of global culture, business, and economics, which is the current state... ...which is the trade we make today with corporate networks, right? Like, it's... We've bizarrely... We've bizarrely... You know, it's like as if AT&T... ...got to decide who made phone calls and who gets to... And they get to take... You know, anytime you call somebody up, they get to take a bunch of the money. Like, that's... And they're asked... And they're also asked to get in the middle of that. And people want them to filter and so on. Yeah, all this stuff. Yeah. I mean, I don't care what your political views are. Like, the idea that we are going to outsource these incredibly important global communication systems to seemingly apparently arbitrary... Like, I just... Right. ...am fundamentally against that idea. I think these... I agree. ...decentralized community-owned systems... Yeah. Yeah. ...are reactions or thoughts. So, first is, you know, you had a good line a while back, which is every command line tool becomes an app, right? Like... Every Unix command becomes a... Yeah. Exactly. Right? So, R... It's like man becomes stack overflow and... And R-Sync is like Dropbox and... And Grep is Google and... Exactly. I don't know. Right? Yeah. So, now, you know, one of the things I thought is that you can revisit every protocol and then you say, what does it look like? What does it look like when you can add global state? Yep. Right? So, for example, what does BitTorrent look like with a blockchain and for discovery? So, you don't have to go to Pirate Bay or whatever, you know? Like, there's 50 kinds of things like this where, you know, almost every protocol is A is communicating with B. And so, what does it look like SCP with discovery or, you know, SSH with discovery? There's probably something interesting there in that space of things, right? Yeah. I think you could go both ways. You could start... Like, I list some of them in the book, but they're... And I, you know, I didn't do a bunch of research on this, but, I mean, there have been hundreds of serious attempts to create new protocols, you know, in the last 30 years. You know, everything from somewhat successful ones like, you know, Jabber and... SecureScalabut. Like, there was all these social attempts like Diaspora and, you know, there's a million, you know, Status.net and there's a hundred of them. So, I think there's... And like a lot of these things, there's probably a lot of good ideas in these, you say, because they were just limited. They had the one arm tied behind their back because they couldn't stay. And they didn't have money. They didn't have... There was no... The protocol had no funding, right? I mean, they could go and maybe raise a little venture capital or do this, but they couldn't... There was no... Like, the VCs wouldn't want to put a ton of money into an open protocol network because they're not going to get the prize at the end. The prize at the end of a Facebook is you control a network effect, right? Yes. That's right. If you're deliberately giving away the network effect to the community as you are in a protocol, why would the VCs put billions of dollars in? It's actually important from another standpoint as well, which is one of the good consequences of all of that, you know, let's call it subsidization build-out and whatnot. Is the user interfaces for something like YouTube or Twitter or Facebook or what have you have actually now remained relatively constant for about 10 years. Like, I mean, I'm not saying they don't add new features, but essentially it's kind of the same looking feed, right? And why that's good is, have you seen like the early history of like electrical power outlets? There was a lot of innovation until it settled on a few... Until it was standardized, yeah. Yeah. Form factors, right? And those form factors for like wall sockets, I mean, there's a few different ones. Like, I don't know. There's like Australia's model and like Britain's model and the US model. But there's just a few form factors. In kind of the same way, I think of these sorts of feed formats as like form factors for our mind. You know, they just plug in, right? And they're sort of like natural fits, like the same with the handle of a cup is a natural fit. Once all of those billions of dollars have gone into just perfecting how Twitter looks, how YouTube looks. Every new video site can copy YouTube's format basically, and then slightly innovate. We've now seen like 10 different Twitters that basically copy Twitter's UX and swap out the community. And the other thing they can do is they can copy Twitter or YouTube's UX and swap out the backend. So that's actually something where a lot of Web3 things I think are essentially taking the same user interface of Web2, adding balances and payments, and adding the same user interface and payments. And adding... And adding global state. And now you actually have a transformatively new app. There's like Web3 WhatsApps that do this kind of thing. Now you can have balances and other stuff. Go ahead. No, I agree. I completely agree with you. Look, and I think I'm obviously somewhat critical of Web2 in some ways. I think there's also really strong things about it. And one of them is the user experience. I think the Web2, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter are approaching the perfect or pinnacle of design and user experience. They've done a great job on that. Look, they've also done a great job, just to give them all credit. Of getting free services to 5 billion people. Like, I don't want to take that away. Like, I think there's been a lot of positive things. And by the way, the other thing I'll just mention is I think I have a lot of friends at these companies. I think they're good people. My critique in the book is not of the people. It's of the system that inevitably leads to these kinds of issues. But I agree with you completely. I think that Web3 needs feature parity at a minimum with Web2. It needs feature parity, and then it needs to have these advantages that benefit the users and the developers and the entrepreneurs through ownership. I think that's... I think that's... I think that's... That's right. And I think basically, you know, as you were also just saying, in the early 2000s, the concept of free hosting, phenomenally easy-to-use interface, global reach, I mean, those were so many things all at once that were so transformative that Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and so on were giving people. And that was an absolutely amazing deal at the time. I mean, you know, one way I put it, you remember the Unabomber, you know, in the early 90s? Right? Yeah. Okay. So Unabomber, he blew all these people up. But why did he blow these people up? He blew them up so he could get an op-ed in the Washington Post and the New York Times. Okay? That's how scarce... Is that right? I don't know. Is that actually why he did it? Yeah. He wanted to get his manifesto out. That's literally why he did it, right? So distribution was so scarce that he killed for the distribution. And so then distribution became so abundant that we kind of took it for... In like 20 years, 10, 15 years, it became so abundant that we basically... We basically took for granted that you could tweet something out and anybody could see it anywhere in the world. It's actually a remarkable, remarkable shift. Well, and by the way, that 5 billion people can do it and you can do it for basically, I think it's $10 now is the going rate for a low-end Android phone. That's right. And there were all these kind of talk about, you know, digital divide, et cetera, in the 90s. Now, the stat I heard recently is more people have access to the internet than running water. Right. It's more reliable. Yeah. And it's just a remarkable thing, right? That anyone can plug in. And participate and publish. And it's just amazing, right? Now the problem is screen time. It's too much time online. Not enough. Seven hours a day, yeah. Coming back to what you were saying, I mean... And then let's go through the book and what I've been... A couple of thoughts I've had, you know, probably related to yours are that if you just take every Web2 app and you add a Web3 wallet that has a balance and that has the ability to do encrypted signing, you enable completely new things. Like a Web3 WhatsApp, you can now do, for example... Yeah. ...counseling, you know, like, like, you know, like, you know, you can do a full pooling, like, crowdfunding within a WhatsApp group, right? Mm-hmm. Like, just in the same way, you can just instantly attach a message or a video or something like that. So I'm seeing tools that do this. Or like, you know, Farcaster, which we, you know, invest in, which is Dan Romero's thing. Now you have Twitter, but you can have communities that are defined by, like, you know, the crypto that they hold and they've got common interest. And so just taking those Web2 things and adding Web3 to them, I think, I think people are starting to see the value of that. But why don't we come back to that? I agree with that. And like, I would add, to me, you just... You just described one of the user-facing kind of improvements. I think there's also, like, a very important developer-facing improvement. Yes. Which is you take WhatsApp and you just, you can make, you can hack and make a different client. You can make a different interface. You can make a different... You can set up a different service that, you know, I don't know, is a group chat thing, that it becomes this hackable Lego brick, right? Which I think, look, if you look at the, one of the case arguments I make in the book, if you look at the history of software development, there's kind of two great threads of software development. Like, Eric Raymond calls it the cathedral and the bazaar, right? It's the sort of... The open movement of, you know, Unix, the web was open, you know, obviously Linux and the open source movement. And then there's sort of the Microsoft, kind of the cathedral, the proprietary movement. And a lot of the history of computing has been driven by these kind of decentralized communities and developers. I think I would argue the PC in many ways, you know, Wozniak and Jobs at the Homebrew Computer Club was sort of, I call it an outside-in movement, a tech movement. A kind of outsiders from the fringe. I think we've lived through this centralized era of sort of app store last 10 years. Everyone's got, and I believe people in tech have this kind of Stockholm syndrome where they're like, it's great to be controlled by this guy that takes all your money. Right, yeah. But when they get a taste of freedom, I think, like when they get a taste again of like, what does it mean for developers to be able to do what they want and not have to worry about getting rugged by the corporate overlords? I think that there will be, you know, this renaissance in kind of developer sort of hacking together these, you know, composable... Software. So I would just add to your point. Like, I think there's adding tokens and financial things, but I think there's also adding composability and developer fits and features. It's like the Chinese, you know, the romance of the three kingdoms. The empire long united must divide. Long divided must unite, right? So the romance of the three webs, the technology long centralized must decentralize. And then when it's decentralized... I mean, I get accused a lot of like fanciful, I'm sure you do too, like magical thinking fans. And maybe. But like the other hand is like... Like we're 30 years into something that's clearly as important as like the printing press. And like... Oh, yeah. Should we assume that the structure is locked in or that, you know, or that these historical forces, like you just said, of like the, you know, like the pendulum swing back. And like, I think it will. I think we're very early in this development. Oh, yeah. I think, I mean, basically what happens is I don't think it's magical at all in the sense of if we go and just look at, you know, when any one of these gets too strong than the other one. If you have a period of too much... If you have a period of too much decentralization, then what happens is people want it to just work. Apple... An Apple-like thing to emerge where it all snaps together and they're willing to pay for that. And so amidst that anarchy, then one solution arises. And then it becomes too powerful. And then people want to decentralize and they want their freedom. And we've just seen like 10 cycles of that in computing from, you know, centralized... The centralized mainframes to personal computing to the cloud to, you know, local again and so on and so forth. Right? Yeah. I don't know if you followed this, but like the new thing social networks are doing now. So they've moved from sort of all, you know, user growth and everything else to keeping you in the app the whole time. And so they've all now been punishing people for linking out. Linking out. Right. Yes. So like you get, you know, if you put a link in your tweet, it will get demoted in terms of its reach. Like Substack. That's true. Substack. The word that can't be said. Well, and like what is Substack and Patreon in a way? In a way what they are, right, is they're... Escape hatches back to the open web. Right? Right. So like you put a link to Substack and Substack, of course, is driven by email, Patreon by the web. Those are web one protocols that don't charge you, you know, 100%, 90%, 30%, whatever. They charge you 0%. Now Substack charges some fee on top. But the point is like it flips the economics. Right? On Twitter, you get nothing. On Substack, you get 90% or, you know, Patreon, you get whatever. I don't know what the exact take rate on Patreon is. But then that's why they're devaluing the link. So I think you're going to see even more, like to your point. Of like consolidation. I think you're about to see even more where there's a move to like really, really keep people within one of five apps. And the occasional time that you click out and go to a website today, like it's still a thing you do. And if you look at the data, like it's still pretty common for people to use websites. Like I think you're going to see further pushing back against that over the next couple of years to the point where, you know, I believe they'll overdo it. And then there will be this counter movement. Right? As you described. Right. And I think actually... It's interesting because I think the web one, web two, web three also has some relevance to what you're saying there. Where web one is, in a sense, another definition of it. Slightly different than the definition we've been using. Is it's a web that Google can index. It's the web crawler accessible web. And then web two is the social web, which is much better structured. But it lives on Facebook's database servers. It lives in Twitter databases. And they can SQL query it. And they can get... It's much more clean than the open web. But it's much less accessible. Right? And then I actually think, in a sense, web three also combines the best of both worlds. Because block explorers are search engines. What's awesome about them is you just get all the updates pushed to you every, you know, block. And so you don't have to go and scrape and crawl a bunch of mess to find out what changed. You get all the edits pushed to you. And it's really rich. And so you can index it and so on. And it's open and it's public. So it's as structured as the web two style databases. But it's as open as a web one style web. And so I think that's actually the new open web. And it's not a moment too soon because AI is making the old open web kind of under threat. Right? So these are two things that feedback on each other. You know? Yeah, I was going to say AI has excelled. Like, so Reddit and Twitter just, you know, put greater restrictions on their API because they feel like these AI systems came and took their content. Right? Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Trained on them. And then, like, look, Stack Overflow's traffic is way down because of Copilot. And yet Copilot was trained partly on Stack Overflow. Right? And so there's a sense in which these AI systems, like I'm pro AI, et cetera, et cetera. But there is this dynamic going on where these systems are essentially incentivizing further closing down of the web. By the way, if you're a graphic designer, you know, do you want to still put your content on the open web or do you want to put it beyond a paywall? Like, I think we're going to see a move toward sort of paywalls and siloization. unless we figure out a good model for paying those people, for keeping it open. And I think to your point, and I have a whole chapter on this at the end, I think blockchains not only do what you do, which is they commit to open systems, but they also provide business models for creative people in an AI world. And that's very important. You need a way to pay those people. I believe both sort of societally but also to keep the internet sustainable. You don't want an internet where people don't want to put their stuff online. That's just not a good internet. I agree with that. And I think what's interesting about it is many of the things that AI is doing, crypto is like the counterforce to it. Like, for example, AI makes everything fake. Crypto is how you can make it real again, with cryptographic signing. Yeah, deepfakes. It's the answer for deepfakes. It's the answer for counterfeit persons. It's the answer for proof of personhood. Of course it is, right? It's the only answer. And you talk about this towards the end in chapter five, and we'll come to that in a sec. And then another one is what you were just talking about, and we've probably both, you know, like I may have seed invested in some of the same, but things, attributability, right? Micro-NFTs allow artists to maybe, you know, if something is incorporated into a work, you can see that you get much more tracking and provenance on something, if you want to go that route. Well, it's like how the offline world works, which is like you don't, like an artist generally doesn't monetize through the photograph of a piece of art. They monetize through the authentic, real piece of art, and the photograph is just out there, and they don't control that. Right? And so you have sort of a layer of, the layer that can be easily copied by technology is the free layer, and the freemium, like the paid layer is the scarce layer, right? Right. By the way, video game, I have some stuff on this in the book. The video game industry figured this out a long time ago. It's a very interesting case study with the, so video game industry has grown in annual revenue to 180 billion, while all other forms of media, have been flat to down in that same time. Yeah, it's bigger than Hollywood. It flipped Hollywood a while back. Oh, significantly bigger. And like Grand Theft Auto, the new One Six, or whatever it is, Five Six, will be bigger than any Marvel movie. And you know, it's far bigger. And so, you know, why is that? I mean, there's a bunch of reasons, including graphics cards and just video games designers are great. But a big part of it is they were very, they essentially moved to what like the dominant model now is free games with virtual goods, which are essentially NFTs. So you look at games like League of Legends and Fortnite, these are free games. And what they figured out was, look, you're not going to lock down the game. There's just a million people making games. In the same way, there's a million people making generative art. And there's a million people writing stuff on social media. And there's a million, like news has become a commodity. Like there's just all, like the games, the games industry said, look, the gameplay itself will be a commodity. Let's not fight that. Let's not try to fight the natural kind of pull of the internet. Right? So let's let that be a commodity. Let's let it spread. By the way, streaming, that was very controversial in the beginning. Nintendo actually, they could shut it down through copyright. Nintendo fought it in the beginning when streaming came out in the late 2000s. Because they're like, it's copy, you're taking my content and copy, it's copyrighted content. Game streaming, game streaming. Sorry, game streaming. Yeah, yeah. But then the game industry was very, like if you look at other industries, they fight it. Game industry finally was like, hey, this is good. The net, you know. And that led to Twitch. Increase in attention. Yeah, but more attention is good. Let's monetize something else. And so then they said, let's lean into this. Let's let the gameplays go. It's not going to be commoditized anyways. Let's make it free. And let's monetize community. And of course, what virtual goods are, are status signaling in the community. Right? But they're essentially monetizing the people and the status signaling within those communities. And it's actually good. It's actually good to push status signaling to virtual goods because it removes it from physical goods. And so then you decouple the dispensable online signaling from the, you know. Right? Yeah. I mean, it's like it's the same behavior we see. I mean, does that Ferrari down? The street actually worth a million dollars or it's probably a hundred thousand dollars in car and $9,000 in status in brand, right? I mean, yes, almost every good you look at around anywhere you go is like a lot of it is status signaling in the in the developed world, right? So, you know, I think similar stuff will move to the online world. And so, so yeah, so in a world of abundant content where anyone can push a button and get any piece of text and any piece of art and a movie, you know, you're just not going to probably monetize. Through the actual content, you're going to monetize there's something else. I think it's right. And so that actually brings to the title of your book. I mean, we're spending all this time online. You know, one of the lines I've had for a while is ask people, how many hours a day are they looking at a screen? And then they'll say six or something. I'm like, oh, so the majority of your waking hours just been looking at screen, which means most the rest of your life is going to be in the Matrix, right? In some sense, Vision Pro and Oculus all make that real. Chris Hurley, Oculus investor as well. Yeah. And so you're living in these, you know, increasingly virtual worlds. We're spending a lot of time online. We're earning these digital tchotchkes, but we're not owning them. And so I think most people kind of understand what reading and writing on the internet is. What is owning on the internet mean? That third verb. What exactly does that mean? Yeah. So I think to go back to the kind of web one example, like you own your domain name, right? So you own that in the sense that like if I, you know, if I have my, if I'm hosting my website at Amazon or whatever. Rack, rack space and they decide to jack up the prices. I can just leave, copy my files and then I can redirect my domain name and I don't lose any of my followers, quote unquote. Anyone can still send me an email. You know, I'm still ranked in Google the same way, right? It all happens behind the scenes. And so imagine just as this is one of many examples, but imagine a world where social networking work that way. And you had, you know, I'm at C. Dixon and I control that and I choose, hey, I'm going to go and use this interface or that interface, but I own it. Now, because I don't own it. Now, the most visible consequence of not owning my name, my social media name is deplatforming, right? People talk about this of, you know, so-and-so was kicked off this network and that's a real issue. But part of my point of my book is there's a lot of very common subtler effects of not owning your name and not owning your digital presence, including, you know, the fact that at a whim they can change the way ranking works, right? So like I put the hey now, now, sub stack links. Are demoted and the fact that the probably the most consequential in my mind that that's overlooked is the fact that they control everything means they control the economics. And so, you know, every social network outside of YouTube makes money through advertising and has a basically effectively 0% revenue share with the users. So, you know, you go to Instagram, you go to tick-tock, you're not going for the Instagram and tick-tock created content. You're going for the users, right? And those users are outside of these little like kind of, you know, de minimis sub 1% of revenue creator funds that some of them create. Like it's just really just not material. They don't share revenue with the creators. And so the creators, I have a bunch of creator friends and they're off trying to do these weird sponsorships and they're selling, you know, you know, body lotion and do other kinds of things because they can't get paid on the internet. And the one exception being YouTube, which is pretty generous. It's like, you know, close to 50% of rev share and that's great. And YouTube, that's for historical reasons. There's a bunch of reasons why, but all the other social networks don't do that. So that's one. What is this circle reason on that? Actually, I don't know. Is it because of AdSense or something? No, I have it in the book because they were competing. It was the competitive thing. There were other, there were other, I have a little thing about it in the, in the footnotes, but the, there were some other services out there that were, that were, that were giving out rev shares and they just had to do it as a competitive thing. So it was just kind of video at that point, for whatever reason, like the entrepreneurs were viewing it more as like a marketplace. Cause remember how social networking started, right? It was, it was not user credit. Like Facebook was just literally profiles, right? Right. And then people started changing their profiles and then people started looking for the changes to the profiles and then Facebook. And then he saw the newsfeed. It was an emergency. And then he created the newsfeed, which was just sort of that list of deltas, the diffs, right? It was a, it was a grep of diffs and that freaked out. By the way, for those who don't know, that was. Yes. Controversial thing in history of the internet is doing that. Um, and so, and so Facebook just kind of evolved much more like it was a profile system and why would you share revenue? Whereas YouTube very much started off as like, this is a marketplace like Airbnb, right? And then we have a take rate and that was how all these video sites started and you had to have a, so it's a kind of a historical legacy mindset thing that they have a take rate that they share. But TikTok doesn't, for example. So, so anyway, so what does ownership means? It's essentially that, you know, that users. Developers, all the kind of participants, entrepreneurs have digital rights. Like you, you, you know, you use a service, you, you can own a name, you can own your money, you can own a virtual good, you can own an NFT, you can own like some kind of item, like embodied in a token. A token is a way to kind of encapsulate ownership that gives you rights that can't be taken away. Right. And that's one of the key things that blockchain enables is a blockchain make, can make these strong commitments. It says you, once you own this, you really. Own it. And even though you're using the service, you, they can't, they can't remove it from you. Right. So, so it's like, look, we're used to this concept in the offline world. Like it's property rights, right? In the off, imagine a world where instead of you owning your house and your car, you, you know, every venue you went to, you had to like go and get a new set of clothes and, and, you know, you leave and they own it. That's the internet today. It's a very strange world that evolved and we're all kind of, I think kind of, uh, uh, you know, numbed into thinking is normal, but it's not normal. It's not the way that something you spend seven hours a day. Should work. You should have the same kind of property rights that you do in the off. By the way, you don't own the Kindle book on your phone. You don't, you know, that like they, they remove those things all the time. Music disappears, like all of these things. And like, what's your, what, what commitment to these services give you? They give you a 50 page terms of service privacy policy, which nobody reads, no one negotiates. They can do whatever they want with their data. Like, so you're just going to these services and, and giving them all of your data, all of the rights, all of the control, all the economics. And the users. And, and all the other participants are just have no power and are disenfranchised. And the alternative sort of web three vision is one where you actually have real kind of rights. Um, and you control data and you control economics and, you know, you can have money where you are in control and you don't have to, you know, PayPal decides to change page 40 of their 80 page privacy policy. And you're, and you know, this line of businesses or this, this category of businesses are now banned. Like, is that the kind of internet that we want to live in? I mean, I'm all for. Rule of law. And like, we should have the, obviously like with the web and email, there were laws governing it. You can't put up a website that does illegal stuff. You know, you get, you go to jail and that's the way it should be. But we don't have a separate tribunal. That's a bunch of other people that aren't legally enforced that decide things. Right. We rely on democracy and that's what we should do. I think with other digital, um, systems. You know, I had this concept in 2018, this talk, I probably should have made a public this talk at Coinbase on the nouns and the verbs. Yeah. You know, like nouns, like, like. Miners and stakers and, and so on holders and the verbs by cell center C, but also like mint burn, et cetera. And one that we were just talking about is switch. And one, one issue currently with these web two services, your practical alternative is really just take it or leave it. Either you take this huge terms of service thing, which you, you, you, you can't red line it and send it back. And can you, you know, you have no negotiating leverage as an individual or you just accept it in total. But with, you know, web three. Profiles and this is already true for crypto exchanges. To some extent, you can just. Withdraw all of your funds or all of your assets and then move to a different exchange. So we know that already works at the asset level and it's starting to work at the username level with ENS, where you can take your entire profile out and then bring it into another site. And so technology changes, microeconomic leverage. Right. And so that's, that's exactly what you're talking about, where it's giving the individual more leverage. Against a giant company that otherwise, you know, everybody, they don't actually have a real option beyond just clicking yes. And the term service now they do. Yeah. Both users and creators. So to example, tick talk, what happened is, you know, they kind of rose up in the last three years and a, and a bunch of creators got to like a hundred million followers. Like there was, it was driven by like 10, big, 10, big kind of influencers on tick talk. And then tick talk. Yeah. I mean, it was like the D'Amelio's and a bunch of others. KB lame. And so on. Yeah. Okay. And so it was very power law, right. As you, as a lot of things are, but then to tick talks, like we don't want to be dependent on these 10, cause then they can go and negotiate. So they deliberately then turn the dial down on those 10 and turn the dial up on a bunch of new people. So they, what they want is 10,000 people with a million followers, not 10 people. Right. Because it's, it's, this is too concentrated. This is Porter's five forces. This is too much supplier power. And, but there, but all the social networks are constantly doing this. They're constantly turning the dials there, you know, there, and by the way, a lot of this is happening now through AI. And it's not some malicious thing. It's just profit maximization. I'm not, I'm not against them doing that. I am. What I am against is when there isn't leverage on the other side as well. Yeah. That's what I'm saying is because there's no leverage on the other side, these guys can't like, look, you know, they can't switch. They can't leave. Like their entire thing is dependent on tick talk. And so there's no, yeah, I'm not like I'm for free market and the company should do what they want. The problem is they're doing what they want with the strongest force in the history of business, namely network effects, giving them unlimited power over their dominion. Right. Right. The network effects, like I'm all for businesses competing, but like, look how web hosts compete. They compete on features, service price, like AWS competes on, in my mind on good, good things. Right. They can, it's like they're fighting Google and other web hosting providers through features and pricing and just all the things. And they still make profits and that's great, but they don't have like AWS doesn't have lock in. Like you're hosting there, your website there because of network effects. Right. And network effects. Just get are just such a powerful lock in force that if you don't have a counterbalance like digital ownership for users, you just end up with these. I think what we have now, these five monopolies who run roughshod over everybody. It is. It's definitely a pain to withdraw from AWS, but it is also something where they know their customers are developers and developers. There's always new dev tools and stuff coming up. So look, they know you can and then therefore they can't talk. They can't fuck with you too much. They're just not going to do it. I mean, that's right. That's right. And they know you'll pay some premium for convenience, but it's just it's very different to have your moat, you know, Warren Buffett style moat be scale and quality and scope and all the kind of traditional moats. Network effects are just a very are just in some ways an OP moat. Right. Right. Like it's just it's just really, really powerful. And the only really counterbalance I think credible counterbalance is to let users like to your point have new verbs and switch with new words. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which would be a key verb there. So, you know, towards that end, right? Like basically now let's say they have the own of rewrite own. They've got their private keys locally. Right. That is interesting because own can be individual ownership. It can be developer ownership. It's community ownership. It's algorithmic ownership like an algorithm can now own property. Even a robot like a physical robot, can you know have ownership? talk about that. You touch on each of these things in the book, right? I have a section about machine-to-machine payments as an example. Right. That's one thing. But basically, you have the community ownership where a crowd can buy things. We just talked about how an individual who's dealing with a corporation now gets microeconomic leverage. They have better negotiating power. But you can now actually have a group of people that all move at once, for example, right? Or you can have an algorithm. Go ahead. Well, yeah. I guess another way to frame it, maybe, is there's – like, the way I like to think of it is when new computing platforms come along, and I think of a blockchain as a computer, and I know that's a slightly controversial statement. I just – when I say computer, I mean Ledger to me is not strong enough because Ledger to me implies it's the hard drive where it's also the processor. It's both the nouns and the verbs, right? So that's why I like to use computer because it's even stronger than Ledger, right? Because you can – modern blockchains like Ethereum are fully semi-termine complete programmable computers. It's actually – Yeah. So what you're saying is – I mean, in fact, just to complement what you're saying is I think that they're like the third operating system because you had the operating system, you had the web browser, which is the OS of Web 2, and the blockchain is the OS of Web 3 because you have a developer environment, you have a compiler, and you have all that stuff, right? When you have new computing movements come along, like when you sort of look at it historically, and I go through some of this in the book, is you generally have what I call skeuomorphic and native applications. And so skeuomorphic applications are basically taking older existing applications and layering on – Yeah. – kind of new functionality, new Web 3 functionality. So it's a little bit what you were describing earlier. Like you take WhatsApp, you take messaging, but now you kind of reimagine it with once the users and developers and creators can have digital ownership, right? There's a second category of – and so like YouTube is a good example kind of going back to 2005. There was a whole wave of video startups then, venture-backed video startups in 2005 because that was a moment where broadband had sort of crossed over narrowband in terms of penetration and everyone realized video was going to be a thing, right? Yeah. And there were broadly two approaches to doing video. One was take CBS and NFL and all these existing TV content and kind of port it over to the internet. And the other was just put up a website and anyone can upload and it's – and basically the bet YouTube was – and that was of course YouTube. But the bet YouTube was making in some sense was crazy because it was like there is no one doing that today. There are no video creators on the internet today. The closest analog was like America's Funniest Home Videos or something. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. YouTube at the time, it's a little bit like – I remember the Stripe founders said this too when they were raising money initially. Who are your customers? They said they don't exist yet, right? Like who are your – who's going to put video on there? They don't exist yet, right? But that – so YouTube was the native video, right? And the ones that were doing like the CBS content like Brightcove and stuff, that was a skeuomorphic video, right? So I think it's similar with blockchains. And by the way, I think skeuomorphic and native are both valuable. So I'm not saying one is better. There are two different turns in the idea maze, right? Like Netflix and first-party content also did really well and it just turned out to be a different branch. Yeah. And so both can succeed, right? And so I think that there will be sort of Web3 social networks, Web3 games, but then there will also be these crazy new things that just couldn't exist before. And like one example I like is what I call collaborative story – people call collaborative storytelling. And so this is an idea that a crowd of people kind of Wikipedia style can get together and essentially do what Hollywood does today. They can get together and a thousand people all over the world. Get together and create the next Marvels, the next Harry Potter, the next Star Wars, right? So today, you know, you have these really excited fan communities if you go read Reddit and things, but they're just sort of passive observers. And they're like, wouldn't it be cool if Obi-Wan did this or whatever they say, right? And, you know, but they're really enthusiastic. Now imagine if you actually had these fan-created communities and then those, those, those creators were rewarded with tokens for their kind of proportional to their contribution. And then what's really cool is that they would then, you know, if you think about the power of meme coins like Dogecoin, you have these armies of people out evangelizing these coins. In the case of Dogecoin, it's kind of this silly, meaningless coin. But now imagine it's sort of, you know, this Harry Potter universe, right? And they're out evangelizing it. And that, that's a very important thing because it, you know, why is Hollywood stuck in a rut where there's – everything's a sequel? It's stuck in a rut because it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to, to go market a new narrative world. So what if these communities, it both sort of opens the gateway, allows anyone to become, you know, it sort of globalizes – And decentralizes Hollywood. And solves the marketing problem of Hollywood because you have these organic communities who can just go out and evangelize it, right? I love that idea. It's a really cool idea. We made a few investments. It's still early and like no, no one has proven it yet. But like that's the kind of thing where you just have like a brand new behavior that to your point, like it's sort of a crowd coming together. And by the way, could some of those participants be machines? Like why not? Like I, my view is if a machine is – like in all of these systems, there's no reason a machine shouldn't be a machine. There's no reason a machine shouldn't be an AI, shouldn't be part of that system. And you know, if the AI is, you know, you already have this on Wikipedia to some extent. You have bots that go fix commas and stuff like this. You know, like, so like it's like if you look at a typical page on Wikipedia, like, you know, on the planet Jupiter or something, there'll be some couple of astronomy aficionados who are editing it. But then there's like the comma guy and the, you know, and the, the split infinitive guy and like there's a whole bunch of other people coming and messing with it. And I think it's similar to like, here with storytelling, you may have AIs that come in and say, I think that's a, you know, you should add a little more flourish to the third act or I don't know what they're going to do. Right. And if they're doing a good job, they should get paid. And then you can have like, you know, some programmer somewhere who's like, you know, prompt engineering and AI who's then participating in some economic system and, you know, and like, why not? Right. So it's funny because I, I have thought about this a lot from a slightly different perspective. So in this sense, I think it's like, I'm kind of Herzbergism getting, you know, we live in a world now. Which is the class of tasks that you can improve crowdsourcing with, with crypto online. So storytelling is one, there's a, there were something called the it was like the massive Lee math project or something like that, where Terrence Tao posted an unsolved problem and had his comments section, try to go to work on it in math. And they were successful site. And so a lot of it is crowdsource math. I mean, you know, crowd, yeah. The big thing I've been thinking about is something where right now crowdsourcing is low skill activities, like a mechanical Turk. And something I've thought about for many years, and actually, you know, I've done iterations on this theme. Imagine if, for example, Elon could tweet out a task and limit it to that percentage of his user base that actually was qualified in rocket science and attach 10,000 bucks to it, right? And so that would work if they had a crypto resume and they had like NFTs in there that proved that they had that skill, then it's kind of like, you know, the limit who can reply to this, you could limit it to those people, right? So that's kind of, you know, the version of that here would be, okay, here's all these people who are actually good writers, and you source these 30, you know, in the right design, right? Users would have what you're describing, like they'd have sort of public NFT credentials. They'd probably also have private data that they could then choose to share with select providers, right? So all of these things would be, you know, you basically have this massive unlock of new applications, you could have a lot of new applications that you could have, you know, you could have a lot of new applications that you could create, like the one you're describing where the Elon is, you know, selectively crowdsourcing. And maybe Elon isn't the guy, maybe he's not the guy, but it might be something like that, where now you can, because crypto helps in other way, you can give a little small payments and all the kind of stuff. I like to call it the missing primitives. Like I think of it as one of the, you know, it's wonderful that the internet was sort of created in this bottoms up, open source way. But as one of the byproducts of that, they were just kind of missing pieces. And like payments was one of the missing piece, like user control, digital identity, reputation systems were missing. And so, and what happens is if you don't step in and fill it with a public good, it gets filled with a private good. So like in some ways, Google, there was a gap, which was, we needed a reputation system for websites and it wasn't part of the open internet. And so Google made that a private good and made, you know, a boatload of money off of that. And the same thing is going to happen with like all these systems, like proof of person, like captures don't work anymore. How are you going to prove you're a person? How are you going to prove, like, you know, looking at the text of a email does not going to work anymore for detecting if something is phishing, listening to an audio, you know, that it sounds like your voice, that's not going to work anymore, right? That all of this stuff is going away very quickly. And so in that world, like, how do we fill the gap where we prove things are real? And I think that's, look, I think the gap, my view is the gap's going to get filled. It's either going to get filled by like a company like Facebook, or it's going to be filled by a public good, like a shared community service that's part of the open internet. And that's like kind of one of the key questions right now is, is we need to build those things now before they get subsumed by these companies. Because it will get filled in some way. Like it's not, the world's not going to let it be the case that you just, you know, get phished all the time, right? So. I think that's right. And I think basically, the crypto version is going to be a lot more secure. You know, there's a chapter five that you wrote, there's a lot that you're excited about in the next 10 years of crypto. And it's now crypto is like a primitive that we can use for things. It's global state. It's signed messages, it's micropayments, it's all of this kind of stuff. What do you think is exciting to you? What kinds of things? Yeah. And just if I can make one note about the book for the listeners is that I wrote the book, although it's a book, and it's meant to be read beginning to end, it's all chunked into three to four page chunks. And so what Balaji is describing is you can jump around. Like if you're an expert, you can jump to like the last part five is seven application area, that I picked just to like, kind of because a lot of the critics will say, well, like, what problems does blockchain solve? Right? Now, of course, a blockchain is a better way to build networks. It's like a building material. It's more like, it's like asking what problem does steel solve? Like steel doesn't really solve a problem. It just makes it so you can build better buildings and unlocks new possibilities. It's just like a better building material. But, you know, I wanted to go really specific into some areas. So I talk about social networking, because it's just such a big, important category. I talk about finance, DeFi, Bitcoin, payments, I talk about the thing I just described, the collaborative storytelling, I talk about AI, well, specifically around AI, like, it's a little bit we were talking about paywalls. But, you know, the internet has operated on this implicit economic covenant between distribution, namely search engines and social networks and content, like websites, you know, media sites, etc. Right? And the implicit covenant is that like Google, the website says, Google, you're allowed to index me, you're allowed to use a snippet on your page, but you got to send me some traffic back, right? You know, like, like, I was on the board of Stack Overflow. And like, one of the biggest fears you have as a content site is that you get one box, right? And so one boxing is when Google takes your content and just shows it without linking back, because suddenly your traffic drops off overnight. And so, you know, in the world of AI, you're going to have, it's, you're going to have these systems that you just say, tell me 10 restaurants to go to in New York, and it just gives you the answer and doesn't link. And that's how a lot of systems work today. And even if they do link, why would you click through? Because you get the answer. And so what's the new economic? Covenant in that world. And that's, that's one chapter of like, how do we in this? How do we rethink business models for media, creative people, anyone putting content on the internet in a world where you have infinite content generation and distribute search systems that just give you the answer, right? And so, you know, that that needs to be rethought. I talk about sort of metaverse and video games. Metaverse is one of these, you know, kind of jargony words. Yeah, but you know what, it's real. I mean, like, that's a funny thing. Both crypto and the metaverse were kind of in the trough. When you started work on this, and now with Vision Pro and Bitcoin ETF, just around the time of this. I think metaverse, I mean, whether you call it metaverse, Apple's calling it spatial computing. Of course, it's real. It's like, yeah, yeah, all this time online. Of course it is. No, no, it's very real. And look, it's also like, there's sort of two ways to look at it. There's the extreme thing of like, Apple's, you know, Vision Pro. And then there's sort of this other thing, which is this gradual, immersive, greater, greater immersion of the, of virtual experiences. So games, the graphics are getting better and better, people are spending more and more time, they're becoming more social, the worlds are becoming more persistent. It's becoming more like real life. And there's a question of like, in that world where most experiences 20 years from now, I think it's pretty credible to think a lot of internet experiences are 3D, three dimensional experiences. It doesn't mean you always have a headset on, but they're in 3D worlds. How is that 3D spatial world organized? Is it organized as like social networks today, where five companies control everything? Or is it more like the open web, where it's like a bunch of, you know, little areas? That are all linked together in an open system. And anyone can set up a storefront or, you know, content site or make a micro game or whatever it might be. And I think that's a critical question. And, you know, it's interesting, I have a, I talk about it, because Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic and Fortnite, has a great podcast, I cite the podcast, it's in my end notes, on like how to have an open metaverse, right? And he's, you know, he's using a lot of kind of web protocols and other things. And he actually is pro blockchain, which is somewhat unusual for the games folks, which is nice. But like, you know, how would we build, I think now would be the time we if we open technology, internet people want this to happen, now is the time to start thinking about these standards and protocols and things, because it's gonna, the way tech works is like, you know, Hemingway, how'd you go bankrupt gradually, then suddenly, like, yep, this is how these things are going to work, it's going to be like, oh, gradually, the metaverse, it seems bigger. And then one day, boom, it's like happening. And we better be ready with the right standards and protocols, if we want to see these, these new worlds be open. Or, you know, be open systems, a la the web and not closed systems, a la web two. That's actually... So there's a whole bunch of, you know, like, I just have one chapter on finance, but that's its own, you know, DeFi and everything. It's its own huge topic. So I think that the broader implications are profound. I tried to keep the book manageable and readable. Well, it's good that you covered, I mean, there's obviously a lot of folks who have, I shouldn't say written, there's a lot of folks, they haven't written book length treatments, but there's a lot of coverage of the financial aspects of crypto. So I feel like it's good that you got into the technological aspects and, you know, kind of like me getting into the political aspects or whatever, kind of a different lens, you know. Awesome. All right. So book comes out January 30th. Yeah, January 30th. Yep. Anything, any Easter eggs? There's the NFT thing, right? The cover of the book. The NFT thing. And I actually have a, I won't just sell the whole thing, but there's, I'm doing some AI stuff around the book too, that I'll be releasing. It'll be some, some interesting tools. I hope people, you know, if they have a chance to read it, I might, intention is to, to any good faith counter arguments, which I'm sure there are good faith, smart counter arguments. My intention is to, you know, kind of in long form respond to any of those. So I would love to see, I'm sure I'm not right about everything. I think I'm, I believe I'm mostly right, but, but I'm sure that I'm sure there are things I overlooked or, or, you know, critiques that can be made. And I'm looking forward to that, you know, having that discussion. Look, I think part of why I wrote a book is I just think all the dunking on Twitter, people dunk on me, it's ad hominem, it's appeals to authority. Like I just would like to see, I don't know. I just would like to see the tech discussion elevated. Sure. And it, whether it's, you know, this topic or AI or whatever it might be. And just have like, these are, and this, actually, we didn't really talk about the policy side, but if I could just briefly, the, I think part of it is, you know, like the, to me, the right way to do, to think about tech policy, whether it's AI or crypto is let's go examine what is this thing? Like, what is a blockchain and what is it useful for? And like any technology, you know, you can use a hammer to destroy or to build. Nitrogen can be explosives or it can be fertilizer, right? Like nuclear can be, you know, free, clean energy, or it can be bombs. AI can create bioweapons or it can enable a new golden age of creativity, right? Crypto can empower users and, you know, shift power of the internet back to the edges, or it can be a gambling casino like FTX, right? And so a smart policy view, I think, instead of having the Twitter dunks and sort of everybody taking a side and this sort of fight and, oh, they're on the other side, let's fight them. Why don't we go and really look at the technology, look at the, what is the actual kind of good case? And that's what I try to write on. I try to make the best case of like, what is the productive positive use cases for blockchain, right? We've seen the negative use cases. Like we've read, we read about them in the news all the time. And now here's the positive side. And my view, the right policy approach would be then to say, how do we design a policy that maximizes the good and minimizes the bad, as opposed to, what's happening now, which I think is very reactive and very emotionally charged, right? People are like, they're on the other team. Crypto people are on the other team. Therefore, let's dunk on them. Let's hate them. Let's ban them. Let's take laws from a hundred years ago and use them to take them to court, right? And is that like, is that what a smart country that wants to get ahead of the future and design a policy should be doing, or should it be doing what I would describe as more proactive? And AI, look, there's these very interesting questions of how do you balance? Obviously, we want AI to, you know, create a policy that's going to progress, but we also want, you know, creators to get paid. That's going to probably play out in the next five to 10 years over like the New York Times open AI lawsuit. It's going to be a series of lawsuits. You're going to have people reading laws from 200 years ago. And like, is there something implicit in 200 years ago's laws about how you should treat copyright and AI? Like, I don't think so. Like, I mean, I'm sure you'll have some judgment or ruling, but in the end, is that the right way to do policy? Shouldn't we be saying what's good about this and how do we maximize the good and minimize the bad? Like, and let's have a policy that's going to be a series of lawsuits. Have like an intelligent, honest conversation. Like, that's what I'm trying to begin. And I'm trying to commit myself going forward to do that and not dunk and not, right? And so I just say to your listeners, if anyone reads it and wants to respond, like I'll be active on, you know, Twitter and things and blogging. And I would love to have a discussion about this topic. Awesome. And Chris is actually quite responsive and smart and interesting on Twitter. X, X, sorry, X, X.com, right? Yeah. But- Hard to switch. Hard to switch the names. Yeah. I will definitely get, and I will recommend read right on to anybody who is just trying to figure out what this thing is in 2024. And that's actually a lot of people. So it's an amazing thing to just kind of checkpoint and say, here's where the whole space is as of right now. It's a great thing to give out to all your employees or something like that. Awesome. Thank you, Balaji. Thank you.