Read Write Own: A New Era of the Internet with Chris Dixon

Transcript

I got into the internet for its open Democratic kind of anyone could go and build a website I think that's a serious risk at this point I think blockchains are the only kind of credible way to turn that I go through that in detail in the book that's what the book's about that is what kind of motivates me at this [Music] point welcome to the web 3 with a16z crypto podcast I'm Robert hack and editor here at a6z crypto and I'm here with Chris Dixon founding partner of a6z crypto and author of the new book read write own building the next era of the internet so I had the privilege of editing you Chris throughout the book writing process um and I'm thrilled now to have

the opportunity to talk to you about sort of what went on behind the scenes and to talk about the big themes of the book uh the challenges that you experienced and also to Branch out and talk about the industry at large as well as what we can expect from the crypto industry in the future yeah um yeah I I see this book as a culmination of sort of my entire career um so you know having worked on the internet I started my first internet company in 2004 so 20 years ago now and before that was was an programmer and working on the internet so in some way involved not as sort of deeply involved um and and really spent you know saw myself tried to be at least sort of a

student of the internet and understanding kind of un how it really works in the sense of not not just how the technology works but how it works from a the perspective of economics and governance and sort of power and how sort of how you gain power on the internet and how that power is used um and specifically what that means on the Internet is understanding networks um by the way um I'll just say I remember when you came up with the timeline or originally you had a timeline you had an outline of when you wanted to write this book and uh I didn't tell you this at the time but I was super skeptical I did not think that you were going to uh hit the deadlines that you were setting for yourself it

was very aggressive um but you cleared your calendar and you pumped out a first draft in like a matter of a couple months which I was stunned by in retrospect the calendar I agree with you it was naive it only worked because one I had a lot of help from people like you and others on the team um and then two went back and just spent a lot more time than I expected honestly and and had this whole like I don't know get into it but like basically got on this schedule of like you know work getting up really early for long periods of time and working you know for four hour chunks every morning and just you know a whole bunch of other kinds of things to get it done this book is the best possible I think or very close to

it condensation of what I learned over 20 years right so you take all that 20 years all all that stuff and like all those meetings and the thousands of I can't God how many thousands of meetings and this and that and all the other stuff and of course there's lots of other details and everything else and you know I and probably I did actually cut out like 200 pages of material and could write another book if people are interested in another book but but you know so not to say this but but really the the the key parts are distilled and then organized in a way that's hopefully meant to maximize the ability to sort of trans for that learning to somebody else and when when you realize that you're like Jesus how could I be spending my time as someone interested in the world

do in any better way than benefiting from that Knowledge from other people right so that sort of motivated me to you know I'm sort of like wow this is just I still think books to me you as much as I'm interested in technology and the internet and everything else I think my books are still I think maybe the greatest technology the idea that you can wow coming from a tech investor the fact that you can stare at squiggles on a page and have essentially a hallucinatory experience so the fact that you can do all that that you can commune with people that have been dead for a thousand years you know in a very intimate way and like get into their head and um I don't know so it's interesting also by the way as a side

note the books have been completely Mo almost completely unaffected by the internet the book industry um for better and For Worse probably yeah I mean I would say also that it's a little I mean it's for the most part that's good like it hasn't been hurt the way that a lot of um you know a lot of other Industries have and hasn't had to go and do some kind of crazy uh minations and other things and you know um and for the most part is a pretty healthy business on the flip side of that when you actually look at the book sales figures which I hadn't really looked at until I wrote a book it's shockingly small Rel I mean like the bestselling those starts if you take out Romance novels and things like this like the bestselling kind of non-fiction

Ideas Book which I'd put this in this that category I believe last year had sold like 400,000 copies which is like a a niche website or something you know user based you've already kind of answered one of my big questions I mean I wanted to back up here and ask like why write a book at all like you're a you're a tech guy yeah know it's a good qu no and I got this question too from a lot of my tech friends well why write a book and I go to a traditional publisher um you know why I just write blog post look I I used to blog I blog for years years I wrote many hundreds of blog posts and I'm a big fan of that format so I think I do think books are special um and I would say in a couple of ways

um so even though what I just said that sort of the bestselling books you know sort of in this style maybe sell a few hundred thousand copies um I think they have an ability to to for the ideas to penetrate uh culture at large in a in a very powerful way that that is much harder for blogs and podcasts to do um and so one way to think of a book is it's really sort of a physical delivery mechanism for what really is a set of memes that if successful will penetrate the culture take Concepts like Black Swan like I think that's now or Tipping Point or something like these are now I think kind of mainstream Concepts that that um and I think that the number of

people that know those Concepts and think about them is far greater than the number of people that actually read those books and to end right I think that's probably true and I think so I think if it's sort of like with a book there's this thing where like maybe 1% read it all the if it's successful 1% read it all the way through you know five or 10% I'm making these numbers up but I I don't because I don't think anyone has the actual data but 5 to 10% um maybe read the intro skim around and then 90% or maybe 95 or 98% who who maybe understand the ideas of it didn't actually read the book um maybe they bought it they felt compelled to or something but they didn't read it um and so books do have this ability to um for variety of reasons I think partly

historical cultural you know I don't know there's a bunch of reasons um have this ability to penetrate more broadly number one so sort of the breadth I would say and then there's depth which is you know you you meet people who and I could say this for myself like that that where a book is really you know I if you saw um spider verse two the new spiderverse I loved the first one I have yet to see they're both I think they're both great they're like the best superhero movies um agree the uh spiderverse 2 think was good but there was just this concept of like Canon event so Canon event with these moments in people's lives that no matter how many times the Multiverse forked those those were like yeah they couldn't change so like Spider-Man getting bitten by a spider I think was a Canon event or

whatever and so it's kind of this cool I think it then became like a meme on Tik Tok of like what were your Canon events you know the things that can't fork and the Multiverse cuz it it you know it's like because then they wouldn't be you and that's part of your essential nature um and so I think books have a way to create Canon events in the sense of like you hear people say and I've had this experience where like this book really changed the way I think about something this book changed my career this book changed my life even um yeah and it for I don't know it's not that you know it's weird because it's not like something that happens to be written on the internet couldn't do that and and I have heard people like when I used to blog people like say like

certain blog posts really important to them um but but again it goes to this kind of quality of I think this I think it's something about the gravitas of a book the length of a book the fact that it's sort of the right length to really kind of fully present a worldview right because you're like a blog post you can present an idea right a book you can present a worldview like this book is a worldview like I not I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with it but it it's it's a worldview formed over 20 years that's a self-consistent I'm sure it's a self-consistent worldview like it's a fully worked out system it's a fully worked out system that's consistent with the facts in the world and everything else and sort of you think about it like

it's a full kind of theory I think it's a theory that a lot of people will find novel because it's a different way to look at things than I think that if you just sort of are a casual internet user and haven't sort of seen how the sausage is made behind the scenes um but so a book I think a book is special in that it can present a worldview I I I think it's very hard and by the way I I say this also like I think there's you know there's a sort of meme out there in the tech world that like why write a book when you can write a blog post why I write a blog post when you can write a tweet and I generally agree with that unless I've been you know active on Twitter forever and blog for years and just generally

felt like hey why would I write a book about this topic when this case I really felt strongly that you cannot this is a worldview that that fundamentally and I've because I've been out there for years trying to describe this worldview on podcasts and blog posts and explain why I'm spending all of my time working on blockchains and everything else and every time I do it I have this feeling of like okay I managed to transmit this piece of information but then there were all these questions about these other things and I finally realized the problem was that um you know that that you couldn't you can't you couldn't take a piece of it without the kind of whole thing right you just kind of needed the whole worldview it's interesting to hear

you describe it as a worldview because you know people might think about a book about crypto or blockchains as a tech book as a business book but really this book is it's kind of a philosophy book yeah I'd say I mean by the way when I say worldview it's not a worldview of like you know how to eat and live your life it's a worldview of the internet like it's a it's a complete Theory that's a different kind of perspective than most people I think will have of like how of the of the internet which I think is now become which I argue in the book has become in some way is kind of This Global mind right this this you know if you sort of think of it as a mindbody dualism of like this is the digital mind this is This Global hive

mind that we all kind of share and plug into and that influences the way we think about things and ideas and our politics and our economics um and so it's it's a distinct worldview of the internet I don't want to overstate it it's not a like full light philosophy or something sure but but I do think it's a distinct uh worldview view of that yeah um and I think that could only sorry I think it could only have been presented in a book format but I finally came to the realization so I wanted to present that worldview and and look and there's specific things happening in the world so for example there's a big policy debate about you know should tokens be illegal and all these other kinds of things and I felt that it was important I obviously have strong views on this um and I felt like the worldview

that I have that sees a very positive vision for how blockchains and tokens and these other Technologies can be used um was not widely understood and not properly represented um in that discussion and so I felt very strongly that I wanted to present that and I wanted to do it through um channel that you know would would be accessible and potentially reach a a broad sort of mainstream audience this is very much a book written for like someone suggested to me that you know you should write for quote smart high school students this is a book written for smart high school students there's no um knowledge presupposed outside of you know just sort of

U just sort of basic common knowledge and willingness to sort of be curious and interested and I right it goes from first principles you don't have to bring prior knowledge to I pretty studiously avoid technical words I mean I have a few but I Define them um it it tries as much as possible to kind of present it in a narrative form that goes through the history of the internet um and how these things developed and give a lot of examples you know they 36 pages of endnotes um Chris I I will say one of your superpowers is kind of this ability to take a deep concept some hard idea and to distill it into a catchy kind of sticky phrase you've got so many of these that you've blogged about forever

you know come for the tool stay for the network um the next big thing starts out looking like a toy can't be evil you have all these catchy phrases and I wonder how do you how do you what is your process for coming up with these sorts of taglines and how do you know when you have a winner yeah so I think the tag I think it's less the tagline it's more like I think what I do what I try to do I think what I'm good at um is and this has just always been my skill and I there's many things I'm not good at and there's one thing I am good at I think which is um taking lots of information um and sort of trying to distill it into simple ideas um and it takes me a lot of time

like so what I would do often is I would get stuck and when was writing the book and I would spend literally like three hours sometimes exercising and other things like how can I simplify simplify simplify like what are the core kind of basic principles here um and then the catchy phrases are just sort of end up being like come for the tool State for the network so that idea I'll just explain it is is that there's a the the prize when you're building in Internet service is always the network like the the internet is part of the thes of the book The Internet's a network of networks right so sort of this base layer physical sort of network of the internet and then and what we do on top of it is we build networks and the original networks were worldwide web and email and then there was later on

Facebook and Twitter and YouTube these are all networks and networks are what um create value business value profits um on the internet because networks are very defensible they have Moes that plor Buffett would say right which is that once you build a large audience like on YouTube it's very hard from the video site no matter how much technology they have and they could have the most beautiful thing in the world and fastest and everything else it doesn't matter because the the network the audience is somewhere else so come for the tool State for the network is I started to observe you know a couple years ago um or many years ago I guess that so every every entrepreneur including me were you know when you're internet entrepreneur you try to create a network it's very hard to create a network because the

network cut the network effects cut both ways so Network effect is this idea that as a network grows it becomes more valuable but on the so let's take a dating you're building a dating network you're building something like Tinder when you get to the point where there's tons and tons of people on there who want to date each other it's very it's then it's you have a very defensible business it's very hard for somebody to compete but when you start it off and there's like three people on it no one wants to come there right and so there's this there's this age-old kind of dilemma for among in entrepreneurs of like how do you get over that so-called bootstrap phase like my my partner Andrew Chen wrote a book about it the cold start problem it's like this sort of cold star problem bootstrap problem

like people call different things um it's like the chicken and the Egg yeah it's chicken and egg like how do you get over that and so you know what I would see is more and more people um so then so then so that's a network and then there's also sort of what I call tools which are and I have a section of the book on this sort of multiplayer single player networks are multiplayer meaning like they only really matter when there's many people using that tool tools are generally single player so like you know a word processor or a spreadsheet or something yeah you can share it with somebody but you can get a lot of value out of it just using it by yourself um and so so the nice thing about tools then right is that they um is that they uh you don't have that

Network effect problem as an entrepreneur and so like the case study I use in the book is YouTube YouTube did the strategy come for the tool State for the network which is they started off 2005 originally they were a dating site they pivoted to being a video site and they basically their their pitch was um they didn't have a network they didn't have an audience no one went to the YouTube site so their pitch was Hey and and in fact what it was going on at the time was everyone had their own websites so like I have my website c.org and then they would have their own audience and then they would want to put video there so what YouTube did they said hey you can come to our site upload the video it's all free we'll subsidize it and then you can take this little piece of

HTML and embed it in your site and basically they acted as a tool you didn't need the big audience on YouTube to have that be valuable and people started doing that and became very popular they had a very nice tool like it was very seamless and they paid for the bandwidth subsidies are a huge part of how these kind of the current networks were built I talked about in the book um that's why they had to all raise billions of dollars as they were subsidizing all the early users um and so um so they built that up and then at some point they had you know millions of websites using it and they said hey by the way whenever you put it on your site we'll put on our site too because you might get some more viewers and people were like great and then at some point

they had this website with tons of great videos and people were just like hey why am I going to Chris's site when I can just go to YouTube right and that's how YouTube started maybe I'm interpreting this too uh liberally but I actually see this book as a tool like a come for the tool stay for the network where this book is the tool and the network is sort of this Computing movement that's going on and uh recruiting new people to that idea to that software I think that's I think that's that's one way to look at it yeah I mean the book is a standalone thing that you can read and understand and I think if somebody finds it interesting then the the next thing afterwards would be to kind of join there's all sorts of communities that are interested in these topics and that

would be the next way to get involved in startups and in life timing is everything tell me about the timing of this book why why this book why right now yeah um good question so um so I've been sort you know I've been in this space for basically 10 years I mean I led our investment in coinbase in 2013 now I wasn't exclusively I was doing other things I had some AI Investments some you know uh drones some other kind of random things so I was doing kind of I was doing kind of Frontier investing which means sort of just new kind of emerging areas um but then kind of I guess five or five years ago or so um switched to

fulltime on blockchains and crypto um and so and and through that time have there's been all sorts of ups and downs you know sort of um many cycles many EP you know things that positive and negative um developments um yeah we had a pretty I would say the probably the roughest period was whatever like sort of FTX in 2022 the most recent downturn yeah and I think it was frustrating because there was a lot of really interesting stuff getting built I talk about in the book this distinction between the computer and the casino I call it which are sort of two cultures that have have coalesced around blockchains and the computer is what I see myself as part of and the book is

about which is people trying to use the Technologies for these productive new use cases and the the casino is people who take I see it as they they co-opt aspects of the technology and use it in ways that that that are that are really focused on gambling and speculation um and to me you know FTX was one example of that and obviously they were worse even worse than that they committed fraud and and it wasn't simply just that they promoted kind of gambling they did more than that but there were a lot of others who just kind of promoted speculation and that still happens today um and I and I see it as that I see it as a struggle between those two movements because the the casino stuff I think

really hurts I mean one is I think it hurts consumers um people that you know obviously people like who had money at FTX and things like that who lost money um I think one of the we could talk about this later maybe one of the really frustrating things that's happened on the policy side is I would argue that a lot of the actions of policy makers has actually encouraged the casino and discouraged the computer and so it really kind of helped the Bad actors and hurt the good actors how say more about that well so just a simple example so like I talk about the book there's something called meme coins so meme coins I like Dogecoin and they're basically tokens that are created that have explicitly no use case um and they're kind of to me the emblem I'm not

look I'm not anti- Dogecoin I mean if you know people maybe at some point like technology develops unexpected ways and maybe Dogecoin will develop in ways that quite interesting um but this idea of generally just like a token which has does nothing has no purpose except to be traded and bet on I I'm not a fan of that concept um the um one of the now one of the great ironies of the current appro policymaker approach is that Meme coins are perfectly legal but if you take a meme coin and you decide to add utility to it by working on it you then are at risk of tripping up Securities laws right and so so as long as is it's completely worthless and doesn't have

there's no ban on there's nothing speculation is not illegal creating tokens is not illegal creating tokens and then working on them um and trying to make them better is what is at what and you know and the Nuance there's a lot of nuance there but that's sort of the the disputed territory does seem a bit backward I mean look there's a reason behind it which is like Securities laws are built to avoid asymmetric information and so the you know those coins there's no asymmetric information it's just meaning I know something about this asset that I'm going to benefit from it and that's right so Dogecoin there's no asmet it's just it's everyone knows it's just a totally meaningless useless coin and it's just like you're just betting on a number going up or

down and so there's no asymmetric everyone's it's a Level Playing Field it may be a dumb playing field but it's a level dumb playing field um the uh whereas once you start having like a team behind something building something then that team might have asymmetric information which is why all of the you know the the guidance from the SEC you know in the sort of 20 I think it was 2019 when the when there was various Guidance the last time they gave guidance since then they have not given guidance they've only done enforcement actions um the guidance was you know you need to be sufficiently decentralized meaning it's okay to have people working on making something better like for example ethereum there's a bunch of teams making it better but there's not one team doing it there's a whole bunch of teams and so the information is sufficiently

decentralized such that there is is still a Level Playing Field so there are ways to build things um to have tokens where you build blockchains um in a way that is decentralized such that it's not a security it's just that sort of a very complex Nuance thing and it's very simple to go and create something that is unambiguously uh clear from that and so like I think we'll like if you go to like sort of a bunch of these other websites who aren't really crypto companies like let's say Robin Hood they have they removed a lot of very useful blockchain tokens but they support Dogecoin right and that you'll see the way things are headed we'll probably see a Dogecoin ETF at some point right

because it's legal some big Ideas books has this have this problem where they kind of just come across as scattered blog posts but uh what's nice about this is it actually has a through line well it's interesting too because like I feel like the best part in a lot of ways is the end of the book which I struggled with because the end of the book is really the kind of the payoff because it's all the work you do before and it's like here's like so the end the last part there's seven sections that are like seven really interesting what I think are really interesting um uh you know application areas of sort of how you apply blockchains to um to finance to artificial intelligence to games and kind of metaverse to uh media and storytelling and a bunch of other areas um but and as like sort

of you know like hey so we think about how you write this don't you want to have sort of the the juiciest Parts at the beginning but the reality is you really need the background to kind of have the payoff because you have to do the work and you have to understand like what are the alternative ways that these things could be built and that sort of goes through a little bit of the history how we got there and then I do a deep dive people always ask like what problems do blockchain solve so I kind of do a deep dive and like why blockchains are a better way to build networks um than these other methods and and then very specifically go through the benefits the economic benefits the governance benefits the software development benefits people use words like decentralization I don't use that

word that much but I mean but it's about decentralization and by the way some of this is affected by like talking to policy makers for example I remember one in particular I was talking to last year uh who said you know I believe a bunch of the other stuff you're saying Chris but I don't think you can really have um built software without a CEO and I was like well you know and then I started going and talking about how 95 to 99% of the software in the world is open source software which has no CEO Linux is by far the most successful operating system and that was a really I think a really good conversation and I think the person I was speaking to found that eye opening I think it's surprising for example that most of the world doesn't know that

that's how most software is built without a CEO that the sort of collaborative Bottoms Up way to build software so there's stuff about that as an example I feel like the open source software Movement by the way is such a perfect kind of uh like precedent for what's happening in crypto right now no crypto isn't very much is much I think in a lot of ways the cultural and intellectual air to the open source software movement I mean open source software continues or it's you know it's sort of a fork or parallel path and specifically open source software is about keeping the software layer open blockchains are about keeping the service layer open I I go through this in the book what what basically happened in in the last um so 20 years or so right is that much of the software

business became commoditized through open source software Ware so it no longer became a good business for example to sell um web server software or operating systems because that you could get great ones for free and so a lot of these companies including Microsoft now sort of fashion themselves the services companies um um and so Services Microsoft who invented the software business that's right that's right so services are software that's live and running and has storing information and sort of instantiated and active um and one of the one of the ways to view blockchains is essentially it's it's taking a lot of the ideas of Open Source software and uh elevating it to the layer of services so a blockchain is

sort of one way to think of it is an Open Source service you know and so um something like AUM right ethereum is this computer in the sky that anyone can access um nobody owns it um it's running all the time it has its own internal economic model that keeps it running that keeps you know because to run software you have to host software and pay for bandwidth and things so you need an economic model to have self- sustaining open services and so ethereum is this sort of you know self-funding it's not self funding you pay to access it and there's so users and developers pay to access it and then that money gets flowed back into the hosting cost and things like that it's very much like the Mainframe Computing model time sharing pays you go back in the 60s it's sort of this open source Bottoms Up

collaborative model and got together with mainframes and created this new kind of open community-owned Mainframe is one way to think of something like ethereum um and that lets you then create services on top which inherit those properties right so you can create a game on top of ethereum which inherits it meaning all of those properties I just described being open and Community owned also apply to the thing created on top of ethereum like the game um and that has all these Downstream consequences which go through in the book what do you read I read also I read everything I read fiction non-fiction I try to read um almost anything that has like a four or above on good reads I'll read uh a lot of his recommendations from friends I always have a stack of

books that I'm going to read um so it's all over some of it's like edification being a person who's well read so I try to be Broad and then sometimes I just go deep in certain topics um but my main my main Theory there is um is uh it's in contrast to social media and the internet like sadly um because I think a lot of social media has not and I mean I write about in the book I don't think we're in a great spot on the interet today and for a whole bunch of reasons um but I think that there's a trap you can get into where you're just sort of checking Twitter and other things um and I try very hard not to do that and to I sort of think of it similar to like people who sort of who are into you know

um dieting and different food programs you know so sort of to me books are protein and social media is generally sugar right because I do it sometimes it's a work thing it is important to stay in touch with some things going on right but it's I think it's very very important to have limits around that um I think there's a thing that does to your brain where you sort of get in the cycles and you need to avoid that I found the 50-page rule on books is a great rule because it's pretty doable if you plan your day right you know obviously everyone's schedules are different and and demands on their life are different so I don't want to presume everyone can do that but like you know for me I I sort of make it a priority and then like some days it feels like oh

it's sort of a pain but okay but it's only 50 pages but when that what often happens is I start and it's a good book and I'm like okay um uh you know I'm going to read more um I also have a rule 50 pages by coincidence 50 pages I have to releas 50 pages of a book before I quit the book um that's a good Rule and I I do quit books um and I think it's important to quit books because I think one of the blockers you get into in that reading is is you is you sort of stuck on a book you don't love and don't get through it um so anyways um you also have a habit of reading very like out of sync out of the way that the book is telling you to read it yeah yeah it vary especially with

non-fiction not with Fiction with fiction you have to read it I think in in order um sometimes with non-fiction yeah I think again like if so if you're Northstar with reading is just like the one way to think of it and this is kind of my model is the Northstar kind of metric the Northstar kpi is how much time do you spend reading books like that's what you're trying to optimize as a post to social media TV whatever it might be um and if that's what you're trying to optimize you want to really avoid the blockers right the blockers of things that like you get bored and you stop reading and so you know one way to do that is to just always make sure that what you're doing is interesting and that means sort of this quit a book after 50 pages is okay and then it's

okay to jump around like with a non-fiction book first thing you look at the table of contents you jump and people should deal with my book I hope they do and then you you jump to a few sections um that look most interesting and I hopefully those are well written and you like them and then you're sort of oh wow maybe I should understand the stuff before maybe that's well written and interesting too and you know and and in the best case that leads you down the path of reading the whole book right you mentioned Andrew Chen before in his book the cold start problem now I know he's talked about how he like will lock his phone in a in a crate in like a faraday cage or something so that he doesn't have access to it so he can concentrate do you do anything like that to enable

to carve out that like 50 page period of your oh I definitely I mean I don't do the thing where you lock your phone and thing because I probably would just go figure out a way to get it out I do it but I do definitely uh put down the phone and like I think there's a um I really think it's like this trainable brain response thing this attention span sort of thing that people have now um it's like for me too like I I have that same feeling you put the phone down and you have this urge to you look at your phone but it goes away if you if you push it it goes away it's just like exercise or something like you first sit down Nick I don't know if you have this experience you first down the exercise and the first 10 minutes are probably

the hardest because you're like I'm lazy and I don't feel like doing this right but then once you're into it you're like it often takes life of its own I think it's very similar with these other kinds of habits and so they you so in many ways the initial action is the most important thing and then it becomes s of momentum driven after that but I kind of think of it as like the most important um uh I guess you sort of think of your brain as an llm right it's like I'm a machine learning algorithm right um which you know we probably are um what the most important thing you can do to to kind of feed that and improve it is the inputs right um and so you should be very deliberate about the inputs it's

very hard to you know to have bad inputs and then you know people try all these things I'm going to meditate I'm gonna do this I'm going to do that I'm GNA unwind but like the problem is you put all these bad inputs in like you just you can only do so much to the to the machine if you've got the wrong input so like and I think for I think to me the inputs like intellectually at least in my intellectual life the inputs the good inputs are books and conversations with people like those are the two things where I learn the most I get the most sort of direct primary information very big on primary sources not secondary sources I'm very skeptical of many secondary sources um I always like to go as much as I can to find the The Source um and then sort of get a lot of inputs

and primary sources and make money own determination um I think that you know like I mean I think it's true for everyone and most in any kind of information intellectual profession but particularly in investing like it's very important to which is what I do like it's very important to develop a model of the world um that is both true and hopefully differentiated right because that's what you're doing investing is your you're you're basically um taking that model and applying it to you know to financial investments right um and trying to find things that are undervalued or or avoid things that are overvalued um because somebody because

the world model that most people have is off and yours is better right and so if if you think about that's what you want to do you need to sort of be very cognizant of how you're training that world model and the the thing the easiest thing to control are the inputs right if we're talking about quality inputs do you have a favorite book a favorite author um you know I kind of grew up reading um I spent years and years both like as a kid and then College even after college reading kind of originally computer books like programming and then got into actually sort of via artificial intell what was

called artificial intelligence back then it was very different um got you know got in into a bunch of sort of philosophy books via like Daniel Dennett and Douglas hoffet and a bunch of these sort of in like kind of bridge bridge writers um it's funny Douglas hopter I would probably cite as like the biggest uh intellectual influence on my own like up I mean G leer B is just an incredible book and well it was it was really a book that was to me I it just opened up a door to another world which was like and to me was proper philosophy and philosophy of mind and language and I spent years reading that I've read I I spent years reading like popular I think I've read all the popular sort of science books I I really love like the Steven Johnson books the you know like

the sort of early malcol Gladwell books and then you know I've read all the sort of I don't know physics popular physics books which all that kind of stuff and then eventually um I think after my Popular Science phase when I was young became history so my the thing I always go back to is history I read a lot a lot of history books um and you know all all eras but I'd say my favorite era of History is probably the industrial Victorian era you know the the I think in a lot of ways you could argue that modern civilization was built between 1870 and 1940 if you just were in New York you go look at all the skyscrapers and you know most of them were built in

that era and the bridges and everything else but also you know obviously electricity and airplanes and you know from and cars and just sort of the whole Modern World um and you had this era of sort of these you know of like a hundred sort of Elon musks or something of these kinds of sort of bold entrepreneurs who would build these big physical world projects um and so that that's always an ER I love um and uh I've I spent a lot of time reading of course you know Computer History Tech History um I really like the I think it's under I think an under appreciated area is sort of the origins of computing I read an article article was published in

the Atlantic magazine a couple of years ago on that yeah how Aristotle invented the computer so my sort of thesis was a lot of computing came out of that that that the the true kind of origin of it was intellectually was logic and philosophy a lot of it came from that um that era when you had people like Turing and Claud Shannon and John V noyman and um Kurt gerell and like all of these other kind of thinkers and it was a very small group of people and what was really interesting to me was that um what they were doing I I started off that Essay with this quote from a computer scientist that was like if you'd surveyed the world in 1905 and

tried to find the most useless unpragmatic area in the world it would be formal logic right but then it turned out later on to to to be a lot of the things that ended up leading to um how you know the design of computers Claud Shannon has this amazing paper where um he was the first one to have the Insight that you could basically do a mapping of um of all of formal logic and sort of Boolean logic and everything else onto circuits and that once you did that he had the Insight that once you could map like Andor and all these other things which are of course what you know the most Bas level uh transistor circuits are um once you could do that you could then do math and everything else and he knew that

because people like bur and Russell like Russell Whitehead famously in the prer be of Mathematica had written out you know a thousand pages of how to construct all of mathematics based on simple um and or not sort of Boolean operations so they had built all this machinery for this very esoteric scientific purpose sorry philosophical purpose but then Claude Shannon's Insight was that you could take all that machinery and just kind of move it over adjacently onto electronic circuitry and have computers anyways I I'm going down a rabbit hole but the the point being that I just think there's a lot of really interesting history throughout that whole period and

really kind of going deep and and I really like primary sources because I I find that um like as an example like people often talk about George bull you know we call Boolean because George bull wrote this book called the laws of thought he's of almost always talked about as a mathematician if you go read the book it's not a mathematics book it's a philosophy book I read the book um it's called the laws of thought because he's it's based on his whole thing talking about Aristotle and how he's extending Aristotle um because Aristotle was basically the prior kind of major thing in in philosophy so I find I like I just find this again and again I like the primary sources because I just think it's very different I find to find it's a very different uh view of history and and again it's sort of like

if the goal is both as a human and as a professional to build your world model you know you should be constantly thinking about you know how um um what those inputs are and by the way um why history I mean I think one I'm just interested in history and I think it's important but two um when you're when you're working in areas that are extremely complex system so the internet is this you know five billion people interacting in this very complex way and there's money flowing and culture and politics and power and it's you know it it's it couldn't be more complex um you can sort of try to come up with little principles and things that try to predict what will happen um

looks business as well too like business you know a typical business you're interacting in very complex world with policy and competitors and customers and changing Trends and cultures and you there are certain rules and everything else but I've always found that that that the best guide is history because history is a series of examples of people interacting in very complex adaptive systems and how that played out right and so they give you these very interesting kind of rules of thumb so like talk about history in the book but it's really I'm not actually interested in history per se I'm interested in history in as much as it helps us I'm I mentioned the future and and your friend sep kvar actually he turned me onto this quote from Neil Postman I'm

gonna butcher the exact wording of it but he basically said like history is the best way to learn any subject any discipline you you something like you shouldn't teach history but everything should be taught as history or something like that yeah something like that which is a great quote and I think that's I I agree with you I think it's a sort of a shame too when it's not taught that way right because these things do generally have these fantastic um you know and very interesting sto very and they're very human stories right it's so like I always find the humanity Behind these these stories interesting and all the struggles and I want to ask about the human element um but uh first I I also want to just pose something counter to sort of this idea of the hian days of all these technologists and Pioneers

coming up with this incredible new technology we're living through a period like that right now and I feel like a lot of people uh they kind of look at the past with these you know roled glasses and they don't see that there are weirdos like coming up with awesome stuff you know today oh I think this is I mean like I think that we are probably entering I I and I say weirdos with love and respect yeah like I I think this is one of the I think this is maybe the most exciting period of Technology you know I don't know this in some ways you could argue that the next 20 years is the culmination of all of the developments in computer computers and computer science and everything else over the last you know

80 some years um and it may all be you know between AI of course I think blockchains play a very important role um the stuff Happ you know self-driving cars virtual reality like all of this you have many and then you still have you you have all these new trends you have existing past trends that continue to play out the internet's still early you know 30 years into what will probably be you know one of the most important Technologies you know you know in centuries right um and uh you know the mobile phone is still playing out like people still figuring how to use smartphones and and all the different applications and you know SAS

and fintech and whatever all these different areas of you know databases and so you have sort of all these past movements that are still have have a long way to go and then you have these really powerful new things layering on top um and so I think we're potentially entering yeah and and look within that there's I talk about a distinction in the book I call Inside Out versus outside in technology so Inside Out Technologies are technologies that kind of come from the cathedral they come from Stanford or Microsoft or apple let's say iPhone it's uh you know windows I think AI is very much an inside out technology it's come from you know Google and um universities and you

know places like open AI which were spin outs of those you know of incumbent technology companies and universities and then there's outside in Technologies and now you know the historical classic examples of things like Linux and open source the worldwide web was an outside in technology was kind of this hack together thing of you know open source and collaborative movement I think blockchains are outside in um and so I think there's all right we're entering a period where there's all of these very important things happening all these prior things happening and then there's there's really as has happened historically there's the kind of the inside kind of Cathedral stuff happening that that gets a lot of attention I think what gets less attention and is less understood is the outside kind of outside in stuff and all the kind of weird Fringe things which is

by the way where I've spent most of my career and I think is the most interesting I'm not saying the other stuff is invaluable it's just not what I'm personally kind of want to work on um so yes I think there are sort of wo the acts and uh um you know and and uh lonus tals and and Tim berner's Le all over right now I don't know you know it'll take a while before we we we you know can tell the whole story and understand what it what it all means but but I think there's we you know and there just and just the scope and scale of the internet and technology has increased hundredfold probably the number of people working on it people of

course using it we're talking about these these people these uh these Geniuses who who really wrenched the world into their orbit and changed the way that you know things work um you know with a book like this it's a big Ideas Book and there is a tendency for Big Ideas books to maybe get too abstract so you mentioned the human element how like reading history is so uh poignant because you learn about these experiences of people who lived these past lives that did amazing things how do you how do you keep the human element in this book like people care about people yeah fundamentally so how do you how do you retain that to capture that sort of human interest and make engaging well I tried whenever like a lot of the

structure of the book is kind of I'm not I try not to be overly rigid about this but I do try very hard to um sort of alternate between kind of narrative telling stories that many of which you know I know from having been there been you know at involved in the in at the time um to then sort of um providing kind of more abstract um lessons from those stories right and so I tried very hard to balance that and to really make that as relatable as possible um but look it is it is an Ideas Book I mean it is fundamentally it's not a you know it's not narrative fiction or something like like it's not sort of an adventure story or something

I mean I think but it so it is there are a lot of ideas in there um but there's also a lot of history a lot of stories um you know and a lot of specifics and uh I'll tell you one thing that did it for me like you mentioned a few of your uh the startups that you founded and your experiences with them and how that has kind of tracked the progression of the internet over time um yeah know I so I I was a founder of two companies and the first one was 2004 was called site advisor security company um and but the kind of there I mean the really really important thing to me was that we were built on the open web and so we went and rated websites and tried to provide kind of security warnings for users if they

were dealing with somebody who was doing fishing or spyware um but but very importantly we didn't have to ask for permission to do that we could go and sort of the web was this open Community owned Network and we could just build new pieces on top of it um and that allowed us to exist and allowed us to be part of the solution in the end to you know I don't know if it's solved but it certainly has improved the security problems on the internet like we were part of that solution we were ended up being acquired by McAfee and bundled into their software it's actually a very our software the the what be our software became is now very popular you know big product for them um but um so that was very much like in that kind of you know Web Two I was in the web two

era but it was piggybacking off of this web 2 design these open systems like the worldwide web um with my second startup it was an AI company machine Learning Company called hunch that we started in 2008 and was acquired by eBay in 2011 um I think a couple of things I think you know obviously I think we were right about the long-term Trend about AI I think we were too early um but our bigger issue was that we we kind of assumed that the internet would stay open the way that it had for my prior startup and so we were we had used all of this sort of data um that we' crawled um and analyzed a little bit like opening eye has done you know now from Twitter and other places and those

things kind of amazing this was 15 years before opening you were working on a yeah I mean as they say in Tech if you're early is the same as being wrong but so you know so I'm not it was necess good that I was early but it was um but we were dependent on a lot of other data sources and that was right around when a lot of the data sources started uh really kind of pulling back um and so you know in the end we ended up selling the company to eBay partly because eBay had their own data um and didn't need to use outside data you talk a lot in your early blogging about this uh you know platform risk basically before that became a real issue your yeah yeah I've been blogging I was yeah I mean I cite myself in there once and like but I had

a lot more examples in on my blog where I was sort of obsessed with these issues of like the internet becoming Consolidated starting and I started blogging about this in 2009 and I have you know I don't know been very consistent very pre to yeah no I mean I it's funny like yeah it's not there's no um I could have I didn't want to I didn't think it would be appropriate for the reader but like there was a lot of the things in the book that I write had been writing literally since 2009 um and uh and I was some people they approach this topic and they see you know oh here's another tech investor they're gonna you know the same thing that happened with web two is going to happen with web 3 I was thinking about this the other day like why why why did I even

like why do I work on the internet like why is that like I picked the internet as my profession um yeah why I I was very attracted to the ideals of the internet you know the '90s ideals of the internet of like that it would be this open democratically owned permissionless system um and that you would have all of these kinds of you know you have open apis and collaborative development and anyone in the world could put up a website and build something you know get distribution and get users and build a business support themselves to me that was what was special about the internet like and what made it different than broadcast TV or radio or other form newspapers or other forms of media right it was open it was Democratic it was um and and

I um started worrying about that when I started blogging like 2009 is I think it got really bad I go through this history in the book a little bit like 2012 or 13 it happened to come along right when what what I eventually now believe is the potential antidote to it which is you know new systems built on blockchains which is what got me interested in that um I think a lot of people think it's like Finance I have I have very little interest in finance personally um it's not I do have a section on it there I think it's an important area for blockchains but it's one of many and and um and honestly I had to kind of force myself to write it because I'm just not interest in finance but um yet you're an investor a venture

capitalist Finance job yeah but it's sort of you don't really do spreadsheets in Venture Capital anything like that you just you know but um you're right it's Finance in some sense but not but not sort of like Trading and I know like interest rates and all these other you know CNB the stuff on CNBC like it's just not anyways so that's how I came to it from that kind of perspective um and that that's you know I think that's a very I think it's maybe you know like I mean in the bad case it's may be over there's five I go through the stats in the book there's like five companies that essentially control the internet um I think it's getting worse you know like Twitter now deprecates your um po i' my told all the social networks doing this

now depcat your posts you even link out they've now moved from this mode of optimizing you know how many people they have and the money to making sure you're just completely stay in their wal Garden I mean it's so the attract extract cycle that you lay out in the book which I think I think that that one concept understanding that is like seeing the code in The Matrix yeah there's a yeah there's to you're referencing in this in this early section of the book called corporate networks and talking about sort of the the logic of how there's basically I think a very predictable kind of logic to how how these these centralized Network Services like Twitter and Facebook how they evolve and the they they start off attracting meaning they sort of become join us we'll do all these wonderful things and then over time the logic switches sort

of the incentive switch and this I to go through and this really like this is not like some cultural thing like it's literally the if you actually just analyze how Network effects work the incentive switch at some point where it's more important for them to extract money from the network than it is to attract compliments to the network happens over and over happens over over it's repeated cycle people keep falling for it unfortunately um it's going to happen now again with AI a new generation will fall for this again they'll build on top of these other platforms and then suddenly things will switch and they'll they'll learn the lesson the hard way I'm hoping they'll learn lesson easy way you can read the book they may learn it the hard way um but um but and it's by the way I it's about to get much worse AI will make it

like I'm Pro AI I think it's a great technology it's very important but it's a central it's generally a centralizing force it rewards companies with lots of data and money and compute and everything else and that will further favor incumbent so I think it's you know situation so I got into the internet for its open Democratic kind of anyone could go and build a website I think that's a serious risk at this point I think blockchains are the only kind of credible way to turn that I go through that in detail in the book that's what the book's about um and that and that that that is what kind of motivates me at this point there's another group uh that you know has a similar concern as you and they're interested in decentralization but they are not on board with crypto or blockchains you

know they this is the sort of the mastedon folks like the blue scy protocol yeah you know vitalic he had a post vitalic the creator of ethereum he had a post earlier this year um called make ethereum Cy Cipher Punk again and I wrote down a quote that he said he said there's a large ideological Rift where significant parts of the non-blockchain decentralization community sees the crypto world as a distraction and not as a kindred spirit and Powerful Ally and that that line really stuck out to me because it's true and how do you how do you bridge those two forces that should be Alli but they are fighting against one another and yeah no it's a great question I um I think it's unfortunate because I think they do like the blockchain people

like me and ballic and the kind of protocol P I call them protocol networks in the book the folks who are sort of pro RSS and then there's a bunch of new things like um the activity Pub is a sort of social um interoperability protocol Mastadon uses and Facebook threads is inter look I I love those things in theory I've been on the internet 25 years and I've supported these protocols the reality is there's two protocol networks that have suceeded in the history of the internet SMTP and HTTP email and the web both of them um were started in the 1980s and grew um in the you know 80s and 90s um before there were actual kind of corporate Network as I call them

competitors centralized networks um there hasn't been a the close the closest one since then that has come to succeeding is RSS and RSS failed in the end I mean it still exists but it it failed to you know it's it's a it's a tiny fraction of the user base of things like Facebook and Twitter um the reality is we've now had 25ish years of or maybe more 30 years of protocol networks being developed there's I go through in the book there's literally hundreds of them and none of them is exceeded so at some point after 30 years of failure I would submit you should consider maybe there's something wrong with the with the approach and I think the thing wrong with the approach is I think protocol

networks are great from a societal benefit point of view what they are not great from is features and funding they have no way features they're limited they they ask you to do things like go get your own domain name domain names like go pay a dollar for a domain name that's not a mainstream consumer Behavior consumer mainstream I'm a developer type I'm a you know internet person I have a domain name ask someone in the street of New York they have no idea why they would ever buy one and they don't want to buy one and they don't want to pay dollars a year for to use an internet Serv how many people are so accustom to things being free it's never they're never it's never gonna anything that requires stuff like that is never gonna and then funding like look Google has I think it's up to if

you count contractors I think they have 600,000 employees like um you know Facebook well I don't know what it is200 thou like these are vast compan they and they spend massive amounts of money on subsidizing these networks so like all of this free stuff you do you know how much money it costs to host that video of YouTube and things they subsidize it in a way that a protocol Network could never do right a protocol like if you have a new video protocol to compete with YouTube you don't have you would need I don't know probably 10 billion to start um just to match the subsidies um you would need 100 million a year absolute minimum to support a Top Flight development team

look it's been 25 I I'm all for those the these activity pubs everything else in theory in practice it's been 25 years we've been trying this I've been part of some of these and they haven't worked so like to me what a blockchain is in many ways is a um a a super evolved form of these old protocol networks where they have i' like to say blockchain networks have the societ benefits of protocol networks like HTTP and SMTP but the competitive advantages of corporate networks like Facebook and Twitter they have a blockchains have an inherent funding mechanism they have a bunch of um software features that let them that let them compete uh uh with the kind of modern user experiences of of the

centralized systems um so they in my my mind they are the they are um further evolved kind of more likely to be uh to to lead to real competitors but share many of the same values as those those other movements I wonder what it's going to take for people to see that that vision and to see like the potential there uh you know Fred Wilson who read and reviewed your book he had some very nice things to say about it uh he had a post recently where he said that he believes 2024 there's going to be a chat GPT moment for crypto that there's going to be this breakthrough moment for the technology that like suddenly every body is going to realize wow it works it works really well it's

amazing and it's just going to like flip a switch for people um do you like is it going to take that and by the way do you think that that is going to happen in 2024 that's a pretty bold yeah I don't know when it'll happen and if it'll happen that soon I think look I think AI though is a very interesting case study and that one is so the first Network paper was um molik and pits in 1943 so was literally 80 years before chat gbt long long history tons of money went into it it 80 years um I I can tell you that like like I started as I mentioned earlier company 2008 there were a lot of AI companies started over many decades and I think a lot of people would argue it didn't really work until 2023 you think you were late at the time by the

way in 2008 when you started it or did you think you were early or it's a good question uh you know uh I mean I thought had the right timing but I was obviously early um but uh the thing people didn't know you know neural networks were were not the most effective method 2008 they literally I mean people thought they were cool in theory and the Brain work that way um but uh empirically they just didn't have the best results um now what was interesting about neural networks right is they happen to take advantage of the same Hardware that video games did gpus and so what ended up happening of course is that you know companies like Nvidia investing in gpus for the purpos of video games ended up having this sort of

spillover benefit to neural networks and then it turned out as neural networks got to some level of scale you know they improved very very dramatically by the way this is like the perfect encapsulation of your idea of the next big thing starts out looking like a toy and it took 80 years and by the way there were all I remember when we were I had my startup we called it machine learning AI was a bad word that's what happens in the sort of the pre-chat GPT moments of Technologies you have all these debate these kind of meaningless debates in my mind over terminology you see that in crypto today people say oh you shouldn't call it web 3 you should call it this I just in the book I just use descriptive words like blockchains and I try to kind of sidestep the tribal battles um in the end I don't think it

matters it's just what matters is products in technology like you can have different names you have different presentations of it different ways of explaining it what ends up mattering is the products I think and so I think Fred Wilson is exactly right like at some point there will be a chat gbt moment there will be a breakthrough I don't know when exactly it'll be I've learned that I think I've been pretty good at predicting what happens on the internet I've been pretty bad at predicting exactly when it happens so I try to put pretty wide error bars around my time predictions these days so I don't know exactly when it'll happen but that that's actually an interesting point because the timeline of a book is so like it's so long it's a sluggish process it comes out like you finished writing it months ago but it takes a

while to actually get it out in the world you know how do you future proof your writing when you're writing about something so fast moving like the tech indust yeah it's hard um and you know in the book I think specifically like look I mean it's just it's a balance too because you don't want go too obviously the more in some sense the more abstract you go the more time proof it is but if you go too abstract it's hard to read and you want to use examples like you want to use particular like name particular products for example I like I I've read a lot of business books like I remember rereading crossing the cowm rec which is now 30 years old and he talks about Palm Pilot and and like it really kind of hurts the book frankly that it's like the examples

look so kind of old because inevitably that you know like new startups will pop up some will do better some good ones will go downward and so you'll just get some of that wrong and that will date the book more and so you got to be a little careful to avoid things that are kind of timely like that um but at the same time you need to give examples so you can't just be too abstract so that's one thing um I mean the AI stuff in particular like when I started writing it was sort of pre- chat GPT yeah this was before chat GPT I didn't and I thought I may have to change more of that but I didn't actually that much I think like I was talking like I talk about this idea of like kind of needing a new covenant between creators yeah and

uh so there's been like a long time implicit Covenant sort of economic Covenant between for example websites that that provide content and search engines that consume that content and share that content and there's sort of the Covenant is we'll let you use some of the content if you send traffic back and it's possible that new AI systems will change that Covenant because they won't be sending traffic back they'll just give the answer so what's the New Covenant things like that and so I guess I don't know that feels like it's like like that was a timely thing that also I think will last for some period of time I mean at some point it'll work itself out but um I think that one probably has a longer term kind of time Horizon um you got seven applications in the back of the book um

for potential uses of crypto demonstrating its potential and its utility uh if you had to pick one what's your what's your favorite of the bunch in there which one sticks out the most to you well there's sort of two dimensions in that question there's kind of what would have the greatest impact on the world and then what do I just think is sort of cool intellectually okay because like for example the finance section um if you could figure out a way to dramatically improve and lower payments throughout the world and lower remittance costs that could have a massive economic impact yeah on lots and lots of people right who pay 7% now or whatever they pay to send money back home or something so I you know things like that I think um yeah instantly

lifechanging I think I think if if you know if we figure out the right way to kind of let creators use nfts in a way to sort of build direct relationship with their audience and sell them digital merchandise I think that could have a transformative effect on on how much money creators make on the internet um so things like that and I think just from an intellectually kind of what coolness point of view um I really love this idea of um of uh what I call collaborative storytelling collaborative storytelling is basically the idea that um you get a community of people together they collaboratively develop kind of a universe think of Harry Potter or Marvel movies or something but their own original universe and then they are

rewarded for their contribution proportionate to how much they contribute through tokens um which they and then they then also can go out and and um you know uh continue to develop the world Fork the world add new characters evangelize the world build all around it and then that kind of community you know you imagine them coming together they have some amount of token and then that Community can make money in various ways too by licensing out the IP to make movies and cartoons and some of that money flows back proportionately to the user so why do I like that idea so much it's so different from like the typical media Enterprise of like you know have a death grip on IP and just like ride that out for decades and it's what's great about

this idea is it solves a number of problems so like one is Hollywood has a problem which is like they just have you know we have this all these sequels all these superhero movies and if you ask them why it's because it costs it's so expensive to Market new IP right um it cost hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to create some new narrative Universe um uh okay on the flip side you have all of these really active creative enthusiastic fan bases who want to be a bigger part you know who are up there saying hey I think Star Wars should do this I think Marvel should do this um who want to be part of it who write a lot of it in times very good fanfiction right so you have this very active the fan Community but the fan Community wants to be participants but is only um

uh but in a lot of ways feels left out and of course has no way to make money doing this um and you know it is sort of left on the sidelines so what's so cool about this idea is it kind of brings these two things together and so you imagine and it takes look at harnesses like you think about something like I kind of talked a little bit dismissively about Dogecoin before and then it's a mcoin but there's also something really positive about Dogecoin which I mentioned in the book which is that it's it's it's the power of this community you have millions of people who all feel the sense of being united around this around this um token um and who go out and evangelize it and you know Bitcoin is the most extreme example of this where it you know it's just sort of

probably at this point many tens of millions of people who are True Believers and they spend all this time blogging and writing and tweeting and going on TV and doing everything else and so what if you took that energy and harnessed it and put it into this narrative Universe you have these people who are passionate about it who help create it who Fork it but then who also evangelize it and that solves that marketing problem right there's no Bitcoin Incorporated going out there putting up Billboards it's like the distributed Community is all but but then it also creates like this economic model for these users right so these people can be anywhere in the world they don't have to be in La they don't have to know people it can be just the same way that Wikipedia kind of democratized um the the kind of the left

brain this democratizes the right brain right like the creative side and you can imagine it's applied to all sorts of other creative areas right and so you you know and you take these this these folks who right now are kind of left out of the internet economics right like there isn't really a model to be a writer on the internet outside of going in you know to LA or some other Hub and you know joining the traditional world media World um and so this provides kind of an Internet native way for those folks to to you know pursue creative activities um I think generally like we are in I read a lot about this in the book I think we're in a a lot of I think I haven't done the word count but I think probably creators and creativity

are up at the top of the word count of the book um you know a lot of my feeling is that this should be a golden era for creators um you have five billion people who have smartphones and you can push a button and instantly uh reach those people um and people are as passionate or more passionate than ever as about you know music and stories and everything else um and the only reason that it is not a golden period I believe and I I think I WR argue this in detail in the book is because these you know five or six giant intermediaries inserted themselves in between on that relationship between the Creator and the audience yep and took most of the economics um and if we can figure out a way to bypass those those five or six people companies um we can transform the

economics so that's really in a lot of ways the theme the themes I write about right is like and that's one reason I like that idea is it's a it's a really interesting clever way to start to do that to sort of bypass those big platforms and I would recommend the take rates chapter for anybody interested in understanding that idea yeah the take is sort of the toll taken literally it's a word that means the percentage of money that flows through the network taken by the kind of network operator um and one of the remarkable things that Facebook and Twitter and the other companies have pulled off is they basically have 100% close to 100% take rates which is unheard of in any other area of the economy um and it I think is really kind of destroyed the economics of the internet for most people yeah what will

make this book a success in your r view yeah I think the main thing I'd like to do is um well a couple things I think so one one I really want I'm really hope it will be the book that people that work in this industry a lot of people that work on blockchains and crypto have told me that you know they they can't explain they're very excited about it they know why they're excited about it but they have trouble articulating that excitement to um sharing that excitement with family and friends and perspective employees and I I I I really wrote this book hoping to be the book that this is the book that you give to those people to explain to them so it's you know a concise encapsulation of why I'm

spending my life doing this right or or anyone who is so I think that's sort of step one I I really hope it'll be that the initial signs are positive having you know I don't know like 30 to 40 folks in the industry read it and they seem very excited about it and a lot of them are buying it for their company now like in our portfolio and other places so it's early but hopefully that will be the case and then I think the next Rong around that would be you know I sort of my mental model like look for for bet for for unfortunately crypto and blockchains have become somewhat politicized um and there's a set of people out there who you know who have decided that anything involving them is evil because of course on the other side a set of people who

love them um and there's also this weird tribalism within crypto some people love only certain blockchains like Bitcoin all right but then I think 80% of the people of the world I I think don't have an opinion and in fact we've had surveys and other things which kind of demonstrate that like they're like yeah I've heard about it I don't really know right I'd like to reach some set of those people and say hey this is really promising and here's why and maybe you know you should be open-minded to what getting involved in some way whether it be as a developer or you know entrepreneur or just simply as a user or participant in these networks and like so I hope that you know my ideal ambitious goal would be for that kind of meme to spread

and for people to kind of understand what the kind of productive use cases of blockchains are and not just the speculative use cases and for that to sort of become part of the broader cultural conversation yeah I mean I'll say my favorite review that's come in so far has been from Kevin Kelly the founder of wired yeah he said this book changed my mind I know and i' you know I've known Kevin of course been a huge fan of his all his life and I mean all of his career and read all of his books I had the privilege of meeting him a few times um and and I it was always frustrating to me because he kind of agreed with everything but didn't agree with that right and so yes for him to say that I know he wasn't he wouldn't have he would have just said thank you

for send me a book or whatever he wouldn't have he would have politely not said that so for him to say that and to let us put on the back of the book and everything I agree with you that was great yeah um I think you get a quorum of that of enough Minds changed that makes this book a success um if you had to write a second book what would it be about I have no idea I thought the process was kind of fun and it was painful but fun but to be honest like I don't know I I know I don't have any plans um but I did like the process so if I had the right thing I would do it again um I will say when I was writing this I was like on the negative side it's so frustrating how um no one seems

to understand this topic and I have to write this book on the positive side like how often in your career would you ever have the opportunity where there's like a major Tech Trend and the Delta between how I see it which I think is the correct way to see it and sort of the popular view of it is so great like it's such a wide Delta in some ways it was sort of the opportunity of a career to be able to try to close that Gap right like it just doesn't happen that like with AI look people in AI think it's great but the rest of the world thinks it's great it's not I mean there's some difference I'm sure in a lot of details and things but generally it's not that there's not that much of a gap right here the Gap is so broad

between the truth and the perception um and so that was just a very rare opportunity to try to be the one who closes that Gap and so it would be hard to imagine that happening again look I hope the space evolves maybe and I could write a sequel like you know of like more stuff happens I don't know I I have some other ideas on like software and Innovation history of software and things but I had nothing planned or anything else so that leads me to my last question for you which is okay okay pitch yourself 15 years into the future yeah uh we've had you know this Computing cycle has gone along and you're thinking about a sequel to read write own what is the word that captures that next internet era after read write own if you had to pick one

word I've always thought of it as kind of a a little bit of a thesis antithesis synthesis you know going back to your philosophy yeah I mean it's a little bit like the you know sort of because the read era was the protocol Network era and it sort of it really showed the great societal benefits of that architecture and then the corporate era the next era kind of you know broadened and democratized went from democratizing information to democratizing publishing and um and really extended the kind of ease of use and and features of the internet and then the third era kind of to me brings kind of combines the the own era combines the best of the read and write and so if you believe that there is no fact for the end of History

the of history but I mean if you had to I think the next obvious Vector would be sort of this very deep immersion I do think it will happen I know it's a clich a SciFi cliche but it's going to happen which is people kind of living inside of these metaverses with full you know three-dimensional immersion and everything else so I don't know the AI stuff too is very interesting like does that lead to some other other kind of era of the internet like that too I don't know um Chris thanks so much for sharing this conversation and uh everybody else this book is on sale and you can buy it at wherever you buy your books