The Promise of Blockchain Technology - Rik Willard, Agentic Group

Transcript

[Music] hello and welcome to the blockchain and us we're pioneers and thought leaders talked about their journey in blockchain technology crypto assets and a token economy and I'm your host manuel stackers if you enjoyed this podcast please give it a top rating and review on itunes and feel free to follow me on twitter at Manuel's dagger this episode has support from shift crypto security the maker of big box a minimalist Hardware wallet for crypto currencies big box is rock-solid compact portable easy to use and designed and manufactured in Switzerland to learn more and get your wallet today visit

www.hsn.com companies worldwide and interim CEO of global blockchain technologies a publicly traded blockchain investment firm rick is a fellow at the foreign policy association and adviser to the field center for entrepreneurship at Baruch College and other board appointments he's also a public speaker and has appeared at the world web forum the European IP summit finance 2.0 the emerging links blockchain series Harvard Business School Dow Jones and Davos 2018 and now to the interview hello Rick and thanks a

lot for taking time today I met well great could be here thank you Rick you were one of the interviews in my film the blockchain and us and in that film you spoke a lot about the potential of the blockchain to create a better world how have you seen the blockchain create a better world in the last few years you know that is realized in many different ways and I have what I've seen and what I've been involved with I can say has been nothing short of eye-opening there are people who were involved with who are into identity and obviously the refugees

situation is getting worse around the world and there are people who were essentially stateless who need a sort of identification solutions or people working with the UN there are people working on financial inclusion and the tokenization movement has done a lot to further that cause sort of helping people create new forms of value which we were very much aligned with at authentic and we are creating a sort of what we term an economy exponential economies outside of the purview of the banking economy and more in the creation and the extrusion of real forms of value

be it physical value with goods the intellectual capital and value with ideas or services and so the tokenization movement it has been instrumental in in helping us understand and bring those forms of value out to the fore as as your view about how the blockchain can can achieve that goal you know to end poverty or maybe at least reduce poverty has changed in the last 18 months yes I think that the concepts are becoming more refined they were pretty raw when we last spoke because all of this is is quite new obviously and we've seen that say from a

regulatory approach you know the u.s. Switzerland and others you know the EU begin to take sort of more substantive stances on what these tokens are in some cases in the u.s. they really focused more on the securitized aspect like a stock whereas in other parts of the world you know we're really talking about access tokens you know access into platforms that can create these new forms of value or that can provide those lever points for you know the creation of this new form of value or these new forms of value but in general it all everything in this space that is

tokenized can but certainly should be pointed to financial inclusion and when it's not it's done deliberately for very twentieth-century reasons but moving humanity forward in the 21st century all of these should be about creating new forms of value all of these applications should be about including the rest of the world the billions of people that have been excluded from value creation to be able to leverage that which they have as a community to their own benefit into the benefit of other humans around the world what kind of examples have you seen you know where you thought oh yeah

this is a really good execution of that idea yeah a lot of these things remember are being developed by people who are in technology or people who are in finance and it's difficult form for many people to see through other lenses than that which they have already been a part of for sometimes you know decades and sometimes just a few years so these are emerging but I'll tell you some of the things that we're doing I think are germane to this so we've taken a private equity firm an existing successful private equity firm called Muirfield and worked with Muirfield in Boston to tokenize their private equity platform so what they do is they get people to

invest in their private equity fund and then they go out and they do different real estate projects in America they have a consistently high return however the people that they're serving their clients their investors have to be in the US essentially what we call you know a pre-vetted investors they have to be investors that you know have at least a million dollars in income is it accredited investors thank you who then you know who have $250,000 to lose should they lose it now that being said that they get high returns from those investments in your fields very very good at doing that very

well-established doing that in the mid market but the average person never gets those kinds of returns the average person around the world never even knows that this PE fund exists much less get a return so that investor say in Sri Lanka or Kenya or Brazil or for that matter Estonia or nowhere ever now has the opportunity to get the kind of returns that have only usually been really cordoned off for people who already have money so as you know it's expensive to be poor it's also

advantageous to be rich in in the thinking of the last several centuries however now we have the opportunity to include people who don't have as much who aren't necessarily wealthy but can afford to lose say or invest $1,000 $5,000 all of a sudden they have access to the kind of returns in wealth creation that only the wealthy have had before I mean return also goes hand in hand with risk-taking so how do you reconcile those two things yes there is always a risk if you're trying to put your money to work as an investment there simply is a risk not everything works so we try very hard to work with established

entities no matter what they are and they could even be organizations instead of companies or funds that have a track record of some sort of success at least are fairly stable so we work with them to tokenize their asset and to make that more more open and more accessible so there are always going to be you know more speculative risk heavy investments that will be out there for people and it really depends on one's risk appetite and what what they'd like to get into but you should have the choice of doing it as long as as the tokens you know on a blockchain provide enough transparency and liquidity for you to be able to make a decision to get out of a fund or to

stay in a fund or you know it or you can say to yourself hey I I know this is high risk but I'm willing to bet $500 $1,000 or whatever it happens to be with the idea that you're going to lose it now that's the nature of investment that really can't be changed hmm however it's the access that has been locked locked out you know for since time immemorial since the beginning of investments almost now of course this was meant to protect people from losing money but the nature of investments again is such that there is always a risk of losing money there's a higher risk or a lower risk what we have yet to see but what we are going to see say in

digital artworks in digital media we're seeing sort of the block chaining and provenance of art which is coming which is itself a sort of new market that's being opened up again but to investors people who are who are either creating the art or investing in the appreciation of the asset itself so do you mean digital art or tokenizing like really existing art like like a painting or something like that right now I mean digital art like like cryptokey that's arguably it is sort of the pet rock of the blockchain right exactly but that being said you know there's

always gonna be those things as well and why not let let a hundred ideas than a thousand ideas let a million ideas bubble up and let's let's see what resonates I mean it's still very early in this in this space if crypto kitties are something to people like well then people like to know beanie babies as well right and that was a very you know very physical very tactile very non digital thing but certain amount of a certain population will always like those kinds of things so why not have them on the blockchain as well absolutely I mean there's there's two themes here right one is I mean obviously access that that you said before then you have liquidity and breaking down these big chunks into smaller chunks and then you have digital

scarcity right I mean in what you just described with crypto kiddies or similar digital assets what what other things does blockchain technology make uniquely possible III think we're going to see a large push in blockchain health and wellness services I think they're platforms like bit med in San Francisco rejuvenant which is being a platform that's already built but being blocked chained by the amazingly successful Fred Nizam who used to run and actually turned around Oxford health plans years ago so you have these these really fantastic successful

players coming into the space who we help to understand the blockchain and how that can be tied to what they do and what they're very good at so these platforms are talking about okay for your engagement and and your permissioned data you know when you want to give it to us and you can hold back whatever you want then we'll turn around and use that data for trials and things like that and you're accruing tokens that then allow you to get free or low-cost medical care you know this is revolutionary stuff so this is opening up medical care to the entire world now of course there are lots of details like signing up you know a critical mass of doctors and groups and insurance and all kinds of things but there that's in the

works right now I mean there will come a time when we can envision that that high-quality medical care at least medical consultation is free for almost anyone it's just a matter of engaging with the platform but but how how exactly does that work I mean magic medical care is something very physical right and how do you bridge that gap with with technology to do it was meant originally just for the transfer of digital currency and how do you how do you reconcile the two what I can tell you certain parts are still under construction as it were so I can't really tell you a lot about that what I can tell you is that there is a a coming intersection between blockchain and

digital engagement and you know physical brick-and-mortar spaces that that's coming that's being you know actually planned as you and I speak and some of the people that we're engaged with that I spoke about just just earlier you know are for winners in that space on a global in a global sense so you know don't be surprised if you talk about access the physical care itself to the health care itself that they'll be brick-and-mortar establishments that are tied into these digital platforms so the engagement happens digitally but health care itself proper you know can happen in a more traditional setting like a clinic or whatever it's that I mean

these kind of health tokens right for the lack of a better word is there a way to invest in those as well or are they more kind of a utility you know and that's that's a question as well there are things that we know are access and utility tokens there are things that we know that are securitized assets that are you know secure tokens what we're moving towards is a new mode of value that's in between those two extremes those two polar extremes and that's the holy grail of this entire space as far as I'm concerned but we need a new taxonomy we need new use cases to bubble up like the ones that I'm inferring to right right now these have yet to be you

know truly established and and driven and even created they're all in planning stages just remember again this was very early on in this evolution of value so you know the kinds of things that have been thought through over the past few years are just now beginning to see the light of day but yes they will be engagement on one side which are in sort of non fungible tokens and then there is a part where it's an investment which is a more plausible security driven token but we have yet to be able to describe even from a regulatory standpoint much less a marketing standpoint that sort of taxonomy that creates a known entity for that kind of token but it's something

that we deal with every day it's something that you know the the think tank portion of agenting deals with every day and the consulting port of a part of identic deals with every day so the question is well founded but the answer is you know we are not quite there yet there are a lot of ideas but you know as far as something you can point your finger to and attach metrics to we're hardly there with any there are no true hard metrics you can't say here's ten years of data that allows us to understand how this token works right this doesn't exist yes but I'm sure that sometimes also opens you up to to criticism right have you had people ask you you know um a do you really need

a blockchain do you really need tokens for that couldn't you just encrypt it better or decentralize some of the you know the data storage I mean what do you say to them mm hmm III say you're right block chains themselves as a technology do not cure cancer and not every not every platform requires block chains or tokens quite frankly however in those in those platforms that are talking about new value creation the best way to get there from here is a tokenized platform because that gives you the apparatus that allows these this sort of peer-to-peer value transfer happen more elegantly more quickly and with less

friction so there are some things that really do benefit with blockchain and tokenization and some things that that that may not so I'm very open to hearing cases where they you don't make sense I've actually told clients who've come to me or prospective clients if that will you work with us and I've said it then well you don't really need this but but it's all on a case-by-case basis and I think that at the end of the day you know not everything needs to be tokenized if I if I buy a blender you know if I'm blending a shake because I need to be tokenized that probably not from IOT perspective it might be it might it might say hey you need know 20% more orange juice or whatever that's a different story but

that's not in in our realm of action yeah I just wanted to ask you about some examples you know that you thought lately or that you encounter lately where you thought oh you know tokenization really doesn't make any sense here but pure you know made the example with the blender but is there another one well let's see I really didn't make sense I mean the way I tend to dismiss those that I don't think make sense right so I don't think about it very much to be honest well maybe in the better let's try to find one where you know it would seem like first it makes a lot of sense but then on closer inspection you found oh you know what it actually doesn't well let's go back to your question about art okay hmm you know can

you can and should you blockchain say the work of the Masters okay the Renaissance masters let's just say you know it's very difficult to do that where you've where are you going to put the identifying tag and and who can't just rip it off you know and put it on a fake right but also you have inherent in the industry itself of say you know that at high art sector you know it's rife with corruption there's more you know value in fakes and underground movement of these you know high-value work of art works of Arts then in the actual reported value of the space itself you know you hear that it's like a hundred

and fifty billion in artwork that's like sort of I believe that's the number that is on the books and a couple of trillion dollars off the books right so so that dwarfs the actual stated value of the space that's all underground that's all great area that that's all so that that sector doesn't even want the blockchain not only is it almost impossible to to blockchain those existing items that are physical items but the sector doesn't even really want it because that's not where the the money is made in the space now digital art is very different and you get to sort of digital rights management for music digital rights management for video and images all

that's very important because as you know the Internet is one big Xerox machine so to be able to get paid for your work now that deserves tokenization that is a blockchain a blockchain application just rights man has been alone but also with a blockchain and tokens you can not only do the DRM but you can also affect the payment rails so those tokens then have no have a dual Direction value you know if I use your photo well then I pay for it that's tokenized you get those tokens and your wallet as the create and you can take them into any other thing Bitcoin easier or Fiat or whatever you want to take them out in so that is that's the great boon to creativity on

the Internet itself but physical assets like art may not require nor it may not be the best case for for a blog chance that that's I think one really good example of I think the other one would be we're rushing into government acceptance of blog chains for for all kinds of things let's just say for government identity which is on on face value not a bad idea right but also remember that if a government has you know one-stop access to all of one's information then that's also you know slightly problematic in the wrong hands with the wrong

government it can be a very totalitarian tool as well as a very liberating tool it depends on whose hands it's in so the need to have for governments decentralized applications which they actually are now they're just inefficient decentralized applications you still have to get permission safe for the the CIA to access certain parts of your life they may do it illegally but but they have to actually get permission or the FBI or the IRS or anybody else you know what you don't want is one switch to turn a person off right during their entire life off so again we have to watch the narratives that we create in this space and we have to watch the use cases very carefully this is an ongoing issue for anybody in

this space what we don't want is for people to have total access of a human being and and their livelihood you want people to be able to move freely one enough to be decentralized that the person has access and permissioned environments for their own personal data and for their own privacy mmm Rick how do you how do you go about understanding all the ins and outs of the technology I mean I sometimes struggle with that right because I'm not a programmer but but how do you and your your team how do you get your information about what are good applications and what what applications maybe need more development well you know we listen a lot we have we have because a genetic was born from a sink tank now we are our DNA

is one of a cute listening and because we have a Federation of over 50 companies around the world they're actively working in this space and that's our technology agnostic they're working with aetherium they're working with Bitcoin they're working with neo they're working with whomever they we get a lot of intellectual capital that comes across our desk every day from all over the world so our part of our mandate as a company is to sift through that information and sort of look at what works and what doesn't what might work later or what we thought would work but actually isn't working now all of those considerations are part and parcel of the vetted environment that we create for our clients and our partners but do

you have advisors there or is it all in-house I mean how do you how do you go about finding the best X experts in this field what we started at the very beginning of the explosion I mean the think tank opened in late 2011 which was pretty much you know days zero of the commercialization of digital currencies and blockchain so we have the you know a unique benefit of knowing many of the relevant players in the space and we have known them since the beginning and they've known us so they're very open with us because we we're very known agenting as a brand is very known for for being a good housekeeping seal of companies and a good housekeeping seal

of advisors and consultants people who are known people who have been vetted and people who are contributing on a very high level to the space mm-hmm cool and you're located in New York right mainly we are based in New York we have the presence in San Francisco we have a presence and Vancouver we have presence in France used to have a presence in England not so much now we have no feet on the ground in a presence in Switzerland and also in Brazil and soon in Kenya and Korea fantastic but as a as a headquarters do you find New York to be a good - steak kind of on the forefront of this

technology yeah New York is still sort of the the media and used capital of the world and while that may well it may be being challenged by other locations it still maintains that the sort of industry superiority in that room that regard everyone every news service in the world as a presence here so we get a lot of information not only up obviously from our from our member companies and our associates and partners but also that we keep our ear very close to the ground when it comes to the news services etc which give us a sort of a leg up and we get to interact with with those people who are reporting the news which again adds to our insight

especially as to what the public may be thinking about all of this Rick you also mentioned you have a presence in all of these other countries right I mean on the west coast but then Europe Switzerland also Africa do you see people in those locations focusing on different kinds of approaches to blockchain technology than let's say maybe in the US absolutely and that's really a great question identic actually was formed on a couple of basic premises and and one of them was that this is a global explosion of value a global revolution not just in technology but in the concept of value value access and value creation which

strikes directly at our values but that's another part of the story the part that that I'm concerned with with your question is you know are people what are people building around the world and the interesting thing is that you'll find people say in Kenya building block chains and applications that are so far reaching that they can't even be implemented in Kenya right so so we provide a network that allows them to be accessed easily and more frictionlessly by people say in San Francisco who it may be appropriate no to to launch that kind of technology and vice versa there's enabling technologies or Financial Inclusion technologies being built in the West that might be absolutely

opiate or more appropriate for say Southeast Asia right so you know we see this a lot actually people just they're building and building and building everywhere but it doesn't necessarily work where they are but more than likely there's another place where it fits just fine and it can it can spread and grow from that other location so you know the the idea of being networked and being closely networked in this space is is critical to its growth because it can happen anywhere you know this this sort of freshness this sort of you know amazing thinking and development the technology standpoint can literally happen in in a basement in the shack in Rwanda as well as it could happen in say

zoo Switzerland there is no barrier you know to that sort of value creation anymore got it I mean one barrier is at the talent a little bit right and that's an ongoing conversation here in Switzerland I mean where do you see the talent concentrating well I see talent is generally of course you know concentrated mostly in the Western Western world of course in developed countries but that's also changing there are lots of sort of both over and under ground no developer sites that have thousands of developers on them that are not restricted by it by physical boundaries right who simply you know react to a call for development on

ethereal called development in C++ on Bitcoin the Bitcoin blockchain Bitcoin cash Z cash what have you and there are people around the world who are answering these calls now again that's gonna flatten out pretty soon because code you know transferred along the internet rails you know are non respective of borders borders don't even count because you I can send you code I can send code to you in Switzerland right now in a matter of seconds so it doesn't matter where I am so that's flattening out you know as we as we speaking will continue to flatten out until geography simply doesn't matter anymore

and when an education reaches a critical mass that tipping point then it won't matter where you are you'll have you'll have a a physical a localized pool of talent as well as a an online non-geographical available pool of talent interesting I mean when you speak you speak in countries all around the world right and I'm sure you travel a lot too so have you seen a difference in how people understand I mean more from the consumer or the user side how they understand what's possible with with blockchain technology I mean there's now a lot of investment funds popping up but maybe in other countries right Southeast Asia or you mentioned Africa have you seen people demanding different applications

in different areas definitely and I'll answer that start answering that by saying that everyone got into the space for different reasons as well some people only saw in a financial inclusion and social benefit some people only saw finance like say a Barry Silbert who brought his ideas of SecondMarket into the Bitcoin space to start his to start his fund for for me it was I came from marketing and advertising and I saw you know Bitcoin as a sort of hyper allocated loyalty point an engagement token which made sense because I had just come from working with MGM Resorts and we were

just getting into players points at the time where the crash happened and I moved back to New York so just a year later you know being introduced to Bitcoin in 2011 I said wow if I have had sort of this mindset when I was in in Vegas in Macau or wherever I was for MGM then then this this sort of revolutionary the gaming industry which it was doing anyway in a different kind of gaming so the how you enter the field tends to be the lens and what you see or you you bring what you love and what you know into the space so there are all kinds of applications blooming now that people from different spaces and

different sectors are beginning to understand how a blockchain or a digital token might work in there business so the answer is yes there is many a bigger number as there are people there are potential applications for this every sector at least has one application now that all applications again no matter in this space but there will be you know those that we can't even foresee yet that will revolutionize how we perceive finance how we perceive value how we perceive inclusion how we perceive access mm-hmm when you originally got in touch with

Bitcoin right in 2011 I think you said what's the most attractive point of it was it the ideology of a flattered world and decentralized access to to capital or what what attracted you originally to it it was the the frictionless peer to peer to peer value transfer I I said I thought that was the the key to unlocking value in the Internet and it solved essentially I believe it was called the 401 or 402 dilemma on the Internet so if you notice when you is you hit a website that doesn't exist you see it says 404 this page does not exist well the 401 page I believe it was if

I'm correct was the sort of the the the financial transfer page the payments page but that payments page never got built out so that page still exists on servers doing nothing so Bitcoin came and sort of moved into that space which solves the I guess is 402 for a to dilemma which was how do you move here to peer payments on the Internet and that's what got me but coming from where I came from which is the loyalty points and engagement brand engagement I said well this is a very powerful secondary economy already airline points or an economy unto themselves

cellphone minutes are an economy unto themselves in certain parts of the world so why not this if this can represent those ten very tangible assets then you're talking about building a multiplicity of economies that you then not only do not need banks but banks are superfluous to it the in the u.s. the loyalty Lobby is the multi billion dollar Lobby loyalty points are very seriously around the world everyone uses them you know just ask you know anybody who's got an Amazon card they have no that's inclusion right into the financial world as much as to the world of consumer goods so I sort of entered from that direction but it became very

clear to me what that meant that meant that people can now create their own value they can tokenize it they can express it financially and be a part of the global evolution of value and all they need you know in many cases is a cellphone and in many cases not even a smartphone so once one says you know really smart phones you know proliferate and I looked at 2.7 you know billion unbanked people in the world or so get most of them get their hands on an actual smartphone with an actual you know wallet that's secure and an interface that they can easily use to trade tokens and we're gonna see a huge

explosion in the trading of these assets you're gonna see wealth created in the most unlikely places on earth and that will be when the world changes let's take a quick break for a message from our sponsors shift trip no securities the maker of big box a minimalist hardware wallet for crypto currencies storing your digital assets safely should be a priority but software and phone wallets can't protect your assets from hackers and malware the big box camp developed by a team of experts who combined with pioneering spirit with a strong commitment to crypto security performance that is second to none the big box is rock-solid compact portable easy to use and

designed and manufactured in Switzerland to learn more and get your wallet today with a WWF crypto ch you're gonna see wealth created in the most unlikely places on earth and that will be when the world changes you mentioned that in our last interview you said to $5 smartphone is just around the corner and that will be groundbreaking I think was the word you used yeah just it's just like right down the street now not even around the corner there pretty much you know you have a lot of phone companies giving the handsets away with with wallets on debt preparing for these for these applications there's a group that was down I believe in Venezuela recently they're out of Los Angeles

and they went back to what they want to do is they want to create a local peer-to-peer economy and I believe I don't want to talk out of school so I won't say which manufacturer but a major mobile handset manufacturer gave them several thousand phones to equip these people committed to that and it's equipped these people with an apparatus that allows them to engage in this ecosystem that's and that's big news that's gonna be happening more and more handsets are you know they're not even important anymore it's it's the access and the value created through the handsets that's important I mean again right that was I thought it was a fascinating point you made there but it was also a point that some people

criticized heavily right where they said well it's the last thing people need is the smart phone if they're if they're hungry right what what would you say to something like that well I would say this what they leave with anything the handset there's only a handset it's the access to to financial health and financial wellness that that handset represents the physical object itself is you know it could be anything if it's a if it's a wrist if it's a wrist phone or it's a phone that you wrap around your head it doesn't really matter right what matters is the access and what matters is the ability to create and to manage and to trade your own intrinsic value and that of your community for other other value

propositions and other communities around the world so they're missing the point when they say well who needs another cell phone you need to eat yeah but you know what charity's not working right charity and debt is is a game that is a zero-sum game if I'm a terrible organization and I'm not saying that people don't mean well I'm just saying that that based on how we view economics and our current global value system based on Fiat you know giving somebody something and not allowing them to create their own value is a form of exclusion and that being able to create your own value is a form of freedom now so basically you're saying that if people have tools if they have networks that they can link into then it enables

them to create their own markets which previously they couldn't that's exactly what I'm saying and and the need for charity goes away because every community has some intrinsic value whether it's a a good a service or an idea but let's say right somebody took you know a thousand smartphones and went to a village somewhere where people had no access previously where they were excluded from global commerce what would be a first use or a first application of this technology for them oh that totally depends on what the community actually does and what they have I mean the first order of things would be to educate them one on how and how to extrude value from what they have mm-hmm well it's a it's a

farming community well certain things would have to work together like for instance how do you create a surplus say in rice and and how do you then market that surplus of rice to other neighboring communities or as they get larger other communities outside of their immediate environment so in that case you know they have a bunch of different crops and maybe there's a way to pool those and take those to market that that's sort of a broad-based question that that depends very highly on that community and what they do produce or or an aggregation of communities that are within close proximity to each other to then band together and create those or to use the internet to find like communities that

are out there to band together to create a larger entity that then has more value or more product to then move into a market place so it's it's an open-ended question that that's kind of hard to answer without sort of understanding what the community has to offer or how they how they might work in relation to other similar communities that that could help create a rising tide to lift all boats right mm-hmm I think it's a good point and you have to start somewhere right I mean I don't think I don't think it's feasible that people who previously had no smartphones will have sudden you know trade cryptocurrencies on on BitFenix even though eventually they will eventually

what once they get you know sort of acclimated to their own value proposition and how and how to make that work in the marketplace then they'll recognize you know other forms of value and then you know that's a it's also a matter of interfaces as well as as direct access right because things have to be made you know fairly simple but I I I'm not disheartened at all as a matter of fact I'm very heartened by the fact that you know in the 1919 30s and the 40s you know the traders on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange or the traders on Wall Street you know these are people who generally they didn't have you know advanced education many of them were high school dropouts most of them never

went to college or left college and they and they traded and made you know very very good livings for themselves some of them had breakout careers and made millions and then billions of dollars moving forward you know people aren't stupid they're open-air market places all over the world in Cairo Amsterdam in a cell Paulo or wherever and even you know in more further reaches in the hinterlands there are people who run the open-air market places all over the world in every possible place now these aren't stupid people they know how to trade they know what value is they know the value of their goods and you know if they are able to then have a broader marketplace

what what makes us think that they'll be any more or rather any less astute in how they manage their wares and how they manage their value and how they manage their net worth that's that's just going to increase for those people and they'll be you know put into this space and they'll and many of them will do very well this is what I alluded to before is that we're gonna see great amounts of you will not redistributed wealth but absolutely brand-new wealth pop up in places that you would never have expected and it could be anywhere it could be an Amazon rainforest but what anybody knows it could be anywhere yeah and it's it's truly democratization of Technology yes that's the underlying substrate right and everything else on top of that will we have to go through

an era of time of instruction and education well yeah of course but once people get it they're just you know the bulk of humanity or not they're not idiots there are lots of good business people who never went to business school they just haven't had the access to that kind of training but they do know value and they know how to horse trade and that's all you really need to know especially especially if you're going to be a day trader right yeah interesting point we were there also maybe promises or things that you imagined would be possible when you read the white paper that you thought back then would be possible that now you know in recent years or months you had to realize that maybe they're they're not that you know

in within reach well to two things I mean jump out at me when you asked me that question what is even though I had a quite a bit of experience with corporations prior to being engaged with Bitcoin and blockchain I became to understand the the actual visceral reaction that incumbents had towards the proposition of new forms of value because that meant that these very well-established corporations had to rethink not only their business models but even how they you know how they use Ledger's and and how to create this new thing and so their first

reaction was okay I don't want to hear about this this is crazy please get out and this is if you look at early you know forays into this by say Morgan Stanley Reeve Corman had said a few years ago Bitcoin is nonsense right and now Morgan Stanley you know they're opening up a desk right so you had this sort of you know JP Morgan all of these you know large incumbents financial incumbent didn't want to hear about this Jamie Dimon right you know really going out against the corner in every possible turn but they're only seeing one slice of this so but so the push back you know was something that I expected but didn't understand until I

got into it how deep that pushback went into a person's core value system right because Jamie Dimon his whole life let's use him as an example about singling him out as an individual but as an example his whole life is built on and his proven very good at it the accumulation of capital and the creation of capital in the Fiat system so his entire value set his home his home's decor his family the kind of lifestyle he's chosen these are value choices value propositions and they're very personal so the idea of access peer-to-peer access to capital can appear creation new value creation

that he doesn't understand is threatening to his very existence and we found that to be something very interesting about the space that it's a revolution not just of value itself but of human values you know what happens when say a small tribe of people say in sub-saharan Africa say the boss I use a lot of cell phones by the way all of a sudden you know find value in some land that they have and they starts treating that and that never comes hot and sudden they were wash in in money all right you know what happens to values what happens to human values on a on a global scale this is going to be the interesting question of our times and you know it just reminds me that a lot of what's missing in the blockchain

Bitcoin and you know digital currencies space digital token space is ethics we're going to have to figure out how to be more humane to each other we're going to have to figure out how to be more human the more technological that we get with this the more being human matters but this is something that's missing in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space or just in general in our society I think people have been blinded largely by the ICL movement and they think of this as a as a land grab or a money grab and that has been the case for the past couple of years but that's gonna die down people are going to begin to see like they do with everything like the telephone or the early internet you know or the Gutenberg press for that matter

there's gonna be all kinds of thing this Cambrian explosion of possibilities are going to you know Whittle themselves down you know through simply dark Darwinian existence into things that work and things that don't work and most of the things that are out here simply will not and do not work but but that's part of the evolutionary process right when you have you know a million become five it's interesting I mean yesterday I heard a talk by somebody who said crypto currencies and this whole token economy is so complex for the incumbents to understand that when they actually understand it it's gonna be too late for them it's already too late for most of them the S&P 500 people already

acknowledged that that in 25 years none of them will be there and they'll be all be replaced by companies that have tilting strategies that's almost a foregone conclusion as far as I'm concerned and what do you think will they do I mean will there be some kind of rift and open rift I mean now I think many of the of the incumbents are still trying to kind of you know hope that it will die down and that there's a lot of shakeout in the ICU space and Bitcoin maybe never recovers from it's crashed but what what do you think will there be like a more open confrontation at some well let me say number one the Bitcoin whether it it crashes or flourishes is immaterial to this movement it honestly doesn't matter as far as I'm concerned there will be a multiplicity

of tokens that are holding all different forms of value Bitcoin being a you know a pretty decent rail that people is of great proof of concept Bitcoin was an amazing proof of concept but to be honest with you it's like a Model T Ford right there the Ferraris have yet to be built but the Model T Ford was clunky he's had to you know you had to crank it up you know do all kinds of stuff used to break down on the road all the time people would yell at you get a horse because there's a stupid machine a contraption that doesn't make any what are you doing why are you buying something like that he's wasting your money wasting your time yeah well bitcoins the same thing it isn't a Ferrari it's a pretty good Model T Ford so that lets us know what's possible and

then after that we'll start building Ferraris but there is a natural evolution in thought and in process that we have to go through the interesting thing is that we're working on internet time all right so it may happen faster than say the automobile industry but to get to your question I believe that a lot of the incumbents will simply be but you have goldman sachs by the way who's trying to jump ahead of all of this right they're making some big moves and and that's and that's interesting so maybe they'll survive this goldman has you know has a pretty strong survival instinct anyway but you have others who would simply be bought by larger concerns you know we're gonna see you know google's it could be google it might not be google who can get scale

and some of these things it might be a company that simply trades in digital loyalty points you know that you can have exchanges once this thing proliferate s-- and brands really understand this in the music industry and the film industry especially understand this sort of value proposition it'll change the way everything works and so you'll have huge companies out of nowhere you know you have i was on a panel in seoul korea last week with a young lady who started a company and got twenty million dollars of investment in thirty five seconds no presale you know this is the future you can have you know you can have incumbents knocked out picture within a day what's her product I mean what kind of product was that

it's a no it's an insurance product it's an insurance product I mean especially insurance companies are looking into this and they mostly use blockchain technology I think internally currently they have a lot of pilots going on there absolutely I mean I think they're looking at it from actuary tables and things like that which is which is a reasonable solid way to look at it from an internal standpoint but think of think of the underwriting experience right Lloyd's is who they are because of access to capital and underwriters so they have a you know a finite member of serious underwriters who have the capital to do that Lloyd's has built a reputation on that but what if I had now have 25 million

underwriters at $50 apiece what does that do to that equation who is in power now who was empowered and where is the risk really so risk profiles are changed this is not as risky a business anymore mm-hmm so there are lots of different ways and it could be a technology company that takes over the Lord spot as top ensure it is very very very possible those are very different business models also that I think many of the incumbents cannot even conceive of because they're so out of reach for them with their overheads with their processes in place with with their concept of value itself and how value works and those gatekeepers that create scarcity or non scarcity and that is that's a value

proposition that's been built over you know over centuries over the past few centuries and how money works ever since you know 1700s or so right so so this is you know what's being challenged here this is the Internet age the 20th century is already gone it's already left behind however most people are still working if you're working in a twentieth century you're really looking in a paradigm shift from the 17th century how so can you explain because because the the mechanism of the the four constructs underlying how money moves and how finance works was really invented you know by the Medicis and even the Knights Templar before then

in lending money and what that means in and you're sorry turning into interest points and all of these sort of mechanisms are all you know offshoots of that initial flowering from the Enlightenment and a little bit before right so it's just you know we've had different technologies and allow us to do things faster you know trading BOTS are nothing but you know the initial Wall Street idea or actually the original stock corporation in England and in and the Dutch stock corporations from the 1600s right so it's it's just to do it faster and they they do it you know a little bit better with similar algorithms and and boom boom boom and you know but that's ruinous in many ways to to how economics

really work so we're entering a different phase now of how we look at value how we look at economies and that's what we call the economy right the exponential economy that it's still being built it isn't possible for me to tell you exactly how it works because you know and you can laugh at that if you want to and your listeners may laugh at that but you know it's got to start somewhere right what we know is that the old system cannot last much longer we move too fast and it's this movement of capital is too strong and too fast to be sustained by the infrastructure that we have set up now and it's not as it's so exclusive to great numbers of people that it creates this rift of haves and have-nots it's

just getting wider and wider and wider how long do we in the rest of the world think that the rest of the world billions of people are going to stand for this how long do we think that we have until people just get up and burn all this down yeah what do you think I mean how long how far is that away no but it's pretty close I mean 10 years 5 years 25 years maybe in our lifetimes but certainly I look at look at my kids and I wonder you know what their life is gonna be like if if people had just all of a sudden had nothing it right just had enough we saw just a little bit of rumbling of that in 2009 mm-hmm right 2008 to 2010 you know imagine if

that was a sustained move you know over time that could become you know that's critical paths definitely talking about so you need to embrace this phase shift not only embrace it we need to listen to the lessons that the narrative is telling us let's include everybody as much as possible in this movement let's make sure that we can end scarcity let's make sure that we don't have to worry about know people aren't worrying about how I'm gonna get shoes or where the next meal is coming from if you're gonna have a roof over their heads tonight you know if we can do that then who wants to fight who needs to fight who needs to burn you down if they have what they actually need now if they want more they can work for more but you

know I'm not necessarily a proponent of universal basic income I believe that people value what they sweat before a little bit what they put some effort into but but that being said you know the way that we can create value now especially with the Internet is very different from subsistence farming right yeah so it's abundance I mean do you think that's what's ahead of us well it's least the necessities of life right that that can be provided it can be extracted from some value propositions that exist right now you know abundance is a global scale you would call that abundance yes I mean we have abundance we just subsidize it and because of economics we burn crops that could be used to subsidize farmers we do

all kinds of crazy things that are our exact opposite of our own existence on this planet like how much of your time did you spend with this technology since 2011 I have spent literally literally every day of my life since 2011 thinking about writing about speaking about or helping to develop the technologies that I that I deal with on a professional basis their absolute hasn't been one day that I've taken off and I hear this from my friends associates and family sometimes that perhaps I I should but it's too important to movement at this at this

juncture - like - just let it go and forget about it really people who are shaping this space I think you'd say to a person probably work every day and I wouldn't consider myself special in that regard mmm yeah it's also what I'm observing and you know many people are so much into this like never before in their lives I mean was there for you before another technology in the past that inspired you in a similar way absolutely I actually had the first company in North America to put up an advertised HD TV advertising screen large giant screen and and then I consulted with many of the screens in Times Square that are now

some still exists some are long gone but yes you know I was very inspired by that movement by a by a public information movement we even had deals with the MTA here in New York to take some of the street performers who were out there without a hat and a license to be on the street and said look we'll film you and we'll pay you and we'll put you on these screens and you don't necessarily have to be out in the street anymore so we leave like pioneered that kind of integration between technology and inclusion and and and sort of you know a way to look at how to use technology to create better outcomes especially financial outcomes for for people who you know could confuse it

right mm-hmm yeah cool I mean before and you said it here again you have this background in advertising and branding how do you how do you see the role of promotion advertising marketing in this whole space well the role of advertising marketing has is both fortunately and unfortunately inextricable from the movement itself because we have to educate which means we have to market but also marketing in extremis can give you this ico explosion that we encountered the past couple of years and and to be honest with you and I'll be very honest you know ninety percent and I think I'm being generous of those I SEOs are worthless in the long run they

did now 98% the highest number I heard I mean in terms of what an investor might expect as a return they're mostly worthless but that happened in the early internet with IPOs as well by the way so that's you've seen this movie before but but it's also you know created sort of an irrational exuberance around the space so I think that you know the marketing needs to really focus on the true benefits of the technology and not just the accrual of of capital or the return on investment some returns on investment are now going to be qualified and quantify differently you know like

you hear people like broad Pierce and others by the way he wasn't the first to say it but say you know the new definition of a billionaire is helping a billion people well that's more on track with what's really happening and that is the narrative that though I think those of us who are truly serious in this space that's the narrative that we adhere to interesting point I mean you just said before we need new metrics to define to quantify this space right I mean how can you in a way quantify this new economy that's you know somewhere on the horizon do that right that's the immutable ledger so once once we understand the metrics that we're

actually looking for and that changes from sector to sector then we'll be able to actually quantify the benefit because we'll see change over time month-over-month year-over-year you know community over community etc and those but those are all line items that are going to have to be baked into this you know just again just starting to be understood as a necessity mm-hmm but if we for example I mean just I mean I want to follow up there a little bit more I mean let's say we look at GDP or or something similar is there some metric you know where we can understand how big this whole ecosystem is going to be I mean you know for example network value

or things like these I mean is there anything just tangible that you know might convince people to understand how big this is going to be well if you look at Facebook that actually it has built a network value of many billions of dollars based on binary meaning you know either yes or no sort of interactive propositions you know I I can I comment on your posts someone comments on my post very binary stuff is now worth you know it could be worth a trillion dollars at this point think of in terms of trillions think in terms of trillions of untapped of unrecognized value in this world all of a sudden flooding into the marketplace

all of a sudden meeting within the next 20-30 years completely changing the face of economics and what we think value is that's the closest metric I can put to this is there are trillions of dollars on the table not billions the billions are old old hat well billions I think we're already there we're already there already there are billions already there yeah cool Rick if there if there was no Bitcoin and no blockchain what do you think would you be doing more than likely I would be in that's a good question I could never I can't even think of myself not doing what I'm doing so I'm gonna take a stab at this more than likely I would be creating

content that would engage people towards towards social benefit I'd be trying to find a way to create monetizable events for I've been doing something very similar without this technology let's put it that way I'd be trying to use existing technology to create experiences and opportunities for greater financial inclusion and for a greater inclusion in general in the totality of humanity and how we deal with each other but but without it without this technology I don't think that we could you know talk about a revolution in values but human values

globally the way that we can speak about it with this technology so it's much much bigger than what I would be doing where I not involved cool if you if you look back on your career is is there anything you'd do differently today you know all roads led to this so while there are some things that I would have done a little bit differently like some meetings I would have held in my first my first company or iterations I I can't say I regret anything III believe that everything that happened happened for a reason and it brought me to my initial understanding my own personal understanding of the

space when I was introduced to Bitcoin and that then colored and affected you know my my stance in my position in the space yeah so I actually am really grateful for everything I've been through whether good or bad that led up to this point because it brought me to a space right I truly feel I need to be and that I believe truly makes a difference in how humanity moves forward in the 21st century cool what's on the horizon for you in the next six months twelve months we are authentic itself is rebranding we're building it out a new platform that we will be announcing you know fairly soon that includes thousands and thousands of players in the space it

is a large rather large undertaking but we've been setting it up now for a few years and methodically biding our time and planning and watching the evolution of the space and tweaking it as it goes along but I think that we'll have you know quite a quite a few surprises for for the global community towards the end of this year that will be welcomed in a space and will help provide more tools to affect what we see as as the future of our existence here on earth well I definitely wish you best of luck Rick Devon and and thanks so much for taking time today it's great talking to you as always I really enjoy interacting with you whenever we get together and

hopefully it makes sense of some people and and it encourages others to your actors good thanks a lot thanks so much for joining us today more info on our guests and our sponsors isn't the show notes of this episode and on the podcast web site the blockchain and us comm to help people find this podcast it's important that you download subscribe and give it a top rating and review on iTunes or on the podcast platform of your choice I'm Manuel staggers and I thank you very much for listening [Music]