Solocast #2 - Web3 by a Winter Fire

 
Jorgenson's Soundbox photo
 

This week’s podcast is my second SoloCast, and during the episode, I share my thoughts and some predictions on the potential impacts and implementations of web3.

It’s a total brain-dump about ideas from web3:

The blockchain can be basically defined as a cryptographic breakthrough that allows for openness but with very careful editing permissions. While web1 resulted in costless publication and web2 in costless communication, web3 allows for costless transactions. This will likely increase the number of transactions we make. Web3 can also create cheap digital scarcity which may help authenticate originality in the digital world.

Currently, the cost of trust in the market is relatively high, and with increasing transactions and original creations occurring via the blockchain, we will have to pay less for trust. Also, there will be less need for centralized parties such as brands or centralized banks, though it’s too early to say which authorities will all be affected.

Some predictions about what will happen as the blockchain gets deployed: The first to be impacted is the management of digital items, with finance and gaming among the earlier industries. Also, we will likely see digital components getting separated from analog components so that they can be managed on the blockchain. Another trend that may happen is that the blockchain may be implemented to manage atoms in the real world.

Web3 will probably impact managerial culture, and DAOs (distributed autonomous organizations) will likely take over some market share from companies. I also believe the biggest networks will be bigger than the biggest companies, in part because there is no cap on involvement in web3 networks and ecosystems.

My goal in sharing my thoughts is not just to tell you what I think will happen but to provide some notions and rough directions so that you can hopefully overlay some of these lessons into your own experience and expertise. Web3 is still not easy to navigate, and it is still early in its implementation, but it provides an incredible opportunity, and it is fun to get involved.

Favorite Quotes:

  • “Blockchains are really interesting to me because I think they are a technology that will increase the effectiveness of both democracy and capitalism, two things that certainly kind of both fit under the ‘imperfect but the best we have’ systems.”

  • “As the communication became costless, it became way more prolific. And as transactions become costless, I believe they will become way more prolific through the distribution of web3.”

  • “There's a lot of effort that goes into creating trust. And I think the blockchain, as it gets more and more distributed, more transactions have happened on it, and more things are originally created on it, we are going to have a significant amount- We are going to have to pay less for trust.”

  • “Decentralization drives a little bit towards each of us as individuals being able to transact, to hold our own keys, to be our own central parties or manage some of those things for us, for ourselves instead of relying on others to do it all.”

  • “I think that we will see a new and even more powerful form of network effect sort of take on and that these networks will be bigger than the biggest companies, in part because there's no cap on involvement.”

  • “I remember Jack Dorsey saying, “I start companies because it's the way to affect change in the world, it's the vehicle that we have available to us.” And I think we will see alternatives to those through DAOs, through networks.”

  • “We are early enough, and new technologies almost always mean a new frontier for opportunity.”

Additional episodes if you enjoyed:

Podcast Transcript:

Eric Jorgenson: Hello again, my friends, and welcome to Jorgenson’s Soundbox. I'm bringing you my second solo cast on this cool winter day with a crackling fire in the background. I hope you pick up a little bit of that and find it as relaxing as I do. This solo cast is going to be about web3. I've spent maybe half my time over the past year trying to wrap my head around this, think about it, understand some of the jargon and some of the impacts and how this might look like or not look like what we've seen in changes to the web and the internet over the last 10 or 20 years. So, this sort of next little bit is going to basically be like if we were sitting at dinner and you asked, Eric, abandon all concept of your social graces and just talk about web3 and its impacts for like 45 minutes while we sit here quietly. This is about what you would hear. Everyone else would immediately leave the table. But this is kind of what you'd hear if you just pulled my string on everything that I'd been thinking about and trying all the ideas that I had to kind of try to wrap my head around over the last year or so. Most of this is big picture, long arc kind of stuff. When I to try to understand the impact of a new technology like this and the social impacts, I'm not very technical, so I don't really look at super detailed pieces of the implementation. I couldn't explain to you a lot of the pieces of the cryptographic breakthroughs, or if I did, I'd just be rehashing something I heard from Vitalik or Naval. So, what I try to lead into is coming up with these sort of simple either rules or guidelines or ways to think about where that technology and the patterns of humanity already intersect so that we can predict the changes that will actually happen maybe in our daily life, the products that will exist that don't exist now, the opportunities that we can see over the next 10 or 20 years. And I'm sure as I look back on this in a year or 10 years, some of what I'm about to say will be embarrassingly outdated or wrong. Some of my predictions will be off. I'm sure the terminology will change a lot. But I think it's helpful to process and at least keep taking swings at this, and it will show the growth that we've all had when we look back and see how wrong we were. But that's how we take steps forward. I will say kind of even before we get started that blockchains are really interesting to me because I think they are a technology that will increase the effectiveness of both democracy and capitalism, two things that certainly kind of both fit under the imperfect but the best we have systems. I believe deeply in both of those systems, and I think that a well implemented and widely distributed blockchain technology and technologies will advance both of those and bring them closer to the ideals that we hold for them and work out some of those bugs. So, I should say that's kind of some of where this passion and interest comes from. And let's dive in. 

I want to keep as far from jargon and introduce as few new definitions as I can. So, the cost for that is we are going to pay in some somewhat terrible analogies. But I want to at least give a very brief sort of what is the blockchain, but I'm not going to spend too long on here because I want to really get into like the impact that will be sort of much easier, much more tangible for us to think through, I think, going through examples. So, there are way better definitions from way smarter people than me out there. But just for the purposes of this conversation, the blockchain is a cryptographic technological breakthrough. It is a new sort of method of a software method, a new block of code, that means that we can create databases that are basically open for many people to view, but with incredibly accurate permissions and the ability for only- everybody can view it, but only specific people who have the proper permissions can edit each line that they are supposed to be allowed to edit. The analogy for this is rather than keeping one book of transactions that is incredibly well guarded and only very specifically chosen people can edit it, there are thousands of books that are open for everybody to read all over the world, but everyone can only edit the line that they are supposed to edit with their own key, their own special pen that they can use to access their line of the book. And other people can see that they edited it and they only edited what they were supposed to. So that is- and there's a method that cross-references all of those books all the time to be sure that they all agree and that the record that we all agree on is the same. There's now a bunch of different blockchains, they make different technical trade-offs, but that's the core of what happens is it's a cryptographic breakthrough that allows for openness but very careful editing permissions. And what that means is a lot of things. So, it's one of those little bit esoteric inventions that, once it's implemented, has super wide-ranging effects. So, the plain English version of what they do, I think the best way to think about it is that they lower transaction costs. So, what web1 did was ake it really, really cheap to publish things. So rather than the cost of publishing a book or publishing a newspaper, it became really cheap through software and the web and the tools of publication to write a blog post and put it up on a website, to create a website in the first place, or to publish even photos. So, if that defined web1, costless publication, web2 became defined by costless communication. So not only could the webmaster or writer of the blog post post something, but someone could like it, someone could comment on it. The communication really broadly brought us social networks. Two-way communication unlocked marketplaces. Two-way communication unlocked things like Uber, where you could communicate your location, the car could communicate its location, and that enabled a new kind of transaction. That's an interesting example because the transaction that happened in the marketplace, in all the marketplaces that we use, Instacart, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, were still offline transactions. There's no difference between putting your credit card into like a reader or typing it into a website. It was still this transaction that happened through the old banking system the same way it would have happened 20 years ago or 40 years ago. What web3 enables is costless transactions. So, in our daily lives right now, we really only make, I don’t know, one to five transactions. Maybe you buy lunch, you pay rent once a month, you, I don't know, buy groceries on the way home once or twice a week, maybe you buy something online. You're not constantly making transactions. But what we saw on web2 was you went from communicating with a few people every day to a hundred people every day or a thousand people every day. As the communication became costless, it became way more prolific. And as transactions become costless, I believe they will become way more prolific through the distribution of web3. So, we're just at the beginning of that now, but one of the things, my mental tricks that I like to use here is how many- if you go from doing five transactions a day to 50 transactions a day or to 500 transactions a day because they're so cheap now, and that's one of the things that blockchain will enable is cheaper transactions, what do those transactions become? If you were going to do 500 transactions a day, what are they? Do you maybe pay for every minute of a movie that you watch? Do you pay your rent every day instead of every month? Do you earn every word that you type or document that you complete or something like that? So, I have a blog post about this that dials into a few more of those examples, but that is one of the things that blockchain does is lower transaction costs. And one of the things that I think we will see in web3 is a 10X or 100X of the transactions that we do each day, and it could result in a really interesting world.

A second thing that they do that I think is distinct and worth mentioning is they create cheap digital scarcity. So almost everything is scarce in one form or another. There’re a few different types of scarcity that I've got a blog post on as well. But let's really quick say there's fungibility, so whether something is replaceable, like a $5 bill or unique and distinct like a concert ticket. That's types of scarcity. And then there's also hard cap versus open cap scarcity and whether something is limited like Bitcoin, there's only 21 million Bitcoin, or unlimited like email addresses. So, there could be as many email addresses as we want. No one's going to say like, oh, we've created too many email addresses, we have to stop now, but each one of those is unique. So, they are scarce individually but not a max. So, there's a little bit of a two by two there. And managing scarcity has been expensive for the most part or high effort; we have to have somebody look at it and manage it and walk through these things. And as that gets cheaper, that's another reason that the blockchain becomes valuable because we will be able to use digital scarcity for way cheaper. So, things like items in video games, photos, blog posts, books, all of that will get easier and digital rights management will get easier. It might mean that we've got a resale market for something like digital books. Reselling a Kindle book is not particularly feasible at the moment or reselling the rights to a digital image. Digital rights management, really, may be a better way to think about it, actually, a certificate of authenticity for digital items instead of the kind of web1 and 2 version where like once something became digital, it was very easily pirate-able. We have all the movies get pirated in Napster and all that stuff. And we are now maybe able to bring this sort of way to authenticate originality into the digital world, and that can change an awful lot of things. 

So reasonable questions – why does this matter? So, if blockchains can give us lower transaction costs and can help us create digital scarcity for cheap, why does it matter? And one of the things, I think the biggest reason that it matters is we are paying a tremendous amount every day to create trust. The cost of trust is absolutely massive, and it's all around us. We are paying constantly to interact with trusted counterparties. We buy things from brands because they have something to lose if the quality is poor. We put our money into banks because banks have done all of the work to get their charter and get FDIC insured and build a big ass vault and earn our trust that they are going to be good stewards of our money. We transact with companies that have good reviews because that goes into trust. So, I have a- this is a blog post that’s actually done. This podcast is about half blog posts that have been written and half blog posts that have yet to be written. So, I do have a blog post called the Cost of Trust that explores in a little bit more detail than we'll get into here how much it costs to create trust and very importantly like what happens to a market when there isn't trust. If there's not trust between you and another person, do you stop transacting with them? And if there's anybody in the- if there are  five sandwiches that you can buy, but you know one of them is going to give you food poisoning, but you don't know which one, you're not going to transact in that market. So, trust is important on an individual transaction basis, but also it has an effect. When there's a lack of trust in the market, anywhere in the market, it affects the entire size of the market and the number of people who are willing to participate in it. So, there's a lot of effort that goes into creating trust. And I think the blockchain, as it gets more and more distributed, more transactions have happened on it, and more things are originally created on it, we are going to have a significant amount- We are going to have to pay less for trust. It's going to get pretty interesting to see how, if we're paying somewhere between Visa is like we pay 3% for those transactions, I think some places are like 30%, auction houses for example, like we pay them a lot to authenticate the piece of art that you're buying. I don't know what that rake is, let’s call it 30%. So, in between 3 and 30% that you're moving to that unlocks, so those transactions become cheaper. They can happen more often. And that is a lot of consumer surplus that comes to all of us who are using new things. 

The other reason why the blockchain matters is decentralization. It has become a little bit of a buzzword. It's kind of the new democratization. But I think there's some interesting components there. So, decentralization, the point is really there to not require a trusted central party like a brand. So, doing a transaction between a company and an individual without using Visa to intermediate fraud payments or charge backs or things like that. So, another example of decentralization might be peer to peer lending, getting a loan from a group of people or another specific person instead of going through the central entity, which is the bank. I'm not so sure actually that most normal people care about decentralization as much as decentralization sort of extremists seem to think. But I do think that there is, in the same way that democratization, it was a good word for sort of web1 and web2, that costless publication era and communication era, democratization of writing really did happen, right? So, a lot more people are able to publish their ideas than have ever been before, but we are not in a truly, deeply, maximally democratic world now that you can have one of those, one or two things have been democratized. In the same way, I think some and maybe many things will be decentralized, and some central sort of, I don't know, actors or parties or authorities or whatever currently might get completely decentralized, and an alternative will arise that makes them sort of crumble and implode. The million- or billion-dollar question is which ones? I don't have a good answer for that yet, but I think it's an interesting question to revisit and to sort of take guesses at and write hypotheses about. But decentralization drives a little bit towards each of us as individuals being able to transact, to hold our own keys, to be our own central parties or manage some of those things for us, for ourselves instead of relying on others to do it all. So those are two kind of really big like why it matters. It'll be really interesting to see, I do think decentralization will increase over the next 10 or 20 years. There are people, just like the early days of the internet, who are calling for maximized decentralization and think that we will live in an entirely decentralized world and federal governments will crumble, and I don't see that happening. I think in the same way enthusiasm around a new enabling technology lets us kind of look past all of the other sort of tangled pieces of a new implementation. And so, I do think we will have a more decentralized world, and it'll move forward ten steps in some places and two steps in others. But it is difficult at this point to predict where exactly and what that'll look like. 

So, let's talk about what will happen as blockchains get deployed. So, I think the first sort of item here is that we'll hit digital first. That's probably- That may be already obvious to most people. And there are people who are currently kind of saying that blockchains are really only ever going to be good for managing digital items. I'm not as sure that that's true, and I'll get into that in a second. I think it's a really, really interesting question. But digital items will almost certainly get managed on the blockchain. I think that's why we're seeing finance first. So, finance and gaming are two of the very biggest sort of early industries. I don't mean to say that they are on chain yet, but the sort of web3 culture is merging with and looking at and deploying projects that work in. So, we have crypto games, like Axie Infinity, we have crypto sort of banking alternatives, stuff like Aave and Alchemix, and there's a very long list. In my episode with Jason Hitchcock, he goes very deep in all the things that DeFi, decentralized finance as we call it, are doing right now. But the things that are easily- that are already digital or easily digitized will sort of come onto the blockchain first. And that's where we'll start to see that increased rate of transactions or that lower cost of trust. So, we're already seeing loans getting granted on the blockchain. We're already seeing some methods of sort of salary streaming is one of the promises that's kind of early but too soon to really say, but that's something where you get paid daily instead of every two weeks, for example. So, we can brainstorm other things that are digital. NFTs sort of come into the scarcity piece, the non-fungible tokens. And we're really seeing kind of like the, I think it's like the million-dollar homepage era of NFTs, right? There's a lot of experiments and a lot of playing around with what the different utilities are, what the options are. There's a huge amount of utility in NFTs over time. I think if there's skeptics saying like, oh, that's only for trading JPEGs, they're missing the point that this is like early sandbox experimentation with a new technology and that we will certainly outgrow that and implement NFTs for much more important and massive things like votes or tickets or access or memberships. Like there's a lot of things that'll happen there. But it'll happen with digital first. 

The second sort of step maybe, and it is not really fair to put this chronologically, but just as mental buckets, is that I think we'll see digital component because the digital is so much easier to bring on chain and there's value to bringing it on chain, we'll see digital components getting separated from analog components. So, one interesting example, and I think there's a few projects or companies working on this, but one of the things that we all interact with is the real estate system and the title industry. That's not ideal. That's a place where we pay a lot for trust, right? We pay the title office to be sure that someone will tell the court that we own the land and that the person who's selling me the land owns the land and has owned the land and bought it from the person who owned it before them. And then you go through the same sort of steps of authentication on the banking side. But we'll see digital components getting separated from the analog components. So, here, maybe the example is separating- I'm seeing companies digitizing the mortgage but leaving the analog of the land and the title alone. So, there are protocols coming and saying like, look, pay us your mortgage, you'll get a cheaper mortgage, you'll get a better rate. We'll do the decentralized finance treatment on the mortgage, but you will still interact with the title office, and you will still own the land and you'll still have all of the same rights to your land or your house or whatever that you would have had in the analog system. In this analogy, I don't- like a big kind of interesting unknown is actually like will the title system eventually move on to its own specialized chain or some version of a blockchain? Because they're certainly operating from a database that's just a manually managed database or digital individual scarce database, and how and when that moves on chain is probably an interesting conversation with an expert to have, but I don't yet know. But I think the theme of digital components getting separated from analog components so that they can be managed on chain is pretty interesting and we'll find new ways to connect those two. 

So, another trend that I think will happen as blockchains get deployed here is that we'll see hardware that makes it easier for bits to manage atoms. That's something that we've seen a number of times in web2 actually. Like you could think of Uber and Airbnb both in that way. You can go on a piece of software and beckon to a car, a bit of hardware, that can come get you. So, I think we'll see more of that but in a new twist, right? So, now the atoms have to manage the bits. So, I had a great email exchange actually with a reader who provided me a little bit of research, because he sent me this question and got really curious about it and pulled up a bunch of great stuff about how there is technology like RFID tags that can be sort of- they can't be removed without altering the- without breaking the tag. Which is a really interesting, I don't know, it’s just a peek at that technology, but it answers this question of like, okay, so you're going to manage on the blockchain these pallets of things, but if I just switched these two stickers, all of a sudden, everything breaks. And it's definitely a problem to solve. It is the first, most obvious problem to solve, but it's not an unsolvable problem. And there are plenty of technologies that can be created to enable sort of you to enter an error handling system when a tag or identifying label is removed rather than push us into- the society to the brink of chaos because we switched some stickers. I don't think so. I think there's a- this is one of the blog posts not yet to be written but something I will work on is this question of like the relationship between blockchain and offline. I think there's really interesting stuff to do there, whether it's QR codes, RFID tags. Another is digital locks that are unlocked by NFTs, by wallets on your phone. So, a crypto wallet that holds a specific key, it can be the key to your home that's not duplicatable, it's scarce, there's only three, you know who has them all. But that's something that could be moved on chain but used to manage atoms in the real world. And so, it's another example of separating those digital components from the analog components.

In the process of trying to understand all of this and what the hell's happening, I re-read this amazing book by an economist named Carlota Perez. She wrote Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, and she traces the sort of predictable-ish or pattern, I should say, arcs that happen between a new technology arising and actually getting distributed and the impact that that has, not just on the market but also on the culture, the politics, and sort of the managerial culture. We manage differently when we're managing a global set of software developers then an assembly line in a manufacturing plant and the culture of management of the Six Sigma era and Andon Cords versus the globally distributed, multilingual digital part-time workforce is incredibly different. And I think we will see more of that change. And she talks about these sort of painful processes of upheaval and change and resistance and inevitability that happened. So, it's worth looking past the technology and even past the market implications and into things like what will change in the culture of management over the next 10, 20, and 50 years. 

In this conversation, probably the most pertinent thing that exists now is called a DAO,  D A O, a distributed autonomous organization. It's a little bit of an ideal of the crypto culture that is an organization that is sort of the new version of a company, but it's not really a company. It is a loose collaboration of volunteers, some of whom work full time, some of whom don't, some of whom are compensated, some of whom are not, which does that make them volunteers? I don't know. But it's much more of a sort of fluid, currently, at least I should say, it's currently kind of a fluid like meritocratic opt in sort of partial employment. So, the promise of that over time is that it gets more autonomous, that it becomes quite a democratic thing, and all the people who are working there are affected, can vote on things that change the direction of a project, that users of the project can become builders and contributors to the project. And so, while I don't- there's another version where I think the extremists overstate, but sort of to dismiss it is also too extreme. So, I think it is fair to say that DAOs and whether they become known as networks or protocols will take over some market share from companies. Some market share from companies will go towards DAOs, and people who currently work in companies will start to work in DAOs. I'm already seeing sort of that happen more and more. There are people who can- you can earn a full-time employment in all sorts of roles, marketing or writing or creating tutorials, coding, designing, creating art. And it just involves sort of finding your way to one of these projects and getting involved. I've done an interview already with Simon Judd who is in this role at Index Coop which is a DAO that creates crypto index products. I’m scheduling another one with Squid DAO, some of the participants from there. So that will be another podcast kind of on this topic of DAOs. And that's where we'll start to see some of these sort of cultural and managerial changes. 

Another, and this is a little bit market and a little bit culture, but I think it's fair to say, and there's a blog post coming about this too as soon as I finish wrapping my head around it, that the biggest networks will be bigger than the biggest companies. So, the biggest companies on Earth now, probably Apple, somewhere around 2 trillion at the time of this recording in market cap. I think that we will see networks bigger than the biggest companies. I don't know what the timeline is – 10 years, 20 years. I don't know if it's fair to call Bitcoin a network yet, perhaps. But the Ethereum likely is, and we will have others. I think it's fair to classify other things that already exist as networks. We just don't have ways to measure them by market cap the way we do with something like tokens or all these projects that exist. So existing networks, we could say  HTTP, the protocol that runs the internet and delivers most of the information that you read on a daily basis, email, pop3 or whatever the other email protocol is, those are used more than any branded product that you can think of. Those both probably have more users than Facebook or Apple or Microsoft. I actually also think that it's fair to use an analogy to religions. I think if religions had market caps, they would likely be bigger than any of the biggest companies on Earth. And I think that we will see a new and even more powerful form of network effect sort of take on and that these networks will be bigger than the biggest companies, in part because there's no cap on involvement. If you own an Apple device or Apple stock or develop on an Apple ecosystem, you're contributing to the Apple network. But there's only so many people who can work there. Not everyone can afford to use Apple devices and not everyone has the skills to contribute to build an Apple project and contribute to that ecosystem. However, there will be in web3 networks and ecosystems that the answer is yes to all of those things. The tokens will be fractionalized. Anybody can afford to be a shareholder and open, so anybody will be able to buy that across any border and in any amount. I think Bitcoin kind of already fits that. I think Ethereum already fits that. We will see everyone be able to contribute to the growth of the value of that network, no matter what their skill is, and people will be able to use whatever their skills are to contribute to that. So, whether that's part-time or very fractionally or anything like that, we'll start to see all of that network effect flywheel that has become sort of the biggest competitive advantage of the biggest companies in the world will get applied to things that are not necessarily today considered companies like Ethereum but that we can all be shareholders of and participants in and contribute to the growth of. And I think that those will become bigger than the biggest companies. There's nothing that says that companies have to be the biggest or the only investments or the biggest things in the world. We went through whole eras of human history where the feudal system was the biggest, most influential thing in the world, and then the church or a variety of churches were the most influential thing in the world. And today, I remember Jack Dorsey saying, “I start companies because it's the way to affect change in the world, it's the vehicle that we have available to us.” And I think we will see alternatives to those through DAOs, through networks. And things like that will, like I said, take over market share from some companies, and network effects will become even more powerful than they are today. Brad Burnham at Union Square Ventures said, “We've now found the native asset class of information networks, and it's tokens.” And I think so far, something like Uber or Airbnb or Twitter is an information network, but the native asset, we've been using a non-native asset class like equity to reward participants in those information networks. And with a native token, with a token that actually fits the system that we are trying to build and something that's transactable cheaply, fractionally, very quickly to anybody in the world who can contribute to it, those are going to- the incentives are going to be much more aligned and much more robust and much more fluid. And it's going to strengthen all of those network effects that we're already seeing define so many of the most powerful companies and organizations on the planet. 

So that's perhaps a slightly vague prediction, but I think it's a reasonable one. And I think those are kind of useful ways to look at what's going to change and hopefully it doesn't introduce too much jargon, it doesn't introduce too many details about things. And the goal with sharing some of this is really not to tell you in detail what I think is going to happen but to share with you the notions or the rough directions so that you can really overlay, hopefully, some hard-earned lessons onto your actual experience and your expertise and the world that you work in. So I use some examples, but what's really most interesting and helpful here is hearing someone take this idea of, oh, the biggest networks will be bigger than the biggest companies, let me actually apply that to my expertise in the energy industry and see how we have big energy companies, but actually if we took the network- So there's a network called Helium that is creating like a decentralized network around IT infrastructure. And so, they've got lo-fi routers that are distributed. They're working on 5g. They're basically building a decentralized AT&T, like an AT&T that is a network. And so, you can put up your own antenna, you can provide service, you can buy service, and there's no need for AT&T the company if we build a robust network that we can transact with and that rewards people who contribute to it and that we are willing to pay for and that everybody on Earth can contribute to in some form or fashion. Like we may see that network outgrow AT&T in our lifetimes, and that's incredibly interesting and exciting. Who knows if that'll happen. Who knows if 50 other things will happen. But I really want to see a ton of examples and have conversations with people who say like, oh, I can take that mental model, apply it to my expertise in the energy industry and say, oh my God, like if we give everybody a micro nuclear generator to put in their basement, we can decentralize the power grid and create massive efficiencies across all of the power distribution and savings and all of these things. So, part of the alchemy here is me sharing vague rules that are hopefully helpful for you to actually take and apply to your expertise and the worlds that you live in. And if you have something that clicks together as a result of this, I would deeply love to hear about it. You can tweet me or email me or whatever. And if you want to come have an hour long conversation about it, holler at me, and we'll see if we should do this on the podcast. 

I want to wrap with like a very reasonable question at this point in my monologue, which is, okay, Eric, but what should I do? What do I have to do? The first thing is like you don't have to do anything. There's a bunch of nerdy pioneers sort of working on this for you as a user. Like I'm not going to say any of this stuff is super easy to use. We are not at the point where like anybody can just go in and set up an account and it's all fine and dandy and easy. It is just not there yet. There is more than a lot of skeptics, I think. But it is crufty and difficult to use. And I would say if you are going to jump into using some of these protocols and tools, that is a great next step, but do it by reaching out to somebody who is a few months ahead of you, and literally go sit next to them and like ask them every question that comes up. That is how almost everyone who uses this stuff got into it in the first place. Get on YouTube, learn some stuff, ask some questions. It's not easy, and if you expect it to be easy, you will end up frustrated. But you don't have to use this stuff to enjoy thinking about it and learning about it. We're still super, super early. It is also true that we are early enough, and new technologies almost always mean a new frontier for opportunity. If you are staring down a dead end, this is an incredible opportunity, perhaps one of very few sort of generational opportunities and life-defining opportunities. So, it is still early enough that you can come in and get up to speed and find ways to apply the skills that you've built over a lifetime, and this new sort of world and ecosystem is growing very quickly. Everyone is desperate for talent and competence. You can also invest both your time and your money. If you want to invest money in companies or protocols or tokens, none of this is financial advice, I only mention things half-heartedly, but it is fair to say like I have and will continue to be investing in web3, some personally, some through a fund that I'm putting together. If you're interested in that, you can get ahold of me. If you are already working in the video game industry, the art industry, or the finance industry, definitely pay a little extra attention to this and walk with a little more urgency because this is kind of already in your neighborhood. So, it will pay to sort of get an early look at this and start wrapping your head around it and seeing some of what's already happening in this world. It's really fun and really interesting. 

And that's probably the last idea is that this is supposed to be fun. Web3 in general is a kind of irreverent, weird, fun, crazy culture where it's actually easier to predict if things will do well if they make no sense and are just like for the fuck of it. So, if you want to jump in and swim around, be prepared to just laugh out loud and be slightly confused and bemused but enjoy the lightheartedness of so much of what's happening. 

This ends my antisocial over dinner monologue. Everyone else is long gone. But I hope some of this was helpful and interesting for you. I have written a lot of this down in greater detail on my blog at ejorgenson.com. I will continue to flush out a lot of these ideas. But I hope this was a helpful sort of on-ramp or exploration of some of these ideas and what might happen over the next few years. And I'm excited to revisit it and see how wrong I was. Thank you all. I appreciate you. Talk to you later.

Podcast, CryptoEric JorgensonWeb3, Blockchain, CryptoComment