Is Blockchain Still a Revolution or Becoming Another Upgrade? Ep.621

When I think about, say, cypherpunk, when I think about decentralization, I'm more focused nowadays on the chains themselves, the protocols that the, the, the real inelimitable core, as I like to think of it of, of cypherpunk is primarily to be found on the chains, and that's where it really matters. And then you're probably fighting a losing battle. If you want every application, every doubt to have that same degree of commitment to these traditional values.

I think those days might be coming to a close. How do we stop Web 3 from merely becoming an infrastructure upgrade for Wide St. I think we've seen a lot of this. I think that's already happened. If they understood more the level of micro targeting and corporate surveillance that's happening under the hood, I think people would be more worried about it. Welcome to Epicenter, the show, which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization

and the blockchain revolution. I'm Frederica Adams, and today I'm speaking with Paul Dillon Ennis, who goes bipolar on Twitter, and Nick Almond, who's also super active on Twitter. Paul is an independent crypto philosopher and a lecturer at the College of Business at University College Dublin. And Nick thinks very deeply about governance and other aspects at the DITO Network as the head of governance there.

And today we want to be having a conversation whether we might have to adjust our intro in due course. So is the blockchain revolution really still a blockchain

revolution? Or is it becoming an upgrade for more legacy players? Before we dive into it, we'd like to tell you about our sponsors this week. This episode is brought to you by Nosis, building the open Internet one block at a time. Nosis was founded in 2015 and it's grown from 1 of Ethereum's earliest projects into a powerful ecosystem for open user owned finance. Nosis is also the team behind products that had become core to my business and that are so many others like Safe and Cow Swap.

At the center is Nosis Chain. It's a low fee layer one with 0 downtime in seven years and secured by over 300,000 validators. It's the foundation for real world financial applications like Nosis Pay and Circles. All of this is governed by Nosis Dow, a community run organization where anyone with a GNO token can vote on updates, fund new projects, and even run a validator from home.

So if you're building a Web 3 or you're just curious about what financial freedom can look like, start exploring at nosis dot IO. Hey, Paul and Nick, super nice to have both of you on. Hi, nice to be here. Good. Maybe for everyone who doesn't know you kind of who doesn't spend as much time on Twitter as I do. Can we get brief backgrounds of who you are, why you are here, and what you came for? Yeah, OK, I'll go first. Yeah, so I'm, I'm a physicist by background.

I was actually an academic for a good chunk of my career. I sort of sailed from physics through to learning theory and governance research over about a decade or so. And then in 2020, I jumped into crypto full time because I was obsessed on Dows and the what wonderful things this technology could do for the world. And I worked on prediction markets, Dow tooling, and now sort of govern a large Dow in

the Solano ecosystem. Cool. Thank you, Nick. It's it's interesting to have a fellow physics physics PhD on on the show, just just mostly for my benefit. Tell me, tell me what you did research on. I ended up doing the PhD in biophysical surface science, so I was interested in. I was working on sort of photonic probes to try and understand how biological molecules and biological systems ordered at surfaces. So I was very interested in,

yeah, the emergence around like how life started, how sort of self organized systems begin in biological systems, that kind of stuff. That's fascinating. It's also not that that much removed from governance and kind of. Like it is, I think I, yeah, I got very, very obsessed on complex systems and self organization. Yeah, for the last 20 years or so, it's been very much there. There's there's a lot of

parallels. 100% So I did my PhD in low dimensional context quantum systems, which is actually by it's actually pretty, it's actually somewhat similar to what what you did. So kind of like, I mean work, work on surfaces and kind of I did, I mostly did carbon nanotubes and graphene and kind of like these sorts of systems. Yeah, so condensed condensed matter physics then basically, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I. Did simulation and experiments. So it's yeah lovely super cool

pie. We we've kind of bypassed you so far, but I'd also very much like a a, a short intro on you. I think many people will recognize you from from Twitter as post polar. Yeah, it's one of those situations where I've reached the point where that has become my name in real life, even at conferences. And by the way, Pol is Paul in Irish, so that that's where the the origin of the name. But yeah, so a similar situation, another academic. So my PhD is in philosophy.

So I guess the other side of the, that spectrum. So if the the physics materialist, the philosopher who's maybe in the clouds a little bit. And then really I was interested in crypto before I got involved

in it in terms of writing about it in an academic context, because I had friends who were involved in WikiLeaks early on and they were telling me about, you know, Bitcoin, the embargo that made me curious. And then I heard about Silk Road and I've always had this attraction to counter cultures, subcultures, that kind of thing. And then I never thought about it of being something that I would actually write about in a

academic context. And then just by chance, I saw a job ad while I was doing my bits and pieces of teaching across Dublin. So I was like teaching philosophy, interior and so on. There was a job ad for a blockchain researcher at the university I am now. This is 2015. And because nobody else in the country was really had a PhD and also an interest in crypto, I got the job. So. So it's just kind of lucky. And then since then I just said, OK, this is a unique opportunity.

I'm looking at a research area where there is nobody else really working on it. Or you could count the amount of academics at that time on one hand. So yeah. And then just ended up writing op-ed articles and then accidentally my my Twitter account, which I don't really understand its popularity as such, kind of took off as a my student, one of my students called it a micro influencer, so which I quite like. I like that too. Maybe she got a T-shirt kind of

like micro influencer. I think that's yeah, I think kind of like that. There's you already kind of let us into why we're having this episode. So you said kind of like you you are you were always interested in counterculture and kind of in a way kind of the crypto ecosystem is very much shifting out of that niche.

I would argue that that segment of Web 3 is still there, but it's becoming increasingly marginalized. So if you look at a lot of the things that currently happen on Web 3, it's more or less kind of technology being appropriated by the incumbents to kind of increase their efficiency rather than kind of turning this agency and ownership narrative into a reality that a lot of us kind of came into the space for.

And kind of I want to explore with you guys how you see that, how dire you think the situation is, whether it can be turned around and if so, how? Maybe I'll start with UNIC because kind of like you've, you've written about governance, which is your core focus as the soul of crypto, right? What values do you think it was meant to protect? Yeah, I think so. I was super obsessed on governance in my academic career. In fact, decentralized organization in particular.

So I, I kind of built a decentralized organization inside a institution as a means to help the academics self organize around improving the university and kind of got pilled on that and realized that decentralization and decentralized organization was a was a powerful force for good in that it's sort of distributed power more evenly across systems

at scale. And then when the sort of Dow happened, I realized that you could like really scale decentralized organization and it was a potential real force for good in the world. Because I, I see a lot of the frailties, if you like, if the conventional governance orders due to centralization, there's, you know, power concentrates around very small amount of people that limits decision

making capability. Decision makers get increasingly divorced from reality and people that they're governing. And that was 20 years ago or 15 years ago, and it's way worse now. So I was kind of hoping the this would be a huge force for good in the world. Sadly, we haven't really focused on governance as an industry yet. I think it's one of the, it got very lonely in the bear market last time around. Sort of still being a believer in Dows and decentralized

governance. Bit sad that it's not really manifested as yet as a kind of broad influence on on conventional governance systems. My sort of belief was that, you know, crypto was almost by like osmosis influence the global ward world order by just like distributing decentralization around the world. And yeah, it's I've got both kind of optimistic and deeply pessimistic views of where things could go based on how things might play out.

And yeah, both of them involve like crypto and blockchain as as

like potential accelerators of that if you like. If you look at governance in particular, it is one area that kind of we were extremely optimistic about in the past kind of. And I mean we were we as Gnosis were up there with kind of the the the best of them and the earliest of them, right. If you look at DX style, for instance, which was possibly the one of the very early kind of actually Daos that actually kind of governed A protocol.

And then you look at the DAO infrastructure that kind of we've seen over the years. So kind of in a way kind of I feel in 20/17/2018 thoughts on how DAO should work, we're actually way more advanced than they're, they're actually today.

So kind of if you look at, for instance, the DAO stack protocol, kind of they kind of like, I mean, it was founded by two physicists. So of course I liked it, but kind of it was it kind of like it had very good mechanism design in terms of realizing that attention is really the scarce resource and kind of you, you need to make sure that you

can't spam it down. Kind of like if you look at how governance plays out today for the large towers, it's mostly backroom Telegram groups that kind of where where kind of you don't really have access to if if you kind of just come in and you and then kind of like deals are negotiate there. And then kind of the, the, the, the, a lot of the votes are just kind of are full gone conclusions because kind of like that they've already kind of been negotiated in some backroom

Telegram tenants, right? Yeah, I think so, yeah. We, I in many cases, both in things like token economics and governance, there was a much more advanced thinking or or rather the the thinking that was sort of deep and interesting was more prevalent in the space at that time. I think maybe an equivalent amount of it exists, it's just diluted by, you know, the rest of the industry.

But also I think there's the reality of governance systems is exactly what you described is that we have this lovely public mechanism that we should be using, but the reality of it is people don't want to use it because it's public and they want to conduct things in backroom Telegram channels because it's easier. So yeah, there's the reality of the way humans interact with technology. They're kind of socio technical systems.

So what how a technology is used is only really manifested as people start to use it. And that's the kind of reality. Humans don't tend to behave in the way that you want them to. And so we we kind of built these quite idealistic mechanisms, assuming everyone would like conform to the mechanism, when in fact you can just choose not to use the mechanism and work around it and people will. So, yeah, I think there was a, you know, and largely people at large just haven't done much

governing, right? It's it's not, you only get into governance if you end up it's kind of super senior in a, in a large organization or you go into politics or something, right. And like 99% of people just are not in that position. So it's really quite an alien sort of thing to do. And I think that's been one of the really large challenges is the yeah, people just don't sort of tend to want or know how to govern stuff.

So it's just a there's a big distance between people and the, and the tools, I think, but I'm still optimistic we'll close that gap. But it's it's it's it's it's definitely one of the most difficult things that you can work on. And just so the other thing is

it's not easy to productize. So the kind of contemporary paradigm of technology as you kind of hyper focus on a very specific niche and then extract rents from it and build a very tight revenue model out of it. Whereas governance is completely context dependent. So you just can't build a really tight neat product out of these things. And it and it's that's just made it very uninvestable for the most part over the last sort of several years. So we we kind of got a bit stuck I think.

It's uninvestable, but kind of like 4 Dows that actually have treasuries. It's also extremely important, right? So kind of like the principle, there should be funding for this because misallocation of funds is, is such a huge risk for these Dows. I, I would very much take the position that having some level of transparency and also the ability of new people with new ideas kind of enter into an ecosystem openly and being heard

that that's really high value. But one belief that a lot of people, I think mistakenly hold in the space is that everyone's voice should count equally and kind of as as someone, I mean, maybe this is this is somewhat arrogant. But as someone kind of like who is build medium sized organisations before and kind of whose voice usually carries a lot of weight, having people come in and expect to kind of be given the same amount of reverence or kind of attention.

It's, it's, it's sometimes starring, right? Because kind of like I, I want to appreciate people who come in and kind of people who kind of bring opinions and and one to sit at the table because kind of obviously you need fresh blood, right? Kind of like this why you wander Dow. This is what kind of like what can elevate Dow's into kind of this paradigm shifting mode of organization, kind of akin to kind of like when we got joint stock companies or something, right?

But at the same time, it not everyone in a DAO is created equally. And I think that's, that's, I mean, obviously you should, you should be able to kind of move within that framework freely, but it should it, it should be in my eyes, extremely meritocratic. Couldn't agree more. That's very much what I've been kind of chasing for many years is that paradigm like exactly how you can shape a consensus by by merit. So yeah, I think there's there's we came to this with these very

idealistic framing. You know, there was a lot of the early Dow thinking was very flat org. You know, we want to get rid of hierarchy completely. We want massively open porous organizations, you know, and the reality of it is that's a terrible idea. There's, it's just, you can't, there's also a sort of feature I call the public governance trap, which is if you do everything completely open, there's always someone hanging around who's going to just nitpick on absolutely everything that

you're doing in public. And it just creates, and I, I know this because I've done this for like over the last five years, right? When I used to do, we used to have team meetings like openly on Discord and everyone would just, you know, and you'd have like 20 people just sitting there watching you not saying anything. And it just, it changes the dynamic for how you make decisions, right? And, and this was a time when you like, you know, this was a quite risky thing to be doing.

And in terms of like global regulatory sort of environment and things like that, you know, dynamics changed a little bit. Be like, who are these people? Makes you more guarded, you know, it's it's difficult to make good decisions in a radically open context like that. And then occasionally you get someone who's got nothing better to do who will just hassle you all day every day, but they're like don't know what they're talking about.

And that's just not a tenable sort of system for for for governing sensibly. So there's a middle ground somewhere, right where you need to have decision making. You need to have a path that for people to walk into an organization and be elevated into a position of status and power if they are capable of doing it and have a material influence over the project an be rewarded for their participation. That sounds almost like a company. A company is kind of like an

interpersonal fiction, right? Kind of like it's historically that kind of we as humans kind of tell themselves it's nothing you can kind of, it's nothing you can touch. It's nothing that's physically there. It's just kind of like a set of. Rules and abstractions. Exactly. That like a legal fiction. Exactly. It's a legal fiction, so and in some ways kind of it, it was it was created to kind of do a lot of the things that you just talked about, right?

Kind of like to to allow new people to kind of come into it and kind of like if they're useful, they can kind of rise within the structure kind of. But it's still seen as kind of like one large entity that kind of like acts as an entity and so on. How?

Kind of like if, if you look at kind of like the kind of a, an idealized corporation, that kind of is that where there's no politics and there's kind of like it, it, it's purely meritocratic and kind of has a strong leadership and vision and kind of, but it's fully permeable. How would that differ from kind of your ideal vision of a DAO? I think there's a few sort of key differences. I mean, for one, these structures are very centralized, right? They're very centralized.

They adopt this very sort of pyramidic structure of power and they start to degrade in effective function as they scale very big are. We talking about Dows or corporations here? Corporations, corporations, large, large, centralized. I mean, the same is sort of true. That's true. For that, I mean, it's kind of, it's kind of.

That's so my theory on this is that largely we've projected the and I think this is back to your central point of this episode, right, which is largely we've projected the old world onto the new. So a lot of people rather than try to explore this new paradigm of decentralized organization, we've just effectively tried to rebuild centralized organizations in, in this new world, right.

So like really, if you, if you look from a governance perspective, like like Max Weber's sort of bureaucracy theory of bureaucracy has like revolutionized the world's organizations of the last 200 years. And it's created these kind of like very hierarchical structures. And, and in reality, the, they're not that meritocratic in the end, right?

The, the theory is that meritocratic, but actually the people that end up at the top of these organizations stay at the top of these organizations, whether they're should be there or not. Finances tend to be very untransparent, right? So the, the, the radical differences in Dow's is that we have this people can contribute to the organization and there's a degree of consent that spreads out across every participant, which is also not the case in,

in conventional structures. So it's, it's somewhat subtle in a sense, but a, a decentralized organization is more about local autonomy. Centralized corps are more oppressive generally, right? The the systems of power in there with managers who enforce people to, you know, codes of conduct and and contractual form.

And it's and it's trying to find a new organizational mode that deviates from that effectively more about radical local autonomy, distributed decision making where in theory people at the lowest levels of the organization could influence the global structure, which is tends to not happen in more democratic if you like. Yeah, I, I, I hear that Paula, you, you've been pretty vocal about crypto drifting towards

corporate corporation. So kind of and would you apply that to kind of the DAO landscape of crypto native projects or would you apply that predominantly to kind of web two players kind of coming into crypto new? Yeah, So I think it's really a story about, it's actually an old story, you know, geeks, mops and psychopaths. As the the old article goes that you, you start off with this culture, which is at least when we think about Bitcoin, it's a combination of libertarianism and cypherpunk.

So we we have these this very unique mix. That's actually really the story of why it kicks off. It's, it's the fact that it's cypherpunk and libertarian.

And then over the years we, we drift into Ethereum land and Ethereum in the beginning actually isn't a cypherpunk, I think as people, you know, tend to talk about, but it like if, if Ethereum inherits anything, it inherits cypherpunk and basically drops the, the libertarianism, at least in the, the Bitcoin Goldberg kind of variation on that. And then there's a little bit of an issue when it comes to Ethereum culture, which is that it's not quite clear what

Ethereum is for. So it's a big question mark in the middle. The, the white paper tells you that it's it's, you know, it's not like it's, it's going to be a general purpose blockchain so you can build whatever you want on it. So you know, essentially it's, it's for anything, which is great. That's a pluralist perspective. And then that's where we get all of our different narratives. They're actually really often

technical narratives. Dows defy NFTS prediction markets, I guess might be the current version of this, but that question of say, what is Ethereum for has always been a little bit unclear. And then, OK, we maybe we could say things like decentralized acceleration, ISM network states. That's like the the attempt to answer the end game social question of like what the

Ethereum society is for. And I think that that's worth mentioning because if you compare it to what the Bitcoiners believe, they know what they're for. We're going to transition over to hyper bitcoinization. The Fiat system's going to collapse. Then you're going to live in the citadel, right? That's, that's their vision for society. Whereas knowing what you end up with in the Ethereum is a little

bit more, a little less clear. And I think over the years this has led to people becoming more pragmatic. So in Dow, as you can actually see this. So in Dow is so every decision is being made in the Dow before anybody votes. So that, that's something, I think that's something I always tell my, my students like there's never a decision made in a Dow that hasn't already been back roomed before you get to it. And there's a lot of insider dealing and pressure.

It's a soft pressure, I would say, like a social pressure to kind of conform with the, the group. And then also the, the fact that foundations stick around so that like the, the, the company progressively decentralizes, but they're usually the, the foundation is kind of like the surveillance state of the, of the, the company in the form of the transition over to the community or something like

this. And then you also have the, the founders themselves, the team having huge amounts of tokens. So the, and the, I mean this, this doesn't really surprise me in the sense that the, in terms of cultural evolution, because more and more if you look at what I call the CTVC podcast industrial complex, or sometimes I call it the block works

extended universe. So this is, let's say people who've emerged into crypto, so they're emerging into say Ethereum culture or into Dow culture, but they're from the Business School so that they've got a Business School kind of

mindset. They're primarily interested in markets and primarily primarily interested in like the like what's happening in the previous week, not what happened 10 years ago, what happened five years ago, umm, under their forward-looking as well, which can be quite good. Uh, but they are generally speaking post ideological. So one of the terms that I took from one of their podcasts.

So this is a term that they use themselves, like, not as a critique that I'm giving post ideological pragmatism. And so effectively just looking at the, it's not really important whether Ethereum is more decentralized on Solana, It's whether people's perception of Ethereum being decentralized matters relative to whether it matters, uh, to say to someone in Solana that it's centralized or decentralized. Like it's, it, it becomes, uh, a part of the market discussion.

It doesn't actually matter as a value or an ideology. So, umm, I think we're, we're, we're deep into this, like we're, we're maybe a lot of people haven't accepted this, that this, this transition has happened. And so cypherpunk and the values of cypherpunk like decentralization, permissionless, this credible neutrality, et cetera. This is a minority sport and it has its representatives, but actually the representatives have even themselves given way to A to a certain extent.

So if we think about the transition that happened with the Ethereum Foundation, so there's a basically a populist revolt from, you know, people who want E to be the primary focus, who want the Etherium foundation to be more hands on. So not the Etherium foundation should subtract or disappear or be decentralized, but should take over should be like the the entity which directs Etherium going forward.

The response to this was essentially to bring pragmatism front and center into Etherium in the form of like a a kind of jewel jewel approach where a dual power approach. So you've got Tomassism, dankratism. So I kind of think of it the the pragmatist approach and then say civil culture council, Vitalik D5 punk representing the OG part. But I think that was an admission that the culture is sort of this dual complicated situation and maybe it will work.

So one way that I think it can work is that the pragmatists are probably the people who look at the the near term. So they're thinking in 2-3 years that can be a good focus. And then the cypherpunks are are thinking in like 10 year terms. And then the other question, yeah, is whether whether these values, I guess are supposed to be also found in the Dallas themselves. I'm not so sure.

So I, I am more and more inclined toward when I think about say, cypherpunk, when I think about decentralization, I'm more focused nowadays on the the chains themselves, the protocols that the, the, the real inelimitable core, as I like to think of it, of, of cypherpunk is primarily to be found on the chains. And that's where it really

matters. And then you're probably fighting a losing battle if you want every application, every Dow to actually look to, to have that same degree of commitment to these traditional values. I think those days might be coming to a close. I mean, decentralization, to me as someone who's been in this in this space for a really long time, decentralization itself is not a value. So to me, it's kind of like what it empowers. So kind of the, the fact that kind of you can have permission

as innovation. So kind of say you're on base, kind of ultimately you are at the mercy of Coinbase, right? Kind of like, and this is kind of like they run the sequences so they can cut you out if and kind of like same goes kind of like if you build an application on that, right? So kind of, so kind of the fact usually kind of decentralization is not something that you need in an everyday situation. It's something that you need in a crisis. So kind of you don't need it until you need it.

You don't need it until someone kind of shuts down your AWS server or kind of unbox you or kind of does whatever else kind of like centralized entities can do to you and your business offering. And kind of the, the decentralisation kind of kind of fosters the resilience that underlies that. At least that's kind of that's

my take. And I think there's now kind of these kind of some of the the second group that you kind of talked about kind of within the theorem foundation, kind of there's a lot of people who kind of almost, kind of almost are in this as a cargo cut. So we're kind of kind of decentralization is kind of the the one thing that matters. And I would argue there is such a thing as decentralization

decentralized enough. And kind of like how what level of decentralization that is very much depends on what it is you're doing. So kind of like if you're if you kind of have on chain Candy Crush probably don't need a lot of decentralization. If you have your identity on chain, your reputation and so on should probably be very decentralized. And I think it's a spectrum, right? And I think kind of having this almost purity trial like mindset where you say, oh, this is not

decentralized. I mean, it, it kind of it depends what you're doing with it, right? Kind of like, it's just like I am adamant that my car has a better security than my bike does because kind of I typically drive my car faster than I ride my bike.

And, and if I kind of don't wear a helmet and I kind of crash in the park on my bike, probably the, the, the, the, the kind of, the, the potential spectrum of outcomes is not nearly as bad as if I were to kind of crash my car at 180 kilometres an hour on the autobahn without wearing a seat belt, right? Joking that I think there's different lenses on

decentralization. I think I think it's absolutely true that we've moved from A almost an extremist view of decentralization in the early sort of era of the I think, you know, the sort of first year of the industry was basically, you know, it was all Bitcoin and post Ethereum sort of second era, we, we hit this very ideological position of

decentralization. And I saw people making, you know, completely Unchained to do lists, you know, and it was even with, you know, low gas fees, it was like 50 bucks to use, you know, make A to do. And we, we discovered that, yeah, with this kind of like on chain everything, decentralization, maximization sort of stuff, it just didn't work because it's completely unfeasible that everyday people would a pay for it and accept the UX pain points for it.

And I think we're moving out of that now. I think there's a kind of pendulum swing like revolt against it where, you know, now we're starting to get people to say, you know, forget it all together. No one cares, right? And there's the problem is, is when you swing that way, the failure mode is the something disastrous happens, right? Where I think we saw this with like FTX where, you know, who cares about decentralization

anymore? Let's just give all our money and put it in this black box and, and trust this guy. And, and we saw what happened very publicly when, when that happened. In fact, that whole sort of explosion in in the last cycle was largely just due to centralization. It was just due to poor trust models, people putting their money in centralized boxes. So I think we've, we've seen first hand why it matters,

right? And why, why where it matters and there's there is a kind of philosophical dimension to it in the Dow world. We were talking earlier about what's the difference between corporations and Dows and it's largely it's about more bottom up approaches rather than top down. That's a philosophy and a value I think that does manifest in decentralization. It's just generally about distributing power more widely.

I think the world needs that. But it is, as you say, is it's a just good enough kind of paradigm. Like one of the things I'm trying to push at the moment I call governance realism, which is like, let's use the things for what they're actually good at rather than presume this Dow can do this stuff that it can't. What is it actually good at? It's not necessarily good at making complex decisions, you know, is it basically a multi sig?

You know, let's, let's, let's really look at brass tacks, what this thing is and what it's good at. So I think, yeah, I think it is that pragmatism. I think there's also, as Paula was saying about the sort of MBA efficacion of a lot of this stuff that we're starting to see. You know, the revenue narrative, revenue matter as people are calling it is, you know, picking

up a lot of lot of steam. So I'm hoping we find a kind of sensible middle ground, rather than just this massive pen pendulum swing the other way and we just stop caring about decentralization altogether. Just on that, yes, So the reason why I think like considering a value is sort of important. So like political decentralization as opposed to say architectural is is because of that threat.

There. There are people who quite clearly, and I've see you see this on Twitter in that NBA if occation kind of school of podcasting where like centralization or like decentralization itself is like up for debate as in like it's not that important. And I think the, this idea of realism is quite important because my, my, my thinking on decentralization is it's uh, to distribute power as widely as possible.

So as, as much as you can is sort of the value or principle that the crypto community goes for. So when we're talking about a chain, we want it to be like truly Poly centric, right? We want Bitcoin and Ethereum to be multiple decision making centers that take each other into account where like no decision can actually be made without basically convincing all of those parties very slowly

over the course of say months. We actually have an example of that in Bitcoin at the moment between Bitcoin core versus knots, which is actually a really nice example of populism versus expertise and so on. But I do think that's that's so like I would say like decentralization as much as possible begins then to kind of soften a little bit when you are talking about say applications that are built.

So you want say file verse to be decentralized as much as possible, but I don't think people should be policing say, an application built on Ethereum as harshly. I say the the the consensus like on chain consensus itself, you know? Fibers actually does a really good job in kind of yeah, yeah, kind of having having almost web to like user experience and still being fully decentralized end end to end encrypted. So kind of I'm I'm a I'm a die hard fibers stun. Yeah, me too.

We're all, we're all, yeah, we're, we're all on side there. Yeah. I mean, it, it shows you that a world of software like that can exist, right? It, it shows you that you can have this kind of stuff can be realized, you can make a good application that protects user privacy, data sovereignty, all of this sort of stuff. And I, I think we just need to see more practical real world use cases, land for people to really get why it's important.

Do you think they'll get why it's important without anything terrible happen happening? So kind of like if you look at if you look for instance, kind of like add a web to example. So if I look at my non crypto friends, almost everyone uses Gmail, right? Despite the fact that ProtonMail is much better for you, it kind of it protects your, your, your data and your privacy. And it's kind of, it's

functionally equivalent. So kind of there's no big kind of user experience drop off and still people don't mind being data farmed by Google. Right. Yeah, It's, it's crazy. I mean, like terrible things happen all the time. I mean, you know, the people. I think it's almost worse than that in that people are so used to having their information on the dark web and that they've just given up, you know, it's like. Almost everything that you, almost all data that's put

online ends up being hacked. And I think we're almost post people caring about that anymore and they've sort of capitulated to it. I think the scary thing is we're kind of close to something terrible happening. Then to kind of just spread actors, right?

Kind of like you're giving your data willingly to kind of the, the, the five corporations whom it's impossible to kind of bypass on the Internet. So kind of like if, if you kind of actually made it a challenge for yourself, how do I do anything on the on, on the Internet without accruing revenue to Google or Microsoft or, or AWS? It's impossible. You can't. You can't. You can't do. It, it's very difficult. I lost a year in a Dow a couple about 3 years ago trying to on Google.

It's a nightmare. It's really, really difficult to, to separate yourself from these entities. And, and largely people just, I think if they understood more the level of micro targeting and corporate surveillance that's happening on the hood, under the hood, I think people will be more worried about it. But do you think people don't

know? No, because kind of like, I think kind of, I mean, we've had kind of like the entire Cambridge Analytica kind of fiasco come out and I'm like, they were outraged about it for a hot minute and then they went right back to using Facebook. It's way worse now. There's a really nice Gigi quote. It's like they they know what is happening, but they're doing it anyway. So like that's that's modern

ideology. Like you know exactly what's happening, but you just continue to practice is like the nature of contemporary ideological life. So how do we get people to care? How do how do we get people to kind of embrace the in my, in my eyes, incredibly appealing kind of cool tenets of Web 3 as kind of they emerge kind of like in in the early twenty 10s. I mean, it may need. I think we're starting to see, you know, fairly public revolt against things like CBDC's and digital ID.

There's very coordinated global strategies converging on very like extreme surveillance practices. Kind of like, I mean, are you, are you guys in the loop with chat control kind of the EU, it's terrifying. And kind of they are voting on it next week or so on. So on October 14th. So kind of like by the time this episode has come out that the vote will be there. And as far as I know, kind of there are quite a number of of of states who already said they will vote in favour of it.

And currently it kind of, it hinges on Germany, whether they kind of vote for against this. And I mean, basically what, what it entails is kind of it, it, it basically builds in a back door into every communication channel and, and kind of bestows axes to state actors on, on unencrypted, unencrypted messaging. And I mean, it's, it's, it's terrifying. It's terrifying. And there's you don't see a lot of it in the mainstream press at all.

It's, I mean, we have the equivalent in the UK, the online safety Bill, which explicitly has a carve out for exactly chat control like functionality. The danger is they've been very over about what it's for. You know, it's the it'll, it will allow the intermediation of all communication by the state. And I think this might be the thing that that changes people's attitudes about the requirements of things like privacy and

decentralization. The question is, is do does it need to be installed 1st and for people to be oppressed by it and for it to backfire and, you know, ordinary good people be targeted by the state through surveillance and by by mistake getting rounded up into, you know, for people to start getting seriously worried about it. Or will people realize beforehand? But eventually, you know what they will realize and it's just a question of like, will, can we do anything about it beforehand?

I mean, I don't know, like this is that this is what's worrying. It's it's kind of scary. I've been, one of the things I realized after a few years of research into these technologies is that, oh, actually these could be used for really terrible things. And specifically in the realm of digital ID, you know, the convergence of that and block chain is like deeply scary. You can build very scary systems

using this kind of stuff. The affordances we understand around token gating and permissioned access and things like that, that as it embeds into society is really, really scary and like. Social scoring on steroids. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we've, we've so certainly in the UK there's, there's actual policy emerging.

There's a campaign that was launched by one of our MPs called We'll Take Away Things That You Love and it was explicitly talking about targeted sanctions on people such as like, we'll stop you from going to the pub or getting on a plane or going to the football match. It's a social credit system. That MP is now the Home

secretary. And we've just announced that we're rolling out digital ID and in fact, we're forcing everyone in the UK to adopt it. So eventually revoking people's citizenship rights, the right to live and work, and unless they install, unless they participate in and adopt this technology, this is happening. I mean, we're, we're just there. This is the thing that we've been worried about. I was talking to Polar about this through the day.

These are the things that we've been theoretically worried about in this industry for many years. But it's happening at a scary pace at the moment. I'm really quite worried about it. Yeah, it's kind of like the the the dark version of the it's happening kind of like Guy getting. Yeah, but yeah, just on this. I mean, this is one of those things I think is like really like the heart of what crypto culture is really about.

It's I'm going back to that quote that I I mentioned there from she's like the the idea of they know what they're doing, but they they continue to do it anyway. I think that that's true of people in society. They, they, they, they know that these like the I think at this point even you're like not very technical mother or grandmother, maybe my grandmother, but your mother might have like even some sense that like the phone is spying on them, right? Like everybody kind of knows this.

That's general knowledge. It's not so obscure privacy nerd thing that, you know, that people used to have. And there's there is a a sense in which I don't think you can really always one of the things that is maybe difficult for crypto people to accept is that, and this is something I've argued before, is cryptos A subculture that can't accept it's a subculture. So it it always has this idea that it can be the savior of everything.

Like we're, we're going to solve XY and Z, like sometimes very dramatic, expansive areas of society that we're going to, you know, suddenly find. You don't think that's going to happen? No, no, no, I think we, we have a cap, you know, like, and I think, I think actually I'd say now we've kind of learned that lesson. Maybe like maybe this is the time that we've learned that

lesson a little bit. And then there's also another part of this where it's like they know what they're doing, but they do it anyway, which is us, like we ourselves use web too. So we're on Google Docs instead of File Verse, we're on Twitter instead of Fire Caster. So like, why would anybody use our apps if we yourself don't use them? So like we're just as bad, you know, it's just at a different level. But we do use like kind of like sending and receiving assets and

using perps. So I guess we are a bit more crypto, but not by much. So I think that that's a part of it. And there's a a quote that I like from Neil Postman. He says the clearest way to see through a culture is to see through its mode of communication. Like what medium does it use?

And I think, you know, air obsession with like X, like reveals a lot about us, which is that ultimately we are just kind of like our ultimate desire is just to kind of communicate with like minded people about this very obscure technology. And then one of the things that I just wanted a couple of other things. One is the UK is the the crypto marketing department. So we we've been kind of rely on them with their increasing Bobby's turning up at your door.

You can't have a beer if you say XY and Z. Like this is actually the thing that could radicalize normies. There's nothing we could do that could ever be a better propaganda than just allowing a government to become increasingly authoritarian. That's and we're going into that age. This is the dystopian, apocalyptic reading of crypto. I have, which is that the way crypto succeeds seeds is that essentially things go so bad that people suddenly realize the importance of like non state

digital currency, etcetera. So in a way it's an accelerationist argument. Just allow the society to collapse and we'll be fine. Yeah, I, I, I hear that. I also think it's hilarious that apparently the worst thing you can threatening threaten an Englishman with his you We won't be able to go to the pub. I mean take away footy and pints is the is the thing that's going to start the revolution.

I mean crazy. There's also a slightly less dark, but in my eyes still pretty dark future where Web 3 is not primarily appropriated by state actors to kind of ensure absolute compliance with stupid rules they kind of arbitrarily set, but kind of extractive incumbents appropriating the technology to kind of do the extracting they already do in a more concerted and efficient way.

And I think kind of like this is what we're currently seeing with the revolutes and stripes and Robin Hoods and so on moving into this space. So how do we? How do we? How do we stop Web 3 from merely becoming an infrastructure upgrade for Wall Street? I think we've seen a lot of this. I think that's already happened over the last few years. I think, you know, instead of, you know, again, in my early crypto idealism, I saw utility tokens has been a real thing.

You know, these like digital assets that mediated access to decentralized systems and how to use within those systems and opened up new kinds of incentive incentive engineering capabilities. And, and actually we just use them as a form of non dilutive equity and largely, you know, the amount of this. So you end up with this dynamic where you've got quick liquidity and A and a game that's largely, you know, pre market and post market and the private market

took over. And largely that has manifested in a case of, yeah, private equity game, but worse, right? Because what we've had is people just like accumulating tokens in private markets from directly from founders and their proprietary deal flow and then a token launch which allows them super quick liquidity, some light sub six months sometimes. And the retail market just gets butchered every time. And and that's just what we've had for the last few years.

So hey, that's already happened. But yeah, there's a whole new realm of that when we've got, you know, these massive corporate actors have just been waiting in the wings like, you know, the likes of Google, Stripe, all of these lot. And yeah, they're just setting up their own L ones. And, you know, and and I don't see this is good for Aetherium and or good for the industry at large. I think they've just been waiting for the right time to

come in and plunder everything. So I I think thinking more defensively and cautiously about this is probably a good idea at this point. I mean, I think kind of like part of part of, I mean, I, I would very much take the position that kind of like we can't stop kind of Google from launching its own L1. And I mean, who are we to do that? But we should make sure that the L1 that kind of you want to build on are not Google's L1.

And kind of like if, if you kind of look at their press release, kind of like when, when, when they kind of announced it, it, it said kind of we're launching an L1 so that they'll be a credibly neutral one that other people can build on. It's like, do you guys understand what credibly neutral actually means? So it's how, how do we, how do we sway people, entrepreneurs and builders into the right direction, kind of how do we make them see the light?

I don't think you really you there's no way you can really force these things. This is I think it's it's the nature of the culture where you just have to hope that there are there are enough of you who are interested in these traditional,

say, cypherpunk values. Say Crops is 1 version that I've heard of put other censorship resistance, open source, privacy and security or so defy punk, all these different kind of ways of thinking about it. It really comes through just the practice of people attending conferences, giving the talk and sort of stressing these values. And one thing I will say about this is you can you can actually get surprised.

So the recent trend of merit and ZK cash and sort of Zolana, all these things that I never would have expect. I'm giving a talk on Friday to the Solana Super team about cypherpunk, which is something, you know, if I just listen to kind of crypto Twitter, I never would have thought was a possibility like that they would be interested in it.

And so it is just a consistent application of people talking about the ideas that that that secures it because I don't think you can really resist them at any other level. We can't compete in markets. We can't compete in the technology. But that's like a it's a complicated story that most people aren't going to get. And it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because they'll just use your term anyway, even if they're exactly, they'll just take like a credible neutrality and say, OK,

well, that's error term. And you know, they'll use in some very ambiguous way in terms of the this is, but there is a bit of a deal with the devil situation when it comes to the institutional adoption. So people want E to go to 10K. They know that the way in which this happens is going to be on boarding the institutions. But you know, one day you will wake up and essentially the institutions will be in this

very powerful position. And I in a, in a strange way, I think that this might be a good thing. So what I think is maybe the the great reminder or renaissance of traditional values, like what exactly a blockchain is or what what credible neutrality is, will only come about when we get a situation where some institutional player, maybe like a Tom Lee gone rogue, actually try to in some way interfere

with, say, ethereal governance. Or else we just have some kind of bug or, you know, something like strange happens, which requires a state of exception like a Bitcoin civil war hard fork type situation or the Dow. We haven't had one in such a long time. And I think that's probably why a lot of the the younger people are simply unaware of the the structure and why the structure is in place. So it may require a little bit of the like.

Maybe the the best way we can do this is sort of push ourselves closer and closer to the institutions until something 'cause it like forces a little bit of a a battle so that people can see why it's important to be decentralized or permissionless. That is quite accelerationist, I think. I think, I think I said this the other day, we can't stop them, but we should be thinking of counterattack strategies.

And the thing that I'm most worried about is, you know, these incredibly well capitalized players just poaching all the talent and they're being a kind of massive brain drain across the industry where everyone just worked for a bank. I mean, like the, the most tragic end to crypto is all the cypherpunks work for a bank in the end. And so, yeah, I mean, like we need to be doing something about stopping that from happening.

So I, I, I think things like the finding ways to like, we need, we need to find what those apps are. You know, we need a lot more file verses we need a lot more like real world applications. We need Dows to start hitting mainstream and solving real problems for real people in real communities that aren't in crypto.

I think we need to start looking out into the world and, and hitting adoption vectors that Stripe won't do and we need to be funding it. We need to be like raising Dows and, and like locking in the talent and making sure it's very difficult to, and it's going to come down to money and like making sure people like taking the at the moment, there's a lot of people who will end up working for a bank because they're poor right in. And that's one of the things

that I think we need to get better at as an industry is like supporting independent developers, grass root applications and like real world use cases that are outside just basic payments at the moment. It's just payments infrastructure that's rapidly accelerating in that. And yeah, I think we need to start working like I sort of got a lot of stick for defecting to Solana after several years of Ethereum. But Salon is like more of a more

aligned than you might think. Like like Polo was saying, the cypherpunk mentality is there. I'm trying to push them into adopting a values based governance system at the network level at the moment. It's we need to start thinking more as an industry about there is a, you know, we've been having these kind of internal micro culture squabbles for many years between different block chains and even L twos within Ethereum and stuff like that. And it just doesn't make much

sense. I think we've got this. There's an abstracted value structure that sits at the at the level of of crypto that I think is somehow we need to find the kind of unite the tribes, if you like, across the, across the crypto industry. Do you think that Ethan? Sorry. Just briefly, I do think like cypherpunk is kind of the unifying principle of, of

crypto. And like one of the one of the jobs that we have in that that battle is to to keep using that term, to keep using those that, that terminology because nobody else will use it for us. Or if they are using it, they'll be using it in that sort of like a credible neutrality, but not really kind of way. But yeah, I think that that's yeah. So that we are more similar than we think and we we need to get to that that mindset at some

point. I I I am 100% with you that kind of like this tribalism and kind of inter faction warring that that's it kind of like it just creates a lot of friction that's ultimately A unproductive and B trans people like like nothing else kind of and but I wonder how much is.

The decentralized nature of crypto kind of working against us here because kind of like people are somewhat reticent or kind of resistant to kind of having one kind of one kind of leadership figure that kind of speaks for a united ecosystem and kind of speaks for cypherpunk values at large.

And I think kind of like this is also something that that kind of Ethereans have failed over the last couple of years kind of with respect to Solana, which I think it's also why Solana kind of rankles the Ethereum, the Ethereum people so much. Because Solana kind of has a much more vocal and centralised leadership that in some sense kind of is the voice of Solana.

And kind of does the kind of marketing that the Theorem Foundation doesn't do. And that we don't kind of has have as an overarching structure kind of across all layer one ecosystems. How, how, how do you think, do you think we can get to kind of like a consensus figure that everyone can kind of rally behind? That's a really interesting question.

And I think that like a lot of the rambling against the Ethereum Foundation last year, earlier this year was almost a, it was a reflection of looking at the likes of Solana, which had a more unified voice. And I think there was a lot we should be doing that, you know. And so I mean, nothing about decentralized system says you shouldn't have leaders. Like there's like the I've heard the term then they they should be leader full, not leaderless systems.

As in what a good decentralized organization system would do is elevate good leaders. So like find ways of discovering people who can lead people. And the sort of leadership paradigm I see is what's like if management is effectively about control and conformity, leadership is about follow, getting people to follow you with soft power, right?

So there's, there's nothing around like influence through just by adopting a leadership position is exactly the kind of thing that we need to be elevating people towards, right? It's what isn't congruent with these systems is people being forced to do things right. And, and it's that kind of, so I think there's different ways into this. I think, yes, you can elevate more leaders across the industry. There are good ones.

We went through a phase of elevating absolutely the worst people in the industry to almost like God like status, which was disastrous. So we need to find people who are like genuinely represent the industry, the best of the best, if you like, in the, in that represent what differentiates us from from and embodies the principles of the, of the technology and what we want to see in the future. But also I think we just need better social consensus

machinery. Like one of the things that I got very excited about Dows is that you could use things like voting systems and this gets more possible with things like

AI Dow crossover stuff of synthesizing the views of many,

many people. And and actually, you know, innovating in sort of democratic tooling, which is one of the things that I found very exciting about this industry and its potential to do is democracy in the conventional world is like failing, you know, represented representative democracy and things like, you know, it is leading us down into chat control, you know, and like, so how do we find better systems for genuinely connecting with people and having them

influence the system as a whole? I think that's that's what we need to discover. Maybe kind of a final question, kind of kind of kind of building on this. So in a way, kind of philosophically, we kind of think about people as unhackable and kind of I think this is also what kind of a lot of the governance mechanisms that kind of we've built in the past kind of kind of take as a prerequisite. But we have seen that people's

minds are supremely hackable. So kind of, I mean, we, we just talked about the micro targeting that kind of like all our data allow us kind of to kind of to happen, right?

How it is, is there a shift needed in how we think about people's minds? And I think maybe this is this is a question for Polo. Yeah, so this is one of the the debates that I've been seeing from the the Block Works expanded universe by my friends over at Block Works where they had this idea about Tom Lee recently. And like how this is the debate that's kind of really in my mind that he has very instructive of the current culture post ideological versus traditional cyberpunk.

And the idea was that say someone like Tom Lee could come in and hire various different devs. You know, we saw that the report, the EF like the like Etherium core developers and how much they're making and how distant it was from say just being on the open market. And so I think from their perspective, they are thinking in that kind of way that we're probably entering into a world where with enough resources you can essentially buy people regardless of values. You could maybe even shift

culture over time. This is something actually, I think is probably the secret danger of the social layer of governance is actually just the idea of wide body with any kind of attack. Just simply seed new core developers over a 1020 year time frame who aren't cypherpunk and know Etherium is no longer cypherpunk.

So like I do think that this is like a yeah, the the ultimate frontier, the great repressed of like, you know, kind of blockchain truly be say credible neutrality or permission list and so on, so long as it has an open governance process, which is populated by people who themselves can be hacked

culturally over time. So This is why I think that that where you get to the importance of the the polycentric or non monocentric was actually a term I heard someone use instead recently, just meaning that there are multiple decision making centers that are supposed to take each other into account. So if you're trying to take over a Tyrion today, you know you've you've got to take over the ACD call, right? You've got to somehow get Tim Baiko and you've got to like

flip him. You've got to infiltrate the Interior Foundation. You've got to think about the

the independent researchers. You've got to think about the cat herders, you got to think about the Ethereum foundation itself, like trying to flip now two different sides of it, the pragmatist side and then also like Vitalik and Shaw way, etcetera. And then you also need to think

about the the infrastructure. So or PCs, Lido rocket pool, each of which have their own sort of mini microculture famous figures, Kobe and Hassu like those, those kind of figures as well would have an important sway, I imagine. But then even beyond that, right, you've got the client team. So they're all working on different client software. So you've got to hope that all

those teams will flip as well. And then ultimately the, probably the, the, the reason why we, we could do with a, a state of exception, a Dow hack, a Bitcoin civil war is people need to see the idea of the power of the, the full node as the, the last offence. Because at that point you are talking about the ultimate, uh, bedrock of cypherpunk culture that you're running a, a node, right? Like you're a non economic node, as the Bitcoiners would call it.

So you're not doing it in order to, to be a validator, et cetera. Like you are a pure true believer. And that's a group that's distributed all across the world. To me, that's the, that actually is the real essence of the social layer that is the the cypherpunk bedrock of Ethereum. So the way that I would be thinking of countering this is what we need to do is we actually should be thinking about more distribution and getting across the people.

The importance of just how everything ultimately comes down to the, the polycentric nature of the system and making it so that like you can sway some parts of the culture, but that will take you a long time and then you need to get another part that will take you more time. So now the the proof of work or proof of the stake at the social layer is actually time itself. And you know, you're, you're kind of making it expensive culturally for somebody to flip you. I, I think that that is

brilliant. It's sort of look at how the crypto is actually more resistant to these kind of like mind viruses that can take over people than potentially the real world system. And I, I don't think there's a government in the world at the moment that's not scared about a populist uprising like with, you know, attitudes changing radically because of social media. And yeah, I, I, I think there's, this is a very real concern,

right? And I think it's one of the reasons why we're seeing, you know, a real rise in in online censorship because they're worried about, you know, this effectively populist uprisings by things just like ideas going viral and people's minds being hacked and so on.

And I think there's like crypto potentially has a space in this, you know, we sometimes refer to this as epistemic tooling, but things like prediction markets and, you know, decentralized sense making systems and, and stuff like that have a real potential to, to add a layer of Poly centric decision making that can lead to good decisions. That's one of the things that I think we should be focusing on as an industry to, to, to actually influence the world in a in a good and good way.

If, if each of you could kind of could suggest one way kind of we as kind of players in this ecosystem can improve on the

culture or the kind of permeating the culture further, how, how would you suggest we go about this? I, I think the, the, the most important place at the moment is the, the conferences, the events. So if you go to say dev connect or you go to ECC, etcetera, then you know, you're more and more going to encounter people who are new to Ethereum, uh, maybe new to Solana, whatever, uh, adventure at. And you can't presume the familiarity with, say, the, the, the, the values, the the

importance of cyberpunk. And so even though it's sort of like, even though it's kind of boring, if you're giving a talk and you're talking about cyberpunk and you look out in the room and you see other people who obviously know about it, I still think it's really important to to run through it for the, the benefit and the service of the, say, small part of your audience who came, who are fresh and new.

Because the way that I've tried to think about this recently is, yeah, if we don't say it, nobody else will. So it, it now becomes more and more incumbent for, for those people who are, who go around and give talks and even if it's just like a local event to ensure that these things are actually mentioned and to not presume them. So, yeah, giving talks, if you are thinking of getting into

giving talks, promoting that. And then also the, the promotion of the apps, I think is going to be in crucial thing. So Ethereal's big focus recent years, all the infrastructure and in many ways at the, the, the Solana issue plus the, the revolt against the EF is also about the, the, the lack of focus on apps that we, we have this, we had this hyper emphasis on the layer 2 road map and then say Beam, as it was called at the time, where you're thinking in 10 years.

And people like actually know we should be thinking in now and what people can use at the moment. So yeah, the the that that idea of like promoting followers, promoting farcaster, I think becomes a small, it's a small thing, but it's these, these, these add up culturally over time. OK, beat the beat the drums we already have is is Polar's kind of advice. Nick, what's your what's your advice? I think we need to go to real people. I think we need outreach effectively.

There's a magic moment that I certainly experienced when first discovering this technology that was this kind of hopefulness about how this could be used, used to like make things better. And I think and then experiencing several, several waves of being completely jaded as as the reality of the industry sort of beds in as as you learn more about it. But that moment is still waiting for people out in the real world

and a lot of the times right. I think we need to be going out to real people and, and explaining why these technologies are important and developing real use cases that can improve their real lives. I still think things like Dows and social coordination tools are what could enable real grass roots communities and empower them. I, I still do a bit of teaching work at the Architectural Association in London, which is taking it, I'm trying to basically downhill people in the real world.

It's very challenging, but it's incredibly interesting to see real everyday people like understand what is possible here. And I think we somehow need to like do that more at scale. Yeah, let's go to the normies. It's time to we, we're in echo chamber and like I think two sides of the coin there probably thinks we should make sure the inner chamber, if you like, stay like it stays on message, but we need to be taking the message outwards at the same time.

Fantastic. In this regard, so just in this regard, Jesse from base who gets a lot of abuse for going out there, like he is actually doing that which he shouldn't get as much abuse for trying to go out and talk to people. I think about these things. Cool, thank you both for coming on. We'll, we'll include your Twitter profiles and whereas to follow you in the show. Now it's it's it's been an absolute pleasure. Likewise, thank you very much for having us on.