Hey, folks, I want to take a minute to ask for your help. This show is a labor of love for all of us here on the team at calling BS. We debate which organizations to investigate. We carefully consider how to best tell these stories. Our goal is to create a show that exposes purpose washing and the real harm it does in the world. But we also want to create a show that's fun to listen to and serves as a practical guide for entrepreneurs and leadership teams about how to do purpose right. We're really proud of what we've made so far, and we're super excited about getting season three into production so we can share it with all of you now to the help we need. So far, we are self funded. We need a sponsor or sponsors to help us with the cost of production. But, and this is important, we feel like it would be disingenuous given the theme of the show to accept money from just anybody. It's important to us that the sponsors of this show shared shows values. We're looking for partners who are purpose lead themselves, Companies or organizations that truly walk their talk. Companies who understand the harm that purpose washing does and who understand how important it is for all of us that more companies embrace the path to purpose. If you're a part of an organization like that, or you know one that seems like a good fit, don't hesitate to drop us a line. You can reach me directly at Team Montague at Calling Bullshit podcast dot com. Thanks for listening, and let's get on with the show. The best case scenario for Web three is that it brings about a golden age for the creator. The concept of Web three is fairly elastic. What is the Web going to evolve into? I think that there's a lot of potential there. Web three overall is less about blockchains per se than it is about the idea of innovating new mechanisms of consensus building in social cooperation using digital tools. Web three the third version of the Internet. It's often described as a potential utopia guided by the promise of decentralization and Internet where your attention and data belong to you and you alone. But is the current manifestation of Web three a reflection of this promise or is it just a bunch of bs? Welcome to Calling Bullshit, the podcast about purpose washing. The gap between what an organization says they stand for, and what they actually do, and what they would need to change to practice what they preach. I'm your host, time onto you, and I've spent over a decade helping organizations define what they stand for, their perp this and then help them to use that purpose to drive transformation throughout their business. Unfortunately, at a lot of institutions today, there's still a pretty wide gap between word and deed. That gap has a name, bullshit. But, and this is important, we believe that bullshit is a treatable condition. So when our bullshit detector lights up, we're going to explore everything the organization should do to fix it. What is Web three? When I started digging into that question, I found myself suffocated by jargon and acronyms, and once I finally got up to speed on the language, I was confronted with a lot of competing ideas. There are as many definitions for Web three as there are people working to build it. It's hard to put your finger on something that doesn't fully exist. Yet, I had a feeling I wasn't alone in my confusion, so I asked calling BS producer Hailey Pascalites to get out there and see what new Yorkers had to say on the topic, We're doing an episode on web three on what web three? Web three? What's Web three? I do know it is. I think it's all hype. I think a lot of it's going to go away, and I think a small part of it will stay and be actually valuable for the future. What part do you think will stay? I think the parts that are have actual practical applications rather than trying to hype and sell something. I mean, I never really had to term it before. I've literally never heard of it in my life. I just think of like new tech, crypto, like these are all words that come to mind. The reason all these words come to mind is because these technologies are all components of a larger but still nascent system and have gotten most of the media attention to date. But for the purposes of this episode, you don't have to know that blockchains are giant, open stoce databases where data can be created but never destroyed, and you don't have to appreciate the way that cryptocurrencies allow money to operate outside the confines of government. Nor do you need to understand that n f t s are non fungible tokens unique digital items that act just like items in the real world. What you do need to know is that Web three combines the ideals of the original Internet, open democratic access to knowledge with the most exciting aspects of some very new technologies. These technologies, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and n f t s are powerful tools for codifying that aspiration into the very fat brick of Web three, because they are themselves open source, anti authority, and decentralized. This is why Web three promises decentralization and data sovereignty. It could be a version of the Internet where everybody has custody over their own data, a platform where your digital self might reflect who you actually are, an Internet where participation in democracy thrives. Another way to understand what Web three might evolve into is by looking at what it has evolved from. Mark Andresen, founder of Netscape and co founder of venture capital firm A sixteen Z, says the three different phases of the Internet can be understood as read, write, and own. Web one allowed users to intake content or read. The big breakthrough was you go online. You can read stuff, you could see stuff, you can do searches. Web two, the version we all know and love is read right. It's the digital world of user generated content and Internet funded by the attention economy, where user data is ultimately controlled by a handful of giant companies, sort of the social networking, blogging, video YouTube, you know kind of user generated content era. Web three is read right. Own own means you can own value, right, you can own money, you can own digital assets. It's basically have a trust layer of money layer and an ownership layer that rides on top of the sort of untrusted, unowned you know kind of space has been the Internet so far. This individual ownership part gets a ton of press because digital assets can now be uniquely tagged and monetized, meaning that n f t s and crypto are subject to insane wild westing and speculation. So if you own a bitcoin today, you will be a millionaire. Jack Dorsey's first tweet sounding for nearly three million dollars. The art world just turned upside down with the sale of this digital collage. It sold Thursday in an auction for sixty nine point three million dollars. And while crypto has become a volatile market all its own, Sam Bankman Freed built ft x into a huge crypto exchange valued at thirty two billion dollars over just three years. Will last week get imploded, sending aftershocks throughout the industry. It has also enabled the movement of money in entirely new ways. In some cases this is super positive, Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation saying they have raised over sixty eight million dollars through more than hundred and twenty thousand crypto donations. In other cases not so much. Bad actors took advantage of the ethereum merge to make millions of dollars. One point nine billion dollars worth of cryptocurrency has been stolen, people thinking that they're buying one of a kind digital pieces of artwork or songs, believing that they're investing in what's the next big thing. I can't call the police, there's no bank. You've just lost all your money and there's not much you can do about it. Web three and all its current aspects currencies that aren't backed by government's art, that only exists in digital form. These might have started as fringe concepts, but they are now fully mainstream. Have you ever heard of the term web three? Web three? No? I have no idea what that is? Oh, dear God, I have no clue. All right, So maybe Web three isn't fully mainstream, but it's certainly popular if you're a coder and investor, or just techno curious. Venture capitalists like Mark Andreesen spent a combined thirty billion dollars on the crypto space last year alone. Many of these investors A sixteen Z included are the very same firms that helped create the monopolies that control our current version of the web. These giants of Web two have optimized for popularity, attention, and convenience. This is their business model, and the ramifications for that underlying philosophy have affected all aspects of public and private life. We know that algorithms shape behavior, so it's not hard to see how the future of Web three will fundamentally affect all of us. With the promise of a more humane, egalitarian, and decentralized Internet, Web three represents an opportunity for a different kind of system, but it's still a very young industry. So what will the underlying philosophy of Web three b Will it be true to the ideals of the promise, or by using the same venture capital, will it succumb to the pitfalls of two. The answer is wrapped up in some fundamental philosophical questions what is each person's responsibility to society and what does it mean to be an individual? But before we get into this cryptic hash puzzle, let's take a quick break. At this point, you may be wondering how the answers to a few semi vague philosophical questions create the scaffolding that holds up Web three. Well, luckily, my guest today, Glenn Wile, is here to explain everything. He's a former economist who now focuses on reimagining the future future of social organization, economies, politics, etcetera. He's a big picture thinker. He co authored the paper de central Life Society, Finding Web three Soul with Ethereum founder Vitalic Buterin, where they make the case for Web three based identity tokens, and his book Radical Markets helped shift the discourse of Web three away from an exclusive focus on blockchains and towards something much broader and brighter. So to start out with, in preparing for this conversation, I learned that you actually prefer the term decentralized social technologies to the term Web three. Can you talk a little bit about why you like describing it that way. Well, I mean Web three is a little bit limiting and has a focus that makes you think in financial terms. It makes you think of an evolution of the Internet rather than the applications that run on the Internet. And so I think decentralized as technology to me captures the notion that what we're creating our technologies, but they also are technologies that are about how people organize and relate to each other. It captures the focus that I think that we should have on social structures and social impact rather than just financial speculation. Um, I think Web three overall is less about blockchains per se than it is about the idea of innovating new mechanisms of consensus building and social cooperation using digital tools. Just to get specific for folks who may not have your background, I've heard a couple of attempts to define the term web three. One is to build a more humane, egalitarian, and decentralized Internet where every individual has complete custody of their data. So that's a theme that that seems to run through a lot of definitions. Is this idea of democratization of power. Power has become centralized in Web two to corporations, and the promise of Web three is to kind of redistribute that power to individuals, which, by the way, was one of the promises of Web one, I think, right, Just to be clear, I I think that the individual focus is one interpretation. The focus I would take is a diversity of communities, not individuals, And this is an important tension in the discourse around Web three. Some people imagine it more in terms of some kind of small d democratic network based you know, collective self governance, and other people imagine it in terms of you know, anarcho capitalist every person for themselves, ownership, property, etcetera. The concept of Web three is fairly elastic, so it's it's a contested space, right right, Okay, I want to pivot a little bit to a couple of specific questions about aspects of Web three that I've heard talked about. One is this idea of owning our own data and benefiting from it from selling it in some cases seems to have been a central idea in the space, and I've seen that you have expressed skept skepticism about that idea. Um, why is that, Well, it's it's funny because Jarren Linier, who's one of my closest collaborators, and to a lesser extent, I I think we're pretty central to kind of originating that mean. And yet, as as often happens, we think it's been very misapplied and misunderstood. In particular straighten us out, Glenn. A lot of people when they think about you benefiting financially from the value created by data that pertains to you, they want to think of private property as their image and model. But that's not a great metaphor here. And the reason is that most data pertain to multiple people. So is this call that you and I are having my data or your data? Right? Um? Is my social network my data? Well, actually not really. It's like it's the data of me crossed, Like each link that constitutes that social graph belongs to at least two people in that group, right and so? And in fact, I would contend that that's true of virtually all data. So data is relational almost always. It represents things in a social contact. It does not represent abstracted things that are the property of a single person. So if we want to think about data empowerment and data dignity, we can't think about it in in terms of private property. We have to think about it in terms of some structure of diverse but collective self government. You know, a union is a better image to have in your mind than is a house. Um, the basic rhetoric of the space is wrong and broken, and if we pursue that direction, I think we're going to end up back in the outcome that we started in, because there will be a race to the bottom where everyone will know that someone who's part of that data will sell it, and so you might as well be the one to sell it first and cheaper. That's really interesting that had never occurred to me. Let me let me push on that a little bit though, because you know, one of the big problems in the world I think is created by social media, and specifically the business model behind most social media companies, which is attention based, right, and that attention is a personal thing, and you don't benefit from that at all, And I guess I wonder if there's a way for people to be compensated for paying attention to things. I mean, so, first of all, just to be clear, I'm a huge advocate of the notion that the value that's currently being captured by large platforms rightfully belongs to the communities of people who are actually creating that value it on form So I'm getting complete agreement on that. That being said, UM, I think many of the simplistic ways of formulating what you just said wouldn't really get us away from the bad outcomes that we're facing. So UM, take the example of the social media platforms. I don't think simply giving people a check in an undifferentiated way for their attention is going to get us past the polarization and so forth. But I do think that there are changes to the business model that really could get us past it. So like the product that Facebook claims to be selling is connection. But but connection and the social network and the graph, these are not things that are valuable to individuals. There are things that are valuable to the society that those individuals together constitute. UM. And of course there's no one society that There's churches, and there's nations, and there's local you know, units, and all of these care about cohesion and dynamism within their communities. And at present, these systems are accomplishing the opposite of that. They're reinforcing divisions. And if those organizations were you know, to replace the advertisers as the customers of Facebook, and to pay for algorithms and curation that built community and solidarity that did what what Facebook claims to be trying to do in the first place. Well, yeah, and even if Facebook wanted to do it, it's business model is misaligned with its mission, and so it can't accomplish its goals without changing how it thinks about its financing approach. Another concept that gets talked a lot about that's sort of related, but but I think different in some important ways is the concept of digital identity or digital personhood that seems to be important in the space. And I've read that there are lots of competing views here and some riffs between various groups about the right way to handle digital identity or digital personhood. Is there a right way in your view? So I'm a big believer in a theory that was put forward by a guy named George Zimmel. He was one of the founders of sociology, and he had a I think very brilliant observation, which is that there is no such thing as a lot of political philosophy imagines as sort of the pre social individual that you can then liberate humans have throughout their entire history survived only to the extent that they've lived in groups. And so actually what happens with modernity is not the rediscovery of individuality, but rather that society becomes more complex. So it used to be that you would worship and mate and work and eat all with the same people, and they were your tribe. But as we get into more complex cities, and in fact all the terms around democracy are connected to city citizen as someone who lives in a city. Right, So that the reason why this notion of a individual citizen emerges is because now all those different social functions separate out, and you become an individual because you're the neat unique intersection of those different social groups that you're a part of. And I'm a big believer that systems of identity need to mirror that structure. The way that you preserve privacy and still allow all the functions of identity is by fragmenting the aspects of your identity among the different things that constitute you in your life, and you know, defending the noess of those different spheres. And you know, this returns to the data union example. I imagine data union but every person might be part of several data unions that represent the different ways in which they participate. And I and I see data, you know, identity being handled in in a very similar way. Like I'd love to see a future where rather than us having like one driver's license that represent us, where we have many different digital tokens, one coming from our work, one coming from like a distributed autonomous organization that we participated in, one coming from some political affiliation, and all of these together knowing various aspects of ourselves that we can present or reveal in appropriate social contexts. Right, you sort of waived at this as you went by, but just for listeners, like the danger of a single identity, a single digital identity is security essentially, Is that right? Or I mean security or privacy? Yeah, I mean so there's there's ways to express it differently. So from a security perspective, you're very reliant in that case on a single point of failure, whatever institution issues that thing, getting things right. And in fact, that's the reason why if you go an interview for an n essay, uh, you know job, they're not going to care much about your passport, like they know that that doesn't really work very well. They're gonna go and look for all your different social relationships to figure out who you actually are. You know, um so so like Yes, security absolutely, but it's also it's absurd that for so many different contexts in our lives, we're presenting this one social security number that can link us across all the different contexts. Most of the times you give your social security a number of nothing to do with social security, and so by not planning explicitly for pluralistic identity systems, we end up with these totally inappropriate cross cut identity systems. Yeah, very interesting. Um, I think this is related. You wrote a white paper about something called soul bound tokens where you talk about them as a way of encoding trust into the system. Can you explain, first of all, what a soul bound token is. So, soul bound tokens are non transferable and f t s their statements that are made by one digital signifier wallet about another, and they can represent a sort of network of social relations. But the potential of these is that it makes it much easier for a wide range of organizations, individuals, groups to issue credentials to each other, and therefore for you to have a intersecting set of you know, credentials that together can constitute an identity in a context specific way, rather than having to rely on a singular institution to give you one thing that you use everywhere. So a soul bound token might be the thing that I used to join one of the unions that you talk about. Yeah, for example, like you, you you might get one from your university, one from your employer, one from uh, maybe every podcast that you do. We issue each other a soul bound token saying that we did it together, right, and that that's like a CV, But unlike a CV, it's not something that you have to send in a PDF and so want us to read and then maybe o c R and then verify whether it's right. There's like a cryptographic signature indicating that for every one of those things, the counterparty to that has said that they did this thing with you, So it's inherently reliable UM, and that can then be the basis of you getting admitted to all kinds of different things. It can be a reputation effectively that you can stick not a single dimensional reputation score, but a multidimensional representation of your self that you can use as the foundation for accessing some social system. Well, I see, so you have many of these. This isn't a one thing that you you have. All right, let's pivot to the peril a bit. Um. What what do you see as the biggest threats to the potential of of Web three or or distributed social technologies. Well, so, I think there's a long term ideological danger and there's a bunch of near term harms that are being caused by the system. There are groups of people such as Peter theold Abology Screenavas and this guy Mensious mold Bug courtesy Arvan, who view all these technologies as a way to undermine the authority, legitimacy, or even ability to colle tax revenue or enforced the laws of governments. And not not just governments, but any social institution, a church, a union, a co op. They're very openly hostile to all of those types of organizations, and they want to get to a world that liberates quote the individual unquote from those institutions and gives them selves sovereignty um. And they mean that like really seriously and literally so sovereign individual imagines that there are literally a hundred million sovereigns um. That have no accountability to any external social authority. And that is a terrifying possibility. And even if something like that isn't actually empowered, it gives a cover, a tech sheen. Two. You know, everything for isis to the sorts of people who don't pay their taxes because they say that the government's legitimate. It gives like a cool factor to these really like basically terrorist organizations, anti anti social order, anti social groups. So that's really scary, um and uh. And there are more modest versions of that that are already playing out. There are people who are in a self sovereign way managing their own wallets and who are getting physically assaulted by people who get them to give them their keys or get hacked. In a more subtle way. There's a variety of criminal activity that goes on, especially in the sort of more privacy oriented parts of this space. You know, some of the protocols, especially those operating proof of work, do a huge amount of environmental harm, and there's an enormous inference times. Yeah, there's an enormous amount of financial speculation going on that's creating a huge concentration of wealth and exacerbating problems for many vulnerable people. So these are really bad outcomes that are being facilitated by the space at the same time as it's opening up experimentation with much better possible futures. Yeah, and it feels like the financialization aspect gets all of the press right, Like that's the thing that people focus on, is the money, and I want to pursue that for a minute, because from the cheap seats, it seems to me that that venture capitalists have latched onto this idea of decentralization in a way that feels primarily like marketing to me. Honestly, you know, we saw that happen the first time in the transition from Web one to Web two, where it started as a very decentralized thing. There were a lot of people, you know, talking about the power of the Internet and the power to distribute information, to democratize access to information, to empower individual people, and that all went away. And let me nuance that a little bit, because I actually do. I think it's a little bit too tough on the VC side. And the reason is that there's a wonderful article by J. C. R. Licklighter called Computers and Government in nineteen seventy nine in which he said that the Internet was meant for trusted transactions, it was meant for identity, it was meant for sharing of computational resources, and that the protocols that have been built by the public and academic consortia covered just the barest bones proofs of concept of what he thought you needed to make the Internet work. Um, and that if if the these multisectoral efforts didn't invest two achieve those goals, that it would be colonized by monopolis. So it was a choice. It was a political choice that was made not to invest, which got us to where we are. More than was the choice or ill intent of venture capitalists. They operated within a system where the only way that they could fund functionality was by raising money from private investors. And I don't think they're evil for having done that, but I do think that our society made the wrong choice by, you know, pursuing this neoliberal path that made it inevitable that monopolies would own these critical parts of our social infrastructure. Well, I guess what I'm saying is, what about the movie that we're seeing now is different? I don't think a lot is different in the US and Taiwan, it's very different. It's it's a bit distant, it's a different cultural context, but it represents the best version of the potential of this space. Um. There's a digital Minister there named Audrey Tonge who's the first transgender minister of a major country if you consider Taiwan to be and I know that's a point of controversy, and uh, she was a leader of the occupying movement there, and she's built a participatory democratic platform for the country that a quarter of the population or monthly active users on and really taken a chunk of the time that we waste hating each other on Twitter and funneled it into people solving real public problems. To me, that's the most hopeful version because the public and social sectors have made massive investments, um, and they've really done exactly what they should do. So I don't think the story is playing out differently now. And I think that whatever the idealism of people in the web three space, unless there's serious engagement from the social and public sectors, you'll just get a repetition of the same thing. However, there is a hope that we can help governments, help social movements understand that and do something different this time, return to something closer to the model that built the original Internet. Yeah, well that would be wonderful. Any chance of that happening more, let's say, holistically in the US, Well, I think you need cultural change to make the political change, and so we need to inspire people with visions of alternatives. And I think that to some extent the Web three spaces managing to do parts of that. But I think, you know, the stories like Audrey's story are going to be even more powerful. So let's just talk about the future and and and predictions that you have for the future of Web three or these decentralized social technologies, Like can you paint a best case scenario and a worst case scenario just so people can understand the choice that we're faced with. I mean, I think the best case scenario is that sort of all the liberal democracies get to roughly Taiwan's level, which let's say that that takes maybe ten of the effort that we spend on social media doing stupid division reinforcing things, and moves that into people doing the online equivalent of participating in town halls, you know, building projects together, solving real public problems. Bridging divide civic engagement just ten to fifteen percent of the time. Just that we're spending on politics online, I think would be enough. And through that there's also large investments made by the democratic world's governments to build fundamental infrastructures or identity data sharing, etcetera. We start utilizing all the machines and data that are basically idle and siloed right now because we're able to have privacy preserving protocols that let it be used and let people get value from it without it being covered up by some proprietary service, and that enables us to find way more effective ways, cheaper ways to solve climate problems. That allows us to defeat pandemics like they did in Taiwan, where they had like only a couple dozen deaths and they grew at five percent throughout the pandemic and have less than three percent inflation. So we're able to tackle problems as as they've been able to tackle them. Because of all this distributed intelligence that we have, people start building bridges and unions and so forth across lines of political division, and that scrambles our political spectrum, and then you know, new voting systems start to creep their way in that bridge divides and then help people reach consensus and that reduces polarizations. Right. I think those are all really plausible outcomes that we've seen played out in a real world context. I think, you know, the worst case is that the dreams of the sovereign individual types get realized, which is to say, they become such strong cryptography and so many financial transactions that governments can't see anything. People can evade any taxes they want, and that breaks down all public services. It breaks down, uh, the ability to do law enforcement, to pay for national defense, etcetera. And the only people who are able to maintain those things are authoritarian regimes and extremely wealthy corporations are individuals. Those organizations then gain all the ability to coordinate and constant traded power. Everything ends up running through those organizations. They end up in conflict with each other, but there's no one to adjudicate that conflict because the UN is broken down and whatever, and so you end up with some kind of global scale conflict without limits on weapons. Okay, alright, that that would suck. Let's not do that. Um so uh, Glenn. Last thing, and this is kind of an experiment we tend to focus on individual companies or organizations on this show and really try to determine what is the delta between word indeed. So we've graded a scale called the B S scale. It goes from zero to one, zero being the best score. Zero BS zero delta between word indeed and a hundred percent fullshit. Um, if you were to give the Web three diaspora a B yes score right now, would you be willing to do that? Yeah, so I'd say, I'd say, But the problem is that, because Web three means these opposite things, I think you could easily defend the answer of zero percent or a hundred percent because because uh, you know, you've got a set of people who wants the space to be like wrecking all social institutions, and you've got a part of the space that wants it to be about um, creative new ways of coordination and reimagining democracy. And it's kind of doing half of each of those things. And that's because kind of half of the people are aiming for those things. So they're all kind of doing a hundred percent of their missions. It's just commissions are opposite to each other. Yeah, a bunch of zero bullshitters all pulling in opposite directions. Yeah, that's very interesting. Thank you for that answer that was That was great and this is a great conversation, Glenn. I really really appreciate you spending time. Yeah, thanks for Glen. Web three isn't about decentralization or even data sovereignty. It's about the potential to make society better. The promise of Web three is really an opportunity to reimagine the whole system as we enter into a future more and more determined by the shape of the Internet. Do we want to maintain the status quo or redefine our social tools and identities. Will we bring our old ideals with us into Web three, or can we take the opportunity to re examine our values and set up new systems that shape our interactions for the better. So which future will we choose? The one where everyone lives just for themselves and we descend into lawless chaos, or the future where we use the Internet as a tool to come together. We've invited two additional experts, a Web three convert and a Web to be critic to help parse this out right after the break, Do you think it's possible that like our data can be decentralized and like taken away from people like Mark Zuckerbrick. I guess I have to think about, like what the ramifications of the decentralized system would be. I think it would be awesome. I'd like to believe it could be decentralized. It's a great dream to have. It feels almost kind of like an impossibility, especially start of the way things are chending, just like you have these being sort of like Internet conglomerate. Sorry, yeah, at the center of everything, folks. I am very excited to introduce two experts who are going to help us continue to unpack both the promise and the peril of Web three. Our first guest is software engineer and notable crypt skeptic Molly White. Molly, thanks for being here and welcome to calling bullshit. Thanks for having me. So, Molly, could you tell us a little bit about your background, like how you got into software, and then maybe a little bit about the roots of your skepticism. Sure, um, so, I am a software engineer, and you know, I've sort of been a computer geek my whole life. Recently started researching Web three and cryptocurrency is a little bit more broadly. Last year I started a website called Web three is Going Just Great, which is a sort of sarcastic title UM for a project that tracks all of the disasters that are happening in Web three but also in the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry is more broadly, you must be busy these days. I am very busy these days. Cool More on that very soon, but first I need to introduce our second guest, Vlad Ginsburg, who is the founder and CEO of the n f T platform block Party. Vlad, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be here. So, Flood, can you tell us a little bit about your background, because I know you started out in the art and then how you came to the Web three space. Sure, they did start out in the fine art industry, and over time I became familiar with block chains of cryptocurrency as there was an increasing amount of buzz about the potential for some of those technologies to disrupt the art market. And the more I learned, the more I became excited about the possibilities and eventually made the switch to be full time in the blockchain industry, thinking about fine art instead of vice versa. So thank you both for being here again. And and this episode just for benefit of listeners, is a little bit different than most of our episodes because it's the first time that we've taken on a sector or an industry rather than an individual company or organization. So usually at this point in the show we would have called BS and we'd spend this whole panel looking at ways to fix that BS, and we do want to get into some of that today, But I thought I would just start out by asking you both to give us your definition of the term web three, because it's a little hard to get agreement on that term. So what does the term web three mean to you? So I would I would define web three as permissionless digital ownership. I would also perhaps add the right to self sovereignty on the web. Talk about what you mean by that. So I think disintribigating the third party between creator and and the market around them is I think the big promise, because oftentimes what we see in well, let's say Web two, right is creators are putting out content, but the content that they're putting out really lives in a third party platform that is monetizing the content or otherwise taking a lot of ownership over it, and the creators are right, Yes, that would be That would be a good way of putting it. And it doesn't seem that the creator is self sovereign in this natively digital space. And by self sovereign you mean essentially their own prestanding entity, right with no no intermediaries between you and the market. Okay, Molly, I want to I want to pivot to you and ask you next, how do you define the term web three? I think the most important thing to understand is that web three is a marketing term more than anything. So it has been a pretty successful, i would say, marketing campaign to sort of rebrand crypto after sort of some boom and bus cycles made people a little bit more wary of crypto as a concept, and so by redefining it to be something that sounds like it will be the future of the web, a lot of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists and other folks have been able to get people to buy in, like quite literally buy in to this idea of web three. If I find myself needing to sort of draw boundary around what is and is not Web three, you know, if I'm looking at an individual project, typically I look for. Is it sort of a web project, so something beyond just like a cryptocurrency token doesn't have some sort of social community on the web, Or is it trying to use blockchain for something like data storage beyond just transactions, and is there a blockchain involved. So Web three is pretty much inseparable from the idea of blockchains. And although a lot of people working on Web three will use much broader terminology like decentralization and self sovereignty, they're typically referring to blockchains. With that. The idea of decentralization and self sovereignty on the web are nothing new, uh, and certainly not anything exclusive to this idea of Web three, but they are terms that are coming up a lot in those conversations. Yeah, are there positive aspects that you see to it? Or are you completely are you essentially a rejector of the entire premise. I think that the most positive aspects of Web three, and you know, just crypto and blockchains more broadly, is that they have brought attention to issues in the Web that I think are really important. You know, the idea, for example, of large tech company is really monopolizing how the web operates today is a very serious issue I think in the Web, and it's one that a lot of people who are working in Web three are also talking about. So I think there's some really shared goals there between myself and other sort of Web advocates and people who are working on Web three. But I also think that the idea that blockchains will somehow form the foundation of a solution to these problems, uh is pretty overblown. I think a lot of the issues with the Web really come down to societal and policy issues beyond just the technical ones. And uh, you know, it's pretty much impossible to apply a purely technical solution to societal and policy problems. And I think that there are some serious negative externalities when it comes to crypto block chains Web three that are extremely detrimental to where the Web should be going. Yeah, I actually find some of the most evangelical folks about Web three end up agreeing more often than not about some of the problems of the externalities that come up. Oftentimes I will find myself thinking about, um, well, maybe we're at really Web two point five, because so much of what Web three requires is really just Web two plus some things like blockchains and n f t s and technologies that are really interesting but still very much under development. Just following on your your point about Web two point five, I guess really the question that caused me to one to do this episode is, you know, you hear the definitions around this space as being about decentralization, about self sovereignty. The phrase I used that I've picked up to build a more human, egalitarian to centralized internet where every individual has complete custody of their data stuff like that. Right, you hear the promise of that, and then I'm watching money flow in and venture capitalists start to invest a ton of money. And that's exactly what happened in the transition between Web one and Web two, right Like Web one was sort of the wild West, very uh democratic, very egalitarian, I mean, I guess to to the extent that you had access to the technology to connect yourself to the web. And then it became centralized. Right the venture capitalists rolled in, They started making investments, and entrepreneurs built these giant platforms which, now, as you said, glad tax people on the way through right on both sides, in some cases one side of the equation on in in some cases both sides. What is going to prevent that same thing happening with Web three. I agree with you that when you look around the let's say Web three industry, and you see so much of the same investment dollars that supported Web two supporting large platforms in Web three, well, you're still kind of doing the same thing. You know, you're you're waving this banner of self sovereignty and you're waving this banner of decentralization. But some of the biggest platforms in Web three, you're still using their servers, You're still very much on their platform, And so I think it's a little bit more effective to see the potential of Web three less as Web Tube versus Web three, and a little more as well. Web two, other than social was also really where e commerce exploded. With Web three, it's a place where n f T commerce is exploding, and we're able to tell creators you can build your own commerce around yourself. Now that's not really happening on some of the bigger platforms, but you can see the promise with the folks that are buying into the possibilities. Molly, any thoughts on that. I have a lot of thoughts on that. Um. I think the comment about venture capitalists, uh, sort of supporting this move into Web three is a really important one to focus on a lot of the talk around the potential of Web three and the decentralization, the return of ownership of data, you know, from these huge tech companies into the hands of the users, the move away from giant tech monopolies. The same talking points are being used by venture capitalists who have supported these technologies that really landed us in the Web two era. And it's pretty wild to see people taking at face value these claims by enormous venture capital firms that they will somehow be acting out of sort of the good of the broader web users rather than in the efforts of enriching themselves, which is what venture capitalists are paid to do. I mean, they are paid to make money, right. In addition to that, I think it's also really important to look at um the claims about how Web three is somehow empowering creators in a way that they have previously been unable to experience in Web two. There's not an issue in Web two with creators not being able to host their own work, receive payment for their work, you know, solicit income from their fans. This is all possible in Web two. The requirement and I guess for creators to use huge platforms, you know, the spotifyes of the world and things like that to reach their fan bases um is largely because of the sort of monopolization of attention that happens in Web two, where it's really hard to just like start up your own standal and website as a musician and actually reach people. You you're sort of beholding to these platforms. What Web three is doing is really creating new ways of artists to distribute their work. But the distribution of their work is not the problem. You know, We've had that solution in this sort of Web two world, and now if they wanted to do it using n f T s or a blockchain, they can do that too. But it's nothing particularly new, and the issue that has been holding back creators in Web two still very much exists in Web three, and we're seeing it play out all over again with massive platforms like open Sea as an n f T platform and other various sort of gatekeepers. Really a monopo realizing the ability of creators to actually reach people. And as you might expect, you look at open see and you look at its venture capital funding, and you see some really familiar names. You see Andrews and Horowitz, who has backed Facebook and Instagram and all of these major platforms that have monopolized attention and Web two, and they're suddenly decrying those same platforms in the hopes of getting people to believe that they're now not doing the exact same thing all over again. Vlad, and I'd love to hear your take on that, um, you know, given what you're up to at at block party. Absolutely, and and and again. This is where I see myself oftentimes agreeing on some foundational pieces with skeptics and encouraging folks to maybe reject things like open see because they are extrapolating things like the attention economy from Web two into what we're trying to build in Web three, which is a creator economy. Let's look at the hot issue right now today as we record creator royalties are the big burning topic in the Web three space. To give a little bit of context to that, one of the things that smart contracts and the blockchain can offer the creator is a royalty structure on subsequent transactions that you are not trusting a third party to divvy up your royalty back to the original creator. But you're simply asking some code to do that. That's the idea of permissionless, of trust less. You don't have to trust a smart contract. You just kind of have to program it to do something. Somebody like me, as much as I evangelize the space might call bullshit on certain platforms, I include Open Seeing this. Sure they pay out royalties to creators, but they pay out royalties on their servers. It's still their internal garden doing the calculation paying it out. And now we were looking at the last twelve months where crypto has taken a backslide and every company is looking for more revenue. So marketplaces, including now there's some push and pull it open See. But a lot of marketplaces are saying, we're going to kill the royalty because we don't want to lose five of the revenue of a of a transaction. We want to keep that five percent. So creators are raising their hands and saying, but wait a minute, that was the whole that was one of the that was one of the key features of us. What are we doing here? And so what you're seeing now is these creators that were sold this promise, they're asking themselves, well, wait, is Web three bullshit? Or are certain companies and Web three bullshit? It's not necessarily the entire space, it's individual players within that space that are creating the issue. Molly, what's your take on on that. I think it's possible for both things to be true. Um, the space itself has inherent flaws, and that these centralized platforms and you know, major players are particularly bad. But one thing that I sort of noticed when we're talking about decentralizing and f T platforms is what I mentioned earlier, which is that the issue is really not with the distribution or the payment rails when it comes to creators monetizing their work. What is difficult is getting people to actually find my work, you know, if I don't already have a following somehow, usually built through these large platforms, then telling someone to hey, it comes see my website, you know, and download my music, it's impossible to get out there in any sort of substantial way. You're really relying on social media, um, you know, music distribution platforms to get in front of people, and that same problem exists on Web three, and you also have the same distribution problem. It is a different technology So if you particularly like blockchains and you want to create a n f T out of your song, that's an option to you, but it is not particularly revolutionary. That's actually somewhere where I would jump in now as somebody that really believes in this stuff. And I feel much more comfortable given my background UM talking about visual artists, and I don't disagree at all that it's been possible to sell natively digital art prior to blockchains. That said, I've spent time in the art industry and I've seen really wonderful works by the names that you've heard of, Solvere, Dolly, Andy Warhol. These artists were around in the early days of the computer and they did create digital artwork. But it's really tough to sell it. It's really tough to create a culture of collectorship around it. And while UM Web one and Web two have given creators the tools to publish natively digital art on the Internet and distribute it and disseminate it, never until Web three has a culture of collectorship been able to grow organically around the idea of digital art. And we get to a place now where we're telling photographers and digital artists you don't need to step outside of the medium to sell your work, you can exist on your own. And we come back to this idea of well, now we're starting to see companies like Manifold, companies like I hope block Party to tell creators, hey, it's actually really easy to manage your own smart contract and set your own fee structure and set your own royalty structure. So the successful musicians that we speak with in in um in the web three space are ones that are successfully building communities. They are thinking about their n f T s less as songs and more about I have put a token that I originated into your wallet, and now I'm able to see every wallet that has one of my tokens, and I can now tell those wallets come join me on on this platform where you can communicate. Come you can have access to things that I'm creating digitally as I create them. I can air drop you things, and you are building this network around yourself. So I've seen musicians do this do this quite successfully. I think that's also not particularly unique to Web three. I mean, creators have been creating communities like that for a very long time. You can look at I mean I follow a bunch of people, for example, on Patreon, who I support because I love their work. There's the same benefits that are being described in web three, and there's nothing that paid Treon is really doing that I can't actually just do myself if I want to. That is possible in the same way that it would be possible for me to go write a smart contract to do a lot of the same things, and it requires very similar sort of levels of effort as well. I think can I can I make an observation maybe to both of you and have you call bullshit on me. But one of the things that I'm sitting here thinking about is maybe, like one of the things is we've trained people to do the easy thing, and it's super easy for them to find music and then downloaded and listen to it. It's very easy for me to get on Amazon and find a thing that I want. And at some level, aren't we also or don't we need to ask consumers, like regular people people who buy things, to actually start pushing back on this idea of convenience, because that notion of making it easy is sort of the ultimate engine behind these giant platforms, right. I think that's really true, and I think that there is a lot of value in pushing consumers to be conscious of the ramifications of their decisions. So I think there is a strong argument to be made to, you know, like let's make a shift back to the indie web and not necessarily consume all our content through Facebook and Twitter and all that. I think there is um but I also think we need to be a little bit realistic about the ability of the average person to engage and devote that amount of time um to doing things like that, you know, And I think we need to be realistic about the circumstances that are leading people to have to take the quickest option, the cheapest option, even when presented with the ethical choice they might go in a different direction. I think enabling people to have more flexibility to make the right decision rather than the cheapest or the quickest would be useful blood any uh any thoughts. Yeah, some of the promise of web three that is legitimate to me and very exciting to me is a very human push and pull between let's all get together in one place and then let's all split off into our own tribes and the success I think of Facebook and things like my Space eventually Instagram, Twitter are this very human drive to have all of these tribes get together in one place, and I think that has sort of metastasized into some really problematic stuff that happens on Facebook, that happens on these giant monolith places. And so when we think about Web three is a rejection of all of this, it's these tribes breaking away and saying we don't want to be part of the monolith. And now we go over to what's happening right now and some of the creators and communities that are building tribes around themselves and they're being given these decentralized finance tools to do it. I don't think we're there yet. I still think that we have years of work to do before it's easy enough to use and attractive to use. But it's not going to be right now. It's certainly not easy for the legitimate purposes of Web three. And that's why I say we're probably years away from Web three, and that we're in Web two and a half right now, because a lot of the value this can bring for creators is very much an R and D, and we're still struggling with the consumer that has a really hard time onboarding into into how to buy these things, and it's really unfortunate to me. And where I will very much call bullshit on my own industry is it's hard to work on this stuff. It is difficult to navigate the regulation of onboarding and getting people into crypto r un seen out of cryptocurrency. It's very hard to get the consumer to participate in a way that is meaningful. But there are folks working on it. It's far easier to put a jpeg on a token, put her an open sea and say this is like I, I personally am not a huge fan of let's say born a ball club where everybody hasn't enough T and that means we're gonna throw concerts and we're gonna open up like an exclusive club in London and all this other stuff. I mean, it's fine, but that's the kind of stuff that you really don't need a blockchain for and you really don't need smart contracts for. But it's easy because if you market it right and you hype it correctly, then people get excited about it. There's sort of this interesting dichonomy and web three where you simultaneously have advocates for it saying you've got to get in. Now, you've got to get in early. You know, you've got to be in the forefront of this new thing. And then you also have people saying it's too early. You know, it's not revolutionary yet, but it will be. The conversation changes every time. You know, it's like, so, should we be using your products if it's not ready yet? Should we be giving you money? Should we be supporting this industry? It's kind of all over the place. You know, people will say, yeah, there are flaws. On the other hand, those same people are saying, come by my token, come use my project, And so it's it's tough because I think the goal posts sort of move constantly. If a technology is so so nascent and it is so flawed that the average person can't responsibly or safely engage with it, it's not ethical to be promoting it as something that people need to be adopting, that they should be engaging with. You know, I think that if you're designing a car that crashes of the time, you probably shouldn't be telling people to strap in and go for a drive. Um, Molly, I understand your point, right, If a thing isn't ready, why are you asking people to use it? But I would observe also that that is seemingly true of the software industry in general. Right, that is an that is a thing that Silicon Valley has spent a lot of time training all of us on. Is you're using an imperfect thing. So you look at like the the issue with self driving in cars, right, Like I own a Tesla, I have full self driving capability. I will tell you it is absolutely not self driving, and I absolutely would not use it that way, but I do use it. And so should they not sell Tesla's until it's perfect and ready? Or is it okay to go? You know, you're taking some risk by trying to sound you're a test pilot, and if you accept that responsibility, get in there and go for it, you know. Question. Yeah, No, I think it's a great question. And I think generally speaking, software and actually many industries have a serious problem with ethics and the acceptability of doing that. I actually don't think it's acceptable for Tesla to go. Yeah, you might kill yourself for somebody else with this, but go for it. You know, you've accepted the risk that you're taking other people's lives into your hands. The same thing I think is true with Web three and crypto where people are saying it's early, there might be bugs, you might lose everything you put into it. So I think that there is an ethical problem and that we as a society need to push back on the idea of software engineers just pushing forward saying move fast and break things. But it's so easy, I think when you are so removed from your user base to say, oh, you've gotta break a few plates, you gotta run over a few people with your tesla, you gotta bankrupt, if few people completely wipe out their savings, it's you. I think it's really critical that the software engineering says, no, we can't just stick out that we're going to break a few plates. We need to be very responsible and thoughtful about not only what we're building, but how we're marketing it, how we're selling it, who we're selling it to, what we're telling them they can do with it, and what it will bring to the world, and what the risks are what they're signing up for, and how they're protected or if they're protected at all from catastrophic failure. And none of that is happening in the crypto industry, and I think that is really really critical to pay attention to you and push back on vlode any any thoughts on that. Um, I'm still going to be very mindful of separating out crypto trading culture, which is not necessarily unique to block chains or Web three, and the very idea of like speculatively wild westing. I think that's a feature of Web three and a feature of blockchain, but I still struggle to see that as the main thing. I'd love for you both to make some brief predictions about the future of Web three. Paint a best case scenario and a worst case scenario for me, Molly, why don't we start with you? Well, I think the best case scenario is that people uh redefine the term a little bit. You know, what is the web going to evolve into. I think that there's a lot of potential there to fix some of the very serious problems that exist on the web and to move towards a more you know, community driven platform which is not so uh, you know, hyper optimized for advertisements and engagement at the expense of everything else. I worry that people will really internalize this definition that Web three, the next generation of the Web, is going to be crypto and you know, block chains and everything else without you know, actually examining whether or not that is true or should be true. And so I think in the worst case scenario, people really stick to their guns on blockchains, crypto, etcetera. And we see what is already playing out with large venture capital firms capturing a lot of the market and really quite successfully separating people from their money with promises of getting wealthy overnight, escaping tough financial situations. Being on the forefront of the future of the web. I think that is the worst case scenario, that this really does continue to play out, and that people get harmed even more than they already have, which is a substantial amount. Thank you for that, Molly at Vaude. Best and worst, I'll start with the worst case. The worst case is that Web three falls into the habit of Web two. So I call web to the Golden Age for the consumer of content. All the world's content is available to us at our fingertips, at a low price, easily searchable, and it's been nothing short of truly a renaissance for the consumer of culture. Web three fails if it falls in the worst case scenario of proliferating the idea that we continue the Golden age for the consumer. The best case scenario for Web three is that it brings about a golden age for the creator, particularly the natively digital creator of content. The best case scenario for Web three is that the creators of content can own their creation, own their copyright, own their commerce, and be able to do so without requiring a third party to facilitated for them. Great, thank you, blod Okay, last question, we have a tool on calling bullshit called the B S Scale. It goes from zero to a hundred. Zero is the best score zero BS and a hundred is the worst total BS. What score would you give Web three today, Vlad? You go first to assign an overarching score for an entire industry has actually made this entire podcast and conversation quite challenging because we're trying to loop in so many different players. Yeah, so to put the score on the industry, I'm gonna say twenty. Molly, I would give it a solid and I think some people might be surprised that I might not give it a hundred. There's some hope there, Molly. At least it's hope. I think that people will really continue to follow the goal of Web three without being chained to the technology um, but I remain fairly optimistic that Web three will end up being defined quite differently from how it has been defined in the past couple of years by the marketing minds behind a lot of the crypto and blockchain projects. Okay, this was an absolutely awesome conversation. I want to thank you both so much for participating in it. I totally enjoyed it. I learned a ton and thank you for the time today. Thanks for having me, Thank you so much time. Alright, folks, it is time to make the call. How much BS is there in the web three space. This is the first time we've looked at an entire sector on the show, and I knew it would be complicated, but I had no idea just how contested and nascent this space is. Not to mention all of the technical language, it's also the first time that we received it's widely divergent BS scores. To recap, Molly gave it a Glen A fifty and Vlad a twenty. There are just so many places that our guests disagree and places their views intersect. I'm going to try to paint a verbal ven diagram. You might want to grab a pencil on a piece of paper. Molly and Glenn agree that the Internet could have a bright future, and that future isn't necessarily tied to the blockchain. For instance, Glenn mentioned Taiwan's digital tools, which are actually built without blockchain technology. Molly and Vlad, however, both agree that Web three implies a blockchain. Vlad believes that blockchains can help create the ultimate directed consumer platform. Molly, on the other hand, doesn't think the blockchain is solving any problems and is probably creating more trouble than it's actually worth. And Vlad and Glenn agree that vcs aren't necessarily the only enemy here. Bad actors take many forms, but everyone agrees that this is a tough topic to dissect and that to some extent, vcs are working to consolidate power in a sector they are advertising as decentralized. So this one is tough to call. I'm going to give it a fifty. I think the fair answer here is that we have multiple factions working their butts off to produce totally divergent versions of Web three, and the outcome is far from clear at the moment. If the vcs managed to create a centralized version of Web three, where our data is plundered for the benefit of a wealthy few. That's bad, and the score goes way up. If the anarcho capitalists win and all our social institutions and governments get erased, I think that's a bad thing. But if end and some of the other Optimists went out and we use Web three to enact some of the original promise of Web one and create a better functioning and more egalitarian society, well that would be great and the score would drop way way down. So let's all agree to keep an eye on this space and revisit it in the future. I am so grateful to have such amazing guests joining me for this one. I want to thank Glenn While, Molly White, and Vlad Ginsburg for taking the time to speak with me on the show. I highly recommend checking out more of their work to learn more about them, check out the links on our show notes, and if this episode monopolized your attention, subscribe to the Calling Bullshit podcast on the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to people speaking to your ears. Please take a minute to rate us and let us know what you think of the show. More reviews help more people find us and thanks to our production team Hannah be Yell, Amanda Ginsburg, D S Moss, Hailey Pascalites, and Parker Silzer. Calling Bullshit was created by co Collective and it's hosted by me Ti Montaguio. Thanks for listening.