How to Tell the Story of Blockchain Technology - Tom Lyons, ConsenSys

Transcript

hello and welcome to the blockchain and us we're pioneers and thought leaders talked about their journey in blockchain technology crypto assets and the token economy and I'm your host manuel staggers if you enjoyed this podcast please give it a top rating and review on iTunes and feel free to follow me on twitter at Manuel's daggers this episode is brought to you by crypto storage crypto storage offers a proprietary solution to enable professional storage of crypto assets the storage is secured both physically and digitally on the highest grade hardware security modules with detailed configuration possibilities for individual based access control to learn more visit WWF

toast or HGH my guest today is Tom Lyons Tom is executive director of research and advisory at consensus Switzerland and chairman of the communications working group at the crypto Valley Association in Zook before he joined consensus Tom ran his own communications agency specializing in thought leadership content and influencer marketing strategy and execution for clients in emerging technologies in tech and financial services with a special focus on blockchain and decentralized technology and now to the interview hi Tom and many thanks for taking time

today thanks for having me it's great to be here Tom you have a long background in communications in the financial sector and now you're executive director of research and advisory at consensus Switzerland what do you do in that role so at consensus I'm involved in or I split my work up into three different areas one part of it is I'm working on something called consensus research which is an effort that consensus to build up a research arm in questions about decentralization so we're not talking about research into the blockchain technology we're talking more the social aspect of blockchain and at the consensus research there's kind of two pillars we're looking to do

data-driven research into the early the blockchain ecosystem and also to do kind of thought leadership into questions of decentralization so that's one part of my job I'm also involved on a consensus project working on the European Union blockchain observatory and forum which is a two-year European Commission project to explore the the blockchain ecosystem in Europe and to do also to do the leadership and to kind of make a forum for exchanging ideas among experts and also the general public in Europe and last but not least since there's only three of us in consensus in Switzerland I'm sort of the de facto consensus rep here you know and we're not we're not we're not highly active in

the Swiss market right now but I do some community stuff and sort of fly the flag okay cool in terms of thought leadership you mention that a few times what is your function there well thought leadership is to be honest um a term that I've been using professionally for a long time and have never liked but it's the one that we use and basically thought leadership is simply you know writing about ideas that are pertinent to whatever business or whatever meant enterprise you're in so my role is to both at the consensus research and at the blockchain observe inform is to create content either by writing by editing editing in the sense

of creating you know getting ideas together finding people to interview working with people is just put it you know finding putting together and getting out good content on a lot of the important ideas around blockchain and consensus I'd like to speak a little more about that whole idea of communications marketing and thought leadership because I mean that's what you're Pro in and because I also think that whole area is quite hard to understand and grasp I mean some people might think that communications it's about sending out press releases to journalists or you know sending emails on LinkedIn about icos or writing on medium or having a telegram or Twitter channel and posting news there but in

your view what is good communications I mean at the heart of what people like myself do is correctly quite simple it's simply storytelling and it depends you know storytelling for in different contexts and and for different reasons and any any good Communications will will tell a story of some kind and that's really the skill you need to be you need to be the most in touch with now there are different kinds of stories out there there's two stories there are fake stories there's propaganda there are inspiring stories there's all sorts of different ways to approach it but at the end of the day that's pretty much

what what it's all about but with with consensus what kind of stories do you tell about that company so there's two major things going on with a company like consensus but I would probably say with any any blockchain effort at this point right there's two things happening we're developing a new technology okay so there are a lot of stories to tell about this technology itself and blockchain technology is a little bit different than other kinds of important emerging to emergent technologies or technologies we've seen emerge in the past because it has a large social component to it it has aspirations to change society so there's a lot of stories about how and

why blockchain how blockchain works why it's important that's one aspect of it and the other aspect of it is we're all trying to build businesses so there are stories about our businesses our efforts how we work what we're doing and why that you want to be telling how do you go about you know finding the right narrative to you know for those different stories I mean that's an interesting question so I I worked for you know long before I came to consensus I worked for many years in corporate communications and that's basically telling the story of a company okay but but the story I mean the story about a company right I mean you could have the founders journey or you could have this company does X and that's why it's

better than the other companies and and then you have something maybe deeper where you say look there's something very important happening here in the world our company is at the forefront of this development something like that I mean there's many many ways to to find stories to tell about a company so I'm just wondering which ones you focus on with I mean you in your work sure it all has to do with who you're talking to number one and what you're trying to say and I think one of the things that that I and also people who do what I do well have to do or often find themselves having to do with people that want to

tell their story is to set the context because a lot of people somehow forget that enough for me it's second nature right to think about okay who are we talking to what do they know what do they not know and you know trying to find a way to make this relevant and important to them and a lot of people I notice who maybe don't come from that way of thinking or don't have that experience tend to jump into the middle of what they're trying to say and throw it at you and I'm always mmm so I guess my commandment number one is is understand who you're talking to and give them a reason to be interested in what you're saying so that that's all about context it's they're an example that you can give well the example in the best example right now of course

maybe we'll talk about this in detail is the whole blockchain story right because you're talking about this wild new technology which once you get it okay you can understand why it could very well be very important but it's basically solving a lot of problems that most people don't know they have so you know how you're gonna make that interesting to them right so how you know what you know what's the context of this whole thing I mean when you start talking about blockchain we start talking about you know theories of money we start talking about exchanges of value transactions you talk about you can talk about the the plumbing of the financial system all fascinating stuff but not stuff that most people have ever really thought about or or really cared about right and again like you said

before right who do you talk to I mean if you speak about you know reinventing the plumbing of the financial system somebody in finance may find that interesting or may not want to hear about it right and and so but I think the main focus with a lot of the blockchain narratives that I observe out there are really about explaining this technology to people who may not already know about it mm-hmm and I'm just wondering how do you do that best so of course that's the best question that I've been struggling with for the past three years or so since I fell down the blockchain rabbit hole but I would say the way I like to approach now when I talk to somebody

who's maybe it doesn't have a technical background or hasn't really come across blockchain before is to say look this is a technology that allows people who either do not know each other or who do know each other but don't trust each other perhaps because they're competitors or or even enemies it allows them to agree on and share information directly with each other without having to rely on some sort of trusted third party and it's actually the agree on part that I think is the most important part because we've been able through the internet and various other communications means to share information for quite a long time but in order for strangers or adversaries to actually be able to agree

on information and use it in a trusted way youth before blockchain had to find some sort of third party some sort of authority to keep and verify and share the information for you and this is I mean this has worked for a very long time but it can lead to certain kinds of problems with blockchain you can do this directly through the technology and directly there's means in the technology to come to consensus on information and means that the technology gives you to save this information in such a way that you know that it can't be changed later so nobody can really cheat in such a system but you don't need a third party to do it for you

mm-hmm but I mean do you think that's a narrative that's easy to understand I think when I get this far if the person is still listening then I try to get to the second part is why does that matter hmm because that's obviously that's obviously the the real kicker and if the person does seem to continue to be interested then I'll say look this doesn't sound like much on the surface of it when you talk about it that way basically we're talking about a brand-new database technology a brand new accounting technology so that doesn't sound very exciting but it turns out if you can share trusted information you can start to do some very interesting and a lot of people think very important things just to give a

couple of examples if you have trusted shared trusted information you can have money without banks which is the first use case for blockchain through Bitcoin and you can do financial transactions without intermediaries but you can also do things like build systems where an individual can get more control over their personal data and their personal reputation online instead of having to rely on a Google or a Facebook you can do things like build you know large global direct peer-to-peer marketplaces where people buy and sell and and exchange things directly between each other without having to use an Amazon or an eBay so making Amazon's Andy base

without Amazon and eBay you can do things like set up platforms where you have true sharing economies so ubers and Airbnb ease without the uber and Airbnb now why would you want to do that well they're certain there's a number of reasons why that could be interesting number one is if you get rid of the middlemen then you're going to reduce costs because there's not a cost there there's nobody in the middle for taking a fee but also if you look at these broad-based direct peer-to-peer marketplaces they tend to be much more inclusive so it's easy to get onto them so it's a broader base of people that can that can that can use it and we're talking about whether in developed developed parts of the world or what's very interesting with blocking

blockchain is the way it could potentially give access to global markets to to people who are right now not banked or just really out of really out of the whole global system mm-hmm how do you usually go about explaining what what your company what consensus does here - I have to split it into two parts okay so consensus the consensus the business is today I think it's fair to say probably the largest blockchain focused company in the world we've got at last count over 800 people in 28 countries around the world and we're focused on building decentralized applications as well as products and services and infrastructure almost exclusively on the etherion platform so

it's kind of like a huge we call ourselves a venture studio so one way to look at it is like a very large venture capital firm except it's not like a VC fund at the the projects we get behind are actually tend to be much more closely integrated into the company than in a typical VC fund but we we find incubate grow and and and bring to market a lot of a lot of projects that are doing interesting decentralize applications on a theorem for all sorts of use cases from financial use cases to energy to entertain men to supply chain to - you name it but we also do or we also have an arm that does consulting we

have an educational arm so we're doing those kind of services we do direct investments there's a something called consensus capital which does in investing into into companies or also kind of also brings in an incubator projects that may not be part of the consensus family yet and consensus also does a lot of stuff on the etherium infrastructure so we do a lot of open source projects these are not generally not-for-profit initiatives of consensus that are building out developer tools for aetherium or you know we do meta mass which is an Assyrian browser that kind of thing so that's the one side of the of the equation to me the other pillar

and this is a very personal take on consensus it's one of the largest and greatest experiments in decentralization and to incite any organization that you'll ever come across so we run ourselves I mean we we we walk the walk and talk the talk or at least we try to inside consensus it's a decentralized organization on a large scale I don't have a boss we're allowed to self organize and it's um it's something you have to see and have to experience it's a fascinating experiment and certainly a lot of fun yeah it's a lot of fun it's a lot of work I mean you you know I think a lot of times when I talk mention to people about a decentralized

organization or I say we're self-organizing I said well I don't have a boss and well I can you know I have a lot of latitude to choose my team and to change teams and get involved in projects and everyone thinks boy now they're right is it ticket to do nothing and get paid my experience so far with myself and with a lot of the people I deal with it's it's been the opposite I've been taking on too much you know there's so many fascinating things going on and I want to be a part of this and I want to be a part of that and I think most the people in the company are probably the same way so the real issue is is is the discipline to focus I would say my first five six months full-time that's that's been probably my my my

number one takeaway how did you manage that to focus I well over the last I'll be honest or the last four to six weeks I've been pruning I've been I've been pruning my own little portfolio I mean I guess one thing that's interesting that's probably been helpful for me is that I was a I was on my own for eight years so I had a little small little communications agency basically a freelancer plus Network thing and I was had to be very self-directed so inside consensus it's kind of like I have my little projects and metal clients inside but you have to um I have to keep an eye on my portfolio and what I promise people because the worst thing to do is to promise something and not being able to to follow up

if they're a vision or an overarching vision at consensus absolutely so consensus is a very idealistic place and I use that word carefully because that can sound a bit that can sound a bit off-putting but there's a large streak of idealism all through the whole blockchain industry it's one of the things that struck me right away when I first got involved and there's this whole idealism and and vision around decentralized structures decentralized economic social and political structures that could be supported by blockchain and consensus has a very clear vision to

support that ok yes we're aetherium focused but we want to build up the apps and in the infrastructure to support decentralized markets decentralized social structures decentralized or important you know socio economic structures do it in a decentralized way because we think that there are there's a lot to be said for that we think that there's that in many cases it's something the world probably needs and certainly could profit from how long have you been doing this at consensus Switzerland so I got involved in consensus actually last August so August 2017 but only part time so they

basically recline on mine for a while and I joined full-time January 1 of this year I mean you said you joined about a year ago right so but that vision probably existed before that already so I'm wondering if you have a company that's decentralized in the way that consensus is and people are spread over so many locations and countries how do you make sure that everybody's on the same page in terms of vision now that's an excellent question as if it's a central question to these kind of organizations inside consensus we have an incredibly I mean I have discovered an incredible culture of sharing information so we have a lot of online tools we have slack and and various other tools where people are

very very community-oriented and I think that's a function of the kind of people who are attracted to a place like consensus and I think it's a function of the fact that we are spread all over the world because not only is consensus present in in like 28 countries or something but it's a remote first company so of those 800 or maybe it's even 900 by now people I believe if I'm not mistaken that the majority of them or at least more than half of them work remotely anyway so it's it's all these sort of little you know little nodes which kind of sounds blockchain like doesn't it a little no it's all over the place you know doing the work so we're very much geared towards sharing information towards various community

channels there's a lot of video video chats and video calls we have company-wide calls we you know we do a lot of that so there's that obviously there's material in that you get um that you can make use of and there's there's the the public facing consensus media which is our thought leadership arm and I have to say I think it's excellent and you know not only can can we internally read that but but externally as well as all there so a lot of we do a lot of publishing about what we're up to there's that and then this comment this company is very much representative of its founder of Joe Lubin who founded it and he's very active you can you can he gives a lot of talks and he's on YouTube

and you can you know you can um you can get a good sense rather quickly if you look forward for what he's thinking and I think the the you know a lot of us I guess you wouldn't be there if we didn't kind of be on the same page is that so those those are the kind of ways I haven't I haven't necessarily had issues or saw a lot of issues internally where we are in terms of sharing this vision I think you might get into you know there's other aspects where we talk about you know sharing information specific to a certain project or stuff like that where where I'm where you could think in a largely centralized organization that could be an issue but to be honest when you're on a project you're dealing with a finite group of

people then it becomes quite easy to share mm I sometimes speak with companies who say oh you know we need a stronger vision or we need to be visible and we need to make sure people get us right away when we tell them what we do in an elevator pitch how important you think that is in this whole blockchain field it's important in any field when I was communications consultant I'd go in to talk to people and I'd say um you're about to pay me a whole bunch of money wasn't even that much but anyway you're about to pay me a whole bunch of money for me to write you one page okay what well but we're going to talk about for wherever the workshop is or however long it takes is to get you a good short when you're talking with these two Qualis

Logan mm-hmm to get you a one-sentence to get you a one-paragraph your elevator pitch and to get your one page description on with your mission statement they wish the same but but one that covers everything you want to do or you want to say and all the audience's you're talking to that's not easy if you get that you're off to the races then you can start building out from that so I spend a lot of time with with people working on on basic messaging and it can be very interesting I mean you know you talk to a you know you talk to developers and technology types sometimes then you say okay so so what is your um what is your app do and you start getting all this techno speak back you know well it's got an improved consensus mechanism in order to you know

do with the API and then I so what does it do well you know we've got you know you double the speed in the I said what is it do you know and try to get it back to towards talking about you know the function and purpose I mean I'm you know when I just said it was a bit was a bit exaggerated because of there are plenty of technologists who works extremely eloquent about what they do but sometimes you get this with with projects and startups you know to get a you know it's hard to take that step back and look at the purpose and it's it's not it it's a more difficult process than people think I mean I've done these workshops and and you know I I once went to a workshop and I said you know I'm here I'm in communications

consultant and my you know my qualification for this job is that I'm dumber than most trees okay what's that mean and what it means is I'm here to ask very simple naive questions that's what it means you know and said when I said no no okay that's exactly but I'm here to ask you very simple questions and to not know anything and that's where you have to start and then and then you start and then um and usually it usually it's usually it's good I mean I like to talk to people you know it depends how the conversation goes but but if you're getting stuck then I'll say okay if we can't get right to the heart of it then

tell me what are what are your favorite you know what are you important themes in your work you know what are the subjects that that surround this thing you're doing that you find important so that's one of them or we can talk about you know if they're really product oriented I'll say well what's your what's your product and and and and why did you make it aha okay and then you know goes back go back to that so there's different ways in what you're trying to get to some some basic messages that that that somebody from the outside would understand I mean I'm quite sure that many of these goals that people haven't you know visions that they what they want to do are quite similar right they want to be thought leader in the space

and cutting-edge technology and always putting the you know client at the center or things like this maybe in a financial sector but how do you how do you differentiate between different offerings well that's that's also a very good question there's different ways to think about that first of all you often have this problem and I see this problem a lot in blockchain right now that you we have so many startups and so many people coming you know projects that are dealing with the same use case all right and sometimes I feel sorry because you know somebody will come up with this ideas I've got this amazing idea for this use case and I have to keep it to myself that there's already you know ten others doing the same thing so there's that part of it but also outside of

blockchain this idea of how do you differentiate is really important and that's one of the things you need to concentrate on to be honest with you there are cases when you don't there are simply cases when you cannot and in such a case I say that's fine then we won't differentiate on the offering we'll differentiate on the way you presented on being trustworthy you know maybe you know this one thing if five companies doing the same thing but who's doing it well or the best or in a way that that somebody would be interested in so um you know let's let's be you know let's just be straightforward and believable and and honest about what we're doing and maybe that'll that'll help differentiate us so it depends but you do try to look for the thing and that is different and

obviously you would have thought that that the people developing the product at the beginning would have been thinking about that and sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't what's your verdict there in the blockchain space do you think people think about those things or not well I've seen everything so far I mean I think like I said there's a lot of you see a lot of people popping up with you know they're very enthusiastic about their use case and there's gonna be other ones you know doing the same thing other times you come across interesting twists on it right now in the blood in terms of blockchain infrastructure we're seeing a lot of people working on on blockchain basics and taking different tax so it's really a case-by-case basis you know having having that having that messages

is one thing but then there's communications there's marketing there's thought leadership there's advertising I mean how do you use those things to get that message out so I've been using this this awful term thought leadership all these years because it does encapsulate one basic difference and and one thing that I've been thinking about in my work for quite a while so I would put it this way in our world today okay almost everything we do on almost everything that a company does or that that a business does is somehow tech related okay and because because you know software is eating the world

there's just no that doesn't seem be any doubt about that so somehow technology related so and technology is complex okay and this technologies we're building whether it's blockchain whether it's artificial intelligence whether it's um all the various different kinds of technology surrounding surrounding all the data we're producing these days not even to talk about biotech which is a whole nother subject so so all these technologies are complex and they have they tend to have a real sort of sort of claim to be able to transform large parts of society okay and how we do things okay so all of a sudden you're into the realm a realm of ideas okay you have ideas going on that have to do with

this complex technology and how it works and and what it's going to do to your life and you have ideas about how the world is going to be changed okay now I don't think this was necessarily the case in the past I mean obviously when we had you know when when the railroads came in let's say or when automobiles came in and things you know and and you know we had a mobility and we had we had communications technologies things were changing and changed and changed dramatically but I mean the the the the speed and the the the the magnitude of the changed in my opinion right now is much more than we've ever seen and it's only getting faster so you have right now in in a lot of this kind of world you're dealing in a world of ideas and

thought leadership is about explaining those ideas and and and and exploring them right when you see this in blockchain all the time so you can do marketing and you can you know try to get your story out in terms of in terms of you know your product and what you do or you can try to get it out in terms of why you do and why you do what you do and why it matters and that's the difference between to me between communications and marketing and this thought leadership thing what kind of channels do you do you use all the standard ones I mean we're living in an age right now of almost paradoxically with with all our video stuff guns this is an age of words okay this is a great age to be a writer a great moment to be

somebody who likes to write it's it's fantastic we have all the blogs and we have all these different platforms and you know Twitter and all this stuff yes you have a lot of you know we have a lot of stuff on video you have YouTube but most YouTube videos in our space or people talking right so it's all about ideas in words and and that's you know those are the channels so medium LinkedIn medium LinkedIn I mean mediums great LinkedIn whatever whatever little blog you have and how we have all the chat channels going on the social stuff yeah I mean I'm personally but this is just me you know from where I come from I'm personally attracted to do more towards actual writing you know to short and long term writing as

opposed to as opposed to social but then again I'm just old school well I don't know I think many more people read these long articles than we think you know I mean I made lots of videos and there was there were always people who said you your videos are way too long nobody's gonna watch an hour of an interview but you know what some people watched it and they watched all of it and really liked you know some parts that maybe happen toward the end of the interview and so you'll always have somebody looking at it and appreciating it as opposed to only you know the very short snippets I agree hundred percent but even if it's even if it's short form stuff you know there's I mean there's just you know people are reading mm-hm yeah do you

think the traditional channels you know of marketing and advertising do you think they still work today if I'm not mistaken if you look at the studies they actually still do let's take a quick break for a message from our sponsors crypto storage is part of the crypto finance group providing services for professional financial intermediaries and therefore bridging the gap between traditional markets and blockchain technology the storage solution offered by crypto storage raises market standards by introducing a new security paradigm which features two layers of dedicated and redundant hardware devices this setup allows for a dedicated independent and highly flexible multi signature framework all

transactions can be independently reviewed and approved on a dedicated tamper-proof hardware the hardware security module the tamper proof signing devices and the tailored software solution are all developed by leading Swiss providers with vast experience in finance and IT security to learn more visit WWF those storage dots eh if I'm not mistaken if you look at the studies they actually still do to a certain extent but I don't think that's applicable to the blockchain world right now another thing we're dealing with them in blockchain is well how do you mean it's not applicable because we we're not consumer facing yet got it okay we're not you know we're building

something I mean the the the main community right now that we're talking to is each other okay which is important right be and and to the important what you know the word I hate but I use stakeholders governments and investors and and and that kind of thing but we're not we're not public or consumer facing yet and we're we are public facing it's in my opinion for the wrong reasons it's all the icy OS and cryptocurrency stuff it's not the technology that will change if there may be a new kind of engaging people and getting them excited on the horizon for this technology the blockchain idea and blockchain

technology at least in theory can let us set up a lot of new paradigms in advertising as it doesn't in in most other things and again we're talking about moving from centralized sort of push advertising like a traditional television or radio whatever it is to to more decentralized models and more direct peer-to-peer models and that can get very very interesting I mean we we we sort of have that now in or people think they do because we have all this data mining and and and all this you know crazy all this crazy online advertising things going on with Google etc and and and you know targeted you know targeted advertising based on whatever data they've stolen from you so that's the

one thing in in the blockchain world I think the the idea is to be able to move to much more much more when equal playing field let's say or a level playing field between the advertiser and let's call it the advertise II okay and this gets into the whole idea of self sovereign identity and having the individuals more in control of their personal data such that you can set up systems where you basically negotiate with an advertiser and you know say look I'm willing to either I'm willing to give you my information for maybe you charge them for it or you know you have it's more of a two-way discussion because it's not like

advertising is a priori bad right in my personal opinion with a what is a priori bad is just sucking up all sorts of information about whatever targets you're looking to advertise to and and abusing that information but if it's something that I'm interested in or there's other sort of structures where I can I can advertise what I want to be advertised about and willing to make choices about about the information I share then the thing that's fine in fact could be very very useful to me as a person so I think we're starting to to look towards building those kind of structures and again we get back to this blockchain idea of trusted shared information without intermediaries you can start to look at those kind of

systems I think yeah makes a lot of sense I'd like to ask I'd like to speak about a slightly different topic which is the place that were in currently which is Switzerland because consensus is based in New York I think right yeah the main office is in Brooklyn the main office right but you're in Switzerland so how come well I'm in Switzerland personally because because I can be and if you can be you should be as far as I'm concerned when it comes to Switzerland now I was I was born and raised in the United States in New York City but my mother's Swiss inside I have a dual citizen and I came

here 25 years ago so I didn't come to Switzerland for consensus but I was very happy to be able to work for them when they're here consensus actually has a kind of a history with Switzerland that a lot of people aren't necessarily aware of so it's technically it's a Swiss company and so the consensus AG is registered in zhuge in Switzerland it's the holding company okay oh yeah and it's very much connected with the whole etherium founding of assyria mix here and foundation which is also here in Switzerland so the consensus history with the country you know you could say

it kind of goes back to also to the founding of the theorem foundation here and but for various reasons we haven't been particularly active in Switzerland there's actually three of us so you're talking right now to one third of consensus whistling okay cool do you think Switzerland is a good place for blockchain companies I think it's a fantastic place for blockchain companies it's not perfect but it's fantastic and there's a lot of reasons for that like what okay so there's here again there's two things I'd like to concentrate on one is Switzerland is a pretty good place in many ways an excellent place to start a blockchain

business that's because you have a relatively blockchain friendly government certainly in the in the city in canton of zoo but also in the rest of switzerland their interest in this technology they want to support it the swiss economics Minister recently came out and said that we're going to build Switzerland into crypto nation zhuge has been known for quite a long time as crypto valley it has a extremely high number of blockchain startups it it's the home of an extremely high number of ICS but it also has a growing and very interesting ecosystem around blockchain in terms of blockchain expertise whether it's legal or tax or marketing we have

great universities who do a lot of interesting stuff with blockchain the ETH Lucerne University of Applied Sciences so in in my opinion in Switzerland you probably have the best mix of government support regulatory certainty and developed ecosystem that you're going to find anywhere else in the globe some places are maybe a bit more progressive on the regulatory side or a bit more you could call them permissive some places may have may have a larger larger ecosystem but if you want the whole package in one sort of area in one self-contained area you can do a lot worse than coming here and also I mean it's Switzerland has been people forget this but what Switzerland has been a very good place for high tech for

a very long time to build you know this is not the only high tech industry we you know we have right and so it's it's it wins awards every year for the most innovative nation in the world and yeah it's got good business reasons taxes are low salaries are high which is good if you're getting them now so good if you're paying them so it's got a pretty strong mix I would say but really in the in the blockchain story really it's about it's about how early Switzerland got involved and and how much it's been behind it and certainly there's a lot of blockchain companies here oh yeah so I'm just wondering you know again if you if you put on your communications hat how do you see them do in terms of

communications I think there's a very active community I mean we have a lot of meetups people get together it's it's a rather social world even here in Switzerland and I don't think it's any different anyplace else but I think people are very I mean what has impressed me in this whole world since I got involved in it is the degree to which people are interested in sharing and mission and talking to each other and discussing what they're doing and you know meeting up and and and getting together and connecting and there's you know that's that's really remarkable when you think about it and it has to do with the fact that we're you know we're

new kind of movement and and and you know people are you know people are eager to connect with other people like-minded people and it has to do with the fact that there's a large open source history to this to this technology so there's that kind of that kind of ethos is kind of part of blockchain anyway but it's it's remarkable you know you know how you have this exchange going on you know I mean I worked in banking for a long time and it wasn't like that if you compare what companies focus on right or on the stories that they tell about themselves do you see a difference in Switzerland compared to other locations maybe in the world I mean you could make a case that there's less maybe a stretch though but you could make a case that we're we have

less of that sort of you know I co you know hype thing going on and that projects based here tend to be more sort of a matter of fact but I don't know if that would you know that would stand to stand examination but yeah I think I think maybe there's that they certainly it's not a culture where you where you make a that kind of noise as I've seen in conferences in New York and other places and you know it's different kind of things going on there was there's actually reason why I was asking that question because if you look at you know the way the press talks about cryptocurrencies there's certainly a lot of scary news right fear uncertainty and doubt and I recently spoke to somebody from a news portal right here in

Switzerland with financial news and and he said it's mostly the mainstream press you know they cling on to all kinds of sensational news to get clicks and to get views and that's what they need and cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin and all that lends itself to that so I'm just wondering you know how do you take this blockchain narrative about the importance of this technology and how do you make it stronger so it can maybe overwrite all the clickbait and all the sensational news out there so I mean that is a problem first of all right and I mean I can almost understand it and he right here I come like we talked about before with my blockchain story well we've got this fancy new

database technology and we're gonna make you know shared and trusted information and on the other hand you know the the editor at the that the local newspaper is seeing all the stuff about Bitcoin and ICO frenzy and dark web I mean what are you going to choose okay I think personally that the tack you have to take certainly in a place like Switzerland is to say look it may not seem very sexy right now but we are starting to build a brand new global industry okay the web 3.0 blockchain industry okay and it would probably be a good thing for Switzerland to be a leader in this industry the way it has become a leader or has come very you know globally

involved industries from finance to pharmaceuticals to high-tech manufacturing so we're building this important new industry let's not miss the boat forget the cryptocurrencies forget the icos you know let's take a look at the fact that we happen to be early in and we should stay that's how it would pitch an editor mm-hmm and I mean we had this conversation a few weeks ago you and me where we said okay that's great that's a nice story and it's you know it's a good approach but let's you know think a little bit bigger let's let's say we are now driving in third gear or something and let's shift to a fifth or sixth gear so how would you take that narrative and supercharge it now you put me on the spot my first instinct to be honestly used to say we

have to wait until we have to wait until we have some national champions we have to wait until we can show stuff we have to start talking about jobs I mean yeah this is not very very sexy stuff or we have to wait until we have some some some use cases that start to happen now for example one interesting thing happened yesterday so yesterday they announced in zhuge that they had the first block chain based Evo ting okay now voting and Switzerland get a go along very well together okay it's an important subject here right direct democracy and all this other stuff so you know all of a sudden we're having this new kind of voting again it's not super sexy on the surface but you can start saying look these

things are starting to happen okay and what's it going to mean for you as a citizen okay all of a sudden if you take it to its logical conclusion we can bring direct democracy to the next level with with um with you know functioning viable decentralized Evo ting systems where you can really vote not just like we do here in Switzerland every three months but maybe who knows everyday on important issues facing you okay and you can trust what's going on and you can have much more transparency in the government so you start to get those kind of things I have high hopes for blockchain use cases in local communities loyalty points kinds of things the Swiss really like you know clubs and and and these kind of things of ferony

right and also the kind of stuff and location associations right Swiss like associations they like you know they're like self organizing kind of things and obviously you can use blockchain to really support those kind of efforts and and and bring transparency and trust and efficiency to these kinds of things and also the whole idea of loyalty points of supporting communities with with with basically with their own kind of I mean a loyalty point is nothing other than a currency and I have high hopes that when you start to see decentralized structures that function that are useful in small communities that people will get used to it will see it will find it

important and they'll say to themselves well if I can have a flat horizontal decentralized I mean they won't use it in those terms but they'll say you know if if this kind of thing works for my community this kind of decentralized structure works here why wouldn't it work for my company and then if it works in my company why in my country but it seems to me you always have to let people discover that on their own I mean I think people have to end and it's very strong I believe with this whole technology people have to experience it and try to try it on their own and and so I like what you said you know it's start small starting community have a have a small win and then build from there I mean the

the challenge we face in the blockchain world right now is simply we don't have that much to show okay I don't think that's a problem we're still in early days okay you have to have something to show now when I go and tell people I'm a storyteller and I do all this other kind of stuff it starts to sound like you're a spin doctor or a propagandist but don't forget the absolutely best story in the world is a true one so when it's there and it works and it's useful okay then we'll have something to talk about if let's say let's say there was a startup and they have a product and it's kind of working and they want to take it to the next level and and tell the world about it so how would you say they should go about that well theoretically

right it should actually be no different than any other kind of product marketing because theoretically you don't necessarily need to know that there's a blockchain behind it in fact if we do our job well nobody will know but they'll see the difference okay it'll be cheaper it'll be more direct let's say you build a some sort of peer-to-peer marketplace right where people are dealing directly with each other and there's a reputation system in there that that kind of works and and there's a you know you can do these transactions in a frictionless way and you start to see that happen all right I mean that's a story that will resonate so that's what you're that's what you're touting

that's what you're talking about you're not telling them it's a blockchain I mean I wouldn't tell anybody to go run out if you have a consumer facing blockchain based project to go run around and say it's blockchain because it'd be like what's that okay tell them you know there has to be something better and more secure about it now the one thing that I'm very personally keen on and where I sometimes wonder why there isn't much more talk of this is the whole idea of data privacy you know I mean because that's one thing we can offer in this world that that I think is extremely important and people don't still despite Cambridge analytic and all this other stuff I don't think

people are still necessarily aware of the extent to which they're being profiled and and how unnecessary and potentially dangerous that is you know and if that's a hard story to tell but if we can start to show you know show functioning self sovereign identity you know we have control of your own identity and stuff like that long story short okay when we figure out how to get how people can get paid to watch ads this thing is gonna take off like a rocket [Laughter] okay so appeal to people's self-interest maybe that's one thing yeah I mean in one in in one instance yes but it's also

fair I think currently right I mean it's when you said don't tell people it's about a blockchain that's the opposite of what most companies do I know you're saying and when I was saying and I there was a bit of a paradox there or a bit of a contradiction there any kind of important new technology comes in people want to talk about it whether it's a telephone or whether it's you know whether it's electric lighting in houses and there's all sorts of stuff of house of work and it's dangerous and and you know people don't people didn't want to wire their houses for years because they thought it would be no they'd all burned down right or when Edison invented the phonograph the famous story is he you know you couldn't find a use case for it right you know the the music use case

for the further for for vinyl records came about towards the end first he thought he'd use it for you know transcribing speeches and it would be you know it would bring transparency to government and accountability because we know what people said and all this other stuff so you you have to do that part right you have to get the story there's something new going on and this is how it works that's laying a foundation that's the part I'm involved in the part I'm the part I personally care about your ask me more about when doing when we're building the apps on top of it and the products on top of it how do we deal with that well then I think that they're the methods for doing that won't be much different than what we have now but hopefully your decentralized application will have properties that an

equivalent application that's not decentralized doesn't and that's going to be your story cool makes a lot of sense Tom did you always want to work in communications well that's a good question I mean I studied literature at university so I suppose I actually never really wanted to work at all that's really kind of where I was coming from when I got out of school but I realized rather quickly that that was not a viable um life plan so I I I got involved in communications and I got involved in banking because a little bit of a little bit of by accident and a

little bit of you know I mean I was trained to be able to to read think a little bit and write and you know that's what Communications offers you I never ever expected to get involved in banking um and that was an accident it was a fortuitous accident in many ways I found over the years banking to be far more interesting than I ever expected because he's dealing with money and money is a very interesting topic so there's that so I can't say I've ever expected it but I don't regret it if you let's I mean let's assume you weren't working at consent Switzerland and in the communication field what what else would you like to be doing if I wasn't working

in communications yeah that's that's a hard question because I like what I do I I suppose I wouldn't mind doing something where I could I could do much more long form writing I'd write you know if I had my druthers I'd probably spend my day writing books you know and not having to worry about getting paid for them that's likely what I would what I would like to that's what I enjoy and who know the day may come right now I'm happy with with what I'm doing and I find it it gets more and more interesting as my career goes on if I was gonna do something else that we would be that which is quite related to what I'm doing now Tom well if there is there a thing

that you'd like people to understand better about blockchain technology maybe not better but there's there's a there's one thing I always like to keep in mind and I think sometimes get lost when people like myself talk about it so I mean I'm I I'm in the category of the idealists of blockchain and I'm not a technologist right so I have to rely on people telling me how this thing works and I can't really tell you if it's going to work if all these things we've talked about today are really going to happen and if we can build these structures nor am I going to be able to tell you that if we build them if they'll actually function because it's one thing to have a flat decentralized structure for whatever the thing is

you're doing it's the other things another thing to plug human beings into that and to see how they behave that's a whole different discussion so um my point is that I don't want to come across as saying these things are going to happen it is inevitable it will happen where I come from every day when I get up and deal with this stuff is that I would they're important things that I would like to see happen and that I think are important for the world I think we have a problem right now with over with with centralization we have a problem with centralization of power centralization of economic might we have a problem with with people losing losing faith in institutions who are not serving them well and we have a problem

with with a very large problem with with the aggregation of technological power in in smaller and smaller hands I can't tell you right now that blockchain is the answer for all of that okay but at least it shows away okay and that's why I got into this thing because he looked at it and said look at least here we have some sort of some sort of technological background and again it will go back to this basic thing of sharing trusted information okay and we have a lot of people with this kind of vision and I think that's important that was really interesting Tom I learned a lot and I really enjoyed this conversation and many thanks for taking time today it's always great talking to you thanks so much for joining us today

more info on our guests and our sponsors is in the show notes of this episode and on the podcast web site the blockchain and us comm to help people find this podcast it's important that you download subscribe and give it a top rating and review on iTunes or on the podcast platform of your choice I'm Manuel staggers and I thank you very much for listening [Music]