Why Education Is the Killer App for Blockchains - Cedric Waldburger, Dfinity

Transcript

[Music] hello and welcome to the blockchain and us we're pioneers and thought leaders talked about their journey in blockchain technology crypto assets and a token economy and I'm your host manuel staggers this episode has support from no official sponsor but from my very own the blockchain and us newsletter get an email from me every two weeks with a very short summary of new podcast episodes so you can immediately pick those interviews you'd like to listen to to stay up-to-date just visit www.nasa.gov/twan [Music] grrrrrr cedric holds a master's degree

in computer science and he is a serial entrepreneur startup founder investor and blockchain enthusiast since 2012 he co-founded Definity a blockchain start-up backed by andreessen horowitz and eight other high-tech companies in Europe and the US he also has a video blog where he documents his experiences and travels and he produces the YouTube series inside Definity and now to the interview hi Cedric and many thanks for taking time today thanks for having me pathetic I read somewhere that you are never in any one place in the world for more than three days so why is that the

case yeah my life is very decentralized in many ways I work on a decentralized project but even more my personal life is completely decentralized there has been for the past two three years about two and a half years ago I gave up on having an apartment anywhere in the world because I realized him traveling so much there was mostly motivated by at the time I was part of different companies and they were all split up in or they were all in different parts of the world and then of course as conferences meetups retreats so I I found myself at the end of last year I counted the number of flights that I was on that year it was almost 120 flights

for 2017 and if you average that out down to have no more than roughly three days at the same place mm-hmm you almost flew to the moon I think yeah I was like 80% yeah I summed up the mileage drive made and I think it was about 80% of the distance between Earth and Moon so it's more necessary for you it's not something that you chose to do you know voluntarily it just happened I think originally I really liked traveling because it allowed me to expose myself to new cultures new people new projects and I always find those are great opportunities to learn and grow as a human but then also over the past couple years there was more and more

business traveler more and more trips that I had to go on so while it's it made some fun like to be traveling all the time but last year was tough like being in no place more than three days especially if it was like three days in in Asia or three days in the u.s. three days in Europe and that for a few months at the time sometimes it was tough because I felt like I was constantly jet-lagged but I think overall I'm I would still say I I do enjoy travel and I do enjoy exposing myself to new opportunities for to grow you were also part of the team that later became Definity and that's why we were having this interview mainly so what does Definity do Definity I think it's part

of the third generation of blockchain technology if you think of it as Bitcoin and similar concepts being the first wave aetherium and other smart contract platforms being the second wave I think the affinity and other projects are now building on the third generation which is these more Universal computing platforms we think of the affinity as the internet computer and what we mean by that is not just being able to execute smaller script like smart contracts but being able to run completely decentralized applications we also call them at autonomous software or autonomous business models meaning that you have a way to run projects that will never stop on a completely decentralized

infrastructure and have them profit from all the benefits and qualities at the blockchain brings to okay how did you get involved with that team yeah so I used to work in Berlin on a company called sum up which is kind of like the European version of square and I was working with a software developer who back then this was 20 and 12 sometimes he he asked me if he could borrow my laptop over lunch to mine some bitcoins and that's how I first got introduced to the idea of bitcoins on blockchain in general and he later on when to etherium helped build out etherium and then later joined dominic

Williams and and started brainstorming with him on the ideas for Definity at some point they realized they probably want to have a component in Switzerland be the foundation or something else and this guy remembered that I was a Swiss citizen that I both had technical experience and business experience and so we started chatting and I flew over and immediately got along great with DOM and the rest of the team back then we were about five or six people and then I helped set up the Swiss foundation that powers the affinity to this day I'm together with DOM and since then I've held many different roles in the company I can try to help out wherever I can have an impact mm-hmm and now currently

I think you're focusing on the growth of Definity right how do you how do you do that yeah so gfinity is a project that's not life yet and we've been working on our technology for I think close to two years now development is definitely accelerating and I think launch is probably it's most probably going to happen somewhere within the next six to twelve months and as we're getting closer to that date I think it's so important to also think about how this technology will be used and how it can be showcased because I personally believe that even the best technology is only as good as its application and it's also something that I enjoy thinking about how can we use blockchain to have

an actual impact in our life not just the financial systems but what are the areas of our life can it impact and so as we're getting closer I'm leading growth in three areas developer applications or adoption um mining and some of our strategic partnerships and the way we think about it is providing people with all the materials they need to get up and running and so we're working on explainers on documentation on tutorials on giving people a very easy entry into the blockchain world one one way or to quote one project we're working on crypto cartoons so we're trying to simplify concepts so much that you can basically read comic strips and

educate yourself in blockchain okay but that's got nothing to do with crypto kiddies no no that's completely unrelated you said it's it's Definity the goal of divinity is to be the internet computer what would be maybe a consumer application of that yeah so Definity is an infrastructure project so we think of us as kind of like the the BGP and tcpip of the Internet right not in a specific website but it should be able to power all kinds of different consumer applications I think the more obvious ones that we all know are any application that touches the financial system insurances banking and all that I'm personally extremely passionate

about governance and education and identity as well and I think identity is something that we hear a lot about governance as well with more and more systems adopting in our Unchained governance system and education I think might not be as obvious at the beginning and but I think once you have governance and you have identity we could have a huge impact on education and so this is a personal thought experiment that I like to discuss with friends I think education could be the big equalizer of the 21st century I believe that if we gave everyone in the world to educate themselves in the same way that I had the opportunity here in Switzerland and we managed to bring an education system

that truly scales to those parts of the world where infrastructure is not as built out as here in Switzerland I think you could have a huge impact and one way I think about it is that our education system kind of split into two parts one I call in content and form where content I think is there we have tons of books online courses papers I mean the knowledge is there right Wikipedia and so on and also distribution is kind of solved with digital content and having cellphones all over the world the other part I think is more tricky which is form or I call it form I think it's extremely

important to learn in learn and teaching communities but I'm not sure the set up that we have right now where you have usually like 20 learners against one teacher and one teacher for all types of learners and that randomly assigned teacher might not be the best going forward so I'm thinking if there's a way that we can teach communities to teach themselves if we can get people to come together and learn stuff together and show each other what they've learned I think that could be extremely powerful and I think the blockchain come in at the point where I'm sure you've hire people before and we all even though we all learn online we still give so much credit to schools and GPAs and all deals

like traditional accreditations and I think a big reason for that is that we we think that online courses can be faked right because if you solve an online course send me the solutions I can go through it in like five to ten minutes so I think if if we focus less on these like static tests and more on like applications me showing that I've really learned about blockchain by building a blockchain and showing everyone around me and then those people giving me I call him trust vectors or they could be called exam vectors or something like that that could be a powerful concept and where I do not only get verification from one person but from like a group of people so it's

basically like combining MOOCs right massive open online courses with some kind of accreditation system yeah I think the important part is to have an online identity that's one on one to one mapping to real-life identities so that later on if I see that someone gives you a certain feedback on what you've done and I can I can also see what kind of qualifications that person had I'm always interested in storytelling and in telling the story of blockchain technology and then it's a big motivation for me to do this podcast but also to to make when I made my films so you also have a vlog where you focus

on storytelling and how did that project start yell go back a few years to give you some context I a few years ago I realized that what makes me truly happy is learning growing as a person understanding concepts and how things in a world work and once I understood that I started creating lots of lots of different learning opportunities for myself both in business by joining multiple projects but then also just by having fun experiments every now and then and one thing I've recently realized is that if I want to further scale my time or leverage my time I need to have a bigger team and I need to make sure it needs to be less communication

which means I can not only transfer him like that kind of the bullet points for what each and every one has to do right now but I need to be sure that everyone understands my incentives and interests in the long run it's about getting people on the same page not just getting them on the same page but also understanding them how I feel about certain things and I I felt like that was often something that got lost in the past because I was very good at giving you ABC but I was not very good at giving you the information that goes between the lines and gives you feedback on how I feel about something or what's my long-term goal with this what's an example of how you feel about something I mean how would you translate that in a video you know on your on your flock

yeah so and then the flock was basically what I what I realized is I need to get better it's storytelling to give people not only information but also emotions and that's how I started the 90 day flogging challenge I kind of see my life not in years but in quarters that's why I decided to run the experiment from 91 days and produce one movie or one flaw vlog per day what episode per day and it's been extremely fun but also extremely challenging as I'm sure you know working in a with similar ideas and projects so much more work than everybody thinks yes boiling down 24 hours into a few minutes per day it's been extremely fun it's also a great way of journaling and

looking bad like having memories now to come back to your question what are the things that I covered like for those 91 days everything like whatever my goal was always to share one thing that I've learned or that I wanted to pass on from that day to my audience to whoever was watching the vlogs and so it was very wide ranging from travel tips to how I deal with jet lag to what are the 64 things that I own - what is the affinity and how do we build affinity after the 91 days were over I decided not to go forward with daily vlogging but to keep producing videos but in a more focused area and I'm now running this format called insight affinity where I talk

about anything that's related to the finished Definity so it could be ideas that we have and think will exist on top of the affinity it could be featuring people from our community but also very importantly showing who works on the affinity and what do these people do every day but have you seen direct results you know from you telling these stories with videos - you know better collaborations better results in your team I think so I mean one reason one cool side effect was that producing these videos my team would also see them and they automatically got a mother they got a lot of context for who I am and how I work and how I think and that's also something that I can just pass on to new

hires or I can point to a specific episode and maybe they are important is that your team obviously is also decentralized so you're not sitting maybe in the same office all the time yeah so for the affinity we have two main offices one in the States and one here in Zurich but then we also ask very as it's very common in the space we have a few people working remotely and distributed and part of that means that you have to be better at communication than anyone else I'm just with you you only get a limited amount of face-to-face time every day or every week or month um what's one takeaway I think I've become better at grasping where to start a story and where to end it um and give

enough context and when I talk about our goals for our business goals I also try to frame them in the way I try to set up my stories so set up conflict and resolution so what's the background information you need to know status where do we stand now what's the problem we're facing and then what are some potential ways we're going to solve that problem like a classic three-act sure almost okay there's something interesting do you know this story circle I don't yeah it's it's basically it's an eight-step process and I found it I mean I've done all my films with that and I found it it works actually quite well especially for technical subject matter but maybe I can share it with you later

but right so let's talk a little bit more about Definity the definitive foundation is in Switzerland in Zook and you're from Switzerland and one of your backers is andreessen horowitz so why did it make sense for you you know coming from Switzerland to look for funding in Silicon Valley yeah I think part of that is that we have our largest research center right now in Palo Alto very close to Sand Hill Grove where Andreessen sits and then Andreessen was not the only backer we ran at the beginning of 2017 a smaller ICO and we decided not to run a second ICO book go

with private investors traditional investors and then Theresa and Polly Jane let our recent round at the beginning of 2018 and we mainly chose them because they bring a huge amount of knowledge and extra help to the table besides their funding yeah that would have been my next question if you do an IC o---- why also go for venture capital so you said it you know before I mean you said knowledge and works but what else yeah I think we kind of we did our I see at the beginning of 2017 and we were still one of the very first I SEOs before the big what's now called the ICO craze in the summer of 2017 what we've realized pretty quickly is that there's many unanswered

questions with icos how are they going to be treated five or ten gears down the road and we just didn't want to take on the risk and risk the project on some regulations that were just not finalized at the time and that's why we saw ourselves forced to go back take a step back and reassess what's the best way to get funding and I think at that point we also saw a lot of value in bringing on some strategic backers and traditional VCS even if it meant maybe smaller rounds and longer education and most importantly not as being as decentralized so distributed

when it comes to who owns our tokens but also for that we've I think we found a pretty elegant way we've recently ran an airdrop and we've distributed over 35 million Swiss francs worth of token to our community members a total of over 50,000 people have participated in that airdrop and we started as a good way to balance out the fact that we had to go with or that we chose to go with private investors in the second fundraise before before we started recording we talked a little bit about differences between Definity and and other blockchain startups and to pick up there again I want to ask you in your opinion what does affinity to uniquely different to

other startups in the blockchain space sure yeah one thing that comes to mind and obviously this is from a somewhat biased perspective right I'm a part of the affinity from the very start and it's the only project that I'm part of so I don't see the others but from the insight but I feel we try to do things in a more or we often do things in a more traditional way bit more conservative and I think it is because we're all in for a very long term also if you come to our offices versus some other projects you'll see that we have real offices people come there from 9:00 to 5:00 for well most it's longer days but we have people at the office every day we believe that it makes a lot of sense to bring people together in front

of a whiteboard to brainstorm things and then also we've provided a lot of very senior people over the last year or so we've brought on people with a lot of experience in the academic industry or like academic area of blockchain or math and computer science and that's also one for me that that's the number one thing why I chose to contribute all my time to Definity I get to work with some amazing people I feel like every day I my head is about to explode because I learn so much and that's just something I'm extremely grateful for okay cool Cedric what was your first company my first company is actually where we're sitting

right now we're sitting at meteor sign which is a media agency based on the rapper Sweden Switzerland and it kind of happened by I wouldn't say accident but it was definitely not as planned as some of the later ventures it started with a very good friend of mine and me working on websites this was around 2:00 to thousands when everyone wanted the website even though they didn't know what to use it for and I was just a kid being very happy when I was sitting in front of a computer and programming or developing websites and my friend was a graphic designer so we teamed up and started doing things in the overtime it has developed to this company it does about employs about 15 people and does

everything from like corporate branding to websites mm-hmm did you always want to be an entrepreneur I think I've always been sort of thing that drives me is creative problem-solving and I think being an entrepreneur just allows you to face all kinds of creative problems every single day more often that you want it I was not naturally someone that wanted to stand out or be in front of people or delete I think for the first 15 years of my life or so and when we started media sign I was I was 14 at the time my friend was 18 so here he was able to set up the company back then and from the very

beginning we had a very clear idea of everyone's roles um so we he was clearly the front end output facing marketing sales and I would take care of all the details finance and a lot of the development and I think that's a lesson that has served me really well ever since is to pick your team and be very clear about who has which strengths and weaknesses and accordingly set up your team cool so when you were 14 you were fully involved in business already so it's not full-time I was still in high school at the time but I was very fortunate that everything in school up until ETH my university came pretty easy

to me so I had a lot of free time my some of my teachers didn't even require me to come to school I could just write the exams and so I had a bit of time on my hand and starting a business or working on websites and educating myself just seemed like a really good use of my time back then and a lot of fun as well but I mean it was one of a weekend plus like some weeknights kind of project back then and then we we've ramped up pretty quickly when I was 18 or 19 we had I think the first two or three people employed and then from there it went on to like 10 to 15 when you look around at at other entrepreneurs and maybe also at your own journey and maybe if you could do it again you know if you

could go back 10 years or 20 years are there things you do different or that you advise people that you see start a company look into maybe with more care or do differently altogether I think realizing that I was so young at the time and I'm still considering myself young I was always looking for mentors and people I could learn from people that would share their experience with me and that's definitely something that I would recommend everyone starting out in any kind of field whether it's as an entrepreneur or any other um profession to copy that I think that was the single greatest driver inside of me

that allowed me to events quickly and I like this quote smart man learn from their mistakes wise men learned from other people's mistakes and I've always kind of made that my creature I was always very open to sharing my experience I also try to pass on a lot of my experience to anyone in my network that wants to learn from from my past experience and that would be my number one recommendation to anyone starting out but but it's is that something you see people do not look for role models not look for mentors and just try to kind of muddle through on their on their own um I think there's different levels as very thing in life I think there's also needs to be chemistry between someone that you want to get

advice from right and someone you want to learn from and that might not always be there I think I've seen a few what from my perspective looked like very stubborn founders um and sometimes they're right sometimes they're wrong so I'm not saying it's definitely right or wrong to go either way but just for myself I think I've profited a lot from the experiences that other people were sharing with me mm-hmm so basically the idea of never be the smartest guy in the room yes yeah I also I do this thing I measure my life not in years but in quarters and so every 90 days I kind of take an afternoon and evening off and I write about 12 areas of my life and I

ask myself where do I stand where do I want to go in those 12 years and it could be anything from like friends and family to money personal growth passions and so on and one thing that I often ask myself in that the area of friends is who did I spend four to five people that I spent the most time with and what did I learn from them if in the last 90 days and then I also asked myself who are the five people that I should have spent the most time with and if there's a difference between the two sets then I tried to course-correct or at least spend more time with the people that I felt I didn't spend enough time with cool that's a good one do you also do this exercise with your team so I I don't do it openly so we

don't necessarily read out what we do but we for example if my team at infinity and the people that I work with daily we do a feedback cycle every six weeks which sounds like a lot especially if I mean some traditional companies that I've seen they to do it once a year which i think is nonsense why would you wait a year to give someone feedback I mean we do it in a very simple way we we use a Google Form and basically we ask like I would give every I would get feedback from everyone they would say start stop continuous so start this what would they like me to start doing stop is what would they like me to stop doing and continue what would they like me to do more and so it's very open it's not about like personality versus skills and

so on so the idea said it that it's quick and that it surfaces the most pressing issues or pressing feedback points that they want to give or pass on to me is this something you learned from a mentor or how did you learn how to do these things so that the start-stop continue is something that I've picked up in an organization called entrepreneurs organization it's worldwide network for entrepreneurs and which I'm part of they have as Erick chapter as well and which has been great lots and lots of people sharing their experiences and tips with me and then a feedback cycle doing it every six weeks is something that we decided on within the team just because we're all very hungry for feedback and given that we often work remote we felt it's it's good

to be extra vocal about our feedback and pay extra attention to giving feedback quickly and openly you're also an investor and I'm wondering do you have a specific focus when you invest so I think it shifts a bit over time but when we started 10 Delon mantras which is the investment company and that we set up the initial focus were two baskets one is ecommerce in Switzerland and the thesis there is that Amazon will not enter the Swiss market for a while and therefore there's an opportunity for high margin niche markets so I'm messing in a few e-commerce companies and then

the other basket is a bit more open openly defined and the thesis there is that there's a lot of value in companies that scale without adding staff and so the requirement for that second basket is that if a company is up and running then it should only it should be able to serve a thousand to ten thousand additional users or customers without adding a single staff yeah those were the two baskets that we invested in we've invested in into our first batch of ten companies between 2014 and end of 2016 so over three years right now I mean kind of I'm kind of in a period of where I assess how those investments are doing um and then personally I invest in different crypto projects right now

we're blockchain projects that I think are interesting and have value in the long run um and they're I mostly invest right now into infrastructure projects because I believe that it's too early for many of the application layer and projects um first we need to establish which is going to be the platform where most of these applications can run on and then we'll come a time and era for all these applications on top of it do you also invest in ICS I have invested in the Definity coin offering that we did back then but I've actually never invested in any other IC o---- why not yeah it's an interesting question um I think it's part it's part trust I like

to spend a lot of time with a team before investing in them um and I felt like mostly only after they've gone life and showed significant progress I gained enough trust to to back a project and then I think maybe a smaller component is also convenient so I just felt more comfortable investing through exchanges versus having to go through the KYC and email process we featuring every project but with the blockchain project to invest in how do you how do you invest I mean do you buy equity or how do you do that maybe I should also say I'm not a huge invest in anything outside and my own projects so it's more of a I invest for

learning I kind of like when I like a project I put some money down to make sure I keep being interested in that project and I naturally just follow it like the people who apply one stock and then they they get to go to the shareholders meeting yeah except there's no shareholders meetings usually it's all it's all online um but yeah I think the motivation can be compared yeah I I kind of like it as a as a reminder to myself to stay interested or to to follow up with a project no I was just wondering because my next question would be how do you I mean how do you evaluate those investments right and and if you say okay I'm I'm mainly investing

because I'm interested in the field I want to stay up to date then of course that's the decision right that's something you're interested in and then you're investing in something but you you try to minimize the downside we are not investing too much but when you invest in entrepreneurs you know in real teams you mentioned a few things already did you find important with entrepreneurs but but how do you go about evaluating as little steamers I'll try to finish the question did you ask me for like yeah so maybe I should also add I'm not I'm not to diversify because what I've learned over time and from my past experience in the non blockchain world is that I make my biggest gains in my own projects not by investing in

others I also think it's more fun to focus on my project and help it get as far as possible instead of just putting down money on other projects and so this is more this I think it's more educational money that that I would look I would look at my investments more as educational money then at real investments like we did with tender elementary standalone ventures was a period where it's like first batch of ten companies was a period where I wanted to paralyze my learning process so I wanted to be part of ten companies and spend all my time on those ten companies and see what worked well and what didn't and now that I'm back in the driver's seat that my own project I'm

trying to reserve as much focus in the energy for that project versus any others I need to land and the worried as many distractions as possible let's take a quick break for a message from our sponsors this episode has support from no official sponsor but from my very own the blockchain and us newsletter get an email from me every two weeks with a very short summary of new podcast episodes so you can immediately pick those interviews you'd like to listen to to stay up-to-date just visit w-w-w and ask ahhmm and sign up today interesting do you think there is a difference between you know maybe a tech

entrepreneur and the blockchain entrepreneur ha I think there's very different types of blockchain entrepreneurs I think there's a type that is a tech entrepreneur um where they build core technology they're very passionate about product and the technology that they're building and then there's a there's a different category at least one other category which I think are often coming from the financial sector and they operate on a different level so they use the infrastructure that's already built for brokerages for hedge funds trading and everything related to financial services and I typically see a difference between

those two but when it comes to tech entrepreneurs in the blockchain space I think they're they're very similar I think one of the interesting differences to what we've seen in the traditional tech space is that right now there's there's a lot of money flowing to the blockchain space and so it's interesting to see how quickly teams scale out and also how responsible people handle their funds and what they are able to achieve within the first year two or three years I think it could have in a traditional tech industry typically takes a bit longer until you raise the amount of funds that were raised in like very early-stage icos in the past year and so

it's interesting to see how these projects will do now that they've on the financial side have been so fast-tracked but have you seen with the rise of blockchain technology or D you know um maybe also the popularity of starting companies in this field have you seen entirely new trades maybe come up in entrepreneurs that you previously didn't see in you know previous waves of technology without naming anyone specifically but I think there's a there's a high percentage or a lot of geniuses in the space which to me fascinates me and totally draws me to the space I think there's a lot of people that have a lot of talent are extremely talented in what they you and that's something that I find

extremely attractive about the space mm-hmm why do you think that is I think it's groundbreaking I think blockchain as a technology just allows us to do so many new things and apply to so many areas of our lives that it's kind of like a green field and so it's very I think there's a high return on time for anyone who's really talented to think about how blockchain could could be applied to make their life and the lives of millions of other people better or at least impact it mm-hmm because of that I still I don't think it's just ICO speech I think you can also if you look at some of the earlier projects which generates these huge sums

I think just the idea of being able to have an impact on so many people's lives and do groundbreaking work and really create something truly new it's just enticing to to a lot of smart people and I've I think there's a lot of people that are intrinsically motivated to do really well in this space and to build something big and impact lots of people in lives and I think that's another component that is really attractive to me about the space but I mean the same could be said about the web all right I mean the web is all routes impacts but I mean maybe I'm not sure do you think they were also that many geniuses in that first dot-com boom so I wasn't

fully conscious back then I was 12 or 13 when the the comm bubble burst at least but from what I can read and observe from my position now I think there's been lots and lots of visionaries I mean if you think of Jeff Bezos right to started Amazon way before the dot-com bubble and it's kind of only reaping the fruit of that I'd say within the last five to ten years I mean that guy has so much willpower and long-term vision I find it's really amazing you know you you mentioned geniuses before and and I want to ask something that I think it's maybe related to that and that's

decision making because I I mean I sometimes struggle with decisions I mean sometimes I take a long time to do to make decisions and then often more often than not they're wrong or not so good at the end but what personally in your work or in your life what helps you make better decisions so I believe in this theory of decision fatigue meaning that you only have a certain amount of bigger and smaller decisions that you can make per day so when it comes to decision making for me I try to be very conscious about which decisions I allow myself to make and which ones I don't allow myself to make so back when I started to minimalize and

cut down everything that I own to just the stuff that fits into a backpack I also made the decision to only own black things and one reason for that was that I mean picking a color it's just an extra decision you need to make that doesn't have in my world view or my value system doesn't have any positive return and so there's a reason why all my oh there's a few reasons why everything that I own is black one of them being minimizing the amount of decisions once I know I need a certain type of iPad I just get it in black or once I know I need to get a certain type of shoes I get it in black and there's another few benefits that come with that I can only wash once I everything fits

well together and then something that also comes in handy given that I travel every few days is that I often stay at places that have white bedding hotels in there bean beasts and it's much harder to lose a black shirt in the white back than a white robe yeah good point excellent how about food because I mean I find that those a big drain on decisions yeah I experiment a lot I wouldn't say I've totally cracked it one thing that serves me well is the ketogenic diet where I basically train my body to get energy from fat instead of simple sugars and that also helps me to just very often just eat once per day as we often I would either have lunch or

dinner which also saves a lot of time and decisions and then what I often do when I go to a restroom for example I just ask for can I get something that has meat and salad or vegetables without even looking at the menu plus say it kind of like it's a good conversation starter and it's an interesting it sometimes leads to interest interesting conversations and menu items that weren't even on the menu yeah I think that's as far as I as I've reduced the food decisions to I mean I found personally that it helps me a lot to eat the same thing always I mean for each meal eating the same thing helped me you know save time at restaurants

saving time at looking through menus but also shopping and all of that becomes very simple all of a sudden yeah I agree I'm the problem for me is that I traveled to so many different cultures and places that it's hard for me like unless I go to McDonald's there's rarely a restaurant that offers the same menu and also I've experimented with Soylent powder that you yeah shake and and it should replace a full meal but I'm just going through airports with powder has become such a pain within the last few years and then also I cannot carry unlimited amounts of it and getting it in time in different places of the world is just hard so that didn't work out me the ketogenic diet or

just vegetables and meat or or let's just say em vegetables and proteins and works to make these to the degree that I was able to experience it so far works pretty well in all kinds of cuisines over the world cool good point you mentioned a few things a few times those 64 things that your own yeah and now you just said it it has to do with decision making too but are there are other reasons for for that kind of minimalism yeah so I'm I really like questions that sounds simple but don't have a simple answer stuff like what makes you happy which we

talked about earlier and at first I didn't have a clear answer to it so I decided to sometime and explore that and then at some point someone asked me how it were I asked I might even have asked myself like how much stuff do I own which sounded like such a simple question but I in in practice I didn't have an idea whether it was 200 things or 500 or 2000 things at the time I was already traveling for like three or four years not as often as I do now but still frequently so I felt like I was pretty lean but I didn't know and so what I did is I I started creating a spreadsheet I walked through my back then I still had an apartment started going through my apartment and indexing every single

thing that I owned and it came out to about 640 things what I realized is that well I'm very numbers driven very left brained and as soon as I had that number 640 items I kind of wanted to know how to how little can I go and still be fully functional the other thing that really attracted me was why do I still have an apartment even if I'm only in Zurich for like three to five days per month and sometimes I would catch myself going back to Zurich just because I felt like I have an apartment I might as well use it if even though my time would have been better spent let's say in the US or

somewhere else where I could have contributed value to to one of the projects do you see yourself keep doing this with the 64 things yeah it's an interesting question I did I mean the term has kind of like developed its own life 64 things right where I I didn't necessarily plan to own just 64 things it's more of a mean it's a means to an end for me the end being being happy everything I do my life ultimately should lead to me being happier or the people around me being happier which in turn will make me happier and 64 things are just owning 64 things right now allows me to spend as much time as possible with projects all around the world that I'm truly curious about so I

think that the answer is I'll keep doing it as long as it makes me happy and if I feel at some point that I'd be happier if I had a fixed place or place where I spend all my time that I would probably work towards that again the one thing that I want to try and stick to is being conscious about how much stuff I own because I feel we live in a world where where you often we make decisions just because we feel we can get something at a discount and I don't think that's necessarily the best motivation to make that decision so I think I'll always try to be very conscious about how much stuff I own and giving away stuff that I don't need anymore because maybe there's someone else that can get more value from it I mean for several years I've

tried something similar you know I had one carry-on suitcase and the backpack that was all I had on me and I was traveling maybe for about three years and but then I started making these films and as you know they were right you need lenses and you need light and you need cables and microphones and backups and tripods and all of that stuff and then there was all this bulk of sudden but now slowly I'm trying to kind of you know go back there again because I find it very fascinating and helpful yeah and we talked about it before we started talking now and I mean you're set up for this the quality is extremely high but your setup is actually extremely low like it all fits into one third of a backpack that's true but think about it you know what what we

have now is maybe already 50 things just to set up to record this interview and I mean right I mean once we could start counting it quickly goes up in the numbers but you're right it is compact I'm very conscious of that but it's just now maybe I have two suitcases one carry-on and a backpack and and so that's just a reality of it unfortunately I often try to think about it as like a 2080 principle anything so I also allow myself to buy let's say four different lenses but then I'll give away three after like a month or so and once I figured out which one does the job most of the time because I have my stuff on my back every single day right

so like carrying an extra lens like I'll feel it and so that's kind of like a natural selection criteria like if I carry something around for 30 days and I haven't used it yet or I have never used it again in those 30 days then I just have a natural interest to let go of it give it away hmm you grew up in Switzerland I mean you mentioned a few times and did you ever find that this gave you an advantage or a disadvantage in in any of your projects hmm I think I mean not I've traveled so many parts of the world I think I'm very fortunate that I was born and raised here in Switzerland I think the education system here is phenomenal and just the amount

of safety and convenience that you that we get to enjoy here in Switzerland so yes it has definitely benefitted me it has definitely helped me get a head start against some other people that grew up in less fortunate areas of the world on the culture side I think it's it's very interesting to think about that I think there's the Swiss person is a bit more conservative than the typical American entrepreneur maybe or South American entrepreneur or African entrepreneur we're all different I think as long as you become conscious of who you are and what your value system is and what what culture you belong to then I think it's not a it's not an advantage

or disadvantage is just a set of tools that you were given I mean we spoke about location a few times I just asked about being from Switzerland what that is doing for you how long do you think it will take until there is no difference at all where somebody's coming from or where a company is located or where the customers of a company are what's your view on this I think that's great that's a great question and something that I often think about I have to start a thought experiment where I think about a blockchain state and the blockchain state is something that governs things in our life that are not inherently physical so I believe that the states that we have right now they emerged obviously because people that lived

close together they had similar interests and values just by the design of how they were living but now that's not true anymore right we all think about different parts of the world we all travel we all have friends all over the world and so I think it would make more sense to split it up and use these traditional States what I call infrastructure states and they help us take care of infrastructure because I'll always have an interest in this road outside this building here where someone in the US will not have an interest in that being up captained maintained but there's so many things like education or our financial systems insurance to some degree medical care that are not physical or at least not

inherently physical and I think those should be governed by something that is larger than our infrastructure states now when do I think this will become a reality I think maybe in some parts of the world it could become a reality sooner than we think Estonia is extremely forward-thinking when it comes to electronic residency I just got my ear esident see a couple of weeks ago I'm so out now how without even going to Estonia I can open bank accounts I can create companies which i think is a first great step towards that direction I know Dubai and some states in South America are very forward-thinking when it comes to mapping their infrastructure and government onto the blockchain and

more transparent systems so I'm very curious to see what we're going to see in the next few years and how these concerts will develop how important or maybe also with Definity since you're working in this project very actively how important do you think will blockchain technology become you know in the future in general I think it will probably become more important in certain areas of our lives where we don't expect it and less important in other areas of our life where we do expect it right now I mean that's the cool thing about being a life right now so much is changing research is

accelerating faster and faster there's new applications and projects and ideas every single day in that four that's what excites me in terms of what I think I think we just have to get there and see what happens and I think it's so hard to make prognosis they're almost always going to be wrong I like to think everything should change and I'm not gonna be unhappy if not everything changes just a few things but I feel just a lot of disruption coming or there should be a lot of disruption coming in a good way mmm let's go forward maybe 15 years and say all of what you mentioned will happen and and all the things that your hope will change will change how would you characterize that kind of world that

we'd be living in so let's say we managed to bring education or similar types of education to the whole world and also rule areas and we have this overarching blockchain state that we all have a direct democracy in or liquid democracy I think it could make the world more more open and more fair and I think if the work becomes more fair more equal I think that would also lead to all of us being a bit more content a bit more happy in the end because we don't feel like anyone else has something that they don't deserve for the world was unjust to someone or to myself but of

course there's gonna be other problems as well I mean as with very larger system or at UK a or an institution in our lives there's also potential for it to affect more and more people and larger diseases hacks I think in total I or in summary I would say I'm I'm excited for that vision and but I'm also cautious that there are gonna be downsides as a very thing in life what do you think most blockchain experts may be still misunderstand about what the technology can do I think this notion of the internet computer or decentralized infrastructure has it's pretty new to some people in the space and this idea

of running autonomous businesses and autonomous systems that completely govern themselves that are owned by its users is extremely interesting and is I think something that we're going to hear a lot more about in the next 12 to 24 months but but again what what do you think is a misunderstanding maybe people even working in the space themselves may have I think it's just that some people think that block changes means Bitcoin and I but I don't think those are the experts right but a lot of people that are currently invested in some coins or feel like they've learned about the space they think that it's always just going to be

a token transfer network and it's always just going to be for financial systems we start what's the first application so I think that that would be the the biggest understanding that I see within or if some people in the space okay in your work or maybe in life in general who are your role models there's this guy Richard Feinman he was a physicist um I read his book I think it was called as surely you're joking mr. Feynman that I often think of him he has such a joyful way of looking at life and seeing everything as a challenge that's kind of thrown his way he lost his wife early on

and I think he just saw that as he had another challenge to grow as a person and and become someone better so I think he's one of the people that I often think of when I when I have to make a big decision or when I think about how I'm living life I think he's definitely an inspiration what are you still learning as an entrepreneur oh everything I feel like I'm at 5% I I think the best part about being an entrepreneur is you get to work with lots and lots of different people and people are also the best and the worst part of being an entrepreneur like just being able to foresee in which position some of them will perform best it's such

an interesting challenge and something that I'm constantly working on taking notes trying to come up with experiments and tests and ideas of how I can better foresee someone's personality type or how they will react in a certain role or position so that's definitely a big part I think more concretely right now I'm working on a lot of a lot of communication like what's the best way to work with people that I don't constantly interface with in real life um we're also we have two offices now one in Zurich and one in Palo Alto so there's quite a bit of distance and and time difference between the two places

so I think communication people and then of course I'm just free I also like to geek out and just learn a lot about technology and figure out how things where you can play with it if you had one wish to change anything maybe in the world or in your life what would that be this is kind of random what we talked about Switzerland earlier um if I could make one wish or one rule it would be that everywhere in Switzerland has to travel for at least a year and early in their life because we live in a very very fortunate place but it's also a bit of an island um it's not how the rest of the world is and the rest of the world makes up 99%

fold warm I think it'd be it'd be good to get perspective for some people I'm not saying switch people in general don't have that perspective but I think it's just for me it's been a very it's been an experience that really broadened my horizons when I first started traveling and first left Switzerland for a bit mm-hmm yeah I totally hear you and I think for everybody it's good to get some perspective and just to move around a bit and see how other people live I think that helps anyone almost I think just understanding that there's not just one right way to do things um and seeing that other people live in different cultures different systems different value perceptions is something that could help us all

so um Cedric how can people find you or get in touch with you yeah they can find me on almost all platforms I mean a satiric wahlburger or SETI Wahlburgers on Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube go check out the flocks and please give me feedback especially I am interested to hear how I can do better and how you think my thinking can be challenged and of course if you have some positive comments as well then that can be a great conversation starter as well how do you think I can do better in this interview I think you did a great job we covered quite a few areas of my life and my my interests I hope we can stay in touch and talk a bit more about and geek

out about equipment and how to run things smoothly and especially I'm we should have a follow-up conversation on what your process looks like for editing all this and which was what people might not realize listening to this is that doing the interviews just a small part of the work that goes into small as far as the small as part of anything that we publish I so it'd be great to be to stay in touch and share experiences of how how we both structural processes cool but but still I'm curious about this what is what's one if one thing one suggestion you think I should have done better so I can learn something yes let me think so I didn't feel like you were a hundred percent conscious at all time

and because I know you have your laptop in front of you you have the timer running next to you and it sometimes slightly distracted me seeing you go somewhere else if you mind even if it was only for a split second and but that's really the only thing I could pass on yeah I definitely have to be more mindful of that in the future and there's so much more to do better improve and learn for me as well of course Cedric I really had a great time I really enjoyed your insight and your openness and I thank you very much for taking time today thanks a lot for having me thanks so much for joining us today more info on our guests and our sponsors isn't the show notes of this

episode and on the podcast website the blockchain and us 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]