Why Executives Need Blockchain Literacy - Alison McCauley, Author of Unblocked

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.cannainsider.com/careers where she advised technology first startups and

fortune 500 companies including PNC Adobe Oracle IBM first data and Verizon she has been working with early-stage teams in data science and analytics machine learning IOT cybersecurity and artificial intelligence before turning her focus to the blockchain and crypto asset space Allison has a master's in sociology and organizational behavior from Stanford University and she is the author of the book unblocked how blocked chains will change your business available in January 2019 and now to the interview hi Allison and many thanks for making time today thanks so much Manuel you're currently writing a book about blockchain

technology called unblocked how blockchains will change your business and maybe let's start with how you develop the idea to write this book yeah so I've been working in the blockchain space for some time and the more time I spent in the space the more I realized there was a huge gap between the vision of the future that those who understood blockchains saw and the rest of the world and it struck me how friends that were professionals running businesses and lawyers and doctors didn't really understand the technology

and I have them come up to me and say kind of a little sheepishly you know I don't really know what this is and so this gap I thought was not only worrisome because they couldn't see what was coming but also dangerous because these are this is a moment in time where foundational systems are being laid and these this these rails for a new world are being put into place and I think it's really important that we have as many voices as possible to make sure that this new world when it happens is indeed better mm-hmm cool

I mean therap I'm sure you know all these other books as well right on blockchains like yeah Tapscott book right blockchain revolution truth machine how do you feel your book will contribute to this conversation well what I noticed about these books is that people would read them and still not understand and so I took a look at what was going on and there one of the challenges is that this technology can do so much right it's a multi-function multi-tool and so it's very difficult for someone who's just coming into space to break it down for them in a way that their brains can digest it and so I my

goal and what I saw is the gap that I wanted to fill was to break it down in such a way that it was more easily understood and not overwhelm them by throwing it all out at once and so what I really put an emphasis on was putting context as to how this is a social movement as much as a technology also ensuring that I'm giving the grounding for how we were already on this path already so I broke it down into six dimensions and for each of those I speak about what is the backdrop the context where this technology comes into our being so I talk about the the macro

impact and the macro shifts in our world I talk about what the technology enables it triggers an evolution and then I talk about some of the implications for that and then for each of those dimensions they also give examples of what pioneers in the space are working on so that people can get a feeling a substitute feeling for what's actually happening in the space so that's what I saw was missing was a way to codify it in in a way that could be easily understood who should be the main readers of the book so I think that's such an interesting question because when I first went out to write the book my focus was on the non-block gene native executive and I

pictured this as the executive in in enterprise or the executive in a new company that's not blockchain native or blotching first but an interesting thing has happened because as early readers have been reviewing the book I've noticed that the crypto community it is very interested in it because there it gives them context for what they know in their gut I mean when we last spoke you also said businesses need to get more comfortable with block chains but if you put yourself into shoes you know maybe offer like you said non blockchain native executive what could they say in

their defense you know why they are still on the fence about this technology the instinct I've noticed is fear let's inoculate ourselves against this thing let's kill this thing let's ignore this thing and so what I'm noticing you know pilots enterprise pilots are stalling and they're hitting the constraints of physics and we're we're in we're still in a hype cycle where at first there's these inflated expectations and then they fall into this trough of disillusionment that's where we are we're in this trough of disillusionment and so there's this temptation to just sort of do nothing wait it out see happens bring your hands Fred a little

bit don't do anything wrong right exactly but I'm seeing that smart organization are taking this time as things are still taking shape they're taking this time to learn to experiment they're getting their hands dirty they're trying things out and so even and that's very difficult to do it's painful because because you're seeing things fail oh but they're they're learning and what I've also noticed is that they think about something I'm calling blockchain literacy and I think this is where where things will start to move forward if you think about it this is something technologists cannot do on

their own they need to make sure that they're identifying use cases that will actually bring impact to the business right now and the only way to do that is to get the subject-matter experts that are involved in the business processes that are involved in different parts of the business to the table get them to understand blockchain technology and only through this can you identify the use cases they're actually going to make impact and so I think that part of this part of part of the reason that it's been so difficult in these these large organizations is because there's too few people that are actually watching literate and that you need to get multidisciplinary diverse perspectives

around the table to even be able to identify how is this actually going to move our business forward and you need it's competitive you need to do that faster than your competitors know what's gonna crack it before you do if you don't know how to raise blockchain literacy in your organization is it maybe also another reason why they don't necessarily want to dive in headfirst in into blockchain technology that there are so many promises around about what the technology can do or can't do or should do or shouldn't do that it's just you know downright confusing to them yeah and I always say it confused mine says no right so if you're confused you're just gonna saying to home exactly yeah that's dangerous so I think that

what another reason to raise watching literacy is to understand what when to call when is this real when is it not and you can't do that unless you understand and so it's very easy to it's very easy to not only not understand when it becomes real but not understand when to actually put real resources against this or understand if your competitors are making something up that's not actually not actually true and that's happening a lot right now so it's it because it feels so scary that is a reason to devote some resource to understanding learning and experimenting

and also to find like-minded partner organizations or potential partners in your industry across industries different companies that have the same intent around your customers to understand how you can collaborate and work together this is this is a long arc this is going to be a very long time before companies are truly collaborating through this new technology and we're seeing some early experiments but there need to be a lot more let's I mean if I imagine I you know was working somewhere in in a corporation and and I had some pressure you know not huge not very urgent to to get up to speed with this

crazy thing called blockchain technology but I don't really know where to start so where where do you think is a good starting point for someone like this yeah so within an organization I think a great place to start is to first bring together the people who are passionate or interested in this technology because you probably have a bunch of people spread out in the organization that already have knowledge and so one of the challenging but important things is to set up some way to find them connect them and see what kind of learning you already have in the organization so way

would be an example of that well I've in in the book I profile several companies and what I've learned from those companies and others is that many are starting watching groups that start quite grassroots in fact they might even be started by just someone who's interested in this thinks it is important for the company they are not often particularly high up in in management and they start to gather people and put out the word I'm interested and sometimes sometimes these become bigger sometimes the people who are doing that are wise enough to get higher level executive sponsorship start

holding meetings start holding lunch and learns and so I've seen groups is started with just a few people super grassroots turn into corporate initiatives with 6070 people involved and so that's one piece to get started but wisest companies are also supplementing that with education where they're bringing in speakers they're providing courses they're making proactive efforts to make sure that they're raising the understanding of what this technology is capable of and then brainstorming discussion can start

to happen about okay how does this apply to our business but the first piece is to understand how do we educate our employees and how do we connect all those nodes of passion within our organization so that we're really we're really being as competitive as we can with tapping into the knowledge we already have that we didn't even know we have and and then I mean let's say let's say there are some meetups there are some you know maybe groups where you know people discuss what what blockchains can do but how do you make you know how do you bridge the gap between idea and actually starting implementation so here's one approach that I've seen to work and this is to

get to use cases that look like they're worth piloting right so that's that would be the next the next piece so once you've established a relatively not knowledgeable core group that's got diversity across the organization different functional backgrounds and in different places within the organization and they're coming together and they understand the technology what the technology is capable of the next step is really to identify potential use cases and so I've seen different organizations approaches in different ways what's really important is to make sure that whatever use cases you're

identifying are strategically aligned with the values of the organization or else they're gonna be dead on arrival right there's if you can't get the excitement and they can't align with the values of the organization then they're never gonna work so then once you have this list of of candidate use cases then I think the wisest thing is to first do everything you can to find an on blockchain answer to the problems raised in these cases find all these problems and then see if you can find a way to answer that without blockchain because that's gonna be right now the most efficient way then that will help to raise to the top those that are actually candidates for this

technology and then to run those through additional filters and ideally you're getting to a very small handful of potential pilots to try out and another thing that I think will be interesting as the solutions evolve a little bit further is to take a look at where is the where's the block where where's blockchain technology evolved enough to attack a key pain point in the organization so for example one thing I'm keeping an eye on is ad fraud so much money is wasted on ad fraud and blockchain provides a really interesting

potential solution to that and so I think that there's going to be some areas in the organization kyc is another one where there's a lot of work being done in that space and so and there's a lot of organizations there's a lot of enterprises that are spending so much money on this on this on very painful kyc processes so even though they may not be the most sexy use cases they might be a chance for the organization to try out the technology learn about the technology and start proving in a small area a return and once you have that knowledge and once you've got that small win then you can look to expand it

so I I'm not saying that this is an either/or but I think there's multiple ways in and the Umbrella message is really to hone in on where you can actually have a win a small win and start small start there and even if you don't get to that point where you're finding something that's viable the applied learning the kind of learning you do when you're actually it's it's not ivory tower it's not conceptual it's not just going to conferences you're actually digging in and getting your hands dirty in the technology that returns so much more then then then not then not actually getting in on it you

must experiment to learn what this can do and also to understand and be able to sense when things are shifting things are shifting what what do you mean so this is this is evolving quickly there are so many minds that are working on this there's so much capital going into the space so there's going to be a shift where things actually start to return value more quickly this will happen you want to make sure that you're tapping in and understand when that is and if you haven't started to learn you're gonna miss it someone else is going to get it before you you mentioned a few applications before kyc detecting ad fraud what are some of those narratives you know that

you've seen in your research that one executives over you know to say okay let's try this let's let's try a pilot with this idea yeah I think I think that these are very early experiments so I wouldn't say it's won people over and I wouldn't suggest being won over either I'd say I think it's more of a tone up let's see what's let's let's quantify what ad fraud is costing us today let's see what ad process cause fraud is costing us today let's make sure that we're seeing what pioneers are doing in the space let's evaluate where they are let's evaluate their solutions against that and let's start working with some of those that are most

prominent sorry most evolved to see what what's actually working and let's do some experiments so that's you know III would advise people not to be won over by anything yet but simply to make sure that you're quantifying what the value could be same thing with kose what is what's the what's the cost to our organization today of kyc and the way we do it now let's let's work with some of the leaders in the space and that are approaching us from a blockchain technology perspective and let's see what they are promising and what their vision is and let's find some people to

start experimenting with and working with and also to join a consortium so that you can share your learning this is definitely a space where the rate of innovation the rate of change makes it impossible for one organization to truly keep up and so you need to find people that you're willing to share knowledge with and share learning with and start practicing collaboration that's going to be such an important skill in this new blockchain era might as well start practicing it now mm-hmm yeah good point I mean I just I just mentioned that because a few months ago I had a conversation with I think it was Jesse McWaters from the World Economic

Forum and and he said you know blockchain technology is this this kind of blank canvas for for all kinds of people to imagine a better future and and you know they with with when they talk about blockchain technology you know they they don't have to be afraid of sounding you know to delusional or to esoteric they can paint these really broad strokes and big pictures of what the future is going to be but it's not necessarily about blockchain technologies but it's just about being more open-minded and yeah maybe that's how it all begins so I strongly believe that what this technology will enable is it enables and creates an expectation

for businesses to be that they're going to have to be more collaborative with our customers the it the the idea of a zero-sum game and this this is with b2c its with b2b its with every configuration you can think of customers are going to expect the businesses that they interact with to be more collaborative with them there are so many different aspects of this technology the deliver to that and so companies need to start thinking now about how do I do that how do I get away from the zero-sum game of what you I take what you have how do you make it more how do we create value together how

can we create value together mm-hmm but what what is an example of that you know that would really require a blockchain so what I think we'll see is that companies are gonna find competition from the actual their customers so I could have this enterprise of one where I have a way to monetize my content monetize my data monetize my data exhaust coming off of my fitness tracker so there's there are pioneers that are working on models where they've essentially infused the sharing economy with a token model so I can actually take my my bike or my drill or whatever

it is that that I want to monetize and put it out so that my whole neighborhood could use that I could be compensated through tokens for that there are micro insurance players that they look quite experimental now but someone will eventually break this that could provide insurance for that item when it's no longer in when it's not in my house and my neighbors using it it enables a way for us to share that we never have before now how does a company compete with that let's go back to the question where we're talking about values so I think an interesting way to think about value and I'm gonna start with an on blockchain example but let's think about how the automotive industry

is experiencing a bit of a crisis right now because people no longer want to buy cars so Millennials don't want to buy cars they want to they want to use the asset but they don't want to actually purchase it they don't want to own it so one model that a lot of automotive players are taking on right now is a subscription model so they're providing these car subscriptions and they're bundled with all sorts of great things they've got insurance and they enable you to swap out the car so if you do one with Mercedes you can decide well this weekend I wanted SUV to go to the mountains and next weekend I want a

convertible to go to the beach and you can swap it out so there's these really interesting rich models that enable you to they deliver a lot of value to the consumer so the company that se sells me a washing machine they could offer through what watching technology enables they could offer a washing machine that has insurance associated with it right I can buy insurance it's already associated with it they could if it was integrated with sensors that told me when parts were going to go out I could I could have theoretically a washing

machine that alerted a service provider when I when my machine was going to go out negotiated contractor that's a service provider figured out when they could come to the house if we were to take this quite futuristic example a little bit further I could have that person come to my house I could have the door a lock for them with my automatic lock I could have insurance while they were in the house a micro insurance the enabled them to repair it but if they broke something while they repaired it that I'd be covered so you could almost imagine one day a token and blockchain

fueled service economy that enabled us to get all this richness and all this value around our washing machine and today we don't need to do that right today that's not that's not possible and we have to deal with it ourselves when it goes out and it creates all this problem but these kinds of models where you've got different players from different industries collaborating to provide more value to a consumer this is this could be possible we're a long way off but that's the kind of visionary thinking that is going to be important for players in the space and what you're talking about is not only providing more

value to the consumer but you're also talking about a new kind of collaboration so that's an example about how we need to move to more collaboration in order really for us to to deliver more value in the space so new kinds of businesses need to collaborate new kinds of partners you need to collaborate and also you have this more collaborative relationship with your customer where you're figuring out what they need upstream or downstream of their interaction with your product and using that to figure out how to deliver more value to them cool interesting I want to I want to ask a little bit about how you went about writing the book so the process of writing and and research as well so

maybe how did you conduct the research for the book when I first decided to write the book I wanted to first take it through a what I'll call a proof of concept to really understand could I break this space down into very of framework or dimensions or something that enabled it to be explained in a more approachable way and so I sequestered myself for two weeks up in the mountains and the snow had just me and my dog and I tested that and so I'd been working in the space for a while and I started I had post-it notes and

sharpies and poster board and I went to town taking all this universe of ideas and thought that was happening in the space and tried to find a way to organize it and what I the conclusion I came to was that the focal point that was going to be important for making this approachable was how will your customer change over time how will expectations change for your customer and once I had hit on that it was really easy to pick I ended up with six dimensions it was easy to pick six dimensions for that Illustrated what

kinds of shifts would be characteristic of this new era of the blockchain era and then to provide context around each of those for you what what's the what's the what's the background for this how are we already moving in this direction what does the technology trigger or catalyze and then what are some of the implications of that and then what are some of the people doing in the space today in this and so that's how I broke it down mm-hmm and you just mentioned it the last point what are some of the people doing in this space today so you also conducted interviews with people yeah so once I had those six dimensions it gave me a focal points of structure and then I talked to people across the space so there were I had a long list

for every dimension of people I wanted to reach out to and I went far and wide I spoke to you pioneers that are doing interesting things in the space to understand little bit more about what their thinking was but I also talked to people who were working in areas outside of the space that provided important context I talked to individuals that work in the data science space to understand a little bit more about what will happen when we break out of our data silos and what that future will look like 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 www.cannainsider.com/careers [Music] and so I'm just wondering how you got people excited you know to to spill the beans for you yeah you know people the

taught the subject the intent of the book they intent to really help educate resonates I found with this community because I think that people understand that we will get to adoption unless more people understands the potential can't do it alone right Chris Dixon said that we need 10 million more people in this army and they need to be from diverse professions right they need to be product developers and designers and UX specialists and so I think that people it resonated with them that I was really looking to educate and help people

understand the space in a responsible way so I didn't have too much trouble getting ahold of people and so I got I got some wonderful wonderful input from people all over the world what was the main surprise maybe that you learned so I actually think my answer to this is gonna surprise you so frankly by Mikey surprised with how fast things are moving along so I know it doesn't feel that way and when you're in the midst of it and you're facing every day the challenges of scalability and facing some of the barriers that you're seeing the technology or dealing with a

pilot that's stalling it doesn't feel that way but if you look at this historically and you look at how long it takes various technologies to be adopted and become mainstream in our world and you go all the way back to say the telephone which took 35 years to get to a quarter just a quarter of the American population and you compare that to the web which just took seven years and and you think about how many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people are working on this and the capital going in you're in the space it's moving really quickly and so it's very difficult from the vantage point of here and now to feel like like that but

when you step back and look at how dispersed the innovation is and you look at how much is being invested in the space it's moving really quickly it's moved so so fast in just a few years and so these next few years I think we all better put our seatbelts on because it's gonna move even faster where there are also things that you had to change your opinion about so I didn't come in with a preconception of what I would find the book really talks about what emerged from that exploration so there was one area where I I there was a little bit of

an aha where I discovered something that felt so prescient it just it struck me so in one of the one of the dimensions I explore I call bigger data so this tells the story of the potential for the technology to break data out of corporate silos and then talks about what's possible in that world what will that world look like once we can do that how will that change our world and I discovered that back in 2007 so before Satoshi nakamoto's paper came out sandy Pentland and a group proposed something to the World Economic

Forum called a new deal on data and this piece is incredible to read so sandy Pentland he was a founding member of Google's Advisory Board and Forbes named him world's most powerful data scientist so he knows data and so in in this new deal and data he talks about how you know our data is is worth more which when shared and that it's aggregate data that's averaged and combined across populations that's really going to move and advance our world forward and in public health or transportation or government or whatever it may be when data scientists are talking about using

data to fight climate change or poverty or hunger that's the kind of data they're talking about the stuff that is not limited is not in a corporate silo but it's broken out of those and so if corporations own the data this can never happen right we can't get to that and so the New Deal on data the the cornerstone of this proposal was that if we were gonna be a successful data-driven society that we need to be guaranteed that our data won't be abused and so it called for ownership of the data to return to the people but it didn't

propose how and so to me that was an incredible prescient historical document and so the if this was this was discussed at the World Economic Forum and there's indications that these discussions contributed to the adoption of GDP our and in this movement that we're on now but when I read that and then realized well today you know we've got you know what you know maybe there's a over a hundred self sovereign identity data projects that are that are out there and you know this is important historical context to know that this is

this is something we're already been moving towards this is enabling something where there has been groundswell for for some time you explained before how you went about research for for the book how did you go about writing so I have in my garage a table saw and it has always impressed me how this table saw just eats up wood so and so that's my friends joke that that I am like a table saw just eating through it I can get very intense in my research so I basically kind of went into a cave and intently research and worked on this book seven days a week

for months on end and I even kind of stopped parenting I have two teenagers I stopped making them dinner telling I went to go to bed they they got through it but it was it was just in an intense period of time and why I was able to do that in that way was because I felt such a passion for the hope for our world that the space provides and I was so inspired by all the different types of people that were working on different aspects of the problem so enabled me to really spend time in that way in in the

intense way mm-hm cool and it's it feels to me it's almost the only way to do it right I mean it's like the books I've written I've seen the same thing they're you're just at some point you just have to put head down and forget about everything else ugly proof yeah it's either that or it takes you years to write it and there's no we don't have ears the space that's for a topic like this yeah when writing the book was there something that you learned about yourself I learned I learned that I could be incredibly intense I kind of already knew that so I learned that it's something I I already understood

I have trouble shutting things off and so there was there was a moment where I realized just how profound this was so I had I had as soon as I started this project I stopped my daily meditation I would eat kind of whatever was in the house I stopped eating properly I didn't sleep as much but it was when I took my kids up to a family camp to try to get a little balance back in our lives and my children caught me posting a sign right by the rock climbing signups for an impromptu blockchain meetup I'd written on a piece of paper hey is anyone

interested in an informal discussion about crypto and blockchain meet me in the Grand Hall mmm funny I actually got I got quite a people to show up but I realized that I had trouble shutting it off and I noticed this about a lot of people in this space where you know people outside the space don't understand that and so it's it's it's I find that I I'm spending more and more time of my time with people inside the space you can understand this this aspect of me are you finished now writing or are you still in the process yeah so the manuscript goes off for layout on Sunday so it's no good Conrad yeah I'm just doing final fact-checking at the moment okay and you

know after the book came out and you know it's in stores and it's available online what would make it a success for you so it'll be a success in my mind if it is if people come out way from this book feeling like they've got a ground in this technology and are inspired to learn more so that's what it's meant to be is an introduction to this space to make it feel safe to learn more and hopefully hopefully will spark some some interest hopefully you'll inspire them and so it's written very differently like the rest of the what I've seen out there

from blockchain books it's really meant to help people understand the human side of this and what kind of difference it can make in our world and in their businesses so that would be that would feel like to me like a success if people feel like they've learned something from it and they're they're ready to learn more they want to learn more if anyone you know wanted to write a book as well and and once your advice on how to do this best what would you tell them well first I'd love to talk to them this has been an incredible process it started off with it felt almost like a curse because it was Maynooth it'ss was gonna

be a big project i knew there would be sacrifice involved but what I found is once I gave myself the permission to spend all day writing and thinking it became this wonderful journey and so I think part of it is to to discover the fun in this and it can feel like this huge looming goal but I had III made friends through this book my editor and I will now be lifelong friends I have made friends that I started off just reaching out to them and saying I'm interested in what you do and I for this

reason and we made friends so it has created this whole new community and I think really that if you look at it as a passion project but you also remind yourself of through the pro the process when it gets hard how do you make sure you're having fun with it and it energizes you that that's really important you know I had my son I I was I had hit some milestone with the book I think I just finished you know finished a chapter that I felt really good at and I was sitting at my computer and I made a comment and my son was also sitting at his computer he's he's 15 and he turned to me and he said you know Mom it's great to see you so engaged and I thought that was really a weird word for

a teenager to use I probably had used it on him but it it was it was pretty cool to have this this kid just call out like the energy that that writing a book has created and so I think that this is something that is very possible in the book writing process and I think one of the best reasons to write a book mm-hmm yeah cool it's your first book alright it is my first book I have never I've never felt a reason to write before I've been working in new technologies at the intersection of new technology and social science for 20 years but there's nothing that I've been willing to vote

devote myself to like I've been willing to devote myself to this space nothing had enough layers to it nothing was intellectually stimulating enough until now can you put your finger on it I mean you said nothing was as stimulating but what what is that you know that that lower almost of office technology that you know kind of drew you in I think there's two things you know when I first heard a heard about this for some time but I was skeptical like so many are today I was skeptical and so I had a client come to me who was looking to make a move in the space a former client

and I sat down with his lead engineer for an hour and I remember my my body language when I sat down with him because I'm pretty mindful and I remember noticing how crossed my arms were and I had no desire to uncross them I was very skeptical and he it was probably an hour that I drill Tim and I came out completely dazed and the reason was because one by one it seemed to me that this technology offered the promise to address every single pool of digital discontent I call it digital discontent right our lack of

control of our data our privacy you know the imbalance in in our digital lives with centers of power that are taking taking so much and giving us a little and one by one I just saw those falling and I literally I was almost dizzy coming out of that because I realized that this this there was something there there's this this could actually offer hope that we so badly needed in our world cool I mean it's it's the story that I hear sometimes not always but I mean I feel it's the most interesting discussions I had ever about technology right I mean nobody got excited about

HTML but here it's entirely different it is because it also this technology it can apply to so many different things that so many different people are passionate about and I think that's why we're seeing such an uprising of excitement for it is because it I like to play a game when I when I do talks it's called name that industry where I have people call out industries and I throw an interesting potential use case in that industry and it can be really fun because people can throw out really obscure things you could say let me think oh yes it could do this or this so I really do think that like the internet was it offers so much applicability to conduct an ability to connect with

people's passions and desires and I've I've also noticed it when I talk to people when I was for doing my research for the book for most of the people that I talked to it asked them so tell me about your moment that moment that you've the revitol human discovered what this really could do and everyone had a fascinating story and and it changed lives it turned around lives that pivoted careers people drop companies that they found it people would drop their lives and they would switch and they turn I also noticed some trends in those stories to where a lot of the people that I talked to had first come first understood the power of the technology because they'd spent time in

emerging emerging nations and developing countries and they saw some the pain that was especially around payments that would happen because there wasn't a technology like this and so for them it fell in place very quickly and so I really do think and I heard from them and I really do believe that sometimes emerging nations can be at the edge of innovation because they don't need to deal with the legacy infrastructure that exists you know right now in the u.s.

we're so happy with you know and in developing nations we're so happy with our credit cards and give us points and you don't we don't we don't need we don't have to pay as much pain but there's a lot more pain and in other regions of the world and I do think that we'll see some fascinating innovation come from there yeah cool I mean one of the things that's always at the forefront right of this conversation about blockchains or not is this battle between centralization and decentralization so I'm wondering did you also notice that in your in some of the conversations that you had with people that you interviewed for the book absolutely and I bring that up in the book this is such a relevant battle a

discussion that's happening and it's an important one so when I was also inspired by one piece that I came across from Tim Wu so Tim was a Columbia professor and he's actually coined the phrase net neutrality that was in the in the early 2000s but he he wrote this great book called master switch that I came across during my research and I think it's got some really important historical lessons in it for us so he was able to show that over time over time there's a typical progression all information technology is where they start off as somebody's hobby and then they become somebody's industry they

move from decentralized to centralized so you could say we're already seeing this right in the blockchain space and he had a great example about radio so when radio operators were first putting up towers right that was in the early 1920s it was so people could talk to each other on this open broadcast medium so they could talk to each other to someone in the different in a different town and it was open right so by the mid 1920s there was NBC so then all of a sudden it was controlled access right and if you wanted bandwidth it it can't it went through this this massive you know multi multi national company right so what was says Tim who says is

it's could I'll never forget before any question of free speech it's a question of who controls that master switch so you know well I think this is really important as these these technologies are being built is and that we're baking in what that decentralized centralization looks like is that we're baking in a lot of thought about that that switch and I think this is important obviously for the critical community who's building these but also for the non blockchain first community that the non natives to understand this history so they can ask the right

questions as well and and we can make sure that we're building technologies that we want to shape our future that we want to shape our world do you think there is a risk of blockchain technology being co-opted and centralized currently yes absolutely I think I think we're already seeing that so and you know I think that I do think that because there's like what's an example of this um I don't know how much I want to go into China right now well when you when you said it first I thought No there was always this narrative of the wallets but now everybody leaves

their coins just on coinbase yeah I mean what I worry mostly is it what's like big in my head is a silver nation using this to control citizens and to be able to watch all their economic activity and you tie it into medical records and I mean it's just that that's a very extreme and scary scenario I do think that decentralization is a is a continuum right and I think that if we are to be realistic about this will understand that we need to move in carefully and slowly in that direction and that there's only a small subset of our population that is ready to jump in to

decentralized everything right away and so if we want adoption I think we have to be cognizant of that so I talked to I've talked to many thoughtful blockchain entrepreneurs but one who was working in the healthcare space talked about how you know when these when they stick no we we don't decentralize for the sake of decentralization we decentralized where it provides more value to the patient and so I think it's going to be really important to be thoughtful about how you how you get a population used to interacting with decentralization and how do you how you

do decentralize in a way where it can gain adoption and I think that it will probably end up somewhere in the middle and my hope is that that there will be passionate people that keep pushing us pushing us pushing us more towards more decentralization but is my hope but I think realistically it's gonna be a gentle progression it's not going to be an extreme progression right away you just mentioned one of your hopes what is maybe another wish that you have for the blockchain space in the future so I have two teen

and I have for some time been so disturbed about how my kids data is in their attention is harvested and sold and my hope is that when they reach their adulthood that they are able to truly control their data and they're able to make a decision about how it's used and that it's not proliferating in servers around the world without their knowledge that's that's my hope okay cool are your kids interested in blockchain technology so unfortunately I've given the blockchain brain virus

Jim most of the people that I'm close to in my life I'm sorry everybody so that includes my daughter here the coach now calls her blockchain the water polo coach calls her blockchain because she was so talking about the space so much and I took her to some events my son is interested but quite skeptical when I first told him what blockchain was the first thing he said to me was my mom what about the quantum computers yeah that's a tricky one good question let's just say you got I thought it was an excellent question that's cool though I always wonder you know what it takes to get people excited and I think the

younger people are the less it takes really yeah I actually that came out in interviewing people in the book so I interviewed a member of European Parliament who works for this technology and she talked about how you know young people that she talked to this is extremely natural to them and that it was so so easy for them to imagine a world where they could buy a house on their phone without an intermediary and I also talked to I talked to Jeremy Gardner I talked to Stephen McKee these are both incredible incredible people who are in their 20s who talked about the power of

the technology for this generation jeremy gardener talks about generation blockchain it's a term he coined and how this is a generation for whom it's going to be as natural to interact with tokens and blockchain as it is for all of us today to use social or e-mail you you always i try to come to a close with the interview but then you always go out on the on the branch there and I feel this is interesting we should also record this and dad will definitely you have to speak again when the books out so Allison where can people find your book

and find more about you yeah so you can follow me at unblocked future you can learn more about the book at Allison McAuley IO or unblocked futurecom when it's out you can get it on Amazon mm-hmm okay cool now listen this was a lot of fun and I feel we could have continued our conversation for at least another hour or so thanks a lot I really enjoyed this conversation and I really appreciate your taking time today thanks so much man well it's been 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 you [Music]