FedEx Blockchain Strategist - Dale Chrystie

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Dale Chrystie, blockchain strategist at FedEx, and we discuss what it will take for worldwide adoption of blockchain, why healthy competition is helpful between organizations, and why opportunity and—

(Dale Chrystie at 00:00:37) Dale. Hey, good morning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:40) Hey, buddy. How are you doing?

(Dale Chrystie at 00:00:41) Fine. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:42) I love those pictures behind you. You know, I always see them in the mall or an art gallery. Never bought one, though.

(Dale Chrystie at 00:00:49) Well, I'm in Memphis, and that is the pyramid. Used to be a sports arena. Now it's a Bass Pro that sits right on Interstate 40 as you cross over. And that's the view into Arkansas, across the Mississippi River into Arkansas. So I saved you a trip, and that's what it looks like.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:09) I love it. It's beautiful. I like how they do the gloss on those. It makes the paintings, or the pictures, really come alive.

(Dale Chrystie at 00:01:17) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:18) But I'm really excited to be hanging out and talking with you.

(Dale Chrystie at 00:01:21) Likewise. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:22) Well, I mean, it's my birthday today too. So I'm very—

(Dale Chrystie at 00:01:24) Happy birthday. Happy birthday. Yeah. I got you the same thing this year as I did last year. I hope that's okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:30) No. You got me something—you got me this beautiful gift that you didn't even know. You got by being one of the awesome people at FedEx. Yeah. And I saw, like, a hundred times on all the notes, it's like not a CTO. We have non-CTOs on the show all the time. It's all about just bringing value. Right?

(Dale Chrystie at 00:01:48) Happy to help however I can. I just wanted to set expectations, so we're all good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:52) Yeah. So if you're not a CTO, what are you doing here? What's your area of interest?

(Dale Chrystie at 00:01:58) I'm business fellow and blockchain strategist for FedEx. And so I've been in the industry for more than thirty years, and my focus is really process in lots of areas. I've done operations and sales and quality and strategy and process improvement and was focused in a quality action team effort around dispute resolution, actually. And we happened onto blockchain, and we ultimately did the first blockchain use case at FedEx. And at the time, I was VP of strategic planning and support for one of the opcos, and that kind of created a fork in the road. And so blockchain has taken over my life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:42) Wow. When did you first dip your toes into blockchain?

(Dale Chrystie at 00:02:46) You know, probably late 2016, early 2017, something like that. Which doesn't sound like it's been that long ago, but that's ancient history in the blockchain space at this point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:58) Yeah. And that was before the—I think that was before the public crest of Bitcoin too, which helped popularize blockchain.

(Dale Chrystie at 00:03:07) That's correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:08) So you guys were in it early then?

(Dale Chrystie at 00:03:11) Yeah. And, again, I do a lot of conferences. And so the early conferences, we really talked about blockchain and Bitcoin. We don't care anything about Bitcoin at this point, but blockchain is very interesting. And so from our point of view, it was helpful early on. I kind of described Bitcoin as if you think of it as a shiny new car, blockchain is the engine or the motor within the car. And so while we don't care much about the crypto side of things and the currency side of things, if you could pull an engine or a motor out of a car, what could you use it for becomes a very interesting discussion. And today, that would get you to a power washer or a lawnmower or a generator or lots and lots and lots of things that that engine or motor could do outside of just moving a vehicle down the road.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:59) Okay. I like it. But, like, I'm curious. How does it bring actual business value to FedEx?

(Dale Chrystie at 00:04:08) Well, so I think the technology—let's talk about the technology first of all. Basically, you know, I've got a slide that says that blockchain is boring and useless. Gets a lot of nervous laughter at a blockchain conference because they've all paid good money to sit there and listen to people from big companies come and talk about it. But the fact is, I'm on the business and strategy side, not the technical side, but we think of it—we've got a lot of databases, and it's essentially just a database. And most of the ones that a company our size uses are incredibly robust and incredibly complicated and have been stress tested at the highest of levels, you know, millions and tens of millions of transactions a day. And this is just not yet very good. It's not yet very fast or scalable or mature. And if you stop listening right there in the conference, you would say, well, the FedEx guy said it's not very mature. Stay away from it. And that's not the point at all. The point is, comma, however, what it does, it does really, really well. And so where authenticity matters, we think it's going to be game changing. And our chairman has been on the record a couple of years ago and basically said it's going to completely change worldwide supply chains. So where does authenticity matter? Authenticity matters when you go to the pharmacy and you want a certain prescription filled. Is that a legitimate pharmaceutical drug? Yes or no? Did it come from the gray market or the black market? What about product that you're shipping across a border? You want that to be authentic. Counterfeit products off of e-commerce and online are somewhat prevalent, especially in certain areas. So where you could actually prove the authenticity of a product, that becomes very important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:00) That's really—you know what I'm thinking about right now. So I have a brother-in-law who's in the Air Force and his job is responsible for tracking the metal origin of the screws. Right? Like, they would have to—all the parts used in the jets and everything, they have to do this special process where they have teams of people who track back the origin of all the parts. And that's really interesting because it's ensuring that they're authentic. And how do you guys use it? Is it actually in that way of, like, merchants—you guys get involved in helping merchants ensure that their products are not counterfeit and stuff?

(Dale Chrystie at 00:06:40) So I will say I'll give you two answers. One is to your most recent question, yes. That's where we think this is going to go. But let's go back to your first comment because you get to be the guy at the dinner table or over the holiday that gets to explain to him how what he does is going to completely change moving forward. So not only do you get to talk to the driver about shipping FedEx packages now and have fun with him, now you get to have fun with the guy in the Air Force. So, in this case, where did that screw come from? Well, blockchain is a database. It's a ledger. So the shortest definition I've come up with, you can look online and see lots and lots of definitions, and they're a lot longer than this. But as the guy who's not on the technical side, I had to boil this thing down. It's basically a digital ledger that is permanent, transparent, and shared. So it's a digital—it is a ledger, but it's a digital ledger. It's not a physical, like, double-entry accounting ledger, but it's a digital version of that. It is permanent, which is to say it uses cryptography. So once you and I create a transaction, neither one of us can change it. Even if I hit the wrong key, there's no backspace, there's no undo, there's no eraser. It's permanent. You and I could recognize that there was an error with that, and we could amend or append it later and publish something, but we can't change it. It's also transparent. You and I can both see it, but we can't change it. And it is shared, which is to say that it exists on the cloud. So rather than one entity that has 50 million IDs hacked or stolen or something like that, it doesn't work that way. It's literally on thousands of computers on the cloud. So, in the case of—and I'll connect it back to the Air Force in a second, but a great example is in the past year and a half or so, we've had a couple of instances of romaine lettuce being pulled off the shelf. Why is that? Because people are getting sick and they don't know where it originated. So if you can create a unique digital fingerprint of something, whether that is that screw used by the Air Force or other people, whether that is romaine lettuce, whether that is a Gucci bag or a Rolex watch, you can now put it on the blockchain. You can essentially then search it, and now you can go back upstream to the origins just like you would search something online in a matter of seconds. So for romaine lettuce, rather than me and you and everybody else having all their product pulled off the shelf because people were getting sick and they didn't know where it came from, you would now be unaffected. And they would now know that it only came from my farm on this lot in this state, and the rest of the romaine lettuce would sit just fine on the shelf and nobody would have any concerns about it. And the FDA is working in that space right now. They've got a big effort in the food safety space. And I think on the FDA side of things, that would be the first area that the FDA moves forward in blockchain because the person in charge of that right now came out of Walmart and did a lot of their early use cases in the food safety space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:53) By the way, a lot of brilliant people that I've talked to, they got some of their origins from Walmart or Walmart-owned companies. They for some reason have this really great culture of smart people.

(Dale Chrystie at 00:10:05) Well, it started off with just a use case. You know, and this is old news now in the blockchain space, but it started off with a group of people and the gentleman, Frank Yiannas, who's now deputy commissioner of the FDA in the food safety space, walked into a room and essentially set a container of sliced mangoes on the table and said, stop everything. Treat this like a live fire drill. Go figure out as fast as you can where this came from. And, so if you think of a world before Google versus after Google where everything was manual, it took them six and a half days to figure out where those sliced mangoes came from. And they had to check and call and all the rest of those things. But if you could put that unique digital fingerprint on a blockchain and simply search it, it would take them about two seconds to find it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:54) But here's where I'm getting lost. Here's where I'm getting lost. Right? And I want to understand this. Is this blockchain becoming an opportunity for us to address this? Because this seems like it could have been addressed without blockchain.

(Dale Chrystie at 00:11:09) Well, we wouldn't need a blockchain within our four walls nor would Walmart or any other individual entity because you can get your databases and your systems to talk to each other. However, when you and I are now growing up in different databases and different architecture and different focuses, and we now have to talk to each other, we tried to do that in the supply chain space around EDI and some of those things. It was essentially kind of a lower-tech version of how can you and I create a common language to speak to each other from a computer point of view. In this case, it does create a common language. It creates a secure chain of custody. And now we have one language that your system, my system, and the other systems speak, and now it is a much more frictionless way of doing that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:00) Who's going to own this? Who's—because I know a little bit about the blockchain, but I'm curious. So I love the benefits like a universally accepted API. Right? Like, okay, we're all going to read and write to this one blockchain protocol for our—let's say the produce world. Right? Or grocers. Is that—am I on the right track? Like, all the grocers would agree that they would read or that they would write to this one blockchain, and then that's how they would get that digital fingerprint to put on the case to then scan and look it up. Right? They would have to agree to do that.

(Dale Chrystie at 00:12:40) Essentially, yes. Although there are nuances to that. So for example, Walmart, in a private blockchain, has now required all of their produce providers to be on their own private blockchain. So Walmart has created a blockchain with IBM and essentially if you want to do business with me, you are now required to do the following. So that's one example of that, and that's also how you get to compliance and to consistency and common protocols and things like that. From our point of view, we don't think that will scale globally in the supply chain space, in the global commerce space. And so, like the Internet, there are many people who are simply trying to monetize it. How do I make money off the Internet? Joel and I got together. We've got a couple of other really smart folks. If we could get a little money, we could build a product and get a few customers and go from there. And there's still lots of people trying to do that in the blockchain space. We actually think it's going to take a big global village. We think it's going to take an open village to do that. And so there are nuances around the question that you asked because, yes, you and I could create our own little consortium. And, you know, we could sit at the table with four of us and write a non-disclosure and sign up, and then we add a fifth person, and we've got to go back to the table and rewrite things and all that stuff. We think that's limiting, self-limiting from that point of view, because every time you add a person, you're going to have to go back and you're going to have to all agree to everything and all that. On the contrary, the kind of fork in the road is, if we hang an open-source license, Apache or MIT or something, on the door outside the big room here and say, first of all, if you guys can agree to that, come on in. We think it just scaled globally. So that's actually kind of a contrarian viewpoint, but that's where I get to not only blockchain as a team sport, but the word that I use which is coopetition.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:39) Yeah. So how do you get that first blockchain—how do you get that launch? Right? Because you would need multiple people to host it, essentially. Right? For it to be decentralized or would it be centralized? It would be decentralized. Right?

(Dale Chrystie at 00:14:56) It would be decentralized. That's correct. And essentially, again, if we are correct that we think it's going to take a big open village to do it, then everyone who is sitting at the conference listening to me talk about blockchain being boring and useless and all those things and who's trying to solve—essentially, they're all trying to win. Right? I'm trying to get to the finish line first just like they did the Internet. Everybody who's doing that at that point, if we are correct, is actually slowing down the adoption of the technology. We believe the sooner people realize, wait a second, I've got to work with Joel, Joel's got to work with Betty, and Mary's got to work this. And across companies, across industries, the coopetition reference, the sooner we can get to that and the sooner we can get people to work together where can we agree, the sooner we can actually scale this and get it to a—and accelerate the technology. So it's not intuitive. Well, it's not intuitive. Right? And it's not taught in business school. It's not taught on your first day of employee orientation. It is something that, even internally within our own legal department, we've had to work through the, okay, what does that mean? What does coopetition mean?

(Dale Christie at 00:16:02) You know, because we've got antitrust laws. Well, of course we have antitrust laws, and I would never, nor would we ever, even get close to crossing that line. However, as I would say, it's not about where we compete. It's about where we can agree. So we are actually part of a trade association that only has three members: FedEx, UPS, and DHL. Almost nobody knows that.

(Dale Christie at 00:16:24) But the fact is, in some areas, under what set of circumstances could we agree? Well, we actually agree that reducing friction across borders—so friction would be delays and costs and resources and teams of people—where we can reduce friction across borders, we win, our customer wins, and global trade also wins. So that's an example of three very big competitors actually finding a common path. And so we actually have worked on and created a position paper from that trade association that we presented to the World Customs Organization a couple of months ago with recommendations, essentially a position paper on blockchain and emerging technologies.

(Dale Christie at 00:17:07) So we don't have a long history of coopetition, at least in the US, and many people are still really hesitant to it. It'd be like, you know, they don't want to touch that electric fence kind of a thing. Well, no, no, stay back from that. It'll hurt you. Well, actually not. I mean, it wouldn't be an antitrust issue to discuss things like safety or other types of things. So it's a more—it's a drill down into the microscope. We actually are competitors with this company, but where can we agree? Well, we actually agree that we need to work together in this space so that we can work with US Customs and Border Protection and others, because we certainly couldn't do it on our own, nor can we wait for the government to actually do it. So there's a whole different—you know, that's a whole different narrative. That's a much bigger story. But coopetition is a word that I use a lot, and it's intentionally a bit of a provocative kind of a word, but it is used intentionally to get people's attention to say, wait a second. And I say, look, look to your left and look to your right. These are your teammates in this journey. And the sooner we recognize that, the sooner we can actually accelerate this and get this technology to a level of adoption.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:24) Yeah. Well, that electric fence thing just reminds me of, like, people always fear what they don't understand, right? Like, that's the default. The default human position is, like, if you don't understand it, you're scared of it. So it's, like, how do you leverage, like, Richard Feynman's techniques of explaining it, like, to a small child so that—and then it's just time. They'll become more comfortable with time. And then, you know, the super old people who are ridiculously rigid, time takes care of them too. But have you guys ever thought of, like, inviting Amazon into that group? Because they're getting really big in shipping, right?

(Dale Christie at 00:19:01) Well, again, we have to figure out who is of like mind in that kind of concept. And so let me go back to part of what is blockchain. Blockchain is what's referred to as a peer-to-peer technology. And so a lot of people—you know, your comment a moment ago is what they don't understand, they kind of stay away from, et cetera, et cetera, however you worded that. Again, there's a lot of people that are sitting in that conference saying, this is mysterious. It's not really that intuitive. That cloud word, I don't really understand that. Let me sit on the sidelines. Right? And my comment as a former strategy officer is, if you're sitting on the sidelines waiting for this thing to mature, I think that's a mistake. If you're going to sit in the front row, do so strategically. Figure out what the technology does, what it doesn't do, how you can take advantage of that. Again, disrupt or be disrupted from that point of view, and then sit there strategically and jump in when you need to. The problem is with peer-to-peer technology—let me walk you through an example. If you need a ride and I've got a car, let's just say that one of the ride-sharing apps is a better model than the cab model. We can argue that point, but for the moment, let's just say, okay, that's a better model. However, if you boil that down, it's essentially supply and demand, right? I have the supply. You have the demand. And somebody created an algorithm and an app and/or a website that sits between you and me. And all they're doing is playing matchmaker. So they're matching supply and demand. They're going to carve a profit right off the top of that, pretty good-sized profit in some cases, just to get you and I together.

(Dale Christie at 00:20:40) So on the contrary, from a blockchain point of view, if you need a ride, I've got a car, comma, and we can find each other in a trusted environment like blockchain, we may not need a middleman. And that's the peer-to-peer technology aspects of that. So when you start asking questions about which company might be in blockchain or not in blockchain, you have to go deeper in that and start thinking, what do they do? Are they a middleman? Do they sit between supply and demand? And is that their business model? And if the answer to that is yes, no matter which company you're talking about, you might not be seeing them with headlines around, hey, we've jumped fully into the blockchain space. But lots and lots of companies are middlemen, and they sit between supply and demand. And so when this really first struck me from a global FedEx point of view, when we first were working on that smaller use case, is that if you think of Shanghai to San Jose, there's a broker and a forwarder and a brother-in-law, and I know some lady, and there's all these many, many, many, many people between you and me when you ordered something and I have it. And a peer-to-peer technology like blockchain is going to have a big impact in that space.

(Dale Christie at 00:21:55) And so, again, if you were in the middle of that, you would want to jump into blockchain sooner because it could affect your business model. Doesn't mean you're going to go out of business, but you're going to want to understand that even though it's not intuitive and it's a bit scary and mysterious and all those kinds of things. You're going to want to understand that because where is that going to put you one or two or five years down the road? And you're going to want to know that answer now and not wait for three or four years for the FedExes and others to figure it out. And then you realize, oops, it's too late to do anything about it, either to take advantage of it or to pivot and do something different from a business model point of view.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:29) Yeah. The first time I did international, like, got a crate of something, right, was these books that I ordered—like, 2,000 children's books for this charity. And the amount of process and, like, what you described—as far as I wire money to China, right, and then I do a bunch of paperwork and I have to get multiple services involved, the forwarder, and then, like, I can't go pick it up from the docks myself. Another company has to pick it up from the docks and then forklift it over to me. But that whole experience—you sort of take for granted the visibility and transparency and ease of domestic package relay, if that's a word, I don't know. But it's just so easy and simple doing it domestically. But when you start getting international stuff from suppliers, it's just a whole other world.

(Dale Christie at 00:23:28) And that's the word friction that I used earlier in that example, where we can reduce friction across borders, all that difficulty and complexity and paperwork and delays and layers and all the rest of that stuff. Where we can do that, we win, our customer wins, and global trade wins. And so we've done a couple of proofs of concept with US Customs and Border Protection. Their mandate is to safeguard America's borders. So if you think today that, you know, Joel just decides he's had his eye on a laptop and he decides to buy this laptop online with two-day delivery, right? That's a plausible example. The challenge is that most of the customs agencies around the world aren't designed to handle that. What they are designed to do is handle something that came across a ship on a container. It was decontainerized. It went to a warehouse. It went to a store. It was received in the back. They unpack it. They stack it on a shelf, like what you used to think of, like, Circuit City or something like that.

(Dale Christie at 00:24:28) Well, today, Joel just calmly said, well, I've got my eyes open for this laptop. It went on sale, and all he did was go, boop, here's the button, and I purchased it, and they tell me it's two-day delivery. Well, behind the scenes, what does it take to get that? Is it already in the US? Does it have to cross the border into the US? The logistics of that are significant behind the scenes. And by the way, US Customs and Borders understands that, and they get this whole twenty-first century. World Customs Organization has a white paper out that says blockchain is going to change clearance in the twenty-first century. I have been at that entity in Brussels not quite a year ago. World Trade Organization in Geneva also has a white paper that says the same thing. I mean, when you talk about some technology that could literally change the world, we think blockchain, one of the early kind of killer use cases for this is global clearance. And then you can get into things like healthcare and pharmaceuticals, aerospace, aircraft parts, back to your Air Force example. Is that a legitimate part? Was it bought and was it produced?

(Dale Christie at 00:25:34) And then it really gets into things like the aerospace side of things also get you into what is called additive manufacturing, which is 3D printing. So you've created a part, you've sold it to me for a lot of money. You don't want me to treat it like the concert tickets that I bought where I can just simply buy two and print six and see if we can get our buddies in. You want to sell me one, and you want me to pay for one and only print one. But there's a blockchain connection to that, where you create a unique digital fingerprint of that as well. And now this really opens us up to all kinds of things where this technology can take us. But you now have authenticity around those products. If Honeywell or Boeing, somebody creates a product, you know that it's an authentic product. We're a big airline. We've got six or 700 planes. So we are not only a mover of parts, but we are a consumer of parts as well. And so there's a lot of very interesting things here that will affect us, and that's one of the reasons we got into this space as early as we did.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:38) That's super interesting. Like, my mind's going crazy right now with the 3D printing uniqueness of I'm going to transmit this to you and you're going to print one, because that is—I haven't thought about that before.

(Dale Christie at 00:26:53) Well, right now you've got a manufacturing plant in Toledo or pick any city, it doesn't matter. And now you've got people building that and doing those things. And now once somebody buys it in Florida or Alabama or pick wherever you want to pick, now I've got to ship it, and hopefully the FedEx truck or some truck picks it up and they move it through a network and it gets delivered. At this point, we actually have a forward depot in Memphis where you can actually print that item in Memphis, and we can inject it that day or the next day into a global logistics network for delivery anywhere in the world. And now you don't necessarily need that same plant. And again, this is early. The additive manufacturing piece is really early, but this is where it's going. Ultimately, you won't need necessarily to print all those things or build all those things in Toledo. You can print them in Memphis and have us put it into the worldwide network. And then the next step, way further out on the horizon, is that you can actually print it in Australia, or you could print it on an aircraft carrier, or you could print it at the International Space Station.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:01) That is so cool. I was just thinking from a consumer perspective, I bet you it'll follow something like how our music and devices follow. So, like, if I were to have a hammer at home and I were to buy the hammer from, like, Home Depot, right, and it were to print one, I bet you it would be less about—I bet you I'd get, like, a certain number of, like, reprints for me. But if I started selling those reprints, they'd be able to track them back to, like, Joel selling those reprints of his hammer.

(Dale Christie at 00:28:28) That's right. That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:29) Yeah.

(Dale Christie at 00:28:29) That's right. So in the blockchain realm, again, a unique digital fingerprint, whether that was a mango, whether that is a diamond—again, more and more consumers are going to want to know. Look, I can walk into a jewelry store and look at a diamond, and whoever's on the other side of the counter can go, oh, Dale, this is your diamond right here. This is this year's diamond, or it's this, or it's that. I have absolutely no idea, right? I mean, most of us have no idea where some of the things that we are involved with in our lives come from. However, think of essentially a QR code, some unique digital fingerprint that's on that diamond that allows me to verify that that actually is not a blood diamond. It is a conflict-free diamond from a conflict-free mine, and I can create a path to the provenance, the authenticity, the pedigree of that. And now I know that, and that could be a turkey. Cargill puts their turkeys on a blockchain. Why? From my point of view, it's not a big deal, but many people want to know where—is that ethically handled? Is your own ecosystem, your own supply chain? How did it get to the store? I want confidence in that. I want, you know, ethics and sustainability and those kinds of things are important to me. And as those are increasingly important, you're going to have data to support that, to say, yes, this really is a Rolex watch, or this really is a turkey that was ethically harvested and processed and all the rest of those things, or virtually anything else.

(Dale Christie at 00:29:58) You know, and here we are—the morning, I don't know when this will actually air, but here we are the morning after the Iowa caucuses. In the future, one of the things we're going to get to is secure online identity. And I believe, we believe, that e-voting comes into that, some kind of sovereign identity from that point of view. And so actually West Virginia was the very first state in the midterm election two years ago, three years ago, to use blockchain for voting. And they did it for their absentee ballots for their military. And it was actually a fairly small use case, you know, maybe 100 or 200 people or something like that. But it actually allowed them to prove out the process and the way it works so that people out of the country could actually vote in a secure manner. And I mentioned the Iowa caucuses because as we speak right now, we're still not sure. We know that they didn't get things counted, et cetera, et cetera. But we really don't know what, why, how, or otherwise. But it won't be too much longer. You're going to see elections—you know, this fall's election, you're going to see more than one state using some kind of blockchain for something. Probably absentee ballots would be an early way to do that because that's really just a slice, a smaller piece of that. But we're going to get to things like secure online identity, and that takes you down the e-commerce path, it takes you down the voting path. I mean, there's a—you know, I don't know, a billion people, hundreds of millions of people in the world that don't have a birth certificate. They literally don't have any identity. So how do you tie into things like state-provided services or many, many, many other things from that point of view? And so it makes the head hurt to start thinking about these things. But again, blockchain is just data. It's not magic dust.

(Dale Christie at 00:31:47) It's just a database. It's, again, it's a digital ledger that's permanent, transparent, and shared. And once you understand that, then you can start saying, well, how could I use that? Where might that help me? And in our case, it may be in logistics.

(Dale Christie at 00:32:02) In the pharmaceutical case, it might be for, you know, where if you and I were two big pharma companies and we were fierce competitors and we know each other. Right? We'd stand there with our arms folded and our kind of our, you know, our jaw set with each other. Under what set of circumstances could we work together? Right? Where could we agree? Well, we could agree that the gray market and the black market are both enemies of ours, and if we work together to put a blockchain solution in and raise the bar, you're forcing the gray and the counterfeit market to do one of two things. Either match us, either go to that level or get out. And so we're gonna start seeing those kinds of things. Again, we're early in this technology, but there's lots and lots and lots of examples.

(Dale Christie at 00:32:42) And that's why our chairman two years ago said this is gonna basically change worldwide supply chains.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:49) Yeah. And I also, you know, take it back to the, well, you were mentioning people don't have birth certificates. Right? And your mind starts to hurt around that. My mind doesn't really start to hurt around that because I think that there's enough parallels to draw to existing things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:05) For example, the trust is created not by Uber or Lyft. The trust is created based on the past performance of the individual you're transacting with, their reputation essentially. Right? So you sort of start participating in this blockchain world and or some sort of ecosystem you start participating in and you build a reputation, and that reputation then creates the trust. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:35) And so if you have a person that doesn't necessarily have government issued ID, but they have certain transactions in this environment, they can be judged based on their past performance and build trust that way.

(Dale Christie at 00:33:52) Completely agree. However, keep in mind that when you search something online, there may be an algorithm that may manipulate that or may adjust that. And that could be paid ads or that could be this or that could be that. So in a very standard, theoretical kind of definitional reference, I completely agree with you, and that's where blockchain's gonna go. You're gonna own your own ID identity.

(Dale Christie at 00:34:19) You're gonna be the center of a Venn diagram where you're gonna be able to share with me your medical information, but you're not gonna be able to share with me or choose not to share with me your financial information. But you will share that with your financial adviser or another one with your doctor or your ecommerce experience or your ecommerce or online identity. It creates essentially a digital twin. It creates an avatar for Joel. Right? You'll be in control of all of that data and you'll be able to do those things. And at that point, it will be objective rankings and reputation, and from that, all kinds of interesting things are possible. I have a reputation as a CTO, as a leader, as a thought leader in this space, but, you know, I also am a U.S. history buff, or I also have three dogs, or I also have this or this or this or this or this. Yes, I did my homework. I also have three dogs by the way.

(Dale Christie at 00:35:16) And but you'll be able to use those things. That reputation is not gonna be this linear reputation where, yes, I have a reputation as a person who has a podcast and has all this, you are a person outside of that. Right? What about your foundation? What about your pets? What about your family? What about this, this, this, this? Whatever the case may be, I've got a son who does visual effects, but he's a U.S. history buff and he has probably a PhD equivalent of knowledge and interest in that space. Under some set of circumstances, somebody could reach out and go, hey, I need somebody who knows something about that, but he would currently never hit any of anybody's radar screen because he's not, he doesn't have a PhD from Harvard or this or this or this or this. But he has the knowledge and he has all the rest of those things.

(Dale Christie at 00:36:03) All of us have the same thing. So where can we use that reputation in a number of ways? And you get a more holistic view of who Joel is or who Dale is through multiple reputations around it. You can isolate them or you can actually combine them and say, well, not only does he do this, but he also does this, this, and this, and he's got essentially a five point O in all of those, that gets a broader picture.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:26) Yeah. And to your point of, you know, paid ads and algorithms. I fully agree with that, but I think that just boils down to a core human need for personal responsibility and due diligence when doing these transactions. Right? The technology will allow for the transparency, but that doesn't relieve you of the due diligence aspect of looking into that stuff. Right?

(Dale Christie at 00:36:52) That's right. And there's a whole big section in blockchain around ethics. Right? I mean, you can make this tech, you can do lots of things with lots of technology. You know that better than I do. But the ethics around this is what can we do and what should we do. And so from our point of view, again, we're trying to be an adult at the table. So when I speak at a conference, I'm not, you know, most of the people on a panel that I'm on are all essentially selling something. I'm not. I'm up there essentially as a, we've given this lot of deep thought and we're embedded in this space and we're actually talking about, you know, hey. Let's all work together to do this. We think there's benefit for all of us. And that includes the government and that includes others as well. We think it's gonna take all of us to actually do this and accelerate that. And so there is a lot of thought around that, whether you wanna think of that as the ethics or kind of the adult at the table or whatever the case may be.

(Dale Christie at 00:37:42) But there's a lot of just brilliant people in this space that are all tackling really interesting things from social challenges like birth certificates, and other types of things. You've got privacy issues in Europe, general GDPR, essentially the right to be forgotten. There's lots and lots of those things. You've got sustainable and ethical discussions around where was this grown or harvested, did this diamond come from a conflict-free mine, is this a real Rolex or is this a real Joel? Is this an original Joel or is it a knockoff Joel? Right? Like I said. That's where you really get into the broader and it makes the head hurt. I mean, frankly, it makes the head hurt. But these become really interesting conversations and it's a very different world, not really that far out in the horizon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:35) No. I love it. I think it makes my head hurt in a good way. I think these are really big ideas and, you know, the question that I like, that's coming to my mind is, you know, with these big ideas, at what point, at what point in the ecosystem does the conversation, when we were, I guess to bring it more concrete, we're talking earlier about the consortium or the group, at what point is technology actually deployed? When does it move from conversation to reality?

(Dale Christie at 00:39:08) Well, I mean, we've built a global supply chain blockchain internally and it works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:13) Oh, awesome.

(Dale Christie at 00:39:14) And we've also been public, almost a year ago. Our CIO came out and said, basically, yeah, we've got one that works, but we don't think we can actually use it. We don't think we can actually slap a FedEx logo on this thing and have the world come to us. Because in the example that we're talking about earlier with in our industry, UPS or DHL or others, we don't think that we can build one and profit off of it and have UPS or DHL or somebody use ours or vice versa. That's the scale, the logic falls apart at that point in time, nor do we think we can have one, all of our competitors can have one, the tens of thousands of companies in the global supply chain can all have one. We don't think you need, you know, tens of thousands of blockchains because you're back to the same thing. I got a database. You got a database. Do they talk? Do they do this? Whatever the case may be. And so it's not really altruistic from our point of view to say we think it's gonna take a big open global village to do this. We actually don't think you can skip that step. And one of the ways I describe that in my conference material is you've got a slide that on one side shows this kind of futuristic looking city that looks like Dubai, very modernistic looking buildings and all that kind of stuff. And then on the left side of the slide, you see a bunch of people. Few of them are holding flags, but it represents people in the room. Here we are, and we're staring at it. We can actually see the future. There it is. It's blockchain. You know, we keep talking about this. And then I click one more time and it essentially pulls way back from that and it shows there's actually a canyon between those two. And so all these people that are all motivated and like this rally cry and like a lynch mob kind of a thing, they're all like, let's go get to blockchain just like we did the Internet. Many of them, most of them are gonna fail. They're all trying to essentially make a toll bridge across that canyon, and we don't think they're going to be successful.

(Dale Christie at 00:41:04) Again, today, you know, twenty years ago, you and I may have thought about which browser I use to get to a website. Today, you don't care how I get to your website. Once we got to TCP/IP, etcetera, you don't care. It's a pathway. It's a portal to get from where you wanna go. So we think there are many people trying to make a toll bridge out of that crossing across that canyon, and I think most of them, not all of them, but most of them, I think, will fail. We actually think it needs to just be a highway, just an open highway, and we think it's gonna take all of us to build it. And one of the ways you could think about that is either the interstate highway system or the electrical grid. You know, no one company could probably build out the interstate highway system or the electrical grid. Right? However, if I could say, Joel, if we could figure out, forget how we're gonna do it, but if we could figure out how to put the electrical grid into a little modular outlet in every room of your house, could you as an entrepreneur figure out a way to put a business model on top of that? And the answer to that's gonna be yes. Right? Now we gotta figure out and if that's the case, how do we actually do that? Right? How do we actually build that out? And we think that's gonna take all of us. We think that's gonna take a big village to do it, but once it's done, all of us can benefit from that and you can put a business model on top of it and so can I and so can everybody else. But to jump to that point to say, let me just put that little modular unit on the wall and start plugging things into it, it doesn't work right now.

(Dale Christie at 00:42:32) And so that's where we get to coopetition. That's where we think, actually, these consortium model, just won't scale. They will in some cases. The private model that Walmart's doing within their produce, that makes sense. There's maybe some other examples from that point of view. But in the global supply chain space, we actually think it's gonna be a big village that's gonna have to do it. And probably the answer to your earlier question would be a foundation. Think of, like, Linux Foundation or somebody like that that would be Switzerland that's totally neutral, that's a totally adult at the table. We think it's gonna take something along those lines.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:09) So okay. So we don't, so the village is not created yet. The, we're still, the village isn't there, but there's desire to build the village that's, like, building. Is that fair? Is that where we're at?

(Dale Christie at 00:43:22) That's correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:23) Okay. Who's gonna be the mayor? We got, like, and then I guess you just kinda watch it. You just observe it, and it's just gonna kinda, like, how matter will, like, coalesce. Right? Like, it'll just, the tension will build, then the village will come.

(Dale Christie at 00:43:37) Well, we're we're gonna have to see where this whole thing goes. Right? But, I mean, there's lots of examples. I mean, think of the letter A. Right? We don't think anything about that, but that's a standard. Right? At some point, we got to the letter A, or we got to whatever example you wanna use and whatever language you wanna use. We think standards are the way to do that. We are founding members of a couple of things. One's the Blockchain Research Institute in Toronto that aligns with one of the leading voices in the world. His name is Don Tapscott. We're also founding members of the Blockchain in Transport Alliance, and we are on the standards council of that, and I'm the chairman of that standards council. And UPS is on that council and, you know, Salesforce and JB Hunt.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:18) Oh, Parker's awesome. Yeah.

(Dale Christie at 00:44:20) And a number of others are on that council where we are calmly sitting at the table creating royalty-free open source data standards that can be used essentially to map the DNA of that to where anybody will be able to use that. I mean, once again, back to the antitrust discussion, a ZIP code is not intellectual property. Right? Well, I use a ZIP code, so does UPS, so does Salesforce, so does whatever any other example you wanna use. Right? Well, let's identify that and let's all use that. And once we can map the essentially, the DNA sequence of that supply chain in this open data format space, then anybody could use that. Right? Anybody can use those data standards for their blockchain applications and, that's where some of that's going. But the word standard is a powerful word. Right? We don't think about that, but, you know, it was about eight or nine items that created the standard that opened up the world for initial coin offerings, that's turned into a, I don't know, $50 billion industry so far. It actually, it was somebody, you know, like you or others that literally wrote down, okay, well, that's a to and a from and a wallet and a, it's really not, there's not a lot there from that point of view to actually make that work. But we don't think we can build it out ourselves and have the world come to us. We've said that publicly.

(Dale Christie at 00:45:40) And we think the sooner we can get others to go, oh, you know what? Yeah. Let's all, we can all benefit from this if it can be built. So, yeah, let's build it and then you can you can all figure out how to benefit from it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:53) I love it. I love what you're doing. I think this is fantastic. So thank you. Like, we're helping push humanity forward. This is awesome.

(Dale Christie at 00:46:01) Well, we hope. It's never been done before. Right? It's brand new technology, but it's very disruptive technology. Again, peer-to-peer technology, you know, I challenge people in any audience, you know, you need to look in the mirror and that's not, I'm not preaching. I'm just saying, look yourself in the mirror and say, what value do I provide? What value does my company provide? Because in a peer-to-peer world with this kind of technology and with sensor-based logistics, you know, IoT devices and all kinds of where all that's gonna go, where, what value do I provide may get you to a very different answer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:35) So let's say that, like, a future version of you. Earlier you said Joel clones of mine, the original. Right? Let's say, let's say a future version of yourself comes back to this interview, like, right now. Like, what do you think that individual would have to say?

(Dale Christie at 00:46:49) Again, I think I would start with open is inevitable. I would say that if you look at all the options and say, okay, let's do that and let's take it to its logical conclusion. We think that the consortium model, which a lot of people are doing right now, is limited because in our industry, and there's lots of other industries, in our industry it won't get you to tens of thousands. It'll get you to five and ten and fifty, a hundred or a thousand or even 10,000, but it won't get you to tens and tens and tens and tens of thousands.

(Dale Christie at 00:47:19) So open is inevitable, and most people aren't yet there. You know, maybe 60 or 70%, 80% still think of that I can monetize it model, that I'm gonna build a toll bridge across that canyon. So open is inevitable is one of those things, and I would tell you that open is inevitable to get you to coopetition. And coopetition gets you to not only industries working together, but governments working together and everybody doing this and recognizing that today, we don't care how you get from point A to point B on the internet. It's just a browser. It's TCP/IP. I don't care if I use Chrome or Internet Explorer or whatever I use. You just want me on your site. You want my views and my clicks and my shopping cart, and that's really the value is there, is not how did I get there. And most people are still trying to figure out how do I monetize the journey there.

(Dale Christie at 00:48:09) And so that's probably where I would start if I were to have come back from the future.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:14) Yeah. And I like what you're saying too because from an entrepreneurial perspective, there's going to be 10 times more opportunity with an open system. Like, the marketplace for an open system would dwarf the marketplace for a closed system. Right?

(Dale Christie at 00:48:33) I would say more than 10 times. I would say—

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:36) Yeah.

(Dale Christie at 00:48:36) Yes. By a huge factor. That's exactly right. Because it also challenges us to think in ways that we've never thought before. Because our default thinking is, well, this is connected to that and that's a middleman to do this and this. And when I ship something from Shanghai to San Jose, you've got the, I mean, your experience, right, from getting the shipment of books, you're gonna experience that. And so as I would say, it's not a process improvement. I've done a lot of process improvement. This is not a process improvement initiative. This is breakthrough. This is start with a whiteboard and say, Joel is in San Jose and Dale is in Shanghai. If the two of them could find each other in a trusted environment, what might that look like? That's completely, that's not a, okay, well, you know, this year we're gonna add this dial to the car and that's better than last year. And next year we're gonna make that square and not round.

(Dale Christie at 00:49:38) This is the Tesla that has a laptop in the middle of the dash.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:45) And I love it.

(Dale Christie at 00:49:45) Doesn't require dials and it doesn't require that, and it's voice activated and it's essentially a smartphone going down the road. This is, that's where we need to get people focused on. And certainly, there will be plenty of space for entrepreneurs, but we don't think we can skip those steps. We think it's a foundational, we think it's a non-competitive technology, and the sooner we can get the world to understand that and start working to build that, the sooner this thing can get to scale and then all kinds of opportunities are available for me, you, others.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:17) Yeah. And that's what I'm excited. Like, I'm a patient person. Right? Like, it's okay. I'll watch that thing build up and I'll wait for that right buzzword to come out at the right time. Like, you know, a sub-buzzword. Like, blockchain's a big one, but there will be something in the industries that consultants can then sell. Like, once you have some base infrastructure or some standards, then all the consultants can jump onto one thing and then the whole market will start buying that one thing and then you can kind of move everybody to it.

(Dale Christie at 00:50:47) Agreed. But again, we think of that as essentially a three-layer scenario. The bottom layer is the protocols, Hyperledger and Ethereum and some of those that are these standard protocols. Then we think there will be some kind of a, you know, maybe a supply chain industry or other types of things that would lay on top of that. We think both of those are still open. And then at the top, you get to some proprietary layer. I mean, I've got an Android phone. Right? So certainly, you and I could develop an app that sits on top of an open source protocol. Happens all the time. But we think that's something along the lines of where this is gonna go. There will certainly be private blockchains. There are certain examples, there's just great examples of this. And there will be a few people that will kind of punch through that and figure out a way to build a toll bridge across that canyon and monetize the journey. We just think that, broadly speaking, blockchain is a non-competitive technology, and it's not the bridge that is the outcome. It's the, let's get everybody across that bridge. And once they're there, then we can all do all kinds of things with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:50) I'll be up there in the Air Force jet looking at you guys build the bridge. Oh, man. This has been so great. Thank you so much for coming on and hanging out. This conversation was amazing. I learned so much about it. Did we, anything we missed or anything else that we wanna get out there into the world?

(Dale Christie at 00:52:08) I would say that from a, so let me speak to the traditional audience that you have, which is a chief technical officer. Anytime you put C in front of that, you, this technology will fail if you end up with some evangelist in your department that you don't know is there, and you can't move forward with that. A C in front of your title means that you have opportunity and risk in your job description. It means that you are a technical person, whether that's finance or technology or legal or whatever the case may be. And I would challenge you, again, as a former strategy officer, I would challenge you. You need to embrace this technology and figure out what it will do. And so, you know, get somebody in your organization, send them off on a Lewis and Clark expedition and say, look, we as the senior, as the chief, as the C-suite may not understand this, but we need somebody who's bright and capable and curious. Go out and learn about it and come back in thirty days or sixty days and tell us what you learned, how you think it might apply to our company. Are we at risk? Is there an opportunity?

(Dale Christie at 00:53:17) And then, as I said, if you then want to sit on the sidelines, do so strategically. But waiting for this technology and peer-to-peer implications and various things like that is gonna change a lot of business models. And you as a C-suite person, you have an obligation and a fiduciary responsibility to look at this and say, I need to open up my mind even though it's uncomfortable and it's mysterious and it's not intuitive. I need to figure this out and somebody on my team or somebody representing our company needs to help us learn. And then once they bring back that technology and the answers and the applicability to your business, then you're back into your C-suite position, which is I can analyze it. I can strategically decide things. We can create plans and prioritize. We could do those kinds of things with your eyes wide open and not with your arms folded and holding on and like, I don't know what that is but it's scary and I'm not gonna get involved with that. So there's that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:12) Dude, preach, man. Like, I think a lot of people needed to hear that. And whether it's blockchain or other technologies, like, in general, you know, them getting up and going out and adventuring and learning these things, like, I think that was, you just said it perfectly.

(Dale Christie at 00:54:29) Well, don't be scared about it. Right? I mean, pull the blinders back and use that new knowledge to apply to your existing technical expertise in your various positions. But your obligation at a C-suite level is opportunity and risk. And this is technology that deserves your attention right now. You do not wanna be on the wrong end of this and go, we sat and we waited for a few years, and we weren't really sure about it. And now come to find out it actually does impact our business model, or we missed a big opportunity to really differentiate ourselves against competitors or others.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:04) Hashtag Blockbuster. Oh, man. This is great. Dale, you're the best. And you're located where again?

(Dale Christie at 00:55:11) I'm in Memphis.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:12) You're in Memphis?

(Dale Christie at 00:55:13) Our world headquarters is in Memphis.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:15) Okay. Yeah. I actually have a couple, like, business relationships up there. Next time I'm in your area, I'm gonna let you know because I would love to come by, say hello and—

(Dale Christie at 00:55:25) Would love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:25) Yeah. It would be awesome. And then I just had a fantastic time, so thank you again for coming on and hanging out.

(Dale Christie at 00:55:31) Likewise. Appreciate it very much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:33) Alright. Talk soon, buddy. Thank you.

(Dale Christie at 00:55:34) Thank you. Take care. Bye.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:41) Bye.