Christian CTO of Equibit

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Today we are talking to Christian, the CTO of Equibit. And we talk about how John McAfee is entering the crypto space, why Christian is scared of Alexa, and how the blockchain is killing the middleman. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:31) Man, I'm loving the Alexa. How's your day going? You're in San Francisco right now?

(Christian at 00:00:35) I am. I am. So I'm almost—no, you're further ahead than I am. So it's still late morning for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:42) That's a good time, though.

(Christian at 00:00:44) It is a great time. I just finished my expense reports and all the boring stuff I needed to do today, so the rest of the day is looking like fun work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:53) That's what we're talking about. Lots of fun. Is it snowing over there?

(Christian at 00:00:57) There is no snow over here. Although all my friends from the East Coast, all the way from Canada down to Florida, are telling me that it's cold.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:05) Oh yeah. I looked on the Google. Somebody calls me up, he says, "Hey, you see what's going on in North Carolina?" I'm like, "I don't monitor weather in places I don't live." He's like, "30,000 people are without power, and it's crazy with the snow." I'm like, "Okay."

(Christian at 00:01:22) I lived in North Carolina about ten months ago. I moved to San Francisco in the spring for a gig here, and now I'm about to move to Toronto, so go figure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:32) Oh, Canada. What's going on up there?

(Christian at 00:01:37) Well, first of all, that's where I'm originally from—Quebec, more specifically. So that's where the French accent comes from. But yeah, in Canada I've got a startup I've been working with for two years now, Equibit. And we're just about to launch our crypto, our ICO, our blockchain, and all that good stuff. So I'm gonna go make sure that the quality of the product is there and do some quality assurance for the team for the next couple of months.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:06) It's one of the most important parts. Somebody has to be responsible for the quality.

(Christian at 00:02:10) I know, I know. And I was listening to your podcast with, who was the guy talking about AI just a few days ago? And you guys were talking about quality. I was taking notes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:21) Dude, Bruno is awesome.

(Christian at 00:02:23) I know. No, it was great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:25) He's a really smart guy. I like to follow up with him, and I was talking with him, and then even the fund that invests in them—I sent a message to his investors. I was like, "Guys, Bruno is really smart." They replied like, "Yeah, we know." I was like, "Okay, cool. Cool. Cool."

(Christian at 00:02:39) That's fantastic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:40) How have your nerves been this week watching the fear and greed play out in the crypto market?

(Christian at 00:02:46) You know, I've been in it since the beginning. I had Bitcoins before Bitcoins had a value. So—and I lost them too. There's all sorts of crazy stories we can go into. But yeah, I've seen it go up and lose 80% of its value quite a few times now, so I'm just holding. That's what I do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:07) Yeah. And I didn't get in on it super early, but I did get on it way earlier than the public. So everything, when I watch the account go up and down, I'm just like, it's never gone down more than I put into it. I'm like, "Alright, cool."

(Christian at 00:03:23) Yeah. Oh darn, I'm only making five times my initial amount, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:27) Right. It was 20x and now it's only 5x.

(Christian at 00:03:30) I know. Darn.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:33) I actually did sell some of the Bitcoin—well, it wasn't Bitcoin, but I sold some of my crypto today because my MacBook Pro, the hard drive started clicking. And I'm like, I'm not a hardware expert, but I know it shouldn't click. So right before this call, I just went and got one of those $1,200 Mac iMac, like 21-inch. They're powerful, man.

(Christian at 00:03:58) That—so had it not been for my stupidity and a problem with my iMac, I would probably have tens of millions of dollars worth of crypto today. Yeah. But I lost, you know, hundreds of Bitcoins, I'm sure, using an iMac years and years, way back when they had no value. I didn't really care. But yeah, it's a great computer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:28) Right. And now that's why Christian is now officially Team Microsoft.

(Christian at 00:04:34) I am now using Microsoft computer, yes. I love their new Surface line.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:39) You know, I want to see a chart or a graph showing me how much crypto has been lost on Microsoft crashes versus Mac crashes.

(Christian at 00:04:47) That would be so funny. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:50) You know, there's some creative marketing that a crypto company could do. Everybody would laugh and share that, right?

(Christian at 00:04:56) Totally. Totally. And then you could self-report. Maybe you get a token to incentivize self-reporting on how much crypto have you lost in the past. Please provide details.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:07) And then after you hit submit, tears just fall out of the screen.

(Christian at 00:05:12) I use it all the time. Obviously, it's a fun personal story, right? In fact, that could have been, you know, a wealthy independent, no need to work kind of thing. But I didn't manage my keys properly. So, you know, here's lesson number one in crypto, right? Be careful where you put your keys and how you save them and who you share them with potentially. Even if it's multi-sig keys and all that, I mean, you still have to trust someone. And if you only trust yourself, you better know what you're doing, which I clearly didn't way back in those days.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:45) So now are you into the hardware wallets right now? Are you just doing paper stuff? Or how are you managing your security crypto?

(Christian at 00:05:52) I think diversification is your friend, right? So I'm all over the place. I've got some hardware wallets. I have paper wallets. I have friends that hold paper wallets for me, so I guess I trust them. I have accounts at exchanges where I don't have the keys, and I have various copies of various blockchains on different servers where I also have keys. So it's a little confusing. I have a password database that supposedly tracks it all.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:25) Yeah. I'm not worried about security. I have, like, I don't know, three, three and a half million in Mt. Gox. So I'm not worried about it at all. It's totally safe.

(Christian at 00:06:39) But you know the funny thing with Mt. Gox, though, right? This was kind of a historical first, meaning that they went bankrupt, right, because of volatility and they were scamming their clients and whatnot. As I understand it, I'm not—

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:51) But mostly volatility.

(Christian at 00:06:53) But the volatility took them down and they went bankrupt, so the court took over the company in Japan, right? But now, with even the reserves—whatever Mt. Gox had of crypto—they are now solvent again.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:07) Really?

(Christian at 00:07:08) It's gone up so much. Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't know that they exist as an operating entity anymore because they did go through a portion of the bankruptcy proceeding at least. But now there's more assets in the company's name than there's creditors to reimburse. So I don't know what they're going to do with that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:28) I have very limited knowledge about Mt. Gox. I just have a couple friends that are really into crypto, and they were in from the beginning. And I remember getting a few sad text messages.

(Christian at 00:07:39) Oh no, it was—I mean, even to this day, you look at the influence of any one of the major players in the crypto space and it's undue influence in a way that—the market is so small that one popular person, you take John McAfee, for example, and I follow him, right, on Twitter, because when he speaks, if you don't listen, you're going to miss out on things. Not that he's just a super great oracle of prescience. He just has a lot of people that follow him, and the market is small enough that one influential guy like this can have a significant influence.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:19) Dude, he's a little crazy, though.

(Christian at 00:08:20) Oh, he's totally special. I don't know what the right words are because, yeah, he's—but I think he's finding a new life in the crypto space. I mean, you know, he was obviously always an eccentric individual, and now he's found a place that is filled with eccentrics. Not unlike me, to be honest. You know, I've got a little bit of eccentric points of view on different things. But yeah, crypto allows him to find a place where he can, I think, you know, show a lot of relevance now in the modern age.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:55) So I haven't heard about him in a long time, right? Because obviously you know McAfee software, right? But so I'm at a photo shoot with this guy named Robert, and he has a crypto exchange in town, and he's been on crypto since he was doing it with video games, right?

(Christian at 00:09:10) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:10) And we've been friends for about, I don't know, seven, eight years now. So we know each other pretty well, and we were doing a—he was doing a photo shoot for his company about page, you know, whole team shots and everything.

(Christian at 00:09:20) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:21) And so he was telling me, he was like, "Oh yeah, I was talking to—because I was listening to your show—you should have John McAfee on the show. I was talking to him at a conference the other week, at a crypto conference." And I was like, "Oh really?" He's like, "Yeah, yeah." So I said, "Okay." So I text my PR person, Jenny, and I say, "Hey Jenny, you know, reach out to John McAfee's team. He's looking for exposure, and we'll have him on the show," right? And so she goes, "Okay, cool." She reaches out to him. Later that night, I'm, you know, thinking, "Well, why don't I look this guy up and learn a little bit more about him," right? So I look up his Twitter, and he's like, "Oh, I use crypto to buy hookers and weed, cocaine." I'm like, "Oh man, this guy is, like, awesome and horrible at the same time. Like, I would love to hang out with him, but I wouldn't love anyone knowing I hung out with him."

(Christian at 00:10:08) Well, I've never hung out with him, but I'm sure it's a fun time. You know, that said, I think—I think it's important that we have—another person I like to follow is Kim Dotcom. Another very unique individual, if you will, in the world, right? But I find that these are the personalities who in the crypto space, which as you know, there's a lot of politics, right, around crypto. And so these are the wealthy individuals who have a brand, right, associated with their names, and they're not afraid to use it to come out and say things that some of us think often—not necessarily about prostitution and crypto, but about political stances or approaches or disruptions that are needed and yet to happen, potentially through crypto technology. And yeah, these guys speak out. So you don't always have to be in agreement with them, but I think there's still value in listening to what they're talking about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:17) I agree that any of those people that have established such a big brand and have entered the market in such a large way, you definitely should not ignore them, right? You shouldn't write them off because they happen to be interesting as humans in their spare time, right?

(Christian at 00:11:31) Even if you totally disagree with them, right? If you follow, you know, John McAfee because you're going to do the exact opposite of what he does, he still has some market power and influence over crypto today. So it's still wise to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:44) Yeah. See, I have a question. I've been talking about this quite a bit on my email. There's a bunch of different CTOs. We're talking a lot about voice technology, right?

(Christian at 00:11:56) All right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:56) The Alexa and the Google Home. Do you have either?

(Christian at 00:11:59) I have none, and I can tell you why, too, if you want to talk about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:03) Oh yeah.

(Christian at 00:12:04) That's a great question because I was listening to you again in a previous interview talking about how you love your device, and I'm like, "Oh man." So I'm one of those technology guys who is reeling back a little bit from some of these technologies. Not because I'm not passionate about it. Not because I mean, I want the Star Trek future like most guys my age who got into computers in the eighties and nineties, right? So yeah, no, that's what I want. My problem with most, you know, quote unquote intelligent agents and assistants like this today is that it's all out of my control. It is all centralized into these cloud infrastructures that are way beyond me. And one of the things that attracts me to crypto, right, you know, cryptocurrencies, crypto technologies, peer-to-peer blockchain and all that, is the fact that we finally have network protocols, which is what they are, right? We finally have network protocols that allow the end peer, right, the leaf of all these trees—us, the individuals—to have more control over who and what and when and how our data is used. And so my passion for cryptography, not just in terms of peer-to-peer networks, but also just in terms of privacy and encryption, has always been to find ways to give back a little bit of that control that we used to have, right? When you're in the nineties and the eighties, when you used to decide who you share your credit card number even with, right? That used to be a thing, you know, protect your credit card. Nowadays, we just throw our credit cards all over the place and nobody cares. And I find that we have been desensitized to the importance of privacy in a free society. And so to me, cryptocurrencies and blockchains and all these technologies are very much a way that I try to build systems that help re-empower the individual a little bit. And so back to your question about the Alexa and all that, I would love an Alexa that I could run on a local server, or at least an environment where I know what happens to my data. But as it is, this all goes out to the Facebooks and the Googles and the Amazons and these large organizations that I have very little control over, if at all. And there goes my data. So, you know, to me, there's a bit of a dystopian future that is associated with that. So I'm going to try to find a way to go build an Alexa one day that you control 100%. And if you don't want Alexa to share your data with other companies, or if you do, because that's actually what you want to do with your data—you don't want it sitting in a database, you want to monetize it—and that's what I tell my corporate clients when they ask me what they can do with blockchain. I said, "Oh, well, you know, you have a database with data you don't share." "Yeah." "Okay. Let's go share it and make money with it. It's a new source of revenue for you." Well, it can be that for an individual as well, and I look forward to that day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:39) So a lot of companies—I actually had one in my office yesterday. They're sitting on a mountain of data, and they came in and wanted to talk about X. And I said, "Oops, you know, look over here. You've got some low-hanging fruit that can make you a lot of money." You know, pay attention to that. And they're like, "Oh wow. Okay. Cool."

(Christian at 00:15:56) Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, blockchain for the first time, we're able to create digital scarcity. Right? We're able to create a unique set of ones and zeros on this network that someone can say, "No, that is a different set of ones and zeros than that one over there." And of course, you need the blockchain to validate that unique record, but it also opens up all sorts of crazy new possibilities that were just impossible before with information technology at large.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:34) So I get your voice technology stance. Right? You want the version of it where you are in complete control, which I am fully on board with. I would love to see what some of those systems will look like that give us control, but still provide the benefit. Valid argument. Definitely, that's a conference talk for you, Christian.

(Christian at 00:16:56) Well, I probably—

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:57) What does the system look like? That would—yeah, that is a great one. But in this, I want to look at the same question, but from a different perspective. What I want is—I often find myself when I'm looking at a subject, like a technology, my initial reaction is I'm emotionally attached, and I'll explain. I think about how I feel about it as a consumer as the first gut reaction, and then secondarily, I have to consider it as a business action. So at first, I'm like, the first time I heard about Alexa, I was like, "I don't want them recording my stuff all day. I don't want this. I don't want that." So it took me, you know, a year or two or three, however long—I just got one this Christmas, so relatively new—to actually get it and get involved with it because of my personal feelings. The thing that forced me to do it was I'm getting my haircut, and my hairdresser's talking about how her 11-year-old daughter wants an Alexa for Christmas, and every kid in the class wants an Alexa for Christmas, and her husband wants an Alexa for Christmas. And that said to me, like, ding, ding, ding, ding. The market is—you can't ignore it. Right?

(Christian at 00:18:03) And if you don't embrace it, you're going to be left behind, or I'm going to be left behind in this case because, yeah, they don't know how an Alexa works, to be honest. And if an entire generation is going to be, you know, hooked up on Alexa, I'll be that guy trying to figure out how to work a smartphone. So I don't want to be that either. So, yeah, no, it's a balancing act. I agree.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:24) You look like me trying to figure out Snapchat.

(Christian at 00:18:28) Oh, you know what's funny? Yesterday or two days ago, I was at a crypto conference here in San Francisco, the World Crypto Economic Forum, I believe. And it was talking there about a few things. And in the conference, the one thing that kept coming up over and over is how everyone needs a Telegram account nowadays in 2018 because that's a cool thing to do. And I ended up talking, you know, with some contacts over there about one of the companies I work with in Toronto, Equibit. And Equibit is on Slack. And I heard you talk about how Slack is wonderful as well, and that's what Equibit uses as well. And, yep, Slack was sold, you know, last year, apparently. Apparently, all the cool new crypto companies this year, they're all on Telegram. So, you know, see, there we go. Even in the choice of chat app, you've got to stay up to date.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:24) Yeah. And you know what? I never even got into the side of things. And I'm sure some of my—some of the people listening are, like, cringing right now. But on all the websites, everyone has, like, public, apparently, public Slack channels. I just see Slack icons on everyone's website, so I'm assuming I can interface with their company by clicking on it.

(Christian at 00:19:40) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:41) However, I've yet to do it, like, ever. I've never been like, "Oh, I want to go into their Slack channel and talk with them."

(Christian at 00:19:47) I know. I know. And ironically though, that is a little bit what I'm asking for. Right? I'm asking for, "Hey, I don't like these large networks that are so controlled by so many other organizations like Twitter, for example." Right? When you put something on Twitter, I mean, it's gone. Right? Everybody can see it and it's never getting off the Internet even when you delete it, apparently. But on Slack, that can be a private channel. Right? If I trust my service provider for whatever, my cell phone or whatever, and they have a Slack channel, I can trust or think that at least when I post something there, I'm talking directly to them and not to a bunch of other companies. And, yeah, so I am looking for, in a way, more decentralization in our communication protocols as well, and Slack definitely can provide some of that. So I definitely respect the technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:43) Slack is great. I was talking with Marty Cagan not too long ago, and he's got a lot of friends over there. April Underwood is their Chief of Product, and she's just having a baby right now, so love to her. And then you mentioned Twitter. Right?

(Christian at 00:20:56) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:57) Have you ever seen—this just came up. Right when you said Twitter popped in my head, so I figured, we'll talk about it. Have you ever seen when on a government-related Twitter account or, like, FBI or something, it's like, "All tweets across the Internet are stored in servers and everything's permanent." Have you ever seen that message before?

(Christian at 00:21:17) No. I have not. And, of course, I'm well desensitized to all the small print, so I am a good, you know, drone, and I do not read the small print. So I might have just totally glazed over it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:30) Oh, no. No. No. It's like in the text in their profile, man.

(Christian at 00:21:33) Oh, Jesus.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:34) It's like—it's like about—it's like, "Oh, this is Department of Security. Every tweet you mention us in and every tweet we tweet with you is recorded for government." And all I can think about is, like, man, at least tweets are small. Because the amount of storage money that they're wasting saving these tweets offline, off of the platform, is just such a waste.

(Christian at 00:21:54) I was at another conference. I forgot where. But there was a law enforcement agency there. And the gentleman talking on stage was saying how in modern day, at least in large city law enforcement, Facebook and Twitter are, you know, becoming quickly their number one source of information for, you know, knowing about crimes and whatnot or knowing about us. So, yeah, I would not go and brag too loudly about, you know, your cryptocurrency profits in 2017 on Twitter. Right? Because you know everybody else is looking.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:37) Chris, that's funny, Christian. We actually have a call in right now from the IRS. Dear Joel. Block. No. We won't even mention the stingrays, and I don't even know if you've heard about those, but they are—have you heard about stingrays?

(Christian at 00:22:54) I have not, other than the fish.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:56) Okay. They're the systems that local law enforcement can purchase, and they sniff out and decrypt your signals from your phone so that they can, you know, illegally listen into phone calls?

(Christian at 00:23:09) Got it. Yeah. They're fake cell phone. They're the fake cell phone.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:12) Fake cell. Yeah. Yeah. Network.

(Christian at 00:23:13) Yes. Yes. Yes. I've heard of those at a high—

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:15) You can Google it. You can goo—they don't even try to hide it. They're, like, "We're a stingray systems. You can buy us if you're a local law enforcement agency." They just don't message it so clearly and explicitly about what they actually do.

(Christian at 00:23:28) The pretense is quickly dropping, I find, in these recent years. And, yeah, some of these, you know, developments in how our society at large, I guess, is handling new technologies like this. Yeah. I'm not totally a fan of how some of this technology is being used. At the same time, yeah, it's a two-edged blade. Right? You know, it works the other way too, you know, in the way that we as individuals are now empowered to communicate and exchange information in ways that were never seen before. And we saw it with the election cycle last year or two years ago now, I guess, with the amount of focus around fake news. Right? And whether you think that the alternative news is fake or the mainstream media news is fake, it doesn't—you know, the position doesn't really matter. The fact is that there is now a dialogue about the fact that people can exchange information in ways that can be truthful or not, but that can now also compete with the centralized media establishment. That—see, that is a development that I do welcome in our societies through technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:52) I've learned so much by watching the elections as far as marketing and communications.

(Christian at 00:24:57) Oh, jeez. Yes. Right? Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:01) Like, it's like watching a case study and the most expensive marketing campaign in the world unfold right before you every four years. It's just—there's so much good information in it.

(Christian at 00:25:12) I believe that is an accurate description of an election cycle.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:16) Yeah. So everybody's all upset about, you know, their side, their topic or anything. And I'm, like, sitting there taking marketing notes. I'm like, "Alright. He's using short simple terms. He's being ultra repetitive. Okay? And they—you never answer a question directly. You always have a pre-done topic you want to talk about, and you completely ignore the question." And—and I just—it was so—it's so interesting how much you can learn by two different people looking at the same situation, but just very differently. Right?

(Christian at 00:25:48) Oh, absolutely. And I've learned—it's funny. I actually learned the same kind of, you know, couple of bullet points there. You know, don't answer the question. Make sure you have your message and answer the question with your message regardless of whether it's the question or not, which are all the things that, you know, I try to be, you know, a good consultant to my clients when I work with them. Right? And I like working maybe even less formally than many people because that allows me a way to express technology in ways that I find is more truthful, more beneficial for the parties involved and whatnot. And, yeah, when I look at the rules of how to be elected in office, it seems like all the rules are exactly what I don't do when I try to do a good job for my clients. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:40) Security question for you. You seem really bright in the security space. So I got a security slash business question. You've got both of those topics pretty nailed down. Do you think that there's going to be a reckoning with the amount of funding that's going into things that should be secure, but there's such a volume of cash being infused into such a small space so fast that I see inexperienced talent getting picked up and paid big dollars to do things that should be done very slowly and correctly and securely, but they're not? They're flying by the seat of their pants. And I'm kind of watching this wave build, and I'm, like, I think there's going to be a big security issue, like, large security issues in the next coming years, with poorly built technology built rapidly, too much money, not enough talent.

(Christian at 00:27:31) Well, you're describing, I think, multiple events that have already happened differently in the blockchain space where I tend to spend most of my time. But, you know, you look at the Ethereum blockchain, which, of course, is a marvel of modern information architecture and engineering. Right? They call it the world computer, meaning you can actually now have other people execute and validate your code, and you pay them for it automatically on this network. It's fantastic. But it is also—I mean, they call themselves Turing-complete blockchain, meaning that you can program anything on Ethereum. And if you fund it properly, it will run. But the problem is that it is also Turing-vulnerable, and that leads to what you're suggesting there. Right? The fact that it is—and I think there's a group that did an analysis last year. They picked, like, a thousand lines of code from a mature piece of software, like, you know, Microsoft Windows operating system or something like that. And—and I will not say numbers because I totally forgot the reference, but I'll have to Google it again. But they said, "Look. In a mature piece of modern software, you know, you can expect so many bugs per thousand lines of code." Right? Let's say that—let's say the number is five, something like that. And the same group did, you know, they grabbed a bunch of smart contracts from the Ethereum blockchain, and they said on an Ethereum or on a crypto, you know, smart contract, that number is a hundred times more. Right? And that speaks exactly to what you're saying. It's new. To be honest, most of us don't know what we're doing. Right? And I'll include myself in it. I mean, every day, there's a brighter guy than me out there that comes up with a new better way to do better consensus, better decentralization, faster number of transactions per second, and this and that. And it is exhausting just to keep up with the market. And, yeah, just like in the dot-com days, 90% plus of, you know, the companies that I work for, that pay my rent right now, most of these companies are unfortunately not going to survive, but those that do will be the new standards. Right? The new standards for your health care record, the new standards for the supply chain for your food, the new standard for your money, for your investments. So they are—it's very immature. But at the same time, these companies are raising dozens, hundreds, and sometimes a billion, over a billion dollars. Isn't Telegram right now—a chat app? Right? A sophisticated, encrypted, you know, peer-to-peer, whatever, chat system. But still, I've heard that they're raising multiple hundreds of millions, if not close to a billion dollars right now. And it's mind-boggling what you do with a billion bucks. You create a new standard. That's what you do. So a lot of the things we are used to using today will be replaced by these large companies that are being formed right now and creating new technologies with, unfortunately, probably a lot of bugs in them. So, yeah, there's a lot to be worried about there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:50) Alright. You just gave me an arsenal of stuff to respond to.

(Christian at 00:30:54) Alright.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:56) So first of all, I love talking to you because you are tickling my brain. Right? New standard. So I've had a couple ideas and, you know, I just think about them all the time. So I see so little money going into forming standards, and everybody wants to make a product, and everybody's trying to fund products in an area because that's what they can sell to investors. But if you—I want to try to sell the idea of funding a standard, they don't get it. I can explain it clearly. I can put the benefits out there, and I—I've never formally pitched this. I just work with investor guys all the time. So I just, you know, mention it to them on calls. Like, "What are your thoughts on, you know, funding someone to come up with a standard?" Right? And they just don't want to do anything with it. They don't see the ROI. They can't see—put the product in the market, put marketing behind it, get stuff back. But whoever does that wins big time, big time.

(Christian at 00:31:55) Totally agree. I mean, you just described my last year with a startup in the blockchain space that I worked with. I mean, we tried to do things. We tried to bring crypto, but to pitch that to traditional VC investors because it was a traditional industry in the food space, right, with farmers and agriculture, you know, organizations that are not necessarily looking at the latest and greatest technology. And yeah, the investors, at least the traditional VCs, just don't know what to do.

(Christian at 00:32:29) And this is because the ICO or the way to raise money in the blockchain space is so alien. And again, it goes back to these standards. It is alien because on an ICO, you promise a vision, right, as you would, I guess, if you're pitching your company to an investor. But there's nothing about, you know, necessarily revenue. Well, there is, but the revenue is not the focus.

(Christian at 00:32:56) Right? The number of clients is not the focus. The focus of an ICO investor is about how are you going to grow that network? How are you going to build that viral network effect that will bring everybody to your blockchain? So you take Telegram.

(Christian at 00:33:11) Right? Telegram competes with Slack and, you know, the other dozen of different chat apps I have on my computer. It's super annoying. I can't wait for a lot of them to just disappear or be absorbed in others because right now, I don't know where to look when I need to check if I'm up to date on everything. I've got like ten different chat apps.

(Christian at 00:33:30) But Telegram is just raising hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency. They're not raising that because they are hundreds of millions of times better than Skype or Slack or whatever else. They're doing that because they're promising a vision. They're promising a vision of a network in the future, a service that's going to be text messaging and community organization. I actually don't know the business case for Telegram.

(Christian at 00:33:57) But it is going to be a communication infrastructure that they are raising, again, hundreds of millions of dollars to promote and develop so that will become a new standard. So their approach to money in an ICO is very—I mean, no wonder the governments don't like it. Right? You know, you go out to the market.

(Christian at 00:34:17) Right? You go to a Bitcoin conference or you open up a Telegram or a Slack channel or something, right? And you go to the market and you say, I am going to improve our communication tools. I'm called Telegram, and here's what I'm going to do for you.

(Christian at 00:34:31) And then you launch an ICO, and people give you money for it. So it's totally upside down. Right? You're pitching a vision, and people give money to that vision. Why?

(Christian at 00:34:42) Well, for most it is greed. Right? Everyone, you know, has seen the Bitcoin, so now everyone wants to be a millionaire next week. But other than that, the real reason why some of us are actually so passionate about it is because Telegram will be the new standard for encrypted communication in future. And there's a lot of people trying to get that standard.

(Christian at 00:35:01) Right? Twitter, Amazon, Open Whisper System. Right? They have their protocol, which is being implemented in Skype right now, I think. So there's a lot of battles for these protocols, and ICOs are how the protocols of the future are being funded right now, and they will become our standards for the future.

(Christian at 00:35:24) So there's a lot of money being invested in standards right now. It just doesn't look like it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:28) Yeah. It's being invested by the people.

(Christian at 00:35:30) It's being invested by people into entrepreneurs, 90% of whom I'm sure their business will not succeed. So most of those coins are going to be worth, you know, nothing a few years from now. But the coins that are going to be worth something are going to be worth a lot because now you're going to own a little part of the infrastructure for, you know, money, for data exchange, for—you name it. Crypto is getting in every industry right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:56) So here's what I'm looking for. Okay? I thought of it the other day, mentioned it once or twice. I want to create a standard for how memories, sort of like stories, memories, story-based memories, are stored, consumed, transacted—like, put in, put out—for artificial intelligence to consume.

(Christian at 00:36:16) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:17) Okay. I want to have a whole data structure of, let's say, the concept of nostalgia. Right?

(Christian at 00:36:17) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:17) Where I can actually organize data in a way that I can put in the future an artificial system or a machine learning style system on there where they can consume that information in a way where they could consume all those stories and then comprehend the concept of nostalgia.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:44) That's something.

(Christian at 00:36:45) That is beautiful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:46) Right?

(Christian at 00:36:46) I love it. I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:47) Yeah. Because whoever creates the thing where you can craft these concepts—I don't even, I don't need an AI to even be able to do it today. Right? All I need to do is create the standard and put so much content out there, put so much information that when the technology hits two, three, five years, that there will be this massive library that the developers will have no choice but to figure out how to adapt it to my standard.

(Christian at 00:37:14) Totally agree.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:15) And that's what we're talking about. That's the arbitrage.

(Christian at 00:37:17) Yeah. That's similar to Ray Kurzweil's vision of how he hopes or plans to, in a way, resurrect his father. Right? His father is deceased, and Ray collects and has amassed, according to the books that I've read—right, I've never met Ray Kurzweil—but from what I understand, he is actually capturing as much as he can from the memetic legacy of his father.

(Christian at 00:37:43) So that as soon as we have complex enough computers and structures and intelligences to simulate a human mind, he is going to dump all that data in there. And hopefully, that system will be able to play back, you know, a ghost of his father essentially. And today, there's a lot of various brain mapping systems out there. Even some of them are free open source as well, where, yeah, you can get started on that. Right?

(Christian at 00:38:15) You start capturing instead of writing in a journal at night, you open up your brain map, and you start documenting what's going on. You start categorizing your pictures on your brain map. You can relate pictures with other areas of your brain map, and next thing you know, you have as accurate of a representation of your mind as we can do manually today. And that can indeed become very, very powerful. But at the same time, where do you put that brain map?

(Christian at 00:38:44) Right? Are you going to store it on the Google Cloud? Because that map—you know, if it's good, it's going to be able to deduce, you know, most of your passwords, most of your identities, most of the things that are personal to you. So where do you store your backup? Right?

(Christian at 00:39:00) And that's a—there's a great sci-fi book called Walkaway where that question is explored, and it's a difficult—

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:08) The title gives it away.

(Christian at 00:39:09) Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. It does, doesn't it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:12) Yeah. So where my—where I'm seeing it—so I actually I haven't read the Ray Kurzweil. Is that how you say his name, Ray Kurzweil?

(Christian at 00:39:20) I think so. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:21) But the first point that comes to mind is—nobody cares about his dad. Right? Like, it's like, don't care, bro. Secondly, if you're developing a system of your memory to use your—that father's thing, like, it's just—it's too far off for me. The second thing is I have no interest in replicating myself or making myself real.

(Christian at 00:39:40) Gotcha.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:40) Here's the arbitrage that I see. The thing that's actually going to make money in the next two to five years. The reason why you should start this system that I'm talking about today and actually make money in two, three, four years is because we will want Alexa to be able to do more than just give us basic information. I want to ask Alexa, like, how her day went, and then I want her to start responding about her friend Jen. And then I want her to learn how to lie a little bit to make up facts so that then her and Jen went to the store.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:12) And then, like, I want to create stories that you give a base to, and then they can lie a little bit, and they have this concept and understanding. And it's not like there's consciousness. It's like, of course, all algorithms, but that they can morph these base stories and build upon them, and then start creating larger structures. And I just think it would be beautiful because people will want that. We will want that right away.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:39) There's guys that, like, date text robots. I mean, that's already happening. It's just not popular.

(Christian at 00:40:45) Oh, there was a recall on, I think, the original AIBO I bought, you know, the Sony dog robot from, I don't know, the early 2000s in Japan. And there's a documentary that I saw about this online somewhere where, yeah, this woman, you know, wanted her robot fixed and I think Sony doesn't support the robot or anything like that. So she couldn't find a place and she wanted a funeral for her robot dog because that dog had been with her for years and she had definitely bonded with a mechanical person, I guess. And, yeah. She wanted a funeral for her AIBO dog.

(Christian at 00:41:25) So, you know, and same thing with Kurzweil. I mean, to me, it's, you know, the individual motivation obviously is important to the individual. Doesn't mean that I care whether, you know, the ghost of someone else's father comes back. But we need to recognize though that that is what motivates Ray Kurzweil, right? And—

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:46) Right.

(Christian at 00:41:47) The guy has invented and done a lot and continues to do a lot, right, at Google. And when I look at, you know, even an anonymous person like Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever that he, she, they are, they have motivations, right, that are, you know, explicitly stated in the white papers and whatnot. And while most people today that utilize these technologies have very different goals and objectives, and rightly so, this is not a negative judgment on anyone, it is important to also recognize what motivates the innovators that give us some of these innovations because that's an indication of what motivates innovators today, right, that are going to give us the innovation of tomorrow, like the things you're talking about here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:34) So yeah. And then I'm sure I super glazed over, like, Ray's whole thing. Probably a one sentence comment from you. Like, I'm sure he's got, like, a lot—like, that snap comment, obviously, is not like—I don't know him. Like, I don't know his story.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:52) I know a passing comment you're saying he's trying to make his dead dad's ghost. So, like, I'm sure there's a lot more to that. Right?

(Christian at 00:42:58) Yeah. And I'll apologize to anyone I mentioned on this podcast. If I mentioned you on this podcast, it's because I respect you in a way. And, and so sometimes I speak a little too, you know, candidly, and it may not come out quite politically correct. But that's because I don't like being politically correct. So there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:18) I can't wait till Ray walks up to me at a conference. He's like, what up, bro?

(Christian at 00:43:21) Yeah. Hey. I heard your podcast with this dude Christian, and he got it all totally wrong. And let me explain to you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:31) And then he tells me, he goes, yeah. And by the way, I've completely mastered that technology, and I get to hang out with my dad's ghost all the time. And no, you and your dead mom can't use it. I'll be like, oh, man.

(Christian at 00:43:42) Okay. Do you want to meet my dad?

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:47) Okay. I'm going to write a book on relationships. Right? I'm going to call it Everything's an Object.

(Christian at 00:43:53) Today, when you look at augmented reality, virtual reality, you mentioned AI. Another big, big phenomenon is obviously the Internet of Things, right? When you bring all that together with peer-to-peer networks and protocols, what we're seeing is really the beginning of, I guess, our virtual universe awakening. Right? We are capturing a more and more precise, in terms of resolution, virtual image of our world, right, through sensors everywhere: in our pockets, in our computers, in our—my light right next to me is programmable now.

(Christian at 00:44:36) Right? And it knows the light around it. And every—you know, we have so much information about the world through IoT. We're bringing that together, and I think the best way to do that is using peer-to-peer systems. Otherwise, that data ends up in private repositories and are hard for the rest of us to access.

(Christian at 00:44:59) So the IoT systems that will connect to blockchain—the blockchain becomes kind of the bloodstream of all that data, the sensory network of humanity, if you will. Right? And at the center of it are going to be a bunch of intelligent agents, you know, automated or not, who are going to now make sense of this massive amount of information and help us make better decisions in the future. So I think IoT, blockchain, and AI are intrinsically linked to one another. They all need one another in different, in their respective areas.

(Christian at 00:45:33) And that's happening now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:36) That's—yeah. Because so often people say, oh, it's the future. It's the future. I'll worry about it in the future. And often, I'm like, uh, nope.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:44) It's right now.

(Christian at 00:45:46) I mean, and this is, I guess, I'm going to quote Kurzweil again. Now I'm going to sound like a fanboy, but he talks a lot about, you know, exponential growth. Right? Better technology allows you to build better technology, and so it multiplies. It doesn't just add up.

(Christian at 00:46:02) And when you figure that out, you realize that, no, the future really is now. If you're interested in something in the future, whether it's AI or big data analytics or virtual reality or blockchain, don't wait. It's happening today. And it's not too late today. Right?

(Christian at 00:46:20) We're still, I think, in the early days. But if you don't catch up today, it's going to be real hard. I mean, I read the—some of the what I call the third generation blockchain systems now. Things like EOS, you know, being built by Block.one, the Dan Larimer crew. You read the architecture of that blockchain.

(Christian at 00:46:41) I don't even know if it's a blockchain anymore. Cosmos, another—they call themselves blockchain of blockchains, and now there's multiple dimensions of these blockchains. I mean, it's becoming much more sophisticated than the traditional, you know, Bitcoin blockchain that some of us may be familiar with. So, yeah, jumping on the bandwagon early allows you to have these insights that will allow you to make a lot of money with these technologies, you know, with business opportunities in the future. But if you wait for the future, you know, you're going to be a little bit behind the curve there.

(Christian at 00:47:18) Things are moving fast. And even blockchain, I think, is not going to, you know, remain forever. I think we've got another couple of years of that before even that label will probably disappear from our, from our vocabulary being replaced by some other cool P2P, peer-to-peer type system.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:35) Yeah. Now I've got to read Ray Kurzweil. I was so intrigued by this individual now.

(Christian at 00:47:42) He is not unlike—no, he is also a controversial figure. Let's just say that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:51) So you have done work in, you know, finance, supply chain, healthcare, real estate, cannabis distribution. What is the most interesting project, like, the past decade that comes to your mind, like, first when I ask you? What was most interesting to you personally first?

(Christian at 00:48:09) I quit my corporate world where I was, you know, good upper mid-level manager-type thing, you know, director and VP level type things. While the organizations I worked for were good companies, you know, IBM—I worked for IBM for almost eight years, respect the organization a lot, still work with them. Obviously, they're everywhere, right? So I encounter them all the time. And while the projects there were exciting, I didn't feel the impact, right?

(Christian at 00:48:46) I didn't feel they were impactful. So when I quit my corporate life in order to try to learn to become an entrepreneur, which by the way is not easy, but it only takes a few years if you put your heart into it—and you're gonna hurt, you're gonna stress, you're going to change your lifestyle—but at the end of these few years, those who dare make that move, I mean, I am so much happier, wealthier in so many ways. So in a way, my answer to your question, I guess, is biased because, of course, the projects that I've done in the later years where I am an entrepreneur, if I may bestow a title on myself—those projects, while maybe smaller in impact yet, have provided me with a lot more satisfaction than what I've done in the past.

(Christian at 00:49:40) So all that said, I think probably the most fun one would have been the ripe.io Blockchain of Food that I focused on last year in 2017. And I'm no longer with that project. Project continues on in various ways. But the idea of using a peer-to-peer system, blockchain, to solve a problem in the food supply industry—and a lot of companies are addressing that today.

(Christian at 00:50:10) Right? IBM and Walmart, for example, are doing provenance and traceability so that they can do recalls in food safety. There's a million great, great, great use cases for that, for blockchain in the food supply chain space. What we focused on, because, you know, you don't necessarily just go head-to-head against IBM—you gotta have your niche, right? So our niche was about stories. It's exactly what you're talking about. Our niche was like, well, we're not gonna beat IBM to provenance and global supply chains, but one of the big problems in a food supply chain is the fact that the consumer doesn't know where the food comes from and what's been done to it.

(Christian at 00:50:50) And guess what? The farmer also wants to know the consumer and whether the consumer likes their food and whatnot. But the supply chain in the middle is so opaque, it is unable to carry along—because they carry the food. Obviously, we eat every day, so the food moves. But moving the data along with the food is too expensive today. It's prohibitively expensive.

(Christian at 00:51:13) And there's paperwork, obviously, every time food moves from one company to another. That paperwork is minimal and it's whatever the government wants to know. That's very different than what you and I wanna know when we're about to buy it in a hamburger, right? So that information exists. It's just not being shared today. So one of the things that, you know, when you wonder whether blockchain is a good system for your problem or not, blockchain is a network that helps a group of unknown people reach a consensus, right? Reach an agreement. And the agreement can be about anything depending on what you wanna program in your smart contracts and in your blockchain. In the case of food, the agreement was about, hey, can we provide an incentive for people who have information about our food to share that information? Those stories you talk about.

(Christian at 00:52:03) And that's what blockchain does. You know, sure, I'll pay you fractions of a millibit of something, right, in exchange for knowing when this tomato was taken from the field, in exchange for knowing whether the packaging is using recycled materials or not, or whether the employees were paid fairly, or blah blah blah blah. There's a million things we wanna know about our food. And so we're willing to pay for some of that, not exorbitant amounts, obviously, but pennies. Even when added up, you know, through a large population, suddenly the farmer can actually monetize information, stories that they have in their minds, in their databases about our food. There was just no way for us to pay that farmer before, and blockchain provides a very, very real opportunity to do that. And that's gonna be applied to any supply chain. So there we go. There's a lot of opportunities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:57) Well, that's what I like. I like that this technology that's coming about now today, what it's doing is it's removing all the middlemen.

(Christian at 00:53:05) Correct, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:06) They're gone. Yep. They're gonna be gone. They're on their way out. We're waving goodbye to them now, right? But you see it in—it's not like in one spot or another spot. It's the market, the whole market. Because what it's doing is it's turning the world into a meritocracy, a borderless meritocracy where we all get to raise our hands and say, we want it this way. Okay, cool, right?

(Christian at 00:53:24) Yep. It's a consensus.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:25) That's what's happening.

(Christian at 00:53:26) Peer-to-peer consensus. And the middleman, whether they were media or big companies or small companies or that co-op that, you know, you just can't get around because they're the only one buying food in town kind of thing—yeah, these middlemen are being disintermediated and replaced with programs. Now if you're a middleman today, you're like, oh man, I don't like this podcast, right? No, no, no, no. Someone still needs to move the food around, right?

(Christian at 00:53:54) There is need for a lot of agency. But it's the governance of our middlemen, right? How do we control what we want and how do we allow the market forces to be more effective when dealing with a centralized middleman who may have market power over you because you're just one of the smaller producers of something? That's why these peer-to-peer technologies really shine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:23) A centralized middleman—I was using the wrong word. Maybe gatekeepers.

(Christian at 00:54:26) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:27) First goes the gatekeepers, right? Because the centralized middleman is a gatekeeper. Yep. And the people that say, oh no, I'll be the decider of if this idea should be funded, or I'll be the decider of if we should bring this thing to market—those people, if they find themselves in those places—

(Christian at 00:54:43) Goodbye. Like most VC capital companies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:48) Why not? Why do I need—

(Christian at 00:54:49) A VC capital company when the market can—

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:51) Can make its own decisions?

(Christian at 00:54:53) Absolutely. And when someone with a good enough story—and of course, these ICOs are gonna calm down, right, in coming years. This is the exuberant phase, I guess. But ICOs are here to stay, and IPOs are gonna be difficult. In fact, my company that I work with now in Canada, Equibit, we're trying to position our way kind of in the middle of all this, right? Understanding that peer-to-peer and decentralized fundraising is here to stay. How do we do that in a way that is maybe more aligned with the rest of our society, right? Obviously, ICO has taken everyone by surprise, not just regulators, but even investors and businessmen.

(Christian at 00:55:37) So, you know, there's a happy middle somewhere that is yet to be found. I believe Equibit Group has a good handle on it, but there's other organizations trying other approaches as well. And it's only the future—it'll tell us, you know, who's gonna be right and who's gonna be wrong.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:55) I'm looking forward to it.

(Christian at 00:55:57) It's so exciting. So exciting. There's never been a more fun time to be alive, I think, than today. And I agree, anyone hearing this, if you're bored with your job, if you're unsatisfied with anything, these things can be changed. And right now there is so much opportunity. It takes will. You gotta kick yourself out, you know, sometimes of old habits. I know I do that. I try to do that every day, often unsuccessfully. But over time you keep trying and it's worth it. And it's a very exciting time right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:30) I can't wait. And sometimes I even get frustrated. I find myself getting frustrated. Oh, why aren't the companies moving faster? Why don't they see this market? Why don't they see that this is the opportunity? They're just being—some of the larger companies are just being so old and stuck in their ways. And I'm thinking, well, hold on a second now. Eventually they'll see. Usually when they're going out of business and they're fighting, you know, they're fighting to stay alive. So if I'm doing the right things today, then in five years, when they're having serious P&L issues, they're gonna be looking around for the market. I'm gonna point back to my book and be like, dude, I've been saying this for five years. Yep. Like, I can help you out with your problem, and then I profit, right?

(Christian at 00:57:08) Yep. No, I was talking with very important people in very large food companies over the summer. And they said the top three technologies in, in this case, the food supply chain over the next decade are gonna be AI to understand all that IoT stuff, big data visualization so that the humans can understand what the AI just figured out, and then blockchain to move all that data, to reward and incentivize the right people in the network to share the right data in a way that is honest because, you know, that's what blockchain does too. When a miner mines a block on the Bitcoin protocol, right, on the Bitcoin blockchain, they are allowed to pay themselves, right? They did these initial Bitcoins. That's why they are mining in part, right? So that they can get those free Bitcoins at the beginning of every block.

(Christian at 00:58:01) Well, they could cheat, right? They could write, oh, a hundred Bitcoins instead of—I think right now they get 12 Bitcoins or so every ten minutes or every block. And so they could cheat about that, but why don't they? Oh, because they know that if they cheat, it's not gonna take half a second and the network's gonna kick them out, and someone else with the right answer, without cheating, is gonna do the right thing. So blockchain really—you can really build incentives for people to follow a behavior that is in demand according to a particular blockchain. If you don't like that blockchain or that behavior that's being incentivized there, you just don't participate in it. I'm not a big fan of Ripple for various reasons. Ripple is a great system. There's a lot of people who like it, but I disagree with some of the way that they manage their consensus.

(Christian at 00:58:48) And so I don't participate in the Ripple blockchain. You know, there's other blockchains that have other types of issues and whatever, right? People can then choose which network, which standard do I wanna use. Do I wanna use Bitcoin Core, I guess as it's being called now, or Bitcoin Cash? I don't know. Weren't they both Bitcoin at some point? Yep. Now they're totally different. And it's complex. It's not necessarily easy, but the opportunities are also tremendous.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:21) I need to—Jake, we need to figure out how to license, um, It's the End of the World as We Know It, because that's why I feel like I wanna play that song as the outro. It's like, I understand the robots ultimately win, and now I'm just hanging out trying to profit on the in-between. That's kind of where my mind is.

(Christian at 00:59:35) Right? If anyone—it doesn't have to be engineers or CTOs and deep technical people, right? Anyone who's interested in technology listening to this podcast, go to a blockchain conference. There's one every week now almost in every quarter of the world, so it's not hard to find a blockchain. It doesn't matter which blockchain or which technology. Go feel the atmosphere. Go sit in a blockchain hall where some guy is talking about, you know, whatever, and feel the energy. You'll never be as optimist—you'll never see a group as optimistic as you will find in a crypto conference.

(Christian at 01:00:21) Now optimists can be misplaced, but, hey, you know.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:25) Is the energy so high because, uh, McAfee's, you know, getting all the drugs?

(Christian at 01:00:30) No, no, no. McAfee is typically not at—well, I mean, I'm sure he's—I don't know where he is, right? I've never met him, so I don't know where he goes. He is—and it is also not about the drugs, although, you know, we could talk about that if you wanna talk about drugs. The blockchain of cannabis is fantastic. Medicinal Genomics in Boston has had a Vice article about how they took their cannabis business, and they put, you know, some information on the Bitcoin blockchain in their case. And that's won them a Vice article, right? Because their technology is super cool. It's genomic research about, you know, relating one strain of cannabis to another one through a phylogenetic—I don't even know how to pronounce it. You know, the genetic tree of DNA. It's fantastic.

(Christian at 01:01:18) And they record that on the blockchain to make sure nobody can alter the results, right? And just that, they've transformed—they've essentially created a patent system, a private patent system that, you know, dispensaries and large growers are excited to use because guess what? The government doesn't provide that service. The government says your business is illegal.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:42) Who are we talking about?

(Christian at 01:01:42) We're talking about Medicinal Genomics. They created a place called—and I don't know if I should be just plugging all these things on your show, but you're not stopping me, so I'll go—

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:52) This is not a plug.

(Christian at 01:01:53) This is not a plug.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:53) I wanna talk about something—

(Christian at 01:01:55) A plug. Thank you. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:57) Uh, I'm like, interested in what you're—talk—here's why I'm interested. You ready for it? I had a call this morning with this awesome gentleman named Roger.

(Christian at 01:02:05) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:05) And he is CTO of this company called Baker. And they saw a market opportunity with the, you know, cannabis becoming legal, and so they built a point-of-sale system that catered to the cannabis world, right, with all the regulations. It was a special point—like, because you can't go use Shopify to sell cannabis. You have to sell—it's got certain attributes, and the whole custom system needs to be set up for it. So he saw, like, that opportunity, and he jumped in there, and their company is doing insane. Like, they've grown to 60-plus people in like the past year or two, and they're just—they look beautiful, and they're just absolutely killing it. So when I heard you talking about cannabis stuff, uh, and I saw in your profile, I was like, oh, that's really interesting. Um, and now that you're talking about this blockchain application for cannabis stores, you need to go talk to Roger because he needs to be aware of this, or gapshery is. He's a bright guy, but maybe bring it up to him.

(Christian at 01:02:59) I look forward to talk to Roger. It is—I mean, cannabis is a growing industry, right? I mean, it is—it is a great place.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:08) Pun intended.

(Christian at 01:03:08) Pun intended. Yeah. But it is a great place to invest right now. It is, you know, there's a clear social direction. We're not at the goal yet, right? You know, it's not all legalized everywhere. Therefore, we know there's gonna be more demand tomorrow than there is today for this product as it becomes more accepted throughout our society. And, yeah, that means business opportunities. So anyone who's already there, they're—keep running and keep using these new technologies like blockchain because the potentials are great, particularly when it comes to payments and money kind of stuff, where, again, in the cannabis industry, it's hard to open a bank account. And, you know, something that you and I take for granted is not necessarily as easy to do when you're a dispensary or person involved in one of those fringe industries. Blockchain can help there.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:59) Yeah. Wasn't Dash and a couple other cryptos going for that?

(Christian at 01:04:02) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:02) Big. Going for that business real big?

(Christian at 01:04:04) You know, and I'll just mention it briefly in passing. You know, an industry that I find is not taking advantage of this that I'm surprised because every other technological innovation that I've seen in my lifetime since the seventies were very much driven by the sex and the porn industry. You know, the Internet and all the web and all that. I mean, initially, this was, you know—I mean, it's still there, but it was one of the things that made it more accessible to individuals.

(Christian at 01:04:38) And I have not seen a lot of that industry in the blockchain space. So, yeah, there's opportunity.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:44) Yeah. No. I think I'm going to pass on brainstorming the blockchain applications for the porn industry. I just—I could already hear the text messages from Jenny, my PR girl. She's like, "Alright, Joel. Your last step is every other episode. We're talking about spaghetti code, MVP epidemics, rewriting systems, we're talking about deal making, people feel like hurt and dealing with human capital. And then we've got cannabis, porn, and the blockchain. Oh, well. I'll tinfoil."

(Christian at 01:05:14) I didn't mean to derail your show. In fact, I started listening to your show in preparation for this. I love the topics. I've got you on my podcaster feed now. So I'm glad to be a new subscriber to your show myself. It's all done.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:29) Now we're going to do a special little thing called Modern CTO After Hours.

(Christian at 01:05:35) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:37) So what do you listen to your podcast with? Like, what are you using to listen?

(Christian at 01:05:42) I'm on an Android, and I use an app called Podcast Addict.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:47) Podcast Addict.

(Christian at 01:05:48) I use it in part because that list of podcasts is nowhere else but on my phone. Well, of course, so many companies have access to the data on my phone, so I'm sure they can get a copy of that. But it was not a list on a cloud. It was not the list on some other centralized. So, again, you see my desire to control my own information here.

(Christian at 01:06:10) But I chose that app specifically because I believe at least I control the list of podcasts on it. And if I delete it, it's not remaining on some other database somewhere in the cloud.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:23) Well, you're a valid member of the market and super intelligent. And I'm actually very—this is why I have such a wide—I let anybody come on the show that I find. The qualifier for being on the show is that I think you're interesting. Like, I look at people. I find I think they're interesting. I email them and say, "Hey. You want to share experience?" So that's the qualifier. And I love that that's the only qualifier. Like, I don't care if they're Fortune 500 or startup or where they're at because that gives me a real good feel for the market. Like, today, I had an experience with you that reconfirmed that there is a huge market out there for decentralized local data storage.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:02) For example, why you picked your podcast app.

(Christian at 01:07:04) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:04) You're a part of the market. People want that. That's a feature people want.

(Christian at 01:07:09) It is. We're still a minority, I think, but I think blockchain technology in part, and while it's not popular—right, blockchain is not popular with the mass public today. It's going to get there. I think it's going to start a little bit like the web becoming more of a—at least peer-to-peer technologies will become more and more accepted and available to the average person. But until we get there, the technologies that exist today, I find are indicative of that demand. The demand for more control, more privacy.

(Christian at 01:07:47) Another area that I've done a lot of work with is in health care. And when you think about your health information, which by the way, on the black market, health data is more valuable than financial data. Right? People will pay more to know more about your body health than they will to get your credit score.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:12) They gotta sell the kidneys.

(Christian at 01:08:13) Yep. Well, I don't know what it is, but they're the pharmaceutical. They gotta know how you're sick so that they can provide you with new treatments. I don't know. But that also caused an environment where that data is very precious.

(Christian at 01:08:31) Insurance companies and hospitals and EMR companies are trying to centralize that data, and then you gotta protect that database. Right? You're going to put firewalls upon firewalls and other detection systems just because the data is so valuable. And there is a solution to that. Give the data away.

(Christian at 01:08:50) And, of course, it's not an intuitive solution. Right? Companies would be like, "Well, no. I need that data because it's part of my business model." Well, no. No. No. No. That data will come back to you. Right?

(Christian at 01:09:01) As a company, whether I'm a credit agency that gets hacked or a hospital that stores medical information in my database. We don't have all those tools today, but they're being built. You know, the EMR of the next decade is being built right now. That gives the individual the control over their individual data. And when you go to the hospital, they're with the hospital, but you open up your data to the hospital, not the other way around. Right? You don't ask your—

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:29) This is what I was talking about over the holidays. My brother and mom are doctors, and I was talking with them about this exact same thing. And they're like, "No. No. No. It'll never be like that." I flipped open Google and did a quick search or two. There are hundreds of millions of dollars of funding and seven different companies actively going after this one.

(Christian at 01:09:49) There you go. And I met two of them in the blockchain space just earlier this week. Right? So they're—it's happening and it's coming. It's not there yet.

(Christian at 01:09:57) So someone who looks at the last thirty years, forty years of digitization, slow digitization of—you know, maybe not forty years of medical information, and you'd be like, "No. No. You're going against thirty years of history where this is not how it works." Yeah. That's why it's called a disruption.

(Christian at 01:10:16) We're about to disrupt thirty years of how we store medical information, and we're going to make it so it's a lot safer. Because then if the hospital gets hacked, right, if I'm the hospital, I want your name. I don't want your Social Security number. I mean, I want a way to identify you, obviously. Right? So I can keep non-personal data and maintain some continuity to the extent where it's logical for the hospital. But as soon as it's used to identify you, it's a liability for the hospital. Now there's hackers who want to get in your database, and your clients will sue you when you get hacked. And you will get hacked because there's a lot of hackers out there who as long as you keep adding good valuable data in that little pot of gold over there, people will try to go at it. So the solution is really to create a system where you give the data back to your patients.

(Christian at 01:11:07) Guess what? When I get sick, I'll be knocking on your door, and I'll be super happy to open up all my records. In fact, I'll have a smart contract that will automatically open up the record to you because if I'm unconscious, I don't want to have to be in the way of you having access to my record. Right? So that data is coming right back to these providers without the risk of saving it into your centralized database. But that means letting go of that—

(Joel Beasley at 01:11:31) And, of course, the audit trail.

(Christian at 01:11:32) Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All the regulations surrounding. Imagine the cost. Right? People tell me, "Oh, Bitcoin is wasteful because of all the electricity that is burned to secure the network." Right? The miners, when they mine Bitcoin, they are the security. Right? This is a security team of Bitcoin. And any other blockchain that works using a proof of work algorithm. So, and we can talk about that, how that works, but the idea is that mining Bitcoin is you're the police of Bitcoin when you're the miner. And the police of Bitcoin kicks people who try to cheat Bitcoin out of the network. So, you know, if you try to make a false transaction on the Bitcoin network, the miners will reject you and you'll just be ignored.

(Christian at 01:12:17) So that is security in the future. Right? And in the future, you know, if you hack my computers—as I have lost Bitcoin keys, I've lost a lot of money on Bitcoin because I was an idiot and I wasn't keeping my keys properly safe. And I lost them. There's nobody else but me to blame. And if you hack in my computer, you can only steal my Bitcoin, not the Bitcoins of everybody else around. So there's a lot of new paradigms there that I think are going to start moving into the world of IT security at large, and it's going to change how we do things in the coming years.

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:58) Christian, I could talk to you all day. So here's what I want to do. I want to come up—I'm going to come up with a separate set of questions because I want to talk more about health care and blockchain and things like that. And we're going to set up another call. And when are you going to be in Canada?

(Christian at 01:13:14) I am planning to be in Canada. I'll be there in the first week of February, and I'll be there again in March. And then I'll probably stay in Canada in March for quite some time.

(Joel Beasley at 01:13:25) Nice. So we're going to let you get settled into Canada and get some great stories for a couple months up there, and then we're going to have you back on in the summer, and we're going to just kill it. I love talking to you, man.

(Christian at 01:13:36) That sounds great. I thank you very much for inviting me to your podcast, and I will be even more familiar with your podcast next time. So maybe I'll avoid certain topics or not.

(Joel Beasley at 01:13:48) Make a list of the topics you should avoid, and then we're only talking about those.

(Christian at 01:13:53) I'm always open to feedback. Awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 01:14:00) Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO Podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it.

(Christian at 01:14:08) You—

(Joel Beasley at 01:14:08) You guys are the absolute best.