Koii - The blockchain project built for media - Al Morris, Koii Network

Speaker A: Hi, everybody. I'm here with Al Morris, chief architect and co founder of Koi Network. And he's here on off the Record podcast, where we talk about the ugly side of growth. Al, welcome to the show.

Speaker B: Hey, great to be here. I'm kind of excited to talk through all of the things that we've been through to get here.

Speaker A: Well, likewise. I have a lot of questions. Uh, now, before we get into the actual questions, explain to us what Koi does and what someone would want to use it. Why would someone want to use it? Uh, in quite simple terms.

Speaker B: So Uber lets you rent out your car. Uh, Airbnb lets you rent out your home. Um, there's lots of other kind of sharing economy things out there, um, but most of them are just replacing services that we already had in the world. You know, you use Uber so that you don't have to use a taxi, use Airbnb so you don't have to use a hotel. Um, the difference with Koi is that we help you rent out your computer to someone who wants to build a decentralized app. And what that means is we're able to build applications where nobody's the owner. Um, and so what we're hoping to do is to build an entire new generation of Internet that has more privacy, more security, and puts the user in charge. Um, and one of the really neat things about this, unlike most cryptocurrencies, where you have, ah, a token that's issued to people who have these really big computers, and then everybody's competing to buy more resources and burn more energy, like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Um, with Koi, all of the newly minted tokens, or at least the vast majority of them, are going to our attention economy. And so if you have content like this podcast, you can publish it into the network and you will earn tokens every time someone actually views the content. Um, and that's the only way to create new tokens in our network. And so the really powerful thing about that is it means that as a content creator or anybody even using the Internet, you're in charge of the whole experience. And then the tokens that you get from that, you can use as collateral to connect your devices to the network, and then you can go and actually provide services to the network, just like Uber, airbnb does, but with a personal computer in your home. Um, and the neat thing is it doesn't really matter how much compute power you have, because a lot of the things that you use these computers for, you don't really need to have a ton of computing power. You mostly need to have a trusted reputation and identity, which you get from being part of that kind of attention economy side.

Speaker A: Right. Well, some of the listeners, and I'm sure, uh, you all will know Brave browser, Brave browser, similar to Chrome and others, a little bit less popular, but built by people who know a lot about crypto. And by default, uh, you can, while you browse, they show you the ads on the homepage and then you can collect attention tokens and I forgot the actual name, but they have that thing. And then you can connect your wallet, uh, your crypto wallet, and then you can exchange those tokens for an actual money. And then roughly it goes, you could get five, maybe a little bit more dollars per month as you go through the ads. How similar or different this model is to Koi.

Speaker B: So the big difference is going to be that as opposed to, um, the token being valued based on the amount of advertising in the network, which is what the basic attention token does in Brave. Um, and by no means those are actually very innovative products and I think they're blazing the trail towards a better advertising system. Um, what Koi does, which you can actually run in parallel to having basic attention token mining, um, Koi will allow you to actually get tokens that can be used to purchase compute from our network peers and computers. Um, and so this is really powerful because what it does is it allows you to build applications that have absolutely no one in charge and are running across this gigantic network of people's home computers and other network computers that are now being provided by IBM and a couple of other cloud providers. Um, and so the neat thing about this is that, uh, it's providing this framework that will allow people to build an enormous number of new applications in a really easy to use fashion. Um, which we hope will lead to more and more decentralized apps, which can also mine tokens on Brave, but also by getting attention on Koi, they can then pay their hosting bills, um, which is very powerful. And you don't necessarily have to run ads because some people are a little bit sketched out about ads. So we don't want to make everybody run ads on their content.

Speaker A: Yeah, nobody likes ads. None of us. Talk to me about your hiring because, uh, conveying that idea that you just explained to new employees, uh, when you started, that's gotta be crazy.

Speaker B: Yeah, and we weren't very good at explaining it back then either. Um, so we've been at this about two, two and a half years now. Um, and so when we first Started this. It was, uh, kind of 2019, middle of like the big crypto bull run. Um, and so a lot of people that knew a lot about crypto were off starting their own companies. In fact, most of my friends that I had come up with in the crypto world, like I'd been in the space since about 2016, 2017. So most of the people I knew from early on had all gone and started their own projects or they had these of kind, incredibly high paying jobs working for someone that was really well funded. Um, and so we had to hire a lot of people from outside the crypto world. And that was kind of tricky because, uh, you know, if you look at the average person who doesn't really know much about crypto, two years ago, uh, a lot of people thought this whole crypto thing was a giant scam. And so we had a lot of people who came into the interview and it was like, almost like they thought that in order to get the job they had to convince us that they were good at lying, um, because they thought that we were running some kind of a Ponzi scheme or something like that. And so they ended up like, kind of playing this role that we didn't ever ask them to do. Uh, but they seem to think that their job was not actually to build the product or to do something meaningful, but to like trick people somehow. Um, and then they ended up trying to trick us. And it was also during COVID so we hired all of these people remotely. And so we're talking to all these people over video calls and everything. And like, you know, we're doing our best to raise money so that we can build this like, new world order that we've been working so hard to create. And a lot of these people were just on Google Meet just like staring at us and telling us what we wanted to hear. And then, you know, after three months working for us, we'd find out that they hadn't really done that much or that they'd been kind of trying to do the bare minimum, or they'd been kind of doing completely the wrong type of work because they were trying to trick the community instead of actually trying to explain what was happening. Um, which is very, very difficult. It created an entirely different, uh, employment situation than I've ever had to manage in the past.

Speaker A: Yeah, that is, uh, that's got to be quite a unique situation. On top of it being difficult to work with remote people and hire remote people, do it with folks who try to pretend that it's, uh, a James Bond movie.

Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah. It was like they thought they were working for Dr. Evil or something like that. And then at the core, we kept saying, this is the mission. We're trying to make the Internet better. We're trying to make it more free, we're trying to include more people in this wealth creation. And they thought that it was all just a bunch of marketing lingo, um, which is insane. And they kind of went along with it. And then, you know, eventually they would flame out because they would realize that they actually had to do some work. And then that was like they would just sort of give up on their job. Um, and, you know, we've still been gradually filtering these people out. Not so much with the employment. The employment side is now very stable. You know, we've got a pretty solid team of about 30 people that work really, really hard around the world. They're waking up every day. They're sitting at their laptop all day and just grinding away, writing code or explaining things to people. Um, but even now, like, you know, with some advisors and, like, kind of business partners, you know, there was some. We hired some marketing agencies early on that were kind of crypto sketchy people. And they had gotten into the space because they thought that it was all about deceiving people. And, you know, you start working with these people and they say the right thing, and they know how to say the right thing, um, because they're marketing people, which is very dangerous. Um, I think the enormous thing that's been interesting to me is how many people in the crypto space actually are in it for the pump and dumps. Um, I think, like, it's gradually filtering out. Like, the people that are that disingenuous, they don't get invited back. Um, but there's enough people in the space and everybody was doing business over video calls during COVID So you had people that were taking five or six different jobs and. And then pretending to do their work or farming it out to some, like, outsourced guy in India that they were trying to get to do their copywriting for them or something like that. It was very tricky early on.

Speaker A: Oh, I think we're still. I think we're still going to go into the dark age as remote work kind of keeps creeping in. We're gonna see folks with 5, 10, maybe less jobs doing, like, all the kinds of things you already described. And I think there's gonna be still. That time will come.

Speaker B: Yeah, we're still hearing about this. There's this, uh. I can't remember exactly what the Phrase is. But there's these people that are now writing blog posts about how they're not quitting their job. They just start doing the bare minimum, and it's kind of like they don't want to stop getting a paycheck, but they don't like their boss, so they stop doing the work. And that just. That never happened when we had offices, you know. Um, and we actually do have an office. I'm sitting in the Koi office right now in Halifax in, uh, eastern Canada. Um, and it's been a huge difference since we started actually getting people to come into the space and work here. And it's allowed us to start building, like, a real camaraderie. And now we actually do this, too. We do sort of retreats at different conferences. So I'll bring a handful of people from the team and start to, like, you know, live out of an Airbnb with six or seven people and do, like, really hard work on a whiteboard for a week. Um, and we've been finding that that is really the only way to kind of, uh, separate the good from the bad. But it's been quite a process to get there.

Speaker A: It's a lot of fun when you get to work with people and then hang out with them after hours. That's really where you can connect versus, you know, you're doing it on Google. It's difficult to establish a trust, and there's a lot of bunch of assumptions you're making about them, they're making about you. And it's a lot harder.

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. I think also, uh, for the employer, the employee side, I would imagine, is even harder because, you know, you're just sitting in your house all day. Like, some people are working from their bedroom, even, like, they've got a desk across from their bed, and their boss is just sending them things to do all day long. And then they don't have that feeling of congratulations when. When they see an actual reaction on the person's face because they're just sending their paperwork in. Um, it's really easy for people to get demotivated. So we've tried to work on that, though. We've got a pretty active Slack channel for our internal team now. We started adding custom emojis. We do little good morning rounds. Somebody will say good morning. Everybody says good morning back.

Speaker A: And it's kind of fun, right? Yeah, that's a very crypto little thing. Um, uh, Al, how did you change your hiring process? To what you had it early on and then to later on to make sure. That you don't have people who are just wandering around for three months.

Speaker B: Yeah. Um, so we do a three month probation now. So you don't get any tokens, uh, guaranteed to you until you get through the first three months and you get a bonus and a raise at the end of the first three months if it goes well. Um, so we hire people on at like, you know, a reasonable salary, but not like a really, really egregious salary. Um, and then the agreement is if they show us that they can work really hard, then they kind of set the bar for how much work they can get done in a day. And we get to say, see honestly, how productive they can be, instead of seeing them kind of like, lead us along. Um, the other side of it too is we started screening way more resumes. So when we were first hiring, we kind of like, were desperately trying to find anybody who wanted to work on it with us because it was like this crazy pie in the sky idea. We didn't have a lot done. Um, and as we started to build out more of the tech stack, we started having really competent engineers who've been dedicating themselves to it. A lot of our team works 16 hours a day. I certainly do some days. Um, and so now that we have this core of really productive people, we're screening sometimes 100 resumes to find one hire. And, you know, it's not like we're interviewing all of them, but we go through all the resumes, we look at the qualifications. We've got a lot of headhunters feeding people to us. Um, and we're just really, really careful about it. Now we don't hire people unless they're a perfect fit for the role, because otherwise it just slows everybody else down. And then there's somebody else that's sitting in their bedroom staring at their computer, and that person has to deal with somebody else being lazy. And that's not terrible.

Speaker A: Oh, it's terrible. And then you have to off board them and then catch them. And then it's just all. It's very messy. It's like. And then. Especially if it, if it drags on. So like, uh, like they say, fire fast. 100%.

Speaker B: Yeah. You have to be really careful with it.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. How do you. How do you track their time or productivity? All of these things? Like, do you take screenshots? Do you screen share? Like, what do you do to make sure that. Or do you only look at the deliverables?

Speaker B: So I used to do, uh, I used to run a Little consulting company in Chicago. And that was like we are using upwork sometimes and upwork does that automatically. They'll take a screenshot like every five minutes or something to make sure the person's working and they'll tell you if the cursor's been moving on their screen. Um, I haven't actually found that to be a good measure of productivity, to be totally honest. I think a lot of this, especially where it's like white collar information work, um, most of it is in your head. And so often a lot of people on our team, they'll go out for a walk with their dog and they'll come back with a great idea and they just save themselves three hours of staring at their computer. Um, so it's worth letting people have that freedom. And I think it also, it starts to build that trust with the team.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker B: Because we don't want people to feel micromanaged at all. Um, so now what we mostly do is we get people to tell us what they want to accomplish and that's what's going to determine if they get a bonus or if they're going to get more tokens from the initial token supply, that kind of thing. Um, and it's really, it's more of a here, uh, is the goal. This is where we want to go. We know that this is the deadline, this is the goal. How are you going to help us get this? And if they commit to taking some of that off my plate or off the other co founders plates, that's what really differentiates them and that's what we end up compensating them based on. So, um, people know that the sky's the limit too. So if you want to work 16 hours a day and just grind for two weeks and then take the rest of the month off, we're not that worried about it. Um, we have a few guys in Pakistan that take most of the month of Ramadan off. And that's kind of like, that's usually the way that that should work. People get to have that little bit of freedom and as long as the work gets done beforehand, it really doesn't affect the productivity of the whole team.

Speaker A: You went from a couple folks to 30. Now what would you say the biggest challenge was?

Speaker B: Uh, I think it's usually delegating and then also knowing who to trust because some people work really well when they have someone closely managing them. And some people work really well when they have, uh, a lot of freedom to be creative. And you have to know which ones are which. So like our graphics team, often they're just. We just kind of tell them vaguely what we want. We have a little Slack channel called Please Draw this and there's a bunch of stuff popping up in there. They have kind of an infinite queue of things that they could work on. And we've managed to find a team there now where they're just. We don't have to talk to them. They just get all the work done. And we hang out and chat on like a weekly call. And that's sort of, that's enough connection for them. Um, but then a lot of the other stuff requires a lot of, uh, interface time. So we've set up kind of a number of weekly Scrum meetings. So, uh, we have like a weekly product call on Wednesdays and on Tuesdays we have a Slack reminder that pops up and says, hey, who has agenda items for the weekly product call? And then we sit down the head of the node team, the head of the UI team, um, my co founder, Kayla, and our head of engineering, and we go through the list and we figure out how to solve all those problems. And then we put those minutes into a certain Slack channel that's just for us, and we know how to solve the problems from there. Um, the other thing I would say too, especially with technical stuff, is we use, um, issue tracking really well. So like, if something happens, we make sure it's in the system. Because a lot of the time things happen on a phone call and you don't know that there was a problem. And so then there's a delay on some other team because someone had to jump over to fix something to put up a fire. And you need to have all of those fires tracked somewhere. Otherwise everything gets completely disorganized.

Speaker A: Yeah, gotta track them down somewhere. Even Trello or something. It's more like a system that everybody uses. Then you could keep track of and sort. And then to make sure that there's a backlog and it's actually being used instead of just written on a piece of paper.

Speaker B: Yeah, we also, we have way less meetings than we used to though. So, um, the executive team has a meeting on Monday and Friday. Uh, we have a weekly ops meeting with a few of the non technical folks and we go through budgets and things like that. Um, we have the weekly product meeting, but we used to have like, I don't know, it uh, was probably like 10 or 20 different recurring meetings with different teams. And we cut most of those. We got rid of almost all of them and now it's kind of at an at will basis and people will hop on with some, someone that they're friendly with and they'll chat for a half hour and they get a lot done. But we try not to have too many weekly recurring meetings. And I'm pretty religious about going through Google Calendar and checking to see if anybody set up some kind of a weekly recurring meeting that I haven't heard about. Um, because those are usually big time wasters and they end up sometimes not being very productive. And uh, it's more like the meeting is the work instead of the meeting solving a problem. Um, and those drain on people too because whoever sets the meeting up is usually, you know, they're trying to do the meeting because they think they're solving a problem and the people who are forced to go to that meeting have other work to do and they know it's like a big deliverable that they're supposed to be working on. So you want to get them out of that mindset and just let, let everybody do their jobs. That's why we hired them. They're usually very productive. Um, and we also, I think the focus time when we meet up in person that's been really, really incredibly productive. Um, because there's something about face to face encounters. It's just totally different from being on a webcam.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it did. It's. Slack has done a tremendous job, but it's. Well, it remains to be seen what Apple could do potentially with that AR headset. If in the future it gets subsidized, people get it and then you work in a VR AR world. But for now, face to face is the way to go.

Speaker B: Yeah, I've tried that with Oculus too. Um, I have an Oculus and the thing that always bothers me about that is there's no way it'll ever track my facial expressions properly because it can only see my eyes. And the rest of my face is covered with an Oculus headset. So even if you have like a camera on the other side of the room, it's never really going to capture my facial expressions. But I'm open to seeing where it goes.

Speaker A: Yeah. What I've heard is Apple will have around at least rumored 14 cameras for the first version of the headset, which will track your facial expressions a lot, a lot better. Um, and one of the biggest use case, of course, beyond the gaming and media and all of that consumption is the future of work. Because now there are, I mean, there are headsets by Finland company in Finland. I forgot the name. They're like €6,000 that are used by designers of like, uh, expensive car manufacturers where they could preview their designs one on one and they don't have to fly in Germany, United States. And so there is a significant use case. The question of course is can we make something that is inexpensive for people to use, that is better than Slack so you don't have to fly in and do those things? And I personally think there is. I think that's gonna happen in the next couple of years and it will be the massive, massive change, but it will take quite a bit of time to adjust and, um, get it rolled out.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think there's a huge value to giving people a hug sometimes too. I don't know, it goes a really long way, but. No, I know what you mean though too. So, like, we have, um, I think we have people in like nine countries now. Um, and we've tried to cluster them a little bit. So like, usually, um, there's no one person that speaks a language by themselves, which helps a lot. So we have a handful of people that speak Urdu in Pakistan. Uh, we have a handful of people that are speaking Spanish in South America. We've got some guys speaking Polish. We've got a few people in other countries, Canada and the U.S. that are speaking English. Um, and the balance there is actually really good. So we try to cluster teams around a specific language group and that way, um, they've always got somebody who's also their friend, so they're not just like struggling with a language barrier by themselves, which makes a big difference.

Speaker A: Yeah, nothing really will replace the actual in person, human to human conversation, that's for sure. The question is really, can we go from 2D, I call it 2D Slack and all that, into something that is profoundly better? And we probably can. Just the question, it remains to be seen because it's difficult to build that metaverse or whatever the name is, and apps and developers and, and the whole economy.

Speaker B: Yeah, I would just love a computer with a, uh, camera right in the middle of the screen so I can make eye contact instead of staring into the blank void of my webcam. That would be kind of nice.

Speaker A: That would be really cool. And that is, uh. Yeah, it. Whether. Yeah, that one. I always thought it was really weird. If you're trying to do an interview, you're looking kind of like you're not looking into the camera. And if you do look into the camera, then you're not looking at anything else. And. But it's just what it is right now. Like the only way to do It, I would guess, is teleprompter technology, where it's like you have, like, a translucent screen and the camera is right in the middle, and then it kind of is able to. It's like. It's sort of like a punch hole. That is not a punch hole, uh, from a screen perspective. So you're looking into the camera, but you're actually looking to the screen. But that tag, probably unlikely, is coming anytime soon for the laptops. But I could be wrong. Yeah.

Speaker B: I think one tip for anybody that's listening to this would be that you can also give people time off from sitting there staring at their webcam. Um, we found that, like, zoom fatigue is a real thing. Like, if you have to stare into a webcam every meeting, all the time, you know, you're often not really thinking as much about what you're saying. You're thinking more about, like, how the other person's perceiving you. Um, so especially with, like, our technical teams, we try to just. You know, sometimes we just do audio calls, and that seems to work fine. Um, sometimes you have to remind somebody to pay attention, you know, like, hey, are you awake? But, you know, most of the time, it's actually a lot more productive because people can speak freely and they can kind of, you know, they can look off into the distance and think for a second without it kind of offending everyone.

Speaker A: Yeah. Put their feet on the table if that makes them more productive.

Speaker B: Right, Exactly.

Speaker A: Al, quick firearm. Couple of questions. One, um, two. Sentence. Sentence. Something short. What would you do if your. If, um, your company, Koi, went bankrupt?

Speaker B: Uh, um, probably start another company that does something very similar or keep working on it. I would probably just keep working on it. I write software myself, so I would just probably keep grinding until something worked. Um, at this point, we've got, like, three years of Runway, so we're pretty comfortable on that front. But it is definitely. It's a big concern. Um, the reason that we set out to build this one in particular is to fix, like, a really big problem in the world, which is this issue of the Internet being owned by such a select few. Um, and so if Koi doesn't work out, I will probably go on and continue working on something similar, or I'd go back to teaching. I spent a long time, uh, before Koi running. We teach blockchain.org in Chicago. Um, and I was teaching people about crypto writing courses, that kind of thing, and it was really enjoyable stuff. And you get a real satisfaction out of helping other people and mentoring Them

Speaker A: teaching, um, is fun. Absolutely. What new beliefs, behaviors, or habits adopted within the last five years have most positively impacted your life?

Speaker B: Um, that's a tricky one. I would say using, uh, a calendar as, like, a very strict regimen is amazing. People will ask for a phone call. It's got to be in the calendar, and it's not in the calendar. It can't do. Um, just means that your time is managed a lot better and you don't really have to worry about things, especially working remote. Uh, I think the other thing, too, is spending more time outside. Uh, I try to get at least a half an hour of sunlight per day. And living in Canada, it's sometimes tricky, depending on the time of year. But, you know, if you go outside for a minute, breathe some fresh air, it tends to just relax everything. And when we first started this, the beginning of COVID it was bizarrely difficult to do that. You know, you'd just kind of be holed up next to a desk for the entire day, and there was always more to do. So you kind of just sit there and stare at the thing. Um, that and cooking my own food. I think I used to live in Chicago, kind of in the downtown. And so always going out a lot before COVID like, spending a lot of time meeting with business partners or friends in the evening. So your dinner was often something that you bought from a quick bite to eat or at a restaurant trying to have a meeting. And that just. I think it degrades your physique a lot. Like, it slows you down and doesn't give you as much energy. Um, but regular exercise and eating well just saves everything. I think working from home has saved a lot of people in that direction, actually. Um, means you're a lot healthier, a lot happier.

Speaker A: Yeah, I don't eat all that. Those terrible fats that people or those quick chains put into their hamburgers or all these kinds of things. And then it's just. It just kill it slow. Slows you down. It makes you really, like, less sharp. And you don't. You feel your cholesterol goes up, and you're generally a lot less healthy. Yeah.

Speaker B: It's a big satisfaction in making your own food, too. Uh, it gives you a certain amount of pride in your day. And so then even if everything else in your day goes badly and works is terrible, you can still go make yourself a nice dinner. Yeah.

Speaker A: Exactly what is something I haven't asked you, al That I wish that you wanted me to ask you, or your final message to the audience?

Speaker B: Um, I guess, uh, probably the most recent topic on my mind has been privacy. So, um, you could ask me what privacy will look like in 10 years.

Speaker A: Yeah, let's do that. Let's do that one.

Speaker B: Okay. So the thing that's terrifying is the, uh, Internet's been around for a little over 30 years now. Um, and it started out as a Department of Defense technology. It was really like a very utilitarian solution to a certain problem, which is we need communication and we need it to be secure. Um, since then, for whatever reason, we have abandoned security somehow. It just happened. You know, we've. We've gotten to the point where pretty much every single platform that we use online has some kind of a backdoor or some kind of a record somewhere that's always just sitting there, and it's just growing all the time. And it's used to target ads, it's used to do all kinds of things online. Um, and what this means is that your life online, you know, like, basically what we're talking about with the Apple headset. Right, Your life online, though, instead of your life at home. Because in my house, I can close my blinds, I can close my doors, and I can sit there peacefully and relax if I want to. I don't do that very often, but you can do that. And in the online world, it doesn't really work that way. Even if you're sending a message to someone, you know, like, if you want to, you can use a really private messaging platform. But if you send a text message that's being recorded, and if you do any of these things, it's always being recorded and it's always showing up somewhere. And a lot of the metadata is being sold to someone. Um, and so at this point, like, you could send a text message that you should reasonably think would be private, but that data is still, still being sold in aggregate, and it's used to target ads. And there's all kinds of different layers of this stuff happening. Um, and so what we really hope, and kind of the main reason we're working on Koi in the first place, is that the Internet could actually be something that's owned by people so that it can connect us directly to each other instead of being something that's owned by other people that tries to profit from us. And we're very close to getting there, I hope. Um, if we don't, I'm kind of terrified for what it will create in the very distant future. Uh, but it seems like we're headed towards 1984. If we can't get this on track.

Speaker A: Yeah. And also you have Canada and maybe some other governments. Uh, in trying to introduce, like, Bill was. It's called, like, C17 now or C11, the one that's supposed to control, uh, what you're saying and you're not saying, which, uh, is more related to free speech than privacy. Ah, but still, there's, uh, there's that aspect, too.

Speaker B: Well, and it's this, um, it's kind of the character assassination angle as well. It's like, uh, you know, if the moral compass of society changes dramatically in five years, you could be prevented from running for political office or holding a certain government position. Um, and I think that is quickly becoming like a power play that is at risk of being overwhelmingly bad. Um, I would say so far, actually, to be fair, most of the stuff that has been included in these kind of free speech restrictions has been mostly to prevent bigoted or hate speech. Um, but it's a matter of precedent, right? So once we do it once, then we're setting it up legally so that it can happen forever. And then it's a matter of, like, you know, maybe we have a really bad recession and some kind of pseudo dictator gets into power, and they start to be very dangerous with this stuff. Or even worse, somebody in a worse country that has less resources sees what we're doing and sees, hey, I can do that here. And they do. And the technology exists for them because we've paved the way. And that is almost even more terrifying because that's probably already happening right now today. Um, and it's something where if we can't get this under control, there's no record anymore. It used to be that we had newspapers that were published every day. We had books that were on paper, and they all existed in big buildings, and most of the time you didn't burn them down. Except if there was a. Like, a territory that was conquered. And then they would burn the library for exactly that reason. Today, if you wanted to delete all the records, you don't have to burn down the Amazon warehouse where they store all the servers. You just go and click the big delete button, and it's just gone. You know, the data just gets wiped out instantly, and there might not ever be a backup. And so you could rewrite news records. You could basically wipe an entire section of civilization off the map. And within a decade now, one would even remember that it happened. M and I think there's probably instances of this happening in a lot of places right now around the world, where we don't really have those kinds of protections in place. And it's really terrifying that we're heading that way as a society, um, because the democratic process depends on information. You know, we cannot together build something and vote on things and decide what to do with all of our government taxes if we don't have a good information system.

Speaker A: That's a good discussion, evidenced by, like,

Speaker B: Cambridge Analytica and that kind of thing.

Speaker A: But, yeah, it's a good discussion of whether that is an ultimate weapon of the 21st, 22nd century or not, because it might just well be. But we're out of time. Al, it was a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming off the record podcast. This was another one, guys. Thank you so much for listening. You can find all the information in our show notes. Uh, we'll also include the links to Koi and to your LinkedIn profile if anybody wants to connect. Um, and, um, we'll launch to the next one.

Speaker B: Yeah, thanks again for having me. And for anybody out there that's working on something like this, uh, hang in there. It's usually hard at the first part, and then it's hard in the middle, and it's still hard at the end, but you get the hang of it. It gets a lot easier. The power.