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If I could hope for but one thing for you, so you'd be curious in all that you do.

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Because love like a flower just wants to grow.

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This is Bitcoin Study Sessions.

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Welcome back or welcome to another session here.

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Today we're discussing the Instant Settlement series by Ivan Makadonsky.

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And we were just talking a second ago about how to pronounce his last name.

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I'll just call him Ivan.

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We're now on a first name basis because of my ignorance of phonetics of his last name.

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So the Instant Settlement series is a series of essays by Ivan in Bitcoin Magazine from December 2023 to March 2024.

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So this is actually an excellent essay series.

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I'm really excited we're talking about it right now.

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We just finished up Broken Money.

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And this essay series on instant settlement is kind of a practical application of some of the theorizing that Alden is doing in Broken Money.

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So in Lynn Alden's Broken Money, she describes how he went off the gold standard because gold could not settle quick enough.

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That is, once we enter the age of telecommunications, we could transact at or near the speed of light by sending a telegram, a simple message.

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But gold couldn't keep up with that.

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gold can only move at the speed of material, the speed of horse, whatever. And gold also takes

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additional time to authenticate. So a large gap arises between transacting by telegram and settling

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that transaction with gold. This speed gap led to the rise of fiat money because that's not backed

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by anything. It can settle at the speed of transactions. It's just words. But in the fiat

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era settlement then is delayed because banks are not open 24 seven and transactions are usually

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done through credit. And that's only kind of settled much later. So what then the question is,

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if settlement could be done instantly with a gold like hard and scarce commodity. And so with

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Bitcoin, then that's possible to speed a settlement catches up with the speed of transactions,

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bring along with it something that's scarce and hard-capped like Bitcoin, so it's now possible.

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So what Lucas and I are going to talk about today is the Instant Settlement series,

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an exploration of that concept of what happens when settlement catches up with transaction

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and it's backed by Bitcoin, and it is in Bitcoin, rather.

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I'll do what we usually do, give a short summary of this series,

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and then we'll talk about it in depth afterwards.

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So Ivan's Instant Settlement series, as I said, explores how instant settlement can change things.

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And so he really explores various industries and then also not just the potential changes within industries, but our psychological outlook in general relating to work itself.

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So the Instant Settlement series consists of six essays.

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The first five essays explore the potential effects in various industries, construction, logistics, publishing, streaming, and gambling.

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And the final essay then kind of summarizes the insights from this exploration and goes deeper into those psychological implications of instant settlement on the nature of work and kind of even what we are as humans.

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A couple of asterisks to the discussion. Ivan says right up front that he does not have expertise in these industries he discusses. So an industry insider might listen or read the essay and say, ah, that's not how it actually is. But he gets the details broadly right, I think. And again, he's up front that he's not an expert. And the importance is in the overall picture of how an industry might run and the concepts involved.

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And of course, in me and Lucas' discussion, it's going to be even more kind of some details are going to drop out.

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So a second asterisk, Ivan is the chief of staff at Breeze, which is a company that is working to integrate lightning payments on the Bitcoin network into apps and services.

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So he exhorts the reader at the end of each essay to go out and build the app that could enable the Bitcoin lightning network to work in an industry that he's describing in that essay.

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And a lot of what he's doing is kind of tracing a general outline or way that an app or set of smart contracts or something like that could take advantage of the Lightning Network in order to transform an industry.

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That is, he's not designing an app. He's kind of doing a really broad kind of brainstorming thing, spitballing to help generate new ideas and spark interest.

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So the importance is not that he's right about an app functioning kind of as he generally describes in each essay to integrate lightning into a particular industry, but that he opens the door to new thinking about how we might get things done if we did have instant settlement in that industry through such an app, through any potential app, and given that instant settlements in the lightning network are now possible.

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So to begin this discussion, the first essay, I'm not going to go methodically through each

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essay, but the first essay does give an overall picture of how he talks about the Lightning

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Network potentially transforming industry if an app was designed to apply it to an industry.

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So he begins with an example.

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In the construction industry, imagine building a house.

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You have different parties that are involved in carrying that project out.

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The house buyer, the construction company, the house planner, like the architect.

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the construction worker and the construction supervisors.

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And in this, each party kind of has their own incentives,

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and those incentives are not always aligned.

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For example, the house buyer, of course,

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they want to get it done as quick as possible to the highest degree of quality possible.

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The construction worker on the other end, at least as far as financial incentives,

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is he's being paid for, they're being paid for their time work.

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So that person is not inherently worried about how long it's going to take.

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They're collecting their salary and pay.

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They're not also inherently worried about doing the highest quality possible because, again, they're just based on, generally speaking, the time that they spend doing the work.

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So to align incentives, you want a way to reward people not for time passed on the job, and this of course applies to many other industries, but for the actual work that they are doing, the speed and the quality that they're doing, that work at, and that they're completing it efficiently.

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instant settlement ivan thinks can help do this an app can be constructed potentially using

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lightning payments on the bitcoin network such that construction workers can be paid for

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incremental tasks done on the way to completion of an entire project to quote ivan unlike traditional

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payment systems these technologies eliminate the delay between completing physical tasks such as

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placing a brick, and receiving compensation. So the idea is that an app could potentially be

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structured so that tasks such as building a wall, assembling a window, have independent payout.

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Workers then would not be paid for their time spent doing those smaller, more granular tasks,

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but upon completion of the task, which incentivizes, of course, the speed at which it gets done.

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Quality could also be incentivized in this framework.

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The supervisor then inspects the potentially completed job for quality.

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They then mark it as completed, photograph it, and report it in a potential app that one might design.

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This app could also integrate a reputation system, rating a worker on the overall quality of the task completed.

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And then the higher a worker's reputation over time, the more likely they would get assigned future tasks. So in this model, the worker would not necessarily need to be on payroll, but could be independently hired for each task.

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This would place the worker in some sort of gig economy, essentially, and would kind of decentralize overall the distribution of work and incentivize worker skill development and reputation building.

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That really simplifies Ivan's discussion of the construction industry, but it brings out the key insight from that discussion and one of the key benefits that Ivan thinks will come from an instant settlement being more integrated into the construction industry, but industry in general.

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And it is that instant settlement can help move us from a pay for time to a pay for work model. When we pay for time, the incentives are to extract the maximum amount of reward and pay for the minimal effort, the office space.

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You're watching the rewards, clock watching, maybe even negative behaviors like taking credit for others' achievements, parasitism in the workplace when you want to kind of glide along with others and do as little as possible yourself.

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You're getting paid as the clock moves, so what more is needed?

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In that type of mindset, skills then corrode over time because people are passing – because passing time is what is rewarded, not necessarily doing good work.

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And all of that changes us psychologically when we're in a pay-for-time framework. Pay-for-work, as allowed by instant settlement on the Lightning and Bitcoin network, in that type of model, best performance yields the most money because one's going to get new projects in the future.

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People are incentivized then to develop their own skills and to maintain their reputation.

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Competition over those smaller projects leads people to further develop themselves.

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This kind of reintroduces the idea of craft, of developing your work into an art, which

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tends to then satisfy people, we might say spiritually, or as full human beings, and

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lead to their retention in the long term.

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So if we switch from a pay-for-time to a pay-for-work model, society then is also made better

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as things are produced more efficiently instead of high speed and quality and to a higher standard.

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Incentives then are better aligned in a paperwork model.

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An example that Ivan gives, he has a Sun Tzu quote that's interesting.

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He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks.

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So the idea is when you have a team, each player should want the same kind of end goal to win the game.

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You don't want a player out kind of maximizing their own fame or their own stats at the expense of the team.

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Pay for work aligns incentives on the completion of the job rather than workers seeking their own benefit by like delaying completion to accrue more time and more pay that way.

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Even more broadly speaking, Ivan believes this can shift us from a kind of fiat mindset.

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If people are not tethered to one time-based job, but instead complete many tasks or project-based jobs, then again, that decentralizes work, allows more freedom. People aren't tethered to one job. They have more freedom to pick and choose projects consistent with their own goals.

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people maybe even stop chasing money and instead chase the projects that fulfill them or help them develop their craft.

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It's not going to be easy, Ivan notes, acknowledges, warns, to change from societally a default mental model based on pay for time to pay for work.

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To quote Ivan, quote,

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Defeating this enemy requires a collective willingness, the enemy being the pay for time model.

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Defeating this enemy requires a collective willingness to break free from the allure of effortless gains and embracing a more natural, purposeful way of working.

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So that's one benefit of instant payment is the shifting of mental models and payment models from payment on time to payment on work.

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Instant settlement also offers other potential benefits.

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It gets rid of fees that are charged by intermediaries and also avoids counterparty risk.

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And so an example from the logistics industry in the second essay, I think, helps flesh these potential benefits out.

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So again, to get kind of a rough and dirty account of how logistics might work, a typical delivery might look something like this.

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The buyer buys from a website, a product of some sort.

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The retailer of that product is notified to send it to the buyer's address.

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The retailer arranges delivery of that through a logistics company. The delivery person from that company collects the product from the warehouse. The product works its way through some sort of delivery ecosystem, maybe various warehouses bouncing around until it finally reaches the hands of the final delivery person who takes it to the buyer's location.

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So there's two frictions in this system.

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A first friction in this, when the fiat system is used to manage logistics, are credit card and bank fees.

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The buyer is probably going to pay a website in credit with the credit card.

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There's going to be a credit card fee, 1% to 3% fee.

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Website's going to then have to pay the retailer another 1% to 3% fee.

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The retailer pays the delivery person 1% to 3% fee.

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instant settlement with the Lightning Network would potentially allow for elimination of this

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friction because the credit cards and the banks are disintermediated. They're removed from the

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equation. And so fees then are much lower on the Lightning Network. So those fees are eliminated.

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Another friction with logistics in a fiat system, all these credit payments present a counterparty

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risk. Whenever any credit is extended, you're hoping the other party is going to be good for it

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at the end of the day, that a bank or credit card company is not going to go bankrupt, that the

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party itself is not going to go bankrupt. So there's always the risk of non-payment when credit

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is used. This counterparty risk is minimized with something like the Lightning Network that

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would remove credit from the equation in different parties like banks and credit card companies.

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so that's then here so far we've seen these cumulative benefits of instant settlement

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the lightning network pay for work not time removing credit card companies a bank equation

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minimizing counterparty risk associated with extending various forms of credit

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one more advantage of the lightning network potentially is it allows for split payments

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which I think is best illustrated in another one of Ivan's essays through the example of publishing.

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So we can imagine a book that is published and maybe this book is also translated and then sold.

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The parties then would be, roughly speaking, publisher, author, translator.

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You can use a lightning payment with an app up front designed for this purpose

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could automate the splitting of payments between the publisher, the author, and the translator

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based on a specific proportion, based on the amount of work actually done,

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so that each sale automatically sends the payment to that party.

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In this way, each party then earns a fair share based on what they did,

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and the app automatically splits those payments, eliminating the counterparty risk.

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For example, in the fiat system, the author and translator might wonder,

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is the publisher actually reporting the correct number of sales?

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Will they continue paying royalties into the future?

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But if it's all automated up front with an app made possible using the instant settlement of the Lightning Network, then that counterparty risk is eliminated.

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So there's more insights in this settlement series, but I think this is kind of some of the bigger ones up to this point, which are that lightning payments through an industry-specific app can really disrupt and transform things by paying for work instead of paying for time, aligning incentives of different participants in a task, decentralizing work based on task-specific jobs enabled by reputation systems.

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So, again, this doesn't touch yet on Ivan's discussion of streaming or gambling, but we'll kind of stop the general summary there and discuss this a bit because this is, I think, a very interesting set of concepts on the table.

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and I have some

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questions

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I've kind of concocted here

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but I'm wondering Lucas that was

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a lightning summary

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of the lightning series here

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anything I guess to add to those accounts

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construction logistics

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or the general concepts drawn

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from those at this point

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I think

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Ivan does a very good job

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of elucidating

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to us

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what we all inherently feel as some sort of undercurrent of potential change,

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but very often do not think about in terms of the world that he is describing seems so good for everyone involved

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that it's almost hard to think about, hard to wish for,

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because you don't want to be disappointed if it doesn't work out that way.

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So I like how he has taken these different industries

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and broken them down to give us these examples.

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When I first heard about Bitcoin,

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the first thing that I thought of was something along the lines

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of kind of the publishing side, which would be, you know, either in agriculture or with music

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that I sell the cow and I retain the ownership of that cow all the way to the plate. And so that

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everybody who adds value along the way, I get a portion of that. And as you climb that value ladder,

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where it goes from the rancher to the butcher to the, well, you can go straight to the restaurant if you want.

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But let's just say there's just three, rancher to butcher to restaurant.

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You know, you sell it for $3 a pound here, and then it's $15 a pound here, and then it's $30 a pound here at the end.

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And so there's that 10x increase that up until now, producers of commodities have never been able to capture. And they've been working to try and capture that by providing value, by saying, okay, in an effort to gain more of the value that I put forth, what we're going to do is try to develop a system that shows you exactly where your food came from.

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You know, this is from steer number 228 that came off the Maddy farm and it was born on March 6th and it was slaughtered on, slaughtered on, on May 1st.

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You know, you'll get, you get all that information.

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And so there's a lot of value to a consumer like that.

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This allows for that.

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The other thing is like in music, you know, I, I can see right now, you can see people that are putting out music that otherwise would never have been able to because they're very specialized.

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People that are like beat makers, I go, I'm going to, I'm just going to make a beat.

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I'm going to put it up on BandLab.

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And then I going to let people fork it just like they fork code And they can they can fork my original They can take my beat They can put guitar on it and they can put that up

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And then somebody else can see that and they can put marimbas on it.

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Somebody else can see it.

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They can put organ on it.

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Somebody else can see it and they can put rap lyrics on it.

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Somebody else can see it.

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They can have a chorus over it.

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And so at the end you end up with this,

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this collaboration of people that are working together only because the thing that they're doing

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is what they were going to do anyways. It's what they're good at.

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Yeah. And so, yeah, the expression of aligned incentives comes out so strongly. Like,

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I'm so glad that he reached out.

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So Ivan reached out after we did our first podcast on software.

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And he reached out and said, hey, I've written these.

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And I think you guys might enjoy discussing them.

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I'm so glad that he did because this is the important part.

197
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I've heard Jack Mallers talk about this.

198
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And I completely agree.

199
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Bitcoin will never go anywhere if it's only used as a store of value.

200
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Look at gold, right?

201
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I mean, gold didn't go anywhere because it was a store of value.

202
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It was too unwieldy to use in everyday transactions.

203
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And so it's very important for the long term life of Bitcoin that it become used as a medium of exchange in daily transactions.

204
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And I pulled up some of the stats, this off perplexity, so hopefully I can trust this.

205
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How is the usage of the Lightning Network increasing compared to Bitcoin?

206
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so obviously the um the bitcoin layer is not meant it's meant to be slow right it's meant to

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be very slow um so the lightning transactions in the last two years have increased by 1200 percent

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in terms of okay so reaching an estimated 6.6 million uh transactions per month there's a high

209
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in there of, I think December 24 was a high of like 72 million transactions. And so it is growing,

210
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it is growing very fast. But to put it in perspective, it says, you know, monthly active

211
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users on the Lightning Network are estimated between around 300 million and a three, sorry,

212
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300,000 and a million. And so I went back and I looked at what other network effect models like Uber and Amazon and Facebook, when did they reach the million monthly active users mark? And the records barely, they don't really go back that far.

213
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so to think of it in terms of that way like I first started using Facebook I think in 2005

214
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it was it was very recently after like it was I was one of I was within probably six months I think

215
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of it at Harvard I can't remember how fast that they they spread it out but I remember I was a

216
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junior and that was 2005. And so, but anyways, um, it was about that. So think about like

217
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Facebook in 2005 is basically where the lightning network is now. Um, and it's growing incredibly

218
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rapid. Um, it's being utilized by people that don't even know they're using it. You know,

219
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Cash App uses the lightning network to transfer value. And so people are using the lightning

220
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network and experiencing as good or better of an experience as they ever did before.

221
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And they don't even know it.

222
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I think that's a sign of a great technology.

223
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Yeah.

224
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It has been utterly frictionless in terms of replacing the settlement rails.

225
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I will stop there because I've got some other notes.

226
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Yeah, because those are such excellent points that you raise.

227
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So just like I love that you're, you know, Ivan did reach out to you. And as you said, how fortuitous, because this is exactly the perspective that complements like Alden's macroeconomic perspective is actually then boots on the ground, how we get this stuff done.

228
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And it's another part of Alden's kind of conclusion is the stuff doesn't do itself.

229
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This is stuff that takes you can't just say Bitcoin fixes this.

230
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It's people using Bitcoin are going to fix things and like knowing how to do it, coming at it with knowledge from your own industry.

231
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I love the example you give from ranching because you have a deep background in agriculture.

232
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You know a lot about that industry from a lot of different angles.

233
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And just hearing how you apply these concepts that Ivan has drawn out that the instant settlement nature of the Lightning Network on the Bitcoin protocol can align incentives, split payments between the different parties, rewarding value provided, divide the different steps into kind of discrete completed tasks.

234
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like those are general concepts that we can take to each of these different industries like you did

235
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with ranching and you know whatever industry whoever dear listener you're in like what how

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can you better align incentives how can you better divide value among the actual value providers how

237
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can you reward value instead of chair dampening and clock watching i mean that's instant settlement

238
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is a very powerful idea and thinking about these things writing about them having the courage to do

239
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it too. Ivan is not an expert in this industry. And when you extend beyond your expertise in a

240
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world of social media, you open yourself up to kind of the easy jab, right? If you get some small

241
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detail wrong. But it's not about the small details here. It is about generating a suite of fresh

242
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ideas and kind of general concepts that people can use in their own industry and walk of life to

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really build out the Bitcoin network. And I just wanted to finally remark on, I loved your music

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example as well. That person could come up with a beat, a hook or something like that.

245
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And then like that can be the project or the task itself, like break things down

246
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into different tasks. A person could do that, follow their own aesthetic direction,

247
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their own meaning of purpose in life, their own creativity, instead of just like,

248
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I'm going to go join some music studio or whatever to help some established artists fill out their songs and whatever they need, I'll do.

249
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Instead, if you can monetize your own artistic and creative direction, you can bring more of yourself into the world through something as technical sounding as instant settlement.

250
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It's just such, you know, these things have, Bitcoin has transformatory potential and it kind of sows and reaps that potential through its technical powers like instant settlement.

251
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And so that, like, I just love your examples and you're tying the macroeconomic down to what people are actually doing.

252
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Yeah. So the, the story that I read the other day, that makes me think of this is, so think about music. And when you hear a musician interviewed, and they talk about all of their inspirations, and who are the people that they listen to in order to be, become the musician that they are, you know, what, what they've done is they've cribbed from that person, they, you know, they've, they've used as inspiration.

253
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That's a way of saying I copied it until I made it my own, basically.

254
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And think about how fascinating it would be to see the hereditary tree of the tracing of all of these people's inspirations through the settlement contracts of all of these different beats.

255
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Let me back up to frame the story that I'm talking about.

256
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The story that I was reading was the Beatles released an album called Rubber Soul.

257
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And one of the Beach Boys, I think it was Brian Wilson.

258
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I'm not sure which one.

259
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One of the Beach Boys heard that album and said, this is the greatest album that's ever been created.

260
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I'm going to listen to this until I'm inspired to do something better.

261
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And so he listened to that until he was inspired to write a song called, I think, Only God Knows Why, maybe.

262
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I think maybe it's God Only Knows.

263
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And then they release an album.

264
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The Beach Boys release an album called Pet Sounds, which is one of them.

265
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This is the Beatles and the Beach Boys.

266
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These are two of the most famous bands to have ever existed.

267
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So these albums are shaping culture.

268
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at hundreds of millions of people at a time.

269
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They release an album called Pet Sound.

270
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The Beatles hear it and decide that this song,

271
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God Only Knows, is the greatest song that's ever been written.

272
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And they're not going to stop until they do something that equals it.

273
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And so they listen to that album on repeat

274
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while writing another album called Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,

275
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which was one of, it was like, at the time,

276
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it was like the most transformative thing that had ever happened in music.

277
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It was this, each, it was,

278
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it was songs that were put together in like chapters in a story.

279
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They all, they all went together.

280
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And you know this,

281
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because I'm doing this with my own music right now,

282
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where each one kind of leads into the other.

283
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But this was like, you know, making this massive thing out of, oh, instead of just three and a half minutes, we're going to put all this stuff together.

284
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But I just think about that.

285
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Like when you watch a football game and they show Andy Reid, the coach of the Chiefs, and then they show all the coaches that are tied to him.

286
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Yeah.

287
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Chips and coaching tree and stuff like that.

288
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Think about if you could have that for music.

289
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Like how cool would that be?

290
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I just, and granted, this is one of those, like, how cool would that be things that it doesn't necessarily add a whole lot of value up front that you think.

291
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But it turns out that a lot of times these how cool would that be things have underlying value adds that we haven't even considered yet.

292
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Yeah. And so, yeah, the the you cannot overstate the transformative nature of work by the hour versus work by the task, work by the job, work by the performance.

293
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You know, now we're going from paying people X amount per year to play baseball to paying them X amount per home run, X amount per single, X amount per walk, X amount per great play.

294
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We're able to have a truly equivalent structure.

295
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Like one of the things that came up in.

296
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So there was this lawfare suit against Elon Musk for the bonus that he got for Tesla.

297
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It was this guy that, you know, one of these very frivolous lawsuits where a guy buys nine shares so that he can be considered as a shareholder and then sues for some sort of breach or whatever.

298
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And it was to invalidate the bonus package that Musk got, which was the biggest.

299
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It was like a $60 billion bonus package, the biggest package that anybody had ever gotten in history.

300
00:33:04,342 --> 00:33:13,142
But he got it because he met these incredibly stringent bonus requirements.

301
00:33:13,142 --> 00:33:17,042
It was like double the company sales every single year or something like that.

302
00:33:17,262 --> 00:33:18,862
And if you don't do that, he got nothing.

303
00:33:18,962 --> 00:33:20,702
And if you did do that, he got something.

304
00:33:20,702 --> 00:33:37,302
And one of the arguments made by the prosecution there was that the negotiations for the bonus were not done in an adversarial enough nature.

305
00:33:37,302 --> 00:33:47,902
And how beautifully does that describe how beautifully screwed up the system is?

306
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Where the idea is that if you're negotiating with someone to give them a bonus for running the company that you want to see succeed, that you're supposed to be adversarial.

307
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You're on the same side.

308
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You both own the same equity.

309
00:34:07,302 --> 00:34:14,502
You know, this is, this is, you know, it really is.

310
00:34:14,622 --> 00:34:24,242
It's tantamount to just, it brings to mind, you know, all of the bad things in society.

311
00:34:24,342 --> 00:34:25,382
You said chair dampening.

312
00:34:25,582 --> 00:34:27,122
I'd never heard that term before.

313
00:34:27,922 --> 00:34:32,262
Sitting in the chair long enough, earning your money and you will see where it comes from.

314
00:34:33,262 --> 00:34:34,982
Chair dampening and clock watching.

315
00:34:34,982 --> 00:34:39,582
One of the insults on the farm, you know, is somebody shows back up and you haven't gotten very far.

316
00:34:39,682 --> 00:34:42,662
And they're like, oh, yeah, must be working by the hour today.

317
00:34:42,942 --> 00:34:43,902
Right. Right. Yeah.

318
00:34:44,082 --> 00:34:46,082
There's actually I don't know if you've heard this.

319
00:34:46,162 --> 00:34:53,662
There's what's called Parkinson's law to Parkinson's law is that work expands to fill the time allotted for it.

320
00:34:53,662 --> 00:34:59,762
Right. This is why you should never have meetings that last X amount of time.

321
00:35:00,242 --> 00:35:02,942
It should be, hey, we're going to do this and then we're going to leave.

322
00:35:02,942 --> 00:35:08,642
If you have a two-hour stand-up meeting every Monday, it will last two hours every single Monday.

323
00:35:09,962 --> 00:35:12,782
It brings to mind all of those things.

324
00:35:12,982 --> 00:35:28,502
But moving away from the adversarial nature of negotiation into an aligned incentive structure where everyone along the way is getting paid to perform.

325
00:35:32,942 --> 00:35:37,702
I'm trying to think, I mean, the gig economy is a great example of this.

326
00:35:37,922 --> 00:35:39,622
Obviously, this is kind of where it started.

327
00:35:39,622 --> 00:35:50,962
But to grow that, you just see a lot less waste in the system and a lot less attacks on the system.

328
00:35:51,182 --> 00:35:54,122
A lot less union negotiations, right?

329
00:35:54,522 --> 00:35:54,722
Right.

330
00:35:55,162 --> 00:35:55,362
Yeah.

331
00:35:56,022 --> 00:35:58,622
No, it's supposed to eliminate waste.

332
00:35:58,622 --> 00:36:26,802
In the construction example, the idea that if you have the flexibility on the completion of each task to determine if those workers are sufficient for the next task and the workers to determine if they are getting paid promptly and want to continue on to the next task, that adds a sort of flexibility that makes the whole enterprise overall resilient because you can not fail overall and instead tweak at each different step as you move along it.

333
00:36:26,802 --> 00:36:39,322
So I do think that Ivan does think that flexibility of the end result is – and stability is encouraged when you have task-based completion as you move towards that end final project.

334
00:36:39,922 --> 00:36:44,782
It allows for constant feedback.

335
00:36:45,022 --> 00:36:45,882
Right. Absolutely.

336
00:36:45,882 --> 00:36:58,242
So instead of yearly employee reviews where one time a year your performance is reviewed, then you have hourly, weekly, daily reviews.

337
00:36:58,562 --> 00:37:01,102
And all that's going to do is make you better.

338
00:37:01,222 --> 00:37:01,922
That's just coaching.

339
00:37:02,822 --> 00:37:03,662
Right on.

340
00:37:03,662 --> 00:37:16,762
Yeah, and just one of the things you mentioned a little bit earlier was kind of tracking the artistic provenance of certain ideas that artists are kind of gestating.

341
00:37:17,602 --> 00:37:20,622
And I don't know how exactly this would track onto it.

342
00:37:20,782 --> 00:37:31,362
This is very kind of brainstorming, but like AI, of course, repurposes all of humanity's cultural products to itself produce something which it claims is new.

343
00:37:31,362 --> 00:37:50,522
If there's a way to track and give value to people's inputs into an AI through some sort of lightning base, you get a microsat every time the AI drops your token, a token influenced by you or something like that, then all these – that mitigates the lawsuits based on copyright infringement.

344
00:37:50,522 --> 00:38:02,742
People aren't so worried if their input is going into an AI, if somehow they can be rewarded for having produced that thing that is then being repurposed by the AI as if it was that AI's conscious thought.

345
00:38:04,022 --> 00:38:05,862
And so, yeah, again, that's brainstorming.

346
00:38:05,922 --> 00:38:07,062
I don't know how that all plays out.

347
00:38:07,262 --> 00:38:08,522
That's something that –

348
00:38:08,522 --> 00:38:16,182
I want to think about that for a second because – so the thing about AI that people have been talking about for so long is like, oh, it will just make everything free.

349
00:38:16,182 --> 00:38:25,922
It'll make all of this information free and you'll have the sum of the world's wisdom and knowledge at your fingertips for zero cost.

350
00:38:26,102 --> 00:38:35,742
But if it is set up like that, then, yeah, then you've got micropayments being made to all of the sources that contributed to that.

351
00:38:35,982 --> 00:38:38,842
That's kind of fascinating.

352
00:38:38,842 --> 00:38:47,442
I think what we saw with DeepSeek is that the cost of AI is rapidly crashing to zero.

353
00:38:48,002 --> 00:38:52,482
Like, you know, they made a model better than any other model in the world.

354
00:38:52,582 --> 00:38:55,502
And I think it cost them $5.8 million to train it.

355
00:38:56,202 --> 00:39:05,482
According to their own self-report, there's some question on whether that's like China OPSEC or like China kind of PSYOP or whatever to say, here's how far ahead of you.

356
00:39:05,482 --> 00:39:09,342
and also to obscure the fact that they were stealing a bunch of training from,

357
00:39:09,662 --> 00:39:10,702
I get, I don't know what that is.

358
00:39:10,762 --> 00:39:13,362
This is an emergent situation as far as deep sinks capability,

359
00:39:13,562 --> 00:39:14,702
but I do agree with you.

360
00:39:14,842 --> 00:39:18,002
I mean, there is, I guess, maybe you get too much of the weeds,

361
00:39:18,002 --> 00:39:20,882
but open AI has requested some immense,

362
00:39:21,002 --> 00:39:24,982
enormous amount of money because like compute is going to become so important.

363
00:39:25,802 --> 00:39:30,222
So whether it crashes to zero, it's, I think you're, you're right.

364
00:39:30,262 --> 00:39:34,402
It's going to get marginally less costly per like query or whatever,

365
00:39:34,402 --> 00:39:42,022
even as the number of queries explodes, such as the amount of compute consumed overall is going to increase vastly.

366
00:39:42,782 --> 00:39:51,142
Yeah, I've just never thought about that idea of the AI giving basically micropayments to all of the sources,

367
00:39:51,362 --> 00:39:53,782
but it does make sense.

368
00:39:54,462 --> 00:40:00,302
It's sound, I think, in that it would resolve a lot of the issues that we have now.

369
00:40:00,302 --> 00:40:05,202
It does seem like it would be really hard to enforce, but I love the idea.

370
00:40:06,242 --> 00:40:25,382
And it does seem like – I forget if this was in Alden or Software or just something tertiary I read that Bitcoin will likely be the preferred currency of AI, even if it's given its own kind of unmotivated choice as to what to use, just given that it's permissionless and decentralized.

371
00:40:25,382 --> 00:40:29,382
And so that AI will want to use Bitcoin.

372
00:40:30,362 --> 00:40:35,642
And so micro SAT transactions will be perhaps native to AI as it develops.

373
00:40:36,882 --> 00:40:37,822
That'd be cool.

374
00:40:39,222 --> 00:40:40,322
I think it.

375
00:40:40,502 --> 00:40:40,682
Yeah.

376
00:40:41,042 --> 00:40:41,522
Yeah.

377
00:40:41,642 --> 00:40:44,882
I mean, that that is the most logical answer.

378
00:40:45,142 --> 00:40:45,402
Right.

379
00:40:45,502 --> 00:40:49,262
Because why would you know, this has been the argument for a long time.

380
00:40:49,262 --> 00:40:55,542
why would a internet native worker, which would be AI,

381
00:40:56,462 --> 00:41:00,302
why would an internet native worker use a non-native money?

382
00:41:00,582 --> 00:41:01,162
Right. Yeah.

383
00:41:01,362 --> 00:41:06,282
It would make sense that the internet native worker would use the internet native money

384
00:41:06,282 --> 00:41:10,242
because otherwise it is just added friction to the system

385
00:41:10,242 --> 00:41:13,622
and keeps you from maximizing the potential of that.

386
00:41:14,102 --> 00:41:14,282
Yeah.

387
00:41:15,062 --> 00:41:17,462
Can we talk about logistics?

388
00:41:17,462 --> 00:41:19,962
We can talk about logistics.

389
00:41:19,962 --> 00:41:37,644
Do you have a zero end point you want to focus on I am just so when I was in grad school my major professor had come from a program where he was writing algorithms for flight control um for you know for

390
00:41:37,644 --> 00:41:48,744
um, for airports. And the other day I read something, I can't remember who it was,

391
00:41:48,744 --> 00:41:54,504
some big giant in the airline industry or wherever talking about

392
00:41:54,504 --> 00:41:57,824
the uselessness of air control towers.

393
00:41:58,744 --> 00:42:04,184
Because air control towers, really, they don't...

394
00:42:04,184 --> 00:42:07,684
There's no sense for them to be up in the sky looking at things

395
00:42:07,684 --> 00:42:10,444
because they're never looking anymore.

396
00:42:10,444 --> 00:42:17,644
Everything is on a computer terminal and it's all algorithmically automated

397
00:42:17,644 --> 00:42:28,424
and it saves, you know, thousands of lives every single year by avoiding all the –

398
00:42:28,424 --> 00:42:30,864
well, it may not save lives.

399
00:42:30,984 --> 00:42:32,664
It just increases the throughput.

400
00:42:33,084 --> 00:42:36,704
You know, instead of being able to land two planes an hour, now you can land 30,

401
00:42:37,064 --> 00:42:38,224
something like that, you know.

402
00:42:39,804 --> 00:42:40,904
And it's just fast.

403
00:42:40,904 --> 00:42:47,264
If you're ever at an airport, park on the outside, like a busy airport,

404
00:42:47,264 --> 00:42:57,124
Like I'm in Denver. So Denver International Airport park there and just sit and look and watch how many planes are coming in and out.

405
00:42:57,204 --> 00:43:02,144
And they're landing like every minute or two. Right. It's in the throughput is insane.

406
00:43:02,644 --> 00:43:07,104
And so I think about this, like the logistics side of it.

407
00:43:07,104 --> 00:43:16,764
And you can take it all the way down to the guy who is installing doors on the construction site.

408
00:43:17,004 --> 00:43:19,004
And it's just the straight gig thing.

409
00:43:19,344 --> 00:43:21,784
And he's got an app on his phone.

410
00:43:22,284 --> 00:43:30,144
And that app shows him which jobs are available, what they pay, what the exact specs are, and what the location is.

411
00:43:30,944 --> 00:43:36,724
And, you know, normally he works in a five-mile radius from home.

412
00:43:36,724 --> 00:43:46,724
But now he wants to go visit his sister in Denver. And so he looks at it and he goes, hey, you know, turns out I can hit this one and this one and this one.

413
00:43:46,804 --> 00:43:54,364
And I can make my way three quarters of the way to Denver. I can pay for pay for the entire trip.

414
00:43:54,724 --> 00:44:06,504
It's the same type of work. And so what this does to me is it truly highlights the ridiculousness of my least favorite subject when I was in school was geography.

415
00:44:06,504 --> 00:44:09,304
because when I was like third or fourth grade,

416
00:44:09,664 --> 00:44:11,404
they broke out this book and they said,

417
00:44:11,524 --> 00:44:12,884
here's what the map used to look like.

418
00:44:12,984 --> 00:44:14,204
Here's what it looks like now.

419
00:44:14,544 --> 00:44:16,044
Here's what it might look like in the future.

420
00:44:16,164 --> 00:44:17,764
And I was like, this is all horseshit.

421
00:44:17,884 --> 00:44:19,764
Like this is all just made up lines.

422
00:44:20,604 --> 00:44:21,564
The joke was always, you know,

423
00:44:21,564 --> 00:44:23,384
whenever two white guys got into an argument,

424
00:44:23,384 --> 00:44:25,744
we had to redraw the maps and it kind of pissed me off

425
00:44:25,744 --> 00:44:27,364
because I had to relearn all of these names.

426
00:44:28,744 --> 00:44:30,504
But what this does,

427
00:44:30,504 --> 00:44:35,224
the logistics capability of these digital currencies

428
00:44:35,224 --> 00:44:37,864
and the smart contracts that underlie,

429
00:44:38,324 --> 00:44:40,784
it really does highlight the ridiculousness

430
00:44:40,784 --> 00:44:43,344
of some of these imaginary lines

431
00:44:43,344 --> 00:44:48,484
and the idea that when you go from here to here,

432
00:44:48,624 --> 00:44:50,284
that all of a sudden you're in a different world.

433
00:44:51,544 --> 00:44:54,124
And you are, I mean, you truly are, of course,

434
00:44:54,244 --> 00:44:57,804
but what we're going to see as a result of this

435
00:44:57,804 --> 00:45:03,324
is just so much more blending and blurring of those lines

436
00:45:03,324 --> 00:45:25,744
Where, you know, you're going to like. It is very much in the benefit of a county that is on the border to another state to allow for residents of the bordering county in the other state to compete for jobs.

437
00:45:25,744 --> 00:45:33,444
and also reciprocally to allow their customers or their people to compete for jobs in the other county.

438
00:45:33,884 --> 00:45:39,024
Because it broadens the amount of work that can be done.

439
00:45:39,144 --> 00:45:40,564
It increases the labor force.

440
00:45:40,564 --> 00:45:46,944
Anytime that you have more buyers and more sellers in a market, you have a more clear market signal.

441
00:45:47,564 --> 00:45:51,604
And you have a more efficient market clearing program.

442
00:45:51,604 --> 00:46:19,624
And so I think I think you're going to see that kind of in the beginning where these these little back and forth between, you know, between Norton County and on the top rung of counties in Kansas and the county Harlan County, I think, is the one up in Nebraska that's right north of Norton, where it's like, OK, you know, this guy's going to come down and he's going to ranch down here.

443
00:46:19,624 --> 00:46:22,604
and this guy's going to come up here and he's going to pay me first.

444
00:46:23,004 --> 00:46:26,004
I think you're going to see a lot more of that as a result of this.

445
00:46:26,124 --> 00:46:30,264
This is revolutionizing to the industry.

446
00:46:30,604 --> 00:46:39,384
Right now, it's been a very good job to be a logistics person for trucking.

447
00:46:40,264 --> 00:46:42,264
They're typically stay-at-home jobs.

448
00:46:42,404 --> 00:46:44,264
They typically make over $100,000.

449
00:46:45,304 --> 00:46:47,284
It is a pretty damn good job.

450
00:46:47,284 --> 00:46:56,724
and that's going to be replaced by an algorithm that allows the trucker to just tap, tap, tap.

451
00:46:56,724 --> 00:46:59,824
Okay, I'm taking this freight from New Jersey to California.

452
00:47:00,544 --> 00:47:06,404
And then as soon as I get to California, I can decide on the way or I can just wait.

453
00:47:06,524 --> 00:47:07,724
I can take time off.

454
00:47:07,784 --> 00:47:08,444
I can do whatever.

455
00:47:08,824 --> 00:47:11,424
And then I just get back on the app and I tap it.

456
00:47:12,044 --> 00:47:16,344
This is that Uber for everything idea.

457
00:47:17,284 --> 00:47:29,804
Where the concept of Uber eliminating the third party, eliminating the middleman, which they didn't quite do.

458
00:47:29,804 --> 00:47:36,304
They sort of missed the boat on that one where they kind of became a middleman that takes a massive percentage.

459
00:47:36,784 --> 00:47:38,904
And that's not great.

460
00:47:39,684 --> 00:47:43,524
But that Uber is coming to everything, right?

461
00:47:43,524 --> 00:47:53,264
Uber for babysitters and Uber for grandpas that are helping out around the house doing odd jobs and stuff like that.

462
00:47:53,264 --> 00:47:53,784
Yeah.

463
00:47:54,064 --> 00:48:03,904
I mean that point you note about the – so Ivan's kind of application of instant settlement to these different industries is about eliminating frictions.

464
00:48:04,544 --> 00:48:07,984
One of the biggest – a big friction is arbitrary lines on the map.

465
00:48:07,984 --> 00:48:27,724
And so, I mean, the forex market with these foreign exchange fees for when you change currencies between jurisdictions, there's also just the fact – and Ivan mentioned this in his essay on gambling – that if you're in a very regulated industry, if you remove yourself as a target of regulation, sometimes you can kind of skirt through.

466
00:48:27,724 --> 00:48:38,684
So an open source and permissionless piece of software can do things that a corporation perhaps cannot because there's no target for a regulator.

467
00:48:39,464 --> 00:48:54,184
And so if you have an open source transparent app connected to the Lightning Network, maybe it's going to allow for certain types of frictionless interstate transfers that otherwise would be caught up in red tape and exchange fees.

468
00:48:54,184 --> 00:49:06,104
And of course, we see that with remittances now, but also it definitely applies in the realm of logistics, as you mentioned, that we can integrate supply chains globally in that way.

469
00:49:06,104 --> 00:49:24,804
I guess just as a side point, this is stepping in a different direction from the essay even, but just you noted that it's always better if there's open market irrespective of arbitrary lines on the map.

470
00:49:24,804 --> 00:49:53,604
And I think we see that maybe that's not the case. If market clearance or coming up with a clear price signal is your only goal overall, perhaps, but also these seemingly arbitrary lines, we saw this play out in the US with the immigration debate. They also can mark cultural and even historic. There's reasons why we have these lines. They're not absolutely arbitrary. And they can serve as divisions that are real in the kind of lived lives of people aside from the products they buy.

471
00:49:53,604 --> 00:50:08,904
So that's maybe not an alleyway to go down, but just to note that instant settlement is maybe a market thing, but there are other factors at play that are going to keep lines on the map, perhaps, if that makes sense.

472
00:50:08,904 --> 00:50:37,864
Yeah, there's cultural differences and everything. I think anything that you do to slow down the adoption of clear market pricing, clear signals is in some way a form of protectionism or nationalism or some sort of micro version of that.

473
00:50:38,904 --> 00:50:43,824
Yeah, I mean, good or bad, whatever, it does exist and it always will.

474
00:50:46,244 --> 00:50:50,564
Yeah, removing friction is just the key here.

475
00:50:51,084 --> 00:51:06,864
When I watched Jack Mallers present, I think it was the 2022 Bitcoin conference, and he was talking about Strike and talking about the Lightning Network and talking about how he used, I think it was potato chips,

476
00:51:06,864 --> 00:51:12,344
to explain the difference between the Lightning Network and the traditional banking rails to,

477
00:51:12,344 --> 00:51:19,644
you know, to boomers and the billionaires that they were working with.

478
00:51:20,444 --> 00:51:27,624
I remember watching that and thinking like, oh, Visa and MasterCard are dead, like dead, 100% dead.

479
00:51:27,624 --> 00:51:37,344
And then I became close to someone who was in the MasterCard system.

480
00:51:38,524 --> 00:51:45,584
And I was able to hear a lot of kind of the internal talk about what they're trying to do.

481
00:51:45,704 --> 00:51:47,584
I mean, it's not internal.

482
00:51:47,724 --> 00:51:49,324
It's not privileged information or anything.

483
00:51:49,464 --> 00:51:51,884
But just like, you know, strategy and direction.

484
00:51:51,884 --> 00:52:01,144
And the constant theme was that we're going to bank on our brand.

485
00:52:01,744 --> 00:52:07,004
We're going to bank on the value of the name of MasterCard.

486
00:52:07,264 --> 00:52:09,924
And we're going to put that on new things.

487
00:52:09,924 --> 00:52:22,704
And we're going to leverage and arbitrage that brand recognizability and that consumer trust in order to attempt to stay relevant.

488
00:52:22,704 --> 00:52:23,944
and

489
00:52:23,944 --> 00:52:26,724
that

490
00:52:26,724 --> 00:52:29,704
makes me think of

491
00:52:29,704 --> 00:52:32,044
Mark Andreessen in a recent

492
00:52:32,044 --> 00:52:33,784
podcast

493
00:52:33,784 --> 00:52:35,944
with, I can't remember who it was, but

494
00:52:35,944 --> 00:52:38,004
he quoted a conversation

495
00:52:38,004 --> 00:52:40,084
he had with Elon Musk where he was asked

496
00:52:40,084 --> 00:52:40,944
about why

497
00:52:40,944 --> 00:52:43,984
they don't have like gaudy

498
00:52:43,984 --> 00:52:46,444
hood ornaments

499
00:52:46,444 --> 00:52:47,624
and stuff on Teslas

500
00:52:47,624 --> 00:52:50,304
you can barely tell that it's a

501
00:52:50,304 --> 00:52:52,084
Tesla, it has like a tiny little emblem

502
00:52:52,084 --> 00:52:57,464
on the front and maybe it says the model, but a lot of them don't even say the model.

503
00:52:58,124 --> 00:53:01,684
And he said, you know, well, the thing is that if you make the best product, then you

504
00:53:01,684 --> 00:53:02,764
don't need a brand.

505
00:53:03,084 --> 00:53:04,544
Like the brand doesn't matter.

506
00:53:05,244 --> 00:53:10,024
And I hadn't thought about that MasterCard thing for a long time.

507
00:53:10,144 --> 00:53:11,124
I hadn't thought about that.

508
00:53:11,184 --> 00:53:12,764
Oh, we're just banking on the brand.

509
00:53:12,924 --> 00:53:14,644
We're going to, because it makes sense.

510
00:53:14,644 --> 00:53:17,544
It's like, oh, you know, we're, we're Berkshire Hathaway.

511
00:53:17,924 --> 00:53:19,384
We're JP Morgan.

512
00:53:19,384 --> 00:53:27,784
And we're, you know, we're these big giants that are, we have this trusted consumer model.

513
00:53:28,504 --> 00:53:34,544
And then I got to thinking about, oh, I heard that quote and I was like, oh, we're JCPenney.

514
00:53:34,924 --> 00:53:36,424
We're Sears and Roboc.

515
00:53:36,924 --> 00:53:38,104
We're General Electric.

516
00:53:38,564 --> 00:53:39,864
We're Blockbuster.

517
00:53:39,864 --> 00:53:59,484
You know, we're all these brands that banked on their brand and failed to recognize that it was nothing more than a shift in technology that lessened the friction for the consumer in order to participate in the market.

518
00:53:59,484 --> 00:54:05,604
and to tie this clear back around into something that I think about a lot

519
00:54:05,604 --> 00:54:11,484
probably the most foundational book that I've ever read is Atomic Habits by James Clear

520
00:54:11,484 --> 00:54:19,604
and he talks about the importance of setting up yourself for success you don't achieve the level

521
00:54:19,604 --> 00:54:26,244
we don't rise to the level of our goals we fall to the level of our systems and talks about the

522
00:54:26,244 --> 00:54:30,644
importance of establishing those habits, establishing those rituals in order to get

523
00:54:30,644 --> 00:54:40,244
your goals met. The goal is not the outcome. Goal is the activity. If you're trying to lose weight

524
00:54:40,244 --> 00:54:48,484
and get jacked, then your goal is not to lift 285 pounds. Your goal is to show up at the gym

525
00:54:48,484 --> 00:54:57,504
five times a week and do the workout and do it for five years. And he mentions an example of one

526
00:54:57,504 --> 00:55:05,724
guy who lost like a hundred pounds by creating a gym habit that he started solely by going to the

527
00:55:05,724 --> 00:55:10,904
gym. Like he first started by, I'm going to put my shoes on and I'm going to walk out the door

528
00:55:10,904 --> 00:55:14,724
and I'm going to walk back. And he did that for a week. And the next week it was like, I'm going

529
00:55:14,724 --> 00:55:19,084
to put my shoes on. I'm going to walk out the door. I'm going to drive by the gym and then home.

530
00:55:19,464 --> 00:55:24,384
The third week, I'm going to go into the gym for five minutes and I put him home. And so he's just

531
00:55:24,384 --> 00:55:31,224
like building upon this, building upon this. And what he's doing is he is ritualizing all of these

532
00:55:31,224 --> 00:55:38,904
micro habits that you have to do in order to get there. You have to have your gym clothes ready.

533
00:55:38,904 --> 00:55:44,704
I remember thinking when I read that, I remember thinking, dude, that hits me so hard because there

534
00:55:44,704 --> 00:55:51,484
have been times when I wanted to go to the gym and I was ready and I did not go to the gym because

535
00:55:51,484 --> 00:55:57,524
I could not find the sock that I wanted to. Like I would look at my, oh, I want to wear these socks.

536
00:55:57,844 --> 00:56:03,604
And I'm like, ah, but I can only find one of them. I have 20 other pairs of socks, but I was really

537
00:56:03,604 --> 00:56:09,724
set on this. And that friction, that decision-making friction right there is what kept me from

538
00:56:09,724 --> 00:56:18,484
achieving the goal. And so I think that Ivan accurately represents that everything about

539
00:56:18,484 --> 00:56:24,804
bettering the consumer experience is about removing friction. It's about, we talked about

540
00:56:24,804 --> 00:56:29,144
this earlier, actually off camera, but it's removing the pain point. What is your pain point?

541
00:56:29,604 --> 00:56:36,024
What is the thing that makes it difficult for you to engage in this so that you may not do it

542
00:56:36,024 --> 00:56:41,964
100% of the time, even though you want to do it 100% of the time, you want to give your best

543
00:56:41,964 --> 00:56:47,704
effort. Like nobody, we all want to give our best effort. Nobody feels good about showing up for a

544
00:56:47,704 --> 00:56:54,624
job and slacking off and getting paid shit per hour, um, and doing even shittier work per hour

545
00:56:54,624 --> 00:56:59,324
in order to get that. Like nobody goes home and feels good about that. Nobody writes books about

546
00:56:59,324 --> 00:57:09,164
that. Nobody inspires people by doing that. Um, what you do is you, um, you do create, uh, a hunger

547
00:57:09,164 --> 00:57:17,764
for something like this, a hunger for a pain point removed experience, a hunger for the growth of a

548
00:57:17,764 --> 00:57:25,804
frictionless economy. Um, and, and people that are just excited about being involved in that.

549
00:57:25,804 --> 00:57:33,344
I think there's a lot of joy that is right around the corner looking at those things.

550
00:57:33,944 --> 00:57:43,104
No, I mean it takes us down to one of the key insights from Ivan's essay series of the transformative shift of pay for work from pay for time.

551
00:57:43,824 --> 00:57:52,204
To quote Ivan, quote, work transforms us, makes us better, faster, stronger, and more skillful versions of our former selves.

552
00:57:52,604 --> 00:57:53,804
And who doesn't want that, right?

553
00:57:53,804 --> 00:58:20,064
I mean, who doesn't? That's to be fully human is to always be improving yourself and becoming what you can become. And so his ideas like salary jobs don't incentivize that. They punish that. They generally, I mean, you can have other types of incentive structures, but generally they punish people who want to develop themselves through their work because, you know, that's an extra effort the person has to take and they're not being paid for that.

554
00:58:20,064 --> 00:58:23,104
They're just being paid for the time they spend at that place.

555
00:58:23,264 --> 00:58:27,364
And so this is a question I have for you, Lucas, and maybe just a general reflection

556
00:58:27,364 --> 00:58:29,644
point for anybody who's had these disparate experiences.

557
00:58:30,204 --> 00:58:36,784
Did you, I mean, you've worked both salaried jobs and also done kind of task per task gig

558
00:58:36,784 --> 00:58:37,804
economy work.

559
00:58:38,404 --> 00:58:44,224
And I'm just wondering if you see, if Ivan's insights track onto your own personal experience,

560
00:58:44,244 --> 00:58:48,144
and of course, it's not going to be perfect because the nature of the gig economy jobs

561
00:58:48,144 --> 00:58:52,224
just oftentimes people take them in a downtime because they need to do some

562
00:58:52,224 --> 00:58:54,604
work. So it's not what they would ideally want to be doing,

563
00:58:54,724 --> 00:58:55,684
but do you,

564
00:58:55,864 --> 00:59:00,284
any of these psychological insights that Ivan kind of begins to feel out as

565
00:59:00,284 --> 00:59:03,904
far as like enabling people to self-improve,

566
00:59:04,304 --> 00:59:09,564
did you see that in kind of gig versus salaried work or any sort of the

567
00:59:09,564 --> 00:59:10,404
notes?

568
00:59:11,484 --> 00:59:14,364
Yeah. So just to give some background.

569
00:59:14,364 --> 00:59:19,924
So what you're referencing is my time as a musician and a band leader, which would be the gig side.

570
00:59:20,684 --> 00:59:33,944
And then my experience in banking and finance and sales, which each of those roles, none of those roles were purely salary.

571
00:59:34,144 --> 00:59:36,504
They each were some sort of performance.

572
00:59:36,504 --> 00:59:38,644
They had some sort of performance based aspect.

573
00:59:38,644 --> 00:59:53,804
But yeah, the first thing that came to mind when you were talking about that was this quote that I think the like the most addictive things in life are heroin and a bi-monthly paycheck or something like that.

574
00:59:53,804 --> 01:00:17,164
But I can tell you that the difference of the people that are drawn to the gig economy and the people that are working a salaried job with a 401k and team performance goals, not individual performance goals,

575
01:00:17,164 --> 01:00:36,524
where the team performance goals are 20% performance and 80% staying in line with whatever sycophantic commandments have been laid down as the company culture that you have to step to.

576
01:00:39,204 --> 01:00:41,424
I'll just give a couple observations.

577
01:00:43,384 --> 01:00:44,964
Salaried folks are fatter.

578
01:00:44,964 --> 01:00:49,104
like that's a physical observation that I think is very consistent.

579
01:00:49,324 --> 01:00:53,984
They're less healthy. Um, I don't see them at the gym.

580
01:00:53,984 --> 01:00:54,484
Um,

581
01:00:56,584 --> 01:01:07,824
I am constantly shocked at the hypocritical nature of people involved in those

582
01:01:07,824 --> 01:01:14,884
industries who have something on their LinkedIn profile or put up something

583
01:01:14,884 --> 01:01:22,064
on Instagram to show how they went out of the way and above and beyond to serve a customer.

584
01:01:22,904 --> 01:01:31,904
But the back end of that is that when a customer calls that they aren't particularly fond of

585
01:01:31,904 --> 01:01:40,824
and they happen to be watching a movie at work, then they just say, meh, I'll do it later.

586
01:01:40,824 --> 01:01:53,104
Or even more insidious is when an employee who they aren't particularly fond of wants them to do something that is their job.

587
01:01:54,004 --> 01:01:56,864
Then they slow play it and knock it down.

588
01:01:57,124 --> 01:02:01,824
So you have these internal politics that end up punishing the customer.

589
01:02:03,964 --> 01:02:21,046
And really you never see that You are a consumer and you do not realize how many times in your life that your consumer experience has suffered because John in sales was having an argument with Kathy in accounting

590
01:02:21,906 --> 01:02:23,506
Like, you have no clue.

591
01:02:23,506 --> 01:02:42,606
Um, and, and these are very, you know, another observation is that these are, these salary, um, kind of, uh, kept houses, house mice, house mouse jobs.

592
01:02:43,186 --> 01:02:44,846
They are very incestual.

593
01:02:44,846 --> 01:02:51,566
you know they they encourage even though there's always hr against it there's always these

594
01:02:51,566 --> 01:02:59,286
inner office romances and dramas going on that end up affecting the bottom line of the company

595
01:02:59,286 --> 01:03:07,306
sometimes in massive ways like truly massive ways but at the very least in small enough ways

596
01:03:07,306 --> 01:03:11,646
that can't be noticed, but are felt over time.

597
01:03:12,286 --> 01:03:15,226
So yeah, that would be kind of mine.

598
01:03:15,526 --> 01:03:16,706
But I want to hear your thoughts.

599
01:03:16,706 --> 01:03:24,866
Well, I think just to mention, like, so your observation that health is one of the emergent

600
01:03:24,866 --> 01:03:29,486
things impacted when you are paid for time rather than like work rendered.

601
01:03:30,066 --> 01:03:32,306
And I mean, it just there's probably a lot of it.

602
01:03:32,366 --> 01:03:33,586
I think that is generally true.

603
01:03:33,586 --> 01:03:51,926
And I think there's probably a lot of explanations, like, because if people aren't encouraged to develop a skill set through reward for task completion, your life is just generally and vaguely more depressing if you're not cultivating a craft, but instead you're just like cultivating the ability to while away your time.

604
01:03:51,926 --> 01:03:59,646
another quote from Ivan that I think doubles down or fleshes out this point the result

605
01:03:59,646 --> 01:04:06,606
of the pay for time what kind of model is a culture of dependency where the quest for easy

606
01:04:06,606 --> 01:04:11,886
money overshadows the pursuit of self-improvement so he says that and then I want to pause there

607
01:04:11,886 --> 01:04:18,766
because the next sentence is striking he poses a question how many steps are we from enslaving our

608
01:04:18,766 --> 01:04:25,346
own children to avoid working. And that's maybe a somewhat hyperbolic way of making the point

609
01:04:25,346 --> 01:04:32,086
that once you begin to go down that road of money for nothing, which is the essence of the fiat

610
01:04:32,086 --> 01:04:39,546
mindset of just being paid for sitting or being in a place or even not being in a place, just being

611
01:04:39,546 --> 01:04:46,646
paid for duration of time expended, then it's an easy shift into, I want to be paid for the future

612
01:04:46,646 --> 01:04:52,726
time of other people. And that's the essence of the fiat money printer, where we spend without

613
01:04:52,726 --> 01:04:58,106
balancing through taxation, where we accrue a massive deficit and pass it on to the future.

614
01:04:58,466 --> 01:05:07,566
We use that fiat mechanic to steal value from future generations. We have social security,

615
01:05:07,726 --> 01:05:12,426
which is not funded, which is going to run out in 2034 or something like that,

616
01:05:12,426 --> 01:05:16,746
probably quicker if things keep on accelerating. So I think that he makes an actual, you know,

617
01:05:16,766 --> 01:05:21,346
it sounds hyperbolic, but it's a very good point. How many steps are we from enslaving our own

618
01:05:21,346 --> 01:05:27,426
children to avoid working? We don't want to work now. So we accrue deficits and push them off onto

619
01:05:27,426 --> 01:05:32,166
future generations that are going to have to deal with them. And so it's like, it's very insidious

620
01:05:32,166 --> 01:05:38,426
that pay for time model. And I don't think that, I mean, just the fact that it bubbles out

621
01:05:38,426 --> 01:05:44,366
unconsciously in the form of one's health shows how deep it is in our culture. And, you know,

622
01:05:44,386 --> 01:05:47,846
it's something that we would need an anthropologist, a sociologist to really

623
01:05:47,846 --> 01:05:53,486
get deep and kind of plumb out the implications of what a switch to a pay for work model would mean.

624
01:05:53,906 --> 01:06:01,366
Yeah, I mean, I personally witnessed people slow walk multi-million dollar deals to the plate so

625
01:06:01,366 --> 01:06:11,346
that the sale could go on next quarter or next month or next year because they had already

626
01:06:11,346 --> 01:06:13,586
hit their bonus incentives or something.

627
01:06:13,726 --> 01:06:16,446
So they literally had no incentive to do anything different.

628
01:06:17,546 --> 01:06:19,486
And that's tens of thousands.

629
01:06:19,566 --> 01:06:26,026
If you're talking about a $10 million deal, that's tens of thousands of dollars that is

630
01:06:26,026 --> 01:06:28,146
lost in the system by slow playing that.

631
01:06:28,766 --> 01:06:30,626
There's loss on both sides.

632
01:06:30,626 --> 01:06:37,246
it truly does lead to a corruption of skills. And the other side is the iron sharpens iron,

633
01:06:37,846 --> 01:06:46,466
is that when you're out there and you are competing, that you have a real life barometer

634
01:06:46,466 --> 01:06:53,706
of your skill because it's being measured in terms of what you get paid for. The quote that

635
01:06:53,706 --> 01:06:59,066
money isn't the best way of measuring a man, but it's the best one we have, I think is really

636
01:06:59,066 --> 01:07:05,506
applicable, where it's like, yeah, what value do you contribute? And how does the world,

637
01:07:05,646 --> 01:07:10,006
how does the world view that? And what are they willing to pay in return for that?

638
01:07:11,226 --> 01:07:16,866
I wanted to know about, so like you, so I experienced this, I'm going to lay a little

639
01:07:16,866 --> 01:07:22,166
background, a little groundwork before I ask this question and kind of throw it back to you. But

640
01:07:22,166 --> 01:07:32,706
So Grant and I lived together. Grant was kind enough to allow me to stay with him in Washington for a couple months.

641
01:07:32,706 --> 01:07:41,486
And I got to witness the most insane work ethic I've ever seen outside of my mother, except my mother doesn't get up as early as you.

642
01:07:41,926 --> 01:07:44,066
So I think you've even got her beat.

643
01:07:45,126 --> 01:07:47,426
I'm spiritually older than your mother is what you're saying.

644
01:07:47,846 --> 01:07:48,786
You may be.

645
01:07:48,786 --> 01:07:56,566
yeah there's there's a shot there's a chance but you know so i i got up to washington i'm like hey

646
01:07:56,566 --> 01:08:00,166
i'm gonna move in with my buddy we're gonna have fun there's all this outdoor stuff to do there's

647
01:08:00,166 --> 01:08:06,646
all this blah blah blah i was there for three months and i think that there was i think that

648
01:08:06,646 --> 01:08:11,306
there was one full day that you didn't work and i think that there was one half day that you didn't

649
01:08:11,306 --> 01:08:19,266
work. Um, but every single other, like most Sundays you would work eight hours. Most Saturdays

650
01:08:19,266 --> 01:08:27,326
you would work like 10, probably something like that. Eight to 10. Most days you would work, um,

651
01:08:27,326 --> 01:08:39,946
12 to 14. Um, and this was in a situation where, um, your cohorts were, uh, nine to fivers,

652
01:08:39,946 --> 01:08:47,506
primarily a lot of, a lot of them. And so I'm interested to see, because I know that I have

653
01:08:47,506 --> 01:08:52,466
very much fallen victim to the trap of, well, if I'm not going to get paid more, I'm not going to

654
01:08:52,466 --> 01:08:58,126
work more. Um, it, you know, I'm, I'm a human, I'm a learning, I'm a human, I'm a learning machine.

655
01:08:58,586 --> 01:09:06,606
And it is a feature, not a bug that when you put someone into a program where they do not get paid

656
01:09:06,606 --> 01:09:13,686
more for more performance, that they adjust to that system. That's learning. That's not people

657
01:09:13,686 --> 01:09:18,566
taking advantage of the system. That is learning the system and treating the system as it was meant

658
01:09:18,566 --> 01:09:25,746
to be treated, which is to make people time slaves. And so I'm curious to know what your

659
01:09:25,746 --> 01:09:32,866
thoughts are on that, because I feel like you were somewhat immune to it. Although I'm certain that

660
01:09:32,866 --> 01:09:37,206
there were times where it just felt completely different from that,

661
01:09:37,286 --> 01:09:39,126
where you're like, oh, I'm just going to stare at this clock

662
01:09:39,126 --> 01:09:40,506
and watch my life tick away.

663
01:09:41,386 --> 01:09:43,406
What's your kind of experience been in that,

664
01:09:43,486 --> 01:09:44,586
especially working in law?

665
01:09:44,706 --> 01:09:47,186
Because lawyers charge by the hour.

666
01:09:47,186 --> 01:09:47,866
Yeah.

667
01:09:49,866 --> 01:09:55,626
So a lot of what Ivan says resonates with me

668
01:09:55,626 --> 01:10:01,966
as far as work is a medium for improving one's skill set,

669
01:10:01,966 --> 01:10:17,146
And it's a way that we, you know, he doesn't use these terms, but when you develop a craft, you develop yourself. And I just think that like that material feedback with the world reaches back into you and changes who you are for the better. And it's essential that we do that.

670
01:10:17,146 --> 01:10:39,046
So the work that I was doing as an attorney was salaried. So it was not, I wasn't earning per hour, but you're right that I was working way beyond the nine to five that was set for me. I was working such that, that I got in trouble for working too much because people, they couldn't understand that like the motivation for my work was internal.

671
01:10:39,046 --> 01:10:53,726
I became connected to my clients and really wanted to help them in the specific legal issues that I was working on with them, but also that notion of a craft where I saw what I was doing, saw the ways to improve it, and saw the ways that improving that craft would improve myself.

672
01:10:53,726 --> 01:11:17,886
And so I really wanted to double down into it, but they did not have an incentive structure to reward that, to acknowledge it. And so, I mean, long story short, I'm no longer working at that job. And you could call it burnout or you could just call it, you know, realizing that your incentives, the incentive structure is not matching up with, you know, the way that you actually operate.

673
01:11:17,886 --> 01:11:25,866
And I saw that to be sustainable in that job, I would have to dial back my work ethic, essentially.

674
01:11:26,426 --> 01:11:30,446
I would have to dial back the development of my craft and what I was doing.

675
01:11:30,626 --> 01:11:36,786
And so that this thing, the work I was doing had this perverse incentive that was constantly nagging at me.

676
01:11:37,026 --> 01:11:41,906
It was true that the more work that I did, the less that I was paid because you don't get more if you work more hours.

677
01:11:41,906 --> 01:11:54,366
But I just couldn't stand that insidious dynamic where I was being told to make myself less because to develop your craft less, to care less for the clients that you're assisting.

678
01:11:55,546 --> 01:12:08,426
And so a pay-for-work model really aligns incentives in a way that maybe I would still be working where I was or in the same area of law if incentives had been more properly aligned.

679
01:12:08,426 --> 01:12:18,386
So it just goes back to Ivan's central point that if you don't align incentives within a system, you're going to – he notes this.

680
01:12:18,566 --> 01:12:31,966
Employee retention is one area that's going to be tough because people – I think the best people in the job do want to deploy and develop themselves within the framework of their work.

681
01:12:31,966 --> 01:12:38,206
There are some times in your life where you just need a paycheck to pay the rent and you're going to do the Panera Bread Cashier or whatever.

682
01:12:38,426 --> 01:12:51,246
But, you know, for the most part, we're hoping to find a job that's going to engage us in the world we live in, enable us to make the world better through the skills we have, and enable us to sharpen ourselves as we do that.

683
01:12:51,346 --> 01:12:54,066
And so if you're on line incentives, you lose people like that.

684
01:12:54,126 --> 01:12:55,846
And it's why I don't work where I used to work.

685
01:12:56,626 --> 01:12:56,726
Yeah.

686
01:12:56,846 --> 01:12:59,766
And just for clarification, it was by choice.

687
01:12:59,886 --> 01:13:01,666
It's not as though you were asked to leave.

688
01:13:02,086 --> 01:13:02,866
No, that's correct.

689
01:13:02,986 --> 01:13:03,146
Yeah.

690
01:13:03,386 --> 01:13:05,486
And so that goes to the employee retention thing, right?

691
01:13:05,486 --> 01:13:08,346
Yeah, if they'd had better incentives for retaining.

692
01:13:08,966 --> 01:13:17,306
I mean, maybe that's one of the perverse things is certain types of work don't want to retain people who work hard because it makes others feel bad.

693
01:13:17,406 --> 01:13:29,966
And I don't want to say that that was the case with my cohort necessarily, but I think it perhaps was the general culture of that employer where some people felt bad if others worked more than they did.

694
01:13:29,966 --> 01:13:42,806
Yeah, I think this highlights the hypocritical nature of businesses that bring together their employees and try to unite them under a team aspect that we're all in this together.

695
01:13:42,806 --> 01:13:50,466
And because we're all in this together, that we're all going to have the same standards and we're all going to step to the same beat.

696
01:13:50,466 --> 01:14:11,366
But the glaring issue with that that arises, which is what you noted, is that when somebody in that system puts forth extra effort, then those around them look upon that derisively and they feel as though that person is making them look bad.

697
01:14:11,366 --> 01:14:17,066
Now take that exact same thing and put it on an actual team, a football team.

698
01:14:17,946 --> 01:14:37,506
And you've got the guy who stays after practice and throws 50 more passes, who shows up early and makes sure he gets a stretching in, who's hitting his early morning workouts, who is being overly exuberant in all aspects.

699
01:14:38,106 --> 01:14:41,026
People don't go up to that person and tell them to tone down.

700
01:14:41,366 --> 01:14:44,186
That's not the nail that they hit in order to knock down.

701
01:14:44,286 --> 01:14:46,666
That is the person that they look to as the inspiration.

702
01:14:47,146 --> 01:14:53,306
That's the person that builds this groundswell of other individuals saying, oh, that's possible.

703
01:14:53,766 --> 01:14:55,626
I could put forth this effort.

704
01:14:55,866 --> 01:14:58,166
I could get this much better.

705
01:14:58,166 --> 01:15:07,166
I could have this approach that I'm just here to get better.

706
01:15:07,166 --> 01:15:08,986
I'm not here to

707
01:15:08,986 --> 01:15:10,786
to just

708
01:15:10,786 --> 01:15:13,426
not be somewhere else for a while

709
01:15:13,426 --> 01:15:15,426
and those are the people that

710
01:15:15,426 --> 01:15:17,326
end up with the C on their

711
01:15:17,326 --> 01:15:19,306
uniform, those are the people that are

712
01:15:19,306 --> 01:15:20,346
truly inspiring, so

713
01:15:20,346 --> 01:15:22,326
what's the C on the uniform? I'm not familiar with it

714
01:15:22,326 --> 01:15:24,086
Captain, yeah sorry

715
01:15:24,086 --> 01:15:25,986
yeah I should have said that

716
01:15:25,986 --> 01:15:29,106
but I think it just truly highlights

717
01:15:29,106 --> 01:15:30,466
no absolutely

718
01:15:30,466 --> 01:15:32,266
all these buzzwords like oh we're

719
01:15:32,266 --> 01:15:34,646
in this together, we're on the same team

720
01:15:34,646 --> 01:15:36,386
no you're not

721
01:15:36,386 --> 01:15:41,706
By killing individual performance, you end up killing the team.

722
01:15:42,426 --> 01:15:53,006
Each team, you know, when a team executes individually in order to achieve as a group.

723
01:15:53,326 --> 01:16:03,386
And so you have to have people who are striving to do the best at what they do, regardless of how it makes someone else feel about their own effort.

724
01:16:03,386 --> 01:16:11,366
Right. And you can't even necessarily blame the clock watcher. They have just fully adopted the incentives of the system they're within. They're very intelligent.

725
01:16:11,366 --> 01:16:12,986
Like I said, that's work.

726
01:16:13,526 --> 01:16:13,686
Right.

727
01:16:14,546 --> 01:16:27,026
It legitimately is a threat to their mode of operation if someone is saying we should work at this more intense rhythm or work more so that we can fully deploy and develop our craft.

728
01:16:27,126 --> 01:16:31,386
And the clock watcher says, I'm not rewarded for that and neither are you.

729
01:16:31,386 --> 01:16:33,106
And so step back.

730
01:16:33,506 --> 01:16:36,326
And it's an excellent metaphor you give of the football team.

731
01:16:36,326 --> 01:17:00,546
You know, maybe one aspect of switching to a pay for work system is the return of like, maybe to put too highfalutin language on or something, but it's like a return to everyday heroism where you see people who do when you are inspired to better yourself by seeing the people around you, bettering themselves and working hard rather than trying to pull them down.

732
01:17:00,646 --> 01:17:02,866
So you aren't expected to work as hard as they do.

733
01:17:02,866 --> 01:17:08,226
yeah i think the conclusion that we can come to out of this is that you are a very slow learner

734
01:17:08,226 --> 01:17:13,706
yeah i i've concluded that myself various times so

735
01:17:13,706 --> 01:17:19,346
and by the way it's like that's the same thing with my mom my mom works a state job

736
01:17:19,346 --> 01:17:25,486
and uh it's one of those jobs that like you it would be very difficult to be fired from that job

737
01:17:25,486 --> 01:17:33,366
Yeah. You would have to do a lot as my master, my major professor in grad school.

738
01:17:34,826 --> 01:17:41,106
He got tenure when I was 20 or 21. I didn't know him very well. I just kind of hung out with him

739
01:17:41,106 --> 01:17:47,086
because he was the major professor of some other friends. And he was a cool guy. And he on Friday

740
01:17:47,086 --> 01:17:53,326
nights, we would all gather at his house and all the poor broke college students would come over and

741
01:17:53,326 --> 01:17:59,046
we'd drink his beer and I'd play my guitar on the back patio and we'd smoke cigars and talk like we

742
01:17:59,046 --> 01:18:05,886
knew shit. And, um, and he was a young guy. He was 40 when he got, um, when he got tenure or maybe

743
01:18:05,886 --> 01:18:11,926
even earlier than that. And his wife invited me to his tenure celebration party. And I was like,

744
01:18:11,926 --> 01:18:18,246
I don't know what tenure is. Um, and, and, uh, so I asked him, I said, what does tenure mean?

745
01:18:18,246 --> 01:18:23,566
And like, what did, what actually does that do? He goes, well, he goes, put it this way. He goes,

746
01:18:23,606 --> 01:18:28,926
you could, uh, you could, uh, sexually offend someone twice and they can't like it either time

747
01:18:28,926 --> 01:18:34,766
before you even, before they even think about firing you. And they're like, yeah, that's pretty

748
01:18:34,766 --> 01:18:39,666
much what a state job is. But yeah, so my mom is the same way. She works 80 hours a week at a job

749
01:18:39,666 --> 01:18:47,186
that she could very, very easily work 15 hours a week at, um, and, and still get the same

750
01:18:47,186 --> 01:18:52,206
recognition. And, and she gets all of these recognitions for things that she does and goes

751
01:18:52,206 --> 01:18:58,666
way above and beyond and stuff. And, um, I have noticed negative sentiment from people around her

752
01:18:58,666 --> 01:19:02,826
that, you know, it's, Hey, you're making us look bad. Like we're, we're just here to, you know,

753
01:19:02,906 --> 01:19:08,326
we're just here to punch the time and get out. So yeah, I, I completely understand that. I see

754
01:19:08,326 --> 01:19:14,486
it around my life. And, and now I, I love how Ivan has put this into a framework where I can now,

755
01:19:14,486 --> 01:19:18,546
I can now view my mother and you as slow learners and myself,

756
01:19:18,726 --> 01:19:19,466
myself,

757
01:19:19,686 --> 01:19:19,986
I can,

758
01:19:20,066 --> 01:19:21,626
I can congratulate my,

759
01:19:22,206 --> 01:19:22,566
um,

760
01:19:23,186 --> 01:19:26,346
at times lazy approach to performance,

761
01:19:26,346 --> 01:19:26,886
uh,

762
01:19:26,886 --> 01:19:27,806
because I was not,

763
01:19:28,006 --> 01:19:28,366
um,

764
01:19:28,446 --> 01:19:29,866
because I was not incentivized.

765
01:19:29,866 --> 01:19:32,106
I can congratulate myself for being intelligent.

766
01:19:32,366 --> 01:19:32,886
Yeah.

767
01:19:33,006 --> 01:19:33,286
Yeah.

768
01:19:33,426 --> 01:19:33,726
No,

769
01:19:33,806 --> 01:19:35,426
it's all about building me up.

770
01:19:35,426 --> 01:19:38,626
No resisting perverse incentives in a slow,

771
01:19:38,726 --> 01:19:39,246
uh,

772
01:19:39,246 --> 01:19:42,306
reticent fashion is definitely makes one a slow learner.

773
01:19:42,306 --> 01:19:46,126
Best just to get in the system and operate like the clog that we were born to be.

774
01:19:46,766 --> 01:19:58,046
So this essay has – we've jumped over – I think we've illustrated the broad and general concepts that Ivan wants to reveal by examining various industries.

775
01:19:58,786 --> 01:20:00,806
We've also looked at a couple of the specific industries.

776
01:20:01,606 --> 01:20:09,206
Within that, just to drop some Easter eggs, it's worth reading the entirety of this series because he drops a lot of different interesting examples.

777
01:20:09,206 --> 01:20:14,626
Again, he's applying this idea of what instant settlement might mean in different industries.

778
01:20:15,086 --> 01:20:24,426
And along the way, he kind of casually talks about how influencers could – their incentives could be more aligned with the products that they are acting as the marketers for.

779
01:20:25,086 --> 01:20:34,206
He talks about how taxis, you could revolutionize the way that drivers and passengers kind of contract with the taxi driver for the duration of the ride.

780
01:20:34,206 --> 01:20:48,246
He even talks about how streaming itself seems like pay for time, but it can be also, you know, it's payment for such a small subslice of time. It almost approximates the type of pay for work. And he talks about all these different things in this essay series.

781
01:20:48,246 --> 01:21:04,746
So I would encourage, I guess, if you want to dial in any topics to further discuss, Lucas, we can. But I would encourage everybody to read this essay and see all the different examples he gives. And then he has two quotes at the end that he says are kind of his final message.

782
01:21:05,326 --> 01:21:06,626
One, build utility.

783
01:21:06,866 --> 01:21:08,686
Do not promise future fortunes.

784
01:21:09,986 --> 01:21:13,666
And then second, do not wait or ask permission to do work.

785
01:21:13,966 --> 01:21:15,926
Do the work that you want to do.

786
01:21:16,006 --> 01:21:21,046
And I would encourage everybody to read these essays with that latter sentiment in mind.

787
01:21:21,466 --> 01:21:22,946
Do the work that you want to do.

788
01:21:22,946 --> 01:21:30,746
If you don't understand your industry and industry perfectly, you can still begin to think about how it can be improved with instant settlement.

789
01:21:30,746 --> 01:21:35,266
to maybe even talk with an app developer, someone like Breeze,

790
01:21:35,326 --> 01:21:39,866
about what your industry, how Lightning could be integrated into that.

791
01:21:40,726 --> 01:21:43,526
And just, yeah, keep on thinking, keep on reading,

792
01:21:43,686 --> 01:21:47,166
keep on applying these things that you read about Bitcoin to the world

793
01:21:47,166 --> 01:21:51,426
because we really are on the forefront of how Bitcoin is going to fix all of this.

794
01:21:52,466 --> 01:21:55,846
Yeah, I loved it. I think Ivan did a killer job.

795
01:21:56,846 --> 01:22:00,506
I really enjoyed this discussion because it allowed me to kind of wander through

796
01:22:00,506 --> 01:22:08,506
a bunch of life experiences and think about some people in my life that, um, I can view in a,

797
01:22:08,506 --> 01:22:13,786
in a different light and look upon them favorably and, uh, with grace. And so,

798
01:22:13,846 --> 01:22:19,346
yeah, I'm thrilled that I'm thrilled that we had this discussion and, uh, I'm looking forward to

799
01:22:19,346 --> 01:22:24,146
the, uh, to the next one. Um, this has been very fun. You got anything else? That's it. Thanks for

800
01:22:24,146 --> 01:22:29,126
joining along. I appreciate it, man. All right, gang, if you can't, uh, what do they say? If they

801
01:22:29,126 --> 01:22:32,586
don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy. Have a great day.