The World Changing Podcast

Greg: Welcome to the World Changing podcast. Was that too much? Yeah, that was probably too much, but let's keep it, we'll keep it anyway. Uh, how about this? If we do the podcast and the world doesn't change, Then we can take that out. Welcome to the World Changing podcast, where we deconstruct the projects and products that are moving us towards a decentralized and carbon-free future.
We'll talk to the skeptics, supporters, and innovators in the fields that depend on electricity to run their industries, which is changing every single day. I'm your host, Greg Robinson, co-founder of Aston Labs, a decentralized infrastructure company, and on the other side of the camera here, we. Flo Lumsden our producer, and she will make sure that the train stays on the tracks while we do this.
So, ed and I have known each other for 15 years. And I started playing in a band while I was in college. Uh, we. Written hundreds of songs together. And while we were playing in the band. Writing hundreds of songs together. Uh, and that was sort of a, a large focus of my life. Ed meanwhile was writing foundational software for, uh, airline mobile apps. ed sold his first software to Soft Disk when he was 15 years old and he went to Cornell. When he graduated from Cornell. He did his tour at Microsoft and Google writing foundational software for the internet,
ed's our first podcast guest for a lot of reasons. Uh, Some of it our history, We've started two companies together. but also because, you know, this conversation that we have, we go from exploring is the weight of online identities, a k a, why Ed doesn't really wanna do this podcast. Um, we talk about how Ed discovered code at a very young age, and also why we started Aston Labs.
Enjoy this, uh, wide ranging conversation with my co-founder and bff Ed Mackenzie.
So tell me things. Yeah. So, um, isn't that so funny? It's like as soon as you hit the recording and then there's like the pressure for it to be, Actually, I read a, a blog post about this the other day. It's probably like Seth Godin's blog or something, which I think is like quantum entangled with my brain.
It was something about like, ma, you know, making something big or making something great like by default is just not gonna be great. It's like the pressure of making something great actually makes you, you fail at it.
Ed: Uh, reminds me actually of this, my bosses, I haven't seen it in forever. There was an episode of Store Trek Next Generation where there is some kind of like time loop and there's this weird like space time hole where this ship from 80 years ago is emerging from the wormhole and it's on a collision course with the enterprise and they try to avoid it and they collide.
Commercial break, it starts over again. Wormhole ship comes out, they try something different, they collide. And again, I'm forgetting the details, , but it turns out that the solution is, they've gotta do the thing that they don't wanna do, which is go through the wormhole and that solves the, the, it's the perfect
Greg: like Yeah.
You know, obstacle is the way as this.
Ed: Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah.
Greg: I was thinking about this. Uh, this podcast is not about stoic philosophy, anything. Here we are. It's not . It's about everything and nothing. But I was thinking about this whole idea of being reluctant to anchor something on the internet.
Here we, here we are, we spend most of our days in Crypto and blockchain and these sort of immutable ledgers and we're like, Oh, this is so cool. You can do something. And it's there forever. And then meanwhile you're like, you know, we're thinking about, okay, well let's, let's record us talking about things that we think today and like that becomes immutable on the internet.
And we're like, Oh, that sounds terrible. So like in this dichotomy of like, we want everything, we want all content to be like immutable, but then we also want it to be like not.
Ed: My issue with who wrote this wrote a while ago that the issue with Facebook is that, in real life we have multiple identities.
You know, I have my identity when I'm talking to you have my identity when I'm talking to my parents or my friends or whoever. So we have. Multiple disparate identities that they overlap, but they're different people. And this was around that time Facebook was forcing everybody into real names. And your identity here is like, you have one identity that's everywhere and it's natural thing to wanna have different identities.
You know, I talked to you about other things. So I talked to, my parents about vice versa. And it's weird to be forced into having one identity everywhere. There's sort of this, there's value in having your transactions frozen forever on the blockchain so you can verify them and look back on them and be able to, prove things happen.
But it feels different. Human interactions.
Greg: Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, there always is that, that that feeling of, I mean there also is, is this really important transition that I feel like we're all having to go through as a society now that like information whether true, false or inconclusive is completely widespread.
but it's like we need a new set of understanding or, or a new set of sayings that, like maybe it's okay to say something today that, in a week from now you get a new piece of information and then you, and then you modify your thinking and whatever you said at the timestamp seven days ago.
Overwritten in some way, but it's not cuz it's still there. And if someone only sees your seven day ago identity, then your new current mode of operation cannot be, you know, you can't be judged on who you are today. You're sort of being judged by this, by who you are in the past. And I think that's an interesting dilemma of mutability in that sense.
Like this is not a new concept, right? Like this is not,
Ed: it's like we need a cultural shift though, because if you're a, a kid today and you do stupid stuff on the internet at, I dunno, age 11, 10 years from now when you're, you know, or even before that, if you're applying to colleges and.
Or you're applying for a job or you're Yeah, I feel like I'm fortunate to have come up with the internet, but early enough that I was before the kind of permanent Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. Like how do you, how do you redeem people who were growing up and making mistakes and Yeah.
Greg: Yeah. Can you like, can we just like check the timestamp, like the timestamp will set you free or something? ? Yeah, Yeah, yeah. Cool. Is the date on this recording right? That is. I agree. Open solicitation to anyone who listens to this, uh, figure that out. Like,
Ed: what are what? We'll change the world.
Greg: Yeah. You'll change the world.
What are the rules that we need for if we are gonna have immutability and I mean, once upon a time, you and I played in a band and we recorded music together and, we went through the process of having to go to the publishing, through all of the details of making sure that if this got played somewhere and then , we got our royalties maybe made like a dollar or something like that, probably think about 25
And there's reasons to have that, online art, like art, being able to be timestamped and then logged as who is the creator. I've seen, , podcasts where people will edit the audio to make it sound like the two people's voices said something completely different than what was said.
And it's basically like indistinguishable from they actually said it. And so there's gotta be some way to take that content and sort of like log it on a chain that says, this is from this creator. It was signed by this creator. And only if that file can be traced back to this original point.
Uh, is it authentic? Is it the actual recording?
Ed: Well, I don't know what the solution to that is, but we need to figure out quickly because I don't know if you've been following. So the stable diffusion, which lets you turn these props into pictures and then Google had a crazy demo the other week where they can do the same thing but for video.
You can turn, these people haven't seen this, they should, um, Basically you can create these realistic looking videos out of English text. You type a prompt, uh, cat chasing in a ball of yarn, and it, the AI will create this, this video that's super look realistic, looking at a cat, chasing a ball of the yarn and, you know, the, the, the evil super villain part of my brain goes to
You imagine the kind of power that would give somebody who was trying to create a, a video for an October surprise during a electrical election campaign. Just the, if you could create a video of your opponent saying something just horrific that looked realistic, and how, how do you even disprove it?
Greg: And the only way I can find out if it's valid is if I could trace it back and say like, this came from this, this particular creator. And then it's up to the, the product builders to then figure out how to. Make that easily digestible to write a, you know, to, to a sort of market as, hey, this, this came from this, this is authenticated or something.
It can't be like, Oh, do you wanna travel back through this chain of, you know, 40 digit numbers and find out who this came from, and then cross reference this other person. Like, it's gotta be easy, but
Ed: what you're . Pointing to is it takes a lot of work to, do the research and figure out things for real or not.
And who has time for that would be a full time job if you did that all the time. Which is why we have trusted authorities, which depend on trust. Like if you can't trust your news media or Right. Your friends or
Greg: whoever. Yeah. So immutability is a, is more challenging than just saying, Oh, it's really great that everything is sort of logged.
I mean, we already know this, like, building a product is very different than building, you know, Society, technology or something like that. Yeah. So, or yeah, you need society to adopt here. I mean, that's the thought. I think that going from this concept of immutability into the idea of decentralization, this idea of trusted third parties versus let's say centralized, trusted parties.
So when, if you use a credit card you get hacked and you lose a bunch of money or something like that off your card, you have, there's some recourse there to like go and reverse that charge because you have this trusted third party who's letting you do that.
And, and I spend most of our days thinking about decentralization of, of physical stuff, physical. Power infrastructure and other things to create resilience, to create things that, that will endure and just sort of redesign, the power grid in a way that, that might allow it to last another a hundred years and potentially support some of these crazy ideas we have around digital money and AI and, you know, electric vehicles and all these things that are gonna require a whole bunch of that.
But, um, well I think there's, there's, that's an interesting thing about centralization and versus trusted third parties. So yes,
Ed: definitely. I think kind of two problems overlap. One is the technical problem of how do you create this record that is not tamperable, you know, we know how to do that.
We can make needle records so we can prove to be authentic using, all the things we know how to do in their. The harder part is, the harder part is trust, you know, uh, whatever agent is creating those records, how do you, uh, it's almost the, the, the key problem of decentralization.
How do you trust that the agent who creates so records is somebody you actually trust? You know, I can, I can create a amenable record that you owe me a billion dollars, but like, do you trust that record? Right? It's easier to solve that if it's just me and you, like you trust me, you're putting your financial life in my hands by trusting me to create this record.
But how do you did that for somebody you've never met and
Greg: Right. That's a good point. It's like the common enemy , in the crypto community. Has become this like trusted third party, but it's like, now you're talking about the issue of the trusted first party. It's like the person I'm actually making this deal with directly.
I still have to trust that person. Or do I, you know, that that is ultimate, ultimate conundrum of decentralization is if I go to you and say, I wanna borrow some money from you, and you say, Well, what are you gonna give me if you don't pay me back? And I say, I'm gonna give you this token that I made.
It's like, How'd you make it? It's like, here I'll show you how I made it. So I send you the code and then you're like, Why I don't, I don't read code. It's like, that's okay, but I showed you so I'm going to do this deal. So it is really like, it's really cool. I guess the reason I'm diving so deep on this is like, It's fascinating to me how many products need to get built for this to actually come to fruition because these are like real, real world challenges of, we've, we've imagined so many scenarios.
It could be sort of disrupted by blockchain, crypto and all that, but it's like, well what is the product? Cuz whatever that front end ends up becoming, it can't just be like, Oh, you can do anything you want. Do it. Take it. You take it yourself and you go figure it out. And then to your point, let's say you do go figure it out.
Do you trust that person who went and figured that out? and when they did it, , did everyone abide by the altruistic nature of decentralization, which is everything's supposed to be transparent and immutable. And uh, sounds like we have more questions and answers at this
Ed: point, but it's like we're at this point where we even, I don't know, just maybe not a great analogy, but.
Blockchain is like the internet, like we've invented the internet. It's this amazing tool that can do all these things, but it's not the complete solution to the problem. You need other stuff on top of it, there's reasons why the AOLs and Facebooks to the world become dominance because it's, it's sort of the vessel that delivers the internet to people who aren't willing to buy the internet kit and follow the 350 steps to put it together.
And yeah. And I think blockchains in a small place where the technology's there and our technology works, but there's a gap between sort of having the, the box legos and sort of the, the product that anybody can use. And I think one of the big pieces that's missing is, again, trust. Like how do we, you compare it to, to fiat currency, you like your example earlier.
, even companies who are deep into crypto and theory know how this stuff works. They get hacked for to the tune of 6, 7, 8 figures worth of money because If you have a bank involved, you can go spend money on your credit card knowing that if something bad happens, the bank's got your back. Where with crypto, there's missing pieces there.
And, a fully functional, financial system based on blockchain has some pieces that have been built. And um, you know, I think whoever figures out it's gonna be, sitting pretty and we'll change the world. But yeah, those pieces aren't there yet. ,
Greg: Yeah. Open invitation for everyone to get involved in this.
I mean, this really is like the hope to me. There's so many things that are hopeful, uh, amidst many conversations I have where people will, I mean, people will ask,
Are you concerned about, There's just these blanket questions like, are you concerned about ai? It's like, you just brought up this point of like, well, the concern about AI is not necessarily my concern about ai. I just know I have to sort of have like a pretty strong, , bullshit filter.
And that filter needs to get stronger and stronger and stronger over time until someone makes A crypto version of a bullshit filter, like, you know, like an authenticated BS detector for every single person on earth. Like until someone is at the Universal BS detector. Is that what it we called, uh,
I
Ed: mean, Yeah. My, my brain is turning on without, Yeah.
Greg: We're gonna interrupt this program to go and
Ed: whiteboard that. We should, we should invite Greg Adams on this, by the way, cuz he's thinking about this stuff for misinformation.
Greg: We edit it out. We, we actually know somebody who's working on the Universal BS detector. I
Ed: don't know if I'm not gonna brand it that way.
I wouldn't say universal, but Yes. Uh, Greg is . Working on, I tools around how to tackle misinformation on the internet because the incentives are line such that, CNN or whoever. Or, you know, even in centers line up in a way where the truth value of the news being presented is not what it needs to be.
And how do we as news consumers look at a story and figure out, you know, is this true or not?
it's like trust is the defining problem of the 21st century. It's like we've taken all of us and put us all in the same room, the entire world. We're all in one room. And a lot of the social patterns and behaviors that we, that work really well when you are just in your house, your neighborhood, your town, They break down when we're all in the same room.
We're all able to speak to everybody at once and it cuts across news and finance and everything, but yeah, it doesn't scale
Greg: well. No.
Ed: Yeah. What's the number? Um, Dunbar's number's. It's, Yeah. It's like the one 50 is the largest number of people you can have in a group before you can't trust surveying the group.
Yeah.
Greg: Or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That so many things to design and build, I think about that with my kids. Like what skills are they gonna have to. What do you think, so when you were, I mean, maybe it wasn't this much foresight, but like if you can go, if you could go back to being a kid and and think about like what did your parents give you?
What access did your parents give you in terms of technology , or experiences or something like that, that you think, like prepared you for, for now? Cuz I mean what we're doing now is completely different than anything you and I would've, I mean, we've known each other for like 15.
What do you think if you went back and said, this early exposure to something has sort of prepared you , for this moment now, even though there's no way you could have predicted that it was headed this way. It's just like,
Ed: Yeah. One thing I've thought about a lot, maybe this isn't directly answering your question.
One thing I've thought about a lot is how fortunate I was to have grown up in a time when computers were just starting to be a thing. And you know, obviously I was really fortunate that I had a dad who was into computers and had computers around the house, but that had to dovetail with the particular computers that I did have.
You know, I grew up on first 64 and the early IBM PCs, and I think that was really formative in the sense that those machines were so simple. That, a 8, 9, 10 year old kid could like get in there and get his hands dirty and start figuring out if I do this, then this happens. It gave me the perspective that, the computer's just machine, you know, the software I get from Microsoft to whoever, it's just software.
I mean, they have more money and more people working on it than I do, but they're just doing a bigger version of what I can do by getting into it. And I think today's computers are very different. You know, they're essentially appliances, right? You, you can buy a iPhone and sure, you know, you can go download X code and start programming with the, the, the bar is much higher for writing software on an iPhone than it was for, you know, changing the colors on the screen on a com 64 or, you know, printing.
Typing, making little text games, whatever. And you have Apple's credit, they've, they come out with swift playgrounds, which are kind of supposed to recreate some of that earlier openness. But I think the difference is that back then if you wanted to use computers at all, you kind of had to learn the stuff.
You know, if you wanted to play a game, you had to stick the floppy in and, you know, uh, load star accommodate one. I still know stuff like 30 years later, but you had to know how to list the contents. Meis, you had to know how to load the Bri you wanted. And like, you were basically, , you've forced to become a programmer to use this machine at all.
one of my formative experiences with learning that, , if on the Commod door, if you wrote a program and you were running it in Commodor basic, you could hit, uh, it was like you could hit command or control break and you would break into your program.
So, or you interrupt your program. One day I was playing this one game, I think it was called Siren City. Basically it was this game you were, where you were a cop car and you were supposed to drive around town, dealing with cop things. But one day I hit run, stop, break in that game and I saw the prop come up and I was like, Whoa, I can list the contents, the, the, the program listing and see how this game was, was made.
And yeah, I think must have been like nine at that point. But it sort of blew my mind that I wouldn't have gotten to that point had I not been forced to do this stuff, to, to play any games at all. Where today, You get an iPhone, you go to the app store, you download your games and well, first off, you can't hit right stop break to break into a game.
Ed: But the, just the, the, the vehicle that delivers a software twist today is much more appliance like that. Even though you can write software for it, you pretty much won't even ask that question or wonder about it because just the, it, it's so easy to just use it as an appliance and you never, you never even know that you could program it if you weren't sent in that direction by some other idea.
So yeah, it, it's a very different world. I guess to answer your question, it feels like
big thing that made a huge difference for me was, coming up in an era where to use computers at all, you had to be exposed to the wires hanging out in a way. If you were a curious kid, like I was, you wanted to know, well, what is this weird stuff type into play games. What? Like, what if I change this?
What if I do this? What if I, and, obviously there's still kids who are playing with computers and becoming self engineers, but that the,
I do wonder, wonder would I have ended up where I am now had I not had sort of, maybe I would've wound up being an engineer anyway, but, uh, I do wonder. , the vehicle is very different now. It, it's much like, even among practicing engineers today, there's so many layer layers of abstract that people just build things without really understanding how they work and how do you make things that are reliable and fast.
You just sort of pick things off the shelf and stack 'em together and it kind of works. We ship it.
Greg: Yeah. Uh, and you hope that everything inside of those boxes that you stacked was built in a sound way. Yes. That has holes in your, in your security or something like that. Yeah. And
Ed: then there's a new update next week and it breaks everything and, you know, understand and handy anybody works, so good
Greg: luck.
Yeah. It almost seems like there's, there's like a, like that's what drew me in to, to blockchain was like, I was able to see this thing that was getting huge. I mean like, cuz we first started talking about this and gosh, it was like 20 11, 20 12 or something like that. I mean, it was pretty early. Like I, I think it's easy to look at like when the Bitcoin white paper came out and be like, Oh, that's when people were paying attention.
No, they weren't . They were not, no one was paying, I mean, 2011 for sure. I met other people who say like, Oh, I started sort of paying attention then. Don't necessarily talk about what financial actions I, I, and many other people I know wish they took in 2011. Um, some people did, but side bar there, uh,
Ed: someone I can't, One Reddit, someone was talking about how they wish the Bitcoin super early and their p reply was, Well, the thing is, if you had, back in those days, you probably had your own like off, off chain wallet on your own machine.
and the number of stories of people who had some Bitcoin back then and lost their key and will never rec their millions of dollars of Bitcoin. Like, Yeah. Who's to say you would've managed to keep that anyway? .
Greg: Yeah. I don't know. I mean, maybe, maybe I didn't, I didn't even know, Like I didn't, like I didn't grow up that way.
My exposure to computers early on was like very much a, a social thing. It wasn't a, it wasn't a personal thing. It was very much AOL instant Messenger was coming around. And so it was a way to, I guess like what you said earlier, it was a way to bring school home with me and make the, make school never stop.
I could just be with my friends all night long and then weird strangers who would ask you weird questions and then you would lie to them. Yeah. So Yeah.
Exactly. Uh, man, crazy, crazy times. So like, that was my, that was my exposure. And I just remember there were sort of two times where, Over the years, I was like, Oh, I get how this stuff works. One was like, when you when, when you would dig into, I, I mean just like even having to like correctly type in like a file path or something like that was like, what?
Like that's a thing many people like wouldn't even think of nowadays, you know? . Now it's just, again, this gets into that idea of the interface, the products you build are actually what the products that get built are actually truly what changes the world or, or makes the progress.
It's not just like the existence of the technology. It's the people come along and devote their life to making it accessible. That I think is, is been most fascinating. And then when we, like, I just, again, I, I can't stress enough how, how little I, I knew at the time about about. Code are really the, the depths of computers.
So I would've been one of those people on the outside being like, Oh, this is a cool game. Like, I'll just play that. It's colors and everything. Like I wouldn't have thought, Oh, like how did these wires connect inside? I think I thought about like the physical wires connecting inside, but it was never like, how did the, how does the software then turn this into this experience?
And if I thought about, it'd be like, God, I'm not, I'm not gonna do it. I'm not gonna look into that. I remember when I first downloaded, any kind of code on my computer that was like a Bitcoin wallet and I was trying to like learn how to, how to, you know, I was gonna mind Bitcoin on my own machine, you know, cuz I was like, Oh, I heard about this thing.
And I just remember how incredibly challenging it was for me, like not being a, not being a software engineer.
And I think at that point when I, when I did that with Bitcoin, I was like, wow, this is both hard but also incredibly accessible in the sense that like a lot of people can start working on this. I think that was the seed for me of crypto and blockchain was like, people can now start working on this because they can see the wires they can go to and, and make.
That goes back to what you were saying is like those wires hanging out of the Commodore 64 that you could sort of say, uh, by the way, these are metaphoric wires, not physical wires. Uh, .
Ed: So the worst were those two? Yes.
Greg: don't cut the red one. So , Uh, yeah, so like being able to see that and like dig into it and be like, Okay, here's what I'm using.
I know why I'm using it, and I can also see the code. And so now I can go and reference that and say, and, and that made me pretty hopeful. Like even to the point that like my kids who are all 10 and under, I'm trying to like seed them with these concepts because I really like, as they adopt things, I want them to realize it's like you can actually go grab the source code of yeah That's, that's an interesting, Yeah. So here's the question. I think open source
Ed: has been huge in that, I mean, open source has been huge.
Greg: this program that you are using to potentially pay someone all the way around the world or do some kind of interaction on the internet with someone around the world.
And you can actually go audit to see what that looks like. And I think that it's almost like the ren, the Renaissance of the people who grew up with the Commodore 64 because like you actually know how to then go take this, this source code and then like, Decode it in some way, even though it's already built, you're not just coming to this abstracted layer of user interface that's really amazing and it's made the iPhone very easy to adopt.
Ed: It's funny, you know, I had that experience with growing up dissecting how 64 work, and then I went from there into the IBM PC realm, you know, Microsoft and ibm.
And, uh, and the commander wasn't open source, but it was sort of a simple enough machine that you could sort of figure out how it worked. You could crack where, yeah, where, um, Microsoft stuff was completely close source and you sort of paid the money. They, you, they gave you a black box and good luck. And if it didn't do what you wanted, wanted to do, then.
You're outta luck. And then Open Source was kind of a, you know, I, I was that kid who ran Lenox all through college cuz you know, I was just done with, you know, 98 and Open Source was huge in the sense that it was, I thought it was better software for what I was trying to do. But it's also interesting as a social movement where suddenly it's like the entire world working on, working on this thing, whatever it is, may or may not be actually quote unquote better than whatever Microsoft is shipping.
But just the fact that I can make it do I want it to do. And, you know, if there's, I remember the first time I, I was running, um, I think I was running Red Hat Makes at that point, and there was some. Bug in the desktop environment? No. And, a light bulb sort went off my head. I could go in there and fix this bug in my desktop.
Like, you can't do that with Windows. You just sort of have to wait for, wait three years for next version windows. And, yeah, I think that's been really interesting. The thing about blockchain, you know, it, it was born in open source and, no, no one would take a blockchain seriously if it was no open source.
Mm-hmm. . For the most part, you're not gonna go in and change the code. But just knowing that the code is there and that you can go audit that code that it creates from that trust we were talking about earlier. You know, just the idea that, you can go see what the Ethereum code is or the salon code is doing behind the scenes.
even though you don't necessarily trust the authors in the way that you would trust your friends, your neighbors, at least the, the trust would be much less if, if they sort of hand you this black box and said, This is a blockchain and it's gonna do these things, put your money into it. Good luck.
Greg: Yeah. It would sort of be like being handed an encyclopedia brittanica and being told every single word in this is a hundred percent true.
Exactly.
Ed: Exactly. ,
Greg: Okay. Take, uh, yeah, with no, without cited sources or any of those things. Yeah. Right, right.
Ed: Um, if there's a typo, you gotta wait till next year when they fix it. Right. , they
Greg: fix it. Exactly. Yeah. You gotta buy the next version. You gotta buy the update version of it. Um, yeah, I think,
so on the other side of, not software, obviously you spend all your time there, but we've been working together on, well, we started working together on music, but then we started working on energy related things. And one of the things I'm often thinking about is not Oh, interesting, this decentralized nature of software and how you could, I, I do often think about like decentralizing certain jobs.
Let's just take infrastructure as an example or, or utility infrastructure. Just the built environment, like the built environment, whether it's any kind of commercial building or power plant or you know, a water utility or any of those things. It's like ultimately, , you have a few jobs that you have that, that have to be, a few things have to be checked off the list.
And it's always been more or less the same. Like if you were gonna, in the 18, late 18 hundreds, if you wanted to go and build, you know, a power station, let's say at like Pearl Street for instance, and if your name was Edison and you had a buddy named John Puron and you were like, Oh, I'm gonna go build this.
It's like, well, first thing you gotta do is you gotta discover that opportunity's there. And then you gotta figure out, you kind of have to underwrite it in some way, whatever that means. That could be, Ah, we have the necessary permits. Maybe there was no permits. Okay, we're in the window of permitting.
And then they have to cite it. They gotta figure out who's gonna pay for the thing that it makes, and then they gotta get the. You had, you had a buddy to give them the money. So that's like the ultimate sort of like peer-to-peer decentralized electricity system, right? Like, it's like, okay, I've got this, I got this system, I'm gonna, me the creator of the, or the discoverer and the underwriting of the, of the system Edison, that is, I'm Edison in this, in this analogy here.
Uh, I'm pure pot , right? And so we, we go in and, and we say, Okay, well we found a place for it. We discovered where it should go. Uh, I've figured out how to underwrite the technology and underwrite, like how it's gonna get hooked up and sort of designed what the network might look like. And we found who's gonna buy the power?
We're gonna power some light bulbs and people are gonna have electric lights. It's gonna be amazing. So I come to you and I say, and, and you're like, who's gonna manage it? Are those off takers actually? Like re are they actually gonna pay you? Cause if they don't pay you, I don't, you don't get your money back.
And so being basically
Ed: people who are gonna buy the power,
Greg: people who are gonna buy, buy the service from, from this power station. Yeah. Buy the power, power lights and they're gonna pay. So you get, so you, so that's the underwriting phase. And then, and then you say, Okay, it's underwritten. I trust this underwriting and the way you trust me to underwrite this, John, trust me, Tom, to , to underwrite the system is , then you put in the money and then we can build it and then, and then we manage it and then we ongoing, we have to manage it to make sure that it keeps making money that is not changed, like the way they build a solar power plant today.
Somebody goes out, call Tom, Tom goes out and then says, I want to, you know, I found a place where I think Solar's gonna really work and goes to a landowner. We're gonna have to introduce some more people. Into this situation here, but like there's somebody there, call it Carol. Carol owns the land. Tom comes up, says, I've discovered this thing.
I'm not gonna underwrite this project. I find somebody who will buy the electricity from it, who is trustworthy or bankable enough to actually pay their power bills. And then, and then the system gets, is now been underwritten in some way. Then they go to their version of John Pierpont, which really is probably like a bank called JP Morgan or something like that.
And, and they get their money and, and then somebody manages it. And so like, none, none of that is really changed over the
Ed: years. Hold on. Isn't the P and JP Morgan Pure Pot, right? .
Greg: It's you . There
Ed: you go. Go on, go on.
Greg: Right . Yeah. So yeah, so, but now it's a big entity. Now you have become this big giant entity that now has its own.
Way of doing things. You're now the centralized entity that you have to go to and, and some, the details have changed, like the way you discover the permitting process is different. There's now tax incentives for building in certain place, but let's just put 'em all under the headings of, we found a place for something to go.
We made sure that it was like,
Ed: could be fun. You're scoping out, you're scoping out on Google Maps instead of running around, riding around on a horse.
Greg: Right. The technology has changed, but the process hasn't really changed that much. It's like you still have to do those things and so what I th you know, what we thought about is that we were thinking about like starting Aston labs.
It was like, well, I think you could apply a lot of this blockchain technology. To these same things that have been going on forever. I mean, you basically, at the end of the day, you need yourself like somebody who can underwrite the actual system and manage the actual power plant or utilities and you need somebody to finance it.
Now, that sounds simple, but that is what slows us down. Who's financing it is a game changer. Like it it, or I should say, if someone with a different view on what the world should look like and what the underwriting process should look like and what the management should look like, that really is ultimately what changes, what the power grid looks like, or what it looks to ha looks like for people to have clean water or what it looks like.
Like you gotta change the money and you gotta change the source of the money, or you have to at least change like what the people putting the money in believe. And so that idea of, and, and again, those jobs aren't gonna really change. You gotta find a place for a power plant to go for some solar panels to go, or a windmill to go and then you need to underwrite the financing out.
You have to make sure that it's like bankable and someone's gonna actually pay the power bills when it gets made, or the cost is gonna be shared in some way. And then someone has to like, make sure that it continues to run and improve. And if the windmill, you know, if the, if the, the blade falls off the windmill, somebody's gotta like put a new on one on there.
And so, but that's always been the same. And then, and then the financing comes in. But now it's just become this situation where everything is so central. And so now you have this, these like controllers of what the future looks like while people are protesting about this new future they would like.
And meanwhile, these people who are tasked with actually financing all of it are like, We're good.
Ed: They are making plenty of money doing what they're doing, and they're at the center of the opens boat. So good luck to you will.
Greg: Right. And it's, And so, so the early conversations we were having before we sort of landed on the idea of starting Aston Labs, it was what if you could decentralize all of those tasks?
What if you could, what if you could get back to the pure sense of like, okay, well there's this finance year and they trust the underwriting. Do you need. Do you need this gigantic like centralized tower of people to do the underwriting? If you had decentralized participation or, or you had kind of had incentivized participation or, or better yet, can the underwriter, I mean back in the days of John Pierpont and Thomas Edison, like they were both going to gain in the growth of that.
And that's what I think is, we didn't really touch on that part of blockchain technology, but this idea of it being open source, the software aspect is interesting, but also this concept of like you, the person who discovers a bug and says, I can change that myself. It's like, well imagine being able to be compensated in some way for working on that after work or just some other time, like being able to, I mean, it was nice of you to fix.
Like even if Microsoft had opened it up and said, Oh, we're gonna let you fix bugs, it's like, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have been throwing some like 1985 Microsoft stock to fix that bug
Ed: for that. But worse than that, there's a missing, The missing piece there would've been unified fix the bug. How it to know to trust me to fix it.
What's the distribution for the fix? Where in blockchain is more of a sort of more direct, I'm providing the for the network, therefore I'm getting paid by the network and yeah. Yeah. I think
Greg: you interrupt this program to think about that . Yeah.
Ed: There's definitely some interesting, it makes, it's simple and makes sense on the blockchain, but bridging that into reality is, Blockchain's in reality.
But Bridget end is for , the realm of physical infrastructure is the interesting problem. Like how do you sort of, Yeah. Mm-hmm. , uh, hey, communicate to people that, Hey, if you solve this problem, there's financial upside for you. Uh, be, you know, how do you verify that that work was done, and then what's the value of that to the network?
Right?
Greg: Yeah. Those are all of the things that, again, there's, I think the gap between, I shouldn't say the gap between the, the work. The building of the network really comes with, okay, these tasks is discovery and underwriting and offtake in management. Like, and financing, like those tasks can now be decentralized, which means they can be scaled using technology, which means can scale faster and it can scale broader, and it can scale ideally lower costs than the amount of time and miscommunication that happens in a, in a centralized situation.
I mean, you see this manifest itself, right? Like we've seen this for the last, at least like 13 years, like that we've been working on it. You kind of see
companies would pop up and be like, Okay, we're a solar company. It's like, well, are you a solar company? Because you think that there's like the, you know, the solar company is like, Solar is a silver bullet for, for the power grid. Or are you a solar company? Because when you went to pitch the people for your money, they said, ah, you're doing too many things.
Why don't you just focus on one thing? Right. Right. And was that idea, we
Ed: experienced that ourselves too. Just sort of the right here's what we wanna do. But then theEnd diagram has, that sur has intersected with where things investors willing to fund. Right. And that has intersected with what things we're capable of doing today with our skills and personnel.
And it's, it's, yeah. Won't make this into a site ran spot, .
Greg: Uh, I feel like innovation comes from the constraints, right? It's like if you're constrained and if you had infinite dollars, we'd do some pretty weird stuff. Make some, But you're right. It's like you kind of have, I mean, this just gets into the same.
I'm sure we could expand this concept of like, what does it take to actually build physical infrastructure? But in, we could expand that into, into what does it take to start any project? Even if it's a software project, it's like you still have to like discover the, the gap in the market. You have to underwrite it in some way through research or through validation in some way.
Then you have to go figure out like who's gonna actually buy this innovation? When I like de-risk the market in some way, I mean you could argue that, let's just focus on the electricity grid. you know, given how much shouting and how much demand there is for like a carbon free, more resilient, like there's so much demand for that amongst people and companies.
And you could argue that the companies themselves and the people in the companies I really do believe want that, but the company itself doesn't need. Except for the fact that their customers want it and they'll stop buying from that company unless the company, you know, helps to build a
Ed: renewable. I think we've also, we've also learned from experience that there's diff difference between people shutting for something and people being willing to pay for that.
Something at the level that would support the company doing it. I mean, if people want, uh, you know, totally sustainable green power, but the only one to pay, you know, 1 cent more on their bill for it, that's not really a business for.
Greg: Right. And, and that's really sometimes the trouble, right? Is that what, what gets the money that's already there?
What gets the, like, let's say some company says, uh, I'm a solar company, so I put together a billion or two or $3 billion worth of solar money. It's money earmarked for solar. So now I got, I got my solar dollar bills here and only spend 'em on solar. So you're going around and you find a piece of land, you're like, Wow, that's a huge piece of land.
I could put like a billion and a half dollars worth of solar on that. And then you say, Okay, I gotta underwrite. It means I gotta find a buyer who's willing to buy it. I gotta go through permitting, I gotta get, you gotta connect it to the grid somehow, cuz I don't have anybody who's gonna use all of that right on site.
And so, and so, let's say you go all the way down there, you're gonna already have your financing committed for solar. So as long as you underwrite it and it can return you money, then you build it. So you build this massive solar farm like out somewhere in the middle of nowhere and you connect it back to civilization and then the rest of the grid sort of has to figure out what to do at night because you didn't build any battery backup and you didn't put anybody near.
So now you just have the same old centralized problem you had before, which is you got this centralized entity that's buying massive, massive, massive amounts of solar and then sort of figuring out what to do with it and now and
Ed: decentralized. So they're just saying what your power's worth, right?
Greg: Yep.
For you. Yeah. So, So there you go. So now you're just sort of recreating the problem with, with a new technology, but it's like that wasn't the point. Uh, I hate to use too much of an analogy, but it was sort of like when Facebook tried to create its own crypto token and people are like, Nah, good. It's just like we don't, the whole ethos, it's not credible.
Yeah. The whole ethos of this is not to go get some massive centralized entity to give you the thing that you want. The whole point is like, well, it's better if it's decentralized. It's more resilient, it's more reliable over time. It's gonna scale better, it'll have more utility, like just more use in the world if it's not, if it's not sort of owned by somebody who has, maybe, is maybe aligned with you but also maybe not aligned with you.
Yeah, that's
Ed: exactly like how, you build on these platforms where they're Facebook's Libra or you know, their cryptocurrency or whatever, and the deal is that, they've spent less money building this product, product that they nice for you, but do you know that your interest could be line five years down the line or even want you're down the line.
And so you've gotta have a lot of trust that they are, it's not that different than the electric utility, you and you're billion and a half dollars of solar and basically your financial features and the utilities hands because they decided how much they're gonna pay for. The power that comes off of those panels and it centralized that you have no say, you either agree to their deal or you build somewhere else, right?
Greg: Yeah. So like that, that whole idea has been tried. It's almost like we had, we had like Power 1.0, which was like, here everyone take whatever we give to you. And in some ways that's right because Power 1.0 was like, you need lamps, We got you stuff to power some lamps. And then people are like, Oh, you know what?
Really use the refrigerator. Like, okay, we think those are kind of like lamps. We'll, we'll do that too. Does everybody want one? Yeah, probably Everybody wants one. Oh, we want a tv. Okay. Does everybody want one? Yeah, probably everybody wants one. And so then you go down this line. Everybody wants one.
Everybody wants one. And then we get to this, we'll call it 2.0, Power 2.0, which is like, mm, Users. The buyers, the people who were just like sitting here taking power from me. It was a one-way street forever. We'll let you put a little bit of power back on the grid. You want some solar panels on your roof.
We'll let you put a little bit of that on the grid. So send to the call that 2.0. They send a little user generated content, let's call it back into the grid .
Ed: And that we're gonna control how much of that happens by basically making that solar nearly used, Nearly worthless,
Greg: useless. Only what you need, can you put up.
And so that, so now we're in that. So that's power two. Funny how this sort of tracks with like web one, Web two, right? Right. It was like Web one was like you, you know, unilateral. It was like I, it was, I send to you what I would like to send to you. Web two is like, oh you can send some back into the network.
And, but then the centralized platforms of sort of gait how much you can, cuz they'll charge you for sending too much content into the network. And I think the same thing happened with Powers. Like you send a little bit back into the network and now we're at this, this precipice of like, I'll call it like Power 3.0, which is where like, you know, I just, you're seeing this a little, it's not to say you're not cooperating with the central groups in Power 3.0.
It's not like you're not cooperating with the utilities, but there are some utility districts that are like, kind of cool with the idea of you having like a little community that's powered. On your own. And that takes vision from the developers, the actual people who put it up. And that's what's so fascinating to me, is we've, we've sort of gone all the way out to the edges where the, the creators, so to speak, the creators of this new network really are these, these builders at the end of the, at the end of the, the line, you know, the, um, and, and hopefully we'll be, have some of those builders to talk to them, uh, on the podcast.
But, you know, something magical
Ed: happens when you can, when battery technology is good enough that you can now sort of have, not separate grids, but grids are almost sufficient and Right. Might need power from the central grid from time to time. But yeah, that the, the smartest live at the edge and yeah, that only works if within that, that only works if the central utility is not setting the.
The value of that power. Yeah. And I have to
Greg: wait us into this, this dangerous place. And this will be where we, this is the last thing we'll talk about is it went way longer. I was like, Oh, we'll have this conversation today. I'll be over in about 20 minutes. I don't know how long it's actually been, but I , I was like, well, I have three agenda items and this will take 20 minutes.
Like, or 1 25, uh, . Okay, so this idea of decentralized power, we'll call it power 3.0 power, I mean, in some ways is like, we need, we need this to be the next movement because there's so many new applications. You know, we were talking about, Refrigerators and TVs and just basic stuff that probably everybody's gonna want.
But now we're in a world where like everybody doesn't want everything that's being put on the grid. So everybody doesn't want, right now an electric vehicle. Everybody doesn't want Bitcoin mining. Everybody doesn't want, any kind of onsite computing in their home. So how do you, how do you design a network or, or whatever that is, whatever that entity is, you know, how do, and that was our hypothesis is like there should be an entity that supports this movement.
And that was the spirit of, of starting as and Labs is like, how do you support this decentralized web, which is becoming like our economy, I is feeding into every single facet of our economy and everyone's exposed to it, even if they feel like they're not, like, you can't sit outside of this and be like, Nah, I'm not really interested in participating.
It's like if you're in any way connected to the fin to the economy, which pretty much everybody is, it's like if you sit outside of it, there's a chance that everything you've trusted and all these centralized groups you've trusted can be wiped out by this movement. And so like, what are you gonna ha Like, are you, you know, this has always been the argument of the centralized grid is like, who's gonna bear the cost of the centralized grid?
If people start leaving the grid
Ed: as people lead the grid to do their own thing, that's beneficial to them. It sort of leave behind everybody who's stuck on the, stuck on the centralized grid and their power becomes more expensive, less reliable, because the utility can't, you know, there's a shared cost that we're all paying to be part of the current world.
And as people leave to do their own thing, the commons become. Crapper and crapper, everybody, everybody's little still on it.
Greg: Right? So that, that goes back to this, this idea of like, decentralized doesn't necessarily mean that the central grid goes away. An optimized build of a decentralized grid is that you still rely on that.
A lot of that infrastructure was there, but as you said, the, the decisions go out to the end. The, the decision making about like what the, what the primary, what, what the main power we're gonna use. The main power we're gonna use is in our neighborhoods. And at the end of the network, the backup power is the middle of the network.
And so the question is, is like, well, how valuable is that backup for you? And how long does that need to last? So the reason, the thing I was said, I was, we were gonna wade ourselves into maybe is kind of a dangerous. Place to go. But we are, we are bold and we're going. There is decentralizes one thing, carbon free is another thing.
So someone asked me the other day said, Well,
so carbon free because like you need to save the planet. And I was like, Well that seems like a little messiah complexity kind of thing. So I was like, yeah, getting rid of carbon emissions for making electricity or whatever, whatever we're doing. Basic needs ideally would not emit any carbon or can't be emitting carbon.
So from your perspective, why should this new decentralized network also be carbon free?
Ed: I think those few ways to answer that. I think one of them one way is. One framing of it is that, um, you know, out here in the West coast, we just lived through get another bad wildfire season and, uh, Lake Powell, it's an all time low. We've got last winter there, we fire tornadoes in Colorado. It's like the climate change was for this vague, distant thing that, you know, I don't remember as a kid I read once about, uh, climate change in, I think it was still, I forget what they called it back then, but I was reading about this article about the rise of the oceans and, uh, it was scary to me as a kid, but also it was supposed to happen in 2050 and I was like, Oh, I'll be, I'll be old by then.
But now we're seeing it, It, it's sort of, Uh,
it's happening now and if we're gonna rethink how we're, if we're gonna go through all the effort of rethinking how the system works, we might as well go all the way and rethink it for, the future. Because are we gonna, are we really gonna redesign it now and then redesign it again in 10 years and or 20 years or there, as a fair, this is a software engineer, there are tons of examples all around us of systems that somebody built that it was good enough for that moment.
And here we are 50 years later and we're still built limitations to that system because, it sucks, but it mostly works. It's fine. And so it's sort of this moment of if the stakes are as high as they appear to be, we should do the right thing versus the just good enough thing. Cuz we're probably not gonna have another chance to redesign the system.
Yeah. In our lifetimes.
Greg: Yeah. I thought you were gonna say, I don't have to worry about 2050 cuz I'll be a mortal by then.
technology will make me a mortal by then. So I won't
Ed: have to worry about depending on trek. Ron and mortality might be a curse by that point.
Greg: That's it. Yeah, that's true. Uh, yeah. I suppose you know, also like the urgency to get things done. Probably if you really, truly believed you were gonna be a moral, you'd just be like, ah, it's all good.
I'll just hang out. ,
Ed: I'm good. I'll be at the beach.
Greg: Yeah, I that, that's interesting. My take on carbon free is of course, all of those things. I think there's like the existential reason and, and just enduring, like, again, like 50 years from now, do you wanna have to both replace the technology that has now sort of broken down because just ages and it needs to be replaced, but do you also wanna have to like rearchitect the whole thing?
Like basically do we wanna have to like rebuild the house from scratch or do just wanna add a coat of paint? You know, like it's better to build something so that you could just continuously add a coat of paint rather than, than have to like rip the whole entire house out of the ground because you built it out of crap and
Ed: nobody, nobody ever redesigned or does the, the, the big hard redesign unless things are so bad that they, they're forced to.
And so, If we're at a point now where we can redesign the system, we might as well redesign it for the thing we know is coming, because we might wind up in that in between place where we design a system that's not actually good enough to tackle the problems, but is just good enough that no's gonna bother fixing it.
Greg: Yeah. I think from, uh, just this is way too optimistic, way too optimistic of a view, but you know me well enough that that's where I'm gonna land most of the time. So the, the optimistic view that I have is just like, well, everything that's carbon free is, is a technology. It's like, it's a PlayStation, you know what I mean?
It's like the PlayStation comes out, you don't wanna buy it now cause it's gonna be like half price next year, right? Like, I wanna go, or, you know, or like the, the parts are gonna be better. Like it's gonna be more efficient. There's something that's gonna happen to technology that's going to improve over time.
So, If you were like an expert in the energy business, you've been in it for a long time, you look at it and you're like, Well, you know, uh, those pieces of technology are no good because their useful life is only 25 years and my gas plant will last for 70. And it's like, well, which by the way, I don't even know if those numbers are actually right.
My point is just like, this will last a really long time. Just have to keep feeding it fuel. And then our, just what we've seen from technology over our lifetimes is just like, well, I'd rather bet on technology over the long term getting better than I would bet on like a fuel getting better. Like, I just don't, like natural gas isn't necessarily going to just magically get better than it is today.
Um, great. Maybe it gets a slightly more efficient, Maybe it emits slightly less carbon or figuring out how to capture the carbon. And all of those things are great, but now we're just, we're moving towards this carbon-free thing. It's like, yes, you can take the stuff that emits carbon and then you can make it carbon free, but you still have to feed it every day.
Like that costs money every single day that you have to do like the amount of inputs that you need to put into the system. They cost money and they cost other fuels. So like to extract fuel and then move fuel and then get it to where it needs to go, and then burn the fuel and then emit the carbon. So I guess for me, the optimistic view is like, well, it's technology.
I, I'll never short technology, I'll never sit here and say, Well, those batteries won't work. They have cobalt in 'em. It's like, okay, you don't think somebody will change. You don't think if that's a scarce resource, technology's always gonna find a way to eliminate the scarce resource.
It's just you have to, cuz if you, if you, That's just how it works. Yeah.
Ed: I feel, yeah. I feel like I'm optimistic on the tech and pessimistic on the, I guess, business side in the sense that the tech can do it, but. Are the people who are writing the checks gonna want to do it,
Greg: right? Well, I think that, I think we've already seen that.
Like the answer is no. The people who are writing the checks today for it's so much more convenient for like somebody who owns a whole bunch of gas power plants to say, Well, if you shut those down, your power lights are gonna, What? I just say, I, if you shut those down, your lights are gonna go off.
It's like, well, that's scary. I don't want, I don't want you to do that. It's much harder to say like, Well, you don't know if that person's technology over there is going to work, and so therefore you should be afraid of it and we shouldn't change anything. And I think that's where we've landed as we've landed in this dichotomy of the people who have the stuff up, keeping the lights on can just say, if we move that stick that's holding up the grid, like what's gonna happen?
You don't know. I don't know. So we should all just be afraid of it and not move the stick. Cause I'm making a lot of money off of that stick. ,
Ed: your uncertainty and doubt are powerful forces. Yeah, exactly.
Greg: The fuds
Oh man. Hey, this was, this took, this was awesome. We're probably gonna, again sometime, I mean, we're probably gonna talk after this,
All right. Thanks for joining me today on this. Look forward to the next episode. I know, I know I've probably inspired you to continue showing up on this over and over and over.
Ed: I mean, uh, we'll, uh, I'll sleep on it. Let's see. All right, man.
Greg: All right. See you. See you.
Bye.
Greg: Thanks for tuning into this episode of the World Changing Podcast. Be sure to follow us wherever you get your podcast. iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube to hear the latest episodes.