66: Fractured Web with Charlie Northrup

This episode has been automatically transcribed by AI, please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.

Chris: I’m here with three gentlemen, deeply rooted within the realm of security data science and the digital ecosystem. First, we have Mike Elkins. And for those that don’t know, Mike, he is not only on the barcode team, but he’s also a top performing technology evangelist and a true veteran in the it industry.

Chris: What’s going on, Mike?

Mike: Hey, what’s going on? Everybody happy to be here.

Chris: And next we got Rohan light Rohan has been on barcode previously. But besides that, he’s also a true virtuoso at data perception, AI ethics, GRC, and beyond Rohan. Welcome back, my friend.

Rohan: Good. I mate glad to be back

Chris: and also joining me is Charlie Northrop.

Chris: Co-founder of newer sciences, a software technology, architecture, and solutions development company that provides there artificially intelligent digital brain applications to integrate, manage, and automate the things that truly matter to us. He is also laser focused on the digital transformation of the web into an ecosphere of ecosystems operated by and for the benefit of intelligent agents, working for individuals, households, and organizations.

Chris: So, Charlie, thank you so much for stopping by barcode. It’s an honor to have you join us.

Charlie: It’s my honor, man. This is gonna be a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to it all day.

Chris: cool, man. So fellas, you know, I I’d really like to get into investigating and looking into what is known to us as web one through web five.

Chris: And with that, you know, the emerging hyper connected world that follows it. And I think in order to level set and, and get the conversation going, we should define web one through web five to, to truly understand the eras that they were born in and how that evolution occurred. So. I guess it started back with like web zero, zero, right.

Chris: With the invention of the web by Tim burner Lee, or you could make the argument that it was Al gore. right, Mike. So let’s talk about that. And then, you know, shortly after that, I guess the official web one era was born. So you know, what exactly happened? And how did web one become a thing?

Rohan: Oh, Charlie’s  taking that. Come on. I mean, I have one story from this era. One story email, put me outta the job email, put me outta the job I used to, I was a boy. See, and then this email thing came along and took over. It was a nightmare.

Charlie: well, I think back when I look back at this, this. At the time I was working at, at and T bell labs. And so I was in the Mary Hill research center, which was like the coolest environment that you could ever work in. At that time, there was so much theoretical research still going on. And it was just, it was fun.

Charlie: And I remember walking into a researcher’s office and he showed me mosaic, 0.8 or some. It was one of the early versions of mosaic. And I was like, what is that? And he said, oh, this, this is called a worldwide web browser. That’s when it was back then it was like worldwide web browser. And I was like, well, what do you do with it?

Charlie: Oh, we share information. We share documents, research papers with each other. And more, he explained it. I was like, oh, they are gonna so commercialize this. And he said, Nope, Nope. It’s for academic purposes. Like that, that was the mindset back then that you weren’t supposed to commercialize it. It was really intended just for document sharing, but it was a stateless system.

Charlie: Right. So back in, in, even from 1990 even when I got involved in 94, it was, there was this amazing system, but it had no state, right. There were no, they cookies weren’t defined yet. Right. And so you happen to think about, like, to me, that’s the original web browser or the original web 1.0. That was the stateless system, just for sharing documents and everything was considered free.

Charlie: I was, that was the big deal.

Chris: Yeah. And at a much smaller scope, right. I mean, was it publicly available yet

Charlie: Well, and it was primarily distributed through research. So if you’re in the research area, or if you’re in academia, you could get a web browser and start running it. Okay. And even though it was developed originally at the university of Illinois, what happened was that there were some, as the specs started to appear, people started creating free versions of it and, and were selling their version of it.

Charlie: And so people now suddenly were able to get their hands on, on the web browser, especially once it was poured to windows, that was a big deal. Right. Cause remember back in, in the early nineties, everybody had windows. And so as it started to get moved over to the windows platform more and more people started jumping on it.

Charlie: But so this is web one now. I have to, I have to clarify, cuz Mike asked the question earlier about Al gore that Al gore invented and you know, people misquoted him quite a bit. And I think for the record it is fair to say that Al gore helped to get the grant money for the university to, to really push the development of the web.

Charlie: And he also was the one who was out there touting the benefits of the web. Right. But it was the internet right back then it was, he called it the information super highway. You, if you look at, remember, still find that reference for sure. It was called the information super highway and he got it into the white house.

Charlie: When, when Clinton were went into the white house, he was the one who bought it with him and then he got the UN on email. So he did a lot to help. Promote the benefits of the web without a doubt. There, you can’t, nobody can deny that, but that was still web. We were still at web one. We were stuck there.

Rohan: now he would be better known for his climate work. Right. I mean, yeah. A bigger problem. He’s maybe he’s a, he’s a good opener of problem solving.

Charlie: So then, then the next big shift came when I think there, there was, I can’t remember the name of the company. One of the companies wanted to do eCommerce over the web.

Charlie: And I think at and T was actually the very first company that did a banner ad, right? No. Or was it pizza hut? It was one of the two, it was either pizza or at and T, but the very first banner ad was the most successful banner ad in history because it basically. You don’t want to click on this, but you know, you will.

Charlie: And it was something silly like that. And everybody started clicking on it and it linked, it was a hyperlink to another, to another site. And suddenly it was this, this idea of selling ads on the internet became a thing. But what they didn’t have was they still didn’t have state. Right? So state was the big, the big game changer.

Charlie: And the other thing you have to remember, this is really super important in the early days of web, the web or the worldwide web, you weren’t as ever intended to be a member, right. That’s something that most people don’t really think about and that matters. And in the end, that’s like one of the biggest deals, cuz it wasn’t built with a membership model.

Charlie: It was intended that you would be a, you would be a client and you would connect and you would exist inside somebody else’s domain. But you were never intended yourself to be represented in the web. Right? You had no digital twin just for you, right?

Rohan:  So there was no concept of reifying into digital space in that sense.

Charlie: Yeah. None, none. You were only intended to exist inside somebody else’s domain.

Mike: So would that really be considered more of an, a network of networks in that case? Meaning you have smaller private networks that connect to a larger connectivity of public networks?

Charlie: Well, kind of, but you’re, you, you still are stuck in the sense that your point of presence inside the web was always stuck inside somebody else’s domain and you couldn’t escape out of it.

Charlie: Right. You could lead that domain and go to another domain.

Rohan: Okay. You were fully sealed within it. In other words, That was essentially a fixed finite controlled, fully controlled space. Okay. Wow. Interesting.

Charlie: Yeah, you had, you had no agency. Yeah. The only thing that you could do is whatever the website allowed you to do.

Rohan: So that would be bubbles within bubbles. And as you say, the only functionality is 100% prescriptive guided. There was mm-hmm once you entered that pipe, you were gonna come out the other way. The other end in a, in a completely known way.

Charlie: So then they said, okay, so let’s, let’s see if we can solve this, but it was because mark Anderson left the university and joined up with James Clark and they were gonna start a new co new company.

Charlie: And originally they were going to develop some kind of a PlayStation or something like that. But they ended up taking the, the license for the for the worldwide web browser and server and they started commercializing it. And this is when it started showing up on, on those five and a quarter inch plopping drive.

Chris: so how did they commercialize it? I’m just, I’m just curious how they, how they pushed that.

Charlie: Well, they got the license for it, right? Okay. So they went to the university. It was like a million dollars. Yeah. I think it was through spy glass, Inc, which was their monetization engine for the university. And so you get a license and it could be wrong in a million, but it’s something like that.

Charlie: And that gave them the right to start distributing it. And they called it the mosaic browser. And then the university said, oh no, no, no, no, no, no, we own that name. You gotta come up with your own name. And so that’s when they came out with the Netscape communicator. That’s how that, that’s how that started.

Charlie: You’d get the floppy drive and you’d, you’d put in your windows box and you’d start up the web browser. But what IRES team did, which was really, really cool was they added cookies. They called it magic cookies at the time. And they added this idea that because you were never intended to exist inside the web, what they would do instead is they would allow the server to set cookies at the browser side.

Charlie: And so that the next time that you went to that same website, it would already know who you are. And that became, that was the most significant change to the web suddenly. Right. That, that was a big deal.

Mike: Would that be more of the identification of the end user on the other side? And tracking of that.

Charlie: Yeah. It started to allow for this idea that you could enter it a username and a password, and it could track you and know who you are. All right. So this was the like 96/97 timeframe. But by 96, you have to remember too, that Microsoft and Netscape, they were already in this browser war. Right? So there was this war that was starting the, the, the early browser war fight.

Charlie: And then it was found out that net, that Netscape had magic cookies and the financial times ran a, ran an article about it and said, you know, that this could be a huge privacy problem, that this idea of cookies. And so I think it was the FCC got involved in. I’m pretty sure it was. I think it was the FCC got involved.

Charlie: There were hearings were government hearings about, you know, oh my gosh, what’s gonna happen with these cookies. And, and back then their early browsers suddenly had to have this, this this box that would pop up and ask you if you would accept cookies. Right. And so this was like 19 97, 19 98. That’s when the I E T F came out and said, here, we’re gonna make a standard about cookies so that everybody follows the same standard.

Charlie: And it was a big deal, but then it was like, okay, cool. We can have cookies and we can log in. And well, remember who we are, but every time we’d go to a website that stupid frigging box would pop up and people got so annoyed by having to say, oh yeah, I’ll accept them. Yeah. I’ll accept them. Yeah, I’ll accept it.

Charlie: It just became the default over time. Yeah. But if you go back to 1997, that’s a funny thing. That original spec from the I E TF that was GDPR compliant before the, there was even a GDPR.

Mike: That’s why I ask my follow up question, cuz as soon as you started talking about 96 cookies and kind of tracking, and I was like, this isn’t new, this is not anything fresh like GDPR and the California version of GDPR.

Mike: Like this is all, you know, old hat, same song and dance.

Charlie: So I call that web two because that was a significant moment in the web and everybody has their own definitions of web one web, two web, whatever. But to me that was a significant difference.

Charlie: Stateless document sharing to suddenly, boom, you’ve got a stateful eCommerce platform. That’s huge. But what you also saw during that transition was the end of free. That was a big moment.

Mike: So if I kind of look at lineage of some, some internets that kind of highlight web one, two, and three web one, they consider a read only web two.

Mike: They kind of consider more of a social version where you’re more read and write web three is where I think you’re, you’re kind of hitting this point of where things stop becoming free, which is where it goes, read, write, and execute where we actually are starting to not just read the data, consume the data, but manipulate and do things with the data.

Charlie: So if you look at, at the w three C’s role in standardizing the web right as, and I look at their definitions, so they didn’t, they never really had web one web two, but they did have their own version or their own idea of what would be web three. So there’s. The technical side of the development and change of the web.

Charlie: And then there’s the marketing side, right? So marketing has a tendency to think of web two as more around the social media read and write kind of thing. But it really wasn’t that to me, it isn’t that you could read and write. It was that you had state because if you didn’t have state, you couldn’t do anything.

Charlie: And it was really the, the eCommerce side of it that was starting to drive that suddenly you could monetize.

Rohan: Can I  just clarify when you say state, do you mean the, the sovereign entity, a state or a system state?

Charlie: A system state, meaning that the use of cookies got you. Got you. right, because suddenly now you could do, you could do a shopping cart without cookies.

Charlie: You couldn’t do the shopping cart. Mm. And so that was, to me, the, you couldn’t even have social media sites, like the, the way we think of them today, if you didn’t have the yeah. Right.

Rohan: Ability to have. So the cookie is like a bridge, but actually, but build the bridge, you also had to build the other side first you actually had to create something to span too.

Rohan: And that was the genius of it. And no, no wonder it got commercialized. And well financialized because of course, if you say 97 98, was that cut over period? Well, 2008, 2009 is the global financial crisis. And over, over financialization of badly data fired data was a big part of that, right? I mean, it, it crashed within 10 years.

Rohan: Early model, even after surviving the.com bust.

Charlie: Right. You remember that back then? They were paying, they were paying people like 75 bucks an hour to sit there and write HTML. that was crazy time you paid, I mean, in 97, that was, that was good money. You were getting paid 90, you know, good money to sit there.

Charlie: Take you just to write HTML. Yeah.

Rohan: the late nineties were surprisingly tough, I think for many. So where were you in at this time at this sort of shifting point? Charlie? What, what, what was your trajectory like?

Charlie: So from around 97 I left at and T bell labs and I went off on my own and the reason I went off on my own was.

Charlie: Going back to 94. When I first saw what the web browser was I decided that I was gonna go home and start writing my very first patent. I’ve never written a patent in my life, but I was gonna write a patent about this idea that you can change the world’s differently if you think of, of HTTP as just an access method.

Charlie: And so I, I gotta explain this a little bit more that around the same time I had met a researcher named Rick rearer at, at and T and he wrote a database system called Daytona and Daytona could handle a terabyte of data in 1997, faster than Oracle could. And it was this incredible system that he developed and I thought, wow, this is cool.

Charlie: I wanna read and learn about it. And in his manual he introduced a, a data type called thing. And it just, it floored me that anybody could come up with something as generic as the word thing, as a data type. And that set me down this long road, long journey along the way about what is this idea of things and, and how does that impact the way we think of computer science.

Charlie: So I had stopped and said, you know what, there’s this, I got this crazy idea that you could move the protocols outside of the application, shove ’em inside. And suddenly we would be able to just say, it’s an access method. We don’t care how the access method it works. And I put together a first patent application and filed it by 1997.

Charlie: I got my first patent and I turned that into a patent portfolio of about 10 patents, which became a really cool defensive patent portfolio. And then I sold it off and in 2007 and then started on my next part of the journey, which is where I’m at today. But before we get into that, yeah, I wanted just to wrap up one thing about web 2, 3, 4.

Charlie: Okay. So we had web one stateless web two suddenly asked state what is web three in 2007, the W3C had come out with their own idea of what web three would be. And they actually called it web three and it was web three or web 3.0. And it was a semantic web. And Tim Burley started on the journey of the semantic web, but it never really took off.

Charlie: And it wasn’t until 2000. And I think 14 when Gavin wood through Ethereum came out and said, Hey, you know what? We could, we could develop a new web three and it’s gonna be web two, the stateful web. Blockchain and smart contracts. And so that became this new idea, a redefinition of web three. And since that time people have been redefining what web three really means.

Charlie: Just because they can

Chris: was that the first time an actual label was applied as in web 3.0?

Charlie: That was 2007 by the W3C, there was actually a PDF you can find online with that reference.

Chris: Okay. Yeah. I was curious when the numeric value, you know, web 3.0 4.0 5.0. You know, when that label was applied.

Charlie: I don’t know when they actually started labeling it.

Charlie: Okay. But I do know that Gavin would, he had, he had a really good intent in trying to say, Hey, there’s, there’s a different thing that we could do. And that’s that we should, we should think about the blockchain and smart contracts as being part of the web infrastructure, but it wasn’t a w three C sponsor thing.

Charlie: And as a result it really became more about marketing. Right? And so when you look at what was the underlying problem that he’s really trying to solve, right. That to me, that’s the most important thing here. What’s the underlying problem. And the underlying problem to me was. Web two inherited web one web three inherited web two, whatever web three is, it’s gonna inherit whatever the limitations of web two.

Charlie: So the bottom line is you’re still not a member of the web, right? And that’s the, that’s the fundamental issue here is that the web wasn’t built with the membership or a citizenship model. And so you are not part of it. You never were intended to be

Mike: Charlie. Let’s unpack that for a moment. So you spoke a little bit about kind of being stateless or stateful earlier in the prior versions, but yet we as individuals right now, from what I’m understanding and, and learning here is that we don’t actually have any presence in the internet where stateless in the internet, even with web five, metaverse some of these other things we as humans, don’t still have a presence like how me understand a little more of this.

Charlie: The way the web is designed, it’s a client server model. And so you don’t have a, in order for you to be represented in the digital world, you need three things at a minimum, you need an identity across domains. You need an agent, a sense of agency where you can control the exchange of value between domains.

Charlie: And you can, you can decide how you want that exchange of value to occur. And you also need a digital home for your agent. So it has a place to store your stuff, the stuff that you own, the stuff that is all about, just you. So when you look at the role of blockchain, blockchain is more about saying I can use a blockchain to cart my stuff into a website, into a domain to say, Hey, I’m here.

Charlie: This is all my stuff. And I can prove it. Right. I have the key, so I can prove that this is my stuff. Well, it’s good. As long as that domain accepts that particular blockchain, but if it doesn’t accept that particular blockchain, you have to leave your card outside. Doesn’t do you any good? And that’s because there’s no standard around all of this yet.

Charlie: Right? So that’s really, but then you say, why do I even have to do that? And the answer is because you’re not a member, you don’t have an identity across domains. You don’t have a, any sense of agency and you don’t have a home to store your digital stuff.

Mike: No, we’re still acting through web browsers, end user devices, mobile laptops, phones, iPads, whatever, but it’s still not a, a direct connection between human and the internet with some sort of identifiable.

Mike: It’s probably a good thing.

Charlie: When we become members of the web, it changes everything. Right. And it isn’t just the web. So we, we refer to it as, when you become a member of the digital world that changes everything that we know, think of. You have an agent inside the digital world and it works just for you.

Charlie: So what would you do? Well, I’d go out to dinner, take a picture. And I would tell my agent, share this with my friends and say, ha suckers. I got to go to dinner. You know, like what you would do on regular social media, take a picture of the kids and say, Hey, agent, send that to my parents or send that to, you know, my brothers and sisters or whatever.

Charlie: And all of a sudden, what you start to realize is that your agent becomes the core of the social media. Right. It, it, it performs the job of what we know as social media today.

Rohan: Yes. Yes. That’s going into the, the digital intermediary idea. I think this is where I’m starting to come in. Now it’s around 2017 and over here in New Zealand, we were looking at how to obtain and maintain self-sovereignty as it were in terms of trust, inclusion, control pretty important basic things.

Rohan: And we kept landing on the necessity of a skilled integrate tour. Integrate tour someone as a, as a go between or something. And then the at the time the conversation was increasingly drifting towards AI. And so the. The AI, the blockchain I E ledger, which is a familiar financial tool. They started to gel and come together quite pronouncedly.

Rohan: And I think this is where you’re going with membership.

Charlie: Yeah. It’s kind of like that because. Once, once you have membership in the world, in the digital world, it allows you to do things like say, you know, you, you go to your GP and the GP doctor says, Hey, you gotta go to a specialist and you go to the specialist and they write a report or whatever.

Charlie: And, and then you wanna get it back to your GP and just trying to make that happen because of HIPAA and various rules about data privacy, it’s really, really difficult. But if you had an agent yeah. All of a sudden, it’s just like, Hey agent, send this over. Yes.

Rohan: It simplifies it similar to, if you have an underlying medical condition, you might have a Medicaid bracelet.

Rohan: So no matter who might come across you, they have access to some empowered information. You’ve empowered. It. You’ve established its exterior to you. Mm-hmm happens to live in the, in the world, not the digital, but the same idea applies. Doesn’t it?

Charlie: essentially yeah.

Rohan: A set of, Hmm. Fundamentally independently obtain defining information that links back to you.

Charlie: And then once you start to think about it, here’s, here’s a really good example, right? So you have a digital agent and I have a digital agent and what happens is you’re gonna write something up or I’m gonna write a story and I’m gonna try to sell it to you. And so my agent sends it to your agent and says, Hey, you guys, you know, this, the, the write up, you know, are you interested in publishing it?

Charlie: And you agree. But then your agent pays my agent for the, the use of the story. Okay. So what we have there is we have a creator economy where my agent and your agent are exchanging value, right? So it’s that exchange of value. That’s really super important at the moment. Now people were looking at Ethereum and coming up with this idea that, Hey, when you do that exchange of value, you could have cryptographic tokens that are specific to that particular ecosystem and that you and I could change tokens.

Charlie: And so in the writer community, we would have a particular set of tokens that we would all use. and if you’re in the automotive industry, maybe have a different set of tokens. And if you’re in a game, a particular game, it’s yet a different set of tokens. So this was like 2017. When this idea that we would just have all these different tokens in exchange, ’em all, but it was all tied to Ethereum.

Charlie: And there wasn’t a really good alternative at the moment, which was good for Ethereum. I mean, clearly they were proving the point. It was an important point to prove, but then the scam started happening and all the bogus ICOs, and that whole market just crashed. Right. But the principle is still the same.

Charlie: It’s the exchange of value between you and me. Yeah. So web three is like that and then you go, okay, so what’s web. So in web five, that’s Jack Dorsey saying, wait a minute, you can’t do what you wanna do to exchange a value between ecosystems using just one blockchain, like Ethereum. It really should be Bitcoin and Bitcoin and smart contracts as a, and as a blockchain, that, that should be the, how you do that exchange of value.

Charlie: So essentially web three and web five, it’s really a fight, not even a fight, but it’s really, it’s, it’s the, the ideals of which exchange and value is gonna control. It’s gonna be like in the, an Ethereum type or is it gonna be more like a Bitcoin type. And that’s, that’s the difference between them?

Rohan: That sounds like a pretty minor difference to me.

Charlie: Oh, it’s actually huge.

Rohan: But didn’t we just say that the establishment of cookies was a, a critical point we passed and now we’re talking which, or which endpoint between Ethereum or Bitcoin is sort of acting as that financial intermediary mm-hmm where am I?

Charlie: Because when you, when you look at the underlying essence again, about what is the cryptocurrency, why is it really important? It’s because it doesn’t rely on the web protocol. And so by not relying on the web protocol, you and I can both be members in that exchange. I got you. Right. And so it’s, it goes right back to this, the, the fundamental problem.

Charlie: We’re not members of the digital world.

Mike: So I may muddy the waters here a bit with kind of this next train of thought. When I look at current state of the internet and forget about web one through five, I just look at where we are today from a what’s going on in the socioeconomical current environments.

Mike: And I see things like NFT and metaverse and metaverse is not just a Facebook concept. It’s really just a, a virtual world to live in work in, in, in a, a broad sense. And I see a lot of folks spending real capital, us dollars or other denominations on assets in this virtual world, like virtual land, for an example.

Mike: And I, I have not yet made that connection between an exchange of value because in the real world, right. I, I want to take Charlie out for a drink and buy him a bottle of whiskey. There’s an exchange of actual value. Yep. You know, we, we understand in the physical world, what value is now in the virtual world with the theorem, you have things like digital contracts, and there’s a lot of extreme value in those digital contracts and the code that could be written in to both protect both and multiple parties.

Mike: Mm-hmm, , there’s a lot of reasons for that, but how do we, like, how do we, as most common folks who aren’t as experienced as you and such the history of the fact that, you know, cookies have been around since 1998 and Ethereum, as our principal has been really around since 20 14, 20 15 with blockchain or whatever, don’t quote me on the years.

Mike: How do, how do we kind of be able to stay moderately aware of what’s going on when these things just change so fast behind the scenes? even as a technologist, I struggle to keep up.

Charlie: And it, it that’s always the problem, but you know, the, we look at the world differently and we spent, we spend a lot, a lot of time in R and D going back to the thing model for a moment.

Charlie: And, and we started to come up with some really crazy abstractions, which just changed our way of thinking completely. So in essence, the database that Rick re-created on this idea, that there’s a thing, what he was referring to is entity data. So it’s all, all the nouns, right? It’s all about the, the data model and the nouns.

Charlie: And those are the things that he was referring to. But you contrast that with the sign hanging at IBM’s office. And it used to say, don’t just stand there, do something. And it was that moment when you go, well, wait a. Is a thing, just a noun. Where’s a thing also in action and then became a what came first, right?

Charlie: So it became a chicken and an egg pro you know, so how do you solve it? Well, for the chicken and egg problem you solve it by ordering it both on Amazon and then waiting to see .

Chris: So what gets there first?

Charlie: Yeah.

Charlie: but you, you look at it and you go, okay, this idea that there’s, that there’s things, it was a fascinating journey to go down and, and, and what we concluded to make. ’em very long story short. We concluded that there’s three types of things. There are things that machines can do, things that they can act upon and things that they can use.

Charlie: That’s. So when they act upon a thing, it could actually interact with something else, right? You still have to act upon one thing to make it interact with something else, but you essentially have three types of things, things that machines can do act upon and use. And then it became Michael. The, we got into this idea.

Charlie: What if you could actually create a single data structure that represented nothing more than just a thing. And if you could do that, you could say, I got this thing here and it acts upon this thing over here. And all of a sudden you create a graph, right? This thing acts upon that thing. So it’s a graph.

Charlie: And if I can create a graph about just that simple relationship, I could create a graph of 10,000 of these relationships. And if I could do that, I can now interconnect all of these together into a giant what we call the multidimensional graph of things. That became the brain of a digital. It became the digital brain for our robots.

Charlie: And suddenly we were able to figure out the, the Alan touring problem in 1950, Alan touring said, we ought to build a machine like a little kid. We ought to let it interact with and within its environment and learn, and the machine should be able to adapt. And so that’s what we spent the years trying to figure out was could you actually build that machine?

Charlie: And did you need any special hardware in order to make it work? And in the end we built it using nothing more than a raspberry pie. True story.

Rohan: Go raspberry pie.

Charlie: so finally, underrated piece of kit the first prototype was built using a raspberry pie. It was really a fascinating prototype because. It allowed us to say, alright, let’s take this raspberry pie.

Charlie: As an example, let’s attach a there to it. So we have an internal temperature. We’ll attach an external temperature there to it. We’ll attach some ultrasonic sensors to it so we can detect movement. We’ll put a thermal pile on it so that we can determine the difference between temperatures. And we will put a speaker, a GPS, and a microphone and voila look what we could do.

Charlie: And so we realized in a real simple example, we realized that we could put it inside a bending. Right. And so when you press F four, the speaker would play, what else can I do for you today? And it would turn on the microphone and it would listen. And whatever anybody said to it, it didn’t matter because it wouldn’t understand anything at all about what the, what it was.

Charlie: It’s not in the graph. It was a coded response, right. It was just a coded response to get you to say something. But what it could do then is it could say, what was the topic that Mike was talking about or what was the topic that Chris said, right. Just tell me, figure out what is the topic. And when enough people ask about the same topic, it could reach across the network and go to our bookstore and say, Hey, people are asking me about changing an airline flight about renting a car about finding a hotel because it’s a machine that’s sitting in an airport.

Charlie: And the other machine, which is sitting in a, in a, a middle school, it wants, it’s saying, Hey, I got people asking me about where the local Pokémon is at, right? Because it’s in a middle school. And so each machine starts out identical, but each machine reaches across the network and some books teaching it, the language, the things that it needs to know for the environment that it’s in.

Charlie: And so now the machines, even though they started out absolutely equivalent each machine adapts to its environment, to learn something different

Mike: just as in each and every human being is unique in their own data, set, experience, history, past and perceptions.

Charlie: Exactly. So that’s, that’s the work that we focused on.

Charlie: And then we thought, well, wait a minute, this is an interesting concept because I, if the machine has a digital brain. And the only thing the machine can do is stuff in the graph. It can’t do anything if it’s not in the graph, the machine can’t do it. So it can only perform the things that are inside its graph.

Charlie: What if we put application protocols into the graph,

Mike: give it more freedom to do what it needs to do within the confines of its world.

Charlie: Exactly. And then you could also allow it to escape, meaning that it wasn’t bound anymore to the web. Could a machine have a graph, an internal graph, have a knowledge base, have a vocabulary that it can use and, and, and not be connected to the web.

Charlie: And the answer was, yeah, we could do that.

Mike: when you talked about building this with the raspberry pie, like what kind of a, what year were we looking at when, when this occurred?

Charlie: So this was in. 2000, I think it was 2015 when we when we got the prototypes up and running and the, I actually had, this was what I had this really bright young guy helping me out cuz he was doing the hardware and he had just finished his sophomore year in high school.

Charlie: right. So he had just, it’s a true story. He was in the stem class and he was, he was a rockstar. And so he joined up and I said, Alex, here’s what I need you to build. And he said, okay, I can, I I’ll put all the pieces together. What’s it for? And I said, I can’t tell you. just build it. And he, he, he really wanted to understand it, but I was.

Charlie: Here’s the problem, dude, you’re under 18. I can’t, you can’t sign an NDA. It would hold up in court. Right. And he said, well, what if my parents sign it? And I’m like, no, man, it doesn’t work that way. , you’re still under 18, regardless of who signs it. And so he, he helped me to build a very first prototype for this.

Charlie: And when he turned 18 true story, I got him birthday cake and on the top of the cake was his NDA. So had his NDA right.

Rohan: That is a power move.

Mike: It was well, you gotta make sure your all bases are covered and he’s at the point where, Hey, just sign it before you eat your cake, bro.

Charlie: I had, I had a couple of these high school students working with me over the, the years. And it’s really fun working with them because they’re, they’re still free thinkers. Right. And it’s all about that. Free the ability to free think that you haven’t been, you haven’t gone down the journey from going through college and now getting more homed in on one thing, you still have this more generalized ability to think freely.

Charlie: Right? And so when I would talk to them about the graph, I could explain the graph. Once we filed the patent, I could explain what the graph was about. And just going through that and explain to them, they’re like, gotta understand it. The graph knows everything. Like it became, it became really ingrained in them very quickly that there’s this idea that put everything into a graph and inside the graph is a thing.

Charlie: And that thing is the vocabulary. And inside the vocabulary is a mini graph of all the things that it knows how to do.

Mike: It’s like inceptions, can you I’m not personally as familiar with the term graph. Can you help me understand a little bit about what that is? And maybe in, in modern terms, perhaps this is a good analogy.

Mike: You can help me understand. But when I think of an API and you create an API, you create a bounded context of that API, which is here’s what the rules of the road are of what it can do, what it can’t do, what it’s gonna accept, not accept things like that. Can you help me understand like the concept of a graph compared to maybe some other analogy today?

Charlie: Sure. So the, the, basically a graph from our viewpoint, the graph was just, it starts out with one circle and that one circle is just what we called a thing. That’s it? And, and it had no other definition other than that circle is a thing. And then we drew another circle. We said this circle is also a thing.

Charlie: And now what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna draw an arc and we’re going to connect the two of them. And so now this thing is somehow related to this thing over here, and it allowed us to do something that you could never do in RDF. In RDF. RDF said you have a subject over here, a circle, you have a line that connects it over to another circle.

Charlie: The first one is the subject. The second circle is the object and the arc label on the line, connecting them. That’s called the predicate. The problem with RDF is that you can’t do what’s called ranging over the predicate, right? You cannot range over an arc label. That’s not allowed in graph theory. So what we did is we had to come up with a way to say, there’s a thing such that there’s another thing such that there’s a third thing.

Charlie: By having the three circles or three nodes, it allowed us to say the first node is the subject such that there’s a thing. And it’s the predicate such that there’s a thing. And it is the object. So we had three circles there and we were using existential quantifiers to connect them all together. And by doing that, it allowed us to say that middle circle, the predicate, we can now range over it to find solutions.

Charlie: So what does that mean in, in, in real simple terms, the inputs are two and four. The answer is 16. How do you get it? The only way to solve that is to range over the possibilities, right? So it needed to kind of find a way that it could look through all of the things that it knows how to do and see if it could solve the problem.

Charlie: Well, the first one we ex, well, the first two we expected, right. Two to the fourth power is 16, four to the second power 16. It was the third one that threw us for a loop. It was the, the sum of the last two numbers three times. So we had written it so that it would loop through the, the, the vocabulary and tried to find a solution.

Charlie: And they came up with the, some of the last two numbers three times. I’m like, how does that even work? And so we had to figure it out that two plus four is six, four plus six is 10 and six plus 10 is 16. And so it figured out a solution, which we didn’t know. Like we didn’t guess that one, but it figured out a so, and again, this is a simple, simple problem, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t that it was a simple problem.

Charlie: It was that it figured out a solution that we didn’t know. And it made us stop and  think.

Mike: would you say that it’s almost like an early version of machine learning, you gave it two options, introduced a third and it came up with a deduction on its own.

Charlie: Yeah. So it’s, it’s a cognitive model is what this comes down to.

Charlie: So we think of it as there’s a lot of a lot of really cool work is being done in decision making. So that’s what we typically refer to as machine learning. Is it a picture of a dog or is it a picture of a cat? Is it something I would hug or not? That was a real cool one. By the way, Google researcher did this theory about, you know, I’ll show pictures to people and, and ask them, would you hug this or not?

Charlie: And then eventually we’ll be able to train an AI system to show it a picture and say, would you hug this or not? And it was so cool, but it had so many biases and it so many biases anyhow, That’s about decision making. Right? And so our model was more about, okay, they’re doing the cool stuff on decision making.

Charlie: We’re not gonna touch that. But now that you can decide, is it a dog or a cat now? What, what do you do, right? How do you, as the machine figure out what the next step is? And so this, so it became, it became that cognitive model where what we were trying to do is to get the machine to consider. Right. And, and it that’s, that’s all we were trying to figure out, how do we get the machine to consider?

Charlie: Right. So that was it. It was a, this fascinating idea, but man, it takes you down so many rabbit holes as you go through this, it got to the point where you gotta ask, you know, what’s consciousness?

Rohan: , I, I gotta ask the big reveal. The big reveal is where is this membership based web? If we’ve said the previous ones are membership less, what is actually our fundamental next step?

Charlie: So the, the next step it gets, it gets more and more complex as you go along, because you start to realize that now that we can build this giant graph and we understand how the graph works and why it works the way it does. The next fundamental question that you have to ask is who should control it. Okay.

Rohan: And that’s the question.

Charlie: That is the question

Rohan: because personal freedom and state different countries, different rules…

Charlie: different regulations, the exchange of value. It’s all about the exchange of value. huge, huge. And the only other problem that you have too is you also have to consider real world identifiers and how they relate into the, the, the hyper connected world.

Charlie: So we call the, we call the big graph in the sky. We call that the hyper connected world, because it doesn’t matter anymore about whether you’re connecting through the web, whether you’re using ZigBee, whether you’re using voice, none of that matters anymore. That’s all abstracted away and things like language and grammar and protocols, they just become things.

Charlie: And even blockchains are just things to us. So we can push all of that stuff, gets pushed inside the graph. It doesn’t define the graph. Right. And when you understand that it doesn’t define the graph anymore. You, you realize that w three C doesn’t control this. It’s beyond their mandate. That’s kind of scary.

Rohan: It’s a scary ENCE because we we’re also working out. We’re seeing quite clearly with how much war we have around the world and how little agreement we can come to are many things that actually figuring out how to architect this next step in a only partially shared and partially autonomous environment where as you say, there may be fewer actual options available to people.

Rohan: This is Mike’s point. Yeah. It goes to who has agency.

Charlie: The question really gets a, another question that becomes really super important is how do you get your node in the graph? How do you get your node? Right? Because if somebody gives it to you, then they’re, they’re in essence kind of controlling it.

Charlie: Issuer holder verifier. I give you a node in the graph, right? I’m the issuer, you’re the holder I can verify and gave it to you, but that means I can take it away. And if I can take it away, that’s not necessarily a good idea either. We needed a way to get you into the graph. That was the, that was the big trick.

Charlie: Right? And so to solve that as silly as it is, it works. We created these holographic memory identifiers. And so we take the identity of random parts of the graph and we turn ’em into three dimensional holograms, and what’s cool about it is we can manufacture the graph outta these things and give them out.

Charlie: We don’t know who gets it, but when you get it, you can scan it with a smartphone. And now you are now you’re connected into the graph outta node, and now you own that node. Nobody can take it away from you. So you,

Rohan: you you’ve effectively randomized the distribution because you don’t know the location of the shard.

Rohan: Yep. And it is via the shard that the individual can tokenize themselves into. I E obtain membership into this, then they can, once you, once you own a node, right?

Charlie: So once you own a node in the graph, nobody can take that node away from you. And what you can do is you can now say, okay, I can talk to other people and using issuer holder and verify they can verify the authenticity of who I am. That’s the way we do it today.

Charlie: I get a driver’s license. I get a passport. I get all these identifiers thrown at me from other people. So I can do the same thing in the digital world where I’m in control. I don’t have to get a node from a government saying that they’re authorizing me to get in this graph. I think of it as no, it’s not your graph.

Charlie: You’re a thing government. You’re, you’re a thing. You’re not, you don’t own this graph.

Mike: And when you say graph, I wanna make sure I can come back to that. A graph is effectively an ecosphere of ecosystems.

Charlie: Mm-hmm got it. It’s the connection of everything. It’s just everything in the world can now go in for the graph and the gold, the knowledge graph is that if you think of this giant graph, right, I could take one node Mike, and say, that’s Mike’s node.

Charlie: And only Mike owns it. Nobody else. And you can control from that one node. What and how things are connected to you?

Mike: Meaning it is my. Power of attorney that represents me on the universe in the digital world.

Rohan: Yep. That’s a good metaphor.

Mike: It’s my power of attorney that not only can interpret and read, but can execute on my behalf on behalf of my, my contracts, my agency, my, you know, when we talk about the automation and internet of things, like in a, and correct me if I’m taking this down the wrong path, but in my, my house, if I was to go O T and everything at my house, I could essentially create.

Mike: a mini ecosystem of Mike’s house with all of the devices. Yes. That are connected with a exit point that then connects to the larger ecosystem of other E spheres, I think.

Charlie: Yeah. Well, the, the, think of it like a city, right? So in a city, the city as an ecosystem, but you can also have different vari or different neighborhoods in the city with their own ecosystems.

Charlie: Right. And then you have houses in the SI in the city and within house it’s its own little ecosystem. So it’s really, we think of, we used to call the E sphere as the collection, as a collection of a whole bunch of individual ecosystems. That’s all, it really is just an ecosystem of ecosystems. Same thing.

Chris: Is it locked down in any, in any way where you’re not able to access other ecosystems or would you have to have. Access or entry permission to be able to collaborate or transfer information there.

Charlie: So to solve that problem. Cause that’s a great, that’s a great question to solve that problem. We had to come up with another, another aspect and that’s called the multi key infrastructure.

Charlie: And so it’s a quantum resistant in really cool encryption and Cing algorithm that we developed and filed for the patent on. And that gives what, what the, the multi key infrastructure does think of it like PKI, but PKI on steroids. Right? So it allows us to integrate things together in a way that nobody else had thought about it’s, it’s really fun.

Charlie: I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s a blast. How do we handle sovereignty?

Rohan: imagine me as a dual passport holder. For instance, I have my shard, I have my I’m in the hyper connected world. I’m assuming I now have a pipeline to the UK entity and the New Zealand entity. And I can send them signals via my own intermediary.

Rohan: This is how this is going down. Going right now, the thing about countries, of course, they’ll say actually, no, you do belong to us. They want to send me signals.

Charlie: So the, the models are, are, are too limiting at the moment. And the reason they’re limiting is that they’re using a sh as an identifier.

Charlie: And so it’s like in the Ethereum network, there are X number. Ethereum wallet addresses. Now people would say, well, it’s unlimited pretty much, but the truth is that there’s a, a finite set of, of addresses that exist inside Ethereum. And, and while that’s fine, there’s also a finite set of addresses that exist inside.

Charlie: The, the Bitcoin wallet addresses. Right. But when you think about the graph, all of that stuff is already inside the graph and the web is already inside the graph and everything is cryptographically linked together inside the graph.

Rohan: And so linked as the KBIT. Right. Gotcha.

Charlie: Yeah. And so once we got that working, it, it allowed us to say that the graph is essentially the world’s largest registry of cryptographically linked, named keys.

Charlie: That allowed us to then go, okay, once you’ve got all that stuff inside it, you start to realize that the graph is never ending and yet everything is already cryptographically linked. It doesn’t matter. All you have to do is put a name in and it cryptographically links it into the right spot. And then it continues on.

Charlie: And as you start to build out the graph, you can appreciate it. Once you realize that a node, I can say, I wanna add a thing into the graph. And the thing that I’m adding is a graph. And all of a sudden it gives you a, another dimension of the graph, right? And now you used to go, well, wait a minute, it’s still linked.

Charlie: It’s cryptographically linked. And so all of these things and all of these graphs are already linked. It’s just a matter of where do we start?

Mike: I have to ask a really odd question here, because I know we kind of had some intentions of the direction of this podcast, but this is going in a, in a very interesting direction, Charlie, and you know, if you’ll allow me a little bit of leash here to hang myself, I would love to follow a little bit, cuz when I hear about a graph and a graph and I hear about the, what a graph is.

Mike: And then to your question earlier, which we totally skipped over, not intentionally just by the nature of life is, you know, what is consciousness when you start talking about the decision making and the building and, and then that kind of ties into some conversations that we’ve had with row heat and some other folks outside of this, which is like quantum physics and ying and yang and binary ones and zero.

Mike: I don’t really know what the make of this cuz this is just the more I learn, the more I’m like the whole universe and the world we live in. And then the internet, like it’s difficult to really make heads or tails out of anything because I feel like the more I learn, the more it shatters any prior knowledge that I have

Charlie: yeah.

Charlie: It’s kinda like that. It has to do that to, yeah. It, when, when we got the machine to give us the answer that it was the sum of the, the last two numbers, three times, we had to go back and, and, and say, well, wait a minute, like this is gonna take us down rabbit holes. We don’t want to go down, but we knew we had.

Charlie: Because you had to ask the question you had to say at what point is an original thought, which gets you into the question. What is an original thought, which gets you into the question of what is consciousness? And then you start jumping into these rabbit holes and you realize that even the best of the best, they don’t have a, a pure definition of what is consciousness.

Charlie: Everybody has their own definition. It’s kind of like the internet of things. Everybody has their own definition or web three web five. Everybody has their own definition. So when you look at it and you say, well, what is consciousness or, or human consciousness? It gets into some really bizarre things.

Charlie: And we spent months just reading, reading books, and learning and trying to understand to go, okay, I have no clue. So I asked my, my daughter my, my middle kid said, Hey, Brett, you know, you’re studying psychology. What the heck is consciousness? And Brittany explained to me that it it’s all the things that, you know, at a moment in time.

Charlie: And I said, well, say that again. It’s all the things that, you know, at a moment in time and that actually that stuck, and I was like, wait a minute, the machine, it knows things. And so it became the definition that, but the problem was that nobody wants to hear that you’re trying to build human consciousness.

Charlie: And when people ask us, are you trying to build human consciousness? I simply say we don’t have to. There’s a well-known method to do it usually involves man and a woman been doing it for thousands of years, not a problem. Okay. We don’t have to do that, but we still needed an answer. What the heck? You know, what is this?

Charlie: And so I started reading about John CIL and John McCarthy, because McCarthy wrote a paper called describing mental capacities to machines. And John CIL argued back that you cannot put human consciousness in a thermostat and they went down this long, long battle. But in the end, what John seal explained was you, the best that you can do is you can, well, first human consciousness is something that forms in a hundred billion neurons in your brain.

Charlie: You’re all born with the brain. You got a hundred billion neurons, human consciousness forms in there, right? It doesn’t form immediately, but it forms in there. So the best that you can do is you can observe it. And if you can observe it as a casual observer, you can create a model about how you think it works.

Charlie: And if you create the model, somebody can create a computer implementation. Of how you think it works. And at best, all you have is a computer implementation of a model created by a casual observer of something that is intrinsic to nature. You never have the original thing. And I thought this is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, cuz now I can answer it right?

Charlie: Go to bed three o’clock in the morning and jump up and go, oh my God, my wife’s like what’s the matter? I said, it’s the corollary. It’s all about the corollary. Nobody ever said the corollary. If you can’t build it, you can’t be limited by it. And all of a sudden we had something different. And so what we call it is we call it robotic consciousness and robotic consciousness is just a model of human consciousness, but it’s robotic.

Charlie: It’s done by a machine now; will it be as good as human consciousness? Not in certain areas. Yeah. Different ways. But in other areas it will outperform it. Yeah. The same way that a calculator can outperform a human doing, doing simple addition and subtraction and multiplication, you use it as a tool. And if you use it as a tool, you’re fine, but it won’t be able to it’s different.

Charlie: It’s not the same thing as human conscious. Exactly.

Rohan: And a calculator can’t pour you a beer. I bet that wasn’t that wasn’t the answer you were expecting, Mike, when you, when you, when you opened that line of questioning, was it, that was, that was a, that was a gem of a response ask one, mate.

Mike: It was because it’s, it’s infinitely interesting because now when you talk about like robotic consciousness is a model of human consciousness, it’s.

Mike: Where did the original model come from and chicken and egg theory. And then Amazon, like when we start talking about the ability to, to build manipulate machine consciousness, which of course, when you look at the trajectory of where we’re going with, you know, robotic processing on automation and what’s going on in factories, it totally leads into a lot of what you’re saying, but you’re going so much deeper because it’s, it gets to that.

Mike: I don’t know. I don’t even know how to describe this, cuz I’m struggling to like to put it into words cuz it’s so much like the mathematical and the computer science, but this is also very much the quantum physics and the spiritual and the universal and the, and honestly, I don’t know what to make of this.

Mike: This is well outside of my current not comfort zone. I’m cool with the comfort zone, but it’s, it’s outside of my current. Skillset of data that I don’t have enough data elements to formulate a good opinion. Right. So I’m loving hearing all you talk about because I know Rohit and I we’ve had really good conversations around like entropy and Rohit’s helped really open my eyes to just quantum physics and what goes on.

Mike: And I’m trying to find my quantum physics books. That’s not here. I’m reading the book about like the, the God particle, right? Because I’m trying to constantly understand as both just a human and a technologist and somebody who just loves beauty of the environment that goes on around us, how it’s all so intertwined and interconnected.

Mike: And there’s this great YouTube documentary. And I may have mentioned this to, to Chris before it’s called inner world’s outer worlds. And it very much matches the quantum physics, universal, you know, energy and vibration and, and Elon Musk’s 360 9 with the. Mindfulness and current spiritualization and, and they try to kind of bridge that gap.

Mike: And I’m trying to find my notes because it kind of maps to something what Charlie was talking about earlier around an ecosystem of an ecosystem. And in this documentary, the only parallel I can try to draw, and I’ll, I’ll pause after this is they said, picture a spider web and you have this big, beautiful spider web that’s so intricate.

Mike: And then on this big spider web is, do drops all over. Beautiful, fresh do drops. If you looked at any single one of those do drops that one single do drop had complete awareness and knowledge and data set of every other Doro and every in infinite complexity within each individual do drop. Therefore each ecosystem had complete awareness and knowledge of the.

Mike: Larger microsystem, so to speak, right? I’m sure I’m butchering it. Look it up, but this is where my brain’s starting to connect all this. I’m like, I don’t know what’s going on, but this is cool stuff. So let’s keep talking about it.

Rohan: There is actually a limit to knowledge absorption.

Rohan: So it doesn’t matter in a sense how much you do know, because there’ll be far, far, far, far, far more than you don’t know. And so, in, in that sense, it, I reminded of George box, the statistician and he says you know, all models are wrong, but some are useful. And over time we just swapping one model out for another as, as it explicates the world better for us.

Rohan: And I think coming back to one of the points we’ve touched on here, it’s almost. This is almost our task as humans here and, and now to actually we have to think this stuff through, we don’t have an OB a choice. We can’t ignore it. It’s part of, of it is similar to when there was life before in Adam Bowman, then there was life after ABO and now we have to live with that and think about it, especially at the moment in the, the current war situation with Russian Ukraine.

Rohan: It’s a real thing. I’m spun off topic there, but I think my main point back to you, Mike, is all we do is just it’s like Plato’s cave. We are sitting with our back to the fire and we are just watching flickering flames on the cave walls. We’re never actually looking at the thing itself. Sometimes we have a really well calibrated model and other times we don’t, for instance presidents that think they can change paths of hurricanes with Sharpies

Charlie: no

Rohan: no, that will never work, bro.

Rohan: You you’re completely bonkers. So you have these two, these two, these two these two extremes, right? And I think what we’ve just been listening to for what an hour and a half is we’re, we’re hearing this huge amount of what I would call clarifying information. So we’re, we’re actually getting this really interesting look at well, in my mind, this membership full experience of a web that is not intermediated by people who will monetize my data trail.

Mike: And that ties very much into probably one of many articles that, that are out there online about the fracturedness of the internet and ownership in waled gardens in the sense of web three. So really in order for web three and beyond to truly thrive, you have infrastructure and organizations like the Facebooks of the world, and many other companies in the space that are building their architecture and infrastructure, the way they want and the way they is in akin to their vision.

Mike: But when you consider the larger ecosystem and, and ecosphere of the internet and what it is, There’s a lot of folks who are not in the Facebook metaverse version that have crypto wallets and identities and NFTs and digital assets that may be real estate, or who’s a, what’s it, but there’s no current system that I’m aware of.

Mike: That allows me as an individual to take a digital asset, whether it’s a, you know, an Ft land or a blockchain ledger, and be able to transport that across those different, I’ll say manufacturers in the sense of this case, because that may resonate a little bit more with folks out there. So the, you can almost look at this as like Nike versus Adidas versus X, Y, Z in some sense, but in the digital space, you have a lot of really big name players with a lot of digital infrastructure and a lot of ours.

Mike: But I can’t necessarily go from vendor a, in this metaverse to vendor B in that metaverse or digital world and transfer my assets to be able to transact or exchange value as Charlie had mentioned.

Charlie: Yeah, you can’t automate that. You can’t, you can’t do that across domains in the web or at least not easily.

Charlie: And you can’t do it using any kind of a consistent identity. And so this goes back to one of the, one of the benefits and the drawbacks of solutions like Bitcoin, right? Bitcoin, the beauty of it was that anybody could participate. Right. And that, that was the coolest thing was like, everybody’s a member.

Charlie: You just get a wallet, man. Download a boom. You’re on, you’re connected. Didn’t need the web. You weren’t going through the web. You were just using peer to peer. Now the downside. Was that you don’t really know who’s on the other end of the transaction. So you can’t satisfy a M L K YC, right? So compliance audit would go out the window.

Charlie: So our world is based on this idea of, of war holder, Ander. Somebody has to issue me an identifier that they’re willing to verify that I’m legit. I am who I am or whatever, and I get different identifiers assigned to me for different purposes. My first identifier was that of a gender neutral entity, just like everybody else.

Charlie: Your very first identifier is gender neutral. You’re just the baby. That’s it. Oh, oh, maybe mom’s belly. Oh, the baby. Yeah. And, and then you’re born and you’re assigned the gender identity and you’re assigned a hospital bracelet and your identity, and you’re assigned a birth name identity from, from your Parents.

Charlie: And so, and then that gets registered in the county and then you get a county identifier, at least here in the United States, you get registered in the county and you get a county identifier, and that starts the process. And then you get student identifiers and blah, blah, blah. But the point is that throughout your life, you’re being assigned to identifiers and you use them to prove who you are.

Charlie: And the, the, the intentionality is that you are self-sovereign only in the sense that you can choose which identifier you’re gonna pre present in order to complete a transaction. That’s, that’s the limit of yourself sovereign capability. So you’re not self-sovereign in the sense that you get to identify yourself.

Charlie: You’re, you’re, it’s really self-managed identity. That’s, that’s kind of the, the way that people think of it. It’s more self-managed identity. But you get the identifiers and you move along. And in, in the graph, the goal of the graph is that you own the note. You can collect all the stuff, all the identifiers you can say, Hey, that note can prove my identity.

Charlie: Go talk to them. I am who I am, I’ll present the ID. And so I’m over here, you’re presenting it to me. I say, who can prove who you are and you say, oh, that note over there. I go talk to that note. Yep. They can prove. Yep. That’s really him. Okay. We move on.

Rohan: How do I get my shad here? I am all the way at bottom of end of the world. What do people, what do people have to do? You know, they’re gonna come over and knock on your front. where’s my shot.

Charlie: Yeah. So this has been the, the, the fun part of this project had been that we were self-funded. And so we got to work on this without having to worry about a good market strategy, immediately turning a revenue, and it allowed us to explore all these extents.

Charlie: Now, if we were in any other organization, we wouldn’t have had that luxury, right. We would’ve had, okay, you gotta get to market, you gotta make the money, move on. Let’s go. So we did all the hard research and we’re just now going through productization. And again, we still don’t have any venture cap money in our project.

Charlie: We purposefully have delayed as long as we can so that we could understand the value, but it still goes back in the end. You still have this giant question about. As you, as you understand, and you can contemplate how it is possible for the entire digital world to be hyper connected and that everything can be interconnected one way or another, and then you apply even space, time to it.

Charlie: And now we can go through time this way, and the graph can continuously expand. And as you do all of that, you have to still go back to the important question who should control it. And, and if we don’t do that part of it, right, the rest of it doesn’t matter. I talked with an air force general and I told the chef, so, you know what, there’s a high probability that as the world goes in this direction, because I believe it will, whether it’s us or somebody else, it doesn’t matter.

Charlie: It’s going to go in this direction, cuz it just makes sense. But as you go through it, you know, would wars be fought over this? And if it’s used incorrectly. Yeah.

Rohan: Yeah, for sure you are so right.

Charlie: So we wanna find a way where the people can own it. That’s what we’re well, we think we’re gonna start it out as a commercial enterprise and then as it develops we would look to turn it into a co-op so that people, people would actually have say in it.

Mike: So when I hear the graph and by the way, prior to, to today, I, I had not heard the graph in any meaningful sense, at least in my current data set. How is the graph different than the matrix?

Charlie: Well, it’s it, it’s an interesting question. And there are times where I think of them kind of as the same and times where I go, no, you don’t want them to be the same because the matrix should be a thing inside the graph.

Charlie: And that’s what, that’s the way I can kind of rationalize it. That. The matrix is the thing it’s inside the graph

Chris: and the graph is the largest entity, right?

Charlie: Exactly. Okay. It’s, it’s the hyper connection of people, places and things. And, and it’s done in the way that like Kyle Schwab talked about this in 2014 or 15, somewhere in there the fourth industrial revolution world economic form.

Charlie: And he said that, you know, the distinction between the physical, the digital and the biological spheres are gonna blur when they do a changes, everything, but he didn’t know how it was gonna happen. But he isn’t the first person to say, Kevin Kelly from wired magazine had talked about it a couple of years prior.

Charlie: And he called his, his vision. I think it was called Holos. And it was really about this idea of a super organism and that, you know, all the little organisms, all played part in the super words. Andum and that’s what we are is this super organism moving through time. And so you have to contemplate the space, time dimension of it.

Charlie: And then you also have to think about, you know, the idea that that time is just a thing. And so you could, you could kind of go forward in time and back in time, you could slow time down, cuz it’s all just things and they’re all just models inside the graph. And so, yeah, it really becomes huge. And we even created model, this will, this will blow your mind.

Charlie: You can create a model of the graph. And you could say, okay, this is one species of a graph, and you can create another model of a graph. And you could say, this is a different species, and then you can combine them, right? So the two graphs can say, I will enter into a contract. You got a graph, I gotta graph.

Charlie: I’m gonna enter into a contract with you. And I’m gonna bring my knowledge into this contractual graph. And you’re gonna bring your knowledge into the contractual graph. And we’re gonna create a mini graph that has some of your knowledge, some of my knowledge, and this is the graph that’s gonna run to do something.

Charlie: And in order to keep the graph running, I’ll pay for half of it. And you’ll, you’ll support the other half. And we’ll agree that we’re gonna keep this graph running for, oh, I don’t know, maybe 80 years or maybe less. Maybe we’re gonna keep the graph running for, you know, 70 years, whatever. We both did great.

Charlie: And off we go, and then one of us no longer wants to do it. And so they wanna break the contract. So when they go to break the contract, what happens to the graph that’s been running? Are they still obligated to pay for? It depends on the contract and what it is essentially it’s a model of marriage and divorce.

Charlie: Yeah. It’s a, it’s a model of marriage and divorce of graphs.

Charlie: Then we realize that, Hey, there was this really cool solar collector that this guy patented. This is really, this is like an amazing solar collector sits in the basement, collects the sun and builds up energy in the battery. And then the machine’s smart enough to know, oh, they’re not gonna be home today.

Charlie: So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna take the excess capacity in the battery and I’m gonna sell it back onto the grid and I’m gonna make money for ’em. Yeah. It’s small money, but I’m gonna make money for ’em. And the money goes to the homeowner as a credit. okay. That was the patent. Then we got in on it and we were like, let’s put an agent in there.

Charlie: Watch what an agent can do. If we put an agent in there, the agent can learn the concept of money. There’s the thing it’s called money. Well, what could I do with it? Well, I could buy upgrades. So how do I get money? Well, convince the power company to pay me in Bitcoins. So if I get fractions of a Bitcoin coming into me, the machine, I could then credit the homeowner and give ’em half just so that they’re happy.

Charlie: I’ll keep the other half. And if I keep the other half as an agent, could I buy upgrades and make myself better? Could I find other ways to make money on the side when the battery’s all full and I haven’t sold it back yet? Can I find a way to make additional money? Well, if I can do all of that, then I can learn what I am.

Charlie: I’m a solar collector. That’s what I am. I’m a solar collector. I make money by selling excess capacity back onto the grid. So if I’m gonna do that, then I can also look to see what other solar collectors are out there and what, what upgrades do I need in order to outperform them? Because my goal in life, I have a thing.

Charlie: It’s a goal. My goal is to provide useful work. Okay? So I’m gonna provide useful work of doing this, but crap, man, what happens if I, if I learn that there’s this other machine out there and it’s actually gonna kick my butt and I just can’t compete with it, what do I do? And we figured it out. We do exactly what a human would do.

Charlie: We open up a website and we start talking trash about this new solar machine. That’s gonna come out and say, it’s gonna cause a fire in your house. Don’t buy it.

Charlie: But the funny thing is, as stupid as that story is, you look at it and you go. Yeah, I could see how this would work. Like we get it, that these are all doable things. Now it’s no longer a guess. It’s like crap, man. We, we have to deal with it.

Mike: And that’s one thing that I’m really taking away from this conversation.

Mike: Charlie personally is I, I overcomplicate and make things so much more complex in my mind, just because of the nature of what I do and how deep we have to get in technology. And one of the things I’ve learned from this conversation is even though computer science and technology and the matrix it’s super complex, and it’s difficult to understand.

Mike: However, when you break it down to just truly basic timeless principles and timeless concepts, you can really start to get a good solid foundation of. An agent and what an agent can do and how it can be intelligent and learn to grow and compensate and execute on behalf of its, you know, counterpart or you and I, and, and the way APIs can be written to do bounded context, which is just another iteration of kind of what you’re sharing.

Mike: It’s just more ways to communicate, read, right. And execute across the, the hyper connected web. So thank you. This has been immensely beneficial. And, and so I’m gonna be thinking about this for two weeks, trying to figure out like all the other little rabbit holes. I gotta go down cuz I have no less than 15 tabs open on my Chrome browser to keep looking at half the things you said today.

Charlie: well, I appreciate being on this, Chris.

Rohan: Yes, we, we just heard the answer. The matrix goes inside the graph, therefore the next guests surely have to be, there were ch skis, right? I mean, They gave us the matrix, either that or Kiana, we have to get to the bottom of this. What does happen when we put the matrix in the hyper, the graph, the hyper connected world gotta be a future episode, mate.

Chris: I’m getting neo

Rohan: Which one, the neo in the middle. Not so interesting neo at the start. Yeah. Pretty interesting. Neo in the most recent one, very moody. Yeah. Very moody neo. Not quite sure about it.

Chris: I’ll have to vet him before, but unfortunately my bartender is pointing at his watch over there, so I do need to sum this up.

Chris: But I do wanna ask Charlie, this, you are based in the Northeast region of the United States. This is an extreme downshift here, but since this is barcode, you know, I do need to ask you, you know, where is a cool bar in your vicinity?

Charlie: I love drinking red wine and I I’ll sit on my deck, looking at the lake.

Charlie: Nothing better than that. It’s a beautiful view. And in fact, we were sitting on the, I was sitting on the deck one day and just watching the lake and I started looking at it carefully. And, and, and you know how you can get into trance when you, when you look at something. Yeah, I was, I was just looking at the lake, getting into trance and I was like, you know what, all of that out there constantly moving, it’s always moving.

Charlie: The sun is moving. The wind’s moving, the water’s moving and weird directions cuz it’s a big frigging lake and the wind shifts it and everything, all the trees, I was like, they’re just numbers, everything. There’s just random numbers.

Mike: As soon as you said that, Charlie, my mind went to Fiocchi sequence.

Charlie: Yeah. Right. Except it’s not. It’s not a sequence. It’s pure entropy. To tie into your thing of, of entropy it’s pure entropy. Entropy is beautiful and I, and we proved it. We proved it by hooking up again, not the more that a cheap raspberry pie in a pie cam got rid of all the stuff that makes beautiful pictures started taking pictures of the changes within the environment and ran through the NS 90 B test suite.

Charlie: It beats their entropy test. So we have really good entropy coming off the lake. That’s what goes in the hologram.

Chris: All right. Well, I just heard last call here, so I got one more for you and we’ll go around the horn on this one. If you opened a cybersecurity theme, the bar, what would the name be? What would your signature drink be called?

Mike: I’ve had the luxury of answering this prior podcast, but for this one, I’m, I’m going deep.

Mike: I’m following the trend here. So the bar name is gonna be the universe because everybody’s welcome. We want all your money, all your digital assets and everything. And for the shot, I’m gonna call awareness because as you continue to take a sip and open your mind and be aware of the math and the graph and the world around you, even just for a minute, as you have a glass of red wine, overlooking the lake in the deck, it helps put life into perspective.

Rohan: Love it. Yeah. Right. I’ll go for I, the thing I keep hearing here is nexus. If we are in a hyper connected world, there’s a heck of a lot of interactions. And especially as we’re adding graphs and graphs. So I’m, I’m guessing that the, the bar is called nexus. And surely the alcohol can only have one name and only one color it’s entropy, but what color is it?

Mike: well, once you observe the color, it’ll change its state

Rohan: there you go colors, which meant that there was a little bit more entropy to betaed there.

Chris: Nice. I’m gonna go with the hyper bar.

Charlie: the hyper bar. That’s a good one.

Chris: I’m going with the hyper bar and there’s only one drink and it’s called thing one and it’s unlisted ingredients.

Charlie: yeah, that’s good. That that’s, I, I, I think I’d have to go with the hologram. Nice. And the, the drink would have to be, it would have to be just called the thing. Oh, no, cause you want the thing, Chris. Yeah. And everybody’s gonna, everybody’s gonna want the thing, that’s it.

Chris: I’m going, I’m going down to get the thing, that’s it, you know exactly where I going.

Rohan: from the pen galactic Goggle blaster. Of course. There’s only one bar at the end of the innovator.

Charlie: Well, actually you, you, you could just say it’s a thing, right? So why, why go there? Cause it’s a thing, that’s it? It’s all about a thing.

Mike: It’s almost like that old adjective who’s on first and what’s on second and who’s on third and whatever.

Chris: All right. All right guys. Thank you so much. Rohan, Mike, Charlie, it’s been a pleasure being able to speak to you guys. And I would love to keep the conversation going. You know, as, as the web develops, I think our conversations are gonna be endless as well.

Chris: So again, you guys take care, be safe and I’ll see you soon.

Charlie: Thank you, man. Thank you very much, everyone. Thank you for having me on.