A Conversation With Larry Pang: Community Lead at IoTeX
Join me in a wide ranging conversation on all things IoTeX with the always fascinating Larry Pang
dean: [00:00:00] All right, Larry, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast. So I've known you for almost three years now, which is crazy. So I met you of course when I first joined IoTeX as a marketing manager, and when I first joined IoTeX, you were already an old head at that point. And you were, I'm assuming, the first non-engineering hire after coming out of mit, going to Oliver Wyman doing that tracked existence. And I just want to hear what your description of your transition was like coming from a fairly tracked career path to becoming one of the first hires at IoTeX.
larry: Yeah. I think the path I took was unexpected on my part. I studied econ and business at mit. And thought I would go into finance, but after doing some internships in both trading and banking, realized it wasn't really for me. So was lucky to have landed at Oliver Wyman, which is this consulting shop.
And honestly the experience there was great. I worked in this practice group called Digital Technology and Analytics, [00:01:00] and I did it because I didn't want to do any risk related projects, but it was honestly a blessing in disguise because, this digital practice group really worked with a lot of the tech and operations function.
But taking instructions from the front office and business end. It really allowed me to understand how systems are built. We did tons of buy versus build assessments for HR systems and risk systems. And unbeknownst to me at the time, I was really starting to understand how to piece together technical requirements, functional requirements from those business requirements.
And that's been so valuable when talking to a lot of web three projects that wanna build on IoTeX I understand what you guys are trying to do from the business side. How do we translate that into functional requirements, technical requirements on that other side? After, five years of consulting and traveling every single week to different cities, it was amazing at first, but every year after that got a little bit more tiring for me.
But the last couple projects I did were all also the ones that were really Instrumental to me moving into crypto. I did [00:02:00] one for dtcc, which is the Depository Trust in Clearing Corporation that does a lot of the equities and fixed income clearing and settlement. And the last project I did at Oliver Wyman was for the occ, the Options Clearing Corporation.
These were big financial market utilities that, gathered data from all the different exchanges, standardized it, and basically provided a service. If it sounds like it's a great web three use case, it was. But at the time we were doing this buy versus build assessment. And they were looking into vendor systems from NASDAQ and from sis, and also a few really early blockchain infrastructure providers.
And that's the first time I thought about blockchain instead of crypto. Bitcoin was a thing at the time. But that kind of peaked the interest, I've always been a little bit libertarian at heart also. Maybe through working with so many corporations
so it was really a me a mesh of all those things together encouraged me to look into the crypto space. And after I read the IoTeX White paper is one of those things that, trusted devices to feed trusted applications for [00:03:00] this trusted society. It was just very intuitive bringing together multiple pieces of my life together.
Yeah, and since then it's been quite a journey, going from a team of l ess than eight to now 40 plus. And really starting to work on things that I think in the web three space are starting to be looked at very seriously now that there's some real proofs of concept in things like helium and DMO and Stepn and things like that.
But I think this sector is just getting started. So that's a little background on how we got here today.
dean: I wanna ask you about something you said, which was your libertarian, which is interesting because you come from basically the inside, right? I don't know what your family background was like, but once you get to mit, you're on a level playing field with elite here in the US and going to Oliver Wyman, you saw a lot of issues with the way society was structured. It's not a libertarian society, so how do you come to be libertarian to view the world that way in that upper echelon place that you were at?
larry: Yeah. I definitely grew up kind of middle [00:04:00] class, so I had everything I needed to have a great childhood and my parents provided, but it wasn't until I got to mit that I started to know more about how the world worked, right? I think I lived in a little bit of a vacuum growing up in Southern California, in a very Asian household.
Not much was known to me because not much was known to my parents who came from communist China and didn't really understand a lot of the ways that, government funding and like lobbying and all these things generally work, it was really when I started to do some research studies at MIT in the Sloan school.
I remember one really big eye-opening thing for me was we were doing research on how social media affected the Arab Spring, the Egyptian uprisings back in 2012 in 2013, before that, I'd never gone international and I've never really understood the plights of less fortunate societies and things like that.
And it was all, living, growing up in America, you don't really think about these issues [00:05:00] too often. The high school I went to was 25% white, 25% Asian, 25% Mexican, 25% black. And pulling people from all sorts of different walks of life.
And I started to really question like, why information dissemination to different categories of people weren't really the same. It's hard for me to speak from like a firsthand experience, but learning more from, different populations that I gotta interact with through life showed me that the cards aren't stacked in a fair way.
And I think yeah, seeing the path that, the traditional upper echelon, Ivy League folks like you and I took it made me think yeah the odds are stacked against those that don't have this kind of information, . There's a lot of other types of things that may be a little controversial to say about like, why I am more libertarian at heart.
But these are the things that, also reflect into why I chose to go into web three. I think who you trust and why you trust that view, from my perspective, has changed a lot through different phases of my life. But yeah. Learned a lot through working.[00:06:00] Different corporations and behind the scenes deals.
And there's a lot of things that the general public just doesn't know happen. And, looking at how Washington works in a deeper context, you start to understand that, the infrastructure bill has nothing to do with infrastructure.
dean: A lot of people that I knew and personally as well got very demotivated when we imagined going into careers that basically just furthered a system that we weren't really bought into. It led to a lot of de-motivation, procrastination, but when Web three came around, it gave us an opportunity to use our place and use our skills in tech, not to further a system we weren't fully bought into, but to create an alternative system that.
was fair and democratized access to, first of all, money with Bitcoin and then information software development. And then with Iotex we're talking about, data transfer iot, it opens up a whole nother level of democratization. So that's what's really exciting. I think about Web three to a lot of people like you and I and many others.
So when I first joined [00:07:00] iotex, You were the busiest person I've ever met. You had 20 jobs, . You were hiring, recruiting, copywriting, business development products. You're very active on the product side. You just did everything.
So as the team has grown, I'm curious, just internally, how has your role evolved and what do you spend most of your time on?
larry: When I first started, back in 2018 at iotex as the first non-technical hire. Yeah, there's just so much stuff to do. I would say my role started really just with community, right? I think when I got hired, my role was actually director of growth and community. So we were just trying to, make people care about this intersection of blockchain and iot.
And honestly, it wasn't an easy challenge cuz unlike today where you. People eyeing iotex is the next big thing, or at least the category that we're in as the next big wave of what crypto is gonna be about. Nobody gave a crap back then. And people didn't understand blockchain enough to understand the intersection of blockchain and iot.
and I think the next evolution of blockchain, IOT and AI is [00:08:00] still unknown until we figure out this blockchain and iot thing, right? So in a lot of ways it was hard because, explaining to people, even IOT people don't know what this acronym really was and some people still don't. Right?
About what is the internet of things and how does it work and how does blockchain fix some or all of the issues with the internet of things. So the community aspect was just really trying to cherry pick folks that could see this kind of vision. And a lot of those people were people that worked in the Internet of things sector or had dealt with hardware before.
And understood the prerequisites to understanding how blockchain would apply. After a while, the tech got to a certain point where we're starting to launch products like ucam and Pebble Tracker and the main net launched and people were starting to build applications on IoTeX.
Then that started really more the business development and partnerships side of things. But even in those days, it wasn't like we had the infrastructure where we have today. We were just trying to get people to build very basic things like [00:09:00] decentralized exchanges and wallets and explorers, right?
So for the first really three years of IoTeX existence, it was just catching up to where some of the other layer ones were, right? And now we're in this era. A lot of the layer ones out there are starting to look like cloud computing platforms in the sense that c ompute memory and storage offerings of clouds aren't that different anymore.
They work very much by, offering white glove service or discounts on, You remember the days where Google Cloud was giving a million dollars to startups just to lock them into their ecosystems. I think the same thing is going on with a lot of these layer ones. But where I really comes in is our ability to add not just the basic compute, memory, storage offerings of all the other layer ones, but this iot machine oriented middleware that allows people to build stuff that's outside the scope of what they can do by themselves on other layer ones.
And now, Through this evolution from community to general business development, my role now [00:10:00] is this ecosystem lead and that's really a testament to where we've gone as a company or as a community even, right? We're no longer just a platform. We're trying to get people to excited about the future prospects of what this platform can do.
Now we're very much an ecosystem where we have other people that rely on our infrastructure to power their applications. So a lot of my job these days is of course still overseeing some of the business development and partnership shingles. But I would say there's a lot of incubation that I'm doing these days with especially like web two companies trying to go into Web three and also just supporting these web three startups that see our machine fi vision.
So it's really coming full circle, and I think that where I've landed right now is what I really do enjoy the most. Working with founders and helping them, not do things that they couldn't do themselves, but just expediting and, taking some experiences that we've learned from growing this company from scratch to help them doing the same.
And this is really exciting time for iotex to bring some real, unique machine fi related projects to life. [00:11:00] It's the journey to date, but who knows what's next,
dean: that was an amazing description. And I echo what you're saying. I've interviewed six or seven ecosystem founders at this. Universally, they say that iotex and youre the lead of this effort has unbelievable responsiveness to their needs and they're blown away. I've heard that exact term "blown away" by how supportive iotex is and how much help and support both financial, but not even financial.
It's actually technical and strategic and everything else, and it's allowed the ecosystem to flourish, especially in the last year. A lot of the ecosystem projects got started in late 2021, have seen pretty crazy growth. So I just wanna talk to you a little bit more about the ecosystem itself.
Where do you see the most exciting ecosystem projects going? Which sectors are they in? Which ones are you most excited about?
larry: I think the ones on a lot of other networks. It's interesting. Maybe ill explain this a little bit. People ask us this all the time about the incumbents it's kinda weird [00:12:00] to call them incumbents in this space, but we're talking about like the helium and the stepns and even the demos of the world, right?
Just to share with everyone what those projects had to do over the past three, four years is basically create very custom tech stacks that integrate with blockchain at some level. But that was really a open, open challenge for them to create these tech stacks. Helium basically wrote a protocol from scratch with no infrastructure or no starting point, or like modular blocks that they can just plug and play and skip some steps, right?
They really created all that from scratch, which, that's why we have a lot of respect for Helium, even if people, there's some negative stuff in the news recently about Helium and you got to respect what they did as the pioneers of this kind of connectivity network.
And even like stepn, right? They were not the very, very first ones to do, like wearables, integrated web three stuff, but they were the first ones to really build attraction that got a lot of people's attention. Where I would say iotex fits in is, it's not impossible for others to do the same thing as what helium and stepn did [00:13:00] in the connectivity
and the wellness and fitness sectors. But where iotex is gonna come into play is shrinking that timeline to do all that stuff, hopefully by more than half, so that's one pitch that just worked amazingly well. When we go out and pitch, traditional companies is look in the weather space, for example, right?
Weather XM is starting their own kind of weather network. We're talking to a lot of different weather station manufacturers to say, If you guys have any inkling of, desire to capture market share in this web three weather sector, then doing it by yourself. By the time you guys launched, Weather XM has had a very long run up to where you guys want to go, right?
So that's why these new products that we're launching as like IOT focused middleware on top of our Layer one blockchain, it's really gonna shrink that timeline incredibly. And I think, when you talk to folks like Health Blocks and elumicate and Road Runr, they're early and a lot of the technical support is just we have these blocks that they need and our [00:14:00] goal as infrastructure is to provide even more blocks to not replicate work over and over.
It's the concept of a software development kit, right? You can't build an SDK without first doing it yourself. I think that's part of the journey of iotex, right? We built Ucam and Pebble Tracker. A lot of people think of these as products, which they are, but they're also templates. Like we had to do it ourselves first before we can build, composable blocks that other people can use and leverage, right?
I think that's really where we're headed. We're trying our best. We're gonna try our best to work with the incumbents in the machine fi sector. I think they're gonna find a lot of value in what we're doing with Webstream. For example, Helium is doing connectivity, moving packets from A to B, but helping them understand the data inside those packets is an entirely new revenue stream for them and for, all these other folks expanding the scope of what they can do with this infrastructure that we have.
But starting next year, 2023, I think it's gonna be the year for these real world. There's a great fun called [00:15:00] Lattice. They call it token incentized physical infrastructure networks. There's gonna be a lot of brand new startups that are launching that will see I techs and the infrastructure that we have as a, PAs go and collect $200, like launchpad.
But also the thing that's super exciting is like working with these traditional web two companies who have existing device footprints, have existing user bases. And just shrinking the time that they need to enter Web three in the right way. It's not all about tech. There's a lot of go to market strategy, different ways to set up your Discord and your telegram and do all the marketing related stuff.
But that's really the exciting part, is we get to work with a lot of the biggest companies in the world in the future, hopefully to invite them into web three. It's not Polygon and Starbucks just issuing an nft, but it's really like, how do you really expand your business model? Drive more value to your data sales businesses or your, ambitions to put more devices out there.
That's what's really exciting piece about what's gonna [00:16:00] happen soon to the iotex ecosystem.
dean: You mentioned Webstream, which the ecosystem founders that I've interviewed, Webstream is always the first thing that comes out when they mention how iotex has helped them streamline the development process webstream is basically a way to transmit secure data from a hardware device to a dApp more or less.
But I want to hear your description of Webstream and where you think it fits into ecosystem projects that are new to crypto, and also web two coming into crypto for the first time.
larry: Yeah, absolutely. Web stream addresses a lot of the big, frequently asked questions that you hear all the time, right about. The Internet of Things is producing gigabytes and terabytes of data. How do you put that data on a blockchain and not break the piggy bank of, all the costs required to store and process and make this data useful?
And, webstream the best way I could describe it is, It sits in between the blockchain and the real world. It's like a off chain compute, like intermediary, right? So it sits in between [00:17:00] the blockchain and these real world devices. It will be able to ingest data from multiple types of devices like vehicles, wearables, weather stations mobile phones.
All these internet connected devices, right? Basically these devices are integrated to webstream and dump all their data into a cluster of nodes. And what these cluster of nodes then do is run computations on top of this data in order to generate a proof. And that proof is what's sent to a smart contract.
Or a D app and instructs that D app to say, okay, wearable X that's owned by user Y has submitted data that proves that they took 10,000 steps and burned 200 calories on this date. And then that proof is sent to the smart contract to say, okay. Based on this binary, yes or no, this user deserves this many tokens, right?
Rather than doing all that computation on a layer one, which is very expensive to store all of that data a lot of which [00:18:00] is unnecessary, right? To generate that proof and also to do the smart contract computations. We're just doing this in a verifiable way in this off chain computing environment, right?
The best way to think about it is we're allowing people to create. If this, then that logic, right? If you do something in the real world and you can prove it with a device, then you can instruct a smart contract to issue some type of tokens or authorizations or mint an nft, what we're gonna start at first is very simple if this than that logic, right?
Where it gets really interesting and the exciting conversations. I've, a lot of the exciting conversations I've been having about. Is when you turn the if this than that into a, if this and this and this. Then that, so give it a simple example, right? I was saying if your wearable says you took 10,000 steps, then you get a token, right?
That's a simple if this than that. But what if we start to think about more like contextual examples to say if a person steps within 10 feet of a [00:19:00] McDonald's, then they get a McDonald's nft, right? That, or if this person today has done X, Y, and Z things. Then give them a token, right? That's where you're starting to put together a lot of user owned data and also public data.
For example, that GPS location thing. You're gonna submit your GPS location from your your phone, but the blockchain doesn't know where any of these McDonald's are, right? So you have to bring in data from maybe a chain link Oracle, or a Google Big query data. That can tell you where these McDonald's actually are, right?
Or if you're trying to settle a weather insurance contract that says, if the weather on your farm is within the top 5% hottest days on record in the past 10 years a weather station on your farm can tell you the temperature, but unless you know the historical benchmark of what the top 5% hottest days on record were, then you couldn't settle that contract either.
So that's where this combination of user owned or device produced [00:20:00] data, which is more like the real time settlement factor combined with these databases, these open source big data databases that people consider to be factual, right? Like an AccuWeather or weather.com dataset.
Combining all of these things together that's gonna create a lot of this probabilistic or contextual proofs that maybe seem futuristic today. But it gets even crazier once you think about intersecting data from different verticals, right? To say if you ran five miles in this park while doing x, y, and Z things, then you can, it just provides, expands the design space of what, like business logic you can create, right?
But where we're at right now is just the first, if this, then that type of process, right? So we're gonna do a lot of stuff with automotive. If you don't drive over the speed limit, then you get some tokens or if you have your seat belts on, right? Automotive, healthcare, weather, geolocation, and yeah, I think those are the industries that you're starting to see a lot of [00:21:00] projects already poking their heads into.
I think devices and web three are gonna permeate almost every vertical. It's just gonna take some time for that digital transformation to happen.
dean: Yeah, that was an incredibly articulate description of Webstream. Thanks for that that really peaks my interest in IoTeX as exploding the potential use cases for DAOs, right? Because when you think about real world attestation that can then result in token transfers, you can then create real world DAOs.
This is what health Blocks is moving towards, is where you can create data collectives where people are contributing to activity pools and they get paid pro rata for elevating their community's health and quality of life. Which is, it's an incredible contribution to the web-3 ecosystem, honestly.
So that's really exciting. If you wanna run with that at all, if you have thoughts about where the DAO side of it could.
larry: I have a lot of thoughts on that. I think like DAOs are a very elegant concept on paper. What's been shown in practice is that the human [00:22:00] bias that's within a DAO really overtakes a lot of the DAO's original objectives, right? The concept of putting together people, it's almost like a utopia, right?
Like everyone is on the same page, everyone's contributing the same amount of effort. Everyone, everything's almost like an apples to apples comparison in a way. But in reality, humans will cheat the system and try to be selfish and all the other kind of human emotions that, different people have, right?
If you ask me like, DAOs today are neither decentralized nor autonomous, they're just organizations, right? But what is a way to remove that human bias is, machines don't have bias. Tamper-proof machines that listen to tamper proof smart contracts to achieve a goal. This is gonna be the future.
Like when we think about a whole like, robo taxi ecosystem, right? Where maybe a smart contract that's open source is serving as the order book for where each taxi is trying to go. If you told that to the driver of a taxi, [00:23:00] then maybe they're gonna, cancel that ride because they don't want to go to Newark for Brooklyn or something, right?
But if you tell a machine that doesn't have any bias, And just does what it's told that sounds exactly like a smart contract, right? So like the hardware version of a smart contract is almost like a tamperproof machine. Like one thing that I think always gets people excited when we say this is from day one, I think that's what I got out of reading that IoTeX white paper paper.
I was like, machines are gonna be the biggest users of blockchains in the future. Following a protocol, and you have these devices that just do as they're told, listening to software that just does what it's told. This is really the foundation for how you remove any behind the scenes nefarious activities.
I'm, I think it's still futuristic to think about, machine DAOs. We have to have a lot more autonomous machines out there. Today we have vending machines and airport lockers. The movie rental things outside of seven 11 stores, it's not really an autonomous drone or autonomous vehicle or, we're still in the [00:24:00] place where devices can autonomously produce data that's valuable, but not yet at the place where devices and machines are autonomously delivering services.
Once we get into the machine service economy, Then it starts to become really interesting and almost a little scary. And that's really why blockchain's needed to add that trust layer. Or also we're gonna start seeing all those Boston Dynamics dogs go after humans ? Yeah, just a little tangent on machine dos, but I think the world is gonna be really interesting soon especially with all this new advancement in AI too.
dean: Yeah, absolutely. Commercial AI has seen an explosion in usefulness in the last year and a half. But I want to go back a little bit because you jumped to Machine DAOs, which is a bit futuristic at this point, but there's a combination of Machine plus Human DAO, which already has a major improvement because as you mentioned, DAOs have a lot of the same pitfalls that classic utopias do.
They require a level of benevolence on the part of their members that just exceeds [00:25:00] human nature, right? It requires too much, and there's tragedy of the commons that come into play. But if you have better attestation with devices where you can actually tie behavior in the real world to a collective that smart contractly automatically delivers the financial governance token to you. You can have a 10 x improvement on DAOs already before we even get to machine DAOs, where it's a whole nother level of, perfection if you will, in terms of being able to trust that things are gonna go as you intend. So that's already really exciting.
larry: Yeah. I think about this a lot too, because What we're talking about is using devices to prove to other people that you've done what you were supposed to do, right? But that's also very tied to surveillance. If that data gets into the hands of the wrong people, right? So this is really where the concept of other web three pillars that are still being developed, like decentralized identity and zero knowledge proofs comes into play, right?
The holy grail of all of this [00:26:00] is when. we own the devices, we own the data from those devices, and we can use this data to share selectively. With others that we've done something in order to get a reward, right? Whether that's, proving to my insurance company that I've ran five miles today, or even something weirder Hey, I showed up to a concert, or, I planted a tree.
Or, other things that, people can be incentivized to do. That's where it starts to get really interesting. But for now, as we're still building out these Web three pillars about decentralized identity and owning your identity, owning your data, and then opting into proving that without exposing the raw data, this whole concept of zero knowledge you're starting to see this really play into the defi space.
Right? And I think that seeing zero knowledge proofs about not just deposits you've made into a smart contract, but. activities that you perform in the real world that's gonna be really interesting. So [00:27:00] yeah, I think there's still a lot of work to do as far as that stuff goes, but one step at a time, and I think where we're headed is a lot of people call it kind of the singularity and things like that, but if you think about blockchain, iot, and AI.
These are gonna be the three technologies that really run autonomous societies in the future, right? Iot as the sensing organism or a sensing technology to gather a lot of data about things that have happened, Blockchain to provide trust on that data, and then AI to then extract value from that trusted data.
It's gonna power a lot of things and we're already starting to see it one way, right? But it's really crazy when you think about not only devices and the internet of things serving as a new data source to blockchains, but also then the other direction, blockchains process what's being done in the real world and then instructs devices to do after the fact, then that's really the foundation for automation, right? Challenge response. But yeah, we were, we're talking about [00:28:00] futuristic stuff again, but I think you're starting to see the pillars really fill out, and I think that's really a journey about what has been on, what's our role in this, right?
We're not AI experts. We're the ones that wanna build the bridge between blockchain and iot and work with other people that are doing the data marketplaces or the AI or the stable coins or, the zero knowledge stuff, right? Before I think we had this huge ambition to be the fully vertically integrated tech stack, but partnering with those that know better than us, I think is really the right approach here.
dean: Yeah, and there's, talking with ecosystem founders, there's an approach now with Webstream where you essentially create parallel data universes. So for example, if your health blocks and you're using Fitbit data, That's a Google company. Google obviously has a copy of the data, but you're creating a secondary copy.
Roadrunners doing the same thing with ODB data. And so what we have here though is a privacy consideration, right? Because ultimately I would like to see a go to a place where you have devices that are secure at the [00:29:00] hardware level. They're not sending a second copy to Google. And that requires partnerships with manufacturers, to actually install the secure computation within the device.
Do you have a roadmap or a plan for introducing more devices in partnership with manufacturers?
larry: Yeah, absolutely. I think, this is an interesting piece, right? Where if you think about all the devices that are out there today, Pebble Tracker, which I, funny enough, have one here that's charging. Pebble Tracker was a device that we manufactured ourselves, right?
And across the sensors that are baked into it and the battery and stuff. The most important part of the pebble tracker is the secure element, which basically is of like the chip in your phone that does your face ID and holds your biometrics, right? Like, why would you trust Apple and Google with your face ID is because it's a hardware level security that data will never leave that secure element.
It's like your Google Authenticator key codes. You're gonna, if you lose your phone, your keys are gone with the phone, right? So it's a hardware level kind of security. That's not how most of the devices out there were [00:30:00] today, right? All the sensors all the cheap smart home devices that are on Amazon, basically every piece of hardware out there doesn't have an onboard chip that is meant for this level of security, right? Almost similarly to how clouds and blockchains are differentiated, right? The level of security and sometimes the sacrifices in performance to get that level of security is also what's happening in the hardware space today, right? So when we think about the future where we don't need to use Google, Fitbit, or Apple Watch or other things that, will send data to Google's cloud, but also simultaneously can send data to the Web three ecosystem. That's gonna be a really exciting time, but I think. The people's desire to use the devices that they already have and not have to purchase a brand new web three only device.
We're probably gonna see this for the next three or four years. But as new devices are manufactured, I don't think Moore's law is really a thing where devices and chips are getting twice as [00:31:00] fast every year. They are getting twice as cheap, So it's a different form of Moore's law in a way.
So I think, flash forward five years. A lot of the very simple devices are gonna have these secure elements on them, and that's where we'll see more protection of user data at the hardware level. I think we're thinking a lot about protection of user data at the software level, and that's basically what a zero knowledge proof is.
We'll start to see it more on a hardware level as well. But until then, we're gonna have to live with co-owning our data with a lot of these big tech incumbents and as I'm sure Health Blocks has mentioned, but even that, the opportunity to use the data that's a derivative of you for something that will benefit you as well.
I think that's already a step in the right direction. But eventually we'll c ut ties completely so that it's only you that's benefiting, not you and the big tech incumbents, right? The really exciting next step of all of this is if I have a wearable that's producing daily [00:32:00] snapshots of my activity that data eventually can feed multiple applications, and your data can mine multiple tokens at once.
Your vehicle data is a perfect example, right? If you build a driving history of how you drive, where you drive, when you drive, and even using the cameras in your car to show how you focus while you drive a lot of stuff that's more on the frontier edge of the internet of things sector.
That data can be used for an insurance D app or a car sharing D app or a data marketplace, D app, or all these different D apps where you have one set of data that's being used to prove things to different types of applications, right? And I think that's why people should start to care about building more of a history of their data starting today, even if it is co-owned by Google, because it's having your credit history, right?
Where if I have six months of credit history, then I'm probably not gonna be able to get a loan. But even if I have, five years of credit [00:33:00] history, even though Google has a copy of that, the opportunity to have statistical significance in the data sets that are about you is a huge opportunity today.
So I still think we're a little early in this discussion but that's why I think, it's important to start thinking about ownership because just like your money compounds, your data value was gonna compound as well.
dean: Yeah, and one of the most obvious examples of that is your health data. So if you know over 10 years or 20 years how walking a certain number of steps affects your health, or somebody like you, Then you can make changes that only play out over decades and you can only see over decades, but that have tremendous implications for your health.
So I want to turn to a bit more abstract topics cuz I think that's where we both tend to play in most of the time when, given the chance at least. But about inequality, right? Because when you talk about a machine future, a machine economy, One of the first things that comes to mind for me is the potential for inequality, right?
We've [00:34:00] seen tremendous inequality in terms of how the tech returns go to VCs, early founders. We can debate the ethics of that, but the machine version of this is ten a hundred x greater in terms of displacing physical jobs, basically making moot the abilities of humans. So can you talk about your ideal vision for how the returns of an automated world could be distributed to fairly make society function?
larry: Yeah, this is a really interesting question for sure. I think , the internet of things in these robotic arms that are gonna make hamburgers in the future. And these, digital cashiers and cash registers that already exist today alongside human powered cash registers, everyone's going into the digital one because people, unless you're an extrovert, you don't really wanna talk to a cashier.
You just wanna punch the buttons and get your burger right. I think, a lot of the physical labor jobs are without a doubt, but it disappear, right? Even, I remember three years ago there was [00:35:00] this amazing vice documentary where they're interviewing these truck drivers and showing them the advancements in what, autonomous trucks are gonna do.
When you tell this to a truck driver, they said, No way. There's no way a, autonomous truck can know how to drive this vehicle when the cargo is in the front of the trailer or is a full trailer, or there's different types of things in the trailer. And then they brought them into the truck itself and took them for a joy ride.
No human touching the thing, and they're like, Shit, we're screwed. So this realization that, a lot of, even the more advanced physical labor stuff is gonna be replaced by machines. That's the sad reality of it. But the counterpart to it, and something I've been really fascinated about over the past, just month, it seems like it, all of this s sprouted up is these aI generated imagery and algorithms and, all these different, aI powered tools like Dolly and Stable Diffusion and, Open AI just came out with this natural language processing algorithm called Whisper. [00:36:00] And that to me is when you close one door with physical labor, you're gonna open up another door.
The creation of software that will instruct these devices and these servers and this, like these neural nets to do different things, right? Like stable diffusion that I just, I don't know how not more people aren't talking about this. Like it's not only doing the physical labor, like the brainless physical labor in a lot of ways is doing the creative aspects of things as well.
So if I was a graphic designer, I would be a little scared right now that, if I'm not like the creative director, then AI is gonna take your job as well. But that's the, as more doors are closed, it gives the opportunity to people, you don't have to work at Google to create something like that.
You can be anyone from, Indonesia or the United States or South America, or Africa or Europe, anywhere. You can create whoever creates the most useful algorithm to do different. We'll win. And this is something I talked to Health Blocks a lot about in the past too, is like [00:37:00] if you own your health data, you don't know how to analyze it yourself, right?
Today, your only option is to go to a doctor and say, Hey, look at my health. Tell me what all these things mean, and tell me how I should live a better life in the future. Maybe there's a 10 year old kid out there in a really poor area of the world that's gonna write the most elegant algorithm to interpret your health data in a positive way, right? There's already like a lot of these health algorithms that will take your 23 and me data and process it in a different way and give you deeper results that tell you predictive stuff about Alzheimer's it's called Prometheus, right? There's gonna be other Prometheus builders that can do the services that billion dollar companies like 23 and Me can do, but better, right?
So I think the concept of a corporation offering services to users, there's gonna be a lot of open source, download from Lime wire or torrent and algorithm that can do exactly what people are doing and paying [00:38:00] for from a monthly subscription type of thing. And even things like subtitling videos, right?
Like you and I have done a lot of videos in the past where you try to get a simple subtitled video, it costs 10 bucks a month. Those are gonna be completely open source in the future. Whoever's writing those algorithms, maybe they charge half a cent for every, individual query.
But volumes, that's gonna provide another, monetary opportunity for people that I guess know how to code, right? I don't know. This is a really tough question. It's like you make a lot of. , the millennials and above take their jobs away, but there's also an opportunity for people to create entirely new gigs without working at a company.
You can be your own boss and just learn this kind of stuff. The sad reality is, a lot of these jobs are going away and very soon. I think people are underestimating the timeline for all this stuff. For sure. Maybe blockchain and machines and AI will make it more equitable in some form or fashion.
dean: Yeah, and you make a good point . It's not even the physical jobs [00:39:00] that are short term at risk, It's actually mid-level creative jobs like DALL-E 2, GPT-3 three, and then Whisper is another level from that. I was playing around the open AI playground and they can write 100% of high school essays, probably most undergrad essays, right?
50% of technical essays. And it's gonna replace basically all noncreative writing very soon. It can conduct original research, it can do everything. So if you're a writer, which, I do a fair amount of writing that's also scary and that's gonna happen sooner than physical jobs cuz it costs a lot to build a robot to replace something.
So before we wrap up here, I just want to ask you a big vision question. So let's say IoTeX is maximally successful in 10 years, which I wouldn't bet against. What do you think the world looks like?
larry: That's a great question. Yeah, I the world right now, first of all is just so insane to think about With all the geopolitical stuff going on, but I think, we're gonna start to see the concept of countries change a bit, I think, [00:40:00] right? Like geographically bordered countries maybe will change into more like meta versy.
The common denominator is not, you live in this geofenced area and you subscribe to these politics. Maybe the common denominator across society is gonna be you subscribe to different belief systems on the internet and already starting to see a lot of these online communities sprout.
But I think, if we're going towards a more digital native and metaverse , then the machines that power. That digital world are gonna need to be trusted without a shadow of a doubt, right? We wrote a report back in the day together called When Privacy Hits Home, and one of the sections I remember we wrote about was, there's no safety nets in the real world, right?
In the digital world, we have companies like chain analysis that will hunt down and hopefully recover some funds if there's like a smart contract hack, right? So there's digital means and digital safety nets that even if you do get hacked, it's probably [00:41:00] some type of paper trail unless you're a real true expert, right?
But once we start to think about like digital worlds and, the intersection of like digital technologies with physical actions and physical people and physical devices, there's no safety net. If someone hacks your vehicle, And makes it drive off a cliff, right? There's no chain analysis that can reverse that into until we have like time machines and stuff like that, so I think, it's all this fancy stuff. It sounds cool at first, but this whole thing about open AI and DALLE, and that can get really weird really fast too, right? So I. Using blockchain and iot and AI and all these other front frontier technologies to protect ourselves against the things that we're innovating on, I think is gonna require, And that's not something that regulation is gonna solve, right?
Cause congressmen barely understand blockchain. Once you start to intersect all these frontier technologies together, then there's only like a handful maybe There's only so many people that really know how to protect ourselves [00:42:00] against artificial intelligence, like truly. But I think there's also an opportunity for more equity and equality if we do this.
The whole concept of blockchains being permissionless Is basically the definition of equal opportunity, right? Anyone can use this infrastructure to do anything. The gatekeepers are no longer relevant to, blockade certain types of people from doing this or that activity. More transparency for everyone and more verifiability for everyone.
We just have to make sure all this stuff is used in the correct way, right? , but I don't know, I just rambled for a while and confused myself a little bit too. So that's a really hard question to answer. Yeah, 10 years is a long time.
dean: One thing you mentioned that piqued my interest of many is basically Balaji's notion of the network state where you can fork countries and institute values with people that aren't geographically located together, that may come.
But you can, IoTeX is, infrastructure is actually a core piece to Balaji's vision you can actually use physical devices, [00:43:00] potentially create a machine country that gives all of its rewards equally, or not. So there's just a lot that you can run with this intellectually. Cool.
. I dunno if there's any calls to action to listeners community for getting involved with IoTeX, more involved with IoTeX that you wanna leave us with.
larry: Yeah. I think going back to that thing about IoTeX changing from a platform to an ecosystem, a lot of our loyal community members have been a fan of I techs and our vision and the things that we preach. And I think that, hopefully everyone sees like step by step the things that we've been saying for the past few years coming to life.
But now we also have like extensions of the IoTeX family in the form of these D apps. As you guys, continue to believe in the core developers and the core ecosystem builders of IoTe, supporting these projects that extend our vision into real world applications, right? Like we're gonna take the backseat and play the role of the infrastructure provider and leave
a lot of the work to [00:44:00] people with domain expertise about how these industries actually work, right? That's where it starts to get really interesting. You have the infrastructure builders, you have the application builders, you have data scientists, you have tokens folks, you have hardware builders. It's really becoming, this web different pillars that need to come together to make these end to end solutions happen in the right way.
We're getting to the point now where even, you don't have to be a developer to make impact. If you're a researcher, you're a data scientist there's a lot of work to be done. So call to action would just be to, it's not just about developers anymore. It's really about how do you bring these concepts to the right people?
How do you design them in an economically sound way? A lot of. Developers and technologists like to think they know about economics and stuff, but they don't. So I think even me within econ, minor, I don't know anything to the degree of like other folks that maybe felt excluded from the previous web three kind of wave.
So now we're getting to the point where, sound applications, there's not just all about not [00:45:00] being hacked, it's about making sure all the different fronts are Are done correctly. So call to action to developers to keep doing what you've been doing amazingly for the past, several years, but also this brand new category of people.
You're gonna have a large role in this as well let's do it together.
dean: Yeah there's a place for everyone in the ecosystem. Nicely sad. All right, thanks so much, Larry. That was incredibly insightful as always, I'm always impressed with how articulate you are about this very complex and wide ranging vision and IoTeX has continued to impress me with how much the vision has executed over the last few years.
So to be continued. Larry, thanks so much
larry: . Thanks so much for having me, Dean.