“Because of this interoperability, I think it’s gonna open some really interesting future avenues. I don’t even know what to call it. The future is gonna be awesome”

Those are the words of our Head of Systems Architecture & Cyber Security, Andrew Weed on what the future has reserved for technology. On a talk with Brian Galler and Abraham Gomez from the Blockchain Mavericks, Andrew had the chance to geek all about topics such as the Metaverse, Blockchain, NFTs, engineering shortage, digital twins and the awesomeness of the future.

Are we ready for the future of AI-enhanced humanity?

Dive now into this brain-teasing conversation:

Blockchain Mavericks Ep. 4

Abraham Gomez: Hey guys, welcome to blockchain Mavericks episode four. We have icy weed. Is that how you want me to call you?

Andrew Weed: Weed is what I generally go by but yeah, I see.

Abraham Gomez: Okay, go go go, so we got Weed here we got Brian Galler. Introduce yourself

Andrew Weed: So I’m I go by icy weed on the telegram channels and discord mainly but my general handles weed patch two. That’s where you’ll find me in many of the security field and network security circles. I’ve been doing security and privacy work since about 2007. And blockchain has been on my mind and at my fingertips since 2000, like the 1213 timeframe. So I’ve gotten quite a bit of quite a broad spectrum view on blockchain from the very beginning till now. And then I am all over the icy ecosystem. I don’t even know what I can’t even say what I’m in. It’s like everything. “You are everywhere”, that’s for sure. And I try and try and keep up on everything, man. So I don’t want anything in this ecosystem to go by without me knowing about it.

Abraham Gomez: That’s really cool. Yeah, good job that dry. Oh, they’re doing a fantastic job. You guys. For those of you guys, I don’t know. It was weed and Brian, along with Janus. It got me into icy. Well, I mean, I was into it, but I hadn’t staked my neuron yet. And you guys helped me through that whole process. I can’t thank you guys enough. Yeah, man. Yeah.

Andrew Weed: He’s talking about staking neurons.

Brian Galler: Oh, yeah. Hey, look at this. There’s some merch from the UD NF T store. Let’s go. Yeah. Yeah, well, it’s open it up, open it up on Friday, at 12:12 am UTC. At 6 pm Central Time, the merch store opens to the public.

Abraham Gomez: Yeah, man, so much for that. Brian, I still need to get my because I found out yesterday, and I completely slipped my mind. So thank you so much. Yeah, yeah, everyone’s super excited about that. So thank you for doing that. So we can go ahead and get started with the show’s topics. So Topic number one is NFTs. We’d I’d love for you to kind of share your thoughts on NFT’s – whatever that may be.

Andrew Weed: Yeah, so, um, I have an interesting view, I connect with Bob on this from ponic Labs is that NFT’s are so much bigger than what people are really thinking about them as so I kind of try and express it in a way this, I try and simplify it down. So I’ll say that people should really understand the NFT’s are any sort of verifiable, digital asset, period, unique, verifiably unique digital asset. So anything you can imagine as a digital thing, whether it be a picture, which is which we’re used to, right, that’s NF T’s pictures, Brian is killing it thrown out, multiple model 3d environments and scenes as a single NFT. Then you’ve got like IC gallery-going like you’ve got an entire museum as an NF t, and then it holds NF Ts and you’ve got this composability that chronics kind of threw off and say like, Hey, you can put shit on top of shit, and then sell them all together. And like, it’s, it’s getting bigger and bigger, and you’re starting to see how these things are growing. But really, any individually identifiable asset can be an NFT. So you’ve also got down into like, there’s this I’m probably going to kill their way they said era Mac me or something like that. It’s a new license for IC developers or any developer, but it’s a new license that allows developers to monetize every line of code in their open-source, code base. So it’s really, there are very, very broad reaches to an NF Ts can become and if you look, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna say too much. But if you look at what, like cypher proxies doing with their intelligent NF’s or inf, T’s, NFTs can become in and of themselves, very, very smart things. So, I, one of the startups that I work with is doing some pretty incredible stuff with digital twin technologies, and we’ll get into that later, but that’s all up in the NFT space. So it’s, it’s very fun.

Brian Galler: Yeah, and I think, you know, the NFTs are going to start to cross more into the physical world too, right? I mean, you know, origin indeed. The deed to your house, you know will be an NFT eventually. So So yeah, I think it’ll it’ll become way more than just pictures for sure. Yeah.

Abraham Gomez: Yeah, it’s exciting for Yeah, when it enters the physical realm, but also, or not that it hasn’t already but when it’s more prominent what’s exciting is some of the things he named off. So I can’t wait till we get to further into the discussion. So yeah, good stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Galler: So let’s talk about the metaverse, you know, so you met you mentioned, you know, we’re doing IC 3d. We’re doing, you know, 3d models as NFT’s and composing them. You know, our vision there is really that those 3d models are our objects that will be able to be brought into the metaverse. Right. And so that’s really what we’re doing there is is is starting that standard, really leveraging a standard that already exists, but you know, starting there, so I’m super, super excited about the metaverse and doing whatever I can to, to bring it, bring it to the IC. Right.

Andrew Weed: Yeah, I think you guys are doing a great job too, right before the show is reviewing the source code on an icy 3d Because I wanted to see how they were doing that the front end with the GOP loader and then also the Draco to compress it down. That’s cool. So I’ve got some I want to talk to you more about your code, and I want to, I want to help build things and make the metaverse better as well. Speaking specifically about how I see the metaverse kind of as a parallel to something that’s already happened is like the internet. So the way that the internet happened is you’ve got these sort of like, ragtag bootstrap set of protocols that allow this thing to kind of work. And it kind of works okay for a few universities and nerds for a while. And then, like 1015 years after this bubble of explosion, where everyone’s like, Whoa, there’s actually this HTTP thing that makes it really easy. And then HTML allows you to do send HTTP requests easy. And this thing exploded because of the standards. The standards were dropped, and then allow multiple developers to just throw up whatever website they want to do in in the.com, boom occurred. And so I see the metaverse is going to have the same sort of occurrence. And right now we’re still in that very, that fledgling stage whereas an industry, we’re still trying to identify what those standards are, what is the metaverse going to look like, right? So like you’ve got Facebook or meta or whatever, trying to almost adopt the entirety of it and have their own specification or whatever. And it’s, there were companies back in the early days of the internet that did the same thing. And they got mac like Microsoft and their browser issues. Right. So the whole thing will play out. And I think that e thing that’s going to drive forward is what you guys are doing is helping define these sorts of standards that will allow others to easily build their own Metaverse and enter in that the real important part where the internet blew up was interoperability between things. So like, my server can reach your server through hyperlinks, right? HD HTML. Same thing with meta versus so so if, if I can go from an IC gallery, 3d space, and then jump into another room and where it’s all on my icy 3d stuff. And the gallery guys didn’t have to dev any of you just plugged in that composability of the IC there. That’s the future of the metaverse as I see it, and it’s it there’s it’s going to explode. Once these sort of these the underlying plumbing gets resolved.

Brian Galler: Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Abraham Gomez: Do you expect the metaverse to be larger GDP wise? Because, quote, unquote, in the digital space that can be far larger than Earth? And like the solar system? Yeah, that’s something but GDP wise, do you think it’s going to be larger than our current physical GDP?

Andrew Weed: Um, well, I think that there are different levels, I look at that as like comparing the different types of infinity. There’s a level of infinity in which you count from like zero positively, then there’s a level of infinity in which you count in both directions from zero. But then there’s also an infinite in the infinite decimal, which is from zero to one, and it goes infinitely down that way, and that is actually a larger infinity than either of the other two. So I think that really the GDP question is more, what is the future potential value? of the physical realm that we’re in, right that’s, that’s the possible physical gap that we’ve got, versus whatever can be created in these alternate realities that we build. And I think that there’s just much more room in the realities and the alternate realities for expansion for growth. You’ll get entire communities of people that will be born into a family of individuals who has been on metta for two generations. And these people only know Facebook’s Metaverse and their children know that. But there’s an entirely different group of individuals that live one street over there on a completely different metaverse. And Citibank owns their life or something, I don’t know. So it’s going to be completely composable. But I think that you’re going to have very, very massive economies in these small digital spaces that can explode. And then you’ll get a whale here that can actually exit the ecosystem and jump into another ecosystem as a whale. Because of this interoperability, and I think it’s gonna open some really interesting future avenues. I don’t even know what to call it. The future is gonna be awesome.

Brian Galler: Like we, this is nice Abraham. So there.

Abraham Gomez: Yeah, just grabbed my charger really quick. Okay.

Brian Galler: Yeah, so, so So let’s talk about I guess, the, what do you think? What do you think the largest challenge is of bringing the metaverse to reality on the internet computer blockchain.

Andrew Weed: The biggest challenge for the IC specifically short term is is is talent. So like the same, the same similar problem to what Elon Musk has been touting is it’s just there’s just an engineering shortage. There are not enough people that are doing it, really. But once we solve that problem, I think that initially, icy punks showed us. And then there’s been a couple of other things that we need to solve as a community that have popped up over time. But one of the other issues is scaling. So we’re gonna need to figure out its scaling and performance. Yeah, so so that and the new sort of user base that we’re having to deal with. So like bots or non-human accounts, proof of humanity is a big topic. Now, these things are like problems we’re trying to figure out. So So these are small problems. They are going to look like small problems, in hindsight, but they’re hard problems right now. And so we’re trying to solve these and I think once we solve these, that’s really going to be the that that the breach over the chasm for the ICD for real.

Brian Galler: Yeah, yeah. So that the very, very first Metaverse problem technical challenge that I want to solve is the multi-person multiplayer, you know, simultaneous avatars in the world, right? In the virtual world, as I do. That’s where they come in. I think there’s when people create canisters, you don’t really have that much control over where the canisters were created, right? On what subnet? No. And definitely, a Metaverse is going to need to spread across multiple subnets, you know, to be on different nodes in order to put the load out. And so we’re gonna have to figure out that right is how do we get how do we make sure that we’ve got our canister spread across? Different southern

Andrew Weed: Valley? Yeah, so like the subnets. I see almost as like, they’re supposed to be somewhat geographically dispersed. But I see them almost kind of like the, like AWS is a region, right. They’re kind of like, then it’s interesting because they’re also supposed to be geographically dispersed themselves. And so it’s going to be an interesting way to try and figure out canister maintenance, I guess, is kind of what you what you’d call it, but without, without like, some kind of API, like you mentioned without some kind of API that will allow us to either manage the subnets that our canisters are in or at least query some sort of load so that we can scale up when we know what when we’re going to need to or something like that. Because I mean, yeah, we would need to spread out across multiple canisters to achieve super high loads, and that was visible because of punks. Specifically, they’re on one subnet and that one subnet had a huge issue while the rest of the IC was just churning. Along with no problem. So if you dispersed their front end across multiple different subnets, that would have been at least divided by two if it was two subnets. But you could have dispersed it across multiple different subnets. Yeah.

Abraham Gomez: So with the subnets, are you guys referring to the subnets as those being the nodes? Well, so

Brian Galler: a subnet is made up of 30. Is it 13?

Andrew Weed: I think it depends on the subnet. There are multiple different options. Okay.

Brian Galler: I said that’s made up of multiple nodes. Yeah. Right,

Andrew Weed: for redundancy or whatnot. And also, so each subnet is its own technical blockchain. So the internet computer is like a collection of blockchains. And each one of these subnets is running its own blockchain. Gotcha.

Brian Galler: Gotcha. And that’s when they refer to sharding. Right. That’s yeah, that’s, that’s really what the shard Enos.

Andrew Weed: Yeah, exactly. That’s the ICS version of shorting.

Abraham Gomez: Right, right. And these nodes, we, are we able to create a node or not at the moment,

Andrew Weed: not yet. There’s a couple of interesting things going on. So actually talking about the news this week. There’s a community node that is going up to where they’re allowing. Yes, so I forget Oh, man, I’m gonna have to remember just recently hit it up, but Dominic commented on it as well. And he said that they’re looking into ways to make onboarding note providers much faster easier. Okay. Okay. But I’m gonna try and find the reference.

Abraham Gomez: I want to know…

Brian Galler: I want to, it’s called what a lot of people do.

Andrew Weed: Yeah, I want to I want to run Uh, okay, so it’s called Definity. nodes.medium.com. Is their main medium. But yeah, so So this is they just released their timeline. They have it’s like going to be a dowel pretty much for owning nodes.

Brian Galler: And that’s and that’s completely separate from the Badlands. Right?

Andrew Weed: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So So Badlands is another potential option. But dominant on this specifically, comment commented, interesting efforts in the community regarding fractional node ownership, which is what the that Tao is. Separately, Definity is working on making it much, much easier to add new node machines will also be possible to add anonymous nodes hoping that work will be completed in a few weeks and can be pronounced. Wow. Yeah, that’s it’s like big news. And that was? That was November 16.

Abraham Gomez: Today, yeah,

Brian Galler: today. Yes. I guess why I didn’t hear about it yet. Yeah. I was heading down today.

Abraham Gomez: Everywhere. He’s like, I got this. It’s

Andrew Weed: like, it’s old news. It’s like 18 hours.

Abraham Gomez: So, Brian, you touched on? One of the things that need to be solved initially for the metaverse on the IC, and that’s the subnets and interoperability between them. What’s something on 3d that needs to be solved? Ah,

Brian Galler: well, so. So we’ve based our NF TS off of a glTF standard. It’s very common, it’s very common, and actually, you know, fairly well. It’s been around for a while. For 3d rendering on the web, right? It’s all about performance on the web. Right? But what we in Unity and Unreal game engines will do this. But one of the other things that we’ll have to have to do is we’ll have to allow the metaverse as you’re coming into it, right, your portal or whatever. You’re going to need to be able to load whatever 3d model in FTS that you have, let’s say in your wallet into the metaverse at runtime, right? So it’s one thing for a developer to create a 3d, you know, Metaverse or virtual space, and during development time, bring in a 3d model, right? That’s going to be in there. But it’s a whole different thing to be able to do that while the metaverse is running, right. And so the code is running. And you can basically import at runtime. So that’s one of the other challenges that we’re you know, we’re going to have to solve is, and like I said unity, the Unity game engine and the unreal game engine. They both support runtime importing of GLB or glTF files. So shouldn’t be a problem but still a little bit of a technical hurdle to get over. For sure. For sure.

Abraham Gomez: Andrew, do you see anything on the 3d side?

Andrew Weed: Yeah. So I think that there are tooling problems. So Unity and Unreal are great tools. But they both have a reasonably interesting licensing and whatnot for businesses and whatnot. So those are, that’s issues that we’ve run into, that I’ve run into personally. So one thing that I would recommend, I don’t know if I mentioned this to you or not before, but I know that at least the front end of the IC, 3d, NF Ts are using just three js, plain. Three js not unity, or, or unreal flavours. So one thing that I would say is, you may benefit a lot from looking into a frame. A frame is another sort of it’s aimed at the game engine, but it’s all web three, it’s all a html5 based sort of game engine. And it’s heavily utilizing Three js, both for its front end its engine and adds and whatnot. And it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s pretty awesome. And if you are familiar or comfortable with HTML, the entirety of the code base, works in HTML tags, and just your main, it’s phenomenal, to be honest. So I’d happily look into a frame. And the reason I mentioned that in relation to your question, Abraham, is because I think the tooling is really one of the biggest struggles right now. Because if you look at like building in adapt for building a hybrid app, or whatever a bap, or blockchain app-enabled app is what dominant called them building a bap for Aetherium. Wherein you’ve got to have this application that runs pretty much entirely on AWS and then just makes calls to a blockchain. The call to a blockchain is not easy, it’s not clean. Metamask integration is difficult. It’s just kind of finicky. And I think that the internet computer does a great job of wiping away a lot of the backend wildness, with Blockchain that everyone is not used to, and allows a developer that is used to web development to just go through and blow it away. And then next to that, you’ve got awesome projects like tonic and fleek that are building out tooling that will allow developers to come in and use the internet computers, more blockchain style features in a very, very easy way that abstracts away a lot of the challenges like exe tandard abstracts away a lot of the challenges of like potentially bringing ERC seven to one token over as ERC 20 token or something like that. But Fleek is like they did dab. And so they’re inside the community they’re killing it with tooling. And so in so much that a little while like before that was announced. Everyone was like, Well if we want to support multiple different NFT standards, like what are we going to do, we have to code for both standards. But dad gets rid of that, and then just puts a layer of abstraction on top of that. So I really think that tooling is the key. We need to make it easier to build things in 3d. And we need to make it easier to build things for the metaverse. And I think that as much as I hate to say it, Facebook or meta is killing it on the hardware side, making it easy for new devs or new people who are creatives to come in and build something for the quest to build something for VR that was just inaccessible before, I mean, even with like, I’ve had a Vive I’ve had like this is my I’ve had this vibe for years. And it just it’s difficult to program for versus like the quest to which is easy. But then, at the same time, Unity and Unreal are building awesome toolsets on that backside for kind of bridging a bunch of the different hardware manufacturers together and an open XR is doing a lot of good work there as well. So there’s a big push for tooling. That’s kind of what the industry needs are better.

Abraham Gomez: There’s a lot of opportunities, the opportunity tooling is it’s better to build the tools than to mine for the gold. So yeah,

Andrew Weed: exactly. Yeah. build factories. That’s where the money’s at.

Abraham Gomez: Yeah, there you go.

Brian Galler: So let’s talk about where, you know, I guess the progression of the metaverse right. And so you know, from the VR, AR and I think you’ve got some new terms to introduce to us. So let’s talk a bit talk about

Abraham Gomez: about walk us through all the terms from like the beginning, which is like AR or VR. I mean, you let us know what are they?

Andrew Weed: Yeah, so pretty much You’d imagine so like the way that the industry started was it was kind of like this virtual reality that was the thing was virtual reality. And then everyone kind of got used to VR. And everything was VR, it was in your headset, or it was in the Google cardboard thing, or it was just VR. And then like, really, AR took off after that, because of apps like Snapchat, or, like Google Streetview was really cool. Because in the beginning, you could get in your phone and it kind of look where you were in the, almost like, there’s a digital twin behind your phone, and you’re looking at the digital twin through a mirror glass or whatever. So it went from VR to AR and then the community was like, Oh, well, is which one’s gonna win? Is it gonna be VR AR, sort of like the Betamax and VHS or whatever? But it ended up kind of being both like, they were just different tools that did different things. And they both work. And so then you had Microsoft, and they’re like, hey, well, why don’t we put this glass in front of your face and kind of just mix everything and they called it Mr For mixed reality. And so you had this VR, AR, Mr Sort of an ecosystem for a little while. And, and it ended up being that a lot of the tooling and the libraries that you use for one or the other ended up kind of being used the same for both and ended up being that you end up just having this extended reality, just this VR, or AR or Mr. toolkit. And then you almost write for all of them, if you will. And that’s the XR sort of mindset, this next step, your version twos XR, and then what we’re trying to push at VR Ulysses, one of my startup, sorry, is what we’re trying to push is the next level is the spatial computing mindset, which is getting out of the fact that you’re extending your reality. The reality is, we’re here in the metaverse, it’s part of our reality now. So it’s not an extension, this is where we live. So it’s a spatial way of thinking. So we’ve got our 2d screens, we’ve got our flat, we’ve got our, the design styles, you’ve got flat, and you’ve got the material UI, you’ve got all these interesting and cool ways to interact with a two-dimensional surface. But we’re extending the future into this three-dimensional spatial sort of computing paradigm. And so spatial is the new term that we’re aiming to, to push out to encompass that more physicality, the more physically based interaction with your digital environment.

Abraham Gomez: Yeah, that’s, it’s been an exciting progression to see for sure. And that we’re living through it, I think. I think, yeah, I think VR was, you know, first, right, like, I do remember Google Glass, but I don’t know if that was before any of like, Vive or Oculus, or any of those have come out. Nonetheless, both are really cool. I’m excited for this new era that we’re in, which is going to be spatial, is that correct? Term? All right. I’m going to start utilizing that no more AR No, a VR MR. at spatial,

Brian Galler: spatial baby. Yeah. And then what was, uh, I think you were before we got on talking about skeuomorphic? Yeah, they’re gonna lay that one. Lay that one on us.

Andrew Weed: Yeah. So you’ve got, I had mentioned in your 2d design, you’ve got like your flat, sort of Flat UI, you’ve got your material UI, that just sort of design languages. So skeuomorphic, which is SKEUOMOR a pH I see skeuomorphic is a design style that aims to implement the physical nature of the item that is being designed or that is being interacted with, implements the physical nature into the interaction, so a lever would be something that was actually grabbed and pulled on or pushed on vice, just an entity that is pointed out or clicked down. It’s a more interactive way of thinking about design. very textural, if you will, very, very physical. Yeah.

Brian Galler: So are you familiar with Blender? Yeah, of course. Yes. So So Blender has you know certain physics you can turn on certain physics for different things, you know, water or cloth. And it will it’ll react like it would in the real world. Is that is that that’s the skew? skeuomorphic is starting to bring those kinds of physics into

Andrew Weed: topics. You could bring physics into it, but it’s more than just the interactive bill. It’s designed around that interact ability. So so it’s not so much the lever, as, excuse me as it is. The goal in the game is to open a door. And that door isn’t something that you just point and click to open, you’d grab a lever and open the branch open the door. And so it’s a sort of design language in which the user experience is defined through interaction with the environment, some more than, like, identification of buttons or lists or things like that. It’s a spatial way of thinking of design and in that way, aspect.

Abraham Gomez: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that’s, that’s incredibly cool. A question out of the left-field, just because we kind of went with VR, AR, Mr. and spatial, and I’d like to know what you guys expect. So get now the craze so 2017, the craze was ERC 20 Right tokenization of the Ethereum blockchain and everyone started an Ico then 2018 ERC 721 started taking off and you know, that was cool. And now it’s essentially a subset of that it was like ERC 20 and ERC language or NF T’s MCS is the word we know. Right. So we know ERC 20 For the most. So we know token right. We know token we know NFT what’s the next thing and then when it compasses them all?

Andrew Weed: Yeah, so I haven’t thought about that. I’ve thought about that from a different perspective. But I like the way that you embody the question. I’ve thought about how to change the name NFT to better encompass what’s possible. Right. And really, that’s tough because I would say like, like, verifiable, unique digital asset. That’s, that’s what an NFT could be. Except that’s way too wordy.

Abraham Gomez: it’s better than non-fungible token. I’ll give you that.

Andrew Weed: I mean, literally, whatever, whatever one of the world has to look up what the hell fungible means. Yeah, right. Right. And it’s a backwards definition, which is like so he’s a non-fungible, it’s just a really weird way to put things Yeah. NFT Yeah, so it’s, uh, it’s gonna be really interesting. I don’t know what it’s, it’s really hard because of the especially with the internet computer, the NY NASM. Mainly web with WebAssembly. Like, the possibilities for what a token can be are limitless now. Like, like, like an Aetherium token is very impressive, but it has its limits like solidity has its limits. But oh, like you can do anything on the internet computer. So. So I mean, that the speed of iteration that Steve is going through atonic labs just for simply like, Well, hey, we dropped like, so when I’m also on the IC puzzle team. And so when I see puzzle dropped the canister for that NFT looks so different from what the canisters are, that are dropping now with NF t’s just from the front end that you can query to the different the available methods. There already. Like ERC 1155 is gone. Like we’re not even thinking about that anymore. So, so it’s so fast that it’s going to be hard to I don’t even know if people are going to need to have a word do identify and NFT because they’re going to be so prevalent. Yeah, it’s yeah, it’s, it’s gonna be an interesting future for sure. And if T’s are gonna blow this whole world up,

Brian Galler: you mentioned you mentioned, Steven, we have to get him on the show, just to prove that he’s human. Right. Yeah, I’m not.

Abraham Gomez: I’m not convinced. I know who he is. No one knows that. He looks like him. But, you know, it’s not set up.

Brian Galler: I’m like, I don’t think he has to sleep. So that’s why I’m not sure.

Andrew Weed: Exactly, exactly. I don’t know. And like, yeah, and the exponent platform is like, like, he must have lived 2030 already. Because, like, Oh, my God.

Abraham Gomez: It’s crazy. Yeah. It’s such an exciting. It’s so exciting. You guys. I know. Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Galler: So let’s, let’s talk about, I guess, let’s go into digital identity. Yeah, I know. You have some some some some passion around this right. digital identity and proof of humanity. Privacy. Yeah.

Andrew Weed: Yeah. So that’s a big thing that I’m I’m interested in is moving our identities into a very private sort of environment in which We control access to any of our PII we control on a granular basis. So any aspect of your personal information can be like I had said before with the license, that era Makhni license where you can monetize individual lines of code, I think that individuals should be able to monetize individual variables about their identity. So so if a mailing list wants to know, my phone number, and my email and my name, author, you pay for each one of those pieces of information, they’re correlated. And so I also think that there are interesting problems to solve. So I don’t believe that technologies go away so much as they say they serve the purposes that they’re meant to serve, or that they can serve, while those purposes are necessary. So like COBOL still exists, for some reason, because it’s still needed in some niche banking situations, primarily.

Brian Galler: first that was my first programming language, by the way, COBOL.

Andrew Weed: Yeah, I got in the business. So with the internet, as it kind of was the web two mindsets of things. Centralized, you’d imagine, well, if I have this digital identity, and it has these, this, these bits of information about me, you could gain access to that once and then a store your own repo of that information of me just as they currently do, right. So like Facebook has a bunch of information about you. But the thing that I’ve noticed about people’s identities across their, their social graph, or whatever, is that a lot of this information, I’ve noticed this, both personally and about other people, is that a lot of that information, ages, and it doesn’t age well. And so like if you go and you end up looking at like my MySpace, I haven’t been on anything since, like 2015, it still exists, that still data about me, and f that data is still accurate, it’s still valid like my name hasn’t changed. So information ages differently. And I think that that’s very kind of an interesting way to look at things. Because if you attach a timestamp to the data that you’ve received, or given out to someone, that data can then age appropriately. And anyone that you provide that data to as a third party can validate the age of that data. And they can say, hey, I don’t want you to give provide me names and email addresses that are over, you know, 10 months old, 12 months old, because that don’t want they’re less valid, or whatever the marketing decision is.

Brian Galler: Or even whenever you give your data out, you can say, I only want this to be accessible for a year. And then they no longer have permission to that piece of data

Andrew Weed: Precisely, precisely. And so you’d end up having that on both sides, you’d have on your side, you would deny the access there. But then they could still cache that data. But on the inside of the person that’s receiving that data, they can set up a sort of validation system in which if you provide the data, they have to provide a valid certificate of that data in which they check with you is this still valid data. And it wouldn’t even necessarily have to share the data back and forth. So you’re only providing the data to these individuals. And they are providing the data of these individuals. And all of it is encrypted. And no one sees the data, but they’re operating on it. And this is something that I’m passionate about as well. Integrating with digital identity is the idea of functional friction or homomorphic encryption. And additionally, on top of that, what’s called Secure multi-party computing, which is being able to spread compute, secure compute, so functional encryption across multiple different computing devices, and then aggregate that information back and get the output in an encrypted form.

Abraham Gomez: Yeah, that’s a lot. And it’s for sure. They’re interesting problems and things that need to be solved without question. I think I grasped most of what you said for sure. I’d like to know is like we’ve been talking on so many different topics. Yeah. How, like, how does your mind correlate the data and then also, like, you’re trying to solve these things, and you’re working across so many different projects, different startups. My question is, how do you do it?

Andrew Weed: So It’s a, it’s an interesting sort of place in my mind. It’s, I learn. So the way that I learn things is that I identify that everything is built out of some sort of like model in which it is capable of being described in its environment. And then, you can abstract specific data out of that model, and then apply that model to different regimes. And so I try and learn the underlying model for every experience in life. And there tends to not be a lot of variances, or things beat themselves in threes act similarly. Right? They respond in similar ways. So I, when you boil down to, like, what is reality, what is everything, I think everything is a wave. Because no matter how you cut any system, over time, you’ll notice that every system has its ups, and its downs, whatever, whatever those peaks and troughs are defined by, you can see every single system values bounce in or in a wave sort of fashion. And that is, it’s beautiful to me. But that’s kind of how I do it, I decompose ideas into fundamentals. And then I can almost use those fundamental ideas like Legos, like building blocks around anything. And so that’s, that was something so when I was in school, like high school and middle school and whatnot, I got, I was not popular with my peers, because I would consistently ask questions of the instructors and we’ll dig, dig deeper. And it’s answering the, how, or the why question, is Uber important in understanding how a system operates and how it works? And why it does the things that it does, is the crux of variability is understanding a system. And then it’s, I try not to be dogmatic in that. No answer is permanent. Everything can change over time. But if you understand a system and you become comfortable with your understanding of that system, when it presents itself again, you almost just kind of operate. What’s the word I’m looking for? Like? Like, it’s like, it’s your second nature, you almost operate just naturally in that environment, because that’s how you understand the system to be. And if you truly understood it correctly, then you’re operating with accurate assumptions.

Abraham Gomez: That’s great. Brian, what do you got to say?

Brian Galler: You’ve got a brilliant mind.

Abraham Gomez: It’s it sounds like it’s curiosity that drives you.

Brian Galler: Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah.

Andrew Weed: I want I don’t like not knowing Hey, alright, so one of my life goals and I do mean this as it sounds silly, I’ve told people before and they said, it sounds silly, but one of my life goals is to bump up against a subject or some topic or some technology or some, some something that I, that I struggle to understand that I have a bet I can’t understand, then that is something that I strive to do. So I research in, like astronomy, I do research in quantum theory, I do research and information theory and cryptography. And I research all these incredibly sorts of complex and deep, deep topics to effectively stump myself. And what that ends up doing is I just learned a lot about a lot of things, and right and stumped myself. So I’m trying to run into something that I know that I can understand.

Brian Galler: love it, I understand that all. And I imagine that by doing that, you can transfer ideas from one discipline into another discipline, and, and create new ideas by bringing

Andrew Weed: exactly and so one thing that I’ve identified is really beneficial about the way that I think about this sort of abstracting models out of everything is that when you start thinking like that, and you start trying to find the model that you’re working in, because after 30 years or so you end up finding that there are not so many novel models anymore, you run into systems that are reasonably repetitive, you end up trying to identify the system, and then you see the system that you’re operating in. And immediately you remember all of the other times you’ve been in that similar system in different contexts. And something occurred to this system that changed it in this context, that would be incredibly beneficial over here, but it’s so unrelated that very few people would ever actually make the connection. But because of the way that I think so much that I’m at abstracting out these ideas, that composability of the ideas is really all that matters. And so I just will it’s almost like the idea comes to me just out of thin air because it’s composing ideas. Right? Right.

Abraham Gomez: So how does one, so it’d be great if there was a doppelganger of you, a little version of you. Would be nice. What did that be nice? How do we? Yeah, let’s talk about a digital twin. Some experience there.

Andrew Weed: let’s twin mind think mind bank that AI is another company that I with. And we are working specifically on digital twins of humans are digital souls. And so what the idea is here is if you, if you imagine that you can build a version of Siri, except that version of Siri, is built using individual people’s data. So I get to speak to an application that records what I’m saying. And if you imagine it’s kind of like a diary, it’s very, very personal asks, really any question you can imagine. You’re, you’re only sharing that data with yourself. So this is a digital soul, it is a digital you. And going back to the functional encryption, the homomorphic encryption, there is no way that the system behind it can access that data either it is encrypted end to end. And all of the functions, all of the mathematics that is done on that data is done on the encrypted form of that data. So very secure, very private, then what we do is we can take a model of all of that data that you’ve presented, and D identify the data, combine that data with all data of everybody else on the platform, and then build a collective model that is the best possible model of a human that we could collectively obtain. And then we can back feed that model to you individually in which your data fills that model. And it is now the best model of a human filled with only your data. So it’s effectively a digital you. And we are both combining cognitive data, which is through the diary sort of interaction like you would with Siri the way you normally imagine. But we can combine that data with biometrics with your wrist watches and any of the other biometric devices. And we can also combine that data with like ancestry or 23andme and get your genetic data as well. Well, and we can combine all three of those to get a really good view and model, if you will, of you. And then use that model for the initial thoughts are self-growth, self-actualization, self-realization, most people have incredible problems with self-reflection, depression, anxiety, PTSD, all of these, these really big problems that people, especially in COVID are, are dealing with. A lot of them are based on a lack of self-realization and understanding of your environment, your context, and what it is that you’re thinking. That’s the initial thought, but some of the benefits that are almost gamey are, you’ll be able to be connected with big thinkers of the past. So if you think similarly to the way that Einstein thought, or Shakespeare or someone like that, we can pair you with that individual. So one of the things that we’re doing with the speech centre action, with the cognitive data is we’re doing like sentiment analysis on your the way that you’re speaking and how you are appearing to like, sort of feel as you’re saying things so we can identify if you’re talking about your parents, and it ramps up your anxiety a little bit, that might be a source of pressure for you that maybe you didn’t even recognize or something like that. And then on the flip side, we also have partners that are in the counselling and the, like the counselling space, so we can match you up with a psychologist or a counsellor, that would be a perfect fit for someone that’s in your particular cognitive state.

Abraham Gomez: Yeah, that’s incredibly intriguing. So I spoke with the co-founder, a few weeks back, and one of the most intriguing things was being able to essentially have, let’s say, my parents, let’s say my parents created a main bank, digital twin, and just having them to reflect upon later on in life after they passed. So I can speak with their digital twin. And that was one of the unique value propositions that really caught my attention. There are endless, you know, things you can do with the digital twin. I would personally have a digital twin to be my assistant, if it would want to be I don’t know if it by myself probably wouldn’t want to be my own assistant, but that’d be fine. Brian, what do you what are you thinking about when it comes to a digital plan?

Brian Galler: Yeah. So we’ve chatted about this a little bit. And tell us a little bit about what’s the, one of the largest challenges right now with digital twins, I think when you and I chatted, it was social, right? There are some social acceptance issues with a digital twin, right?

Andrew Weed: Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s another big problem that we’re still seeing. There’s a lot of people that when when you start talking about the things that I’m talking about, there’s a lot of people that are like, whoa, pump the brakes, that’s I don’t need the computer in my mind, or my mind in the computer. So there’s, there’s, there’s that sort of hurdle that we have to get past. And that’s what I’m aiming at, approaching that from a more privacy and security sort of mindset, right, so ensuring that the data is only ever actually visible by you. Not even the system won’t even be able to see your data, we will be able to do our analytics and our get value out of the collective. But we’re identifying individuals data. So, other challenges. So one of the challenges that we’re seeing is just in the sort of the next thread of that, that social acceptance mindset is once you do have a group of individuals that as accepted that this is sort of something that’s coming in, this is what’s going to happen. You have to think about regulation and legislation around that sort of thing. Because if you think about maybe 1520 years after a product like this reaches the market, there’s going to be significant questions around what sort of rights that digital twin has. What what what happens if someone attacks that digital twin, is that like attacking you? Because I would imagine that it is it’s very, very similar to attacking you. It’s it is the exact rep representation of you without the physical form. And so it can be seen and acted upon, very similar to just an attack from another individual on a digital plane. We are heading up that as well, with a petition to the UN to ratify, I don’t remember all of the exact names of the acronyms and whatnot. But we’ve we have a change.org petition into the UN to effectively make human rights with digital twin rights so that your digital twin will have the same rights that you do. And so that that is already up. And so you can go and you can find that and sign. sign that petition.

Brian Galler: You’re interested. Yeah, yeah. So I saw your post that I haven’t done that yet. But I will, for sure. So I guess the big question is, do you have a digital twin? And do you end… Do you like him?

Andrew Weed: Right now we’re not in the stage where we’re personalizing them yet. That’s, some difficulties get right there. And, and so we’re making sure that we’ve got a lot of the privacy and security considerations done first before we start putting actual hardcore data in there. But I have trained a few models.

Abraham Gomez: That’s pretty good. So are you guys at the stage where it’s still rudimentary and building up data before you start working into the AI aspect.

Andrew Weed: actually, we’re in the AI aspect. Now, we’re already working on building models and providing, providing valuable features to users. And, we are also building out the front end and the application so that users can jump in and provide that data. So our very first sort of foray will be offering the application up for users to provide data as well as some limited features that do take into account AI modelling on top of your data. So some of those early features are like, we’re looking into being able to assign just based on a speech to text and sentiment analysis and just basic analysis of the users’ answers, being able to assign you Myers Briggs Type, or like a big five type based on just your answers. So early stages in that sort of thread, but that that’s the route we’re going down is to try and assist on the Counseling Psychology front initially law.

Abraham Gomez: That’s an awesome, awesome start. Great initiative. Yeah, it’s exciting. So let’s go with current events. So Brian, if you want to walk us through our current events,

Brian Galler: sure. Yeah. So um, I don’t know, a lot coming up this next week. But so on Thursday, we are going to interview Rick Porter, from Discover, so um, I’m looking forward to that, as well. He is going to talk about Discover, I don’t know how much he will reveal. But I know that Discover has some really big changes coming. Some cool changes. So I know a little bit of those. But I’ll let him decide what he’s going to tell the community that and then just in general, you know, I think he wants to talk about governance as well. Right. That’s, you know, a big part of the discovery is, you know, the community governing that and decentralization so that you guys have anything to say they’re discovered.

Abraham Gomez: I’m excited about it. Yeah. Excited. Cool.

Brian Galler: And then the big thing on Thursday, as well is the constitutional Dow. And we checked here, as of I don’t know, at the beginning of the show, they were up to $6 million. I think they’ve got to hit something over 20. I saw some, it’ll probably go for about 20. But by the time you know, the Sotheby’s, you know, fees, and all of that plus the expenses of you know, securing it and all this, you know, they’re probably talking, you know, a couple more million above that, that they’ll have to get to purchase. I think it’s one of 11 I think there are 1111 copies of the Constitution. Original copy.

Abraham Gomez: only private, privately held ones still though. Okay. Cool.

Brian Galler: Yeah, I wasn’t. I know, it was. I know it’s privately held. I wasn’t sure if it was the only one but yeah, I think there’s I think there are 11 copies of like original copies. And so I think it’s one of the 11 and they expect that somewhere around 20 million, so they’ve got a ways to go for this dow, and I guess it’s a theory on bass, right? Yeah. So it’s, it’s a Dow based on Ethereum, and they’ve raised 6 million. So getting close.

Abraham Gomez: What’s your guys’ thoughts on it? Like, I’d love to know what you guys think that’s cool.

Brian Galler: I think I think it’s cool, you know, the, I guess, individuals being able to participate in this way, it’s a perfect example of a doubt, right? It’s an imperfect real world, you know, or a more public publicized way of showing what a Dow is capable of, particularly if they’re able to pull it off. Right. And, and purchase the Constitution or a copy of it. So yeah, I think it’s cool.

Abraham Gomez: I think it’s exciting, especially if it succeeds.

Andrew Weed: Yeah, exactly. I like the idea of the bridging of the ideas of the constitution that was built by the people and for the people. But at the time, there was no way to give it to the people. And now there is a way to do that in the form of a bow. And so it’s almost like, I almost feel like it would be next to appropriate to have the US government purchase it in a Dow that is attached to every, like the consent of the census. So every US citizen becomes a partial owner in it. That would make a lot of sense to me. But it’s like this current idea of this sort of third-party Dow starting up to have collective ownership over it. I like that idea, too.

Abraham Gomez: Yeah. I’m, I’ll ask one last question before we wrap up. So you, let’s say the Dow, so we purchased the Constitution, the Dow. And we succeed, do we? We make it into an NFT, obviously, and then provide governance tokens, but do we burn it?

Andrew Weed: Oh, oh, oh, I don’t even know. You know, I think you donate it to like Smithsonian or something like that. Or like, maybe it’s under with the, like, the Mona Lisa, where, you know, you don’t ever actually see the real one. Yeah.

Abraham Gomez: Yeah. Okay. So, no, I also vote now. Yeah.

Brian Galler: You know, it’s a very, very interesting question, right. Because you write in a Dow, there could be a proposal to do that or to do other things. Right. And, and it’s completely under the control of the will of the people.

Abraham Gomez: That’s right. Yeah, right. is true.

Brian Galler: it could go, it could go bad.

Abraham Gomez: Or it could go, you know, yeah. That’s a great point. Yeah. It’s, it’s within the power of the doubt, which is everyone. What everyone votes for is what happens. So it’ll be interesting. I’m praying that it happens. I would love it. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. All right. Weed. It’s been such a great, great conversation. We can’t thank you enough for your time. Do you have any closing thoughts?

Andrew Weed: Um, no, I don’t think I mean, it’s been great. This is an awesome platform. I appreciate you guys having me on the show. And I look forward to future episodes and helping build this thing with you guys.

Brian Galler: Really? Yeah. And welcome back to the man. You got other things you want to talk about? Or, you know, yeah.

Andrew Weed: I can talk forever. Yeah.

Abraham Gomez: Well, we love hearing. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you again, Brian. Thanks, you guys. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you guys. You guys. Have a wonderful night. All right.