You don't have a DAO. I mean, if you are five people, if you can't agree on anything, if you don't have a value system, stuff like that, you're doing some bullshit, but it's not a DAO. It seems like privacy nowadays become sort of luxury,

to protect ourselves or to fight against that? I myself have a actually legal press card because, I got that, once. So whenever I park my car, I just put the press sign on there, and so far, I have never received a sign. So would you mind telling us a little bit about this kind of intersection of privacy and industrial,

competitiveness?

Privacy is the basis for any form of meaningful self organization because if you cannot keep your things private, then you fall prey to all forms of surveillance, of state control, of basically intrusion from people and organizations that you don't want.

And I'm Eugene.

Yeah. I really, appreciated the conversation. You know, I think that this is the first conversation that we've had focused more on privacy, which I think is an important angle, and I know one that we're gonna touch on with at least one or two other guests in the future. But, yeah, this is just such a interesting conversation. I feel like a lot of the privacy conversations do focused on the individual, which is obviously important, but we did kinda touch on governance systems and privacy a little bit. You know, some of, Joakim's work is focused more on industrial policy and thinking about privacy from that angle, which I think is one that, unless you're specifically in those circles or looking up that topic, is just not the angle of privacy that you hear about more often. So I feel like we, you know, just got to have this really wide ranging conversation that touched on everything from here's if you care about your privacy and your digital footprint, here's some actions you could take as an individual all the way through, you know, the levers policy, makers can pull to try to adjust how people, do or don't disclose information online. And, again, these kind of more industrial and, innovation angles around privacy, which, I found fascinating. Yeah. And what about you, Tamara?

Yeah. And we we have a guest in the intro this week. I guess he couldn't help but come say hi because he just really appreciated all the focus on privacy and making sure that no data leakage. So I won't even I already disclosed, his gender accidentally. I won't even say his name to preserve his digital footprint, but, yes, puppy approved episode. And so if you also approve of this episode and the podcast, please, like, subscribe, and share with a friend. Feel free to reach out to us if there is anything in specific, you wanna hear in the future or if you're gonna be coming to DevConnect and wanna potentially link up with us while we're there. And otherwise, please enjoy the conversation with Joaquin.

I ended up in blockchain because it's, the most wonderful thing for me to do, and I'll explain in a second. First of all, happy to be here. Thank you very much for the invitation. Indeed, you said it. I've now reached a certain age as an economist in various functions where I might say that I've seen all the sectors and ecosystems that we have in the world out there. That is because of my academic career until 2001. Then I've been working, in the European Commission since the last twenty four years. And, in this context, I've been doing industrial competition policy, access to finance, blockchain, and crypto. In the function for competition, for example, when I was dealing with mergers antitrust state aid, I've seen cases that really relate to everything that is in the world out there. And all of this is interesting, but when you reach a certain age, I think you dedicate your remaining time to a topic that is very close to your heart. And, blockchain and especially decentralized governments is very close to my heart because, as an economic historian, I think that we are at a tremendously exciting point in time. Because for the first time since at least five hundred years, we can get humanity back on track where I think, people want to be, and I need to explain that a little bit. So when you look at human history, humans started self organizing their activities within local communities throughout all times. They created first settlements. They created first villages and cities. And all of that was indeed self governed, was self organized, and, followed rules that were agreed among the group according to their specific preferences. So they didn't wait for the state to tell them what to do, but they just went on to solve the daily problems. And this went on for a while until and let's not go into these details. Some Egyptians invented centralization for some opaque, reasoning. And then, we saw a history that accelerated over the last five hundred to eight hundred years where the responsibility of small and local groups or the individual itself always became less and less because we see a world that is growing in a more complex way, where intermediaries of all sorts, banks, insurances, but also administrations come into the system to solve a lot of problems that previously have been your problems. And one might think that all of this is good, but in fact, it is not. And it is not because I think personally, and that's as everything I say here, my own opinion, we are now living in a world where basically people are so disconnected from actually the ability to actively influence the world according to their preferences that, this is causing a major problem. So we think that when it comes to governance, our role within what we call democracy is to vote every four years and otherwise let other people decide on whatever we do. We are getting more and more disconnected, also even in a digital environment because people then stay at home. And nothing of that is really similar to what people have always done before, that actually you look at yourself, you decide what you like and what you don't like, you chose like minded people with whom you form a community, and then you decide to do something based on your value system, on the spirit of the community to, let's say, indeed move in a specific direction which you like. This is, what cooperatives have always done. This is what local communities have always done. And this we have lost over the last five hundred years when we had all these intermediaries, I said, creeping in. And now everyone is looking to the state and ask for solution where we see that every day we get less and less solutions from centralized systems top down. Blockchain is finally the enabler that we have waited for in order to get rid of our chains. And what blockchain does is it allows to scale the local communities that have always been physically restrained that they had to know each other very well in order to be able to trust each other or in order to be able to understand what the other one is doing. And this function of coordination and trust, of immutability of the inputs is now provided through the blockchain because the blockchain guarantees in a distributed way that everyone has the same information, that no one can mess around with that information, and that, actually, you can come together and self govern yourself by voting on daily and hourly on whatever basis where you have to decide on doing that in a safe way and creating spaces where every community can live in a safe environment. The digital space is endless in terms of size in order to do and decide what people want to do. This is a liberation. This is something that is an absolutely fantastic opportunity for us to get more engaged and to really be who we are inside ourselves without waiting for approval from anyone to tell us who we are. And this is something that I find so beautiful that I don't see blockchain only as a technology. I see it as a societal revolution, and this is why I have decided to devote my time and efforts to this because, I am very, very privileged to live in these times to do so. Thank you so much.

Does that make sense? That makes sense. And I try to, find a way to answer that. First of all, I would say that nothing is disconnected. People that sometimes see me at developer conferences and stuff note that I wear a hoodie, which states disconnected. That's actually a French metal band, which I like, so I take that, and I think disconnected in a way is a good phrase. But, I would not go as far, at least for myself, to say that when we are in a digital domain, we are completely disconnected from the rest of the world. So, of course, I take my views, if you want my prep my prejudices or whatever I see on the real world, I take into the digital domain. And, this being said, I think that the digital domain has a number of advantages. Although I'm a very traditional person, so I don't believe in blind digitalization of everything because that means also a lot of centralized control, and I think that we will come to that point later. But, it can avoid certain issues. And give me a personal example. So I consider myself in terms of my nationality as a Prussian. So, and we talked about that, I think, before. Prussia has not been in existence officially for the last eighty years. It has been taken a decision by first the Nazis and then the Americans to basically, terminate its existence. I don't accept that. I have a long family history. We are Prussians. And, so, I would like to live according to my value system because I think, actually, that is a fantastic country that has done a lot of good things. Now if I am in the physical world, promoting the cause of pressure would be relatively difficult. You would face a lot of challenges if you really think that, Prussia is a physical country at this very moment because, the territory is on four countries that exist right now. And, of course, it's not easy for me to just get enough troops and tanks to invade four countries and, just say that this is the territory of Prussia. In the digital domain, I can find like minded people and live according to my preferences and values the way that I want. I can preserve my culture. I can digitize arts. I can, for example, celebrate festive days. I can do whatever I want without, in my opinion, anyone else having the authority to tell me otherwise because I do not think that the digital domain belongs to a country or a state or a central authority. It is a free space. And this can, if you see it from that perspective, reduce conflicts because at the end of the day, the digital space is basically sort of galactical space. It is endless, and we have room for each other. So I can live in my virtual Prussia next to virtual Neanderthalas or virtual whatever you have, just whatever people want to be. It is not for me to decide what other people want to be. And this allows me to have a safe harbor if you put it like this, where a part of me that comes home and then just wants to be immersed in my culture can do so. And this I find very beautiful, actually. So for me, it's not necessarily the case that you take your real life conflicts with you in the digital domain and then see this as a better ground in order to kill everyone in the digital world that is around you. It is quite the opposite. And if you allow me one last remark on this, I find this actually of extreme value to humanity because it allows us to preserve who we are until better times arrive. Many of us or many of those that I speak to are activists in countries that are having much difficulties with, the current incumbents of power, of course. They resort to the digital space, to organize themselves, and, they wait from their perspective, hopefully, for things to change, self organize themselves, and find a way forward. And this I find very beautiful as long and this is very, very important for me myself. We do not judge on others. So I'm not taking a position on political views. I have a very clear political view myself, which is not mainstream, but I respect others, but I want to be respected myself. And this is indeed, again, something where the digital space can help you. So I see where you come from, but in my understanding of the digital world, it feels more like the opposite because it gives us more opportunities than it gives us constraints.

I'm convinced that when it comes to digital forms of self organization and communities, and then we are, of course, immediately discussing decentralized autonomous organization or or DAOs, that we are seeing the first stages of digital states to emerge with an increasing number of functionalities. And what we see at the moment is experimentation. What strikes me very much as a traditional offline person is that nothing what I see in the digital domain, including what you mentioned, is new in any way. Indeed, we have seen throughout history, and these examples are still at this moment on the planet, that communities have chosen their spaces to live according to these, principles. Take South Africa, where you have the African speaking population, part of them sitting in a town called Orania that actually, to my knowledge, issued the first, cryptocurrency in Southern Africa because they want to live according to their values, which is the culture and the language. There are other examples you mentioned a few. But, indeed, we have also real world examples, that are interesting now from a legal perspective and are being discussed in terms of governance very broadly for countries like, for example, Afghanistan, but maybe also Ukraine. Take Neumorsenet as an example. Neumorsenet, is a place that existed for one hundred and three years between the Congress of Vienna and the end of the first World War. It is a very small territory between Germany, The Netherlands, and Belgium. And, basically, it is a mine for a specific commodity that was of strategic relevance. And during the congress of Vienna, the neighboring countries couldn't agree to whom belonged that mine, which resulted in the fact that at the end of the day, they forgot about it. So, for one hundred and three years, this, nationless country without having any law, was occupied by mine workers, criminals, and prostitutes. It ceased to exist, at the end of the first world war. It is one of many, many examples of actually how multifaceted forms of organization and governance have always been throughout our history. And now, of course, we see that this moves into the digital space, and it is being accelerated. And I had the privilege, for example, last year to work on some reports, being done by Project Liberty with contribution from Blockchain Gov and and others. And, I was interested in noting that several, university professors contributed who apparently hold a chair for intergalactic trade. Now what is this? Imagine that you are in a spaceship. Your spaceship is somewhere in the universe. And as the Americans say, they don't care too much about other things, but just trading with whatever comes across. So, when you see some, let's say, other form of hopefully intelligent life coming up to you, Probably the natural impulse of continental Europeans would be to find some sort of cultural alignment or to be curious in a way Americans want to trade. So the idea is how can you actually deal with entities that you know nothing about, but that might have something to offer. And this is a very good metaphor, for what the Internet is. Because at the end of the day, we all have our avatars. We all have, perhaps different identities in a way. It's not really important who I am as long as it's in an environment where I can build confidence that I can deal with these people and then exchange goods and services, which I tokenize. A token is the container of the Internet, like a physical container in the real world, and then it goes on. So, in this sense, we learn from history. We have different forms of organization. We can create our own countries or entities. No one will be able to prevent that. And, it is a very interesting competition, I would say, regarding to, what will happen in terms of, improvements of our everyday life, or will it be only contained to the Internet? Will it be something strange, or will it find repercussions to the real world? That call is still out there, but, we are in the middle of the discussion.

And that does sound like quite the fascinating discussion. And, yeah, the the American impulse of either blow it up or trade with itself. It resonates. So, yeah, I very much, can hear you there. But I I was hoping to change tracks a little bit. And I know you mentioned part of your focus and expertise lies from the industrial competitiveness domain. Yes, ma'am. And I think the link of privacy and industrial competitiveness is not necessarily the lens that many people will jump to first. I think a lot of folks think of it on, you know, more the human right basis, the individual basis, what does it mean for our relationship in the state. But I think this angle of, you know, viewing privacy as a potential driver or aid of, you know, innovation or competitive advantage is also an important one to explore when thinking of governance more broadly. So would you mind telling us a little bit about this kind of intersection of privacy and industrial, competitiveness?

Sure. And to to start with privacy, indeed, I'm very convinced that privacy is the basis for any form of meaningful self organization because, if you cannot keep your things private, then you fall prey to all forms of surveillance, of state control, of basically intrusion from people and organizations that you don't want. And here we face a fundamental problem in the digital domain because, in the offline, world, in the traditional world, I always had an element of privacy. I mean, if I was living, which was the standard case in a little village, certain things were not private because everyone observed everyone. But you had a house where you could retreat or, you could keep certain thoughts private or just exchange it with one person that you, have trust in. Or if you're fed up with everyone, you just go into the woods to have a walk, and then you come back, and hopefully, it's it's much better. In the digital domain, everything is recorded. It leaves traces. And, we know that, of course, we have this discussion at this moment a lot, on how we can actually use privacy enhancing technologies to at least safeguard a certain level of privacy. I attended a conference a couple of days ago where we discussed the interplay between blockchain artificial intelligence and quantum computing. And it's very interesting for me to say how, for example, the Bitcoin community reacts to that. Actually, I think that blockchain is a fantastic solution to the upcoming problems created by quantum algorithms, because distributed systems are much less prone to attacks by mere calculation power than, other centralized systems. But if you are Satoshi and hold your Bitcoin in a wallet that was indeed created 2008, you are open to hacking once quantum computing, will be ripe. But if you buy your Bitcoin now to just name one example, you will probably be pretty safe. So what I'm saying is, these things have always been an issue, but, privacy is indeed the basis for many things. And when we now today in the digital domain discuss privacy, I have the feeling that the discussion is hijacked by organizations in power, specifically the state, that want to push through their agenda. And their agenda, and this is something that I see very often also from the inside, is not so much driven from being kind to humanity, but it is a mere clinging to power and control. We want to see what is going on. We want to proactively monitor. And if we don't like something and regardless on what basis, we want to prohibit it or worse. And that discussion is very much led with a view to, first of all, crime, where we all know that if we look at the figures, crime offline is of a much higher proportion than crime online, specifically because, the digital domain is indeed transparent. And this transparency actually, by default, reduces the amount of privacy that we have in the real world, so we must offset that. That. And then that discussion is very often led with a view to activists or with people that do something which, on an individual level, others don't like. But what we forget is that the same applies actually to companies, to businesses, and it also applies to states. I give you an example. Everyone knows that I am a very big supporter of privacy, privacy coins, and mixers. I am, very much in favor of not only having them but extending their function because I think privacy should be something by default. You will not find easily people, in the official domain that speak about that, but I know a lot of companies, very, very respected and big euros European industrial companies that use mixers. Now why do they use mixers? Because, they engage in new projects with new suppliers, with, let's say, parts of their value chain where they start building up new product lines, for example. The payment is a digital payment. The transactions, the IP is secured through tokens, and they want to avoid that their competitors go to some analytics firm and just track the transactions and the metadata and tell them with whom you deal with. So they say, okay. We're using all these obfuscation technologies in order to keep our stuff private. And this is also something that we saw in the metaverse. There were a lot of people when the metaverse came about that thought it would be a fantastic idea that we all run around with these extended reality classes. And then they were surprised that no one serious in the business world is inside the companies using these glasses. Why? Because they could as well livestream all the internal things on YouTube. I mean, at the end of the day, it just fails to protect your business secrets and your privacy. So privacy is a concern to everyone. It is even a concern to states that pay a lot of networks where others, are not supposed to see anything through the use of these, technologies. And I think that, privacy as such has this double function. It is an enabler of activity, of progress, but it is also something extremely fundamental that we desperately need in order to, balance the increased opportunities for states to control citizens, by having something that provides a shield against too curious people outside where, basically, they don't need to know anything.

There is not one simple answer to that. But in my opinion, it's a spectrum of things. And it leads also back to the question on industrial competitiveness. It is the same for citizens to not saying that citizens need to remain competitive. Of course not. But, the whole mixture of, doing something meaningful and realistic in your life on the one hand side, on the other hand side, to protect yourself against extreme is someone that we all face, and people find different positions in this spectrum. I I know a lot of people that are concerned about what you say, but 95% of them are not active people like we are and just continue using, their their Facebook and Instagram and whatever for all sorts of stuff. So, for me, I do a number of, safeguards which do not fully protect me, but make life for others hopefully a little bit harder. I have a mobile phone that doesn't have any Internet, functionality. It is for friends and people that I work with. I'm not on any social media. There are sometimes fake accounts, but I'm never on any social media, in any way. I have arranged that all my private communication runs through servers in countries that have no agreements, for example, with The United States or the European Union, that I'm fully protected with my VPN, with my tour, with an arrangement of stuff where, basically, I can't say that I'm as much expert to say it's impossible to, breach into that, but it makes life, pretty hard, and I think that should be normal. When it comes to, finance, I prefer either paying cash or with privacy coins. I know that sometimes compromises have to be made. So for example, here in Belgium where I live, if you want to take a bus or if you want to park your car, the only thing that you can do in order to remain within the limit of the law is, to make some movements with your debit card, and then something happens that you can't control, and then you've made the payment. You have no oversight of what actually happens. You have no other alternatives. So either you do that or you find certain alternative, ways. I myself have a, actually, legal press card because, I got that, once. So whenever I park my car, I just put the press sign on there, and so far, I've never received a fine. I mean, this is now a little bit funny, of course, in a way, but people need to be creative. That's what I mean by an activist. It might sound strange that, I call myself a privacy activist, but a privacy activist to me is not a silly person that puts glue on their hand and then, gets, to the screen and never gets the hand off the screen again and stuff like that. But you need to be a little bit creative in annoying people within the limits, but also take precautions. Have a certain amount of money in different places. Be prepared for things to happen. Secure your computer. Follow the, very, very, very good, online, platforms where they give you a twice on how to encrypt and how to do certain things. And bottom line, of course, never, never, never disclose any information that you might, at a certain point, regret. Once a thing is digital, it will remain digital, and at a certain moment, someone will have it. And that's the bottom line of this. So we might all have been a little bit naive in the past, but at least I have always, taken care since the state of the event of the Internet. I've said a lot of very hard things, especially as as a football journalist, which was my hobby. So, I said very negative things about other football clubs, and I'm very happy that I said this. And if you find them on the Internet, I still subscribe to all of that. But I think that I've never personally insulted anyone. I've never given out any personal detail that I now regret, and this is something that you have to be very aware of because you see that probably also with yourself. You can trust a lot of people, but this brings me back to governance, if you allow me to say one one sentence indeed on that. I have a lot of people that come to me and say that, Joachim, I have a DAO, and it doesn't work. What can I do? And what these people do most of the time is and I had an example again. Recently, five guys coming to me and saying that, this is a conference. We are here. We normally live on different continents. We can't agree on anything, so our DAO is not working. So what did I say to them? You don't have a DAO. I mean, if you are five people, if you can't agree on anything, if you don't have a value system, stuff like that, you're doing some push, but it's not a DAO. DAO. The end of the day, a DAO is never started by an airdrop of some silly tokens and then you have a DAO. A DAO is started by a meaningful interaction, mostly offline, where you get to know someone, where you develop a joint vision, and then you implement a tool to basically go in the digital domain and do whatever you have to do. So it requires a certain foundation, which is in the trust and confidence that you build in concrete people, and then you can go on and protect yourself in the digital world. But it is never that you randomly search the Internet with a bottle of wine in the evening and find some funny faces and say that let's do something. This is not realistic. So if you apply a few standard row rules, you can do a lot of things, but, bottom line is you are never 100% certain. And this certainly comes also with the advent of AI and deep fakes and everything that we have been discussing about. I mean, as an economic historian, I have never seen any part of, human history where technical progress has been so fast as it is now. And we will simply not be able to control all of that, but if we act responsibly, we can reduce 99% of the uncertainty. I would just like to invite everyone to become more active and, test these things out for themselves. I mean, I don't have the expectation that everyone now becomes a radical and starts the next French group, which was, in my opinion, a disaster anyway, but, that, you take control of your life. If if technology does something and if digital tools do something, they give you back parts of your lives that you haven't possessed before because others had occupied the territory. And, for me, I'm completely stupid when it comes to digitalization. I mean, I've never learned programming, and my computer is a nightmare. And, the the maximum level of expertise I have is that I have learned MS DOS thirty years ago or something like that in a way, so I can't do anything useful. But even I myself can do a number of things, on the Internet, and the young generation does that automatically. And this is something where, actually, I'll be curious also on your take on this because you you ask about the big organizations. You ask about public service. You ask about industrial competitiveness. And I I must agree with you that we have a lot of practical problems because people have misunderstandings of technology. People don't use the opportunities. But the one thing that gives me massive hope and the one thing that actually fully convinces me that I'm doing the right thing and that we get there is that now we have a young generation that is growing up with the Internet. It's growing up with blockchain. It is growing up with games. It is growing up with tokens in all different ways. And we will have the same thing that we had after 1968 when, certain political groups were creeping through the institutions and the government thirty years later. This will help with crypto. What we are talking here is in twenty years the mainstream. It is just that we have to survive the intermediate period between being still, controlled by the legacy system until the legacy system is dead, and we are in the position of the legacy system and hopefully don't become as corrupted, in a way, but, we get there. But, the transition is the interesting thing, and the transition is in the progress every year because it's people that are growing into the system.

Also, if you allow me to add on that, Jamilia, you just need to stand your ground. I did a financial transaction, over the weekend, 100% legal within the European Union. And then the next day, I had my bank on the phone, and the bank asked me, oh, it was flagged by our, services, because we need to check if it was you who initialized the transaction from a bank within the EU to a bank within the EU with a very reasonable amount. And I just said, yes. I, authorized the transaction. And the guy didn't want to hang up, so, I felt that the guy was wanting to know more. Why did I do that transaction? Who's that guy with whom I did transaction? First of all, I find it a disaster that, I still have a bank to do these things, but that is for historical reasons. It makes life in a way easier because some people I deal with have a bank account, and that's nice. Second, I just don't think that it's anyone's business, and these people have to learn that. So, the burden on proof is not on me. I do not have to prove to anyone that I am not a criminal. It is the state that has to prove to me that I did something wrong based on rules. And that is also that we see in things like, Tornado Cash, for example, where Mhmm. They abuse an existing anti money laundering rule for something that they very clearly don't understand. They don't know what smart contracts are. They don't know what DAOs are. They don't know what mixers are. But just grab a guy and put him in jail because he did something that was then taken up by a criminal to do something. And this is what never happens in the real economy. I mean, if bank robber uses a car, you don't go to the car company and arrest the CEO because, they produce the car. But, apparently, it is normal in the financial domain, to do so when you have a programmer. Why is this normal? You have to show to these people that it is not normal. And, this is probably, I would say, the biggest function, that I see in privacy activism that we have to live by example. I mean, I I do not have the illusion that I will convince a significant part of the world to do what I do, but I know that I am an immense nuisance to a lot of people by my mere existence. And I loved it. So, I I wear my stuff. I do my stuff. I go to places. I just do normal things. And then when everyone is looking at me and saying that this is not normal, I just say, you are not normal. Let's say be a little bit bolder than your own shadow, but by no means does that mean that you have to do anything which is out of your comfort zone. But, let let's face it. I mean, it makes life more interesting. And I am in a luxurious position because I know a lot of people that you know very well and, you are engaged with are in a much more difficult situation where these things are a matter of life and death, whether people catch you or whether people don't catch you. And this is also where I think we all have a responsibility. I mean, I certainly belong in everything in my life to the privileged 1% of humanity. And, I don't think that individuals matter. I think that communities matter, and we have an obligation to do something. But the obligation is not to to talk. And this is also something, Yamila, that we we talked, before. Talking is nice, but the proof is in doing. And it's actually very easy to do certain things. There are thousand things to do. Just start it.

And I guess I wanna follow-up on that because I feel as though, you know, we talked about some things that say the industrial or policy level, which inherently feel, you know, large scale and and don't feel as individual and personal. And, you know, on the other hand, you are bringing up these points of individual level action, of individual level advocacy of, you know, hopefully that now the current generations, Gen z, and whatever the moniker is for the ones after. You know, the one the younger folks growing up now are digitally native in a way that, you know, even we weren't and when we were just getting exposed to it. So it does feel as though there is a tension lying across these two domains of just the realities of change. And on the one hand, you know, if you're someone hearing this kind of conversation and you are in a position where you don't have as much privilege, where you might have, you know, fear, of repercussion of some sort, whether it's professional because of changing political lens, whether it's, you know, you were just of a minority group and you were worried about how the majority group might treat or act towards you. And kind of the realities of those individual level changes and the fact that, you know, how many of us have had our things hacked n number of times and yet haven't even bothered changing a password, as a sad reality versus on the other hand, thinking as someone who can have policy influence and spends time in those circles of, well, what is actually the onus of the government to act now? Because, you know, maybe realistically, the individuals may or may not make certain decisions on their own. So, So, yeah, I guess in terms of this kind of privacy, where do you really put the onus on the individual versus the system, and how do you think of the trade offs there?

I honestly think from my experience that people who take a certain position enormously underestimate the inner life of, what we would call the system. I'm not an no one of us is, but, I'm not a conspiracy theorist in the way that the system is bad and let's kill the system and then let's go over with it because the system consists of people. And I know certainly in my function in everyday life that whenever I speak to my colleagues who know about blockchain and crypto and privacy enhancing technologies, regardless of what function they have officially, they all more or less agree to what I say. They might not be as radical as I am in expressing things, but the direction is absolutely the same because they understand the repercussions. But when you are in hierarchical systems and when you have a top player, which I will not comment upon, further publicly, it means that you have a certain role and they have a certain role. But it remains important that whoever is in the situation that you have described, Eugene, does not lose hope and actively engages also with individual people in the system because, they are the ones that can do a lot of things, and they are the ones that at a certain moment will need to be there when the situation changes. And this is actually, something where, for example, we have a privilege in in Europe compared to, for example, The United States. In The United States, when the government changes, they exchange, tens of thousands of public officials. Here we see public officialdom as something as a service to the nation, to put it like this. It might sound silly, but allow me to go back, one moment to the Prussians again. We had a king two hundred years ago that said the public official, so that's me, serves the king and the nation. If the king and the nation disagree, he serves the nation. And this is how I see my role. I do not see my role to creep into anyone's ass. I, see my role as taking an opinion of what is in the public interest because my salary is paid by public money. And then I need to do the best responsibly to serve the public interest, and the the word here is serve. So, as long as I do that, and I'm not perfect in any regard, I think that we can still achieve something, and we should avoid a confrontation to the extent that this is possible where we are too confrontative because people have to develop an understanding from both sides. People in power have to understand that you cannot wipe away all this blockchain, Bitcoin, crypto thing, privacy technologies. They are there. They will be there if you like it or not. But, also, people in the Web three community have to understand that we still share the same plant and that, from a social perspective, it is better if we work with each other than we work against each other. Now I completely agree that there are periods in history where the talking doesn't help anymore, where we are basically having a situation like conflict and war out there, where, actions have to be taken. But, luckily, these are hopefully limited periods on of of time, but we see that more and more, and this is a matter of concern. I at the conference I was last week, I I met a friend who comes from a certain country more towards to the East. I'm not saying which country and which person. And he looked at me pretty much in shock, and he said that, you are, and I'm really concerned we are turning into zombies because, over day, we do our daily life. We do our jobs. We behave like normal people. And when darkness come, we get together and, go to the street and burn down stuff and fight the police and behave as if we were crazy people. And, this is what we now see in many places. This shows to me that the existing system is collapsing. The rules that, have been there are not working, but we are in an interregnum period until we build something new. And, that and I think he's hanging somewhere on on my wall behind me. I have these pictures there, Oswald Spengler. If you read his his theories, he basically sees societies as an organism. So societies have birth, use, they mature, they have an age, and at a certain moment, societies die. And in the last phase of societies, he says and he sees that throughout history in ancient countries in China, in Europe, everywhere, and he's not the only one who, comes forward with the theory. In the last stages of the life of a society, it becomes a fuss. It becomes the phase where the the Caesars come, where the crazy guys come that crap power and stuff like that. And then at a certain moment, it is too much, and then there is a collapse, and then people build something new. And this is an eternal cycle where, let's say, the history of, humanity comes in these waves. And I have a very strong feeling that we are pretty much at the end of one of these cycles, but, I'm not negative about that. It it's a natural thing, and we already see the seeds of the next, wave flourishing. We really see it. I see it everywhere. I see it when I talk to people. I see it here when I talk to you. I see it, in all sorts of of context, and we just have to believe in our own power to be that little seed to create our first leaf to grow a little bit, to connect, etcetera, and then we will be a wonderful organism at a certain moment, again. So keep the hope, keep the big picture, do what you can, and that's the best contribution that you can do regardless if you're an industry and public service, in private service, wherever.

And I guess one follow-up that comes to mind there in recognition of what you're saying because, you know, I'm I was born in the Former Soviet Union. My family immigrated to The US, when I was a baby. And just the world has changed so much in the last thirty to forty years. And, you know, things that seemed unthinkable in certain places are becoming, within the realm of possibility, if not commonplace. And so, you know, it feels as though we're we were having this conversation, let's say, optimistically in the late nineties, early two thousands about the future of privacy tech. You know, that it seemed and maybe I'm just taking the current pessimistic view backwards, but it seemed like there there would have been more optimistic times to discuss them because, you know, now we see nation state firewalls. We see, you know, attempts at blocking encryption software. We see, you know, backdoor vulnerabilities being amassed by certain nation state type actors, and, we just see a slew of behavior that in many ways can preclude one's ability to even exercise privacy in in the digital realm. And I guess before because we are gonna ask a more hopeful question after this one. But to leave a leave at least a a little room for some of the, you know, the the feelings of dread that many might be feeling around the world these days, what is your personal advice to folks who are maybe in environments where that's not The US, that's not EU, where we can still download signal and get all these tools as readily? Kinda what is your, point, what is your call to hope for those who are feeling most hopeless right now?

You put a lot of responsibility on my shoulder because, bottom line of, in my opinion, what you are asking is to realize a disconnect between a long term hope and, I would say, an assurance because, as said, I'm an historian. I think in long terms, and we've seen all of that a 100 times what we are seeing now. But it doesn't match with the life span of individuals. If I'm now in Gaza, if I'm now in, places where you have a war, where you have all sorts of, state terror in a way, it doesn't give you hope that I say, okay. There will be others that will benefit from nicer times than than you in a way. That is completely taken, for granted. I would still say that, the best assurance that you might have is not to look to the outside world, but to look inside you and ask you who you are and, on whose shoulders are you standing. And, if you put that reliance solely on the Internet, in my opinion, you will fail. I was born in a time where there was no Internet. But my big hobby in my use was radio. And imagine that, when you had a shortwave radio, you could listen to radio stations all over the world. And during the cold war, my father was in the army. I was a member of the listener club of some of the Eastern European countries. I got letters from Libya, North Korea, and whatever country. You had a German news broadcast every evening, both from Iran and half an hour later from Iraq when they had a war with each other to just listen to that. You could listen to anyone. And the worst thing that could happen is that some country put a jammer on the main frequency, which meant that the other ones went five kilohertz up or down so that you could, listen again. I know, and my father told it much later, basically, just last year, that when I was young, he had a lot of discussions with the secret service, asking what his son is doing, because he was indeed in in in the military. He was one of the guys that built the tanks that are now being used by everyone, the MARTA, the LEOPARD, and stuff like that. And I was chatting with the whole world regardless of what their opinion was be. Not a single person at that time came to the conclusion that they had to do something about that. That. And now when we have this wonderful Internet, everyone is erecting walls, is trying to shut down things, is doing like that. So what I'm saying is, we have to be resilient in a way that, we don't only bet on one horse. I still know how to build a radio. I still know what to do about things. I still know how to communicate. I still have land somewhere in in the woods where I can do what I want to, let's say, at least, avoid certain things that can happen otherwise. So, if you if you get into a group, and I think that is, for me, the reason why many of these people out there still live. If they were completely on their own, they would be completely desperate. But if you have people in the same situation, if you have people that are so solidaric, and I truly think that people are social and and solidaric, that they share even the last piece of bread that they have with with someone else whom they care for. This is the fuel on which we thrive and live, and this is much stronger than anything that comes from the outside. So I don't I'm not in the position to tell you what gives you hope. I know that, and that was also my history, that I talked about with this digital Prussia thing there. If we, as a group, live long enough, we will be there. I mean, I know that I will die at a certain moment. I have given certain values to my son, which makes me feel quite comfortable. So he will be the next one who will carry that thing, forward. And, at a certain moment, it doesn't really matter that it is you or you or me. It matters that the strengths of what we believe in the values, the principles live on and can be transformed into something good. And, to a lot of people, that is not enough. But to me, it is enough because that is all I can do. I can't do more.

Yeah. Now at the individual basis, I I appreciate that kind of message and kind of recognizing time and wanting to make sure to also bring it back for at least one more kind of policy or system level, question before we start transitioning to the quiz. You know, I I know in, one of your talks you mentioned that, a lot of policy workers, you know, talk a lot, and that there were some kind of misconceptions around policy work and the realities of what it means. And also kind of in recognition of the fact that sometimes new regulation or new mindsets don't really come in until there's some kind of, you know, crisis like situation or an actual crisis that's happening. And so, you know, I wonder when it comes to thinking about what could actually trigger a fundamental reorientation from a policy perspective around being more pro privacy. You know, do you have your own either guesses of what that might be or, if you'd rather take it into what you hope will finally be enough to make the change happen, kinda whichever feels, more the reasonable question to take there.

I mean, first of all, indeed, I think that as a policymaker, it is not enough to to talk, but also to build and to try out. If I regulate technology, I need to understand what technology is, and that means I have to try it out. Otherwise, I don't understand it. So I think that is also what my colleagues and I did on on blockchain, which is why we have things like the MICA regulation and all the, I would say, very good things on the European blockchain service infrastructure and other things where, we are we are pretty advanced, I would say, over the last ten years in really ensuring also with our blockchain infrastructure privacy proof technologies. I mean, we we developed a concept called proof of authentic proof of authority where basically, you onboard people through the public sector with your identity card or driver's license or Social Security card. You give them a digital identity. But the moment you have that, you anonymize everything that they do afterwards. So, the only thing that authorities can know is that this is a legitimate person, the the person exist, but they don't know who that is and, what other elements are there. And I think you can build that. We'd be demonstrate that, this is is a very strong point moving forward. Now to be very honest with you, Eugene, is, I I don't have confidence that people in power will understand the value of privacy enhancing technologies, which has nothing to do with the substance as such, but with the willingness to learn. Because my experience is that, for example, when you go to a politician and speak of permissionless blockchain, that person immediately gets to shiver because they think that permissionless is anarchy, and anarchy is attacking my privileged position. And that is very much also with with other technology. I would like to avoid the other extreme, which I hear a lot that it needs, a complete collapse in order to rebuild from the ashes. I would like to avoid that. What we are discussing here is turning into a broad and very much patchwork movement, which is accelerated by certain crisis. I mean, there is an there's a line of argument, to to which I also lean that at least to take a country as Germany, for the last fifteen years, we see a sequence and actually convergence of crisis. So So we had the financial crisis. We had the migration crisis. We had the pandemic. If you call it like that, we had now all sorts of economic and other issues. So people are experiencing more and more crisis situation. And in every crisis, certain groups of society are excluded from the mainstream because they take a different view. So first of all, we had this famous six weeks in the financial crisis after the collapse of Lehman Brothers when the Bitcoin white paper come. And then crypto was taking off, but it was also seen as something suspicious. In the migration crisis, it were certain political parties that were seen as suspicious. During the pandemic, it was those people that didn't want to be vaccinated who were seen as suspicious. And especially in Germany, Belgium, other countries, a lot of people that I know in school service or in health service lost their job because they didn't want to get vaccinated. So every crisis, the system is losing more of its people. At a certain moment, you will have a handful of people left that are somewhere sitting in the trenches and try to cling to the power. That is the moment where the others will take over, and it will happen. The question is, how does it happen? What gives me courage is that through every one of these crisis, people are more and more discovering decentralized technologies, peer to peer platforms, privacy. So for example, in the pandemic, there were networks popping up, and I know them very well, where people that had lost their job got together autonomously and just provided services from home. So they provided educational health services from home. They got the payment through these channels, and, officially, they didn't exist, but they could make a living. And people are gaining more experience with things. Specifically, also in countries that are authoritarian, people resort to these domains and they gain experience. And at a certain moment, they accumulate power. So this is the way that, it works. And, I would say that in this regard, we are indeed very clearly on a trajectory where the centralized legacy system is everyday losing power and where the other ones are more and more getting their act together. The big question, of course, is what will happen at a specific day when this switches because it is not enough to be aligned, in opposition. The moment that you have the power, you have to do something, and this is what needs to be prepared. And this is where I hope very much for a very proactive, alignment also of, people to think in these terms and prepare themselves. Preparing is not only what we're discussing on privacy to defend against something. Prepare is also to fight for something. What is what I would like to have the moment that it can actually do something? And I have a very long list in my drawer what I want to do when that moment comes. So, we are prepared.

And so I wanted to kinda last question before transitioning to the quiz, to maybe be a little more explicit around that moment of, you know, when whenever that moment does come up, it's the transitioning towards the future state of governance. You know, I did just wanna make sure that we, kind of laid out as much as possible some of the features that, you know, you hope to see in this future state that feels, as though it would honor the kind of principles of the privacy preserving elements that, you hold dear?

One element that I find, very strong in terms of what we are discussing is that, and now I speak only for, the Central European countries. Every third citizen is still, engaged in a traditional cooperative actively or passively. So, people, whether that is in finance, whether that is in agriculture, whether that is even in industry or certain services, know how that works. But at the moment, they still lack the education to use the digital tools in order to educate themselves and leverage that power. So, what I find particularly important is, the governance mechanism, the self organization, for example, the voting mechanisms within power. I mentioned that product liberty report that we did last year where we looked into the tools that are available for having everyday self governance through a democratic decentralized process where people can voice their opinion and can find a consensus. And, I wanna say two things about that. First of all, what I learned during the work of this report, and it really structured my mind, is that, when we self organize ourselves, we face three principal trade offs. And we have to find a position, within these trade offs. So for example, one trade off is, inclusivity versus, the speed of decisions. If we have to react quickly, a decision has to be taken, but that means that we can be less inclusive. We cannot wait until the last one has come to opinion and and voices that opinion, etcetera. And as a group, we have to see how we position ourselves. Do we really value inclusivity that high that we ask everyone for an opinion until we decide, or do we designate power to certain people or a certain mechanism that take this up. A second trade off is the human centric versus the machine perspective. So when we look at smart contracts, is a smart contract really something where code is law, or is there a chance for the human centric element to come in when something goes wrong? I'm not saying that there is a very clear answer to this, but we need to take decisions on that. Do we trust the human? Do we trust the machine? Interestingly enough, twenty years ago when I was working on industrial policy, this was precisely what separated Boeing and Airbus as the two big plane producers because, what Airbus does, and I think now they are proven right after twenty years, When the pilot wants to do something different than the machine, the pilot decides. The pilot overrules the machine. Boeing designed a system where the machine overrules the pilot. Twenty years ago, they had the same number of accidents. I don't think they still have the same number of accidents. So, that's an interesting perspective. So whatever trade off there is, you have to come to an agreement in your group where you position yourselves, and then there are digital tools. So I will restrict myself to one example. The holy cow of the existing cooperatives is the principle of one person, one vote. They were really the first thing that you hear whenever they have a cooperative one person, one vote. I find it silly. Sorry. I mean, I think it's a democratic principle. Yes. But what do you do with someone who for half a year hasn't done anything for the group? Does he still have one vote? I don't think so. So when you have a smart contract, when you have a digital tool, you can find you that you can say that nothing done over the last four weeks, we, deduct 10% of your voting program, or we do certain other things. I mean, these are decisions that have to be taken to be prepared. And I think if you actively discuss and agree of that, you get a very strong group because the group agrees on the principles of self organization and on how they govern themselves. And then they are prepared to do the necessary thing. And, this is something where we can do this already right now. As such, every third European citizen is somehow involved in these groups. We can we can work with them. We can work with with many others, and it's not really reinventing something. I mean, when I look at artificial intelligence, I sometimes have the feeling that we are inventing here something stupid because, if I if I don't know anything, why should I ask a machine that doesn't know anything but just accumulates all the nonsense of other people that don't know anything either? I mean, this is not really in line with what I would see as natural, and I know that now there are certain parts where AI is interesting. So when I look for an information in the Internet and I'm in a meeting and I do that, and someone says, Johan, what do you think about article 59 in MICA? I don't have a clue what is article 59 in MICA. I just type, tell me what is article 59 in Mica, and then I see the thing, and it this is nice. But that's not really artificial intelligence. But on on these things here, blockchain, crypto, privacy enhancing technologies, you don't need to convince anyone because it is embedded in us. It is the principles that we like, that we have been accustomed to. And so, there's an open door if you really engage with people to to discuss with them, but you have to take them seriously. You have to get them from one point. We all know that if you want to talk about blockchain, you better don't say blockchain. You just say what it does, what it helps with, and then you get there. And, that's a matter of time. And that's really my last remark. At the end of the day, it's really demographics. I started my academic career after the fall of the iron curtain. I went to a university in Saxony at the time, and, they took the decision politically to basically destroy everything that had been there from the companies to the universities and just put us rest on people in there to tell them how they need to do this stuff, a major disaster in a way, but we build it up. And I did my PhD on innovation and growth in transition economies and how we can do that. At the end of the day, you can design any sort of model that tells you how you get innovation and growth in a system that was centrally planned before. And the bottom line is you do not manage to convince the business people, the people living there from the beauty of the market economy if it has any, which I doubt. But, the people in power just die, and the next one go in there and occupy the territory. It is demographics. And let's not make this fast too complicated. Demographics is also something that the elites are realizing. And why are people and I don't call names, but look out there who is old, who is in power, what their hobbies are. They all are in a club and investing money in some scheme to live eternally, to somehow leverage their pitiful existence into the next hundred years or into some sort of design that lives on because, they're just a threat to die and just a threat to lose power. This is a natural thing to to happen at WhaleRep.

Feel like a priest. I'm sorry. But I've I still am a technical guy. So No. We love it. It's actually it's great. The screen, you touch the screen and you'll mute.

No. The the the the one thing that I would really like to stress, but I think we touched upon that before, is, overcome the division. Mhmm. As said, every one of us has very strong beliefs, and I think you are entitled to your beliefs on who should have what identity and whom should marry whom or not and what country should have what border, etcetera. And if we go on like this, we'll never agree. But the situation that we face is too serious for continuing all this this nonsense. I mean, I was born in a city in Germany in Koblenz, which was the biggest garrison city in Germany. We had a population of 120,000 people, 12,000 soldiers. And, the reason why all these soldiers are there because we regularly started our holiday trips to France, from from that part and, to invade a couple of neighboring countries. Now if you look at the border between France and Germany, it is, with certain exceptions, the same as it was twelve hundred years ago. Why did all these people die? And that is something I think that we need to remember. We can continue with our beliefs to which we are entitled. But if we want to do something meaningful to tackle the abuse of power that is really constraining our resources for all the daily activities that we need on this planet. We have to get together. And that is something that I want you to reflect upon. It is so easy to get together. Just start with one person. I mean, I always get the question, how do I start? My answer is talk to the next person. Find one person that you can discuss with and find a way to do something. Doesn't really matter what it is. It's the crowd effect. It's the crowd effect where, we really get get the power. And this is something that I really want to to convey. You don't need to agree on anything what I say. You have your own beliefs. But if you want to do something, start it today.

Kant. That's not a book, but I have only one word and he hasn't written any books that only have one word. But, my economics student always asked me which book should I read, which economics book, and I say, read Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. I have them all hanging here in my office, etcetera. Because the bottom line is the fundamentals of society. It's not economic theory. It's not legal theory, whatever. Read your standard philosophers and start thinking yourself. And, actually, Kant might be a bad example because no one understands Kant. Even Kant didn't understand himself. I tried reading him. So let me replace it by Fichte. Fichte was an activist. You can understand Fichte. Read Fichte.

Integrity. Privacy ensures our personal integrity because we don't need to fake something. We don't need to mimic something to just please someone, but we can be ourselves. And for that, we need privacy because, we're sometimes doing silly stuff. We're sometimes doing nice stuff, but we can only be ourselves when we are shielded against being watched all the time, and this is what privacy does. It gives us integrity. It gives us honor.

Delaying. I know that it's good and inclusive to talk and talk and talk and talk and and and do something, but, problems don't have the tendency, unfortunately, to disappear. When when I was younger, I was terrible, and my my wife took a very positive influence on me because I thought when I close my eyes, I don't see the things that are there to be done, face the things, don't accept delay. You very often do the wrong thing, but, it's even with our MICA regulation. People ask me, are am I happy with the MICA regulation? I say, well, it's it's probably the best bad thing that we could do. So it has its its faults, but it is a text. Everyone knows that we can deal with that. We can move forward. It's it's in that way is good. The worst thing is doing nothing is delay.

Communities. Self organized communities. We will unfortunately or not, regardless of how you you value that, we will be thrown back to that because, when I will be old, state doesn't have the money to put me in a nice environment, where beautiful young ladies will do nothing else the whole day than just feed me and say nice things to me, etcetera, or or other things on this, planet. We have to take precautions and, deal with that ourselves in communities. So prepare in communities. I'm not saying that you defect the state. I'm not saying that this is in opposition to everything that's that's going on. I think we should keep our confidence, in in certain things, but communities are the best guarantee that we have that, at least we can have a decent life. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Great.

Thank you so much for coming to our podcast. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for tuning in. The Governance Futures podcast is sponsored by the Skrull Foundation and produced by the governance team at the foundation, Jamila Kamalova and Eugene Leventhal. Any music and photos are attested in the episode description. Feel free to subscribe, leave a review, or share with a friend. Until next time.