Sam Radocchia: Bitcoin Pizza

Transcript

[0:00:26] CH: What’s up everybody? You are listening to Author Hour. The podcast where we interview authors about their new books. Today’s episode is with Samantha Radocchia. She is the author of Bitcoin Pizza. Now, when you hear the word block chain, what is your reaction? Do you think it’s a fad that’s been over hyped or do you just kind of have a vague understanding of how the tech works but you’re not really sure how it will impact your life? Neither reaction is wrong. Blockchain and cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are still in their infancy. But they will soon fuel a worldwide cultural and technological shift that is going to disrupt pretty much every single industry, whether it’s finance, film, in arts distribution or supply chain, automotive, social media, data security, real estate. You name it. Here’s a little bit about Samantha’s background. She is an early blockchain pioneer and she has led corporate trainings at Fortune 100 companies, governments, the United Nations and she has educated leaders all over the world on these emerging technologies and how it’s going to shape our daily lives in the decades to come. She was named to Forbes’ 30 under 30 list in 2017. And she is a three-time entrepreneur who holds several patents and she is the cofounder of Chronicled which is an enterprise blockchain company that’s focused on supply chain. In this interview, Samantha is going to give us an exploration of what block chain really is and this is what I love is that her book is a no bullshit guide to block chain. So, whether you’re an executive who is looking to prepare your business for this decentralized future or you're just somebody who is curious in trying to learn as much as possible about the blockchain hype. This is the episode for you, Samantha will be your guide to give you the confidence to explore this technology by first showing you the big picture. Now, here is our conversation with Samantha Radocchia.

[0:03:02] Sam Radocchia: I grew up around technology and running around in warehouses and gaming, in coding, in teaching myself all of this stuff. So, I ultimately, when I was in college, started my first company and it was a technology company. It was a totally random thing; you know? I was studying anthropology and I come more from a social science background, I really just am like kind of that weird kid who was sitting in the back of the class, observing people and seeing what they do. And so I noticed that a lot of people were spending time on computers. I built a company around that and you know, something that I noticed was a struggle for me even though I had this self-taught engineering sort of hacker background was that when I built the business and it was a completely female founded business, we went out to raise money and there was such feedback in the market in terms of these assumptions that because our team looked the way they did or because they didn’t study computer science in college, that you know, I can possibly be a technical cofounder. Everyone was, “You need a CTO or how do you understand what you’re doing and you know?” The thing with that first company is we ended up building software that was more advanced than Netflix at the time. They were some recommendation algorithms and we built software that to this day, people say that’s not possible to do. So, for me, I went through this period of time as a 19-year-old girl where I have a lot of self-doubt. It was largely around the fact that on one hand, I loved tech, whether it’s deep tech or new tech or thinking about how technology is impacting society and people and their behavior and I ultimately went on to study it, you know, through advanced degrees as well from that perspective. And so, I still had this like sort of gap or insecurity around like, “hey, if you don’t have this sort of qualification or if you’re not an engineer or an economist, you can’t possibly grasp or understand or build businesses around it.” That frustrated me, it’s carried on for two more businesses after that and ultimately, the desire to write this book was that you know, in 2014, when I cofounded my most recent business, bitcoin and in the underlying technology blockchain was certainly not something that was part of the common discourse. You know, many people had never heard of it, they hadn’t heard of bitcoin or cryptocurrency and so, for the first few years, I spent a lot of time educating people. Doing a lot of public speaking, doing a lot of one on one meetings or board presentations or sitting with the leaders of governments. What I found was, you know, a lot of these people. Let’s say you were a leader of a country or you’re not confident enough or you’re afraid to admit that you might not understand this or if you’re a person whose kid has come home from thanksgiving and is like, “you got to buy bitcoin.” And you're like, “I don’t know what it is.” All you can read about is what’s in the mass media or that terrorist and drug dealers use this stuff and so what I found was that, this kind of broader challenge that that I had faced where it was like learning to find confidence and understanding around something that can be very scary and villainized like technology. You know, there aren’t that many resources out there and I would sit in the audience at events where I was speaking and you’d see like no offense to people who are coming from the perspective of a tech minded presentation, but they would jump straight into this like super boring rant about mining and get into the nitty gritty details of the wallets and this and that. And you know, they would just lose the whole audience and so I just, I found the need from talking to so many people again, regardless of what their position was or what they do for a job where you know, everyone is talking about this technology and other technologies, like artificial intelligence or additive manufacturing. And they’re thinking, “hey, you know, I really don’t understand how this works.” And more importantly than how it works. “Why is it important to me, what’s happening right now that everyone is talking about it? Am I – will the nature of my company in business change such that I won’t have a business anymore or will automation take my job away?” and there’s all this fear and I really think we’re actually at a beautiful moment in the history where things are changing certainly and they’re changing very rapidly. But I mean, it doesn’t necessarily have to be in a way that it is scary or reminiscent of a Black Mirror episode and it can be, we all have the capabilities to make decisions to influence where we’re going. Which I think is incredible and I think giving access and confidence to people and that’s what I try to do and hope to do with this book. It’s really – it’s not a deep technical guide. It’s more about the why it’s important and why our culture and our global economy and our society in the way we do things, why that’s changing right now and why you’re all a part of it.

[0:08:35] AH: Yes, in layman’s terms, in plain English, I don’t think anything is more essential around this technology right now than what you just laid out. I’ve experienced it as well and I study this stuff in my own time and there have been so many moments, I don’t think I’m dumb, I think I’m pretty smart and I’m able to grasp the stuff, I bought bitcoin in I think 2012 and so I’ve known about this stuff for a while and I’ve had this same experiences as you so many times. Even among my own friends where I’m just talk like a normal person, act like I have ADHD and I’m four years old, like explain it to me like that. And you know, your book reminds me of a video that I saw that Wired put out a couple of years ago where they had a blockchain expert explain blockchain in five levels of difficulty to five different age groups and five different - So, they started off with like a five-year-old and then an eight-year-old and then a 15 year old and then you know, they went all the way up to college professor and explained that in very complex terms. Yeah, it’s like there’s this massive barrier and its – to be able to explain it in plain English to a non-engineer, none technical person. I love the title of y our book, Bitcoin Pizza: The No Bullshit Guide to Blockchain. Real quick, give me a quick rundown of why you chose Bitcoin Pizza as the title?

[0:10:22] Sam Radocchia: Yeah, my background again is from the social science perspective and so I’ve always – when I think about block chain or distributive ledgers or the broader technologies that enables or automation or AI or machine learning, I really don’t think about it in terms of technology. I could care less if we’re using a blockchain five years from now or some sort of quantum ledger thing. The way that I see it or the lens by which I view things and it’s just the way I think is very abstract, it’s from kind of a socio-cultural perspective. For me, the shifts that are going on in that we’re laying the ground work before the release of the bitcoin white paper in 2009 and so the 2008 financial crisis precipitating this and really showing people, “hey, we need to think differently about the way our global economy and by extension, global supply chains and you know, world is structured.” We’ve been taking this for granted, it’s just, you know, I think of it as this broader socio-cultural paradigm shift. To basically pay homage to that, I thought, “well, there are these culturally relevant moments in the history of this particular technology, including the origin story.” And so, we have this one origin story where you know, an anonymous person or a group of people propose the bitcoin white paper and that’s Satoshi Nakamoto. That’s obviously kind of the most prevalent origin story but Bitcoin Pizza, what that represents is there is another sort of origin story which supposedly is one of the first transactions on the bitcoin network which is again, not true. It’s just the story, the first transactions were obviously between the people who created it but you know, a young programmer named Lazlo buying two Papa John’s pizzas for 10,000 bitcoin. It kind of rose to obviously mainstream recognition when the price of bitcoin was very high and those pizzas all of a sudden were many millions of dollars. And so again, I think it’s just for me, it’s a name that represents the origin story and the myths and the cultural aspect of the changes that are taking place and I think as you read the book, you’ll see that a lot of the framing narratives of each sort of theme or chapter are largely around how the technology or how the business is working with the technology are shaping our daily lives. And I just like pizza.

[0:13:09] AH: Who doesn’t? If you throw pizza into the title of any book, it sounds better. I mean, Catcher in the Rye Pizza would be a way better title.

[0:13:18] Sam Radocchia: Yeah.

[0:13:20] AH: Sam, let’s say a skeptical listener and it was just like, more block chain, more bitcoin, why should I care? I’ve got my investments in stocks, my money’s fine, I listen to people like Jamie Dimon who are saying that bitcoin is a scam. Why does it really matter to people, now?

[0:13:48] Sam Radocchia: Okay, I welcome these questions and the naysayers and again, there’s a chapter in the book for you about the naysayers. Look, I’m not here to convince you, certainly not here to give investment advice, ever. Not here to convince anyone, one way or another and that’s why it’s The No Bullshit Guide to Blockchain. I’m so personally sick of hearing people pontificate about the uses of this technology or thinking of it of a ledger. What I’ll say to these people, the analogy I like to use and that I actually refer to in the book is if you think about something as simple as a map. In the mid-90s, we remember companies like MapQuest and so what they were making were better navigation tools, right? Like a better map, moving a map to a digital kind of direction software. But that’s not really what they were doing and so, when you look at Google Maps and they took a totally different approach and this was around 2005, so in the early 2000s, they didn’t look at it and say, “ hey, we’re just going to build a better map that gives you better directions.We’re going to view this more as an open system for location data.” What we saw then shortly thereafter was Uber and the rise of ride sharing. We saw Airbnb, we saw Yelp, we saw all of the food delivery apps and all of that, they were running on top of Google Maps or started off running on Google Maps and so we basically created – the people who shifted their thinking in terms of this an – we’re not just building a map, we’re building a system by which other people can build other systems and that created an entirely new business model, called the demand economy. And that was you know, as we’re now seeing all of these IPO’s after the past decade of development on this business model, I just urge people to think, we have no idea, we’re still in the phase of looking at blockchain and bitcoin and thinking of it very literally. So, we’re thinking of it in the same way that if we were to look at a map and say, let’s digitize it and we have now a map that shows us data points on a computer. Versus looking at it and saying, “this isn’t a map at all, this is just a set of information where we can build products and services and companies we can never imagine.” Now expand that beyond – we’re not just talking about location information; we’re talking about opening up all of the information. And so then, imagine what business models will be invented that people have not even began to think about now.

[0:16:41] AH: Right, that’s the trickiest part of this whole thing is, when you say imagine what could happen. It’s almost impossible for the average person to imagine, right? You literally have to say,”go back to your life when you were used to taxis and there was no alternative and then, what happened after a few months of using uber. You were like, how the hell have we not have this before, you know?” It’s staggering to think about – that was not that long ago. It was less than 10 years ago and so, the changes that are to come with blockchain are hard to – almost impossible to imagine now for the average person, but 10 years from now, they’re going to be saying the same thing which is, “ how have we not been using this before?”

[0:17:34] Sam Radocchia: Yeah, I mean, again, I’m not a fortune teller and that’s very risky business to get into, but I do – throughout the book give examples of days in the life in the not too distant future of things that you know, we could reasonably expect to happen shortly or are already happening now.

[0:17:52] AH: Yeah, let’s do some of those slices of life because I think that will really lay out a much more enticing picture of this. Let’s make it real. Give us some of those days in the life of blockchain?

[0:18:05] Sam Radocchia: For sure, I mean, I just gave a talk and this is maybe not so day in the life, but it does get into retail and I was talking to the entire manufacturing industry of a country in southeast Asia. And you know, the way things are made today in our daily life with just Amazon and it being super easy and you order, it’s produced in some sort of factory and then it goes to a distribution center and then you click on your button and you order it and it is delivered to your home in a package. That’s changing. And so, you know, there’s a chapter in the book where I talk about the shipped from supply chains which you know, is kind of the area where my most recent company focused to what I call demand change. So, we have this combination of one, a technology like additive manufacturing, 3D printing or 3D knitting of objects, where you would and then a combination of that in a blockchain where it would hold maybe the design files of a lot of different brands. So, let us say instead of going into a shopping mall, which these don’t even really exists anymore, but let us say a clothing retailer on the street on New York City and instead of having clothing racks with a bunch of clothes, you might have a screen and browse through the screen and see the samples of these clothes and click on it and the machine is there that just knits or creates the sweater, let’s say right there on demand. And the way it works is that we’re connected to a blockchain network. So that the design file for that sweater is on the blockchain and so a payment that is then released back to the brand and a payment goes to the store and then you get your sweater and so on and so when you think about that that is definitely a change in the way that you shop or as a consumer. And Amazon is already moving in this direction with patents that have been filed to create a knit clothing as it is in the delivery truck and again, to go back to the pizza analogy, we were seeing this and you know you could joke about pizza all you want, but companies like Dominos Pizza have consistently been kind of on the forefront not just in terms of market cap but as tech innovators in terms of the way that they automate and create the pizzas themselves. So again, just making them on demand in transit in an autonomous vehicle or a drone. So that is just one example of how from the consumer’s perspective from your daily life, it may or may not change. You might have – things might be more efficient. The food or the clothes might get to you more quickly or it might be more personalized. It might taste better. It might be catered to your preferences. But from the business side, that is where people and business owners and companies and employees get a little nervous and they say, “well what does this mean? I own a factory, what does this mean for me?” And so when I work with them and speak to them, I say this is – we are going through this process of you need to unlearn and recognize that the assumptions we’ve made are now changing and we have to base them off of new assumptions and so as a factory owner, now you own a physical space and you have kind of assembly lines or whatever it is that you are producing and in the future you might own a fleet of 3D printers or 3D knitters that are decentralized and distributed all over the world and that’s your business. And so, you know as we think of these simple sort of macro trends leading into different behaviors, I mean the behaviors are still the same for the people. You are still buying and consuming something but you know maybe the way it’s produced is totally different.

[0:22:02] CH: Yeah, so a lot of explanations around blockchain, they’re like, “think of it is as a ledger,” and right there is where you lost me. Yeah, I hated accounting in school. I don’t want to talk about it. What is the day and the life example that you tend to give that really lights people up where they get excited? They’re like, “oh, that’s exciting.”

[0:22:27] Sam Radocchia: It is not really a day in a life example, but I will correct this because I hate accounting as well and ledgers are not sexy. I do make some jokes, so I went to a wedding last summer and it was between a lawyer and an actuary and they were so buttoned up and they got into the dance floor and were like one guy was break dancing and I was like, “wow, this could be fun, accounting could be fun.” So, when I think of like a lot of what my academic background was and has been and studying linguistics and anthropology, I mean ledgers are the basis of written human communication. Like the first things that were written down were around part of the agrarian revolution in recording how many crops there were and when they would be ready for harvest. And when you think of the fact that ledgers, you know we can use a different word, it could just be communication. Is it a normal part of our everyday life. It is in everything. It is from your grocery list to meeting someone new and sizing them up and just giving them the up and down. You are constantly giving like a yes-no in your head and there is this sort of mathematical way that people interact or view things or record or process things, then it becomes at least to me, more exciting to think about because it is just kind of the basis or foundation for everything. It might not be that exciting to think about it or think or look in terms of excel spreadsheets, but you know I think it is very powerful to think about it that way and that is just a foundational backbone.

[0:24:17] CH: Yeah, so let us talk a little bit more about what a typical business looks like running on blockchain. How does it fundamentally change things? I mean you talk about a trustless way of doing business. What does that really mean?

[0:24:34] Sam Radocchia: So again, I am not going to get into the specifics. For example, what a blockchain technology stack or a decentralized, you know the software and tools that would be used in lieu of traditional databases and I think frankly, that is a very literal way of approaching the problem and where I think a lot of businesses see frustration because I think, “okay, I haven’t even done my whole digital transformation thing, like I am still using PDF and emails let alone a database or I haven’t even move to the cloud, I am still doing on prem servers.”

[0:25:13] CH: Right or they just learned about Facebook Pages and groups and they’re like, “igh, now I have to move everything to the blockchain? This is outrageous!”

[0:25:23] Sam Radocchia: Yeah and it is totally insane and that is where again, I see there are many approaches to grasping or to seeking to understand what this technology represents and my approach is from more of what I call the operating system perspective and this isn’t necessarily your tech operating system. It’s more of a social operating system. You know the ways that we interact. The way that you think of your finances or where your food comes from or how you build a business. And that is the shifts that are taking place are largely first and foremost from centralized systems to decentralized or distributed, which in turn shift things from more opaque to transparent and then more siloed to open systems and ultimately from reactive systems where we don’t- to proactive, where we do see automation or more efficient systems. And so, when you think from a business of like how would you build a block chain enabled business, I would urge you to think beyond it and just think in terms of the broader paradigm shift from centralized to de-centralized and what does that mean? We are seeing a lot of this and I am very passionate about future of work and in the shift from companies being fully centralized and traditionally one office and one location and employees that work there for 30 years or 40 years and they buy their home in one location and have their mortgage and that is kind of it. In our systems we’re build around that one model and then we did see retail and we saw grocery stores in physical locations. And things have shifted in the way that people not only work but build businesses and these were ushered in by obviously the advances in other technologies like networking and communications. So, as businesses are being built now that are fully remote, you know? Hundreds and hundreds and thousands of employees that are completely distributed without a central headquarters, of course, the systems both technology as well as cultural to support that shift are changing. And so again, I would urge people to learn from blockchain in a way that expands your mind. So instead of thinking of it as simply a technology or a ledger or some other system or tool, I would just throw that away, throw the term away in the first place. A lot of people ask me, “do you think we’ll actually be using blockchains for these things?” And I think for some implementations yes and for others it might be a new technology. We haven’t even given a name to or we might not even use the name blockchain in 10 years and it might just be so prevalent of a way of doing things that we don’t need to use the term where it is evolved. But again, if you start to unpack it and really understand where it came from and the sorts of shifts that are taking place, it is largely fueled by growing distrust that happened because for a number of reasons but we, our technologies and communications systems and people in general, we have evolved very quickly. So, we went from localized trust in having face to face interactions in a town or a village to these vast global networks and supply chains where it is not your local farmer necessarily growing something. It is coming from another country across the world and changing hands through a distributor and moving to a retailer and all of this was ushered in with again the evolving technologies of production or global supply chains or global communications networks. And then somewhere along the way, we started adding more and more counter parties that we just stopped trusting. We stopped trusting each other or where our food comes from or the news that we receive, I mean it is at a point now where instead of choosing ambivalence and throwing our hands up we’ve said, “okay maybe there are ways to evolve to a new way of organization, a new way of thinking about governance. A new way of creating business models or companies or governments. And seeing where that goes where again.” Ironically, you call it a trustless system because it is relying on I guess trust in the computer system and programmable logic as oppose to trust in the individual relationships but you know I think it is very telling to see these shifts.

[0:30:18] CH: So, Sam, I mean I could ask you questions about this all day because frankly it is something I find fascinating but we’re going to start to wrap up here. So, the couple more questions that I have for you. One is tell me about some of the people who have gotten a lot out of your ideas, maybe they came to you before they were wildly confused about blockchain and then after, they walked away and they started to experiment or they got involved in a community that’s into blockchain or whatever. What kind of transformations have you seen by helping people with the ideas in your book?

[0:31:00] Sam Radocchia: I have seen quite the range of transformations; I mean they’re on one end of the spectrum. It is people that I have worked with again because I talk a lot about this stuff and because for a large part of my career now, I have been in a space and you inevitable are confronted like say I am at the hair salon getting my hair cut they say, “okay what do you do for work?” And I go in the standard sort of process, “do you know what Bitcoin is?” And it opens this whole conversation and then I get into asking, “do you accept Bitcoin for your business? Why or why not?” And what I found so again, people who wouldn’t otherwise have any sort of relationship with technology then start to understand things like, “well, I have been using Venmo for tips but now, you know it is hard to manage all of these digital payments and I have considered Bitcoin for this reason. Or I travel for work a lot and I am getting paid in all of these different currencies.” So, for that I think the feedback I have gotten is just amazing of people feeling like they really didn’t understand it at all but they hear about it, they see it in the news and they now feel more empowered and more confident to talk about it or not listen to or listen to their crazy cousin who is telling them to buy cryptocurrencies. At least feeling more empowered and not seeing it as totally unrelatable. And then on the other end of the spectrum and we’re looking at a lot of businesses, you know there will be the groups of people who are the naysayers, who are, “this is just a buzz word,” and it is part of buzz word soup and all the digital transformation consultants come in and tell us we need a blockchain strategy. And you know what I have learned from them is that if they can start to see it beyond just a ledger and beyond just this sort of enterprise tool, another tool in the toolbox that will go away in five years, but really start to see the massive shifts that are taking place on a level that is far beyond this single technology and we’re talking about the future again of work or the future of community. The future of how food is produced, the future of health like all of these things are changing very rapidly. So when they see that and when they feel more confident about that, then they actually have made efforts to completely change or restructure some of their thinking around their strategies and understanding that even if they can’t radically change their business because it is too big that they are taking active steps to think through new strategies, to grow new businesses or to get involved in the technology. Again, just either this technology, blockchain or you know the combination of other technologies that are also part of this transformation to a new way of doing business.

[0:34:15] CH: Awesome and final two questions. What is the best way for our listeners to connect with you and follow you?

[0:34:23] Sam Radocchia: I am on all of the social media, but mostly on Twitter. My Twitter handle is @SamRadOfficial and you can also go to my website at samradofficial.com.

[0:34:37] CH: Nice.

[0:34:38] Sam Radocchia: So yeah, you can find me everywhere in the internet.

[0:34:42] CH: Excellent and the final question I have for you is to give our listeners a challenge. What is the one thing that they can either take away from this interview or that they can apply to their life this week from Bitcoin Pizza that will have a positive impact?

[0:35:01] Sam Radocchia: So many challenges. This is a great question and I am trying to think of a good actionable way to get people, to get you to do this and so for me again the biggest goal that I have in this book is to challenge people to unlearn and to challenge their assumptions and of course that is a very broad concept. And so, in terms of an actionable item, it would be do something you have never done before or look at something in a way you have never seen it before. An exercise I did, I always love doing this back in my academic days was this exercise of pretend that you have arrived to this planet and you are an alien and it’s the first time that you have walked into let’s say a pizza shop and just watch it from a perspective of if you don’t have any of the language or tools or assumptions that you have now. So how would you describe bread and how would you describe bread being made to create this thing or how would you describe the culture of eating a slice on a paper plate? And then from that framework of totally having a clean slate and understanding where all of these assumptions come from, redesign that space or that experience and you know it might be just a fun thing to do while you are travelling or at an airport or you’re in a waiting room. But really, I would just challenge you to understand that our perception is grounded in these assumptions and those assumptions can change and that is what is happening right now on that much broader level and that’s what this technology represents is that rebuilding things, things as big as the internet from a new set of assumptions and so then imagine what that world can be. And then I would push it one step farther to challenge you then to build things in a different or more empowering or a better way because we all do have the power to make a positive impact, both on ourselves and our communities and our planet and you know the hope in empowering people with education. And in as basic level, knowledge of a new technology or a new historical moment would be that this is the moment to jump in. This is the moment to change how you do your business or what your career is or if you are just starting out and you’re younger, you know getting involved in new businesses and so yeah, that is my closing thought. I would challenge you to unlearn.

[0:37:41] CH: Excellent. The book is Bitcoin Pizza: The No-Bullshit Guide to Blockchain. Sam, thank you so much for being on the show.

[0:37:51] Sam Radocchia: Great, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed our conversation and talking about the book.

[0:37:58] CH: Likewise. Thanks so much again to Samantha Radocchia for being on the show. You can buy her book, Bitcoin Pizza, on amazon.com. Be sure to check out authorhour.co for show notes and a transcript of this episode and if you have a minute to leave us a review on iTunes.