Thank you all for coming. Basically, the premise of the talk is a little bit about what are RCOs, or a broader superset, token-generating events? I think that's the latest parlance that we're pushing out of Switzerland. The different kinds of them, and what are kind of some of the regulatory problems and moral hazards and other things, and maybe my opinion on where the hell it's all going. So what is a token-generating event? We've got three different types. Got the ICO. That's what everybody's doing right now. $1.3 billion raised so far. Got people copy and pasting code, changing a name, putting a new name in, raising $200 million, not to name any ventures or anything like that. Other people making great claims, and that's fun, and we'll get to that in a bit. Then you have two other forms. One is called proof of burn. Anybody know what proof of burn is? Show of hands? A few of the oldies in the space. And what was the first proof of burn? You got it, right? And what is proof of burn? It's an upgrade.  It's a really interesting device, and actually it doesn't seem to pass to how we test it, in my view. Then you had a share drop. Anybody know what a share drop or an air drop is? You ever hear this term before, a show of hands? Ah, a couple of people. So, anybody know about Ethereum and Ethereum Classic? What happened there? We took Ethereum, and then took the UTXO, copied it over, and now we have two Ethereums, Ethereum Classic and Ethereum. It's a share drop, so if you had one Ether, you have an Ether Classic as well. Now, the rational actor would say, well, that's impossible, because the minute you do it, the new coin will die, because everybody just makes infinite profit, right? As soon as you get it, it's free money. You should sell it till it goes to zero. But these TC is actually over a billion, and it's doing quite well. So, share drops actually can result in a stable ecosystem with lots of money. So, these are kind of the three vehicles. And I've been in the space long enough to actually witness all of them be used to various degrees of success. The first I see I'm aware of was Mastercoin. There may have been some decentralized crowdfunding on Bitcoin talk prior to that, but Mastercoin was like the first one to do an Exodus address and all this stuff. Jarrah Willett had the Bitcoins on his laptop or desktop, and they rushed and created some Delaware company to actually do illegal structure, and they raised like $500,000. And at the time, they were proud, man. They were like, wow. One month, we raised $500,000 off of Bitcoin talk. Oh my God, this is so cool. Now, later on, Dan Larimer, working with some guys, did angel shares, and they raised like $4 million. And everybody's like, whoa, this is so cool. Then the big daddy was Ethereum. Everybody remember that one? It was $18 million. My God, how are they ever gonna spend all that money? Now you do an ICO today, it's like $18 million. Oh God, how did it fail? You know, what did you guys do wrong in your marketing or something? So, the point is that we're growing up like an order of magnitude, basically every time, every event. And that's a good indication that there's probably gonna be a bubble and there's probably gonna be a collapse. The other thing is that we're no longer talking about what is the technology, what is the purpose? Do you have a right to exist, a reason to exist? Do you wanna change the world? What are you gonna do with the money? It's all about ROI. That's another indication that there's a bubble. You see people who got really lucky with Ethereum or really lucky with Bitcoin and it got 100X, they say, hmm, well this new token, yeah, people are gonna like bats.  Let's put in some money and we'll get a 10X, right? And so you're actually taking lucky people and they're doubling down to be lucky again. So, I believe what we're in for is going to be some form of a bubble and the bubble's gonna collapse. And then that'll draw on the regulators. So that's kinda the premise of the talk today is to have a little bit of a discussion about what are some of the moral hazards that I've seen or I think in the space and also what would a regulatory event look like in my opinion and what would the aftermath be if such a thing occurred? So it's probably a glum morbid speech but I get to tell it cause y'all came. So anyway, what are some of the moral hazards? Well, first off we're not doing KYC and AML and a lot of these offerings. What is KYC and AML? Anybody run an exchange? I know you do. Okay, so basically, let's say John. You say you're John O'Connor, right? Okay, you say that but I don't know that unless you provide some evidence to that. Now why would I want that? Well, I know you're a unique human being. That's the first thing. So let's say we have a crowd sale and 5,000 people participate and all send funds to this Exodus address. How many are real people and how many are just transactions? The only way you can know that for certain is with KYC and AML. You have to do compliance or else it could be one guy who created 5,000 transactions and sent it to the Exodus address. Now why would you do that? Any ideas? Well, what if you are an insider? Where's the money going to yourself and you're creating coins out of thin air doing this? And then there's a hype cycle. So when it goes way up, you sell the new coins you've created and you make a 5x or 10x in the money that you just put in. And it's anonymous, right? Nobody knows, nobody sees it. You say, I don't know who these people are. They're people over the internet. For the more, you know, there are foundations that are doing these events. And what do legal entities have? They have bank accounts. And so what does a banker have to do? Anybody in banking here? Anybody ever been in banking here? Show of hands? Have the courage? Okay. So this one guy over there who's very courageous and the ones who aren't courageous, what do they have to do when you open account? They do KYC and AML. And they also have to think of origin of funds, right? So when you have an account like a business that's brand new and they have $10 million that came out of damn nowhere and you call them in the office and you say, hey guys, where'd you get this $10 million from? What do they say? Oh yeah, it's so cool.  We got it from all these people over the internet. We don't know where they're at. Could be in Iran. You know, who cares? It's so awesome, man. It's great. Is that like a high-risk bank account or a low-risk bank account, right? So that's a problem. Then you have a litany of other moral hazards like how do you spend $200 million? I run a company. We operate 10 countries. We have 100 people. We have three research partnerships. One at Edinburgh, one at Tokyo Tech, one at Athens. And I would not be able to spend this much money. It would be so devastating to us as a company. First, think about wages. You have a guy come on board and say, I ask him, how much do you want to be paid per month? He says $25,000 a month because he knows you have $200 million, right? There's no, oh, I don't have the money to pay you. There's none of this discussion because everybody publicly knows you have this much value in your back pocket. Furthermore, you start thinking, well, I can take business class. Well, I can do five-star hotel. I earned it. I got all this capital. And lo and behold, your expenses go way up. You don't work any harder. Your people don't work any harder. In fact, they're actually thinking more about the money than the project or the product. And so you actually execute slower. Job on is a great example of that. If you get overfunded, it's just as bad as being underfunded. And this is a phenomenon that I think a lot of these ICOs are going to be facing soon enough. And the other thing is that your investors, the people buy these tokens, they have an expectation of a return. How many people gave money to an ICO and said, you know, I don't care what they do with the money. I don't care if the token goes up. But yeah, it's fine. I love the mission and the vision and the principle. You know, if it's your favorite charity, maybe. But for a lot of these guys, you're like, oh, that's a good investment. That's going to be 5x. They've got some good people. If you raise $200 million, now your guys want a billion-dollar capitalization. And they want you to do it in two years or less. How do you do that, especially if the market's in a bubble and the bubble collapses? I think bank were raised $150 or they're at $60 now. What if it goes to $10? Are you going to have happy people who are all copacetic and they're feeling great about life? No. So the problem is that the Securities Exchange Commission, which is kind of the big watchdog for a lot of the stuff, is in between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, they say, you know, we don't want to stifle innovation. We want to allow this model to grow and persist. But on the other hand, we're starting to see a moral hazard. It's growing up by an order of magnitude every generation. You have obvious structuring schemes where people go and hide in Switzerland or somewhere else. They operate in America, so their substance is in America, but their form is in Switzerland, so there's kind of a tax evasion component to that. And they have no moral or ethical obligation in their view to the buyers. If you read the terms of sale of a lot of these ICOs, they say things like, you have no rights. It's a donation. If we go spend the money on our favorite extracurricular activities, it's just as good as writing code.  And there's no consumer protection. Why? Because they didn't do KYC and AML. So how do you know how to help the people? How do you know how to assist them? If Bob says, I bought your ICO, and he comes to you six months a year later, and he says, well, I lost my credentials. You can't go check his passport and say, yeah, you match our records. You don't know who Bob is. So you can't issue a new certificate. You can't use a backup recovery archive. You can't do any of this stuff. You just say, Bob, you've lost everything. So sorry. So you get a situation where people are irrational. You have massive amounts of money. You have a lot of corporate malfeasance. You have a lot of potential insider trading, a lot of board transitivity, and no regard whatsoever to consumer protection. This is the environment our space is currently in, whether we want to admit it or not. So what will happen? Well, bubbles break. They always do. And when they break, all these ventures get defunded. Then that's a great time for the SEC to come in, a great time for class action lawsuits. And they have seven years to do it called statutes of limitation. They can still go after the master coin guys if they want to. And then every one of these ICO guys has to argue why they don't pass the Howie test. How many of them got a legal opinion on that? Not, I talked to a lawyer and the lawyer said, yeah, it's probably not. Now there's something like serious, like a more likely than not opinion, where they had to do research and provide an argument and the law firm stands behind it. Probably not many. How many got a no action letter from the SEC? None. So no one's protected if they've sold into the United States. And then you have some people get clever who are like, well, I didn't send and sell into the United States, wink, wink. But if you don't do KYCAML, how do you know? Yeah, there's already decisions that the SEC has made that you have to do that to blacklist them. And if you don't, well, you probably did. There was a certain venture that shall remain nameless that bragged about how they didn't sell into the United States. And then on right on Times Square's billboard, their logo's there. And there's trucks driving through Manhattan with their logo on the side. And let me get this straight. That's not a road show. That's not advertising to US purchasers who will use VPNs or other things to evade and buy in. Why would you market if you're not selling into this jurisdiction? So there's a lot of precedent. Now if they do get involved, what happens? Well, you get double whammied. First off, if a token is a security, you can't sell it on an exchange. Why is that exchange? Because you need broker dealer, right? You need special licenses to sell securities. You can't list normal instruments like that. Okay, so we'll see tokens get delisted from American exchanges and probably international exchanges as well as part of risk mitigation. Furthermore, the banks, they're gonna say, these are too risky, these clients. They'll drop the accounts. Okay, so they lose their bank accounts and they get delisted from exchanges and the token value goes to the toilet. And then the token buyers feel defrauded and want their money back. What do they do? Class action lawsuit. That's probably, in my view, the most worst case scenario that we're looking at in this space. Maybe it'll be less draconian but it's probably gonna happen. And what's the aftermath of that going to be? Well, in my view, the SEC will have to create a standard. They'll issue an administrative ruling and say something like, well, this is how you have to register. You have to do KYC and AML. You have to have some consumer protections and they'll create some framework. They'll pick somebody really egregious. They'll throw the book at them to make an example. And then for the rest of the people, they'll give them a fine or say you have to register or do something like that. And the industry will move on. That's how this usually works and that's how it's always worked. Now, will this stop ICOs? No, because we have other mechanisms like proof of burn, share drops. People are outside the United States legitimately. Like if you have an organization in South Korea or China, you just sell the people in China, there's no US participation, there's no jurisdiction there. It's very difficult to have that. So those will continue. And that's over six billion people. So I think ICOs are here to stay. I think ICOs are going to continue growing. I think we're going to have more and more and more rational exuberance. And then eventually I think it will burst. It'll contract the market a little bit. The strong will survive. A lot of the weak will get flooded out. And if you're in a developed jurisdiction like countries in Western Europe or the United States, my belief is that there'll be regulation for these things. The regulation will probably be kind of hybrid. Something like the Jobs Act, something where it's somewhat easy to comply, but you'll have to have a prospectus and some notion of registration and some notion of compliance. And as for the rest of the world, they'll continue like online gaming and gambling and running in a kind of a gray area market and doing gray area things. So that's my view on ICOs. It's a very pessimistic one, but I think it's a pragmatic one and I think it's a realistic one in a sense. This said, I do believe there's a lot of room for innovation in the space. And I do believe if you're an entrepreneur and you want to capitalize your company, there are a lot of really clever ways you can still do it. Like proof of burn is legitimately a great option for a lot of people. Let's say you have a great new privacy coin, for example, and you think yours is legitimately better than Minero or Zcash or any of these other guys. Okay, create an endowment and do a proof of burn.  It creates a distribution, it creates a value. They've upgraded their token, but you don't take anybody's money and you only get paid if the tokens actually were something. So you're actually directly aligned with the people that you're working for and you're betting on the technology, its adoption and its growth over a period of time. That seems to be a far more sensible model. Share drops are also interesting. That's where you have philosophical differences, Bitcoin may experience this. If the segregated witness debate doesn't pan out the way that we want it to, you're gonna have one philosophy here and you're gonna have another philosophy here. And what does that mean? We're cloning the token. We now have two of these tokens or more, just like Ethereum and Ethereum Classic and the communities diverge. And because there's real people there and there's real trading and real mining and we split the community, we've actually now created completely different ecosystems and those will have real value. So I think that those are healthy because they actually allow you to take an unstable community that can't advance and split up, mom and dad split up, they got a divorce. They can now go get remarried and have a better life. And there's maybe a lot of business models. Like maybe you wanna grab someone's community. Like maybe you wanna compete with EOS and you think the Steam guys and the BitShare guys got screwed because they didn't get any distribution. You can just take the ownership, create a share drop and fork EOS. Maybe you'll do something there. This has actually been tried with some projects to some degree of success. So I think there's a lot of innovation here that doesn't necessarily involve an ICO. The last point I'll make is that there's a moral obligation when you take other people's money.  It's just insane to me. You take someone's money, you gotta deliver something. You have to create value, real value or do your best. You have to wake up every day and say, well, my job is to make sure these guys have a good outcome. That's the key. And I think that that's the mindset we need to return to in this space because the reality is that that's how Bitcoin got created. Nobody was thinking about money in the beginning days of Bitcoin because it wasn't worth anything. If you were a core developer, it's because you were philosophically aligned with it, you believed in it. And it turned out that all the people got in early if they stayed in, got fabulously wealthy. But that's an after effect of a philosophy and a passion. And that's why I entered this space. It's why I'm here. It's why IWGK exists. We do a lot of first principles research. We do a lot of Haskell development. It's not easy, but we do it because we love it and we're really excited about it. And we think we can do great things as a company. And if we are successful, we're a company, we're for profit, we'll do well. But my success is not measured in how much money we make. It's measured in the things that we do and the products we build and the protocols that we enable and their impact that they have. If you change the world, you're gonna get rich. Either an experience or in money. So that's my brief, cynical, sleep-deprived, wreak elevator falling presentation on ICOs. And I'd love to have your questions because I assume that we're gonna get at least one or two good ones. Thank you. Let me provide a little bit of comment on the other side of this picture. So I ran a publicly traded company for almost 20 years, raised $550 million for other people's mindsets. Over 39 different transactions. I went through a five-section lawsuit. Went through an S&T investigation of closing their fault, it was fantastically good fun. Learned, like, no, no, we'll look later on. We're great, I'll tell you the story about the settlement with the judge of New Jersey. You could have been on ICOs, fantastic. But the point is that it's been, it was an interesting process to go through the setting up of an ICO and the legal work for it and the process of getting an opinion from the legal side and trying to figure out the right mechanisms. Oh, sorry, and trying to figure out the right mechanisms to put in place. There are things that are definitely on the edges of this. The question is, do we or do we not want a token-based economic model versus an equity-based economic model? And so the real change opportunity here, and I'll tell you where the real risk is and the huge opportunity, the risk is we as companies should not use tokens as compensation, period. Not to vendors, not to developers, not to third parties, not to founders, employees, and others. But the moment we concede to that point, we lose the fundamental benefit of the token economy, which is that there's this participation as a group in the formation of something that's a broader ecosystem. And so it moves it out of this sort of corporate culture and into this much more potentially distributed architecture. I think that's where the real battle should be balanced. Both for the SEC, the other regulators and others is that's where the innovation is that we can't really use stocks for that because the rules are tough on that side. People aren't gonna give away bits and pieces of their stock to other vendors and get it all distributed around because it makes a mess out of governance of the thing. Where in tokens, I think actually what you want is mass distribution of your tokens as broadly as possible. So just from a slightly more optimistic side of this, by the way, I think the real thing here is I think of this as like corporate venture done crypto style.  By the way, I'm a member of the lunatics crowd.  I'm a religious fanatic, right? I'm gonna go out there and tell you why I need at least $20 billion of value stored on devices just to like get up in the morning. Well, that's like the current valuation of Ether, right? So that's just like, that's just roundoff error. Let's get this thing cooking.  Because if we do our job, let's say every IACO, we average all of them and we look at it three years from now, probably pretty good guess, zero. No gain, no loss. Some will win, some will lose. No gain, no loss. But the underlying crypto went up 500%. How many people are gonna do the trade again? Like take 5% of your position, put it in a marketing budget and see if we can make the core underlying crypto go up. Because the problem today is we don't really use crypto very well. We use it as a store of value. We don't really use it. Like what's the total actual throughput in use of it for practical purpose? Not a lot. Maybe the IACO might unlock the utility of crypto on a global basis. We just don't know which ones are the winners and the losers, but we need like a hundred of them. And so Intel did this a long time ago.  Guess what? We all have wifi today as a result. And so I think there's an interesting aspect of this and kind of how it helps the whole ecosystem grow. We have to be careful. The points you're making about like pay attention to the details. Really critical. Both as buyers and then the seller side of this equation and understand we're building product and we have to be careful when we build product otherwise it will absolutely become a security. We don't want that to happen too soon. Sorry, just my two cents. Okay. Testing? Okay, works. So, you know, my pessimism is that I see where the industry is going and how people act. Private conversations with other CEOs and the attitude people have towards token holders. Also where the money came from. You know, if the money comes from smart money it's like dot com bubble and a certain respect built an entire industry. And you know, there are a lot of losers but let's be honest about where most money came from there. It came from VCs that were already quite wealthy. Right? So they make some bets, they lose some bets. Shame on them. Right now we have a situation where a lot of people got really rich really quickly. That's one of my primary concerns. And when you get really rich really quickly you're not smart. You're lucky. And if you don't know the difference between the two you're soon going to be poor again. And so what's happening in a lot of these things is I think we're building kind of a house of guards where some people got really rich really quickly and now they're realizing that value to get to another token and it just repeats and it just repeats and repeats and eventually it comes collapsing down and there's no liquidity and these things would happen. Now as your point about the utility of the token the devil is in that detail. If you got a legal opinion that says there's real utility here, the way you're using it, the way things are done and it doesn't pass the Howie test, that's fair. You know, we did that with Ethereum. We talked to a law firm. It was an incredibly aggressive and extremely painful time consuming effort and the conclusion of that was that it didn't pass the Howie test for a variety of reasons. The fact that all these ICOs are occurring on Ethereum is a good example of that. It's an enabler of these types of things. It's not in itself just valued as a speculative instrument. It's an enabler of distributed computation but you have to draw a line somewhere and frankly no matter how you want the token to be used people are going to use it the way they want to use it. Some people are going to use it as a dead instrument. Some people are going to use it as a currency and some people are going to use it as stock. And so the question is does the use, the guilt of these open systems transitively come back to you? And where do those boundaries end? Being an unregulated product and given that there's a lot of moral hazards in the space, my opinion is that it will be shut down as a funding vehicle without some form of a channel, a regulated channel. Well it can't be shut down. It's a distributed system. I should say shut down and that it's no longer a lawful way of doing things the way we're doing it today. Yeah, they've done a season equity offering. The difference is that, hang on. But hang on, no one has an expectation of return there. That fails the how we test son. Come on, I'm buying a car to resell it at a 2x or a 3x. Okay. Okay, but the vast majority of people buying slots is their opinion of an expectation of return and also is their, okay. All right, so it goes on average, right? And is the vast majority of people buying a cryptocurrency, do they feel there's an expectation of return or do they want a real life utility out of it? And that's the unanswered question and what the SEC has to look into at some point. Yeah, it's a fair point and I understand what you're saying. Ferrari has the same problem.  Let's open questions up to the floor. I've got lots of hands here. So question to Charles Hoskinson. Yes, hi, my name's Robert Willis, executive MBA, entrepreneur in the technical space. We've experienced a lot of noise in the space of crypto currencies and blockchain. And I suppose I've got a controversial statement of stroke question. Do you think most of the ICOs are found venture capitalist adventures? And so the next step for those companies were to pitch to the populist, people who are not really educated or know much about how business works. And as a result, they were able to develop a white paper pitch and we're here to, we are where we are today. Controversial, but what's your take on that? I'd give Steve money and I'd give Eric money over bets. There's some very good people who have had fiduciary responsibilities before and they certainly earned the right to try again because they have real products and there is real infrastructure there. There's a business plan. They can execute.  But that said, there's certainly a lot of people who are raising money with absolutely no business experience whatsoever. The challenge is that that's not a criteria itself to blacklist people or else we wouldn't have Elon Musk. You have basically a college dropout, left Stanford's physics program to go play with his brother and start zip to. At that time there was no legitimate reason to believe that Elon and Kimball were gonna go build some empire. It was a roll of the dice and it was the same for the most of the modern tech industry. So on one hand, I'm sympathetic to the idea of giving people a shot but on the other hand it has to be reasonable and scoped. You don't hand a 16 year old a Ferrari. You hand a Toyota or something like that. You let him build some reputation and credibility and grow up because the vast majority of the time you'll have a bad outcome. Now, you're probably right that a lot of these ventures are junk but to be fair, if you're in venture capital 90% of what crosses your deck and gets funded is junk. Think about how many of these damn social media apps we have that get a big buyout and they're just customer acquisition plays. They've never seen a dollar of revenue. They just burn cash like crazy. Their tech stacks are absolutely dreadful. They're like always two days away from the whole service falling apart and they get acquired just basically to get the customers and roll them into an enterprise product line from a larger company. So given that this environment already exists in the traditional world, I think it is unfair to go ahead and say that somehow the cryptocurrency world is uniquely different in that respect. It's a human enterprise and the things that people try to do in the old system they're gonna certainly try to do in the new system. And Steve, do you wanna add anything to this? I don't know, I think you're right on. Okay, next question. Thank you, that was a good question. Okay, so my question is supposing that the bubble is bursting as you predict and I'm the guy from the SEC who comes along and says, I've studied your monetary policy document. Can you explain to me why is your scheme not just a Ponzi scheme or why is yours not and the other guys is? What is your argument to me as to why your scheme is not a Ponzi scheme? Right, that's a fair question as well. And it's one that's been levied against Bitcoin by traditional economists. So just because you have fixed supply or deflationary supply mechanic doesn't necessarily mean and it's problematic, it just depends on the use cases. It's store value, we're doing something with it and so forth and also why are people acquiring the token? So if you have natural demand in your system, for example gambling, no one ever goes to the Bellagio and says, boy, I can't wait to buy some Bellagio chips.  They don't do that. Instead they say, I'm doing something with the chip and the game is to get more of the chips by taking them from somebody else. Do you particularly care that the Bellagio has 100,000 chips or 200,000 chips? No, because that's the game. If the game is I buy my chips and I'm trying to sell them to John for a 10X so he can sell it to Jane for a 10X, who can sell it to Duncan for a 10X, that's a Ponzi scheme, right? So it does depend upon what the system is being used for, how the system is represented and the expectations that the people have. And you can look at the infrastructure, you can look at the roadmap and you can look at the commercial attempts that derive here. Like Ethereum is an interesting example of this. So if they are actually able to realize their vision, we're talking about a computational layer for the entire internet.   But it's a multi-trillion dollar business we're talking about here. So as a natural consequence of the ledger doing its service, the currency will get more appreciation. But that's not the primary purpose. It's more of this is fuel for computation. And when I buy Ether in distant future, five years, 10 years, 15 years down the road, I might very well be just trying to fund a decentralized application. And it's just like an Amazon EC2 type of a deal for me. It's just maybe a competitor and I need this to be decentralized because I don't trust Rackspace or Azure or whatever it might be. That could be a reality. But the thing is, is this analysis has to be done on a case by case basis? Absolutely. And if you try to make a blanket statement, I think that you run into some problems because you'll inadvertently actually take some honest actors who do good things and throw the baby out with the bathwater. That's my best non-answer to your question that I could get. Hey, sorry, he's putting his hand up. So I see one of the big values of cryptocurrency and token sales as being the accessibility of them as opposed to buying some shares or something. So if there's, as you say, a fallout of ICOs, eventually, what do you think, what do you predict might happen to the market for the people who don't want to take on, who still don't want to take on the legal obligation that they might have to in that kind of fallout because they don't have to because it's a decentralized, unstoppable system. So if I understand the question, can you repeat it, rephrase it a little bit? I just wanna make sure I'm answering the right question. So if there's a fallout of the ICOs, as you say, and then the NSC comes in and imposes legal obligations on these kind of sales, there's still a whole market of people who don't have to take on that legal obligation. What do you predict for that part of the market? Okay, well, first off, remember, the SEC is powerful, but it's not God. So if their regulations come down, there's still going to be ICOs trading and all kinds of things happening. And then actually, I liken it to file sharing. There's a certain degree of resilience to this technology. So what happened when we got music online, got Napster, and then the government's like, ah, this is crap, they shut it down, right? Then the response to that was BitTorrent and Tor and all these other things, and people started using it to anonymously share things and now Game of Thrones is the most pirated show in history. The more people watch Pirated, then people actually watch the show on HBO. So if they push too hard, what will happen is that it will continue, we'll just see decentralized exchanges running in dark nets with all these things that have been put in to make it impossible to identify people. And actually, the regulators created an even bigger problem then, because there's absolutely no way for consumer protection. At any point, somebody can just run an exit scam and do all these problems. So I think that first off, the regulation or not, it's not gonna kill the market. Just it'll change the structure and the form of the market, and frankly it'll make it easier for guys like Steve, because then the lawyer can say this is absolute certainty and it can even get a no action letter and other such things, which is not currently possible in this type of an environment. And now this legitimate fundraising mechanism is available. The downside though is if it's treated too draconianly and harshly, it could actually end up hurting the market. First innovation and then second by dramatically reducing consumer protection by offshoring it to increasingly hostile technology. But we're here to stay, tokens are great, I love them and the world is being tokenized it's not going anywhere. Steve, you wanna add anything to that or? Guy, I'm being tokenized. That's the whole point, right? The fundamental economic model of how we're going to compute we've experienced is called cloud.  And so we've given our servers some money to buy more servers because the humans decided to all watch the same stupid funny video at three o'clock in the morning while everybody was sleeping and we don't wanna wake up and have a question, new server, new server, we just make it automatically happen. And so we just wanna extend that concept from a completely centrally controlled model which is the cloud architecture today to the utility compute model that's out there. This is the first touch of that. So you might actually be witnessing not just the beginnings of an understanding of an economic model of the end of enterprise compute. So enterprise networking has been based on ports and passwords and spectrum and right-of-way delivery of service. And we're moving to a model where service is delivered based on the identity of the device. Oh, so we need a whole new back office to run all these device identities. That's what blockchain is. You can almost think of the monetary system as just an alpha because we wanna run the network on a global basis. And I can send movies around the world completely outside of the control of the people who've been licensing right-of-way and spectrum. I mean, you can't take up the streets with the free feet you're putting a new network in, but Apple shifts everybody in the country in iPad and they're completely in control of the continent delivered. And that's the model. And we should open that box so that everybody can have their own iPad that way. This one's for you, Steven. I think you correctly identified that the current ratio of economic value and economic applications to speculative cash in blockchain is currently very, very low. I think from there, you go and say that's what you expect these wave of ICAs to do is to boost massively on the economic application size. But actually in the short term, when we've got no constraints on the amount which is being raised, when often these raises aren't being raised for specific business applications, aren't we really just pushing up on the speculative size? We're just getting warmed up. So in my previous company in 1999 and like, God, I don't know, April, May timeframe, 1999, we raised $20 million. And thank God because we got relisted back to NASDAQ and so it was fantastic and we were all really excited. And we knew we were gonna have to raise some money further in the future and we're sitting around Christmas of 1999 and NASDAQ's on its way to 5,000. We're going like, dude, we really need to get in on this action. This is a really good idea. So first week of January, we pick up a phone, we call our investment bankers who'd done the deal a year before and we're like, we need to go raise some money. They're like, you just raised money. Yep, we're like NASDAQ 5,000. We should be raising money. So four weeks, we put together an entire offering into the public market. It was a NASDAQ national market cap trading company. We went out and we're like, let's go raise another $20 million. That'd be great. So we start our road show, stock at 11, start our road show going out to raise $20 million. We came home six weeks later with $122 million priced at 34 with the stock trading at 43 and Bain Capital took $34 million of the transaction. We sold 3.2% of the company and that year we did $56,000 in revenue. So when you guys got to get ready to do this, like this was fully NASDAQ compliant, da, da, da, da, da. So I would just say we lived through this. We're not even close to the scale where like in like round off area, you can't even get to 1% of what went on in the dot com. Now the question is how are you enjoying the dot com? Like you like all this video stuff you got on your phones and this multimedia stuff is actually pretty good too. And we got wireless networking. That's working out all right. And we've pretty much got better than DSL bandwidth almost everywhere on the planet, except my house. And so, you know, there's the good news side of it now. So this thing crashed. We lived through the crash too, it was fine. I don't know, 12 months later, we had 20% of the market cap we had. We bounced the sucker off a $2.5 billion market cap. We could have bought a General Motors division, right? I mean, it was crazy. And yet you can survive through that process and yet build incredible things. And so, you know, companies suffered out of it and people had a hard time, but we didn't end up with every company in a shareholder lawsuit. So I don't know, just a little sort of a reality check on this. It's okay to raise capital and to put it together and put it to good economic use. And some people do like pets.com. Remember that? Yeah, like $200 million, so we get it. It was fantastic. It was fantastic. So like, go back and just remember that we're humans. We do this stuff over and over and over again. We can't fix ourselves. Okay, time for I think two, three more questions. Tony, if you obviously want to ask Steven a question, please do so. Hi, I'm Luke. I'm a corporate lobbyist. Don't boo. We've heard a lot about how the industry itself can be its own biggest risk. With the gambling industry, we've heard about how, you know, there are different models, but really the reason that it's not legalized in the US is because of the casinos, because of Sheldon Addison, because of a protectionist model. The reason that we haven't had decent streaming services is because of the Hollywood and, you know, all those industries. How, who are your external enemies and how are you gonna win them over? Well, for raising money, your external entities are the people who raise money from, right? Investment banks, VC's, these types of people will say, oh, the moral hazards are so terrible. We have to shut this whole industry down unless we're the ones running it. In which case it's actually a wonderful industry and it's an innovative new way to create liquidity. Right? So, and it's just like how digital music worked, right? They tried to say that there's only one way to do that and then people kind of forced their hand in the matter. On the other hand, certain other industries have been shut down successfully. For example, the online gambling business where they did this, was it 2007 when the crackdown came from DOJ? Yeah, anyway, they did that and then it's like with $4 billion industry. Now it's like a $40 billion industry. So yeah, how's that working out for you, DOJ, right? It's really against Costa Rica every year. Right. Right, and so you have to ask yourself, are you creating a good outcome or are you just protecting an existing business model? Unfortunately, in my experience, most regulation is about protecting incumbents. It's less about outcome. That's why we keep having collapses over and over again. It's kind of funny, remember 2008 where we say we're going to end too big to fail by making the banks larger? Okay, so I think some of that's there, but I do think we're going to have a bit torn like effect where capital is now too liquid. Also monetary policy as a whole is not being run well by central banks. They're just printing and printing and the interest rates are not where they need to be. So there is a flight to alternative value. And what I think is what I'm happening is we're going to have just a tokenization of value for everything. So I've been traveling all around Europe. I was started in Odessa and then I went to Athens and I went to Zurich and then I went to Germany and then I went to England. What's unique about every one of these countries has different money. I guess Germany and Greece have the same money now, but I paid in dollars for everything. I never exchanged because I have a card, right? So when I bought something, I was paying in dollars, they got paid in local standard. So why conceptually is that any different than me being able to have tokens representing pretty much anything I want? Land, gold, silver, these types of things and holding them in a universal wallet on my phone. And there's a decentralized market maker that lives in between and there's a payment service that happens to accept this stuff. The merchant always gets paid what they want. I'm paying in airline miles or gold or any of these things. Well, the point of this is that the very same technology that makes data reality also enables online gaming and gambling, also enables content sharing that enables a lot of really good things. So I think it's gonna be rather apiric if a regulatory crackdown comes. My belief is it will because of incumbency protection, but I believe like BitTorrent, it's gonna actually, these markets and this tokenization is gonna be so pervasive. It is going to force the entire regulatory system to change and how the space is perceived, how people are going to treat cryptocurrencies is completely up to us as a community. And we need to treat ourselves a little bit better and take better care of ourselves.  See, I got my belly right here, right? There's a lot of ribs in here and a lot of steak in here, okay? It's, that's my point. Well, we got, I think about time for one more question. So he's a lucky person to ask the final question before Steven speaks. Shahan's, one more question? No takers? Oh, no one, kids. Ah, we got one back there. One back there, wait, there we go. I mean, so just a kind of counterpoint. I mean, there are a lot of problems with the ICOs, but it's not like the current system we have on whole is that great. And I think Steven was alluding to this. I mean, it's not as though everything that gets issued in the equity markets is a great business. It's not as though those businesses don't fail. And then on the whole, I mean, you know, anything could happen with ICOs too. It's a very new, but the way equities are sold, the way IPOs are sold, someone like me, you know, or the average person here has barely any chance.  And even then you have to go through a broker dealer. You've got the exchanges in the middle of things. I mean, you've got a very centralized structure. You have a lot of rent seeking at different layers. And while I agree that, you know, the ICO market right now is a wild west in a sense. On the other hand, I mean, it does, at least for the moment, cut out a lot of this centralization, cut out a lot of this rent seeking. I can on the whole be certain that what I'm getting for the money I put in is the token that is being sold. I don't have questions, like am I actually getting the share that's being sold that you might going through an IPO process without a broker dealer. And then I guess more people maybe get to participate for now. I don't think it's so bad necessarily if even these high risk asset classes are funded by, you know, a lot of people giving a little bit of money rather than just a small pool of accredited investors giving a lot of money and them being the only ones who can like rise or fall with the tide. I think more of us at least now might have an opportunity. Right, and actually bring up a very valid point and another counterpoint to strengthen your argument is the fact that you now actually can have money anywhere. You know, if you're born in Nigeria or Ghana, good luck getting Silicon Valley investment is not gonna happen. Now everybody's on the same stage with ICO. So there's a lot of power there. It opens up liquidity to everyone in the world. My only grievance is not with the mechanism of how we move value from Alice the Bob. It's about this desire to abandon basic business principles like due diligence and verification of claims and knowing who your customers are so you can protect them or at the very least have a relationship with them because after all they made what you're doing happen. You have some sort of moral obligation to them. This is my primary criticism for it and the issue is as we as a field don't do something voluntarily. Either through our actions or self-regulation or through some sort of smart contract driven standard then it's going to be done on our behalf by the people who want to end this field and as a consequence it'll set us behind a bit. Won't end it, but it'll set us behind and it'll actually reduce good outcomes. That's my primary grievance with this whole thing. The other side of it is that I am deeply disturbed by insider trading. This is one thing that the Nickerbocker crisis in 1907 taught us leading up to that you had a situation where everybody knew everything in the inside like you're alluding to these accredited investors these insider guys and they legitimately actually got information before anyone else. So they knew when a collapse was coming, they knew when a balance sheet was bad and they could buy and sell based on that information at the expense of every single other person. And it's taken quite a bit of time for us to get to a point in the markets where they're a little bit fairer. They're not quite, there's still tons of problems. Facebook, IPO is a great example of that. And there's others. Yet in cryptocurrencies we've now regressed because if you don't actually do any compliance the problem is you have no idea of knowing who actually participated as I alluded to earlier. So you mentioned the monetary policy. You know you got a token. Well if we said there's a million tokens but the reality is actually 99% are owned by Bob who's just gonna play around for a little bit at your expense. There's been more than one dubious offering in the space that's done that. And I think that's one area that we really do as a community need to clean up a bit. Anyway, I've taken way too much time. Steve, I know you have a great presentation. All right, everyone, big hand for Charles Hoskinson. Thank you very much.


Yo, what's going on, the Affinition Sleefer back again, and welcome back to the channel. Today we are here with another pack opening this time, I did not spend money on the game, I got these packs from doing Conquest and the first inning program and all that good stuff. So, we have some big board packs, so let's get into it. Alright, so quickly, quickly look in here, we got some pretty big packs to open here. The big three being the ball in is a habit pack where we have a really good chance of pulling a diamond. We've yet to pull a diamond, which is absolutely crazy to me. We're going to pull one today, we need to, like I absolutely need to. I'm getting depressed over here without a diamond, so let's go through with this. We get a guaranteed legend here. Let's go with Sean Green, why not? Bang, so that's one, and we get another one of these. And I guess we can just take anyone here really, I don't know, Evan Longoria, sure it's a name I know, so we'll take that, there we go. We got the ALA East Infinity Packs, I'm not sure what these are, we got the Team Infinity Packs, we'll open up these first. I mean, these will just help me with the collections, I really just need the Yankee players because I have all the other collections done. And we don't pull a Yankee player here, which is interesting. And next pack here, some Yankee players, two Yankee players, beautiful, so that helps out. And all right, so we're going to go with the Team Infinity Pack, Delta will be diamonds in this one. There's an old player, Max Kepler, not too bad, some Cardinal players, not too bad. All right, so now we got eight of these and three of the ballings in the Habit Packs. This video is going to be a little bit shorter, but I had to open this on video just in case that pulls something. And it's going to be upload anyways, it'll be funny if I don't pull a diamond, three videos in and no diamonds, but hopefully we can get one here. So here we go. First standard pack, bronze player, okay, seven more to go here. Come on, just let me see a diamond. I just want one diamond, just one. And then if you don't want to give me anything else for the rest of the year, that's fine. I'll take it. I just want to pull a diamond. It's been so long since I pulled a diamond, literally dating back to MLB 20. So crazy things. Five more of these to go. Surely there's one hiding in one of these. No, silver player. We're working our way up. We finally got a silver player. This guy's up to an 81 now, so that's cool. Four more of these to go. Bronze in this pack. Okay, okay, pregame shake. We like that. I don't know. Three more to go. Come on. The pack opening animation is a little slow here. I don't know what that's all about, but nothing to show for. No golds in these regular packs. The highest we pulled is a silver, and it continues to be a silver as he's down to a Kaila Smith. I can't talk. He's down to a 72 right now. And last of the regular packs, and then we're on to the balling as a habit pack, where I have high hopes for those packs to say the least. So we're on to them. We have three of these.  It contains one guaranteed gold player or better, plus four other player items. So we have a high chance out of diamond. A guaranteed gold, high chance out of diamond. Surely we pull one in three of these packs. It's a bold in this one. Ramon Lariano, we pulled him already. So that's a second time we pulled him. We got two gold players actually, so a pretty good pack. Chris Bryant and Lariano, not too bad. Two more of these to go. Surely there's a diamond in one of these two. Surely. Come on. First diamond. All right, we're going one by one.  It's finally happening. We're pulling a diamond, man. I'm like, I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day. Oh my god. Here we go. Put the controller down. Who's it going to be? Come on, baby. Someone good. I'm begging. All right, we got a batter here. First time seeing this walk-out animation, by the way. Kind of. A Yankee. We need Yankees. DJ Lamehue. I need Yankees. He's down to 183, wow. But we need Yankees for the Yankee collection to get it done, and we pulled DJ Lamehue. We will take that. Our first diamond pull finally took us three frickin' videos, but we finally got him. DJ Lamehue, welcome to the squadron. Down to 183 isn't the greatest, but he's got some good contact against lefties and righties. Not a power hitter. Pretty good fielding and vision and arm strength. So not too bad. We will definitely take that. And hey, we got one more. If we want to pull another diamond, that'd be great. Back to back diamonds, question mark. Come on, here we go. No, OK, it's a gold. But oh, wait. Oh, that's an epic fail, dude. That is an epic fail. That is so funny. I didn't think a diamond was going to be in that slot. I thought it was going to be towards the end. But we pull Chris Sale and Tim Anderson. That's pretty funny. That's a pretty good pack. We missed a walkout. I'm going to call them walkouts. We missed a walkout. But hey, back to back diamonds. Three videos in, we didn't pull anything. Two videos in, technically. And now we pull back to back diamonds. My pack luck is now here. Oh my goodness, thank God. Chris Sale, we will take that. We actually just bought him last night to complete the Red Sox collection. So we can sell him right away. And we'll get the stubs ready to get the Yankee collection done. But hey, we will take that. Well, we don't have to search for diamonds anymore. Obviously, we want to pull more. But we finally pulled diamonds in the video. We pulled two in this video. A fail on the second one. I didn't think a diamond was going to be in that second last spot. I thought it was usually always in that last spot. But hey, we will take it. Two diamonds. Chris Sale and the Mayhew, absolute W's. We made stubs. And these were from the free packs. We didn't spend any money on this, which was perfect. But guys, that is it for today's video. If you guys did enjoy it, be sure to drop a like on it. If you guys are new around here, make sure to subscribe and button down below. And again, that is it for this video. Thank you guys very much for watching. I'll talk to you guys later. Peace!


Joshua Cooper and welcome to Cooper Union, what's happening with human rights around our world on Think Tech Live, broadcasting from our downtown studio in Honolulu, Hawaii in Moana, New York. Today we're looking at the beauty of belonging in nation building, universal declaration of human rights, 15th right to nationality on Indigenous People's Day. And we're very excited to be joined by Richelle. Richelle, can you share with us what it was like to commemorate Indigenous People's Day in San Francisco and Alcatraz Island? Absolutely, thank you so much, Joshua. I'm really happy to be here. Buju Anin, everyone. Just to introduce myself quickly, Rochelle Diver with International Indian Treaty Council. I'm an Anishinaabe woman from Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior, Ojibwe in Northern Minnesota. International Indian Treaty Council has been going out to Alcatraz for sunrise gatherings. Our earliest flyer is 1979, we've been commemorating. The 69 to 71 occupation of Indians of all tribes that took boats out in the middle of the night to Alcatraz Islands and reversed what was called eminent domain, right? And the doctrine of discovery, we turned that right around on them. And so what was harnessed at that time was the Fort Laramie Treaty. And they went back to this treaty that said that unused land would be returned to the Indians as they called us back then. That was the nicest thing they called us back then. And so since then, we've been commemorating those brave aunties and uncles and some of them who have entered the spirit world now that we know are still with us. We make sure we're out there. Indigenous People's Day, reminding people that it's time to really get rid of Columbus Day. And we tell the true history of the first contact. This year, we were lucky to have our Taíno brother, Roberto Barrero from the island of Bordecai, what is now known as Puerto Rico, to also share some of that history with us. So it's just the truth in history is really the most important part of it. And if you'll excuse me, there's some noise behind me and I'm here at Yoruba Buena Gardens in San Francisco. We go from Alcatraz and come right here, partner with the city of San Francisco to celebrate Indigenous People's Day here at Yoruba Buena Gardens. So it's quite a day, but we stay energized and we know, as I said, all those that came before us are standing with us. Thank you so much. And it's so important because Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says, everyone has a right to a nationality and no one shall be arbitrary, deprived of one's nationality nor the right to change one's nationality. And that's what's so important is that you, as an Indigenous woman, are able to claim and make sure and frame your rights to self-determination and to make sure that no one else defines who you are and what your beliefs are. So we know the Universal Declaration is so important. We also know the UN Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples adds to the important work of the UDHRs where it commemorates its 75th anniversary. Could you share with us a bit how you first got involved in Indigenous rights and why this issue is so important in international human rights law? Absolutely. Actually, it's a very interesting story. I'm so glad you asked this question because I was introduced to human rights defenders and frontline human rights advocates at the time before people were using those terms. And that first person was my mother. We grew up outside of the reservation in a smaller city called Duluth, Minnesota. It was not very progressive at that time. It's an old mining city, lots of old mining money and really built on the backs of the native people there, the Anishinaabe and the Dakota and really did a lot of extractive industry projects. There are a lot of coal-fired power plants and things like that. So we've been dealing with a lot of direct, a lot of impacts of colonization that were still impacting us today. But my mom was really an advocate for women, which at that time was also still quite controversial, women's reproductive health care, the women's self-determination to determine what's best for their own bodies. And she was a fierce women's advocate, a fierce human rights defender. And I was just there with her while she went to school, while she worked hard. And then I continued on my path. I went to school. I took my first human rights class and I read a book about Rigoberta Menchu and other Nobel Peace Prize winners like Ely Wiesel. But Rigoberta really, really resonated with me and I started to plunge into this world of human rights. Well, I started to take every human rights course that I could and really do my best to see how I could contribute positively. And it took a few years to realize actually, I've been surrounded by human rights my whole life. I didn't have to wait for a book to tell me about it. So with that story being said, I was so lucky to come across the International Indian Treaty Council while looking at international organizations of indigenous peoples that were fighting at that level. International Indian Treaty Council was one that always came back. And when I looked at their board of directors and honorary, one of their board members and longtime sister in freedom fighter was Rigoberta Menchu. So I wanted to share that story about Rigoberta but also of my mom.  And I really did follow in her footsteps even though I thought I was blazing my own path. That's a great one and really important. It also brings up the exciting part of really the Nobel Peace Prize that was just awarded as well. This year, awarded to a woman who's still in prison in Iran standing up for the right things. And of course, you sharing about Rigoberta Menchu who really was, like you said, a trailblazer, a transformative indigenous rights activist creating the first UN working group on indigenous populations and being very active. And at that time, of course, when you went to the UN it would be very lucky if you could return home and not face severe challenges let alone even killings. And so really exciting to see you raise the women's rights issue. Unfortunately, we still are looking at bodily autonomy as well as self-determination for women and indigenous peoples around the world. And the Universal Declaration of Human Rights inspires individuals and peoples around the planet to strive for that self-determination. And the right to nationality is essential for equality and equity for all on Earth. And Article 15 does guarantee everyone that right to a nationality. When we look at the UDHR also assigns opportunities for a new way forward for our world. And UDHR 15 serves as a valuable vision for indigenous peoples and continues to shape participation in global politics speaker for our own people as an integral part of the human family as equals. Can you share with us a bit? You talked about the International Indian Treaty Council, can you talk to us about a couple of indigenous movements that you see that are really inspiring, that are actualizing Article 15 in today's world? I also just wanna say this is a very timely interview as I sit here in San Francisco where the UN Charter was signed. So that's a very exciting as well. But as we talk about what nationhood means you touched on it a little bit and you'll hear a lot of indigenous peoples when they introduced themselves that I am Anishinaabe living in what is now known as the United States, what is now known as Canada. Our nationhood is very important to us. We're seeing these discussions take place right now about enhanced participation at the United Nations. It's really important that we're able to have the self-determination to go there as nations, as our traditional governments and not as NGOs. And that's where it's been so far. So we're taking that pride of our nations and we're bringing that idea into the international arena. Many, many of our aunties and uncles and brothers and sisters have been fighting for this for years. And it seems it's finally coming to fruition a bit. We're gaining some more, we're making some gains and moving forward. So just, I mean, so they call us tri-citizens, some of us, right? So we're citizens of the city we live in, of the state or country and then we're citizens of our nation. And so it's an inherent part of who we are. And we actually have that self-determination to move forward with our own citizenship, what that looks like, my nation of Fond du Lac. We have our own, of course, elected government like many of the 574 federally recognized tribes or over 800 all together that are here in the United States today. But not all of them are recognized. So we throw this word around sovereignty, but are we sovereign when the country that colonized us still has plenary power over us? And every time we're going through a presidential election, we're unsure if that president or the upcoming House or Senate is gonna decide to wipe our rights away with just the stroke of a pen, because that's how easy it is. So yes, we're a member of those citizens of our nation. Yes, right now, we have the autonomy and the self-determination to move forward as nations in our own government, but we are very, very vulnerable to the politics of the United States. So I could say a lot more, but I'll leave it there. No, no, it touched upon a lot. First and foremost, being in San Francisco, there's so much history there. First, 26 April to 26 June, that meeting of the 50 governments at the time to say what will be the rule of law for the rest of the world, trying to recognize the Holocaust that just took place, but to have that spirit of never again. And what was significant, of course, as you did share, was human rights are mentioned for the first time in international law, really, and also self-determination, recognizing at the time that only 50 countries, and now there's 193, we have seen a move in the right direction for decolonization, but it's pointed out so much more of what we have to do. There used to be the unrepresentations of people's organization, and some countries did transition from that membership as a shadow United Nations into the UN, but you did bring up a good point. There's still too much colonization in our world. We still have people talking about Columbus, talking about Captain Cook, which then leads to Captain Kirk and everything else in the world, but we really pointed out the invincibility of indigenous peoples as the world tried to make them invisible throughout those five centuries. As we gather today, you also remind me, one of the first times we met was at the University of New South was Diplomacy Training Program, and Australia is also having a vote with the voice. I don't know if you've kept up with that and how you see that as an active call for Article 15 for indigenous peoples and aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders of Australia. Honestly, it's just really exciting to see that movement building there. I'm not gonna comment either way on the way that, you know, about feelings about it. I'm not from there. I was a guest on those lands. Really honored to be able to study and learn from the oldest documented indigenous peoples in the world. So that said, here we are 2023. It took this long to even start having those conversations down there, let alone to get back to what's really important and what's really gonna matter, and that's land back. And I really hope that that can happen through them, whether it's through the voice or in other means. And another thing that really struck me when you were just speaking is also about the acknowledgement of our collective rights. And that is also extremely unique. And we saw a lot of really what that can look like when COVID struck, how our nations dealt with it. First and foremost, it's about all of our people, the collective, our elders. So we didn't take an individualistic take on how to deal with the crisis. And although our nations were hit quite hard, that collective nature and honor of our people and our future generations really was a huge part of why we came out of that. Of course, like everybody else did, but stronger than ever as nation. Really excellent point because the world, of course, of human rights does look at individual, but it's also been collective the entire time. When you look at the right of self-determination that's in the UN Charter, it's all peoples have the right of self-determination. And it's common article one of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. And we know the United States is going to be brought forward to the UN Human Rights Committee to look at the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Are there any issues that you think should be at the forefront of that review of the United States that is coming up at the Human Rights Committee later this month? Well, Joshua, I'm so glad that you asked that. We went through the official report of the United States that was submitted ahead of time to the committee. We were very alarmed to see that the United States does not think that people have the right to clean water. So that is definitely something that is meant to be addressed. I actually was at the World Water Week a few weeks ago in Stockholm, Sweden. And I was able just coincidentally to stand next to a woman from the U.S. State Department that works in the runs the water sector for the U.S. government. And I asked her about this and she said, no, that's right. You don't have a right to clean water. People have a right to sanitize or safe water, but that's it. I said, well, how do you define safe? As I work a lot in environmental toxics and I understand how those impact people, her definition of clean and safe is not my definition of clean and safe. And the first question I asked her said, well, what about fluoride? Do you think that that's safe for human consumption? And she said, well, it's really good for your teeth. I said exactly, but it is a neurotoxin and it does not belong in your body. And we also have had that water in a cup or you take a shower somewhere in a different place and it smells like chlorine, like bleach. This is not healthy for us. It's not safe. So if this is the standard that the United States is putting forth, we're in big trouble. And that's just one of the things on this report. But I will say that we have a very strong team of indigenous peoples representing all seven socioeconomic regions that are gonna be there on site. Because also this is a review of the United States, but their actions, their decisions and their policies impact indigenous peoples and all peoples around the world. So it's important that everybody has their say. Really bringing up a lot of good points. First and foremost, I remember being at the UN for the Sustainable Development Goals in those final negotiations partnering with indigenous peoples major group. And it was true. The United States tried to weaken SDG number six for clean water and sanitation. And if it wasn't for Palau and the indigenous peoples coming together, we know that would not even have come to fruition to be able to have SDG six on clean water and sanitation. But you also brought up a good point about the ICCPR and that important review of the 18 experts is also that concept of extraterritoriality. And that's where US corporations and US foreign policy does impact indigenous peoples. And maybe that might be one of the super strengths of the International Indian Treaty Council, not only being the first indigenous movement to get Ecosoc status, but also really uniting indigenous peoples from many regions where the US operates that then has a huge impact on the future generations and wellbeing of indigenous peoples around the world. That's so true. And IITC is really unique that way in the, I mean, these were grassroots people. IITC was founded in Sandy Grapp, South Dakota in 1974 with over 99 indigenous nations present from North Central South America, the Caribbean and the Pacific. They came together alongside the American Indian movement, which was really taking up arms against the government and finally fighting back for the first time. So this is the premise under what they met or kind of the feeling in the air that everyone had. Everyone was a victim of colonization that was there and they talked about what can we do? And they talked about what it meant to be colonized, to be indigenous. And I mean, this is a word that wasn't even being used. What it meant to be native at that time and what level can they take it to to be realized because the governments that colonized us were never gonna do that. And so that is the premise in which in 1977, they went into UN Geneva, a delegation of American Indian and Alaskan natives, of course, and demanded to be heard as such, as sovereigns and not as subsidiaries of the governments that colonized them. That's absolutely huge. And treaty council has been committed to stay within the UN space since then. And as you said, it was upgraded to general consultative status in 2011, really showing not only the impact that indigenous peoples have had that were credentialed through IATC or partners of IATC, but really the broad reach. And so it's just also important to say that treaty council is a movement from the ground up. Every two years we have treaty conferences in the communities of our affiliates or our board members, and that's who feeds IATC, the work of their next two years. What is happening in their community? What kind of threats are they facing? Is it mining a new pipeline? Are there human rights defenders under threat there? Are they having water issues? No access to water, no clean water, a variety of things, but we hear from them and those are the issues that are taken to the United Nations and nobody speaks for them. Treaty council provides the access to these, to the UN arena and many different for us so indigenous peoples can speak for themselves in front of the world. And I think that's huge and important too to all of our people and our movements. It really brings back exciting memories as well. I remember being in South Dakota and marching with all the founders who were actually involved in the beginning being there with Russell and Dennis and marching across the borders there, of course, of North and South Dakota, but then also even hosted with the nation of Hawaii with Bumpy over on Oahu on the windward side and being able to be together there as well. And also that reminds me, you're really a pioneer in the space focusing on the three treaties that people don't maybe get that involved with that really look at the wellbeing of the individual but also the collective and also our Mother Earth. Can you share with us a bit the work you do and those three treaty bodies and why it's so important and the human rights approach that you've taken to it? Absolutely and I appreciate this opportunity as well because we see a lot of indigenous peoples at some UN mechanisms and we see very few in others. And we're gonna talk right now about the Stockholm Basel and Rotterdam conventions and actually also the Minamata Convention on Mercury. These four conventions work in synergy under UN environment program and one of them, the Rotterdam Convention is housed in FAO. So they actually share a secretariat or the secretariat's work in tandem and they're really trying to merge the chemical and heavy metal sector to sink it more and provide more access. So we're talking about pesticides, we're talking about extractive industry chemicals and pops, persistent organic pollutants. In the past maybe five years or so, maybe not even, you started to hear about PFAS, PFOA, but these were not common terms before that and they have been being discussed at the Stockholm Convention for many years. So we're trying to find a way to mainstream what's happening at these conventions that truly impact everybody and how we can increase indigenous voices not only because these mechanisms are lacking a human rights approach period. I have actually heard inside the negotiations of the Minamata Convention, this is not about human rights, nor is this about health. This is about the environment. Indigenous peoples and most humans know that all of that is interconnected and we cannot separate them. So I'm gonna now highlight the Minamata Convention on Mercury because the COP 5 Conference of the Parties 5 is about to take place from October 30th to November 4th in Geneva. And Treaty Council was at the forefront of bringing in voices on indigenous rights but also being just relentless on pushing a human rights framework to be used within this treaty body. It was difficult. It's important to note that the states are in there and all the multinational corporations are there. We've got Monsanto and Bayer sitting there with state representatives. These are very unique mechanisms and it makes our job even harder as indigenous peoples and our allies in civil society to really have our voices heard. They definitely don't wanna be talking about human rights. So that is even why it's more important that we need to prioritize being there and make sure that we're bringing a lot of different voices into those spaces so that we can finally be heard. The Minamata Convention ended up reaching out to International Indian Treaty Council because the secretariat and some states had recognized the lack of indigenous participation while acknowledging the disproportionate impact mercury has on indigenous peoples' lands and territories. So we're partnering with them now. We're gonna do our webinar beforehand to train indigenous delegates. We have a ton of events on site. We're gonna be doing some media pushes. So I encourage anyone that's interested in either of these conventions to, or all four of them, Minamata Convention, Stockholm Basel in Rotterdam. Visit IITC.org. I'll share my contact information. I'm happy to engage with people individually, answer your questions. But yeah, keep an eye out for all of us at the end of October and we really hope to increase more participation and bring all of you lovely folks in to have your voices heard as well. It really is an honor to talk with you about those three, four treaties because very few people are involved, yet it goes to the core of our health. We all know that we've been involved with the Center for International Environmental Law and all the other movements for the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, getting that adopted first in Geneva at the Human Rights Council and then later at the UN General Assembly just last year. So all of these rights are indivisible, interconnected and we know that it's all one. Unfortunately, the rest of the world hasn't and that's one of the reasons that you shared about getting indigenous peoples to seat at the UN, not as NGOs, but as indigenous peoples because we understand and we can start to see a shift. Remember when we first started doing some of this work, it would be more tokenistic of do a chant at the beginning, maybe start a march, but then other people move in. But now we see at the climate change marches that we do in New York City. Now we see at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which we've run into each other and been able to partner at over the past decade that now people are recognizing and beginning to respect indigenous peoples' ancestral knowledge and how much we need that wisdom to be able to actually protect our world from irreparable harm. If we look at the climate crisis, that's the next meeting that'll be coming up and we just know we have less than six years until we hit a point where it'd be Koyana, Scotia are entirely out of balance. No, absolutely. And, you know, I think everyone's got a lot of anxiety about the upcoming top 28. We're seeing a lot of really negative media coming out about the big hand that oil companies are playing in these discussions in Dubai. I also want to call people's attention to the new plastics treaty that's being negotiated right now. All of this works hand in hand and talking about these credit systems and the new global biodiversity framework as well. Now they're talking about biodiversity credits. People have their own opinions on that but we are not seeing a reduction in carbon footprints and we're not seeing the results that were promised at COP 21. That was a hard fight for many of us two weeks sleeping in there and, you know, at a makeshift conference center at an airport fighting, fighting, fighting, fighting and listening to them say, oh no, three degrees, four degrees. It was very just heartening. And here we are now, COP 28, posted by oil Mongols. You know, are we moving in the right direction and is it possible anymore? I think a lot of us and especially we know our youth are really feeling that anxiety about their futures. I definitely remember working to guarantee a strive for 1.5 so people can just be alive in Oceania, the people of Tuvalu and Kiribati. I remember you fighting cup by cup for a little fun to be able to survive for that right to food and to go. And we really do appreciate your scrappy never quit perspective in international human rights law but also never forgetting where you're from and continuing to organize on the ground for your nation, building that nation and also for a global civil society that is rooted in international human rights law and the rule of law for all people. Could you briefly provide a small vision for the future of these rights? That's always the hardest question for me, right? We go from one place to another and we really focus so much on where we are and we focus so much on what we don't want, what we don't want to happen in the future but we're gonna turn that around and we're gonna talk about what that looks like in a positive way. And that really involves a meaningful seat at the table to discuss, to have a vote when our rights are on the table and really be acknowledged nation to nation as it should be. I could have a laundry list of things but I'm just gonna leave it at number two, which is when we see our rights fully realized that's gonna look like land back for our displaced peoples so they can go back to their traditional ways, they can go back to living subsistence lifestyles, they can go back to their traditional foods. So that's really, I think, what everybody's hoping for, respect, acknowledgement and for the states to uphold our rights as enshrined in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and that we see allyship come from non-indigenous peoples that understand that when we say land back, we're not trying to take anything from anyone. We really want everyone to stand with us and make sure that we all have a piece of the pie and that our indigenous peoples that were removed can once again return and honor their ancestors in that way and set up life for their future generation. Mahalo, thank you so much. You really embody the beauty of belonging and nation-building and creating a world that is building back better but with a bold vision of what matters most and that's people. Mahalo, thank you again. Aloha.