[Music]
[Music]
by most people’s standards I’ve always
had an unusual relationship with money
and financial risk to me it’s always
been a game some of my earliest memories
include playing low stakes gin rummy and
betting the horses with my grandpa
as a teenager I learned how to play
poker and program computers I quickly
became hooked on both I started my
career in Palo Alto doing artificial
intelligence research in the early 1990s
but soon after getting a glimpse of this
new thing called the World Wide Web
I gave up the ivory tower and gambled on
my first startup with two friends
pick’em was a fantasy sports company and
I got really good at designing games
involving competition for scarce
resources when my partners and I cashed
out with a million dollars each I
doubled down on my fantasy world I
invested in startups and gambled on
high-flying internet stocks even after
the web bubble burst I traveled the
world for three straight years on the
professional poker circuit which at the
time was anything but professional it
felt more like an endless traveling
summer camp with characters straight out
of the movies after two full years of
travel my best friend challenged me to
an adventure let’s spend the next year
touring the United States in an RV
attending sporting events and playing
games I quickly called his bluff and
thus was born the ultimate sports
adventure which is wow I found myself in
Charlottesville for the first time in
the fall of 2003 we were coming to watch
a Wahoo homecoming game
see what other fun we could have the
betahaus adopted us for the weekend and
let us park the RV on their front lawn
the fraternity brothers schooled us in
beer pong and other local traditions
like late-night Gus burgers at white
spot making money was always easy for me
easy come easy go I always knew I could
make more if it ran out so after the RV
trip instead of hoarding what was left
in my original fortune I used it to
support myself and launch a new company
and play some more poker as the startup
was failing and my bankroll dwindling I
entered a world series of poker
tournament three days later I walked
away a world champion with with $350,000
in cash in my pocket that wind sustained
me until one of my early angel
investments began to pay off in 2002 I
had invested $50,000 to help launch an
online poker site called Full Tilt Poker
by 2007 we were making so much money
that we began distributing dividend
checks to investors I went from near
broke to suddenly making two hundred and
fifty thousand dollars a month I was
flying in private jets and I was
partying like a rock star and despite
the egregious displays of wealth at
times I like to think I spent my money
on many of the right things I’ve donated
and raised millions of dollars for
various charities that I’m passionate
about I invested in dozens of
entrepreneurs and I’ve helped mentor
many hundreds more I treated my friends
and family to luxuries they couldn’t and
wouldn’t spend on themselves but years
of treating money like a game had taken
a toll on my compassion and my basic
motivations as a poker player I’m
required to exploit your
and your fear as a venture capitalist
it’s impossible not to capitalize on
your inexperience and your desperation
to get my money as a game designer I
became a master of engineering and
senta’s to get the economic behaviors I
want out of you regardless of how your
behaviors will make you feel and well I
rarely use these skills in intentionally
harmful ways I became callous and
unconscious to how people feel about
money and how they felt about my
behaviors by the time my financial hot
streak ended at the age of 43 years old
Full Tilt Poker had earned me nearly 12
million dollars and I was sitting on an
estimated hundred million dollars in
equity then in April of 2011 the United
States Department of Justice issued
indictments for illegal gambling and
fraud the accused Full Tilt Poker of
being a global Ponzi scheme by October I
was named personally in the lawsuit and
by January things were looking quite
bleak my sole source of income and the
vast majority of my assets were gone
several of my very closest friends
stopped speaking to me by year end my
wife and I were fighting and I was
starting to exhibit manic and highly
delusional behavior for the first time
in my life early in the new year I woke
up in a hospital psych ward in a
paranoid psychotic state trying to
figure out the key to the game to get
myself released not realizing I’d
actually signed myself in the night
before and I was free to go at any time
and while I wish I could say this
experience taught me my lesson about the
dehumanizing effect money has it didn’t
not right away
playing only for myself the stakes never
felt high not high enough to look in the
mirror I guess I was afraid to see what
I might see it was only after starting a
family that I realized how every little
action every intention was being
absorbed and imitated how my own
gamification of life of human emotion
and not being radically honest with
myself all of this would lead to
recapitulation of my own traumas in my
kids so we asked for help from a
community of people who like myself were
ready for change beginning with
ourselves as a community we hold up the
mirror for each other
not because there’s any financial
incentive but because we care about each
other
one of the main truths that’s been hard
for me to look at is the overwhelming
power money has to hijack my neurology
and keep me operating from fear greed an
emotional disconnection long past the
point of rational self-interest allow me
to illustrate what I mean
right now there are 7.5 billion people
on the planet with nearly half of us
living on less than two dollars and 50
cents a day yet there’s an estimated two
hundred and fifty trillion dollars in
excess wealth being hoarded around the
world we produce enough food to feed 10
billion people and yet malnutrition and
starvation are still realities for many
and the United States and Europe there
are 7 million people without homes about
30 million homes sit vacant the level of
suffering behind these numbers is
staggering but it’s hard for me to
really feel this can you can you I
assume most of us here have homes and
are not undernourished by a show of
hands who has walked past a homeless
person asking for yourself for your help
yearning for human connection
and you walked right on by without even
as much as eye contact look around okay
evolutionary biology explains the
disconnect clearly how we’re wired to
fend for ourselves and our kin while
ignoring the needs of everyone else but
emerging neuroscience is also clear on
how we’re hardwired for empathy giving
and self-sacrifice furthermore we’re
finding out just how malleable our
entire neurobiology really is well into
adulthood and old age so what if what if
we could reprogram our brains and our
behaviors to tap into this ability to
feel compassion for people everywhere
regardless of how we’re related is it
possible to create money which supports
and enhances our empathy and reflects
the value created by helping each other
because we care I believe this is
possible but unless we pause and take an
honest look in the mirror and reflect on
our own personal roles and the global
mess we’re in if we can’t do that we’re
never gonna form the neural connections
necessary to see and feel the path
forward
Einstein said no problem can be solved
with the same level of consciousness
that created it so I’m gonna hold up a
mirror and reflect for you one of the
ways money works to hijack our humanity
I don’t know you or trust you but you
have something I want like food so I
give you a piece of paper and you feed
me later you take that piece of paper
you give it back to me so I will let you
sleep in my house this confidence game
is the basis for the entire global
economy money allows us to cooperate
while keeping complete emotional
distance from one another and the more
we actually do care the more
complicating and hurtful money can
become
cryptocurrency is a new form of digital
money if you’ve heard of Bitcoin it’s
the original cryptocurrency you might
have also heard of an internet
technology called the blockchain
blockchain and crypto currencies they’re
one in the same without one the other
doesn’t exist
I’d initially heard about Bitcoin from a
colleague I’d helped hire at Full Tilt
Poker and I was instantly hooked a
viscerally understood the appeal of
money that wasn’t controlled by
governments or banks too big to fail but
instead money controlled by a
decentralized protocol much like the
Internet itself a protocol that no one
person or institution can change
unilaterally and frankly which is as
unstoppable as the internet itself as a
game designer and computer programmer
myself I saw the genius of the Bitcoin
protocol it’s a competition for scarce
resources a race to solve a
cryptographic puzzle wherein the winner
is rewarded in Bitcoin then immediately
a new game begins with an even harder
puzzle as the game goes on it requires
exponentially more computing resources
yet the size of the reward diminishes
over time and here’s the kicker the
Bitcoin protocol sets a hard limit of 21
million bitcoins ever in existence so as
long as there’s demand and people keep
playing the game the market price for
Bitcoin is guaranteed to rise and when
prices rise demand increases and more
people want to play the game the CEO of
JP Morgan and other finance ears have
called Bitcoin a fraud and in a sense
they’re right we buy Bitcoin speculating
it will go up in value so we can sell it
to someone who’s speculating on just the
same thing but enough hole if enough
holders of bitcoins stop believing it
has value it will crash and become
worthless in this way bitcoin is fraud
just like
the usdollar economists will argue the
dollar is backed by The Full Faith and
Credit of the government but as we all
know from the latest financial crisis
and the 20 trillion dollars of national
debt that we have there’s not much faith
or credit left Bitcoin on the other hand
is backed by something way more bankable
human greed and the fear of missing out
on the next price increase as the
Bitcoin protocol was copied and modified
different strains of cryptocurrency have
evolved with more sophisticated
protocols these protocols do add
fundamental value to the currency I love
how if you hold file coin for instance
you hold the right to exchange it for
cloud-based file storage other
cryptocurrencies
are backed by uber style ride-sharing
creative content and real estate so if
you get stuck holding these currencies
when their market price crashes at least
you can redeem them for the underlying
thing of value backing the currency with
cryptocurrency I don’t have to have
faith because I have collateral the
promise of cryptocurrency is to create
jobs and liberate us from the economic
shackles of government controlled money
is both fascinating and exhilarating to
me but if we remain in denial about the
neurobiology and the unconscious
motivators involved we’re gonna
accelerate the collateral damage created
by money 1.0 we’re just now learning how
thoroughly
social media hijacks our brain’s reward
systems and our fight-or-flight
responses and now we’re adding rocket
fuel to the mix and the pace of growth
in cryptos is actually a bit frightening
in 2011 when I first got involved the
market value of Bitcoin was about 40
million dollars and it was the only
cryptocurrency around at the time now
there are over a thousand different
kinds of cryptocurrency and their value
has ballooned to just under 200 billion
dollars as of today if the current
exponential growth
continues for just another six more
years cryptocurrencies will surpass the
value of all traditional money combined
perhaps this is why JPMorgan and every
major financial interest institution on
the planet is experimenting with an
investing in cryptocurrency despite
their claims that it’s a fraud and
perhaps this is also why citizens of
countries like Zimbabwe and Venezuela
are adopting Bitcoin as their currency
of choice and why the head of the IMF
the International Monetary Fund is now
talking publicly about the end of
banking and the inevitable triumph of
cryptocurrency while I have my doubts
about Bitcoin itself I have no doubts
the cryptocurrencies are the future of
money but like all technologies Kryptos
are a reflection of the values held by
their creators and their users if you
had the power to redesign money would it
be your priority to enable faster
transactions commodifying everything and
creating competition for artificially
scarce resources or do you want your
money to embody human values like social
justice health creativity biodiversity
we’re at the dawn of programmable money
for the first time in history we have
the power to change how it works and we
don’t need permission from anybody else
we can come together those of us who
care and design currencies which serve
our community needs which reflect our
values and our priorities I have a lot
of ideas what about a cancer coin which
pays doctors and other healers for
actually saving lives and for quality of
life or a renewable energy coin which
takes sunlight and converts it into
universal basic income for everybody
alive or how about a community based
currency for social entrepreneurs to
support one another and share in each
other’s success these are all pasta
but these are just ideas they don’t mean
a hill of beans unless they reflect the
actual values and priorities of the
global community right now the global
monetary system is being rebooted by
software developers government agents
and the Wolves of Wall Street and it’s
happening at a staggering speed do you
trust them to program money 2.0 with
your values and your priorities we all
need to participate especially those who
feel disenfranchised by money who feel
the dehumanizing effects who want
tomorrow to be different than today if
we’re gonna survive on this planet we
need to wake up to reality we we already
have enough material wealth to solve all
of our economic problems overnight our
problem is not an economic one our
problem is we refuse to see and feel how
utterly interdependent we all are in one
another not just at the local level but
globally as well I don’t know what this
solution is but I know it starts with
all of us coming together to cooperate
not in a transactional way but in a
human way
not because we’re paid to do so but
because we care about each other thank
you
[Applause]
[Music]
by most people’s standards I’ve always
had an unusual relationship with money
and financial risk to me it’s always
been a game some of my earliest memories
include playing low stakes gin rummy and
betting the horses with my grandpa
as a teenager I learned how to play
poker and program computers I quickly
became hooked on both I started my
career in Palo Alto doing artificial
intelligence research in the early 1990s
but soon after getting a glimpse of this
new thing called the World Wide Web
I gave up the ivory tower and gambled on
my first startup with two friends
pick’em was a fantasy sports company and
I got really good at designing games
involving competition for scarce
resources when my partners and I cashed
out with a million dollars each I
doubled down on my fantasy world I
invested in startups and gambled on
high-flying internet stocks even after
the web bubble burst I traveled the
world for three straight years on the
professional poker circuit which at the
time was anything but professional it
felt more like an endless traveling
summer camp with characters straight out
of the movies after two full years of
travel my best friend challenged me to
an adventure let’s spend the next year
touring the United States in an RV
attending sporting events and playing
games I quickly called his bluff and
thus was born the ultimate sports
adventure which is wow I found myself in
Charlottesville for the first time in
the fall of 2003 we were coming to watch
a Wahoo homecoming game
see what other fun we could have the
betahaus adopted us for the weekend and
let us park the RV on their front lawn
the fraternity brothers schooled us in
beer pong and other local traditions
like late-night Gus burgers at white
spot making money was always easy for me
easy come easy go I always knew I could
make more if it ran out so after the RV
trip instead of hoarding what was left
in my original fortune I used it to
support myself and launch a new company
and play some more poker as the startup
was failing and my bankroll dwindling I
entered a world series of poker
tournament three days later I walked
away a world champion with with $350,000
in cash in my pocket that wind sustained
me until one of my early angel
investments began to pay off in 2002 I
had invested $50,000 to help launch an
online poker site called Full Tilt Poker
by 2007 we were making so much money
that we began distributing dividend
checks to investors I went from near
broke to suddenly making two hundred and
fifty thousand dollars a month I was
flying in private jets and I was
partying like a rock star and despite
the egregious displays of wealth at
times I like to think I spent my money
on many of the right things I’ve donated
and raised millions of dollars for
various charities that I’m passionate
about I invested in dozens of
entrepreneurs and I’ve helped mentor
many hundreds more I treated my friends
and family to luxuries they couldn’t and
wouldn’t spend on themselves but years
of treating money like a game had taken
a toll on my compassion and my basic
motivations as a poker player I’m
required to exploit your
and your fear as a venture capitalist
it’s impossible not to capitalize on
your inexperience and your desperation
to get my money as a game designer I
became a master of engineering and
senta’s to get the economic behaviors I
want out of you regardless of how your
behaviors will make you feel and well I
rarely use these skills in intentionally
harmful ways I became callous and
unconscious to how people feel about
money and how they felt about my
behaviors by the time my financial hot
streak ended at the age of 43 years old
Full Tilt Poker had earned me nearly 12
million dollars and I was sitting on an
estimated hundred million dollars in
equity then in April of 2011 the United
States Department of Justice issued
indictments for illegal gambling and
fraud the accused Full Tilt Poker of
being a global Ponzi scheme by October I
was named personally in the lawsuit and
by January things were looking quite
bleak my sole source of income and the
vast majority of my assets were gone
several of my very closest friends
stopped speaking to me by year end my
wife and I were fighting and I was
starting to exhibit manic and highly
delusional behavior for the first time
in my life early in the new year I woke
up in a hospital psych ward in a
paranoid psychotic state trying to
figure out the key to the game to get
myself released not realizing I’d
actually signed myself in the night
before and I was free to go at any time
and while I wish I could say this
experience taught me my lesson about the
dehumanizing effect money has it didn’t
not right away
playing only for myself the stakes never
felt high not high enough to look in the
mirror I guess I was afraid to see what
I might see it was only after starting a
family that I realized how every little
action every intention was being
absorbed and imitated how my own
gamification of life of human emotion
and not being radically honest with
myself all of this would lead to
recapitulation of my own traumas in my
kids so we asked for help from a
community of people who like myself were
ready for change beginning with
ourselves as a community we hold up the
mirror for each other
not because there’s any financial
incentive but because we care about each
other
one of the main truths that’s been hard
for me to look at is the overwhelming
power money has to hijack my neurology
and keep me operating from fear greed an
emotional disconnection long past the
point of rational self-interest allow me
to illustrate what I mean
right now there are 7.5 billion people
on the planet with nearly half of us
living on less than two dollars and 50
cents a day yet there’s an estimated two
hundred and fifty trillion dollars in
excess wealth being hoarded around the
world we produce enough food to feed 10
billion people and yet malnutrition and
starvation are still realities for many
and the United States and Europe there
are 7 million people without homes about
30 million homes sit vacant the level of
suffering behind these numbers is
staggering but it’s hard for me to
really feel this can you can you I
assume most of us here have homes and
are not undernourished by a show of
hands who has walked past a homeless
person asking for yourself for your help
yearning for human connection
and you walked right on by without even
as much as eye contact look around okay
evolutionary biology explains the
disconnect clearly how we’re wired to
fend for ourselves and our kin while
ignoring the needs of everyone else but
emerging neuroscience is also clear on
how we’re hardwired for empathy giving
and self-sacrifice furthermore we’re
finding out just how malleable our
entire neurobiology really is well into
adulthood and old age so what if what if
we could reprogram our brains and our
behaviors to tap into this ability to
feel compassion for people everywhere
regardless of how we’re related is it
possible to create money which supports
and enhances our empathy and reflects
the value created by helping each other
because we care I believe this is
possible but unless we pause and take an
honest look in the mirror and reflect on
our own personal roles and the global
mess we’re in if we can’t do that we’re
never gonna form the neural connections
necessary to see and feel the path
forward
Einstein said no problem can be solved
with the same level of consciousness
that created it so I’m gonna hold up a
mirror and reflect for you one of the
ways money works to hijack our humanity
I don’t know you or trust you but you
have something I want like food so I
give you a piece of paper and you feed
me later you take that piece of paper
you give it back to me so I will let you
sleep in my house this confidence game
is the basis for the entire global
economy money allows us to cooperate
while keeping complete emotional
distance from one another and the more
we actually do care the more
complicating and hurtful money can
become
cryptocurrency is a new form of digital
money if you’ve heard of Bitcoin it’s
the original cryptocurrency you might
have also heard of an internet
technology called the blockchain
blockchain and crypto currencies they’re
one in the same without one the other
doesn’t exist
I’d initially heard about Bitcoin from a
colleague I’d helped hire at Full Tilt
Poker and I was instantly hooked a
viscerally understood the appeal of
money that wasn’t controlled by
governments or banks too big to fail but
instead money controlled by a
decentralized protocol much like the
Internet itself a protocol that no one
person or institution can change
unilaterally and frankly which is as
unstoppable as the internet itself as a
game designer and computer programmer
myself I saw the genius of the Bitcoin
protocol it’s a competition for scarce
resources a race to solve a
cryptographic puzzle wherein the winner
is rewarded in Bitcoin then immediately
a new game begins with an even harder
puzzle as the game goes on it requires
exponentially more computing resources
yet the size of the reward diminishes
over time and here’s the kicker the
Bitcoin protocol sets a hard limit of 21
million bitcoins ever in existence so as
long as there’s demand and people keep
playing the game the market price for
Bitcoin is guaranteed to rise and when
prices rise demand increases and more
people want to play the game the CEO of
JP Morgan and other finance ears have
called Bitcoin a fraud and in a sense
they’re right we buy Bitcoin speculating
it will go up in value so we can sell it
to someone who’s speculating on just the
same thing but enough hole if enough
holders of bitcoins stop believing it
has value it will crash and become
worthless in this way bitcoin is fraud
just like
the usdollar economists will argue the
dollar is backed by The Full Faith and
Credit of the government but as we all
know from the latest financial crisis
and the 20 trillion dollars of national
debt that we have there’s not much faith
or credit left Bitcoin on the other hand
is backed by something way more bankable
human greed and the fear of missing out
on the next price increase as the
Bitcoin protocol was copied and modified
different strains of cryptocurrency have
evolved with more sophisticated
protocols these protocols do add
fundamental value to the currency I love
how if you hold file coin for instance
you hold the right to exchange it for
cloud-based file storage other
cryptocurrencies
are backed by uber style ride-sharing
creative content and real estate so if
you get stuck holding these currencies
when their market price crashes at least
you can redeem them for the underlying
thing of value backing the currency with
cryptocurrency I don’t have to have
faith because I have collateral the
promise of cryptocurrency is to create
jobs and liberate us from the economic
shackles of government controlled money
is both fascinating and exhilarating to
me but if we remain in denial about the
neurobiology and the unconscious
motivators involved we’re gonna
accelerate the collateral damage created
by money 1.0 we’re just now learning how
thoroughly
social media hijacks our brain’s reward
systems and our fight-or-flight
responses and now we’re adding rocket
fuel to the mix and the pace of growth
in cryptos is actually a bit frightening
in 2011 when I first got involved the
market value of Bitcoin was about 40
million dollars and it was the only
cryptocurrency around at the time now
there are over a thousand different
kinds of cryptocurrency and their value
has ballooned to just under 200 billion
dollars as of today if the current
exponential growth
continues for just another six more
years cryptocurrencies will surpass the
value of all traditional money combined
perhaps this is why JPMorgan and every
major financial interest institution on
the planet is experimenting with an
investing in cryptocurrency despite
their claims that it’s a fraud and
perhaps this is also why citizens of
countries like Zimbabwe and Venezuela
are adopting Bitcoin as their currency
of choice and why the head of the IMF
the International Monetary Fund is now
talking publicly about the end of
banking and the inevitable triumph of
cryptocurrency while I have my doubts
about Bitcoin itself I have no doubts
the cryptocurrencies are the future of
money but like all technologies Kryptos
are a reflection of the values held by
their creators and their users if you
had the power to redesign money would it
be your priority to enable faster
transactions commodifying everything and
creating competition for artificially
scarce resources or do you want your
money to embody human values like social
justice health creativity biodiversity
we’re at the dawn of programmable money
for the first time in history we have
the power to change how it works and we
don’t need permission from anybody else
we can come together those of us who
care and design currencies which serve
our community needs which reflect our
values and our priorities I have a lot
of ideas what about a cancer coin which
pays doctors and other healers for
actually saving lives and for quality of
life or a renewable energy coin which
takes sunlight and converts it into
universal basic income for everybody
alive or how about a community based
currency for social entrepreneurs to
support one another and share in each
other’s success these are all pasta
but these are just ideas they don’t mean
a hill of beans unless they reflect the
actual values and priorities of the
global community right now the global
monetary system is being rebooted by
software developers government agents
and the Wolves of Wall Street and it’s
happening at a staggering speed do you
trust them to program money 2.0 with
your values and your priorities we all
need to participate especially those who
feel disenfranchised by money who feel
the dehumanizing effects who want
tomorrow to be different than today if
we’re gonna survive on this planet we
need to wake up to reality we we already
have enough material wealth to solve all
of our economic problems overnight our
problem is not an economic one our
problem is we refuse to see and feel how
utterly interdependent we all are in one
another not just at the local level but
globally as well I don’t know what this
solution is but I know it starts with
all of us coming together to cooperate
not in a transactional way but in a
human way
not because we’re paid to do so but
because we care about each other thank
you
[Applause]
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