GRTiQ Podcast: 71 Sam Williams

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Sam Williams (00:19):

But as we progress down making the web3 stack mature, I can imagine that we get it to the point where it’s just frankly easier to build a web3 service, and so people naturally do that and eventually the notion that companies provide web services dies, that’s definitely possible [inaudible 00:00:36].

Nick (01:05):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today I’m speaking with Sam Williams, founder and CEO at Arweave, a critical piece of the web3 stack that enables users to store documents and applications forever. Sam is a recognized thought leader in the web3 space, and as you’re about to hear, he’s extremely thoughtful and truly brilliant. During my discussion with Sam, we explore a lot of interesting topics ranging from the nature of truth and how we can access it, what is web3 and how Arweave fit into it, what needs to happen next in the web3 stack, the origins of Arweave, which might surprise some of you, and many more thought-provoking ideas. I started the discussion with Sam by talking about the recent news announced during Graph Day related to the partnership between The Graph and Arweave.

Sam Williams (01:52):

Yeah so we’re very excited to see that The Graph has now integrated Arweave, so that you can query for information stored inside Arweave via The Graph, which is a really important scene for Arweave, because as well as being a data storage system, each item of information in Arweave, there’s a rich, if you will, document. So it’s not just the data, it’s a set of arbitrary tags that the user can set, as well as the person that uploaded it, the time they uploaded it. And those tags are a really, really important part of our ecosystem.

(02:23):

When you’re doing something like building a decentralized Twitter on top of Arweave, you would use those tags to say, “The app name is D-Twitter, and the type of this transaction is a post.” And then when the piece of software that renders the website to the user tries to find all of those posts, it will ask something like The Graph now, thankfully, “Can you give me all of the posts from this user ID,” which is really just their wallet address, “with the app name D-Twitter and the type post.” And then it will get back a list of all those posts. And with this system, it’s really the missing piece to building fully decentralized web applications on top of Arweave. So we are extremely excited about this.

Nick (03:02):

Can you take listeners behind the curtain a little bit about the things that have to happen for this partnership to come together? For example, do those tags already exist, and it’s just like some software mapping, or is there months and months of work and recoding to make a partnership like this work?

Sam Williams (03:18):

So the tags already exist in Arweave, but they’re not indexed. And one of the things we worked very closely with The Graph on is making sure that the schema that they use is essentially exactly the same as the schema that the Arweave community is already using. And this is really exciting, because it means that now the Arweave community can plug in a decentralized Indexer on top of their applications that they’ve already built. And previously we had these indexes but they weren’t incentivized, and they could be distributed, but they weren’t yet decentralized. And so this is a huge step up, I would say.

Nick (03:50):

What does it say about the advancing of the web3 stack? This partnership signals a lot to people within the web3 community that these types of partnerships are solidifying that web3 stack everybody’s focusing so much on.

Sam Williams (04:04):

Right, exactly. I mean, the stack is now blending together, the different layers are becoming more tightly coupled, which is fantastic because all these silos where you can do this sort of thing and that sort of thing over here, and that sort of thing over there, but having it all tied together so that it neatly integrates into something that we would call a suite, if you will, is really important. And we are just reaching that in web3, so it’s extremely exciting.

Nick (04:29):

Sam, as you know, a lot of my listeners are members of The Graph ecosystem, and so when it comes to framing the web3 stack, they understand that The Graph is the indexing and querying layer. How would you then create some context for folks that don’t understand where Arweave fits in?

Sam Williams (04:44):

So Arweave is the data storage layer. It’s the, if you will… I mean, the way we conceptualize it at the base, the thing where the user data is stored and also where the user interfaces are stored. So when you go to an address on the decentralized web, you would go to an Arweave TXID essentially, you put that into a gateway, and it renders on the page, and it pulls that essentially from Arweave’s blockchain-like structure. It’s not quite a blockchain, we will get into that later. But it pulls that out of the network, renders it like a web application, and then it would query something like The Graph and get back user information, and then it might pull images, or in the case I was mentioning before, posts and this type of thing out of Arweave as well.

Nick (05:25):

When you think about that web3 stack, and how far along we are in the actual building and implementation, as I said, this partnership signals a step forward, but top to bottom, where do you think we are in the completion of the web3 stack?

Sam Williams (05:41):

That is the fundamental question, and I would say we are on the edge of the breaking wave. We’ve been building this wave for many years at this point, and it looks now like the entire thing is possible top to bottom, essentially. There are going to be kinks to work out, but I would say all of the core pieces are now in place.

Nick (05:57):

This is a question I ask all the time, I’m sure you get asked it all the time, but web3 is a little bit of a buzzword, and unfortunately because of that it’s lost a little bit of its meaning, and I’ve heard different people frame it in different ways. They either frame it in contrast to web2, or they frame it on principles, the things that web3 aims to accomplish in the world. How do you think through this concept of what web3 is?

Sam Williams (06:23):

Yeah. So I’ve actually spent quite a lot of time talking to Tegan Kline about this from The Graph team, so I think we’re quite aligned on the definition. But we believe it’s about protocolizing web services, so turning web services into something that is immutable from the user’s perspective, and respects their rights in a way that fundamentally cannot happen in web2. It’s a little bit of a funny one, because in some senses web3 is like a… It’s reabsorbing some parts of Web1 and big parts of web2, and merging them together into something much better, which is web3.

(06:59):

Back in Web1, there was a greater focus on… And really on the internet pre-web as well, there was a greater focus on protocols that offered services to users, but really that focus had a lot of real great benefits from a user’s perspective, but that focus died when people realized that on the web, as essentially the dotcom bubble was growing, and then [inaudible 00:07:22] it crashed and then became this enormous web industry as we know it today. The protocols there were forcing people to monetize via companies, essentially, to insert a service-providing company into the relationship between what really should have just been user and service.

(07:41):

And so we see that essentially what’s happening with web3 is we’re saying, actually we can go back to providing the same benefits that you get from a protocol, that immutability, the guarantee of access, and all the other rights preservation that you get, while now also allowing people to capture some of the value that they’re creating with their protocols, and subsequently allowing them to be incentivized to do so, so that we don’t veer back down this direction of rent-seeking organizations accidentally amassing power and then being forced to use that power in ways that aren’t necessarily in the user’s favor.

Nick (08:17):

Some of the issues I believe in the framing of web3 is this dichotomy between web2 and web3. In essence, this either/or, or this winner-take-all perspective. How do you think through an environment where web3 is fully adopted, so to speak, in the world, and what happens to web2 in that environment?

Sam Williams (08:37):

Yeah. There’s an interesting question as to whether there will be a place left for companies providing web services. I think that essentially in almost all cases a company providing a web service is less desirable than a protocol providing that service. And there are ways that you might want humans in the loop, if you will. Like you might want your Uber to have service providers that can help if something goes wrong with your ride, something like that. That could be a place where a human’s in the loop. But generally speaking, I think it will always be better to have a protocol governing the situation rather than a company.

(09:19):

That said though, I don’t know that in every single case the benefits are high enough to be worth the cost essentially at the moment. But as we progress down making the web3 stack mature, I can imagine that we get it to the point where it’s just frankly easier to build a web3 service, and so people naturally do that, and eventually the notion that companies provide web services dies. That’s definitely one possible outcome.

Nick (09:47):

How do you, as somebody who’s so active and such a thought leader in the web3 space, navigate environments like where we find ourselves today, which is a bear market, how do you stay balanced and building and looking forward?

Sam Williams (10:04):

I try my best to ignore it, frankly. I’ve been involved in crypto in some sense since Bitcoin was worth 3 cents, so I’ve seen a lot of ups and downs, and at this point I’m completely numb. It’s not nice to see, frankly, every time that the prices go down. And that also makes me not very happy when the prices go parabolically up, either. Those around me know that I’m not super celebrating in those times. We actually ran an event last September around NFT Berlin, since [inaudible 00:10:38] hyped up, called an anti-party, where we got together a bunch of Arweavers and we got a bunch of whiteboards in the room and we tried to spend a few hours, as a side event around NFT NYC, solving some of the biggest problems we could find in the ecosystem. Because we really think it’s not time to celebrate yet.

(10:58):

So when these things happen, I really just try and block it out and I try and focus on the long term. That’s what we did in 2017, 2018, which was the other cycle where Arweave was an active project, and it was, I would say, harder for us back then because we were so much smaller and less established and we had a lot of promise in the network, but there wasn’t so much to show for it. That was a difficult time to stay focused, but we did it then, and it paid off in an extraordinary way, and so we’re going to do it again for sure. And I look forward to guiding, as best as I can from my position, the other projects in the core Arweave ecosystem, if you will, trying to help nudge them in the right direction, stay focused, as the tides around the ship and the waves rise and fall. It’s the nature of the game, I guess.

Nick (11:44):

Are you one of these individuals who perceive a bear market as a benefit to crypto at large, in the sense that it thins the herd so to speak, and it allows the builders to shine and advance, and maybe gets rid of some of the projects or other ambitions that hold the whole industry back, I guess?

Sam Williams (12:01):

I wouldn’t say I think it’s a benefit. I think that in the bull markets there’s more attention around crypto, and that brings in more people that are excited to build new things, and it spreads the message further. In a bear market there are fewer people listening. The rest of tech and even the mainstream laughs at us a little bit, which makes it harder to communicate the important ideals of the thing. So I definitely don’t see it as a benefit of any kind. I would say it’s something that… It’s just a fact of life. We can’t change it.

Nick (14:10):

Sam, I appreciate you joining me. I know you’re on the road, you’re in Berlin, and you’ve just recently celebrated the fourth anniversary of the launch of the network. I guess it’s, in the context of where we are in the market today, an interesting time historically, when Arweave we’ve even launched in the first place. Is that right?

Sam Williams (14:26):

That’s exactly right. Arweave launched just at the eve of the bear market, I would say, in 2018 actually. So four years to the day, we had almost exactly the same circumstances playing out. But thinking back on it really just reinforces this sense that we’re just here to build something, ultimately get it adopted, and what the market is deciding to do today or tomorrow or yesterday is almost irrelevant at some point. Of course, it matters to people and does matter ultimately in the end, but we can’t really control it, so just let it do its thing and just focus on the long-term building of the new and frankly enormous amount of infrastructure and projects that are going to be needed to make this new web.

Nick (15:08):

If we zoom out, and we just look at technology and human activity as humans as a species, and technology as a tool. Is web3, in your opinion, the next step in the evolution of how this species uses and engages with technology?

Sam Williams (15:28):

Yes, in some sense. I think it’s also just continuing what I would call broadly the internet revolution, which… Probably the first major change of that magnitude since the printing press, probably the most appropriate analogy. And I think it is just reinforcing the decentralization of the system fundamentally. And the internet started with these principles pretty close to heart. I mean, what the internet fundamentally did, it made it so that people at distance could speak to each other. That was a huge change. And the structure of the network was fairly decentralized. I mean, it’s not decentralized in the way we would call it today, because it’s not resilient in any sense. Actually that thing is taped together, just about works. It’s frankly remarkable the whole thing works. There are protocols in there that are arcane and bizarre, like BGP, the Border Gateway Protocol, has absolutely zero security. It’s just ISPs decide to peer with each other, and they set where they think the other addresses are, and they do network address translation, and it’s really remarkable that it works as much as it does. So it’s certainly not redundant and resilient in the way that blockchains enable, but it is broadly decentralized in structure.

(16:48):

And I think that essentially what we are on the cusp of here, what we are on this breaking wave of, is reinforcing some of those fundamental principles and opening up the opportunities further. And I think that Bitcoin in some sense was this idea, what if we could transact with value inside this new network? And suddenly that was an enormous [inaudible 00:17:09]. And I think that what we are really excited about with Arweave is saying, what if that network, what if that transmission layer, could also remember things? And what if it could remember those things forever? And now the whole network shifts into this public data commons, fundamentally. And The Graph’s component of this is saying, how are we going to access all of that in a resilient fashion? So that’s what I see coming together right now.

Nick (17:36):

I recently spoke with my children about what web3 is, and tried to explain blockchain, and ended up going on YouTube to watch some educational information about it. And one of the videos, quite popular for children the age that mine are at, talked a lot about blockchain and web3 in the context of transactions. It makes global transactions between people easier. But I felt like that was a really narrow… And especially in the context of things like what The Graph can do and the things that Arweave can do. Do you also have a similar concern that viewing blockchain and web3 as only enabling transactions globally, is it too narrow?

Sam Williams (18:23):

Well, I certainly think that viewing blockchains as only about finance is completely missing the point. To the question of transactions, this is actually quite interesting. In Arweave we call our data uploads transactions, which of course we inherited from Bitcoin. And when we want to refer to it a specific piece of information, we’ll refer to it by as transaction ID, or TXID. So when you go to an address on the [inaudible 00:18:47] you put in gateway address typically, unless you’re accessing a direct fashion, stroke TXID. So it’s really ingrained, if you will, in the protocol.

(18:58):

I wonder, if I could have chosen, I would’ve maybe called it a ledger ID, but the part of it that’s actually quite cool is, in Arweave’s case, Arweave is just a permanent ledger of speech. It’s a way of committing to memory a piece of information that a person at a point in time with a set of metadata has asserted, if you will. So it’s a ledger entry, and that having a transaction-like format is frankly perfect for us. We’re certainly not averse to it. If anything, I would’ve just called it a ledger ID, but who cares? It’s good enough for sure.

Nick (19:33):

So then what is the benefit to the world of blockchain technology, if it isn’t so narrowly defined as just something that enables or facilitates transactions?

Sam Williams (19:42):

Yeah. It’s a trust computer, fundamentally. It’s a way of performing some sort of computation, even if that computation, if you will, in our case for example, is about verifying storage, one way or another it’s some sort of joint computation, and making sure that that computation happens correctly. And then you can layer on top of this a natural thing that emerges out a bit is the ability to make decentralized or owner-less or controller-less incentive systems. In our case we use that to store data permanently and back it with an endowment structure that generates yield in the form of storage purchasing power, and then uses that to pay miners to store data, essentially perpetually.

(20:25):

So I really think it’s a way of building computer programs that do not require trust in a single centralized third party, which is completely impossible before, and extremely exciting we think. And what’s so exciting about web3 particularly, layered inside this blockchain infrastructure that has been built, is the ability to, if you will, apply those properties to web applications themselves. So now you can build a decentralized social media network where you don’t have to trust Facebook, you don’t have to trust Twitter to choose the content moderation system. That can be built into the code itself, but you agree to it up front, you know what deal you are getting into. You know that, for example, if you use PermaMail on Arweave, encrypted mail service, you know that no-one can come back later and say, “Actually, we want to sell access to your data,” like Google did with Gmail. You know the deal you’re getting into up front, it’s just fundamentally different, and I would argue profoundly in the user’s favor. So very, very exciting.

Nick (21:29):

A lot of what you said there could also be put in this bucket of, these technologies eliminate the need for middlemen, whether it’s a rent-seeking organization or whether it’s just some human watching and monitoring things that happen between users and an application. My question to you is, what do you say to people who think that a middleman or a human still needs to get involved, because somebody’s got to moderate the discussion, somebody’s got to moderate or oversee the transactions, there needs to be some check or balance, and leaving it up to code or protocol seems a little risky? What do you say to them?

Sam Williams (22:09):

Well, I think that… Okay, there’s a couple of different things in there. For one, it just occurred to me as you were describing this, languages are protocols actually. And so there is no centralized overseer of language. We speak to each other, we transact with each other in the real world, we talk and we trade favors all the time, and actually it doesn’t go so badly, typically. So I think that that idea that there has to be some centralized party in the middle, and typically the people that propose such a thing are that centralized party or are close to that centralized party in such a fashion that they benefit from being in that position, I think that they miss that.

(22:49):

And to the point of content moderation, this is a fundamental theme with a permanent information storage [inaudible 00:22:53] like Arweave. The way that we approach this is to embed it into the protocol. We’re not anarchists, frankly. We don’t believe there should be no rules. We just believe that people should agree to the rules of the game up front, and the rules can’t be changed on them arbitrarily. So in the case of Arweave, the deal is, Arweave will store your data perpetually, as long as you upload it and you pay for it, and there is someone in the world that is willing to store it. Everyone in the network is incentivized to store it, nobody’s forced to store it.

(23:23):

It’s not stored in an encrypted fashion, so everyone can look inside it, and we’ve built tools, one being for example Shepherd, that helps the miners, those are the people that store data in the network, helps the miners introspect the data and see what’s inside it, and just decide whether they want to store it. Those nodes that they run are essentially web servers. And that’s actually very, very nice, because it means that all of the laws that have been put in place over the last 20 years approximately to govern the web in different jurisdictions apply directly to Arweave servers, because they are web servers. And that just means, if you wouldn’t store it on your own web server, don’t store it on your Arweave node, and you are legally responsible for doing so.

(24:06):

And that essentially exposes the protocol to rule of law. There’s some content that’s essentially illegal everywhere in the world, but that content just doesn’t get stored in the network. But there’s other content that might be politically sensitive in one country but not in another, then maybe the people in the second country might store it, and the people in the first country don’t. That’s our approach to content moderation.

(24:28):

But I think in general, supporters of middle men fairly frequently tend to benefit from being that person or being closely associated with them, or that class of people potentially. And so I think that the strive towards disintermediation is a generally good thing in life. And if it’s not, we have a legal system for putting in place voting to elect generally representatives, who can put in place limits and changes to how that system works. That’s totally fine, but we should expose it to democracy.

(25:06):

The funny thing that the web did, and the internet before it… So to go into a little bit of detail on what I mean by that, on the internet, which is the technology that enables the web, essentially. Everything is a location, and a physical location… So a physical location has an address, and because the web was layered on top of this protocol, TCP/IP, we had this natural flow-through of properties essentially that said, well, the website must reside somewhere. It must be in a physical location.

(25:40):

The thing about that is the physical locations are owned by people. And that essentially flowed all the way through to the websites. And even, I don’t actually think a lot of the web2 companies wanted it to be this way, but they essentially were forced to have the power over the location on the web, because they had the power over the physical location where the service resided. And that flows all the way through the stack until you go to twitter.com, and twitter.com now has the power, but also frankly the responsibility, to decide who should or who should not be able to speak on a platform. And so I think that this is a really fundamental part of the system that we can now change by saying, what if the data is actually in many places, and everyone’s incentivized to store it, nobody’s forced to, and they can choose for themselves?

Nick (26:29):

For you personally, not speaking on behalf of Arweave or the Arweave community, but just speaking for yourself, when it comes to content and freedom of speech and the ability for people to say and do these types of things, where do you come in on red lines, things that should not be said, things that should not be produced, and things that are within play?

Sam Williams (26:53):

Well, as much as I have personal opinions, I like to shun them, keep them to myself, because I think that no matter whether I try to or not, I will necessarily end up speaking on behalf of the community or the protocol, unfortunately. I would love to have that conversation, but I see that whether I like it or not, I do speak for the protocol and for the community and the ecosystem sometimes, and whatever I say will be interpreted that way, no matter what I preface it with. So I just try and keep myself to be a good ambassador of the collective beliefs of our community. And I would say that that is exactly as written in the content policies. How that system works is what we have all essentially agreed is an appropriate way to govern [inaudible 00:27:44].

Nick (27:44):

Fair enough, Sam, and I appreciate your response, and in fact I should have anticipated that. Maybe just a shade different, but on the same theme of how important free speech is, I know a lot of the history of Arweave and you intellectually as grounded in this purpose around historical truth, maintaining a historical record. Why is it so important to you and the Arweave community to protect history and truth and to preserve it into the future?

Sam Williams (28:14):

Yes. So the reason we started in the first place was because we saw that there was this growing trend towards authoritarianism throughout the West, and I guess broadly across the world as well. And I’d spent some time studying, what are the practical things that happen along the road to that terrible outcome for the humans that live in those societies? And one of the things that constantly comes up is what Orwell described, it’s essentially a work of fiction, but in the fiction there was a meta-truth, if you will. There was this truth that… It was the observation of a pattern that emerged in many different places over and over again, but he described it as the person that controls the present controls the past, and by controlling the past, they control the future.

(28:59):

And sure enough, if you look at what happened in the development of authoritarian societies virtually everywhere, the three big ones that stick out are of course Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, China, those are [inaudible 00:29:14] my head goes to first, there’s always this notion of controlling the way that people think about things when they’re living in it. And by doing so, they change their frame of reference and their responses when things happen in the future, and also the things they might actively do. I think we saw this most recently [inaudible 00:29:34] your opinion on the situation in Ukraine with Russia, I think it’s more subjective to note that in the year leading up to the invasion of Ukraine, Putin went to great lengths to essentially attempt to rewrite his version of the history of Ukraine. And why was he doing that? Well, he controlled the present. He was attempting to control perception of the past, changing the nature of Ukrainian sovereignty essentially in people’s minds, in order to change the way that they reacted to things in the future. That pattern happens over and over and over again.

(30:10):

So yes, I think when we got started, we were thinking about the one thing we could maybe solve. Actually blockchains almost have the little nugget in there that’s like, that’s really cool, that might just work. It’s a ledger that replicates information across the world in a censorship-resistant way, but it’s small amounts of information. We went and solved that. And then Arweave stores arbitrary amounts of data essentially, there’s no limit on the scalability there that is practically applicable.

(30:38):

And then once you solve that problem, you generate the second problem, which is, how are you going to pay for it? Big problem because the larger the ledger, the bigger the burden. And then we came up with this endowment structure to do that essentially. So you pay for 200 years’ worth of storage when data goes into the network. As the cost of storage declines, that 200 years extends out over time. If it declines at a rate over 0.5%, and the real rate in the world tends to be about 30.5% Safe margin, as that cost of storage declines, if it’s over that 0.5%, it essentially goes on perpetually. And so you get an extremely, extremely long-term data storage system [inaudible 00:31:17]. And we thought, you can apply that to make a record of the past that, no matter who says what about the past in the future, they just can’t change the hard ledger, the hard record of truth. And so that’s what we built, and that’s where we see it fitting into the, I guess, geopolitical equation.

Nick (31:35):

So Sam, when I have the opportunity to speak with thought leaders in the web3 space, I’m always struck by the underlying vision in the pursuit or exploration of truth. And certainly in the case of Arweave, you just said it yourself that it is a preservation of historical truth or fact. How much of what you’re doing is geared towards that exploration of truth, and are you at all worried with the loss of what truth is? Subjective, objective truth, my opinion, your opinion. There’s a lot going on here.

Sam Williams (32:09):

That’s very interesting. One edit I would make to that ledger of truth is that it’s really a ledger of assertions. We make no claims that the things stored on Arweave are true. That would be completely impossible, and is I think beyond the capabilities of any human or institution presently existing to actually tell you what the truth is. But what we can do is we can store a persistent, accurate ledger of what people asserted the truth to be. And I think that in itself is valuable.

(32:42):

I think on top of this, there’s a lot that we can do to try and help discern the truth better for the group. And I think that one of the least appreciated inventions in this millennium so far was the retweet. And the reason for that is because it enables a crowd of people to self-organize discerning the truth or attempting to discern the truth, which is a fundamental change in the way it had to work in the traditional space, pre-internet. And indeed in the early stages of the internet, where we had broadcast journalism fundamentally, but a small group of people had the ability to control what many people saw. And so the truth discernment system was very vulnerable to that group of people being wrong. Whereas what the retweet starting to experiment with was, what if we allow people to discuss between themselves? And so you have a crowd of people, and instead of everyone shouting and no-one hearing anything, you get this ability to say, “I believe that too. I will lend my voice to that idea.”

(33:51):

And I think that was a really profound invention. I’m not even sure they really realized they were doing it, but when they did, it was really extraordinary. And I think there’s so much more that can be done there to help people discern the truth, and we’re just starting to look at it. And I’m actually very excited to see that a lot of web3 projects that are in the social space are really playing with these ideas, and I hope that that will be very fruitful further on.

Nick (34:13):

How do you deal with the balance of retweeting false information or false assertions then? I mean, is that a tax we have to pay as a society on this great tool and the benefit as you just explained?

Sam Williams (34:29):

100%, yes. I mean, we should try and build tools that help people come to correct conclusions as groups as fast as possible, of course. But we shouldn’t have rosy eyes about the old solution. I think the fact is the old solution, being broadcast-based, had exceptionally little talkback, and then we just didn’t notice when they were wrong. But actually having been a founder in the space for quite a while now, I’ve been interviewed by many, many journalists in the traditional space, and it’s always remarkable to me how inaccurate these reports are. And I don’t mean [inaudible 00:35:02] stuff that… “Sam doesn’t believe that…” They don’t actually talk about content moderation, interestingly, but if they were to, that he doesn’t agree with their way of thinking about it. No, it’s like Forbes recently wrote an article about Arweave. The first sentence was, “Arweave is a San Francisco-based startup.” It’s just not true. It’s just fundamentally… Not even a single employee in Arweave works in San Francisco.

(35:25):

So I think that what we didn’t get back then when broadcast and traditional journalism was the norm, was the ability for anyone to actually say, “Hold on, that’s not actually right.” And so we just went around believing it. I think that if we look at the history of journalism… Well, I want to be clear about this. I think that the job is extraordinarily important, and many people doing it are trying to do so in an honorable way, but the record is not optimal in a lot of cases.

(35:55):

You just have to think back to… One of the conversations I had with a few journalists when we were… The Arweave community ended up archiving about 80 million documents out of Ukraine during the first few months of the Russian invasions here. And so I had a conversation with a few journalists about misinformation. And they were like, “What if someone stores misinformation on the network?” And that would be bad, but we can’t also have this idea that no misinformation existed before the internet. Actually, we just have to look back to 2003. Why is it that we went into Iraq? Well, we all kind of agree now that there was this idea out there, that was pushed by broadcast journalists, that there were weapons of mass destruction. It just turns out that wasn’t really true.

(36:40):

And then, you go back to Vietnam and you look at the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The one thing that we know for sure about that incident is that the story as originally described at the time was not true. There were at least some things about that that were wrong, but that’s why we went into Vietnam.

(36:55):

And then you can even go to World War II. The day after Germany evaded Poland, what was on the front page of the New York Times? It was actually the Nazi propaganda line that Poland had attacked a radio tower in Germany. This was not true in any sense. So I think that we should do everything we can to optimize the speed at which the crowd comes to truthful conclusions, or as close to truth as we can get, but we should not have any rose-tinted glasses that in the past the broadcast journalism system got us very close to the truth. I think actually we were quite far from it. And that is despite the best efforts of many of the people in that industry to truly inform the public.

Nick (37:39):

As I process and synthesize the things you just said, I can’t help but feel like web3 and projects like Arweave and The Graph, it’s a shift in responsibility. It’s a shift back to individuals to process and synthesize assertions and make judgements and not, as you say, put rose-colored glasses on and just believe everything they read and see in media or by journalists, for example. Is that true? I mean, is that some of the framing that you use as you think about web3’s impact in the world?

Sam Williams (38:13):

That’s not the framing I use, but I should. That’s a very nice way of putting it. I think that’s exactly right. Thank you for that. I think that you’re exactly right that it pushes power and also responsibility back to the individual, to make a correct or as close to correct understanding of the world as they can. And I think that that is the, again, right and responsibility that is given to us by this great fortune of being in democratic countries. I believe that this is fundamental to the core of what democracies are about. And I’m very happy to work on a project that’s trying to push towards a world that really refocuses on those democratic freedoms and responsibilities in a way that I think that the alternative is that we are very, very far away from it.

Nick (39:32):

When you and I did a prep call for this interview, we talked about your background. You came out of academia, you made these insights about authoritarian regimes and the manipulation of historical information. I think a lot of listeners that haven’t met you or listened to you before, Sam, will be surprised that a lot of the Arweave history is embedded in these type of ideas and aspirations. What else in your research, or I guess at the time that you founded Arweave, also played a role in informing and launching Arweave outside of this concern for maybe futures where authoritarian regimes manipulate information. Were there other elements that played into this?

Sam Williams (40:13):

Well, I mean it was that, and I wanted to live in a society where I could speak, and I thought that was really at risk. And as time’s gone on, maybe I’ve got slightly older, I’ve realized that passing that down to the next generation is just as important. We were given a gift when we arrived here at random. Could have been born anywhere in the world, we were born in a place that lets us state the truth as we see it. And I would like to make sure that we pass that down to the next generation that comes, and so they do so in the future, at times where I think that essentially that guarantee is increasingly at risk.

(40:51):

I mentioned before, in the physical world, you can just speak. You do have the ability to literally just open your mouth and say something. So the default, if you will, is that you have free speech. That is not true in cyberspace, and we are moving more and more into cyberspace over time. See it all around us. We spend… You and I are speaking in cyberspace right now, and I have little doubt that half of the rest of your day at least will be spent in cyberspace. We are coming to inhabit this new environment. And the thing is that that new environment right now has absolutely no guaranteed right to speech. We wanted to solve that problem, make it so that everybody is guaranteed a voice, and they can speak to the future if they so desire. Doesn’t mean people have to listen, doesn’t mean people have to store it if they really don’t want to, but they can at least have unfettered access to opening their mouths in cyberspace, if you will.

Nick (41:45):

I want to bounce an idea off you, Sam. I think about some of these things myself all the time. I think about what truth is, and especially… I’m joining you from the United States, and because of a lot of political and social turmoil here in the States, I’ve revisited these ideas, because as you may or may not know, there’s lots of families and friendships that have been strained in recent years because of interpretations of truth and navigating a lot of information here in the States. And so I’ve come to believe, at least presently, that objective truth is something that probably exists in the had sciences. You get a little math, you get a little physics, biology, and you can reach objective truth. But when it comes to subjective truth and the way we just decide individually to navigate the world… And so I guess I’m starting, the older I get, to see that objective truth is quite limited, and most of our experience is navigated through subjective truth. I’m curious how you think about that and if you want to correct me in any way.

Sam Williams (42:49):

No, I think that that’s astute, of course I think that there is a ground reality, in not just the hard sciences, but also interactions between people. There is a ground truth, a ground reality to that, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are almost infinite different potential perceptions of those interactions. And therein lies the problem. But I think therein lies the problem to which the only solution can be that we open the door for different interpretations. The old system, as I was describing it, traditional means of sense-making in society, basically had us all believe what a very small clique of people wanted us to.

(43:30):

And it’s actually an interesting idea that that might be better for societal stability, but it’s certainly not better for outcomes. The reason that we have democracy is so that we can basically all debate many, many different ideas and interpretations of truth and fact, and then we go to the polls and we try and pick people that represent those ideas en masse. And there’s lot of different interesting problems with that, but that’s broadly the process. And we all have a built-in trust, and I think that trust is well placed, that over the long enough period of time, the group tends to make better decisions than the small clique inside the group. The small clique tends to corrupt, the group tends to see a little clearer, at least, even if that’s very foggy, I think that it’s better than the alternative.

Nick (44:17):

Well, something that’s resonated during our conversation today and in that planning call that we had a while back is that, for me, I interpret what you and the team at Arweave are building are the table stakes, the foundations upon which to pursue some of these ideas of truth and democracy, to reset a solid foundation. How do you feel about that? I mean, am I thinking about that mission and vision of Arweave correctly when I say it’s creating the table stakes for the potential of democracy in the world?

Sam Williams (44:50):

Well, I would say it’s a permanent ledger of assertions, and we allow anyone to come along and make those assertions. And then that, through the magic of technological trees, if you will, stacks and stacks of technologies, that leads to this outcome where you can build systems that I would say make that slightly better. I try not to get too lofty if I can, and I would really just say, it’s a good thing for people to be able to speak, not just to the present, but also the future. So let’s enable them to do that. And then from that, I hope that we have a positive effect on things, but I wouldn’t claim to… You can say those are my motivations. I wouldn’t make claim that those would be the outcomes, if that makes sense. I think we just do our little bit.

Nick (45:40):

I want to ask you just two more questions, Sam, and then I’m excited to ask you the GRTiQ 10. These are 10 questions I ask each guest, and I can’t wait to hear what you have to say. The first of the final questions is, you seem quite optimistic about the future. And going back to what I was saying earlier about the U.S., and a lot of the different things that I as a citizen in the United States am navigating, sometimes I don’t feel so optimistic, but I do see web3 and projects like Arweave as a potential out on some of my pessimism. But have I framed you correctly? Are you optimistic about the future and some of these types of issues?

Sam Williams (46:21):

I say we stand a good shot. I wouldn’t say that I am optimistic in the sense that I am not fearful of the situation we are in. Not so many people know this about me, but outside of Arweave, in the small amount of time that I have, I spend every waking second basically reading geopolitical analysis and open source intelligence feeds as much as I can. I try and absorb as much information as I possibly can about the world. And I’m going to take back to my girlfriend that you think that I’m an optimistic person. That’s great. I find myself often really worried about the state of things. But I will say that that was what got me building, in the end, and I’m not blindly optimistic, but I am happy, because I truly believe that I am doing the best I possibly can at trying to move this careening ship in very troubled waters towards… Doing my small cog in the machine to get it towards the right type of outcome. And that does mean that I have a meaningful life, and I’m very thankful.

Nick (47:32):

And then the second question, Sam, I want to ask you is about that web3 stack. Arweave is an important element of it. The new partnership with The Graph is super exciting for members of The Graph community, and it’s certainly my position that The Graph is a key element of the web3 stack. As you evaluate it top to bottom, where are the gaps? Are there any places where you’re thinking, I can’t wait to see someone step in here, or I hope soon we’ll see more developments on this particular part of the stack?

Sam Williams (48:00):

Not the stack, the applications. It’s now time for the damn applications. Let’s go. We’ve been building too long. We need a decentralized public square that respects people’s right to speech, not necessarily the right for everyone to listen to them, but their right to speak in the first place and have that speech be analyzed by others. We need that, not yesterday, but like three years ago. There’s no time to waste. And I know people are working on it now, and that’s exciting to see. I actually see a number of projects in the Arweave ecosystem which will integrate elegantly with The Graph, because The Graph nicely used the same format, the same schema as I mentioned, with the existing GraphQL system in the Arweave ecosystem. So, great to see that, and yet just more of that really fast now, please.

Nick (48:49):

Well, Sam, we’ve reached a part in the podcast where I’m now going to ask you the GRTiQ 10. These are 10 questions I ask each guest of the podcast every week to help listeners learn something new, try something different, or achieve more. So are you ready for the GRTiQ 10?

Sam Williams (49:02):

I’m definitely ready. Let’s go.

Nick (49:15):

Sam, what book or articles had the most impact on your life?

Sam Williams (49:18):

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. That’s the most profound book I’ve ever read, and as far as I can tell, the most profound book that’s ever been written. Well, I’m going to offend people with that. Let people make that their own decisions. It’s a recantation of someone’s experience going through the gulags in the Soviet Union. And I would also partner it, so that you don’t get a politically swayed version of this, with Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl [inaudible 00:49:50] someone going through the Nazi concentration camps. Frankly, once you read them, you’ll realize there’s no political bias here. It’s very similar story on both sides. But when you’re confronted with quite how bad things can get in society, suddenly your view of what matters shifts pretty radically.

(50:12):

And there’s this effect that Adam Curtis, a documentarian, he elegantly calls this concept “oh dearism.” So you watch the news and you see something terrible that is happening in the world, and you think, “Oh dear,” and then you go on with your day. If you will, the rain bounces off the jacket. Well, the Gulag Archipelago is 1,600 pages long. It’s about 70 hour audiobook. If you read that, there is no way that your brain can reject that this is a possibility. And that was actually what I was reading, I was just on the last two chapters of that book, when I started Arweave.

Nick (50:54):

Sam, is there a movie or a television show that you think everybody should be required to watch?

Sam Williams (51:00):

Can I recommend a book? Can it be the last one? I’m afraid I don’t watch much TV or movies. Okay, here’s… I would argue that… I mentioned before that I spend a lot of my time trying to ingest as much information about the world as I can. And I would argue that actually, if you start to do that, it’s sort of as if you are starting to watch a soap opera from the middle, or you jump into the middle of a TV series, and so nothing really makes any sense. And subsequently a lot of what people are talking about just isn’t interesting to you.

(51:32):

But if you persevere through that, you’ll find that the best story in the world is the one that is unfolding around us all of the time. And by spending your time watching and engaging with that story, you you’ll see the benefits everywhere else, because it’s not fantasy, it’s profoundly real. And then you might find that you end up interacting with a small part of it. Actually, you are part of this thing that is happening. And that I have found has led to a much more meaningful life, if not a life filled with a sense of responsibility, I wouldn’t call it fun necessarily, but certainly meaningful.

Nick (52:03):

Sam, what’s the best advice someone’s ever given to you?

Sam Williams (52:07):

We were going through the Techstars startup accelerator in Berlin in 2018, and one day I came along and asked an advisor of ours, “We’ve got all this pressure to focus on the token in our system, but we really want this thing to be long-term.” And they said to me… And I’m paraphrasing now, unfortunately, I wish I could remember exactly how they said it. They basically said, “In life, if you just focus on the things that you are passionate about, money tends to follow anyway.” And he was absolutely right, 100%. Mid last year, the Arweave fully diluted [inaudible 00:52:49] account was worth $4.8 billion, and I’m thinking to myself, we just focused on exactly the thing I was passionate about, and sure enough, that’s what came out the end. But I think that’s because when you’re passionate about something, you do it with a vigor that is impossible to emulate.

Nick (53:00):

If you could listen to only one music album for the rest of your life, which one would you choose?

Sam Williams (53:06):

I don’t know. That’s a very difficult question. Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon is pretty good, I think. But I wouldn’t want to listen to it all the time. There’d be too much.

Nick (53:18):

What’s one thing you’ve learned in your life that you don’t think most other people have learned or come to know yet?

Sam Williams (53:24):

You don’t have the truth, and nor do I, on almost anything. And that doesn’t mean that we should give up. That means that we should respect each other’s opinions and we should work to try and come towards a conclusion. Just because you read it does not mean it’s true, by any stretch. When you read, you do not gain knowledge, you just gain a list of assertions. It is your job to turn those assertions into knowledge, as close you can get to true knowledge. I would say that’s something that I wish that more of the people around me and around us would internalize.

Nick (54:04):

What’s the best life hack you’ve discovered for yourself?

Sam Williams (54:09):

I would focus on meaning. Happiness is useless. When I started Arweave, before that I was a person that focused on happiness like everyone else. I assumed that happiness was the point in life. And then I had this transformation where I realized, and it’s partially by that book, that actually there’s an immense responsibility around us. And I thought, maybe I’m wrong to believe [inaudible 00:54:37] isn’t true, but when I started Arweave, I really thought that it was an incredibly dangerous thing to do. As someone, early community member wrote in the genesis block about something you could do, wrote, “This is a machine that will make lots of powerful people very, very angry.” He said, “I like it.” Putting aside that last part, it’s occurred to me often that a machine that stops people from memory-holing the past is probably not something that a lot of people that are currently the writers of the past will like very much.

(55:08):

And so when I was looking at doing it, I truly thought it was a sacrifice in some sense, which is a great irony, because it’s brought such meaning, and also frankly there’s so much money around me now. There’s this whole organization we run, which goes towards building these ideas that I find [inaudible 00:55:29] passionate about. So it’s had exactly the opposite effect of what I’d expected, I suppose. But it was the moment of agreeing to the sacrifice, to do something that I thought was necessary, that actually led to the feeling of meaning and so on. And now I’m not hunting for happiness. It’s not relevant or interesting to me. I live the best possible life, I could say, I would be able to live.

Nick (55:55):

Based on your own life experiences and observations, what’s one habit or characteristic that you think best explains people finding success in life?

Sam Williams (56:05):

That’s a very interesting question, to which I’m not sure… I’m not sure there’s one thing I could pick out in people that I know that have been successful. I think generally people have to do what they believe in. If you’re not doing what you’re believing in, then there’s no use. Stop immediately and go find that thing and go do it, because you won’t reach true success if you’re not doing something you find is worthy of your time, because you just can’t fake that sense of passion that people have when they’re doing something that they really believe in, I guess. I don’t find many people, founders of other web3 projects, that kind of thing, that don’t believe in what they’re doing. That is not a characteristic I think I’ve ever detected.

Nick (56:47):

Sam, the final three questions are complete the sentence type questions. The first one is, the thing that most excites me about web3 is…

Sam Williams (56:55):

It’s giving power back to users. Fundamentally, that’s what it’s all about. Making a web that better respects people.

Nick (57:03):

Complete the sentence. If you’re on Twitter, you should be following…

Sam Williams (57:07):

[inaudible 00:57:08] something basic like Vitalik Buterin. And Arweave team, of course. You should definitely be following Arweave team.

Nick (57:13):

And the last question, complete the sentence. I’m happiest when…

Sam Williams (57:18):

I’m building something I believe in.

Nick (57:29):

Sam Williams, thank you so much for your time. You’ve been extremely generous. I know how busy you are, and so on behalf of myself and all my listeners, I really appreciate that you take the time and answer these questions. And I congratulate you on the fourth anniversary, and the great news related to The Graph protocol in this partnership. It’s so exciting for everybody. If listeners want to follow you and keep up to date with all the things that are happening at Arweave, what’s the best way to do it?

Sam Williams (57:52):

So all the things that are happening at Arweave, they should follow Arweave team Twitter account, and samecwilliams is my own Twitter handle if they want more of my rambling. Thank you so much for the opportunity to ramble. It’s been fantastic to talk to you. It’s been really fun.