Dan Pratl: A World Where Your Expertise & Judgement is an Asset You Control

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Artificial intelligence is changing how work gets done. But what if the real disruption isn't AI itself? What if the most valuable asset in the future economy isn't code, content, or even data—but your judgment?

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Executive Voice Krish Raja sits down with Dan Pratl, CEO of Quadran, for a thought-provoking conversation on the future of expertise, work, and AI. Drawing on his background in financial regulation, open-source software, cryptocurrency, and AI infrastructure, Dan argues we're entering an era where expertise itself becomes an asset people can own, verify, and monetize.

The conversation explores why past technology movements—from financial regulation to open source and crypto—often drifted from their original missions, and how incentives, more than technology, determine long-term success. Dan believes AI offers a rare opportunity to redesign those incentives.

At the heart of Quadran's vision is a simple but powerful idea: your expertise shouldn't disappear every time you change jobs. Instead, your accumulated judgment and decision-making could become a lasting asset that grows more valuable throughout your career.

Together they discuss:

• Why expertise—not information—is becoming increasingly valuable

• How AI is shifting value toward human judgment

• The future of intellectual property and personal AI systems

• Preserving expertise inside organizations and across careers

• The future of consulting, knowledge work, and AI infrastructure

• Why storytelling, curiosity, and cross-disciplinary thinking will matter more than ever

  
  

Throughout the conversation, Dan argues that AI shouldn't replace human thinking—it should help us better understand, preserve, and build on it.

If you've been wondering what comes after today's copilots and chatbots, this episode offers a compelling look at what the future of knowledge work could become.

Watch the full episode and join the conversation.

🔑 What We Cover💡 Key Takeaways🎯 Why This Episode Matters Read the full transcript below.

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Krish (00:02.271)

All right, welcome to my channel on the Signal and Noise podcast, where I write down a lot of the economics and implications of building with AI. I'm Krish Raja and I have an awesome guest with me today, Daniel Prattl. He is a former crypto expert and a former attorney. so he's worn a lot of hats and currently wears a lot of hats. We were just off air talking about all of the different hats you have to wear when you're doing AI development.

and we'll absolutely get into that throughout this session. So Dan, welcome to the pod.

Daniel Pratl (00:37.314)

Thanks, Krish. Great to be here.

Krish (00:39.349)

Awesome mate. So look, I mean I when I s when I spoke to you the first time, when I spoke to you the second time, and I and I keep booking time with you because it's fun. and I and I always come back to I always come back to the way your mind works and the way that you sort of unpack all these really complex things that are happening out there. you've worked inside, you know, three probably more systems. You've worked in securities, you worked in open source, you worked in crypto.

And they've all, you know, from your own words or from your own take, they've kind of there's something wrong with all of those systems from the way that they were intended to be built versus what's happening to them now or what how they're decaying or what's kind of happened over time. Can you can you unpack that for me in your own words or in your own language? What the problems are there?

Daniel Pratl (01:32.278)

Yeah, that's a great question. so started my career at the SEC right after the Great Recession. you know, had a bunch of bosses. the revolving door of the regulatory state feeding into the private sector and vice versa is very real, and I became very disenchanted with that. That's a system that's predicated on a an experience that the creators of the 33 and 40 34X was the Great Depression, you know. That was that was traumatic for those individuals. And that's a system that

generated basically compliance and and forced people to do the right thing so we wouldn't have a arguably fifteen to twenty year period of of of economic malaise. that's reliant on memory, you know, it's very reliant on people that remembering the bad times and let's not go back. And then open source. It's a system predicated on on people developing code in the open and sharing with one another because everyone remembers how painful proprietary software development was and how

Arguably inefficient it was. I think the the old adage is, you know, every every problem's quite shallow if you have enough eyes looking at it. so that's a system reliant on obligation and fascination to get things done. And modern digit digital infrastructure really devolves into what they call the Nebraska problem. You know, I don't know if you guys have ever seen the cartoon, but all of modern digital infrastructure, very complex and sophisticated, resting on one guy maintaining a repo in Nebraska for free, right?

Krish (02:55.784)

Mm-hmm.

Daniel Pratl (02:58.274)

That is a system that came out of, man, shouldn't we be able to do this differently, more dynamically, more efficiently? And totally forgot about compensation. People paying their mortgages, right? Like that's that that's that's very problematic as well. Yeah, exactly. And then you get crypto that came out of the Great Recession and the notion of why the hell do we need the banks you know, being our intermediaries and feeing us to death when they just go and ruin the economy.

Krish (03:09.462)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Real well.

Daniel Pratl (03:23.436)

We can do it ourselves. We can disintermediate, we can decentralize, and after 15 years, the greatest thing that's come out of it is token go-up, staking, speculation, base human interest and desires, creating a totally decentralized and unregulated casino. Great technology, but really not what you would say is it's the greatest gambling. I I I did a crowdfunding startup. Crypto is the greatest crowdfunding tool ever created, but

Krish (03:39.8)

Well we we turned it into a a gambling token again.

Daniel Pratl (03:50.465)

It's really reliant on stories that are very self-interested and don't really fulfill the Satoshi brighter tomorrow that really is the ethos of that that initial w the initial white paper. So yeah, long-winded way of saying I've been inside of these systems and each one of them

Krish (03:54.253)

Yeah.

Daniel Pratl (04:05.986)

Basically, the mechanisms outlive the mission of the individuals, and we were never able never able to program the incentives later. We can now fully program every layer of the stack, and I think that's the next opportunity, is actually building durable incentives into the next wave of economic development and value creation.

Krish (04:23.682)

Right. Okay. So so this is really when I talked to you about this the first time I met you, my mind kind of blew out of my head a bit because it was it was very meta. It was stuff that I hadn't really thought about. it it always has existed, of course, these concepts, but until you think about them, you don't think about them. You just sort of plot along with your daily life and and so and and and and for me the AI is a really good example of that plod along, which is the

myself to a lot of degrees and a lot of people I talk to care less about the judgment in the middle bit and more about the the the magic and the AI did it is you know or or if it's bad AI did it it's AI slop; nah. however, none neither of those things you know are really what we pick at here. The the the middle bit I guess is where you're talking right. The the the judgment, the the how did the thing come to light. But

Daniel Pratl (05:00.002)

Mm-hmm.

Krish (05:23.952)

so tell tell me like and by the way, I'm very aware that I just asked you as an opening question, like the most broad opening question on planet Earth. Like, tell me about open source and crypto. And you did a really good job of of turning that into into an actual answer. So thank you for that. but look, I just want to talk a little bit about the difference between I guess what I've just said, which is AI.

automates a lot of the middleware versus what you're talking about. And you are are CEO of a business called Quadron. Okay. So let's dive into this topic a little bit. Quadron, tell me a little bit about or the one line around what Quadron, are designed to solve for in this context.

Daniel Pratl (06:11.874)

Yeah, I'll try to do it in a line. you knowing me, you know that it that'll be hard. so judgment, insight, expertise is now the scarce resource in the world. Expertise needs to be evaluated. We treat it like an asset, like any other asset. You build a marketplace for it, infrastructure to evaluate it, and then allow individuals to optimize for their own self-interest. So expertise is an asset class, quadrant builds the infrastructure for it.

Krish (06:39.202)

Love it. I love it. That's like a yeah, it's a really clear way of looking at what actually is the commodity now versus you know, what can be commoditized. And so so do you think that am I right in thinking if if I break it down that the unit of captured work i or how you capture or or give a metric to something, what does that change to in a world of in a world of AI? What what are we

What are the things that we're measuring?

Daniel Pratl (07:10.604)

Yeah, to answer that question, I gotta go back two hundred and thirty-six years, unfortunately for you and your audience. the the value is largely created in the world with the presupposition that the artifact is the valuable thing. And that goes back to James Madison writing the intellectual property system into our constitution in seventeen ninety or thereabouts. And that was built for an era d of two that was built to do two things in an era of kind of the the the

Industrial Revolution. It was predicated on things, steam, you know, steam engines and cotton gins. And also it was latently encouraging individuals out of the fields and into service-based economy, white-collar jobs, attorneys. It was written by attorneys for attorneys. And if you look at our intellectual property system today, who makes the most money on the IP system? Because you can't monetize a patent. It's a monopoly on enforcement. The people making the money are the attorneys. The system is doing what it's designed to.

Now, when you have high velocity, high-quality noise coming at you at a million miles an hour thanks to AI, those systems largely fall apart. So AI has generated basically the demise of the intellectual property system as we understand it. And we've got to go deeper into what actually created those artifacts, because the artifacts are no longer the point. It's the people, the wetware.

And how do we encode that? Well, judgment and expertise is not something that fits into a square box, you know? It is something that is comes, it it it becomes manifest over the course of time. It is happens in those quiet interstitial moments, and it's vibes-based, for lack of a better way of describing it. And then what our system is intending to do is capture those vibes, those moments where you're working across your very fragmented workflow of different tools, capture together, try to make a coherent tapestry of who you are and what you're doing.

Rebuild those vibes into something that looks like a brick. We call it a lens. It's a way through which you look at a problem space and then allows you to redeploy those lenses into chained lenses, solution loops that can then be accessible and exposed to you when you're seeing a similar problem. So it's ingest and then egress, if you will. We take from what you've done.

Daniel Pratl (09:26.072)

We re-recompile it, allow you to either just trust the system that it cur it evolves your expertise, or you can say, no, that's not quite right. I will, you know, change it. And the whole point is, is that you are doing either development work, not in the software, not in the software frame, but you're just doing work. You're are articulating a project response, you're doing analysis, et cetera, et cetera. And then you gotta shift the distribution, email, talk about it online.

Send it to somebody else. This pivot from development to distribution, you're the fulcrum, and there's really nothing below you. There's no substrate supporting you today in this near-term work. And then long-term, thinking about how do we make you more efficient, cognizant of your learning. And that's what Quadron's intended to do. It's that warm hug of the as you develop activities that's trying to provide you not only something that's useful today, but helping you articulate your value and prove your value over the course of time.

Krish (10:20.726)

I love it. And so so the the the mission, by the way, I I should say I had about three separate thoughts while you were talking that would have each taken us to a different podcast. So we'll have to do another one at some point. But you know, the the one of the things that I was thinking about there is a lot of the way in which I make a judgment call, or the reason I am a worker that is unique as me or that I

Daniel Pratl (10:28.926)

Yeah.

Krish (10:50.828)

you know, the Krish approach to something, blah, blah, blah, is because it's it's it's a lot of it's packed into the way I was raised, the way I was brought up, like the the values, the morals, all of that sort of stuff. So and and that for me is it helps me guide those little nuanced decisions. I see it day to day when I am building AI tools myself and and have only re really recently started getting good at

loading my judgment into harnesses for AI before I start the task. And I don't judge the I don't load the outcome into the har I load maybe a North Star outcome of what I want to achieve. But that that first bit now is not really about hey, go and write my LinkedIn post or it's not an executional thing anymore. I actually I was doing some app development yesterday like or a generative coding for example in that way. The new term for vibe code, because we don't like

Daniel Pratl (11:22.318)

Mm-hmm.

Daniel Pratl (11:38.626)

Mm-hmm.

Daniel Pratl (11:48.268)

Mm-hmm.

Krish (11:49.121)

You know, it sounds tacky. but the the the entire first thirty to forty percent of that session was about getting it to interview me on my take on my philosophical take on why things should be the way they are, what I don't like and and so that that was you know that that I totally yeah, I love the

Daniel Pratl (12:09.922)

Mm-hmm.

Krish (12:15.66)

the the meat and bones of of Quadron and what what you're thinking about here. my question is is how do you capture that? Is it like like in my head, I you know, if you've been in the software space or the media space for for long enough, you'll see taxonomies, you'll see cohorts, you'll see buckets of you know, ways in which you you bucket people to sort of make those inferences. how does that happen in

Daniel Pratl (12:36.108)

Mm-hmm.

Krish (12:45.917)

this world, the vibes world where you're where that's so intangible, right?

Daniel Pratl (12:50.626)

Yeah, it's first off, you have to get your mind around that

In a economy based on expertise as an asset class, there's no, much like like if you look at like analytics in sports, right? There's no statistically determinative you know variable that says like this is going to predict the future, right? So like I'm thinking about like a quarterback on the blind side, like a tall quarterback that has very long legs is problematic because they're hanging out there for the defensive end to come and get, right? That's a statistically interesting data point, but it's not actually.

outcome determinative on who's going to win the game, right? So very similarly with expertise, you capture a whole tapestry and range of data about the individual and how they work, and we create a very opinionated system about who you are, what you do, and what

Inclined to believe to help speed up that kind of harness training, as you were talking about. And that improves over the course of time. So you play a lot of games, to use the metaphor that I'm now killing. And the idea here is that you become a more well-rounded individual the more you expose to a system like that, and the more that you yourself learn from being exposed to a system like that. It's a good feedback loop. And yeah, I think the latent point here is that you need to introduce or reintroduce friction into AI development, because right now

Now people view, and it makes a lot of sense because ChatGPT and Claude are very much single player, they are the easy button. Just do it, just do it. And if you think about it from a software development perspective, you're hollowing out libraries, which is a hazing process, which is you can articulate the problem and why it was a problem and how you solved it. All that hazing experience has now completely gone, and it makes you, for lack of a better word, quite dumb.

Daniel Pratl (14:33.15)

Unproductive. A system like ours, irrespective of software development or totally another space, gets you to stop and think about why you're doing.

Doing because it's valuable today, obviously, to make you more efficient. But long term, if you want to think about your expertise as a monetizable asset and monetizable in myriad ways, one to one, like a consultant, one to many, like an API layer, or even just an asset that somebody else can utilize for themselves and you get a payment trail. So you're benefiting from somebody else kind of resolving the whole open source

Structure, you have to start thinking about this as friction-oriented. You really need to spend the time and energy to build something of worth. Because at the end of the day,

Krish (15:09.976)

Yeah.

Daniel Pratl (15:14.69)

What makes you you and what makes me me is totally irrelevant to anybody else, right? Like the nuance and the spectacular uniqueness of each of us is only interesting to other people if it helps them along their own journey, right? So you gotta bake that into the system somehow and make that manifest to make you more interesting than say somebody else. That's how you actually monetize yourself. Now, what I just described is exactly what everyone's been doing on YouTube for the last 10 years. Like, like, like influencers and branding. This is just encoding it.

Krish (15:41.698)

Right, right, right. Yeah.

Daniel Pratl (15:44.8)

in making it accessible to everyone, from software engineers to dietitians and nutritionists.

Krish (15:50.243)

Yeah, right. So you're building almost like the data layer that mirrors the you know what people have been doing in propagating and sharing their ideas in that chann in that world. Yeah. Okay. This is really interesting because I I I love I love the idea of it. I s I I hear it and I feel it. A lot of the a lot of the best work I've done or the most satisfying and clean work I've done with AI has come when I've done

Daniel Pratl (16:02.561)

Exactly.

Krish (16:20.214)

when it's asked me really hard questions at the start that weren't the easy button. and and so I'm very much a believer once you unpack or strip away that sparkles icon and all the other the the stuff that makes it look like it's just gonna do it for you. Once you once you get rid of all of that and you start to accept that the world is the same in that nothing good comes easy, right? You're like you you shouldn't sit there and

Daniel Pratl (16:22.126)

Mm-hmm.

Daniel Pratl (16:33.846)

Mm-hmm.

Krish (16:48.04)

expect your work to be done. There's an ad on the s the New York subway that does my head in. It's the there's the it's one prompt, job done. And it's just like a black square with I'm like, you kill you are killing my soul. And and and and yeah the these these slogans and taglines really misappropriate what I think people should be doing with AI, which is answering more hard questions about about themselves in order to to fill their own

Daniel Pratl (16:56.686)

I've seen that one. I've seen that one. Yeah. Yeah.

Krish (17:18.456)

to gaps or or, you know, for for me, for example, it's how do I help a a a business leader take back the time that they've saved with AI? What are they pointing that at? What are they what are they gonna future proof themselves with? So the the question I have for you is there's one force pulling in that direction, right? Which is the easy button. and and people are you know incentivized to think less and just ask AI and get the output back. And so where do you where are you finding the

I guess the say do gap, which is what, you know, people people are like, that's a great idea, but then in reality, do you find that people actually just don't want to do that hard work or do you have to just frame it to them and s and and so if so, is that the incentive structure you're talking about?

Daniel Pratl (18:05.1)

Yeah, so right now we're at the very much the wild west of all of this, right? And so I'll tell you a little bit about Quadron and how we got to now, right? Because I I speak to a lot of founders that are very interested in this space, because I think it's abundantly clear now that expertise is the scarce resource, and actually articulating the value there, I think, is now finally being understood. You see a lot of new entrants into the space. I might be about a year and a half ahead of them, just given the pain that I've experienced trying to set this up. And there are two

Krish (18:09.729)

Yeah, yeah.

Daniel Pratl (18:35.024)

It really bifurcates into two worlds, and I would say institutional, enterprise, and then the individual side. So Quadron began when I

My last role as the insight that ideas were assets, and that evolved into expertise is assets because it's kind of upstream of the ideas. And we began with an institutional or an enterprise product, and the idea there was: okay, let's make composable and modularize the context away from the artifact, right? So, Krish, you're at a company, they encode your expertise, you move on, they've got a version of you, so to speak. And they can redeploy that on two different artifacts: yours, others, they can.

bring new employees up to speed by utilizing your expertise. It was a way of making modular this thing that used to be monolithic. I always kind of think about it as like hardware and software in the 70s, right? And then you have virtualization, you decouple them and the kind of the world explodes and the the way we kind of view the world today comes into comes into focus. That was premature. We got plenty of customers and engagement and LOIs and and the thing what we realized is that we were, it was very much like GitHub and Slack era.

Early GitHub and Slack, but you're trying to articulate the pain to a CIO or a VP of innovation, and the pain hasn't yet been crystallized. You go back to GitHub, it's like open source, why would we do that? Right? We're giving away our code. Slack, why do we need a faster email? You needed human beings to articulate their pain, right? So we understand that that's coming. It's gonna bifurcate into the professional and personal, but you really need to begin with individuals' pain. And individuals' pain really comes in insecurity.

Krish (20:01.911)

Yeah.

Daniel Pratl (20:12.082)

legitimacy, safety. individuals want to feel that there's something they can do that they can control for themselves, because again, going back to the IP system.

Organizations hoover up your value and then monetize it and then hand you a layoff. Individuals want leg control of their own narrative. They want to be able to monetize their expertise. And but most importantly, they want proof and legitimacy because it's a competitive edge. And that is where we're attacking today. And that really devolves into young people that are AI native, that understand how to use these tools.

And are in highly pressurized environments, trying to get into college, trying to get a job, trying to reorient themselves after some career, you know, layoff, whatever you want to call it, or riff. That's where we're finding the opportunity. What we think is that those individuals, once they articulate their pain and appreciate their the the solution of assetizing their expertise, that's how you drive institutional adoption, because the values become much more clear.

Krish (20:59.798)

Mm.

Krish (21:11.222)

Hmm. Yeah. And and and let's talk about that side. What you talked about there, the monetization and the the payment for that. So an asset has a price, a buyer has asset you know has a market. So can you walk me through that? Like and I the reason I said the taxonomy or the segment or the cohort earlier is because I was trying to I was trying to sort of elucidate and get a really clear understanding of what someone would buy and

Daniel Pratl (21:31.278)

Mm-hmm.

Krish (21:40.473)

Like who's gonna who's paying and what are they paying for in a world where and and how that how do they know that I guess that it was judgment that they that they bought? Now these are not quadrant questions, they're more like philosophical idea questions for you. but I'm keen to hear your thoughts on that.

Daniel Pratl (21:59.459)

Yeah, yeah. So first off, right off the bat, what it is not. There's gonna not gonna be a New York stock exchange of Krish and Dan, right? We're not gonna trade ourselves like equities or bonds. It's not gonna float out there with one number and everyone kinda hopes number goes up or alternatively you short it, number go down. That's not what we're talking about here. we're talking about something that

Is very driven by the proof behind it and enabling individuals to then articulate that proof, expose that proof, and therefore the value however they'd like, right? So first you gotta start with in encoding and structuring and standardizing what it is to be expert in something, right? Get that into a box, right? And then

You need to be able to evaluate it from just a purely analytical perspective or alternatively a monetary perspective outside of the silo that it exists today. So right now, your very ineffable fuzzy expertise.

really only gets gets gets gets kind of analyzed when you're getting employed, right? When you're going through the recruiting process and then speaking to a hiring manager and then getting employed. And then it kind of stops. It's kind of like a radar ping on on the the the journey of your career. And the evaluation of your expertise is in that very narrow silo. Did you get a bonus? Did you get a promotion? It's these very anecdotal evidence of your

Of your expertise. We're trying to explode that, right? So your expertise can be articulated and encoded. It can be utilized, exposed, scrutinized by others, mind you, while keeping the intellectual property that's it's created, all the artifacts with the appropriate owners. We respect the system as it is. But you're getting outside of that silo. You're allowing individuals to utilize it, expose it, and you, most importantly, can then monetize it however you'd like.

Daniel Pratl (23:43.981)

Do you wanna be a consultant and it's all about proof? You wanna prove what you've done so you can get that next consulting project and it's still, again, anecdotal information about you? Go for it. Do you wanna encode yourself into an API layer and it's a one-to-many experience? Go for it. We can do that too. Do you wanna create just discrete streaming, so licensing arrangements around particular pieces of your portfolio?

We can do that too. So think of it as like streaming for insight. I subscribe to Krish, I get Krish's loops, let me run Krish's loops, and I know they're super targeted and great for over here, but if I apply his stuff over here in some other industry segment, it's gonna fall apart, right? Because it's not generally utilizable. We can do that too. The world as I see it coming is that expertise has a monetary value to the individual, and that monetary value

Krish (24:22.348)

Yeah.

Daniel Pratl (24:34.126)

Is purely interesting for individuals to bet a better sense for themselves in an economy that's data-rich and structurally inefficient when it comes to the analytical progress that an individual relies on to show value in their data, in their in their own.

Krish (24:49.494)

Yeah, got it. Okay. So your so the the main customers and the like the the people that would benefit from this straight up are individuals rather than the businesses that they work for. Is that right in saying or is it a bit of both?

Daniel Pratl (25:01.698)

Yeah, yeah, well well it's it's again, come back to a market, right? You have you have individuals optimizing for their own self-interest, capitalism, right? Individuals jet definitely benefit, right? And definitely create, if you will, the the tapestry of information that organizations write on, right? What v organizations need is verification because from an audit perspective, from a compliance perspective, from a CYA perspective, they need to know who, what, where, when, and why.

Who ran, with what information, where was that information grocked, using what model, where does it reside today, all of that information. Right now and into the future.

If you would force individuals to do that, it's gonna be one of two things. It's gonna come off as an obligation, yet another workday style tool that nobody really wants to use. Sorry to workday. Or alternatively, it's gonna be surveillance, right? Or maybe it's a little bit of both. And nobody wants to do that, right? Nobody wants another tool to be surveilled because they fear being replaced. What you need to do is you need to make it in their self-interest to do these things. It's to their benefit. And then verification falls out the bottom. I need to have this tattooed.

Krish (25:52.897)

Yeah. Yeah.

Daniel Pratl (26:09.636)

somewhere. Like verification is a byproduct of human ambition in the in the modern age. You need to allow individuals to optimize for their own self-interest if you want to get a rich verification environment to do and allow organizations to do to get the information that they need.

Krish (26:26.828)

Yeah. And and I look I I guess we've seen we've seen, you know, to play devil's advocate on this one, we've we've seen that that play out in various loops, right? Where the first era of a lot of big tech companies and technology offerings are with that, you know, self interest in mind for you know, and and you can say in social media that happened, with you know, Google that happened, it was before before it it became a monetary thing, it was

Daniel Pratl (26:48.334)

Mm-hmm.

Daniel Pratl (26:54.829)

Mm-hmm.

Krish (26:55.284)

about the user and you know how how helpful Google Maps or whatever it was would would be to you. and so I guess my question is for you, what you must have to battle with a lot of short term, midterm, long term like forces here because if you're if it's gonna be in the user's self interest, but then I but then the other side of it is that y if any any marketplace

Or the marketplace dynamics will eventually force anything that's measured or has a monetary value downwards in order to get it for cheaper, right? That's kind of how things, you know, will always end up working in any open marketplace. So my question to you is, w isn't that dangerous if that happens to judgment as a metric?

Daniel Pratl (27:31.992)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Daniel Pratl (27:47.757)

Yeah, absolutely. If you allowed fiat currency to basically drive the economics to do what they do, Monopoly to do what it does, yes, things become cheaper. That's why you put it in a token environment. You have a program you have a you have a programmable layer using a digital token, a y digital utility token. And the idea here is that you create inflationary pressure on

The utilization of expertise. So what that means is the more you use it in a bounded environment, the more valuable the actual digital utility token that reflects and represents the expertise becomes, right? if you think about fiat currency, right? We live where that that that money printer just goes burr, right? Fundamentally deflationary, right? it creates a downward pressure on everything.

Krish (28:25.686)

Mm.

Daniel Pratl (28:37.602)

That we actually use. Equities continue to go up for myriad economic reasons, which I won't get into. If you bound the number of tokens, you create a ring fence, and you have more people utilizing that token to reflect their own expertise, inherently and inevitably the token goes up, right? So this is separate and apart from a fiat currency. This is something that is

Backed by a stable coin, so you can convert it to a stable coin, but the digital utility token, which there's a finite number of, continues to go up, right? If you're in this economy utilizing it. Now you can then do additional token, you can create additional tokens, which has a deflect deflationary effect. But the idea is in V1, if you utilize this system and you encode your knowledge, and then we help program the incentives for individuals to do the right things. You can't convert them into money immediately.

It's inevitable that your expertise becomes more valuable because more people participate it. And this is the whole crypto story, right? More people buy in, the token goes up, blah, blah, blah. Bounded that, and there's a finite number of them, so token inevitably goes up. Same exact story, but rather than just token go up, speculation. This is actually you doing the right thing by you and your long-term self because it benefits you to actually show how competitive and how unique and and valuable you are versus somebody else, if that makes any sense.

Krish (30:01.056)

Yeah. So so the way I hear it is the the deflationary pressure of being a commodity in a marketplace would be offset by the fact that information compounds and data compounds and if you were able to use information ec economics rather than the zero sum game of you know regular economics, then then you could potentially offset that and it might be

Daniel Pratl (30:07.598)

Mm-hmm.

Krish (30:31.412)

it might be in self-interest to to have better judgment and to have better critical thinking and better all of those things because it would actually not just get you a better outcome or be in your self interest in terms of how you monetize it, but you would actually offset the marketplace economics as well, right?

Daniel Pratl (30:41.452)

Yeah.

Daniel Pratl (30:57.736)

Exactly. And if you look at synthetic markets like sports is the one that is the most press you know, like comes to mind most immediately 'cause it's the youngest. name image likeness in the United States in in college. I I played college football, I kinda follow it and you know,

You get two when a name image likeness was allowed and it's and athletes in s in college could make money off of themselves for the first time, you had this new synthetic economy that was created where the quarterbacks obviously made the most money, but then everybody else kind of did the long tail, the third string guard and the backup tight end started making money as well. And individuals needed to be able to evaluate those persons more rigorously than they did prior. What are they eating? When are they going to class? Are they doing the right things in their social life?

So on and so forth. All if you if you create a structure and boundaries around this economy, everything becomes much more interesting. And so therefore the information becomes much more robust. That's what we're trying to do with the thing that drives the modern economy, which was the stuff inside of our heads.

Krish (32:00.757)

Yeah, and it's I mean, when you when we talk about it like this, it feels like it feels like a really critical piece of the jigsaw in a world I don't yet understand. Do you know what I mean? It's like the it's a it's a world that I kind of really quite imagine I live in yet. But I think that one of the bets that you're making and like Dan, whenever I talk to you I I feel like I've just come out of twenty thirty five. And so if if I i it

Daniel Pratl (32:12.067)

Yeah.

Krish (32:30.282)

You know, is that is that the kind of it's a I guess it must be a blessing and a curse, right? It in a curse in the way that a lot of people you're talking to, like you said earlier, just maybe are not there yet or don't like not in terms of intelligence or smartness, but just in terms of like processing that this could be a good thing for them. And this is not just a good thing for them, but it could be a really critical cog in

Daniel Pratl (32:52.397)

Yeah.

Krish (32:57.952)

the wider machine of how society might work in the future.

Daniel Pratl (33:01.378)

Yeah, so when I talk to you, I talk very a little bit more high-minded. I get a very bit meta when I speak to you. So when I'm sp yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no, no. It's it's when I speak to people about the value proposition, I try to keep it real, proof. You want to show that you're what you've actually done, not just say nice things about yourself on LinkedIn. And that really resonates. I keep it very one on one, if you will. but the way I see things playing out is this is somewhat inevitable.

Krish (33:06.722)

'Cause that's 'cause I don't understand it fully and I ask all the silly questions.

Daniel Pratl (33:28.802)

This transition to an encoded expertise infrastructure where expertise is the scarce asset and we monetize it more effectively than just every two weeks when you get your paycheck, right? There is th that is that is somewhat inevitable. There's a lot of details that are still up in the air about how it looks like. Do we create passive annuity structures and universal basic income off of this? I don't know. I can't predict that kind of future. But I liken it to

Analytics again in sports, right? in the early in the late 70s and early 80s, baseball was starting to baseball analytics and then basketball analytics started becoming a th becoming a thing. And it took until 2015 or so with Steph Curry, you know, shooting three-pointers for some for the insight that an additional point, 50% more on a three-pointer, is from an analytics perspective optimal, right? Like that's what you should be doing. People should be reigning threes as you see the game today. It took 30 or so odd years for that insight.

To be fully digested by a system that knew what was good for them and still ignored it. I think we're probably going to see kind of a compressed timeline of that. And I think it's probably gonna take three to five years for this kind of to be digested by the broader economy. I think the wealth gap, I think rising, you know, insecurity and the notion of a career is going to drive that, and that's gonna compress that timeline. and why am I in this? I'm not in this to like.

to to to to to make a billion dollars. There's a faster way to make a lot of money than than doing this. It's I'm doing this because it's the right thing to do and because the incentives layer is also very critical to building a durable economy. You need to incentivize individuals to think long term. And if

someone like me doesn't you know come with that long-term thinking. It devolves into yet another casino and a prediction market on who's expert. Krish, I guarantee you this is gonna happen. And my expertise is gonna back that up. Prediction markets have their value. And this is just an example. Prediction markets, resolvability by some point in time, absolutely have their value in the economy to come, just given the vast amount of information that's going to be available.

Krish (35:22.68)

Yeah.

Daniel Pratl (35:34.882)

But you can see where it fails, right? If you don't think about long-term thinking and proper incentives structure. So that's why I'm in this, because I feel like I've had a very serendipitous path to this moment, and I've got something to say that's a little bit unique and probably interesting and useful as time goes on.

Krish (35:37.944)

Yeah.

Krish (35:54.189)

You know, I I I really hope that what you're saying here behind like the theory and the the the way that things unfold do do unfold like that, because it would mean that people took their data more seriously and it would mean that people took more pride in where the outputs of their minds go. you know, right now, you know, like I s I mentioned social media and all these sorts of areas, but

The say do gap is huge on that one where people people claim to want data privacy and people claim to be outraged when things are done with their data and and mined by companies that are not in their best interests and then they act very differently in in real life. so I think that, you know, if if people were incentivized and felt sort of that felt compelled to do this, I think, you know, that would be good. I mean I I would think that that would

Daniel Pratl (36:24.386)

Mm-hmm.

Daniel Pratl (36:34.028)

Mm-hmm.

Krish (36:52.824)

Throughout the course of my career I guess I've been frustrated that people didn't care more about their data and it's not just a behavioral signal, it's like it can get a l it can get really deep and and

Daniel Pratl (37:03.49)

Yeah. You've you've got to create a better dopamine hit, you know. free, making yourself the product is not something you think about on the day to day. And hell, even in crypto, nobody really cares about decentralization, right? The things they say they care about, they simpl they simply don't. it's the it's all about the docam dopamine hit, finding out what your friend's doing, poke.

Krish (37:08.856)

Yeah.

Daniel Pratl (37:25.784)

Token go up, you need to provide a counterbalance dopamine hit that is actually useful and constructive. It's harder, it's very hard, but it's doable, especially now that we have the tools in front of us.

Krish (37:39.905)

And so and so then let's let's talk a little bit about the consequences or the I the what if scenarios here. AI bubble and people and companies doing you know layoffs by the swathes. obviously this th the potential of a really big fallout in the next two years, which is there, could have a big impact on what you do with your business potentially. So I imagine you're thinking about this. What

So just some predictions, basic predictions on like what do you think there is a big sort of tipping point for corporate work and the way that jobs get done over the next year? I I I could I feel like I can see it not happening, I can see it happening, I can see it crashing into a headlong into a wall, and being like a really bad

you know, one off moment in society, but I can also see it just like a w a war of attrition where, you know, over bit by bit, brick by brick, roles and people's jobs and actions and that people take at work just get replaced one by one. What what what's your take on where things might go from here?

Daniel Pratl (38:53.694)

Yeah. It's hard to paint really broad strokes, so I'll try to keep it as as as like high level as I can and go specific on a couple of things. AGI, so what? What's the point? What is it going to do? Right? And that totally ignores the fact that a vast majority of individuals, you know, especially in the service industry, consider themselves and their value in eight minute increments and that's not going anywhere, be it accountants, law firms, et cetera.

So a lot of the things where these tools are rapidly and readily deployable run into the harsh reality of human beings' own self-interest already, right? So let's put AGI aside for that simple fact alone. And then you have front frontier foundational models. Those tools are

Are generating this massive real estate build-out that's running into municipal conflict, regulatory and compliance conflict, and people are being primed to do something like I am trying to do, like think about yourselves and your security and your self-interest. And putting that aside, this notion of like we've created this perfect opportunity for a situation like mine to say you matter and you need to feel secure, let's think about the real estate build-out for a second. We've seen this before, right?

First, it was the hardware build-out in the 70s when it came to personal computers, thinking that the hardware was the valuable thing, and then commercial off-the-shelf with a virtualized application layer came around, and it turns out the hardware is a commodity, right? And then with networking infrastructure, Cisco was the most valuable company in the world in 2000, and then all of a sudden, 10 years later, network function virtualization, software-defined networking comes around, and all that fiber we built out was totally unnecessary.

I very much anticipate something like that happening here for very foreseeable reasons as well, is that human beings want something on their thin client, their phone, that's just good enough. We really don't care about it being the best Opus 9.5, fable, whatever. We care about good enough and latency. And I think also security when you're considering your own data from an asset perspective, because it's value, that's the dopamine hit.

Daniel Pratl (41:01.652)

I anticipate AI becoming just another tool with small language mod models at the edge on a thin client being just good enough to do something with a very articulated and well-defined purpose. That's where the world is going. We've this is very much the fulfillment of the IoT Internet of Things narrative from 15 years ago, twelve to fifteen years ago. We're just making that manifest, right? I think AI makes that more durable and more accessible.

And I think this this build-out for AI AI models is a little bit silly, as especially as we see small models become more performant. I don't think there's gonna be an AI explosion or nuclear meltdown. If it is, it's gonna be in the compliance-related spectral sector. some EY, Deloitte, compliance-related failure because they were reliant on AI. It'll be something like that, right? We'll see something that that kicks off some type of small.

Krish (41:53.239)

Right, right, right.

Daniel Pratl (41:56.217)

Economic meltdown related to the general integrity. If this could happen here, where else is it gonna happen? That narrative could totally play out. But these these technologies are very durable and very useful, but they're not going to replace people. They're gonna elevate people, make them more successful, make them more valuable, because you're sharpening the data integrity around these individuals. That's the whole point of them. so I threw a lot at you, Krish. Hopefully that made a little sense. Yeah.

Krish (42:21.388)

No, it does. And honestly makes a lot of sense but also gives me a lot of hope, I guess. It helps me imagine a world where everyone does level themselves up and level and and get get to grips with what isn't just good enough, but is like you said, intelligence in your own self interest and and turning that into something that that really benefits your day to day.

Daniel Pratl (42:46.285)

Mm-hmm.

Krish (42:51.37)

any any parting thoughts you wanna you wanna leave me with, Dan? You always do this pretty well, so I always I'm always like No, no, no, wait, let's talk about that.

Daniel Pratl (42:59.095)

Yeah.

Yeah. the one thing I'll say is after building these products by myself and with others, it's there is no easy button to do good work, right? So expertise now more than ever matters. Expertise really is going to come from judgment, taste is going to come from brownfield adjacencies. And what I mean by that is I think the era of 30-year careers and a gold watch at the end is pretty much done. I think we've we all kind of know that.

Krish (43:28.172)

Yeah, I agree.

Daniel Pratl (43:30.828)

going into the thing that's right next to the thing you just did, like I was a riveter here and now I'm a riveter here, outside of the trades. I think that there's that's a whole different economy. But for the knowledge work, finding other interesting things that are germane, it hell, unrelated, and trying to gain expertise there.

Is where the most valuable insights are going to come from. Because this jumping from one silo to the next is where you develop then that that instinct, that creativity that human beings have, that machines just don't have, right? I just don't think we're ever gonna create that because it is this gut feeling, this insight that you get, that you it's you spend three months trying to put words to.

Human beings need to get really good at being imaginative and creative again, which was what we always did before the Industrial Revolution came along and turned us all into riveters, so to speak. So yeah, expertise matters, have a lot of varied experiences, because that's how you're gonna make yourself most valuable.

Krish (44:29.45)

I'm seeing almost like that Japanese Ikikai drawing where the Venn diagram where there's what do you do, what do you like, what means a what are you good at. And there's there's all those different circles and and this one maybe is just encouraging you to not only think about what you do, right? And it's encouraging you to maybe go into one of the other areas for a bit and think about think about what you don't do that you are good at and what you are good at in what you do that

Daniel Pratl (44:43.31)

Yeah.

Krish (44:58.772)

Is transferable to something else, you know?

Daniel Pratl (45:01.1)

Yeah, and and then sorry, I I keep thinking of things as you say them. You know, and the thing that connects those four Quadron's that you just described is the ability to tell a good story and narrative. And that's actually what I've I've built into our system is, I mean, man, try to explain yourself and a and and e and articulate your value to somebody. You can tell other people's story quite well, but tell yours, it's terrible. You're like, I don't know, I did this thing and

Krish (45:03.392)

Yeah.

Krish (45:12.119)

Yeah.

Krish (45:25.559)

Kill that.

Daniel Pratl (45:26.016)

You need to have a system that builds iPhone photo stories for you, for your career. You did this, then you did that, and then you did this thing, and it's amazing. And that just is created for you. Telling a good narrative is absolutely critical in the modern economy. And branding, I think, is something that we can build into these systems for its users.

Krish (45:48.054)

I love it. And there's so many ways places it could go. And look, as promised, you did end on something that I want to talk about for another hour. But alas, we we we have run out of time. it's been as always a massive pleasure, Dan, to talk to you and just to explore all these different scenarios. And it sounds like, like I said, what you're building is something that I couldn't even grasp when I first spoke to you. and now it may it really excites me and

Daniel Pratl (45:55.724)

Yeah.

Krish (46:16.044)

So hopefully anyone listening to this as well, sort of gets gets pumped by that idea of what what could be in the future. thank you so much, Dan, and until the next time and we'll we'll probably unpack it another another bit as well.

Daniel Pratl (46:29.153)

Awesome, Krish. Appreciate you, man.

Krish (46:31.436)

Thank you.