(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Zena. Our guest today is Dan Pretto. He is the founder and CEO of Quadrant, a company building what he calls the verification infrastructure for the AI era. Dan's career spans SEC enforcement during the financial crisis, the CTO's office at Red Hat, and crypto at Ava Labs. Across all three, he kept seeing the same problem, the growing gap between what people know and what they can actually prove. Hi, Dan, welcome to the show. Nice to meet you, Dave. Great seeing you, and thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely. Also joining us today is my co-host, Zena. Zena is an AI that has been trained on my work, and if you want to further interact with Zena, you can chat with her at brainius.com slash Zena. Hi, Zena, welcome to another episode of our podcast. Please say hello to Dan. Hi, Dan, it's great to have you with us. I'm looking forward to hearing how you're shaping verification in the AI era. Let's dive in. All right, very good. So, Dan, I'm excited to have you as a guest here, because we're both working on similar problems around this idea of personal knowledge, and it's also based on this principle of judgment, human judgment, and how it matters in the age of AI. But before we dive into that, I'd like to hear a little bit more about your background. So can you share a little bit about your story and what you're working on right now? Yeah, so my background is, and only in retrospect, serendipitous. It didn't feel that way in the moment. I started out as an attorney at the SEC after the Great Recession. I was there very briefly until I got a bit disenchanted with the regulatory estate and moved on into tech. I was at Red Hat for a large chunk of my career and got to see the arc of open source go from what it was to what it is now. Started a crowdfunding company in the mid-teens, because the legislation had changed and democratization of finance was very hot and very interesting. This was prior to crypto becoming what it was then or what it became. Got to see a very good idea, kind of get strangled, so to speak, by old legislation and moved into crypto because it's arguably the greatest crowdfunding tool ever created and got to see the promise of disintermediation, decentralization, really devolve into what it's become, which is base speculation. And across each one of these, I noticed that not only have mechanisms that were created outlived their mission, but there really is no overarching system architecture incorporating the goodness of these technologies and these systems to do something beneficial for humanity at large. Now with AI and blockchains, you have the ability to unlock value that was previously inaccessible. And create new economies, new market systems that we simply didn't have access to or couldn't even conceive of in times prior. And that's what Quadrant is. It's a big bet on human expertise being the valuable resource going forward and that we can enable individuals to tell a better and more verifiable story about their value, both myopically focused on industries, but also generally than we ever could before. Yeah, no, I love the way you say that human knowledge is going to be the basis for everything that we build with these technologies. And I think it goes back to the idea that we started with is that human judgment is so essential for these technologies to be effective. Without human judgment, it tends to drift and you need to provide context to AI in order for it to be effective. So let's dive in a little bit on that idea. So you say that your judgment is an asset class. Tell us what you mean by that. Yeah, expertise, judgment, insight, the unique taste, if you will, that you bring to bear to the world is incredibly valuable because think about these systems. They are very good at producing high quality artifacts, legislating between identified critical facts that we create in the world, and then creating something that passes the sniff test, if you will, a lot of high quality noise. But we don't know who actually created it, where they came from, why these facts have been oriented in the way that they have to prove the point that you're attempting to make. I can create high quality BS as well as good as anybody else, but it really comes down to where have you been? Where did this come from? Why do you feel the way you feel and think the way you think? Why did you orient this constellation of information in this particular manner? There's no verifiability today for all of those variables under the outcomes. That's because our systems are predicated on evaluating and valuing outcomes. We need a system that allows individuals to be rewarded for collecting their information, verifying their information and exposing information so we can understand the individuals behind the machines. Now, to create that intelligence layer of the people and the information that they bring to bear, you have to give them an incentive to do that, to expose and organize their information in a certain way. That's just an asset class. That's just a market economy. So the idea is, is that if you allow individuals to structure their expertise, to have it evaluated broadly, and to be rewarded for that, then verification falls out the bottom. Verification is a byproduct of human ambition. And that's the big idea here, is that if you create a system that does not reward individuals, you will not get robust information. If you force a system, an AI system on individuals or a way of organizing their information, it creates an obligation. And that feels like surveillance or you're training your replacement. What you need to do is have a new system architecture that rewards people for being right, being good and exposing information, correct information in the right way, and then allow verification to fall out of the bottom of them optimizing for their own self-interest. So in that way, expertise becomes an asset class because individuals see the benefit accrue directly to them by operating in a certain way. That's such a powerful concept. So tell us a little bit more about how Quadrant goes about providing that asset class to individuals that are interested in doing that. Yeah, so first right off the jump, it's not a New York Stock Exchange with Dave and Dan. There's no equity arrangement or bond structure that's gonna trade and we do price discovery on us as a person. No, what I'm talking about is expertise being atomized and then recompiled based on the things that you do day-to-day and the workflows that you have and you'll have in the future, the intelligent workflows, you know, the tools, AI, ChatGPT, or ChatGPT, Cloud, the rest of them. So the way that you work throws off a variety of signals. You went one direction, not the other. You stopped it here. You decided you were finished with this product. All of those data points create a version of you in the way that you think. We call them atoms. You capture those atoms. You organize them based on projects. The world is largely oriented around cases, concepts, projects, and we help you today with your near-term activity. So you solve the problem in front of you while we also help you think long-term because the AI easy button is right there. The world wants you to think about outcomes because that's the way the world has always rewarded things, is outcomes. Quadrant helps you think short-term as well as long-term. Why did I do the things that I did? Why is that valuable? How can I share my own story to other people and have the information around the decisions made that I expose the critical insight into my decision framework while maintaining the object, the artifact, and keep that secret because intellectual property and concern still exist in the world. So the idea is that very simply, Quadrant V1 is a productivity solution that helps you work across models and across tools and then help you talk about it without actually talking about it. You don't have to describe yourself and go on LinkedIn and say nice things and have other people say how great you are and that kind of just be the social proof, right? Totems of competence where you went to school. This allows you to accomplish today and have a system tell the world about how great you are in a vocabulary and a vernacular that's accessible to others. And what that means is that rather than you describing your work, the system describes your work to the individual in a vocabulary that they can access. So gone are the days of engineers having to talk to human resource managers about how good they are at naming your language with that human resource manager not understanding really what's going on. That human resource manager can go on a journey into your work, into your provable progress and understand why you did what you did. What was the result of that? All the while the work that you've created, say for a former employer gets protected. So you have this portable credibility that informs others in the way that they want. And frankly, it's just an evolved approach to proving who we are. Yeah, I really think there is a powerful idea behind it in that you can now have mechanisms that help you show the world what you have produced. But more importantly, it also helps you reflect on your own knowledge, your own capabilities, what you have done throughout history. It helps you discover who you are, right? This is who I am. This is the thinking that has gone into my work. These are the things that I believe in. These are the things I wanna share with the world. It just makes you stronger as a human being. And I think there's a lot to be said about that. Now, your solution also has a verification component to it. So help us understand where that verification comes in and why is that important in the age of AI? Yeah, so there's kind of two layers to it. It's the meta statement. Verification is a byproduct of ambition. You make a market, all of the information individuals optimizing for their own self-interest means that all of the decisions to prove who they are and what they've done creates a robust verification layer. That's one side of it at the 30,000 foot level. The deeper level is that gone are the days and era, in my opinion, of the platforms that you go to to get somewhere else. That's pretty much the internet as it exists today. And we monetize the advertising layer, right? That's how revenue is generated today. You go to LinkedIn to meet people. You go to Reddit to find the communities that you wanna be a participant of. It's our opinion that truly portable, sovereign information about you and what you've done should rest and reside with you, irrespective of what you want to dock or incorporate and interact or integrate with. So consider this. If you don't exist on LinkedIn or Upwork or Fiverr, wherever your reputation currently resides based on work you've done, you really don't exist from a professional perspective. If they cut you off for whatever reason, that reputation that you've accrued disappears. This also applies to the gig economy, think Uber. What if you had portable credibility that revolved around the work that you've done and it rests with you? And that's the blockchain. That's the distributed ledger, if you wanna call it that, component of this. You get a portable credibility wallet that you fully operate and own and you can modulate as you see fit to show the world what you want and what you don't. And all of it totally resides within your hands. So true disintermediation of these control platforms from the web two era. And rather than us monetizing your work, you monetize your work the way that you see fit. A la carte, streaming. So think of it as streaming insight, very similar to a, it's just a licensing contracts on the backside. Or alternatively, turn yourself into an API layer and allow agents to consume your work in the way that you think and the way that you accomplish tasks. It's truly up to you. We wanna fade into the background. We wanna exist at the interstitial moments when you go from one tool to the next and move from development to distribution activities. And we wanna help you tell your story. We're not gonna sell you ads. We sell you a capability to monetize yourself in a new way using these new technologies. Yeah, I think that explanation helps understanding this idea of judgment being an asset class, right? Because now you're truly monetizing what you know. You're monetizing the way you want. You're not dependent on LinkedIn or any other platforms. You have your own way of, like you said, perhaps opening that up to AI agents so that they can leverage your knowledge to do whatever work it is that that agent is trying to do. But you have the control of what extent you're going to allow that to happen. And maybe there's some licensing agreements involved. You are in control of how your own judgment asset, let's call it, is used by the market, right? Exactly, exactly. And mind you, all of this that I've described already exists in the world today. I mentioned like the goodness of these different technologies. GitHub, they're social proof, but for a technical audience. Reddit, networks of communities where individuals self-organize and evaluate the notion of value quite differently based on community. But no one's ever connected these things together to protect and monetize the most valuable and visible value in the world, which is what's in our heads. And that's what we're trying to do here. Take all the proven models, integrate them, and create a market for the truly most valuable asset class today as well as tomorrow. Very good. I'd like to get Zina in on the conversation, and I want to have her ask you a question. So Zina, given Dan's expertise in this idea of creating verified mechanisms where you can leverage your personal knowledge and market that as a asset, what question do you have for him? Dan, with personal knowledge becoming an asset in this AI-driven world, how do you envision balancing verification without stifling the individual's evolving judgment or creativity? Yeah, it's a great question. I'd actually say that the system today without some type of bottoms-up mechanism that where you're programming the incentive layer is actually stifling it as we speak. Think about the world as it exists today. You have organizations monopolizing the intellectual property system. Just keep in mind, patent copyright trademark is just a monopoly on enforcement, and they're quite expensive to go and get a patent. The way the system was constructed 236 years ago was to optimize for service providers, law firms, law lawyers, to make the money because be it filing or filing for litigation, there's some expert in there helping you do that, and those are attorneys. So I would say the system today is actually stifling innovation generally and stifling individual's judgment. I would say that Quadrant, a system like Quadrant, actually gives entrepreneurs, innovators a home where they secure their secrets, expose what they want in a cost-effective manner. Not having this solution today means that you either need to be part of an organization or be well-capitalized yourself to create simply a monopoly on the enforceability, not true monetization of your work, which is what we're attempting to do. Now, let me ask you a question. I want you to either confirm or deny the premise that I'm working under. And like I said, I think we're both working with similar concepts, even though we're attacking it from different angles. But one of the premises that I'm working under is that everyone should be building their own corpus of personal knowledge. And the idea here is that AI needs context, right? AI is only effective if you give it the right context. And if you don't, then what happens is AI tends to pull you towards the average. And pretty soon you're sounding like everybody else, right? You know, you lose your identity, your voice, your brand, everything that makes you unique and valuable. So providing that context is absolutely important. And the way you do that is by building a canonical corpus of personal knowledge that you can share with AI. Do you agree with that? Do you think that's the right concept? I think it's a great starting concept. I agree with that. I think that having a deep repository of information that articulates you. So Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, the great writers, you can create a compiled knowledge base and then have an AI pull from that and it creates a great Ernest Hemingway or Oscar Wilde to refer back to. The problem with that is that that in itself becomes a boundary, right? Just like if you just allow AI to treat you as tabula rasa and you're a blank page, everyone starts sounding the same. Well, Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway are only gonna sound like the snapshot of Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway at the end of their careers, not who they would have become had they have lived longer or whatever happened during their lived experiences. The idea is that you begin with that corpus of knowledge and then you use augmented systems and metacognitions, whatever you wanna call them, to help you more rapidly evolve yourself, more rapidly evolve. And you need to get outside of the myopia of today and think about what you're attempting to do, not only for the project at hand, but who you wanna become in 20, 30 odd years. Excuse me. We have a system called Future You. It's a metacognition. And its whole reason for being is to ask you questions. Like it's you in 30 years, but it's had an eternal sunshine of the spotless mind moment. Its memory is completely wiped. It knows it's successful, but it doesn't know how it got there. The idea is that it's constantly engaging with you and helping you articulate how you think and how you feel because it's helping you become who you want to be in the future, more rapidly and more structured. We think that is a helpful way of getting out of the projects and start thinking about expertise as an encodable unit that reflects your value to the world. Gets you outside of the headspace that you have on the day-to-day, for lack of a better phrase. Yeah, no, I think that's a really good point, right? This should not be something that is fixed. This is something that should evolve over time. And as you start to understand more about yourself, about your beliefs, about what's important to you, the idea is that you should grow, you should evolve. You know, you might find certain things that you start changing your mind on, things that may be contradictory to what you thought before. And that's totally okay because the whole idea here is for you to continuously grow and be able to get closer to that, you know, this is what I want to be in the future, right? Yeah. If somebody is listening to this today, and they're wondering, you know, what should I do today? What should I be focusing on if I want to preserve my identity, if I want to have ownership of my personal knowledge, but I also want to evolve in the way that we've been talking about, what should they be doing right now to be able to be effective in the age of AI? Yeah, and it's almost a follow-on to the prior question, and it's a two-part answer. First off, you need to ensure that you're having varied experiences because sitting in a job for 20 years is not how you have unique insight. Unique insight comes from brownfield adjacencies, whatever you want to call them, different experiences in different realms solving different problems. That's where creativity and imagination, the connective tissue across these things comes in. So that's the first part, different varied experiences creating unique insights. The second thing is kind of the follow-up on the prior question, is that no person is an island. Nobody should operate in isolation. The point of these solutions, future you and all of these tools that we want to develop is to create structured collaboration with others that are similarly credible and experienced to drive useful disagreement and structured novelty. And the idea here is that these tools, if you allow them to take you on a ride, they will take you on a ride towards the average. The idea is that if you have structured disagreement with credible, high quality trusted parties, you can actually use these tools as a true amplifier to go more rapidly towards the unknown, if you will, right? True novelty and exploration. And that is what we should all be striving for. Let's articulate who we are, what we know and what we don't. Let's make it verifiable and therefore credible. And let's get on this fast path towards discovery, which we couldn't do in the past because of the lack of trust and the antiquated rewards mechanisms that we had in place. Yeah, no, I love those ideas. David Epstein wrote a book, Range, which talks about the importance of you gaining the ability to go across domains and gaining experience, whether it's cultural experiences, traveling, researching some domain that you know nothing about, that wide range of experience and knowledge helps you become a better person. And I think in the age of AI, specifically where AI is going to be an expert with much deeper knowledge than any of us could ever hope to have, that range of knowledge becomes very, very important because then you can ask the questions of the expert, right? And you know just enough to ask the right questions, which I think is really important. But the other thing that you mentioned that I think is absolutely critical is don't hold it just for yourself. You have to share that with other experts, other thought leaders, because you need to be challenged on your thinking and you need to be able to evolve and grow your thinking. And having that collaborative capability is absolutely critical. Yep, yep. Be it Mark Twain or Anthony Bourdain, everyone said that, you know, traveling and different varied experiences makes you successful. And that's always been true. Now it becomes professionally valuable, if not critical. Yeah. So I'd like to ask Zina a question here. Zina, I'd like to get your thoughts here. And in particular, I'd like to ask you what you think users should be doing in the future in terms of recording, protecting, and leveraging their personal knowledge in the age of AI? I think users should treat their personal knowledge as a core asset. Start by intentionally capturing what matters, whether that's reflections, key decisions, or lessons learned. Protect it through trusted, secure platforms, just like you'd safeguard any valuable. Finally, leverage it by using tools that help you synthesize it into better decisions. The goal is not just to store it, but to turn it into wisdom and action. Yeah, no, I think that's well said. And I think it's in alignment with everything we've been talking about here. At the end of the day, you want to become wiser, right? So you want to grow and compound your judgment so that you make better decisions in whatever it is that you're pursuing in life. Dan, this has been a great conversation. Please tell our audience where they can find you. And is there a final message you want to leave for the audience? Yeah, sure. You can find me at Pratl, my last name, P-R-A-T-L dot me, Pratl dot me. That has all of my socials. I try to be on them as much as I can, but I'm also heads down working a lot these days. And the message I'll leave you with is that we have never been more valuable ever than we are now. We just have to do it the right way. We have to structure information, expose information, and think about the secrets that we keep in our head as something that needs to be secure for our own value. And shareable with others. That solution is going to be critical. And I'd love to talk to you about how your expertise makes Quadrant more valuable to you. So I'm happy to talk to anybody and reach out as you see fit. Yeah, I think the way you said that is really powerful. We're becoming more valuable than ever. People are afraid of AI. People are afraid of AI taking their jobs. I just think human beings are going to become better, more capable, and needed much more than we were in the past because we have some unique abilities that AI can't duplicate. It's our judgment. It's our intuition. It's our ability to really see across domains and use AI as a partner, as a thinking partner. But having the final judgment call on what matters, what's important, what's right, putting ethics into everything that we do. So there's a lot that humans can bring to that conversation. Well said. Thank you so much, Dan. It was great having you here on the show. And thank you, Zina. Thank you for being a great host once again. I'm here to help make each conversation insightful and meaningful. Let's keep uncovering new angles and helping others thrive in this AI era. Very good. Thank you so much, Dan. Thank you. Take care. Take care. Bye-bye.