Show Notes
On this episode of Nuance, Case interviews Chris Danusiar, a highly-regarded business and technology consultant. They discuss the emerging technologies of blockchain and artificial intelligence, and the need for people of deep Christian faith and wisdom to be involved in their development. Chris unpacks the potential of blockchain and cryptocurrencies to disrupt traditional financial systems, highlighting the need for integrity and ethical considerations in the adoption of these technologies. He also shares how such tools can be used to benefit our communities, particularly when shaped by a commitment to integrity and the good of others.
Episode Resources:
Chris’ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisdanusiar/
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System by Satoshi Nakamoto: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Public Company Accounting Oversight Board: https://pcaobus.org/
Your Work Matters to God by Doug Sherman & William Hendricks: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0891093729
Nuance is a podcast of The Collaborative where we wrestle together about living our Christian faith in the public square. Nuance invites Christians to pursue the cultural and economic renewal by living out faith through work every facet of public life, including work, political engagement, the arts, philanthropy, and more.
Each episode, Dr. Case Thorp hosts conversations with Christian thinkers and leaders at the forefront of some of today’s most pressing issues around living a public faith.
Our hope is that Nuance will equip our viewers with knowledge and wisdom to engage our co-workers, neighbors, and the public square in a way that reflects the beauty and grace of the Gospel.
Learn more about The Collaborative:
Website: https://collaborativeorlando.com/
Get to know Case: https://collaborativeorlando.com/team/
Episode Transcript
Case Thorp
Okay, really, do any of you truly understand blockchain and all this artificial intelligence emergence? Well, I’ve tried. I have watched untold numbers of YouTube videos trying to get my mind around this stuff. And you know what? Thankfully, it’s a guest like I have today who is patient with me and continually try to make all this make sense. Well, today, friends, we’re focusing on blockchain.
In particular to artificial intelligence, these two complicated concepts, but so integral to one another. Now here on Nuance, we focus on Christian professionals impacting the public square. And let me tell you, I am very grateful to have someone like Chris Danusiar at the forefront of this emerging technology and especially on a global level. I mean, why should we care?
Well, as with any emerging technology, the methods and patterns we use for such a technology at its startup can have major implications down the road. And I am grateful. We need people of deep Christian faith and even deeper wisdom in these laboratories, these boardrooms, these strategy sessions, seeing that innovation occurs while at the same time that technology serves the common good. So Chris, thank you for being here and welcome.
Chris Danusiar
Pleasure. Thank you.
Case Thorp
Really appreciate it. Chris and I have known each other for a number of years and through work in the greater denomination, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. And Chris, I know I’ve driven you nuts with all my questions.
Chris Danusiar
No, I do love your questions and I especially love the discussions that we eat into once they come up.
Case Thorp
Well, smart people make me happy and excited. So to our viewers and friends, welcome to Nuance where, like I said, we seek to be faithful in the public square. I’m Case Thorp, and I want to encourage you to like, subscribe, and share these videos and podcasts. It helps us in a big way, grow an audience. Also, let me invite you to our website, collaborativeorlando.com, where you can subscribe to our blogs.
We’ve got a couple of five-day e -devotionals that come right to your email. And then I’m going to hold up a picture on for those on YouTube, this 31-day faith and work prompt journal. It’s a 31-day journal where I give you some prompts and in and through your prayer time and conversation, you really grow an understanding of how faith and work integrate. If you register for that on our website, we’ll be glad to send it to you for free. Well, let me introduce you now to Chris Danusiar. So this is really interesting to me. He has worked with four of the big five. And if you’re not familiar, what’s that five of the big four? Is that because Anderson became Accenture?
Chris Danusiar
Four. Five of the big four. Five of the big four. Yes. Because the Anderson went away. Yes, that’s right.
Case Thorp
That’s okay. That’s great. If you’re not in the world of accounting, you may not realize like the big four are those major corporations that young, energetic college graduates get big fat offers and excited. And then three years later, after working 90 hours a week, they’re exhausted and spent. But for many, many decades, Chris went from Anderson to Accenture, KPMG, Price Waterhouse, Cooper’s, Deloitte, and Ernst & Young.
Now today, he’s a bit of a free agent in that he partners with global clients to engage current technology, develop high performing teams and advising startups. He’s been a CTO, a CIO, a CEO, and a senior product officer, worked with companies with 350 million plus budgets and more. I love that he’s also really leading in more than just the marketplace and in technology, but also in the governmental area.
He’s part of a technology advisory group called the Public Corporation Oversight Accounting Board, the PCOB. And they’re a nonprofit regulator in the accounting industry and over broker dealers that advises the Security and Exchange Commission. And that’s a big deal seeing that our financial markets and the technology that’s out there are doing well for us all. Chris has earned a diploma in strategy and innovation from the University of Oxford, the Said Business School. He has a wonderful wife and three grown daughters with three great husbands and the first grandchild around the corner, lives in the Chicago area, elder in his church, Emmanuel Presbyterian. Dude, all that amazing resume and you’re about to be a granddad.
Chris Danusiar
I know, right? Yes, it’s exciting, super exciting.
Case Thorp
Well, I’ll be curious to hear how blockchain blesses your grandchild. So, what didn’t I hit? What more do we need to know about Chris Danusiar?
Chris Danusiar
When I have spare time and I’m home, I love to cook, I love to go on road trips, and I love to sail.
Case Thorp
Okay, so like, Michigan?
Chris Danusiar
Yes. Yeah, in fact, I was supposed to go. A friend of mine has a timeshare and we were scheduled to go on Friday and Sunday this past weekend. Friday got canceled. We tried to go Saturday. That got canceled. Sunday got canceled. All the wind and six-foot waves in Lake Michigan were too much for us. So I’ll get there. Yeah.
Case Thorp
Yeah. Well, the conditions have to be right. So my senior year at Emory, I had one class, which was a required four hour course on Mondays in religious studies as a religion major. And then I had a buddy who was the president of the Emory Sailing Club and they had a little boat up at Lake Lanier. And, you know, I mean, when the wind’s right, you got to go. So I missed like three of these in a row and the professor reached out and said, Case. You want to graduate, don’t you? I was like, I do, but when the wind’s right…
Chris Danusiar
Yeah, you gotta catch it. That’s right. That’s right.
Case Thorp
Well, tell me this, so like you’re at that intersection of accounting and technology, certainly business. What was the path that got you into this? The numbers side or the computer side?
Chris Danusiar
It was definitely the computer side. I actually graduated with engineering degree many moons ago and it started my senior year. I realized I didn’t want to be an engineer. So I finished with my engineering degree and didn’t want to just, you know, as I saw it kind of crunch numbers and build things. I wanted to deal more with people. So I went out right away and got an MBA and out of my MBA, I bounced into the consulting business and it was technology consulting. Computers weren’t everywhere like they are now. They weren’t ubiquitous. We didn’t even have an internet. So it was a move right out of MBA school into consulting and tech consulting.
Case Thorp
So your career has ridden this computer revolution. Did you start out consulting in abacuses?
Chris Danusiar
Totally. I can remember actually vividly, half your audience probably hasn’t, would never live before GPS, right? But I remember I was in India in the back of a taxi cab going to a client meeting and my Blackberry of course no longer exists, but it gave me a notice saying, Google Maps is available. I said, what the heck’s that? And I downloaded it in the back of the cab. And I turned on my GPS, which had only been announced a year or so before that. I downloaded Google Maps. And I said, I’m going from here to here in Hyderabad, India. And sure enough, it worked. Day one being released. And I was blown away. Now I can’t go anywhere without it.
Case Thorp
Wow. Yeah, we used to have to actually plan and think ahead. And now we just get in the car and go.
Chris Danusiar
Yeah, it’s a different world.
Case Thorp
And without cell phones, you had to like all agree, okay, we’re going to call mom or this friend and they’re going to be able to say, so and so is at this place and that place and different world. Well, so, riding the computer wave, especially as a person of faith, give us a sense of what we’ve lost or perhaps what we’ve gained. And I know you’d be an optimist, so I imagine you’re going to hit more on what we’ve gained, but you tell me.
Chris Danusiar
That’s right. Yep. You’re right. I am an incurable optimist. And I’m also an unrepentant change addict. So I really, I think certainly it’s flattened the world with computers, right? And a good example, a positive outcome of the pandemic was that a lot of companies and a lot of educational organizations and universities, and my alma mater at Oxford, have been able to open up their teaching and their degrees to anybody with an internet connection, right? And they could do that for less. I’ve been saying for 20 years, I can work anywhere. Give me a phone and an internet connection, I’m working, right? But only after the pandemic has it become really obvious to most that that’s true. And it’s flattened access to many people who never would have access to Oxford as an example. And I think that’s a huge, huge positive.
You know, the big negative that’s finally coming to light is the kind of addictive design and intent of an iPhone and of all the apps that are on there. And Silicon Valley intentionally saw what would happen if they created things certain way. The endorphins fire, the addiction kicks in and you’re stuck. And I think it’s rewiring brains and doing a lot of damage that, you know, we as parents, hopefully we can fight against. But it’s ubiquitous access and it’s great for leveling and giving people that opportunity, but it’s also far too addicting and it’s rewiring brains, I think, in a bad way for people who are so smart.
Case Thorp
Okay, tell me this. So I guess Apple early days of the iPhone and their development and the little red dot that comes up, were they really thinking endorphin hit? They were thinking a practical way to say, go check it.
Chris Danusiar
Absolutely. No, they were thinking endorphin hit. All of them. They were that aware. And it stands to reason why Steve Jobs wouldn’t let any of his kids look at a computer or an iPhone. He knew exactly how bad they were.
Case Thorp
Really, they were that aware? Wow. Okay. Well, blockchain. Help me as a fourth grader understand blockchain.
Chris Danusiar
Yes. OK. And I do recommend this to people. If you haven’t read the Satoshi white paper on Bitcoin, just Google that white paper on Bitcoin and read it. Even if you’re not a mathematician or scientist, it’s a fascinating read. It’s about 12, 13 pages. And it brought together the first kind of public cryptocurrency on blockchain. And blockchains are simply published ledgers or you can think of it as kind of a Google app spreadsheet in the sky or some way of collaborating across the cloud that nobody owns and nobody runs. It’s been designed and built so that the rules of the actual blockchain handle its propagation, it handles its integrity, and it allows a disparate set of parties to collaborate even though they’re competing or they have no kind of a formal way or reason for being governed together. And so it really is kind of a spreadsheet in the sky that kind of helps manage, it manages itself mostly. There’s four or five or eight different ways that governance is handled. And it’s all down to math and the use of cryptography and to make sure that when you access it, it has integrity, it propagates and allows people to share what they want to share in a consumer or corporate sense, but also protect either your privacy or your intellectual property as an organization behind that.
Case Thorp
Okay, well maybe that answers my question because I hear transparency and the movement of monies are very clear to see, but then why is there the mob? Why are there criminals that wouldn’t they be exposed?
Chris Danusiar
Well, yeah, it’s in the early days, the fear and indeed some to some still in Washington, D.C. here, they’re, you know, they’re convinced that it’s only used for evil and that needs to be shut down. I think it’s like any other tool personally, it can be used for evil. And, you know, one of my favorite Wallace and Gromit lines, you know, we’ve created him for good, but he turned out evil. I mean, that can happen. And you either govern it well and put and manage it well and much like we’re doing right now with the ethics around AI, you’ve really got to handle it in a way that is ethical. If you don’t, it’s absolutely out of control and can cover or harbor a lot of bad stuff.
Case Thorp
Well, and as a man of deep Christian faith, you know why anything can be corrupted.
Chris Danusiar
Absolutely, absolutely. And yeah, and at its core, the technology itself is not nefarious, but it’s the people.
Case Thorp
Yeah, it’s the people. It’s the self-centered. Okay, but even still, wouldn’t a criminal be exposed if they’re using blockchain for money movement?
Chris Danusiar
They have an extra layer or two of ambiguity. There’s literally one of the startups I advise is a kind of analysis platform for cryptocurrency. And there’s I think two, three thousand active cryptocurrencies out there now. There’s a top one hundred that are most active. And they all have some sense of as long as you have your key, which is either a password of 20 words strung together or some other way of uniquely identifying your account.
Case Thorp
And you carve it on stainless steel and bury it in your yard, right? Yep. Cause it is required. No password reset.
Chris Danusiar
You can do absolutely, absolutely. And there’s all sorts of stories. It is part and that’s right. And if you lose that little piece of stainless steel that had what is written down, then whatever it is in that account is lost forever. And it just hits their orphans on the block chain. Nobody ever accessing again. So if you’re just known or if your counsel, we know by just an IP address or this this kind of token address, then you could be anybody. You could be the most common good giving person in the world, or you could be the biggest criminal. You all store it in this ambiguous address.
Case Thorp
So the address is not necessarily tied to a name. Got it.
Chris Danusiar
It is not. It is not. Now, there are ways, of course, law enforcement’s been ahead of this for all over this for a long time. And even not knowing who it is just by the patterns of how it trades and how it moves, they can deduce and find things. So it’s not pure anonymity at all, but it has a layer or two of that some people find very attractive.
Case Thorp
Okay, now didn’t I read a couple of years ago that was it Costa Rica completely shifted?
Chris Danusiar
I believe it was Venezuela. Yeah, that’s right. And they did. And they wrapped it around their oil reserves. It was a petroleum kind of… It’s a digital, as I understood it, it was a digital instantiation of their physical oil under the ground. And that’s the big nut that everybody’s trying to crack in blockchain and cryptocurrencies. And, even AI, is how do we represent with integrity something physical in a digital space? Because once your physical gold or your physical oil or your physical artwork is represented digitally, then it’s much more liquid, it’s much more fungible, it’s more transferable, but there’s always got to be the link between the digital and the physical for that to happen real fast.
Case Thorp
Okay, so that’s blockchain in the financial world, but it’s more than that.
Chris Danusiar
It is. It is. And there are public blockchains which are owned. They’re not owned by any single entity, as I mentioned. And the people who actually work the blockchain and crunch the numbers to keep it have integrity, they manage it and vote for change that might go on. There are also private blockchains, and they tend to be built by the big corporates. But there are some startups who have private blockchains. And there is a company or an entity or a nonprofit that’s behind it, but they design it in a way to hopefully allow disparate parties, even competitors, to participate in a very efficient way. I’ll give you an example. In the shipping industry, I think at any point in time, there’s tens of thousands of cargo ships circling the globe. And every container on that ship, and each ship might have, whatever, three thousand containers. Every container is uniquely numbered. Every item that’s in that container is uniquely numbered. And every time it passes one jurisdiction to another to another, there’s taxation that has to be tracked. There’s ownership that has to be tracked. Just literally millions of data points in order for the shipper to communicate with the buyer or the owner of every individual item in that ship of all the insurers that are involved, all the taxing authorities are involved. It’s a big hairy complex bit of computer code. And there’s no one entity that can say, look, I’ve got this shipping masterpiece of a platform. Let me run your entire shipping end to end.
Case Thorp
You wouldn’t necessarily trust one certain country or the UN to own that.
Chris Danusiar
Exactly. And so something like that, which is very complex with many disparate parties, very data centric. There are some private blockchains out there operating right now that have cut the cost of keeping track of all that stuff way, way, way down because of the blockchain technology, which allows everybody to participate in the way that they should and see the data they’re allowed to see, but not see the competitive data or the data that is proprietary to any individual party.
Case Thorp
Very helpful. Now, what if there’s a dispute? To whom do they appeal?
Chris Danusiar
It depends on which chain you’re on. But there’s a governance. In some cases, it’s a set of 10, 15 persons who no one of them has a full say. It’s almost like a board in any organization. In some cases, it’s the developers, the people who are contributing to the layer of the blockchain and the developers themselves who have invested, of course, and have own bits of the blockchain or own tokens on that blockchain, and they’re perpetuating. They vote to make a change or to do something different. That’s what Ethereum has gone through a series of major changes in the last 10 years. All had to be voted on by the lead parties, and then it takes years of development and testing, and then finally they flick the switch and the change happens.
Case Thorp
Well, that’s very helpful because the currency side of things is a little too out there, but I can really get my mind around such a thing. Let me throw this by you that somebody said to me. They say, Case, you know, all your online life, so many of our listeners, myself included, have pictures and Facebook and Google docs and all this stuff. Number one, you don’t own any of it. You would agree. And number two, you can’t ultimately control it.
Chris Danusiar
That’s right. Yep.
Case Thorp
And the worry is as AI moves forward, it’s going to be grabbing and searching for data. And so what if one day your grandson’s grandson says, Hey, Alexa, pull up great, great granddaddy, Chris, to talk to me about Jesus or to talk to me about shipping blockchain. What’s to keep the AI from scrubbing it, making it politically correct, twisting with the theology. And the answer is nothing.
Chris Danusiar
Nothing, nothing whatsoever. Yeah. Yeah, for good or evil. And there’s the speed of innovation. I left the big four industry back in 2018 and did some work as interim CEO of a blockchain startup. In my first three or four months of that job, I realized that which I’ve been doing for the previous 15 years, I would advise my board and, you know, of the companies I was with, yeah, you’re going to spend $10 million, $100 million, $300 million on this project. And then three years from now, we’re going to throw away at least a third of it and redo it because it’ll be obsolete. And when I moved into the blockchain arena and went to the Web3 conference out in Berlin, spoke there on a panel and got absorbed in that blockchain kind of technology, I realized that half-life of three years is more like at that time of year, I think it’s down to six months or fewer now. And with AI, it’s three, four months and the next generation comes and it’s much more powerful than the previous. So keeping up with the pace of change is a big, it’s always been expensive and hard, but the price of not participating is high.
Case Thorp
Well, so if the normal Joe isn’t participating in managing, protecting, dealing with their online life, there’s danger there. And so the theory that my friend suggested was, well, we’re shifting from digital to blockchain. And I don’t fully know what that means, but his hope was by being in blockchain, you will then be able to control and own your digital life.
Chris Danusiar
There are plenty of blockchain startups and efforts going on to do exactly that. I mentioned Web 3.0. Web 2.0 was kind of the Google, Facebook, Microsoft. The big corporates own the internet. And it’s not just a wide open connection for the world as it was envisioned back in Web 1.0. Web 3.0 is where they’re trying to design the technology such that none of those big corporate entities rule and have, I mean, they’re all being brought up on monopoly charges and everything else, right? Because they’re just, once they get hold, they maintain that hold as hard as they can. Web3 democratizes all that and allows you participate in it and you decide, assuming that the platform is built this way, you decide what information about you want to share, who gets to see it, in what context or whatever. So you have a much more granular way of sharing your IP, your digital likeness in the community that you’re participating in. There are a couple of them that are out there and the thing is they haven’t grown fire because of the big advertising budgets and all the sort of things that the big corporates have. But the technology is getting there so that there will be alternatives in the coming years.
Case Thorp
So is Web 3.0 being fought by the big corporations?
Chris Danusiar
Yes, I think there’s some co -optation trying, if that’s a word. They’re trying to kind of participate yet own or participate yet overly influence, of course. And there’s kind of the purists who would just totally rebel against that and say, you know, that’s the big Death Star evil thing. We want to keep them out of it. There are others who, you know, there’s a lot of good tech talent in those spaces. There’s a lot of investment. But keep the math intact so that the integrity of the system keeps it from being co -opted.
Case Thorp
Okay. So as a man of faith, I mean, I could say perhaps your intersection of accounting and technology, but certainly faith is so valuable. Tell me how, as a Christian, you’ve engaged with this career and what sort of difference it makes in your consulting and advising on such things.
Chris Danusiar
Yeah. I’ve wrestled with that exact question as a university student, coming out of university with engineering and then an MBA, and have hopefully grown a bit through the years in living that out. A big part of it is, I guess two things. One is like we’re doing here, to the degree I know a little bit about something and somebody doesn’t, I’m very eager to help them understand, help them get their head around it, reduce the fear that they have of not knowing what’s going on or how they can participate with integrity. Secondly, I’ve been very careful to put myself, my energy, my blood, sweat and tears, my intellect, whatever that is, behind entities and organizations that do have integrity, that are doing good things for the marketplace, for the common good. And so, startups I advise, the boards I sit on, all are doing very positive things for the world.
And frankly, I could make a whole bunch more money, you know, going working for like some of the tobacco companies for the last 30 years or something, you know, but I haven’t just because I’ve not wanted my energy to go to something that is just ultimately harmful.
Case Thorp
But can you tell us a specific situation in which it’s a very out there technological option to go this way or that and where you saw folks doing it for ill purposes?
Chris Danusiar
Yeah, I mentioned the Web3 conference in Berlin. It was 2019 is when I spoke there. It might be late 2018. It was one of the early Web3, probably the fourth or fifth time they gathered. And in that former kind of propaganda building in East Berlin, there was three and a half thousand people for this conference. And it was very obvious to me as I walked the halls and talked to people throughout, there was probably a good third of the people there who were just in plain terms anarchists. They wanted to upend and bring chaos to the kind of standard world order. And this technology would be able to do it. There was another third that were kind of like me thinking, well, this technology is innovative, it’s novel.
And it’s powerful. How do we kind of route it for a way that is good? And there’s probably another third that were there, kind of spectating, not yet participating. But it was in any way, whether it’s hiding, you know, money laundering or, you know, there was a Silk Road selling all sorts of illegal drugs and everything else. And then they were hiding a lot of their work and a lot of their commerce on blockchains and cryptocurrencies. Feds finally broke in, but yeah, it’s really down to what enterprise are you feeding and ultimately where does that lead society?
Case Thorp
Is it, well, before I ask this question, so we did a lot of work in Madagascar in our global mission department and especially in the marketplace direction. And church leaders there would tell me having a Christian businessman or woman is foreign to our culture because they said there’s been so many decades and centuries of colonial exploitation that the perception is if anybody has been successful in business, they had to have lied, stolen and cheated their way there. And so they said to us, one of the best things you could do is just bring over Christian businessmen and women who can just be an example and let it be known. Yeah, you can be a hardworking leader that’s innovative and financially succeed. So I bring that concept then to this question for you. Do you see those leaders in your industry that come from cultures in which the gospel has been present and at work for generations? You know, is America a Christian nation? Well, not on the whole, but by golly, we have an appreciation that Christianity brings to us for human dignity and diversity and those sorts of things. Do you find individuals in this space who come from cultures in which the gospel has not been on the whole at work therefore with a different value system and going in dangerous directions?
Chris Danusiar
Certainly, certainly. Yeah, my experience has been very, I’ve worked until the last four years always with US -based or US -dominant companies. And so I’ve certainly worked internationally, lived in London and Europe for a while, I’ve worked in Asia. I would say that the most obvious or egregious divergence from a real faith -based common good perspective, in my experience, has come more from people who are just, they buy the maxim that’s frankly written in our US corporate law, which is the only reason entities exist is to make money for their shareholders. And it doesn’t matter what you do to society or your customers or your people, your only job is to make as much money as you can. And I mean, we see how Boeing has been performing the last few years because they, and then the whistleblowers now, I mean, Boeing’s done amazing things over life. I’ve got good friends who were there and very senior execs with strong faith. But in the last five, 10 years, I think it’s real obvious. They were maximizing shareholder value and planes are falling out of the sky, right? And that’s terrible. But that’s what our legal code actually holds them to.
And if your faith isn’t a backstop to say, well, it can’t just be that, right? We make more money by making these phones more addictive or by cutting more corners on how fast we can build an airplane or whatever, covering up the fact that my diesel engine is spewing particulates into the air much higher than the regulations sort of allow. Then people make those decisions, they make money and hope they don’t get caught. And that’s the big kind of non -faith, non -higher cause type of person that I run into over and over again.
Case Thorp
I was listening to a Wall Street Journal podcast and they made the point that Boeing used to be run by engineers and that they subtly or intentionally or unintentionally the accountants took over. And that financial driver sacrificed a good bit of the engineering safety and product.
Chris Danusiar
Yeah, and accountants and or the other finance people, right? The people who are looking at, yep, this is how we’re investing. Here’s our return. And we can make this one go down and this one go up and everybody’s happy until something tragic.
Case Thorp
Yeah. So what’s your vision for the future as you seek to bring about the kingdom of God? How do you see that coming about in your work?
Chris Danusiar
I think, you know, I used to, well, you and I grew up in the days of, you know, our parents could have been at one organization for their entire lives. They started working this company and they’re there for 30, 40 years. They retire and never worked anywhere else. I thought, frankly, I was going to do that until Anderson went under. I’m like, well, OK, I’m not because it doesn’t exist. And I’ve now enjoyed, you know, several very high capability organizations. I guess what I would hope is that this technology continues to allow more flattened access, less kind of isolated information access, isolated financial access, isolated influence access. And those who are trying are actually doing quite successfully. I just spent two weeks of vacation in Africa, Egypt and Rwanda, visiting extended family. And the notion of all across Africa using Momo, which basically is your mobile phone number, and you just wire money to each other without a bank, without all the things that are keeping people from participating in financial markets and in commerce, that’s hugely powerful. And so that would be my hope, is that that common good available to everybody enablement comes. Certainly we need many people more to kind of contribute to the software that does that, to the innovation that goes around that. So it’s not just an access to financial markets opportunity, it’s also an access to a vocation or to work that is digital that 20 years ago nobody had.
Case Thorp (35:14.234)
I spent a month in Scotland last summer on sabbatical and there was no cash accepted anywhere I went. None. And I’m seeing it more and more here in Florida where signs on the door, no cash accepted.
Chris Danusiar
Yeah, and pandemic can heighten that, of course, because handing bills back and forth to each other, potentially, they thought might be tracing the sickness. But yeah. Yeah.
Case Thorp
What worries you about the future?
Chris Danusiar
You know what? I think those who say AI is powerful, not unlike nuclear fusion and nuclear capabilities worth 30, 40 years or 50 years ago, I think they’re right. But the AI is another high level order, more powerful both for the positive and negative in that it’s only a matter of time. And we’re already seeing it. That’s
AI are set up and whether it’s large language model or some of the others, and they do take on a life of their own. I mean, we’re seeing already some of the Silicon Valley AI platforms figuring out kind of how to game and lie and hide something from their creators, from the participants in a way that it wasn’t taught. You know, it certainly wasn’t created to kind of be a backdoor or be…
My big fear, and I’m not the only one, there are plenty of people smarter than me that fear it, that unless it’s governed, unless there are ways to keep it under control, it’s going to be faster, stronger, more powerful than us. It will.
Case Thorp
Are you telling us Genesis 3?
Chris Danusiar
It does things already. The black box AI, those creators don’t know how it got to this answer. But it came out with something.
Case Thorp
In our Gotham fellowship, we watch lost interviews of Steve Jobs in the nineties. And this interview is just before he leaves. I forget the name of the company before he goes back to Apple and…
Chris Danusiar
Yeah, I think it was next. I think it was next.
Case Thorp
Yeah, next, before he goes back to Apple. And the interviewer asked something along the lines of, why do you do this? What’s your purpose in this? And he talked about seeing a national geographic program when he was a kid and really impressed at how much faster than the human running a cheetah is. And that not only speed on the ground, but also weight and all those sorts of factors.
He said, but however, if you put a human on a bike, there’s no comparison and the human can far exceed the cheetah. And so it launched him on the hunger to understand how can technology make us superhuman and do things so much bigger and better beyond ourselves, but it’s not always bigger and better.
Chris Danusiar
No, no, bigger for sure. Bigger, faster. Yeah. And, you know, the other big elephant in the room is the energy consumption and these large angular models, these AIs, they gobble up power like nobody’s business, right?
Case Thorp
And they’re running out of information. I read this week how there’s no more libraries or articles or online content.
Chris Danusiar
That’s right, those accessible legally or illegally, right? But then by their nature, they learn from themselves. They learn from ongoing contribution. But yeah, there’s no more source material to suck up. But the power that needed there, and even the computing power, that’s why I think it’s telling that my understanding of what’s going on in Silicon Valley is yeah, they’ve got AI, large -scale, as well as all this other stuff, but they knew years ago if this actually kicks off like it did, we’re going to need more power and we’re going to need more compute. And so you’ve got the nuclear fusion and some other things are being looked at. And then you’ve got computing capabilities that are just magnifying and getting so much stronger. So it’s all going to be harnessed, though. It all has to be harnessed for good, or at least not.
At least make it neutral, right? But there’s a lot of ways it can go bad.
Case Thorp
Well, at the Collaborative, we try to lean into all the sectors of the public square. So you have had such an amazing career in the marketplace, but also in technology. I want to explore a bit of the government aspect in your work on the PCOB. Give us a better summary than I did of exactly what is that, and then tell me about your experiences that compare and contrast between the marketplace and government work.
Chris Danusiar
Yeah, well, that’s a great question. So the PCAOB is the regulator of the accountants and broker dealers across the US. And because it’s a US marketplace, it has huge influence on similar regulators all around the world. And I’m part of a, in fact, we wrap up here in the next couple of months, a two -year technology innovation working group. So there’s 10 of us on there. As I said, when we talked to her, the nine people smarter than me in the room, it’s really amazing. And they’re from all different walks of accounting, business, academia, research, technology, et cetera. And we’re there to advise the board on what technology innovation is doing already right now to change and influence financial markets, financial statement preparation, all the data that’s communicated to potential investors from companies that are looking for investment. And then our second activity was to put together recommendations for the board on how the PCOB itself can embrace and adopt and understand how technology innovation can, again, add integrity to the financial markets, make sure that financial reports and financial data has integrity, minimize fraud, minimize all the kind of bad things that happens when financial markets go bad.
Case Thorp
And you say integrity, I mean, trust is essential. Trust is at the core of all financial exchange work.
Chris Danusiar
It is at the core. That’s right. And it all heretofore has come down to trusting humans, right? Trusting institutions that humans have put together, trusting the law, the code of law that the humans have created. And there’s a lot of things that some on the one side of the spectrum at the Web3 conference wants to eliminate all that human governance and intermediation and let the machines and the math do it rather than humans who can be corrupted or whatever.
Case Thorp
Well, when my car can drive itself, I do believe there will be less car wrecks at some point. But I don’t know if I trust it yet.
Chris Danusiar
And I’m not sure you’re going to see it in your lifetime, I would say. But yes, that’s right. That’s right. But you’re already putting so much trust in your car, even if you’re driving, because there’s at least two dozen computers constantly monitoring everything that’s going on. And they’re deciding when to put the brakes on. If somebody’s going, they’re deciding how fast the wheels are spinning based on the road surface. They’re deciding all sorts of things all the time. And you’ve trusted that on the nose to yourself.
Case Thorp
So government versus marketplace atmosphere.
Chris Danusiar
Yes, so the government is, I mean, the duties and responsibilities are as you’d expect, as I experienced. They’re mind blowing, right? They’re universal. The decisions they make affect everybody. And where they put their energy or don’t put their energy, you know, just wags the tail of the cat of the of the of the populace. And so there’s a huge sense by most that that’s a high calling, that we got to make good decisions. And the decisions we make have a level of big effect on everyone. What I didn’t appreciate until I got involved was, I didn’t appreciate it fully, is that most of the people in these positions are lawyers. And so if you can get in the mind and heart of a lawyer, how they were educated, how their mind thinks, I mean, people very smart, some as smart as people I know for sure.
But there’s an aversion to change. There’s a protective kind of ethos about them. It’s a battle, who can win the case, who can win the argument that perpetuates the ethos of these institutions. And so when I got there as a technologist, as an unrepentant change addict and somebody who really does enjoy figuring out something new and how to embrace it and make it good.
Case Thorp
Unrepentant change addict. I don’t want anybody to miss that. Unrepentant change addict. That’s great.
Chris Danusiar
Yeah, it’s true. But I walked in with that persona and quickly realized that if I emphasize that, nobody in the room was going to give me any credibility because that just means risk, risk, risk. my gosh, we’re going to, you know, the sky’s falling. So we’ve hopefully found ways to help educate and help those who are making these big decisions embrace the technology. And in fact, indeed, I hope work in a different, more collaborative manner as a regulator, which I think can benefit all. If the regulation is purely a hammer, a stick, and a gun, or a fine, that drives certain behaviors. But if there’s some kind of, let’s figure this out together, yes, if you cross the line, you’re going to get fined or put back. But there’s got to be ways. And indeed, blockchain, as we talked about, allows parties that don’t even have the same interests but do want to collaborate can kind of participate in figuring some things out, yet not giving up their role or their intellectual property, which they’re very, very protective of.
Case Thorp
Someone did a study on the lawyerization of Congress and looking at the various professions of Congress through our 200 year history. And you had so many more farmers and small business owners and such and now almost all are lawyers. And therefore the shift that the thinking is, you know, the right words, the right paragraphs will change behavior or control behavior.
Chris Danusiar
Interesting.
Case Thorp
And so the argument was we need a much more diverse Congress to understand the various ways in which society can change and move.
Chris Danusiar
I would say absolutely. I mean, if it’s a representative body and it’s all lawyers, that’s representing 1 % or 2 % of the population, right? Yeah. We do. They’ve got great intellect and great role, but they think certain ways and they don’t think other ways, right? And they’re missing usually. In my experience, I’ve worked for some law firms and some really bright lawyers. But collaborating or dealing embracing technology change is not something they’re naturally learning on or wired to do.
Case Thorp
Well, Chris, I always close by asking people, where do you feel God’s pleasure in your work?
Chris Danusiar
I feel it mostly in seeing individuals or teams who have either been left to kind of fall apart or been written off because they’re just, they used to be good, but they don’t get it, or, no, they can’t do anything. I like embracing people who have commitment to get something done, but yet can’t figure out how to really contribute, and making them high performing, seeing someone who is really bright in a direction that is not normal. How do we kind of bring that into the mix so that they can be their best self and contribute the most to the organization? Since Hendrick’s book, Your Work Matters to God, 30, 40 years ago, 40 years ago, I guess, I read that and I thought, that’s it. It’s helping people thrive. It’s helping organizations thrive. And that’s where I feel God’s pleasure the most.
Case Thorp
Wow, we’ll be sure to put that and the Satoshi white paper in our show notes. Chris, thank you so much. I’ll also put in our show notes a LinkedIn link so you can connect with Chris if you like. Danusiar, D -A -N -U -S -I -A -R, Danusiar. Kind of funny last name. Is that Hungarian?
Chris Danusiar
Thank you. It’s been a pleasure, Case. It’s Ukrainian. Yeah, yeah. None of that would know came over two, three generations ago.
Case Thorp
Ukrainian, wow. Well, thank you so much. And friends, thank you for joining us. Remember, like and share, put something in the show notes helps us to get the word out. Visit collaborativeorlando.org for all sorts of content, but especially you can put in your information there at the bottom button and get this 31 -day Faith and Work prompt journal and we’ll mail it to you. You’ll find us across the various social media platforms. Don’t forget, we’ve got Nuance Formed for Faithfulness, which is a weekly 10 -minute devotional for the working Christian that follows the liturgical calendar. I want to thank our sponsor for today, the Magruder Foundation. I’m Case Thorp, and God’s blessings on you.
