Decentralised Data Ownership & Historic Preservation: Brittany Kaiser on DAOs, Blockchain & Innovation

[: 00:00:05

[00:00:31] Brittany Kaiser: But I helped co write the first DAO LLC law in Wyoming in 2018, where we really saw the future of DAOs as a very intelligent way to manage legal organizations, you know, companies, non profit, governmental organizations, of course, if you've ever read Bellagio's The Network State, I think you have an idea of where that could possibly go, but Appreciate it. 


We really started the Dow LLC because we saw the emergence of real Dow architecture for having autonomous organization run by people decentralized all over the world that have come together to create a business or some other sort of impactful organization managing assets together, where you have clear, transparent governance structures and voting mechanisms, which are a lot better, I would say, than the typical kind of like board or shareholder votes. 


Obviously, I'm on the board of two public companies, so I know how difficult and intense that can be and how not transparent it is. So using DAO architecture to actually run a true legal organization is where we all saw that going, but it's really only been this year, I think, that we've seen a huge resurgence of DAOs from maybe three years ago when they were exciting on Ethereum. 


Now they're very exciting on Solana. And they're getting much higher valuations, much more investment, much more engagement, much more notoriety, much more well known people getting involved, and the numbers of people getting involved. I mean, it's insane. I think the guys at DAO's. fun who have basically created what I would call like an initial DAO offering platform where you can launch a DAO. 


And you can have VIP allocations and then a whitelist for, you know, a wider community or the general public in order to all be able to put in a little bit of Solana to launch the DAO. And then some people are able to stake and have governance tokens and participate in whatever that DAO is meant to do. 


It's absolutely incredible. The, the speed and the valuations. I mean, that's how AI 16Z, which is. The kind of DAO of the Eliza OS framework, the largest agentic open source AI software in the world, number one on GitHub, they launched on that three months ago and reached at the peak, like two and a half billion dollar evaluation for a DAO. 


I mean, multi billion dollar company in three months. That is some amazing stuff. And even just a couple of days ago, an AI fund launched on there and went up to 400 million in about five minutes. So it's pretty serious stuff that's going on and for me as someone that probably spent thousands of hours of my life writing a law to make DAOs real seven years ago, it's amazing, amazing to see. 


I'm very, very excited and bullish about the future of DAOs and their use cases. Amazing. And do you see a lot of institutional money coming in to invest in DAOs? Oh yeah, definitely. If they can get in an allocation, they are getting in loads of crypto VCs and hedge funds and difficult for them. If they can get in, they will do it. 


Everyone begs for an allocation and each of these, it's nothing like I've ever seen before. Amazing. What about M& A like token mergers and things like that? There's been a few that have happened with DAOs voting to merge tokens. Do you have a view of how big like kind of M& A market is going to be in blockchain? 


Oh, huge. Absolutely huge. I think one of the interesting and more difficult things in the crypto industry is, you know, if everything has its own token and a different architecture on a different L1 or L2, like, it's a technical question just as much as it is a legal and regulatory question when you do M& A, because you have huge communities and so many token holders and so many products that have built on your technology. 


How do you get bought by a bigger technology and actually integrate and merge those communities? I think there's going to be a lot more of that in this cycle. Now that there's so much institutional money and focus in this industry. So, you know, the devs are going to have to keep up and they're the most expensive devs in the world. 


If someone wants to do true M& A with two different technologies and different sets of tokens, you know, you just have to have the money to pay all of the devs to figure it out, how to bridge it and all the community managers to encourage people that it's a good thing and get them to adopt whatever's happening next. 


[: 00:04:38

[00:04:58] Brittany Kaiser: So now we're seeing a lot more that are launching that are taking very, very niche standpoints. I'm helping co launch one that is specifically to use AI agents to create a buy side, sell side of everything you need for compute from hardware to software to power contracts. Okay. That I can negotiate all of that for you. 


So no matter what you need in the space on the buy or sell side, that it can actually arrange that for you. I know that you usually pay humans who do this hundreds of thousands a year. So to be able to replace some of those negotiations with AI agents is huge. I'm also launching one for my company, Satoshi, which is my private members club for the preservation of historic estate that I'm the founder and CEO of. 


Been working on and off for seven years and more full time for three years, but we kind of have gone into a very big niche of the real world asset space, which is creating alternative financing and commercialization opportunities for historic estates, so landmarks, monuments. Castles, palaces, in a lot of countries, you cannot get a mortgage or a loan from a bank on these estates, which should blow anyone's mind that isn't real estate. 


That historic estate owners of buildings that have been there for 500 to 1, 000 years can't get a mortgage. So, we do alternative lending. Bull. traditional and blockchain base in order to create a treasury for these estates and keep up with the restoration, upkeep, and commercialization of these estates so they can become financially sustainable and still be there for our children and grandchildren. 


So we work with places of national historic importance in the UK, France, and Italy at the moment and being able to launch a DAO for our community and a token where people can use that token in order to book out entire estates for themselves. Company retreat, family vacation, wedding, birthday, whatever, or to just go and book rooms as they're traveling and spend their money at a historic estate instead of a random four or five star hotel, and then also be able to book tickets to everything from a black tie gala ball to, you know, a masquerade to historic tours of these places is An amazing opportunity, really cool utility, and for me, I would just love anyone around the world that would love to be able to book out some of these places to participate. 


I mean, for me, the reason why I even thought of this is because I lived in Europe for a half of my life, and I had so many friends that inherited ancestral homes. that had been in their family for, you know, 500 to a thousand years, but they had a normal job. They were a professor or a journalist or something, and they could not afford the upkeep. 


And so for the first time in a thousand years, since the king built it for their 13 ex great grandfather, they had to sell their place because they couldn't get a mortgage, couldn't get lending, had no commercial opportunities. And so they had to let go of it, which to me is. Beyond depressing, and then the new person who has that as no emotional connection to it usually does inappropriate renovations, in my opinion, and a lot of the history is lost. 


So, before I went into law, I was obsessed with archaeology. So, for me, losing that history just because this is a financial problem where a whole multi trillion dollar sector of the real estate industry is not taken care of by the traditional finance system. That's a problem for crypto to fix. So that's what we're doing at Satoshi and we'll be launching the Castle DAO very soon. 


[: 00:08:16

[00:08:38] Brittany Kaiser: And then anyone around the world can buy a utility token. It's like buying travel points or what have you, because you're using those to book out all of the estates in our network, the castles and palaces owned by our friends or our partners. Amazing. Congratulations. I mean, most people would know of you for your background in law and Cambridge Analytica, but from this part of our conversation, hearing about your interest in history and how there's a real, I'm just sensing a real passion for you in this topic, Brittany. 


Ah, so much passion, it's like what I wanted to do with my entire life and then I went into archaeology and I very quickly realized that it was a lot of digging holes and begging other people for money and the archaeologist I was working with said your IQ is too high for this, you need to go get the money and bring it back to archaeology. 


They literally told me that I should not go to university for archaeology anymore even though I had applied to major in it. So I went to college to major in international law and minored in archeology and have been waiting for the opportunity to bring the money back to the sector with what I had figured out in the rest of my career. 


So I'm finally there, which is for me, very exciting. It doesn't say how amazing is it that you've got this sort of contrast of this new technology with these really historic houses. It's kind of almost, you think they would be the last ones to be, you know, jumping ahead with the technology, but it's so great to see that as being at the forefront of it. 


Yeah, I mean, it's just amazing that it does actually fix the problem, and it's a problem that most people don't want to talk about because a lot of aristocrats and royal families or people that have inherited these places, or people with a lot of money that recently bought one of these places and realized they have no idea what they're doing, they don't like to talk about the problem. 


So it's a big societal thing where people are not discussing this and they are selling these places off market because they're even too embarrassed to put them on the market. But when we come up and we say, Hey, we understand the problem. We'd love to help you keep this in your family and help you finance it. 


You just have to open it up to the public or to our friends in our private membership club who will come and stay there when you're not using it. Most of these people own multiple estates, not all of them do, but some of them do, and we can help you make it financially sustainable. You know, they're nearly crying with excitement because they're like, no one has ever addressed this problem. 


The bank won't help me and there's no one else to help me. It's either sell it or let part of it rot. And they're living in a national landmark and that's their choice that they're confronted with. I mean, it's depressing and crazy. So, more than happy to help. We started this conversation looking at AI and data provenance and tracking and the role that blockchain could help, um, play in that more generally in terms of digital data and our own personal data, you know, is there a way to be truly invisible digitally speaking? 


It's very, very difficult, and it's not for the common, untechnical person, not very achievable, unfortunately. What I like to preface these conversations with is, you know, what you can do is take precautions about all the data you're producing from now into the future. Board advisor and chief evangelist for a big Silicon Valley company called Drumwave. 


They've spent the past seven years in stealth creating the first ever product where you can own all of your data, claim all of the data that companies hold on you, API into it, put it into a data savings account, and every time someone wants to license that data, the AIs will build value on that data for you, add extra models on top of your raw data to make it more valuable. 


And if you accept to monetize it, you get paid and you keep it in your data savings account. If you want, you can spend it, you can invest it as fiat currency value, or you can earn compounding interest by leaving it in there. And you can even borrow off the future value of it. So it's really exciting. 


since we launched that money: 2020

I'm a much bigger advocate of data ownership where you can own everything and you decide whether you want to monetize it or not. If you monetize it, that's your money. A few billion people around the world living on less than 2 a day much more benefit from earning more than 2 a day from their data than they do from keeping completely useless data set to themselves. 


What is useless to them? Keeping your grocery shopping private is really not that interesting. It doesn't really add to your safety very much. But if you can monetize that information, you should have the right to, and pay for your next grocery bill with your data savings account. And is Drumwave a consumer product or a B2B product? 


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[00:13:26] Brittany Kaiser: I bet you in your app, you don't know that you are sharing probably with thousands of companies and third parties, your data at the moment. So what is incredibly important is for you to actually understand the technologies that you're using and where you're able to protect yourself. Your settings on your phone and in your computer and the cookies you allow or disallow are the most basic tools that you have. 


And now these days there's a lot more transparency. So spend time in those parts of your technology, figure out and read each of the different privacy settings and what they mean and what their implications are. Your phone is a lot, gets hot a lot less often. You'll notice that your data plan becomes a lot cheaper, etc. 


And so far the amount of data that you are paying to process on a daily basis in order to feed the global data machine that is making trillions of dollars off of people's individual data, having you pay for it is insane. This is why something that I've been advocating for a decade, but specifically is kind of the messaging around Drumwave, is that every individual pays for at least 50 percent of the cost of processing all of the data. 


We pay for the hardware on our phone. We pay for our data plan. That's more than 50 percent of the cost of these companies taking our personal data from us. So we should own at least 50 percent of the revenue. So in all of these data savings accounts, you get 50 percent of the revenue of all of the third parties that are licensing your data. 


And the other 50 percent goes to the company who paid to build the platform that has collected it. So cool. Um, sounds like, you know, rather than spending the next few days doom scrolling, people could benefit from actually diving into their phone and making sure the settings are, that they know what they're sharing and not sharing things that they don't want to. 


Yes, exactly. It will really open your eyes when you see how many apps on your phone you are sharing your live location. Think about it. Do you know that company? Do you trust everybody in that company? Do you trust all of the maybe hundreds of developers from around the world that have access to that data? 


You shouldn't be sharing your live location with anyone for any reason. I turn on my live location in order to like use Uber Eats or Google Maps on my way to somewhere, and then I turn it back off again. No app should have access to your live location. That's Insanity. So do go through and make sure that you are knowledgeable enough to make an educated decision about how you feel about each of the privacy settings in the tech that you use on a daily basis. 


[: 00:15:50

[00:16:12] Brittany Kaiser: So teaching kids about not just kids, obviously I teach legislators and government officials and fortune 500 boards, but concentrating on children and teaching them what their data rights are, everything from the different digital literacy concepts around your digital footprint. All the data that you produce online, how to control that, screen time management for your mental and physical health, countering cyber bullying, how not to be a cyber bully and have digital empathy when you're interacting with other people. 


All of these concepts called DQ or digital intelligence quotient, like an IQ or an EQ, and we have different materials and curriculums and even games that you can use. In order to learn more about those concepts and not just be able to protect yourself online, but to be able to be a good digital citizen and to be successful online, because obviously I'm a technologist. 


I do believe that everyone should learn how to be successful using technology and not be scared of it and not think that privacy is the only way forward. That's not what I advocate for, but certainly I'm not going to let my child have access to social media. Social media didn't exist until my, like, last year of high school. 


continue to be involved since: 2018

Childhood suicide has gone up over 400 percent since the proliferation of social media. No children should have social media at this point, certainly not now after MEDA has decided to stop content moderation altogether when they're already responsible for the deaths of so many kids around the world. 


So no, my child will not be able to access a lot of these products until he's ready. I just got him a Kano, which is for Christmas, which is a product where kids can learn how to build their own computer on Raspberry Pi and then engage in a global community to learn how to code. I think that is cool. I actually backed that a decade ago on Kickstarter and my name is in the source code. 


They're now like a very globally used product, which I think is really cool. And yeah, so definitely going to get him technically ready and technically savvy. But I think that the social media thing for kids is highly, highly dangerous and parents should take that very seriously. The owners of all social media companies do not let their children use it. 


That should be the number one biggest red flag. What about, how have you found managing all of your things and motherhood combined, Brittany? Has that just been like a seamless thing or have you had to change the way you work at all? Oh yeah, that is a special one. But definitely my child is in preschool a little bit earlier than I would have if I wasn't, you know, a mom running many companies at one and Because I'm a professional public speaker and traveling around, being at conferences all the time. 


He definitely has a very thick passport, uh, definitely a different upbringing than some other children get, but that's why I'm quite careful about and intentional about what he's learning and what he has access to. I don't have a huge problem with a little bit of screen time, like we're currently using, um, Hooked on Phonics videos to teach him how to read, which I used Hooked on Phonics cassette tapes when I was a kid. 


So, I really like their program. Especially useful on planes. They have, like, logic games and reading games and things for him. And some educational cartoons and programs that he likes. That I don't think is as much of a big problem if you're intentional about what they are accessing. But some parents might think it's safe to use YouTube kids, but like YouTube kids only gives you like two and three minute videos and they just keep going. 


Your kids should not see a different program every two or three minutes, just creating attention deficit problems. Like it's, it's really not good. So I think a lot of the things, digital products that are geared towards kids are not actually safe and are not good. And you should be highly intentional before allowing your children to have access to things like that. 


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[00:20:33] Brittany Kaiser: Oh my God. Such a beautiful voice. Yeah, completely obsessed with him right now. Obviously ever since like he came on the scene, I've liked this music, but right now it's just like, come back full and strong in my life. And so to be honest about what I'm listening to on repeat right now, that's it. I mean, you have the most diverse landscape of careers and backgrounds. 


[: 00:20:54

[00:21:16] Brittany Kaiser: Like, my first job was as an archaeologist working for a company called Pre Construct Archaeology in the UK, which does, like, Time Team, if you've seen that on TV, all of the archaeological investigations. So, my first job was my summer job as an archaeologist, where I was wearing, like, a high vibe vest, hard hat, steel toed boots. 


Doing a dig in Peckham, um, it was like a Victorian, Georgian and Roman dig at different levels. And that was my first job, like little teenage Brittany dressed as a construction worker, digging holes in Peckham Rye, south of London. Like, it's quite funny because my career is very different than that right now. 


And yeah, I think that's something that still shocks and surprises a lot of people because it's like the opposite of law and tech. Well, maybe your AI agent will have you in high biz clothes next time. Yeah, exactly. I bought it for Christmas. My son got a, a mini set. He's obsessed with construction vehicles right now, so it's highly appropriate, but I'm like, Oh my God, that was my first workout, but 


[: 00:22:19

[00:22:39] Brittany Kaiser: So please check me out on there. And on LinkedIn, I'm on your data and generally on every platform you can find me by Brittany Kaiser on your data. Awesome. We're going to do an intro, obviously with a glittering introduction with your bio and whatnot, but we thought we'd just use the time very patiently today. 


Perfect. Thank you so much.