Investing in AI, Crypto, & Tech in 2025 | Elad Gil
01:17:58 Share

I do think that to some except one could argue that there will have been three ages of humanity, right. The first age is um all the computers, roughly humans and other animals. But the second age of humanity is probably this, what we have right now, which is there some split t between humans and machines, and humans are directing the activity. And probably the first age is the age of machine intelligence, right? That's the predominant form of compute and intelligence on the planet.

Welcomes a benker, or today we exploit the frontier of tech investing. This is ran chon atoms. And here a David hofman, and we are here, tell you, become more thankless.

I LED with tech investing. I mean, cyp du, of course, is a form of tech and investing. We're talking a little broader than that.

We're talking not just crypto o, we're talking about A I today. We have unicorn tech investor E I gill on the podcast. He's giving us the silicon valley take on AI crypto and also silicon valley's involvement in politics, particularly the recent involvement.

So this is one part getting up to speed on everything that's going on in A I and e. LED provides a master class in that. And then we talk about the intersection of A I and crypto and his take on that. And then politics, how will take flourish under the new administration? What changes have we ve seen in the last year?

E, I probably knows as much about AI as ryan and I. Bangles knows about cyp to and vice versa. He knows about crypto. O, about the same about that. I think we know about A I, so we really start off picking his eye brain, but he's a just familiar with the growth of markets, the growth of tech, having seen the rise of the internet.

And so not only the intimately film liar with these tech sectors, especially AI, but also how investing works and how markets developing grow and the s curves and how these many esker relate. So feels a little bit like ancient wisdom from a tech vector veteran on the poking. He's also very calm, which I found to have found very peaceful. Ah so overall very enjoyable.

And this does he meditate? David usually call when guess meditate, you can have this.

He could he could be a meat might be a he might be question.

Going in for him was like, okay, give me the truth on A I is IT overhype right now or is IT appropriately hype or is IT underhand so stay tuned for that answer as well.

Let's go here and get right into the epo de with the E. L. gale. But first a moment to talk us in these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible, if you do not, in december of twenty twenty four, half an account crack, consider clicking the link in the show knows to getting started with cracking today.

Want to know the exchange we have been used, used to byelaws trade cypher is cracking one of the longest standing in most secure cypher to platforms in the world, with tools for every type of trade to get started. Over thirteen million users trust packing with their funds because they lead transparency and privacy through top note security measures, plus to live access to professional twenty four, three, sixty five client support from real humans because your financial goals deserve real attention. Cache also has a trading platform for advanced traders called cache pro e professionals and digits love cracking and pro because it's one of the most customizable, high performance and intuitive trading platforms in the industry.

Design your ultimate trading interface using from over twenty five bridges for market data analysis, execution and other order management tools, save multiple layouts and switch between them effortless ly on any trading scenario across three hundred different assets. Manage your trades on the go with crack and prose highly rated mobile APP, or use the all new desktop APP to unlock later trading in a native rust application with crack and pro, you can truly trade like a pro ready to take control over your cyp to journey. Visit cracking doc m slash blank to get start today.

Intellectus is in history with the largest fifteen and million dollars for critical bugs. Found a union swap A V four. This isn't just any update. Unique v four is built with hundreds of contributions from community developers as early undergo independent audits, making IT one of the most rigorously reviews code bases to be deployed on chain and was two point for a trillion and cumulative volume process across hub b 2ND three without a single hack。 The commitment to security and transparently is rocks.

P labs is taking an extra step to make A V four as secure as possible with a fifteen and a half million dollar bug ground. Ty head to the link in the show notes to dive in and participate in the united before bug county. All the details from eligibility and scope to the are there have you ever felt that the tools for developing decentralized applications are too restrictive and failed to leverage advancements from traditional software programing? There's a wide range of expressive building blocks beyond conventional smart contracts and the wait time, the basics from scratch and don't limit the potential of your vision.

Cartelli provides powerful and scalable solutions for developers that super charge of development. With a cartesian virtual machine, you can run a full linux O S and access decades of rich code libraries and open source tooling for building in web three. And with cartesians roa framework, you'll get real world's scaling and computation no more competing for blocks space.

So if you are developer looking to push the boundaries of what's possible in where three cartesian is now offering up to fifty thousand dollars in grants, head over to cartesians grand application to apply to that. And if you're not developer, those with staked C T, S, I can take part in the governance process and vote on whether or not a proposal should be funded. Make sure your vote ready by sticking your C, T, S.

I before the vote open back in. Very gale. He is one of silicon valleys greatest of all time investors. I would say that he's backed forty, including airbnb, our beloved coin base, F I G, ma stripe, many others. He super active right now in A I he actually host a podcast that I enjoy very much. And sometimes like the the AI sister podcast to bank lace is called no, priya, he's just in general a very precious thinker. Today we want to get this takes on A I on crip do on the next decade of tech investing what the opportunities are you said?

Welcome to bank less. Thanks much me. So um let's .

start with A I because I ve been following this in very ways the bank less audience uh knows about IT but you like we focus mainly on on the cypher to tech revolution. Not as much ai um catch people up, catch us up to speed. So obviously there's a lock going on right now. How about this year if we just zoom into this year, what are the big things like the big milestone events that happened in A I that we should be paying attention as, uh, general tech investors?

And you know it's kind of interesting because if you look at the history of machine learning and A I and know to all call the machine learning ten years ago, I think what a lot of people really under appreciated is that we had a series of fundamental breakthrough that effectively put us on a different technology curve from what we talked about machine learning. So we used to talk about convolution networks and networks and all these in the two thousand tens um with the alex nad and feel the breakthrough around machine vision and um you know a few other areas and the basis for those things kind of shifted in twenty seventeen when google even invented what are known as the the transformer is a specific type of architecture model for machine learning that a implemented a google but also to open the eye in the t and GPT is transformer and IT wasn't really until ChatGPT launch just two years ago that a lot of people woke up to this fundamentally different technology curve that we're on. It's almost like were in one curve of machine learning.

And then all this transformer based off came out and a kind of boost said to a different trajectory and honest a different technology curve and the capability that is very different from what we have experience in the past with traditional machine learning, which is really effectively running a bunch of regressions in some sense, data mining out statistical correlations between things this way of A V I, which is a lot of people are calling general A V I is um about the ability to understand and manipulate different types of language and imagery and a few other things in language includes things like code. In language includes you know the synthesis and understanding of knowledge. And there's these multistep processes that you have in all these other things.

And so when people talk about A I, we've been talking about IT for literal decades. But I think the specific flavor of eye that we're focused on right now is only two, three years old. So even saying what's happened in the last year is almost like saying what's happened in a third or half of the timely me of which we've been aware of this really interesting technology shift that we're undergoing.

right? I think there is probably a mainstream interpretation of A I and how it's going to impact our lives. We see chat B T.

We see its implications. Then there's stuff like uh, custom AI generated videos and you know deep fakes. And this is gold going to impact our lives in this particular way. There's probably a consensus level understanding of how AI is going to impact us. But I actually like to see if there's any difference there between what you think is the future trajectory of A I, if there's a gap between mainstream understanding of the future AI and what you think is true, is there a gap? Is there an alternative version of A S future that you think is being under represented or under discussed that mainstream society, mainstream tech, four people are maybe missing I .

love is under discussed. I do think in general A I still underhill pe despite being incredibly hype, right? And I think the the thing that people fundamentally misunderstand is, as we have these advancements over time, really the product that you're selling or the n product of these A I systems as units of cognition, right, you're selling pieces of thought or ability to do things.

So for example, you look at a company like deca gon and what it's doing is its augmented customer success agent. So you are a customer support rap and you some are making that person's job might to be easier. We are tackling more of the queries that they get through users and so each person can handle a much larger basis of people.

And suddenly, a person who only speaks english can support people in thirty plus languages. Twenty four, seven. You you're kind of shifting the paradigm of how work is done in the leverage that you're getting on work. And so for the digital world, you're basically selling units of labor for the physical world.

If some lay's advancements and robotics come through and you know I think that's uh were much earlier and accurate, then eventually you're selling units of robot time or labor time or everyone to phrase that you know, IT does seem likely that one of the major types of our robotic chasses or approaches that will have a forever factors is going to be human owd. Um a because the world is designed around that and b because is general purpose in terms of the things that could do right. But that's that's much further ahead in the future. If you just look at the digital part of that, which is very clear right now, I think eventually you're selling units of labour or thought that's a very different from, hey, we're doing this progression on a bunch of data know which was machine learning.

IT feels A A little cloud like as there's a cloud of labor out there that you can purchase units of labor, is that an acceptable comparison?

Yeah, there is a great way to put IT. So as an example, eventually you have a series of bots that will do aspects of coding for you. And already people are using coding tools like Chris or magic or cut or devin or other things, right? But fundamentally is as capabilities get Better and Better, you're onna have the um eee system to write more more good for you or the eyes system do more and more customer support for you.

I don't if you saw the tweet from the sea of corner that came out maybe six and nine months ago where he said that they let go of seven hundred people in the customer support team because they replaced IT was something they built on top of open eye. And IT had a higher necker moto score. They had a twenty five percent reduction I think in repeat queries. Es IT was available twenty four seven and I think was like twenty plus languages. And uh the time to actually resolve the issue for a um a customer went down dramatically over by fifty percent or some significant amount.

Strict improvement across all domes.

strict proveth across all domes with a ee system. Effectively to your point in the cloud, they created a cloud of customer success agents for help. Right now I wasn't quite agencia agencia almost implies like this thing is going to be so fact in really the place and the technology basis still has to develop to get there.

But again, I think it's back to the units of cognition or labor. Have you only faced and its units eventually a robot minutes, a robot timer of physical labor camera, and that's eventually what this way is about right at rest for A A language, right? There's image, jen and video. And then there's all these foundation models being both for physics and material science and biology and all of these other areas, which is different and we'll have different of potential and and kind of a overlap in terms of um what happy person they're there are gona augment to their place.

What I think I I would love to find out from your perspective that is like where we are and kind of the s curve of this new of this new transformer sort of unlocked that we've approach A I so you're talking about the measure being units of productive intelligence in the case that you just gave is basically like, uh, some corporation has a new customer support intelligence center, primarily staff ed by human agents right now, right? So those are at the units of of customer support productive intelligence.

And what it's just done is in using OpenAI is it's been able to replace that productive intelligence with a higher form of productive intelligence, right? So you see that, that could happen in customer support, maybe some White color a type jobs. We're also getting these version upgrades with the ChatGPT of the world rates.

So like we go from three to four and to like five to six, but at some point in time, I mean, we know ency pta, right? You sort of you're on the other side of that s curve and kind of adoption progress for the the technology that you're curve that you're on. IT starts to be Peter out.

I mean, where are we on the curve here? Is this still early? Or like we have a lot of upgrades to go? Or like when does this version of the tech curve kind of a stop and we started getting diminishing returns?

Yeah, this is an era of active debate within the a community. And some people say, well, and really, if you look at A I, there's three or four components that go into how smart the system or how capable the system is. And part of IT is how much data and what's for the data do you have to train IT and how clean is that and how does that leave old and how is IT generated IT? And there's how much computer you thwing anything.

And you know, there is a lot of find tuning or post train, what do you do once you actually have the system up and running? And then there is the how much computer are you actually allocating at the time that you're doing inference, which is for the moment that you think the a system and ask you to do something on your behalf in each one of those things can scale in different ways, right? And so a one from open eyes really focus on that last piece.

And you see that a lot happened with people that you can ask a question, and if it's a hard question, you'll for a minute, for a few seconds or whatever, then you answer, you won't just want the answer. And an easy question you immediately built out, right? And so differentially allocating compute is what you do is a person, right? You're kind of thinking more or less.

And similarly, that has a scaling law that people think has a lot of runway on IT. The training side probe still has quite a bit of head romona in terms of just the core. I'm going to train a big model on the a bunch GPU. And on the data side, there's ongoing questions of like to move synthetic data.

Are you capturing data new forms? Are you going this specific type of experts for the the post training side of IT? So I think each of those there is debates around how much room there is, but I think overall, an enormous amount room to improve.

So on the one hand, I think we're still reasonable early in this curve. Um and that's a debate topic. I think there's a lot I had we just with a stuffer doing. There's a separate question. I say that we stopped our progress and we just took the models and capabilities we have today.

How many more applications could be cover for IT? And there was a time, right again, this technology in some sense of people, people awareness of the technology, is two years old GPT four came out. But I don't know what. Sixteen months ago, right in four was a big stepping capabilities versus three. And that's when you could something do legal.

So you know, one of the companies have back is called harvey and they have this sort of legal assistance and set tools and um on three point five, which was was the version of GPT before before they couldn't do legal workplace that just didn't work. I was not smart enough and enforcement he was capable enough, right? And so um I kind of call the GPT later step right.

As you move up from four to five to six to seven, you are opening up entirely new markets that couldn't be served before because that wasn't sort to serve them or you're fundamentally changing the capabilities that you can do in this marked and if you look at um sass in the U S, is a half trillion dollar a year to and enter Price outwards at Hilton dollar a year market. If you look at all this sort of White color, is services the payable for those in terms of areas that could be impacted by areas about three and I have to five trillion. So you convert ten percent of that headcount costs to employees salaries.

In the sass revenue for A I, you've recreated all obsessed enterprise software and turns a market cap, right? So this is a huge revolution, and that's why i'm saying it's under high. And so there's two s curbs as a technology s curve, and it's really a few different s curbs stacked on top of each other with as mention, there's the training and the post training and there's the hand of inference stuff. And then there is the esco of of adoption. And on the escarra adoption, really, really we're basically in the era of you know it's a year after um the bitcoin White paper dropped or something and what we're about to have like the mouth x blow up with the analysts early you an yeah okay.

So you're painting this portrait of stacking s curves, all of which are early, including the adoption s curve here. Can you give some insight into how transformation all this will be? So you've been in silicon valley since the early days.

You have seen kind of the the birth of the internet, and you've seen mobile and you've seen you like cyp to and and you've seen social meat. You've seen all these kind of trends, right? And famously Peter till talks about how like um some of these um you know software value you know creation hasn't really filter down into like real world productivity for the rest anyway.

Is this different or how does this compare to previous revolutions? I heard some people compare the AI revolution, this idea of unlocking productive intelligence to the industrial revolution, which was kind of like a whole new scale of productivity output for humanity. And I think that's a different trajectory. Maybe then what the internet was anyway. How does this stack up in terms of the detect that you've seen and come out of silicate ley since you've been there?

Yeah, I would separate out two things because again, there is a digital revolution and there's the atomic revolution of robotic state, which is, again, we're not quite area on the second one, but that has its own transformation curve or is or its own implications for a globally and soft driving cars is of one substantiation of that in some sense to that's .

so the atoms in the bits and .

you sort of separate that I was separated out yeah because it's very different society level implications but also um the degrees which view rework cities and physical labor and everything else is fundamentally different from what can you do with digital information?

And the bit is happening now.

The bit is happening. Yeah, the bit is happening now. I mean, the internet was the biggest revolution of them all on for this stuff because this A I this set of a ee system couldn't exist without the internet and strip te compute and you have a cypher, right? And so I think a lot of the um a lot of the really big technology ways, or just outgrowing the internet and one for another and so that to me is the the granddaddy singer, what everyone to call IT.

Um but on a relative basis, I think this is much bigger than more able. Um it's gonna be bigger in some ways in certain aspects of social uh cyp do I think has been enormously transformative, mainly at least today. And you know the financial sector.

Yeah, obviates spilt that over the art with N, F. And you know IT spilled over in other ways. But I think a lot of a kind of web three premise of everything is gonna on the blockchain, you know, have to be on the blockchain with the talk and you know that stuff hasn't really proven aquae. Um and so I think, uh you know it's gonna a very big revolution and it's gna take a decade to subtenant.

One thing that we've seen in cypher U S. Kind of these repeating hype cycles where every sort of four years or so got such a tair and then IT sort of gets ahead of itself in terms of, you know the market Price, reflecting kind of the reality of where the technology and where the adoption actually is. sure.

And and trying to like paint this picture for cyp to to investors onto A I do anticipate something similar where basically IT will happen in waves. And you know I don't know where we are in the first wave, but it's been incredible to see the evaluations of of companies like and video of this cycle just like you know, absolutely exploded the most valuable company in the world. And so it's hard to look at that and not look at some cyp to analog.

Well, okay, maybe A I is going to be a long term transformational technology, but are there periods of time within the decades of that transformation where gets kind of overhyped from a market perspective? Like are these companies making money? Do they have business models yet?

Yeah, I mean, video is clearly making money. So I think that everything .

is quite highly, but that's one of those like reflexive money type things, right? Like it's it's making money because they're so much demand for G P S and chips because there's so much, you know I guess, hype going into the the other elements of a it's not .

just hype is really interesting. You look at the foundation model world, at least L M S these large language models which you know um open the eyes GPT or um you know claude from anthropic or senate from anthropic or you know can a name your model uh google and barred in all of us are doing there um or your gami you know fundamentally um the reason the hyper scales ended up as a primary backing ers of these big model companies, right IT of U S.

Probably is the biggest backer anthropic now. And microsoft the biggest backer of opening is because IT also drives enormous revenue on their clouds for A I services, right? So microsoft had something like a twenty eight billion dollar quarter last quarter, and I think they publicly said that fifteen percent of the lift on the quarters, that's what three and half four billion dollars came from A I that's not possible.

That's that's significant, right? And so these things we're translating in the real revenue and it's happening at startups where something has started go from zero to ten to fifty and two years, which is insane in terms of any sort of traditional as application. You see that in terms of the rumor numbers are in the open eye, where there are now in the billions of revenue after two years for three years of offering GPT is an A P I.

That is actually being used dry. I mean, these are insane adoption curve. Now there's a separate question of what is the durability of a given company related these adoption curves because overall, the segments gona happen. It's such a useful and powerful technology and IT gives you so many capabilities and so many considers and so many new revenue streams and all the rest of bit that it's happening and it's gonna happen.

And then the question is, who wins? And for each lair of the stack rate of the foundation models actually have the chips with the video of the foundation models, you have apps, actually have infrastructure that you have apps and with an option B2B and you hav e con sumer. And within that, that stuff for each sector, you can go through an oppole is hardly fragment.

Who wins? why? What's the defensive ability of betwen of these things? Sorry, what's the technology basis for winning? Do they have to build on models or not? So there's all that stuff, right? And so I think the direction is clear that who in some cases is clear, in some cases is less clear.

And it's the old thing about how the future in some cases is determined, but you just don't know who's going to be the person who drives that piece of the future, right? But you know that future is coming, and I think that's very true here. I mean.

we've definitely seen that with with script. It's been hard protect to the india, the individual networks that like we now are going to be but we we sort of know that the futures is inevitable. Um want to ask you a question about the evolution this market. So you're painting the picture you out of this.

Is the early market still actually under hyped from your perspective even at this point time? Ah how do you think this industry evolves and there is different lovers on this? Like a lot of the the value right now seems to be going and kind if you call this the platform layer, but like the max seven and some, he's big companies, right? There's also this other layer we can talk about a close source.

First is open source. I mean, something that the know cyp to advocates are very passionate about. Is this centralization anybody being you like able to use this technology? sure.

There are different versions of that in uh, A I, but at something that, uh, i'm sure you support permissionless to centralized the ability for anybody to spin up these tools and not to be closer in some world garden. Anyway, what do you think of this? This market structure will IT be centralized.

Will there be kind of power law winners here? Or will this be more more defused? I mean, well, we see decay unicorns in the start of world start to a compete against these max seven companies.

Yeah, there's a questions. Let me try and a tackle them one by one. I think one is around h opens. Worse first is close force and I obviously a huge fan of opens for software. Um I think both will happen in this market and I think arguably both have happened in cypher.

A right you have dexia, but your subtitle ed exchanges and a lot of the things that are supposedly decentralize or actually way more centralized than people really see the first blast, right? Like how many people going to actually commit to bakin core and you know how many um miners actually make up a portion of the network? No, it's prety centralized actually in some ways so you look at salon or other you know particles and you know related dly sometimes as more centralization, less centralization, right um and so uh the same is is gonna be true in this world where the really big opens first models of the foundation model layer at this point are basically laa from meta and then miss raw, right? And there's a bunch of other stuff, but at least for um the language model side, those are the ones that are I think most prominent.

And then there are other types of open source models for A A wide range of other areas in terms of you know things that have come out of academy for robotics a whether simulation or biology or you know so you can can go through one by one and as will not be close force or opens source and to some extent um the hard part for opens source in traditional software which is different from crypto where you can often monodist other ways through a token or there are two three ways actually that you can you can monitise options for a syncytial u many other things don't apply in the A I world and it's much more than traditional SaaS where you have to um figure out a business model around the thing in charge for IT. And so for lama, there is a few things that I thought really covered. The facebook did one is um if you're over a certain news number a cm, but that wasn't the original license.

So I could be at over seven hundred million users, you had to pay for IT or license said otherwise could use IT freak. And so that mean if you're a hyper scale and you were trying trying to put lam on your platform, you head a license. Or if you were one of the really, really big social networks or companies with enormous numbers of users, you'd have to license that everybody else could use over free. I thought that was very clever of them. Well, can you elaborate .

on why that's clever? Why why does that work so well? Why is that a good mechanism?

Um because I think that does two things. One is IT a potentially and I don't have any insights and you know how facebook thought about IT. IT potentially creates a monetization path for lama because all the big hyper schemes, if they want to adopted that the license and pay for IT.

And again, if is driving cloud services, they should benefit from that. IT also, I think, means that the very large competitors of meta cancers had update and compete with meta using their own technology. And so because then they kind of bridge the gap of having something that was roughly fully open source.

But for the things that i'm assuming they really cared about, IT was effectively close force or at least you had the license, right? I thought that was really smart. Um in that minute, any developer can just pick you up and start using IT almost anywhere in the world.

That's amazing, right? So um I think A A lot of the value of that type of open source is probably going to go to the infrastructure providers and then APP companies that want to use that as a differentiator. The reality is at least today, a lot of people are using um open a eye or claude is sort of the starting point.

And then if they figure something out, then i'll go and maybe fine, tune in, open weights that opens for a model like lamb. But it's kind of like try them on A P I. First way. You don't have to do a lot to have you lifting and see for works. And then if you think you can really optimize IT or you worried about data security or whatever, maybe and again, I think the data is quite security using these other aps. But if you if you have some concerns about data back then, sometimes you go down, the opens worse out, you know in find turn you're a model or do whatever this you need to do.

We've discussed the multiple of adoption curve s curves of growth of of A I and why IT seems to be that you can accelerate very quickly in the near term. I want to introduce one more adoption curve as curve of technology, which is crypto and where I think we are starting to approach cyp dos like middle of the s curve these days, especially with bitcoin crossing one hundred thousand dollars.

Um I wondering if you're paying attention to the intersection of crypt D O A. I. And this intersection has been growing uh right after a ChatGPT launched.

I remember there was like kind of A A surgeons of cypher AI tokens like right afterwards kind of just writing the narrative of AI and IT was IT would didn't really make any sense. IT was kind of like we going to call a stony version of cypher. I eyes very elemental isn't IT wasn't real.

But that was over two years ago. And since then, I think there have been some developers who are really trying to make this work, like trying to figure out how do these two parallel frontier technologies, how do they intersect, how do they grow together? And lately, there's been some very strong Sparks that have probably actually turned into alec.

Small to medium sized wildfire in the cyp to world has a really broken out into mainstream uh and this is kind of the story of truth terminals and not of year to familiar. There's but the number one github down to a fork and start get hub repo right now is the lives of framework, which is allowing people to build their own AI agents, some with crept a while, some just spinal agents. So i'm wondering, are you observing the space? Is this space interesting to you? And if you just having IT takes .

yeah I have like four or five comments on I guess the first thing that I think is fascinated, do you know the origin of near then .

you're pretty all you talking about with lia and team? Yes, that was A A I origin, right?

Yeah actually really has a very well cited A I paper yeah .

he's on the transformer paper. He's the original transform her paper. He's the last that Peter yeah ah and so when my understanding is when he when he left to start um near and IT was called near, that A I IT was really A I company and they were visible to do I was like GPT style stuff yeah they decided they needed to do and hope, hope correct me all this um mind descending is they decided that they need to do a lot of data labeling and they were like how we pay people.

The label data on the world may be used at thea. And of course, if the room was a scalable back then, that's why we have all the l two staff and all the stuff are doing up at the room now. So they they said, hey, how do we create a real scalable protocols so that we can create tokens that can be used to play people around the world, the labeled data that we can then build a giant eye system.

I think that's the origin of near was fascinating, right? Or at least some version of the origin story that I put of IT. Um so I think there's a long been an intersection of the people who are inter sit in A I and the people who are intercepted in crypto.

And I almost feel like anna given or when one of them has been harder than the it's tip people's career in one direction of the other. You know I know if you know umer roy from the sink, right? Yeah, she's great, great.

And so that's a great example of somebody who did a lot a and maybe if SHE started her company two years later, he would be doing a ice stuff right now. I mean, she's brilliant, right? And SHE is very smart on Z, K, are the mathematics underlying out.

But you know this stuff like that that I think is just fascinating in terms of these past that are almost like moment in time depending on when you graduate and may be shouldn't crept anyhow. Don't know. I'm just saying that he had that background, right? And so I think there's a lot of overlap in the background of people reducing these things so that we are subset of people.

So I think that's one aside just in terms of the the human capital or the people who who are excited about IT, I think three or four protests that people have been taking to the intersection of A I and crypto and a lot of IT is over time, has been can we create these data of posit aries? We get paid in tokens to label data, use data, do data set. There is distributed computer stuff which are more sceptical about these reasons.

You centralize these things. Usually one kind of your world coin is in part of proxy. Sam Allen, you know, memetics, um there is an identity which I think is super interesting and actually do you think like a blockin resident identity could be used by the agencia I world and it's still surprisingly nobody y's bt.

I get true legal identity system on the block chain there is payments which is kind of that obvious one was is why maybe you mention you know building A I with the wall attached because IT be natural for an algorithm ent to transact using crypto. Um I think the sensor ship and censorship resistance is super important aspect of crypto that AI doesn't have and I think that is showing up in almost like what you call the politics of the models, right? Because the models are all bring steer them very political, the specific subset of political paths. They kind of reflect the the area and the bay area. Politics is best of what you see when you interact with one of these systems and that may not be a good thing for humanity or um so I think there's a lot of ways that these things kind of .

intersect one conversation in the gypt basis, the idea of decentralized versus centralized AI. We have the ChatGPT, the opening eyes, the facebooks, google, with a lot of resources at the the benefits of centralized coordination, I think really pushing the frontier of of A I I really introducing IT into society, into mainstream. And then in response to that, there has been a growing parallel world of decentralized A I um which I think has um some difficulties because I think maybe you one of the biggest job access that decentralized versions of, I don't have access to the same data that open a eye that met IT does.

But there has been some Victories um one thing that has come on my radar as a recently as prime intellect, i'm not sure if you're too familiar but the story that i've heard uh is that these uh the central of these training models have had uh some constraint in the centralized foreign factor of of training of AI training. Prime intellect is a decentralized training platform. I'm kind of like out of my ski tips here, explain this technically.

But they were able to poke through to breakthrough A A glass ceiling of the number of premiers that they were able to use meaningly from. I think the constraint and the central world, or something like four hundred million criminals, and now there they're breaking through at ten billion. So a very significant increase in part of the decentish zed structure of the A I.

Revolution is starting to get some winds versus their centralized counterparts. And wondering if if this is how you see this psychotic y like there's two like different worlds of AI. There's the centralized ed AI and decentralized AI, and they're both kind of developing in the iterating forward into the future and how you see IT.

Not really. I tend to think a bit more as the open source and close source and the open source may include open weights and may include open data sets, you know may include all these things. I don't think um you need to necessarily decentralized the computer.

You know I don't think that is necessarily helpful in us. You're like we can't afford IT, otherwise they're crowd forcing IT. You know. So those reasons to do IT, we can buy all the GPU, whatever is.

But I I don't really view IT through that framework because the decentralized is not additive in this context as far as I can tell them less again and addresses of those other issues I mentioned. And so it's more just like what's out in the open that anybody can use and how can they use IT. And I think that's that's the vector I would care about the most.

Um it's kind of um know the one other thing that I used to speculate on that I no longer do you around crypto O N A ee then by the way, I think is really called about the tender and parameter model in a decentralized. So i'm not trying to say it's not cool and interesting. It's more just the the dimensions I care about are like what's open verses closed and who has access right versus that is centralized or decentralized.

Uh, the the thing I think is kind of interesting is if you think about the block chain, you've always had this kind of purple matic agents in very, very simple reasons acting on my gheria small contracts and other things were effectively these programmatic prepay things that happen with strong economic value as a with them. And so four, five years ago used to speculate what was a blockchain, the first place where artificial general intelligence emerges because you have these economic games that are played repeatedly between effectively agented systems. And so what a wonderful place to actually train in the agent N A. I.

right? So maybe that's a place for the decentralized day. eyes. Step is super interesting if you basically have this selective functions unblocking in resident agents playing economic games at scale and learning off for them. Now that's really cool.

I think that spent like a more of like my personal interests. I think when David, I started really getting into kind of intersection of A I crp TOTO is more on the agents properties of IT because the idea of cyp do is um know this podcast is called backless, right it's the the ability for individual um humans to go bangalore. But actually the most of other bank population of the future is truly going to be A I agents, right? Very difficult till like kind of you can open up a stripe account, but then you have you know three percent credit card transaction fees and they open up an A I like the the form factor of a blockchain with programmable money in property rights is basically like fit for purpose for A I agents and social security .

number to open up a trip account, right? And so like some .

of the early use cases, uh, which are starting be interesting in some of these frameworks that that David mentioned is almost like the AI agent influencer you like package, right? So he's talking about um he's talking about eliza. There's this platform called virtual and there's this you like me account uh uh called truth terminal on twitter and has this goat token and basically almost like taking the job of like influencers.

I like crypto u influencers, right? And so playing almost like attention economy type of games. And you A I agent in the L M like models that we've created are pretty good at like interacting with humans and like passing the turing tests and being being interesting to interact with.

And so that's been the early, almost like toy version of A I agents on chain. It's been interesting to see when you hook up a twitter account, basically. And allow the LLM to kind of like talk about whatever he wants and pair that with a crypt to wallet.

So create that token incentive. What experiments fall out of that? And to your point, like actually think that thesis of know that I comes through this intersection of crypto ai could be like a spot on as this evolves.

Anyway, that's the potential that we've been more excited about recently. But people look at IT, they're just like a just me coin games. Again, it's you just talked to twitter account to an L A model and it's pumping a mean token in my who cares what's your take on this trend? You think there's something here?

You know, I think it's really interesting training data for A I right again, if you if you're getting back in the economic game theory and how humanity evolved and what are the set of drivers for evolutionary progress and probably a lot of IT was forms of economic games, right? And so I think is the training that is super interesting. Obviously, you don't need skill of computer and you need skills, you need all the other stuff.

But um I do think it's really interesting from that perspective. One of the big um sort of future A G I concerns or sixty concerns the anthropic talks about is resource of Green gate by A I and so they spend less time talking about, hey well let me I venter bias that will do X, Y, Z and all the stuff of I think is actually not very likely anytime soon. And there more like what if in A I is not enough to start aggregating resources at scale and using those resources to make society? And how do you prevent that? It's sort of and clipped, that would be a good basis for that.

Basically either AI as a god or forming a religion, or creating some sort of memetic social, something like this.

not even as a god. What if this is very good at predicting stock movements and I just starts getting a bunch of money in paying people to do stuff for IT that gets us more money, right? So it's it's more about that form of a safety. Um I do think that to some except one could argue that there will have been three ages of humanity, right.

The first age is um all the computers, roughly humans and the other animals for and from a concentration perspective of humans and that was probably leading up into the century and then we have kind of a hybrid age like the second age of humanity is probably this, you know what we have right now, which is there is some slip between humans and machines and humans are directing the activity and all the rest yeah and probably the first age is the age of machine intelligence, right? That's the predominant form of compute and intelligence on the planet, right? And so the sum extent perhaps were very lucky to be in the second age, right?

Seems like a limbo period is a waiting room for the third period. Migrants, him of things, is going to be like all of humanity is in the first age. And then we have this very short amount of time where we figured out how to get computers to think, but dummling like calculators. And now I think the third age is how you're describing IT is like when are they .

think on their own and there's a lot of them, right? And so from a sheer compute perspective, there's way more intelligence embodied in machines at some point than there are in people. And we're out there at right. But at some point, that will happen in the coming decades, right?

Does that third stage kind of like scarious sometimes, I mean like we actually opened up the the rapid hole of the crypt to by um like talking to ala u casi and is definitely has a defined um thought on this, a kind of dum take on A G I in general. But like should we fear this third age? I mean maybe it's inevitable. Yeah I guess we're all investing in IT to some extent. Part of the thing we kind of like worry about if you take ela cokey line view as, oh cool so we've created this you property rights in financial system and economic resource allocation system for a bunch of robots are that are going to comment like in slave VS or a blitzing humanity like great job cripp u like, do you have any worries like that?

You know, i'm not part of a doomy called and I feel like some of a some of the progress investigators on this topic are basically do mistake all readers right? Like it's not i'm a saying any body specially i'm singing in general like there are these things that effectively feel like music cuts and they have A G I as the you know, before I was like the media striking the earth or you know some religious event and it's it's almost like a religious rapture and some of these people's minds, I think my take is bit measured, which is I I would kind of view myself as like a agi or safety moderate, right? I think there's enormous god coming through A I, and I think we're only in the earliest innings.

And if I look at global health equity and educational equity in other rest of IT or how you wanna phrase IT, right, these are the things that are gone to drive the ability of humanity to participate at scale in ways that they couldn't before. You know, everybody should be able to get a one on one puter education that's best in class in the world. And everybody should be able to have access to the world's best medical information through any device, right that's coming.

Now at some point, there will be this very intelligent the machines. We will be interacting with them in different ways. And I don't know what that world looks like, like I can speculate, but I think it's very hard to say what in years or decades from now things are gonna be yeah see old saying that a less happens when you think in technology in two years and more happens and you think in five years.

And once you're had ten years, like it's game over, like ten years ago, we won't be predicting any this stuff. We won't predicting the stuff that space x is doing. We wouldn't be predicting the quantum computing stuff that google is released.

We were in people, you know, we won't be predicting this way with general vate. I nobody predicted the different curve on the transformer models. So I just think that's very hard to think ten years. Then we ve also, over pret predicted certain things, rather didn't a happening in terms of technology curves.

New projects are coming online, the mental later to every single week. Why is this happening? Maybe is because mental has been on the frontier of layer to design architecture since I first started building mental D, A power by technology from and d because users are coming onto the mental layer two to captures from the highest yields available in defy and to automatically receive the points in tokens being accrued by the three billion dollar mental treasury in the mental reward station.

Maybe is because the mental team is one of those helpful teams to build with, giving you grants acquit these support inventer partners to help boots drop your mental application. Maybe all of these reasons all put together. So if you're a dev and you want to build on one of the best foundations in cypher a or your user looking to claim some ownership on mentals I apps, click the link in the center cigar started with mental.

Are you ready to take control over your entire financial life? Cypher, defy and fia, all in one place. Me, I yield the free financial planning to built for crypt ones, unlike traditional portfolio truckers that just show you the value of your assets.

Iie ld goes deeper, I can told dates, everything, assets, debt, income and expenses, offering you a complete financial picture across sixteen thousand tokens, forty five particles. And currently with real time D I yelled tracking for platforms like of A A I usp I yld interest that you're always on top of your shaking rewards investments and cash flow. And the best part is a hundred percent free with no ads and its secure, no personal data, no I D requirements, no compromises.

So headed over to I yield dot com to sign up today and get the guest work out of financial planning. Imagine the world's GDP moved on chain. We will say hello to safe net built by safe the project set on actually making that happen. It's not a blocker chain.

It's on a layer too is a transaction processor network built to send money anywhere and swap anything on thousands of layers, all from a single universal baLance with seven five hundred second execution guarantees in zero cross ss train latencies safe net delivers a salona like user experience for a theory and is later to making transactions lightning and same less safe night connect safe smart accounts across multiple chains, allowing users to access any chain with a unified baLance, always super charge security, scalability and speed. So get involved today. Join the weight list and follow safe on and check out the safe net dogs.

There is a link in the show nux. You are, you are a markets veteran, your attack evolution veteran. You've seen a thing or two.

Ah now we have these like two emerging frontier technologies, AI and crypto. I think we've talked about A I quite a bit. Um I want to just kind of get your takes on raw cyp to crypto without the AI.

When you're looking over into the world of cyp, do you're seeing bitcoin in two thousand nine theory um in two thousand and fifteen coin base going public a circle? These companies that are just evolving maturity, the industries becoming legitimized regulatory we've had regulation oversight, um we've now we have regulatory lead and sea, at least we think that's what we're getting. Um just like what patterns are being Sparked was what what you're overall take you've seen in a thing or to you before, like what you was resonating with you in the .

growth of our industry. Yeah you know at this point I feel like i'm reasonable ignorant on cyp do like I I used to spend a lot of time on cyp do and I did a lot of crip to investing in twenty sixteen twenty seventeen six r and got about companies like um some of the put to call liable things and then um index funds like bit wise and you know just different things across the industry start war and that early working, you know all sorts are really easy case stuff.

You know like mini, another sort of early adopters of different ways do. So I think um it's it's like amazing what the group of ministries is accomplished. And I think IT is a fundamental thing that's here to stay.

And usually when I look at these sorts of technology shifts that are so important in so fundamental, I try to just still let down in the use cases like water. The specific aspects of the technology that make a uniquely good for a specific application or use case is otherwise. Gna use IT. And that sometimes where I feel like people in any market segment, especially with a lot of technologists, lose their way because they started extrapolating all the stuff off of the technology that nobody actually cares about what they think should happen because the technology so good, right? And so the the mobile version of that is if you look at the really big mobile centric companies that got formed, it's the companies that uniquely took advantage of the new capabilities of phones, which was GPS.

So location always on um IT was the instinct to the message that push unification actor and roughly what that collapse into the social products like what's up and others you know instagram, whatever is and then um uber, you push a button in a stranger, shows up in a car europe e getting in and they'll you to where you want right indecent and galloped services, right. So you kind of go through to say where we're the new startups or new things created and obviously is enormous income ency. You a like B F A apps and all the stuff now.

But um but the the the main things were the revolution was important was one opening a access down stopped at the internet. But because you had a device you could you care with the other supercomputer pocket. But second, with these unique things that were enabled by G P S and um text message and another rest of the right.

And for cypher, it's the same question of OK. What are the court capabilities of crypto? Because some versions of light chains and obviously is much more sophisticated now. But in the early days, a blockchain was kind of like a shady database, right ah that had very unique characteristics that made IT incredibly important around censorship, persistence in permissionless systems and all the rest of the right. And then you ask where where where those unique capabilities really important.

You know you have this twenty four seven accessible financial system, right that's emerged and that things like store value, like bacai, it's defy um you know it's a bunch of stuff like that in my mind. So I I almost view IT is like what are the capabilities of the system and therefore, what are the unique use cases versus casses? Do everything do you like?

I'm Christie s and framing of this, which is like he goes through through a book called a read right own, which is basically web wine, is as read, uh, web two is is right, you know, he get blogs and that kind of error. And then A B three with crypto is is so it's the idea of like property rites which fits into store value to centralized finance, the ability to spin up assets that are um like digital scarce. Is that the ribera through which you view crypto use cases?

Um no I kind of view IT more as like when do you need these capabilities? I mean that over lapse, right? And there's a lot of things that haven't happened in crypto that I thought would happen.

like what what are you thinking would happen?

Uh, I mean, your point of property rates like a public letter of um who owns what properties are, therefore your um you can avoid government sees your ruby land or other assets right or the the notion of identity on the block chain where you should be able to fragment identity but probably show that you did stuff. So for example, you can probably show on one identity strand or you one wallet or have you want to kind of asset that you are a google engineer, you're done X Y Y things and then the other one that you are contributor to some a doll or something that you are anonymous on IT in on on, right. So um there is a bunch of stuff like that, that hasn't happened that the blockchain e feels like a really good fit for because you can transparently in the clear pool identity without having to reveal identity.

What's really difficult in in this I D love your take on this is it's hard to determine kind of the order of Operation through which these things will happen like some of those use cases that like identity um i'm personally David are both personally big believer s that identity will happen on chain important time like Z K tax tax just like makes no much sense for this use case where you can just like to prove something without disclosing all of your your private information about IT.

But your point right like crypto is not really done much in the identity space. Like bitcoin has been the big use case, has been really store of value being the big use case. And some of the things that we thought would happen earlier haven't happened yet.

But the question is, will they happen in kind of the the fullness of time? How do you get the the order of Operation bright uh, in these different tech trans? I think .

that's a great question. And if I knew the answered to that would be retired right now, I think that um i'm jacking about retiring, but I think I was going to .

say i'm sure you could retire. You like you just like what you're doing.

Too much return is boring.

I don't know. That sounds pretty nice. So I. I think that the world of Operations, a great question, particular M C identity, we can have to be strap up network and the usage of bit and all the rest of IT right?

Um I think for other areas just never gonna because IT doesn't matter. Like the argument for like a decentralized to uber was well every dry working by a token and therefore have a stake in but you can go by bus stock yeah do you know I know it's not. And so I feel like some of these things are a little bit overstated in terms of wake, you know, deceptive ization and a token will magically make something occur.

But the website of IT is like a store of value where you can cross the border with the literally a billion dollars in your head, which nobody can sees is amazing, right? That's a superior product to gold, to a superior product to whatever story about the earth or whatever you're going across the border with. And so I do think that there is a lot of stuff like that encysted a that's really important.

And I can I do think dev is an example of that. I think you know all the stable coins in all of the U. S, D, C, in all the whatever form you want to talk about, like all that stuff was clearly going to be really useful for all rest of applications. So I just think there is a lot, a lot the crypt I was accomplishing a lots of till to do, and it's very exciting in the place where I see crypt o companies sometimes get a little bit loss as if they just go all. And i'm building some really copied infrastructure that doesn't necessarily have an application or really focusing on like a use case where the existing centralized version works just fine.

What would you say you let is like kind of the mainstream. So on valley tic and cypher or right now because I I feel like i've been charting this from the outside a little bit IT felt like there have been periods of time where there's some pretty intense skepticism about crept out, just like this term that you used earlier. You know, just a slow database like who care? So like I don't understand why bitcoin is worth what IT is.

This look feels like a too up mania. And you know this has been present at very times. In fact, a lot of the crypto startups of just like not happened in silicon valley.

We've happened outside of sort of the the VC silicon valley apparatus. What do silicon valley think about crypt of now? Or do they not think about a silicon valley? All like A I, A I, A I and the script to things happening on the side. But it's like less interesting how how the negative really shifted.

No, no, no.

I think um there's a subset of founders and firms on the venture side in the rest of continue to just participate in crypto ongoing, right? And so um you know and then there's a obviously specialist firms that have kind of span up, right? So you know in terms of the the broader firms, obesity in reason is continued to deal a lot of crypto with Christian s said in others there um there's been standalone firms that obvious um either span out of existing institutions or set up on their own.

That's paradigm electric and some ventures and you know you name right there is a bunch of different folks and there are all based looking bali, right? Um IT feels like maybe the biggest ship over the last couple years is um the degree of which momentum really increased for new york is one of the cortland aces for crp du over the last five years or whatever time here are doing to put on IT and IT was almost like this transition from l wan to other layers, right? Because if I felt like that all one stuff company to be out here for a while in the bay area, then IT kind of shifted elsewhere.

Obviously was always distributed in this people working all over. But I just feel like um the type of worker, almost the sub cluster crypto for a while at least, reflected to take the nature of the work being done and try to the geography where there was concentrations of people. Um but I think mainstream tech, maybe twenty percent of people always thought clipped that was really important and taking IT was important.

And then maybe there were thirty afraid people who swing in and out based on bitcoin Price. And there there's thirty forty percent will always be skeptical. And you know, those are the people who, like, get off my lawn. You know, kids playing there. You know, it's very in some of these folks are very smart.

Zed, I think it's a little bit backwards looking because I think it's it's clear that there is use cases, is clear that there's adoption and you think there's a lot of asset to to reflect that in to one of them minutes that hit that escape poop, in my opinion, barring something really unexpected or you know some quantum attacker got as well. But even then, I will survive IT. And obviously, quana resistant algorithm is that you can and IT was there aren't that many things I can think of that would disrupt IT outside, you know, civilization of all events at this point. But that could be wrong and that, you know made the regulation like a global lock down from a regulatory perspective of some tyrrhene world government or something.

Know I I would love to pick your brain on regulation because that affects many things. In a and crypto, you went one last thing on kind of like crypto companies in the evolution there is crypt to founders. So you you've had an opportunity to invest like in work with many of the best tech founders in this space.

You know people like palmer, lucky, bright, armstrong, of course, you know coin base who were very familiar with Dylan fig ma. Um i'm wondering if you think that basically the the tech founders you like generally are similar to the gypt to tech founders. If you think that there's a different pattern with egypt to tech founder, one thing that kind of breaking them all the little bit and cypher u is obviously you have the original cypher tech founder, which is shi.

And like, who is this person right? They disappeared. This is not Normal like that certainly not something going to happens. Then you have people like ftc and he has like the telecoms has not like marky z ockram g CEO type qualities. There's some of something like I have describe as like monkish about IT is almost .

like a he is a movement founder, not a tech company founder.

right? Yeah he's founded an entire movement. IT feels like A A type of this, like post this on him, but there's something like kind of movement, religious about IT in a way. And then you will also have the bright armstrong's and Jessie powers of the world and the hate nats and such anyway, other differences between crypt to founders and tech founders, are they kind of like, you know same same patterns?

Interesting question. Um I feel like tear point. There's been multiple different types of ecliptic founders. A because IT went from a true backwater, right when the biton paper drop in, you know you had to be kind of weird to get into IT right um then you are you know using IT to buy pizzas and you know all the stuff just to trying get other people who adopted right for member those days where they are just giving up the going.

Can I get anybody to do something? And uh, so that that was a wave of people. And obviously that also came out of a kind of right leaning technology community, which is very different from the internet, which was very lovely lining in terms of its origins, right in terms of the text of people working on IT.

And as you kind of moved up and down the stack, you change the type of founders that show up. And I remember there's also an era of a lot of like professor coins, right? And like twenty seventeen or twenty eighteen, like every every professor working on cypher like monster own token, right, was working on a token.

Yeah there is kind of the AI economies of that where you have kind of these professor A I companies right there. There is these new architecture model company that spend an academic lab and has a very a where there and then sometimes the execution is lucking, I mean, obviously as good versions of that too. So there are some analogs or parallels, I feel ill in different herricks of each of these things.

Um as mentioned, I do think there's people like a uma from saying or a number of other people they are from here who have done both or could have done both. And so I do think there's a lot of overlap and that obviously also differences in terms of either some of the philosophical perspectives or political landmines or other things between the two communities. And sometimes they overlap, sometimes they don't.

So you like, I want to pick your brain on politics from a different angle here. This is just like silicon s valleys entrance and big text entrance into the political landscape in, uh, twenty four. We're certainly seen this encysted to and David, I have been you like tracking IT quite closely, but I in general i've never seen tech so political.

You know you have you on mask, you have the uh all in podcast game, you have mark and Jessen talking about ian politics, of course, encysted au is taking the form of be like brian armstrong, just a power from crack in the fair shake pack like political donations, public advocate for proscriptive candidates, all of these things. Just a couple weeks ago, we had conversations around d banking go viral and that has kind of A A political lens to IT as well. What's your story for why tech got political in twenty twenty four? Did did this need to happen?

Yeah I I mean, I think i'm there's always been some overlap between taking politics. And so if you can go back, you know, one hundred years or eighty years, the world work two, and all of the industrialists being pulled in specially be able to create large scale weapons systems in other things for the U. S. Military during world war I I.

I mean, that was effectively mobilization of what was a power generation of tacking some sense, right, when tech was more about automotive or more about shit building or more, you know that all these things were high tech of day for a detroit used to be the high tech capital of the world in some sense, during the automotive industry boom, there was very clear cluster effects and everything else that happened during the error that now we're happening. So can valley. Um so I think one could argue on one of all that there's been this engaged in different ways or different forms.

Obviously, I think there's a period where technology went very kind of libertarian and very kind of hands off from government and vice. vera. And one could argue one of the reasons tech has been so optimistic time as because I was so lightly regulated and say you could be optimistic.

Because if you're heavily regulated, you tend to always have constrains around you who become more pessimistic in summer around the world in you can actually see the most um regulated industries when you talk to people in them are often the most pessimistic IT turns. What can actually be done right are very AR garls. And I said of the garden, you can do much.

So I would argue part of tech optimism is due to a lack of regulation. And I think that um if you look at the administrations are always ways of tech people participating. So the obama administration and different people from gool actually join the administration in the some of them cycle backup to companies like facebook, in google and others.

Um so I think there has been some back and forth. I think maybe the differences that in this cycle, some of the most prominent people in tacker very actively engaged, and that's ill on mask in that to your points, some of the other folks you mentioned the tax exit up, and these are people who built very large scale companies and had enormous success. And now they're building that spect.

Bringing that perspective is go set in everything else to government in a really deeply. And I think part of that is because there may be this moment in time is being recognized about being able to affect large scale change and actually change the system. And that would be things like dough, the department of uh, government efficiency in sort of the changes in some of the supreme court rulings that may not actually able IT to happen right? When before you didn't have that legal ramework to do so check on and other things right.

And then um I think part of IT is that certain aspects of government became highly weapon zed against the aspects of tech. And that's the big the debating stuff that you mentioned that was um going after uh elan mask in different ways across different companies. I think there was like a dozen or two dozen lawsuits from different fiscal agencies against sla and space acs.

I think the most degree ious one was where um as a government contractor they had A A higher we go the U S. residents. And so they there's one rule in the books that says that as a government contract, we have to do that. And there's another role in the book.

This is you can't discriminate against immigrants and so you get suit either way depending on what you're doing, right? So how can you function in that environment? And why did his company specifically get sued? And so if you're being targeted, of course, you're gonna trying to do something right.

What do you think about? Doge, so now, now, elon musk, it's onna, buy back along with the vic. Are you optimistic about doge? Uh, maybe maybe you like doge in theory waiting to see IT and play out in practice ah what you think .

I think that if they're able to pull off what they are hoping to, then IT is a truly wanted in a generation opportunity to affect massage change that can escape through time in a positive way. So if you are actually able to reduce certain cuts of regulation and certain size of government and the rest IT could be extremely freeing for the U. S.

Economy, for progress, for um ah the capabilities of the country, the economy, people's participation in the economy, sea technology progress, all that stuff. So I think I can be incredibly positive. Now obviously, there are certain things that are important to maintain while you do that, right?

It's for example, i'm very happy that fda has prevented the painting baby formula in the U. S. Which has happened in china, right? I think that's really good. We probably don't want to get rid of that, but there are other aspects of things that we probably do want to change and that we want to change significantly. And part of IT, too, is just asking, are we functioning within the proper legal framework relative to the U.

S, in other words, is a constitutional to have all these agency setting rules that they weren't necessarily test with doing to begin with, right, that go outside their Mandate and that should pretense be legislated by congress rate. And so there are also interesting legal questions of our are we in compliance legally as a government and as a country? And if not, then we should probably fix that either by changing the laws to say, hey, we're now a compliance or getting people in the compliance, right? That's the reason we have legal frameworks, is to kind of set the rules by which we do things in.

I know one thing in kind of watching this, you ecri pt to get political watching this up close first hand over the past four years, I I think you're very right that you know in particular cyp to leaned kind of libertarian right leaning is like we're doing our store value thing. We don't need of the nation state to interfere. We're not get involved in in politics uh IT turned out that um know this happening of in twenty twenty two that um uh somebody actually changed that encrypt u his name was sent back and freed. He started to getting very active in politics only in negative way that kind of blew up in our face.

I personally watch first hand as people who are, I would say, more libertarian, an right leaning by by philosophe people like brian arm's drag in the wake of twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four say, okay, we can no longer afford to do this um politics is actually existential furrin pta at this point we had the gary gangster or uh attacks. We had, you know the f and in various banking types of movement. So for cypher to, I really felt existent.

Al, this election, twenty twenty four. And that's why there is so much funding, there is so much advocacy, so much work done and to actually push proscriptive politicians. And I think that's largely been successful.

I know market and reason is as taking the point that know everything that was going on in cyp tou was sort of act one for what the existing government apparatus planned to do around technology. Two was a whole bunch of handcuffs and uh, aggressive actions against A I to try to capture that from a regulatory perspective from your purch. Did you kind of see that in A I like you were watching what is going on encysted like, okay, well, you know this is starting to to a affect. The A I and I could really offset the U S. Is progress in this incredibly important tech field.

Yeah I mean, I felt there are three, four things all happening at once, right? So your point there is the the cyp side of the um where um you know you had kind of what felt like a reasonable rand um enforcement action that wasn't quite enforcement action, but with these warning letters that you know is very like um unclear frameworks for how you can actually function in and then sort of action against companies that fell either politic motivated or super random um you also had censorship at the social network side right which was clearly coordinated with the government.

At least if you look at the twitter files, other things, then you had a strong antitrust activity that in some cases seem justified in some cases was just kind of weird. And um that year point, on the a eyes side, there is an interest in getting really heavily involved from a regulatory perspective. And I think this is the domes day called stuff help fuel the ability for politicians to do that.

But I felt to me like a lot of that activity was just another way to try and take control the tech industry. IT wasn't IT was that opening to regulate tech more broadly? IT wasn't a hey, we care about the ire understand IT deeply, right? I mean, you talk the people behind, they didn't necessarily in some people were very bright about what A I is in how works. But a lot of the regulatory action there was coming felt like, kid are some aid in administration who kind of want to get a hand hold on tag and this was a way in. And the tech industry was some I welcoming IT.

Now some of the people who were welcoming IT, perhaps you're doing so because regulatory capture, the ability to hablot extra rules can start helping combine and hurt t startups and said this was hurt of the big tech versus little text of like these were very big in some cases maybe kind of probe texting that would have heard a lot of innovation that startups um so I think you know fundamentally it's back to like are we other clear uh, regulatory and legal frameworks? Do they make sense? Are we complying with multiple levels, company level, government level, actually a and in the cases where we're not or we're acting well outside of our Mandate in ways that are potentially quite negative society or sectoral, like why are we doing that and how do we stop that in behavior? And um there there have been absolutely obviously bad actors and critter and there will be bad actors and and know and so it's good that there is some military framework for the stuff, but we just did to make sure that it's it's it's corrective and is properly enforced.

So do you think all of the negative headwinds h we felt from the regular ory Operatics, do you think that just all goes away under the administration? You think we get big changes here?

I don't know. I mean, i'm hopeful that in the tier point, I think i'm coin base and others have done great job of kind of helping rally the industry um around some of these issues, right? To your point, there was packed set up and other things to really focus on creating a proscriptive enviroment. And I think that this is the first time to cut that way and one could arrow that's the reason that I must release started running.

And so i'm hopeful that given the um in alite capabilities of the people from tegel involved in the cycle, because IT really is some of the strongest people right, like you on musk is probably once in many hundred years founder right or something on that level right? I mean, like if you just look at the span of stuff that you know we have some very capable of people getting involved in that the question is how government reacted. You know, how does that story play out? But I hope that, that ends up in a really positive place.

What do you think about this newly appointed cyp dos, our position? So David sax was kind of tapped for that role, obviously from that all in podcast yeah in by the way, this is a crypt oz zr position slash A I I believe. So it's kind of a combo type. Do you think that will have some power in the administration?

I don't know the nature of the role. I think David is very smart, and it's funny that you call him a podcast. Are you talking about .

the all founder, all these other thing? I mean.

he was early at paypal. He was, I think the. But what was he C O O something at pipal way back in the day. And then he started dammar, which was bought by microsoft and he ran a division at microsoft and then um you know he became a uh prominent investor with craft ventures and um he funded all sorts of early cypher things back in twenty seventeen or so, right? And then you know i've overlapped with the months of the eyes.

Staff had talked him from ten of time on the stuff, so I think it's very smart and he has done a lot of stuff Operationally. He has done a lot of stuff as an investor. He is participated in the crypto in the eye in a way that many folks in the park administration who had those words of responsibility to s or roles hadn't.

So I view IT is is quite positive. Um you know that the proof for being the playing, however, the british the tomato sausage is what british people set right. But whatever the british system is, you know obviously we now have to see what things translate into but I think he is very strong. And I think, you know i'm excited to see what cache could have you know you .

like this has been great. We talked a ye, we talk cypher, we talked about sort of the s in the regulatory apparatus. Maybe a final question to kind of close this out. So obviously, um we're speaking to an audience of investors, crypto investors slash tech investors who are looking at twenty twenty five and always will look at for the kind of the frontier opportunities. What do you see is the the biggest uh, growth opportunities for tech investors in twenty twenty five? You know may maybe particularly unless the V C kind of start up type of thing and in more kind of the category that, that a retail investor might have access to would like what advice would you give them on how to do well into investing?

But if I have good advice, I think um fundamental the way i've been thinking about the world is water effectively um in disease on major tech movements and then what is durable in the face of tech movements, in other words, what is the best way to participate in a basket of stuff for related to A I and to some extent in video that may be other things.

What's the way to participate in crypto o you know to some extent one could argue um a coin base where I still you know on some stock or um some other the other companies in the market may effectively functioning in desease on top of the cyp to industry because if you're treating all the tokens, then you know fundamental um you're participating in those transaction fees and there for you, you've created an effective index, right? And so I I tend to think a bit in terms of like water, the index companies for the areas that I think gm is important. Like I would argue, Andrew, now is effect of being index and defense, right? And so sector by sector strike used to be index on e commerce or the new wave of e commerce companies because of all the new e commerce companies are adopting stripe.

You effectively had in index, right, because they took a piece very transaction. So I tend to think through that lens in terms of how can you participate in markets broadly, right? The second question is what a durable so A I comes and it's away the world, what things will survive in, what things will get augmented, but what things just won't care.

And so I probably like the companies that just don't care. The extreme example of that would be a railroad. There's only so many railroads, A I, not a ei, that who cares this is going to keep shipping and freight, you know and um so that's very durable in the face of A I right? So I can attend to think in those in those ways.

He said he didn't have advice, but as pretty good advice he had, h told the end of this, thank you so much joining us. It's been a pledge.

charity today got to let you know this nation.

Of course, none of this has been financial advice. Script to his risky you could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the back with journey. Thanks a lot.