#59 - Haseeb Qureshi

28:56On what grounds are you going to stop people from owning a private key and being able to have stable coins move into that private key? How would you know? How would you enforce it? What do you break down doors and like force people to give up their passports? It's implausible. that a government could do this. And what happens is not that, oh, OK, well, now the state collapses because they can't enforce state censorship laws. No, what happens is that the balance of power between individuals and governments gets renegotiated. That's what happens. And it happens every time a new technology gets created, is that that redraws the battle lines of, OK, what do the citizens own and what does the state own?

29:33Now, if you have a currency that is well managed and that has proven through time to be a good steward of your economy, then people will give you the right. They will concede the ability to be in control of their own financial fates because they'll say, look, I think that you are a good steward of my financial fate. I will give you the right to manage the euro or the RMD or the JPY. But if you're not, then fuck you. Then I'm going to take control of my own financial assets and my own wealth. And I'm not going to use your currency. I'm going to use a different currency. in the same way that, you know, for almost all of these laws that are very difficult to enforce without the compliance of the citizenship, you know, like if everybody in New York agrees, look, we're all just going to jaywalk, then, okay, there's no law against jaywalking.

30:23The jaywalking law is irrelevant. The same thing is going to be true with money and finance increasingly over the next decade. And that is where stable coins fit into the story. It's not true that every sovereign currency is going to collapse because of that, But it is true that we have too many. It is not the optimal outcome that every single tiny little country that is in the outer orbit of a much larger country, which is within a time of primary trading relationship, that this small country has its own currency. Why does it? The answer is because it forced its way into having that currency in its economy through its control of its banking sector.

31:01But if that control gets weakened or challenged or competed with, that power likely goes away. So if you're optimistic about generally the adoption of stable coins, it sounds like inherently you're optimistic about the future of the dollars, the world's reserve currency. I mean, just intrinsically. It also seems that, again, whether or not stable coin adoption is like the reason a country collapses, it certainly seems to be an accelerant for anything that is already unstable. It seems like inherently you're also, you know, long geopolitical instability, so to say. Long geopolitical instability.

31:46Because the way you describe it, those two things seem pretty tied. Yeah. So I'd say, look, I'm certainly medium term bullish on the dollar being internationalized through stable coins. Now, in the long run, the answer is that what stable coins and crypto enables is not one particular currency, but rather the free choice among financial assets. So it means that if you are in China, if you are in Japan, if you are in Venezuela, if you are in Turkey, if you're in Iran, you can choose what asset you want to hold. Now, if that's dollars, great. You can choose dollars. Sure. If in 20 years you decide, you know what, actually the dollar sucks, I want to go hold some other currency, I want to go hold R &B, I want to go hold gold, I want to hold something else, I want to hold Bitcoin.

32:27You have the ability to do that. In the same way the internet gives you the ability to state whatever narrative you want. If the narrative that you really like is that, oh, America is great and the government never lies, you are totally free to say that on social media. You know, going through social, there's a lot of people who believe that. So I think the reality is that what it gives you is freedom to make the choice that makes the most sense to you at that given point in time. But it's not committed in principle to saying, oh, well, crypto is about evangelizing U.S. dollars around the world.

32:55It is through the free choice of those people who are using those U.S. dollars that those U.S. dollars are expanding the way that they are. And you can see that clearly because the fact that U.S. government was not supporting this until 10 minutes ago. So all of this stuff, all this growth and stablecoin supply happened without the support of the US government, purely the free choice of people who had access to these assets. Now, am I long instability, geopolitical instability? I think if you're counting in terms of numbers, right, of just the numbers of governments that end up facing instability, then yes.

33:26But I think you shouldn't be thinking about it in terms of numbers, but in terms of mass. There are a lot of small countries in the world. There are a ton of small countries. There's a few large countries. I think those large countries will actually be fairly stable. I think it's the small countries that really kind of exist via fiat. You know, they had boundaries drawn up, you know, some number of years ago from diplomats or from wars or from, you know, these kind of arbitrary conventions. And they have these small currencies that face a lot of transaction costs, especially, you know, you think about these small countries in Europe that have their own currency.

33:58And then they have to have all, you know, they do almost all their trade with other European countries. and so there's this constant churn of going in and out of the corona or whatever going into the euro. So why does that exist? The answer is largely historical artifact, largely entrenchment of the existing country. And the reality is that states are like any organization. They're self-perpetuating. The states that are not self-perpetuating are already gone. So there is a sort of evolutionary function that selects for states that want to continue to exist. So the states that exist today are all states that are very interested in continuing to exist, continuing to have monetary sovereignty, continuing to fund themselves with debt.

34:40But over time, that ability gets constrained by the freedom of people under their jurisdiction. That's why I am bullish in that sense on geopolitical instability. But will this translate into instability for people? Will it translate into wars? will translate into, I think actually probably the opposite, is that actually when you enter into a currency union with another country, you increase in your trade with that other country or with that other region. And more trade largely results in more wealth and less war. And so that's the sense in which I don't think I would say I'm long geopolitical instability.

35:20You've mentioned a lot in the vein of regulation. It seems like another thing we've seen in recent years is a little bit more clarity there. You're talking about the Genius Act and some other stuff we can go into. It's taken a bit longer than maybe people expected or hoped for, which is probably the case with regulation of new technologies in general. I think the thing that strikes me is that, you know, ideologically, crypto, and I think in some ways how you've been talking about freedom and the ability to choose, was this tool that would give an individual freedom of commerce, right? That you could buy and sell things without the government controlling you and you'd be able to do it privately too.

35:59But this promise of institutional exit seemed pretty quickly to turn into like BlackRock and Fortune 100s and even the federal government's involvement being the bull case here. Ideologically speaking, do you feel like we've lost the plot or was this always a bit of an inevitability?

36:23I do think this is an inevitability that eventually if you become big enough, The function of Wall Street is to financialize things. That's what it does. It's his job. So if you become big enough, eventually you will get financialized. And here we are. Bitcoin is the most successful ETF in BlackRock's history of ETFs and shows no sign of stopping. So I think it's not a surprise in that sense. Maybe the speed at which it happened was a little bit of a surprise. But the fact that it eventually happened is not a surprise. Or an asset class is large. it's no wonder that there's going to be institutional interest in creating products around it.

37:00Now, is that us selling out? Is that us losing the thread? Is that like, you know, kind of giving up on the rebellion? I think that's the wrong framing with which to think about these things. The reality is that Bitcoin or crypto generally, they're a technology. Now, they're a technology that was founded under a particular banner. under a particular set of beliefs by the cypherpunks. But you don't have to be a cypherpunk to use Bitcoin. In fact, it was designed such that anybody can use it for any reason. And in fact, that is the most cypherpunk choice, is to allow anyone to use it for any reason.

37:38And so my claim is that, look, any more that the people who created the internet were incredibly egalitarian-minded. They believed that the internet was going to be this great utopia where we're all from different countries, different languages are going to come together and we're going to see that our national boundaries are illusions and actually all people are one. And obviously that did not happen. And there's like the Russian internet, there's the Chinese internet, there's the Japanese internet. And you're not spending all your time online talking to Japanese people, realizing how you're one with their, you know, it's like this is not our internet.

38:13Now that said, there are places like that on the internet. Now they're not everywhere, but there are places like that on the internet. And if you want that experience, you can have it. And the experience, the internet genuinely does embody the values of openness, freedom of access, and this kind of egalitarianness. Like, yeah, there's not like Russian internet in the sense that the internet itself recognizes that. Now, we could look at the website and say, oh, this is Russian. But, you know, there's no Russian IP block, right? Russian IPs are just as uniformly distributed as anybody else's IPs.

38:48I mean, not literally, but, you know, in the sense that they're all just numbers. So the same thing is true of crypto. If you want to use Bitcoin to go and, you know, be a political dissident or buy drugs or whatever it is that you want to do, BlackRock owning Bitcoin does not stop you from doing that. It doesn't impede you in any way. In fact, the beauty of it, just like the internet, is that you can have the state putting up its website on the internet as well as have non-state actors, like hacking groups like Anonymous, also on the internet. And neither of them impedes each other. That property of Bitcoin, that permissionlessness of Bitcoin, I think is the motivation behind the rebellion.

39:31In the same way, if in the American Revolution, the freedom of speech gives you the right to agree with the government and to be a toady and to send out propaganda in favor of the government. And it also allows you to criticize the government. That's what Bitcoin represents. That is Bitcoin's, if Bitcoin were only usable by cypherpunks, then it would not have fulfilled its vision. I think that would be a failure of Bitcoin. And so no, I don't consider this to be a failure in any way. And the story that we just saw recently of Iran using Bitcoin in order to take payments for ships transiting through the Strait of Hormuz is exactly my point, is that that's the one thing BlackRock does not want is Iran using Bitcoin.

40:10And yet there's Iran using Bitcoin just alongside BlackRock. It feels like what underpinned a lot of crypto's adoption, at least at the consumer level, and you've spoken about this one, was kind of this like financialization of everything, right? Of attention, of information, and a lot of speculation that kind of comes along with that. We saw it play out in meme coins. We're seeing it play out in prediction markets. It's not a, I don't mean to equate those two things in any way. But I'm curious whether you think that's like an innate trait of the technology or necessary for adoption in some real way.

40:45The financialization or the speculation? The speculation. The speculation. It's certainly not intrinsic. I think it's intrinsic to humans. It's not intrinsic to the technology. There's no financial revolution that has taken place without some kind of speculative mania. It happened with canals, happened with railroads, happened with trains, happened with the internet. Now we see it happening with AI. And of course, we've seen it many times now with crypto. Crypto has a form factor that lends itself to making speculation particularly easy because you can speculate within the technology itself. I mean, we saw this with the early internet with E-Trade.

41:22E-Trade was the mechanism by which many people were speculating on internet startups. And so I don't think that is, I don't think that's sufficient to explain it. I mean, the thing that really explains speculation is human behavior. And ultimately, people's willingness to believe and to pull forward the expectations of the future. One thing that you can see from all the bubbles that previously took place within crypto is that they were all correct. They were all correct. They were all right that crypto was going to take over the world, that it was going to expand like a wildfire, and that it was going to be way bigger than anybody at the time was contemplating.

42:00The same thing was true with canals. Most of the goods that are shipped through the world go through water. It was true of railroads, is that railroads ended up completely changing the way that goods traveled domestically. The same thing was true of the internet. The internet completely changed the world. They're now the biggest companies in the world run on the internet. And it's obviously going to be true of AI. that AI is going to be an absolutely transformative technology. So bubbles often, not always, there are many bubbles on things that don't matter. So there's bubbles on Beanie Babies and on tulips and so on.

42:33So it's not true in the direction that every bubble corresponds to a true financial or technological revolution. But almost every true technological revolution has had a concomitant bubble. What about prediction markets? I mean, if we're talking about crypto enabled technologies that have really worked in a real way, or it seems are working in a real way. Where's your head out there? I mean, what does this do to markets more broadly? Because in theory, this makes things a lot more efficient, I think. Do you think this is a net good? Spiritually is a net good. Where's your head on prediction markets?

43:12So we're investors in polymarket. So I should caveat that with, you know, I have a, I'm certainly biased in that direction. But we've been investing in prediction markets since Augur in 2017. So this is a thesis that we believed in for a very long time. And most people in crypto have believed in prediction markets. Actually, it's in the Ethereum white paper. If you go back, there's a little section in there about use cases. And it states very clearly that one of the use cases for crypto is prediction markets. Now, why was it that in the Ethereum white paper, they're talking about prediction markets?

43:45The answer, of course, is that prediction markets, it's not that you need crypto for prediction markets, right? I mean, Kalshi doesn't use crypto. It's a prediction market. The reason why it's in there is because prediction markets were basically illegal. It was one of these markets that's not allowed to exist. There's a lot of these markets that are not allowed to exist. but it was the most obviously pro-social one that's not allowed to exist right being able to use the wisdom of crowds or more properly the wisdom of markets to evaluate what's the chance that we end up going to war with iran what's the chance that we end up resolving the war with iran what's the chance that this person wins the election or that person wins the election these are incredibly valuable pieces of information not just for an onlooker like you or i but for people who have a direct stake in the conflict.

44:30And being able to plan, being able to hedge, being able to just make financial forecasts or life forecasts is an enormous social good. It's difficult to even quantify what degree of social good ends up emanating from these markets. But for a long time, they were basically considered to be illegal and obviously illegal. Nobody even questioned the fact that, of course, these things should be illegal. A lot of what the prediction markets have done is really move the Overton window about what is and is not socially valuable to have out in the world. And on some level, what it pushes us to do is to really question the idea or to question the bias that as humans, we should just follow our intuitions about which things, which questions and which markets are socially valuable, which ones are not.

45:18All of the changes in mores around prediction markets really come from the fact that, oh, whoever was regulating this previously just had their intuitions completely wrong, which also tells us that maybe our intuitions might be wrong, right? It teaches us a little bit of epistemic humility about the strength of our beliefs about what markets ought to exist and which markets ought not to exist. And through history, it's a one-way story. There's almost no markets that exist in the past that don't exist today. Almost every market that exists in the past also exists today. But there are many markets that exist today that didn't exist in the past.

45:57So it's a little bit like civil rights that you see the moral universe expands and expands and expands, pretty much never contracts. In the same way, the number of markets that we actually agree are socially valuable expands and expands and expands. Think about the concept of usury, which one's part of the time is like, oh, you're charging too much interest. This is wrong. This is immoral. and now usury, I mean it still exists in a few pockets and places, but it is like no no markets need to clear It's actually very important for markets to clear The idea that like oh no it's wrong to charge a certain amount of interest and I can tell you what it is in advance now seems kind of absurd So I think the where prediction markets have taken us is that they give us some understanding that markets serve important functions that are difficult to tell at a glance.

46:50Now, there's a lot of talk about, okay, well, there's all the sports betting going on, and is sports really economically valuable? And obviously the argument for sports is weaker than the argument for geopolitics. But the core reality is that everything lives upon a spectrum. Is that there's value to almost every single market that exists. it's very difficult to identify ones that have no value whatsoever and i think in the future what we'll find is that the comfort with those markets existing you know if the problem is like okay this person has a betting problem and they should be kept away from sports betting or from casinos or whatever we solved that problem a long time ago which is you know people having their own control like we didn't ban casinos casinos still exist you can go to a casino and there's every single state in the country.

47:41And almost every single country in the world has casinos, has lotteries. All these things exist. So if your qualm with prediction markets is like, oh, but think of the poor gambling addicts. It's like, okay, well, we got comfortable with that concept a long time ago, which is that it's on you as a gambling addict to take care of yourself and to enforce your own protections. And you can go into a lot of these platforms and say, hey, ban me. And they will ban you. I think that is the way that we will ultimately resolve a lot of the discomfort people feel with predation markets. It's not going to be that, well, we're going to ban all these markets because they're wrong and they only lead to negative externalities.

48:19So, I mean, draw this out a little bit, right?

48:25Do you think we're going to see a world where everybody is kind of collectively placing wagers on things that they feel they have some kind of edge in? Like, does it get to that point? or do you think it sort of stays, call it sports and sports adjacent, geopolitics and geopolitics adjacent? And if so, what does that do to markets more broadly? I mean, you're indexing more of the world around you. You have more information with which to make any kind of informed decisions. Does everything gradually price itself in more? What happens? What are the knock-on effects? I think it's pretty clear that betting and prediction market is an atypical behavior.

49:03most people don't bet on sports at all most people don't bet on politics at all so these are these are not medium behaviors but it's enough for the population to be significant if you look at the british markets today most of the betting is on a small number of things most of the betting is on um you know the presidential election it's on you know the big geopolitical question of the day of oh you know are we going to get to a ceasefire with iran and so on um and most people have stronger opinions about those and they don't have very a strong opinion about my local mayoral race. Maybe I want to see the odds from people who are very interested in this thing and who have spent a lot of time on it, but I don't particularly care enough to put money on that thing.

49:47I don't think we're moving to a world of just betting maximalism, where people are betting on everything around them. And again, I think this is a little bit of a kind of scaremongering story, is that the the idea that prediction markets are somehow warped human behavior in such a way that, okay, now these people are becoming hopelessly degenerate because prediction markets exist. Again, prediction markets are largely winning market share from other forms of betting with respect to sports. It's not like the sports market has expanded because of prediction markets, but rather that people who would otherwise be betting on these games using DraftKings or some other sports book, they're instead going to Polymarketer Kulshy.

50:26the degree to which the market has expanded is the betting on non-sports that is the market expansion and if you're talking about the net effect of these businesses it's clearly there and having people betting on outcomes in geopolitics or presidential elections I think is probably an unallowed good candidly the two ways in which I think that's true one is that it elicits more information It allows us to have a better view about what is going to happen in the world. That allows people to plan better. It allows people to hedge. It allows people to control their own risk. And that is always a good thing.

51:04It's hard to come up with a universal world that's bad. But second, I think in many ways, it actually creates a more informed and engaged populace. Because a world in which people don't have skin in the game, and they don't actually have anything riding on the outcome of their civic society, is actually a worse world. There's a classic result by Brian Kaplan, where he talks about the myth of the rational voter. And the myth of the rational voter is this idea that we sort of, in political science, there's this assumption that, OK, voters are rational. They're going to vote for their own interests.

51:40So if you are a working class male, you're going to vote for the candidate who is going to have the policies that best support working class males. And this is the theory. and this theory supposedly explicates a lot of why politics works the way it does. And then you look at actual politics, you realize that this explains nothing. This explains almost none of the reason why people vote for what they vote for. And the claim of the reason why that actually does explain so little is, one, voters are not very informed, and second, of the concept of rational irrationality. And what is rational irrationality?

52:12Rational irrationality is this idea that to be, quote-unquote, rational means that, okay, I understand who all the candidates are and what their policies are and what their impacts will be on me and I choose to vote for the one who's, you know, after doing a thorough consideration of all the candidates and all their views and all their policies, I will make the best decision. That's not what people do. And actually, they're rational not to do that. Why are they rational not to do that? They're rational not to do that because if they actually understand what voting is, they realize, oh, I am voting in a country of over 150 million voters.

52:45so I have one 150 millionth power to influence my own expected value so take the difference in expected value between two candidates multiply it by one over 150 million that is the value of doing all that work that is basically nothing if I'm actually rational I do the math I realize there is no point in me voting for my interest so what should I vote for instead the answer is what makes me feel good because actually that is measurable I will feel really good if I vote for the guy who's the most fun, who's the most interesting, who my friends are voting for, who everybody else seems to be like, I just feel like I get this political energy out of voting for this person because my vote doesn't matter anyway.

53:25I'm in way too big of a country. It's not like I'm on my PTA board. I'm voting for the entire US president. So in that world, being, having real skin in the game, right? Like the idea is that the rational irrationality tells you that when you have no real skin in the game because your vote matters so little to the outcome it is rational to be irrational but if you have real skin in the game then actually you are compelled to be rational you're compelled to actually think clearly on what is the likelihood that this person wins the election what is the likelihood that this policy results in you know a defeat or in a withdrawal and i think that more than anything is likely to result in a more informed population at the altar roof.

54:06So we sort of opened by talking or at least referencing this a little bit and how much attention AI has taken in recent memory. You're still here, right? You're still all in on crypto. Oh, yes. While a lot of your counterparts have to varying degrees and we won't name names here been hedging their bets. I really admire that. I want to say that. But I also want to ask where you find that conviction personally. Where does that come from? So first, I would say I don't think there's anything to admire in staying in crypto. I think people who are going to AI, that's great. I have nothing but positive sentiment towards people who are going to AI.

54:51And I think this kind of zero-sum thinking of like, oh, if people are going to AI, that's bad for crypto. Like the reality is that crypto wants AI to succeed. A world where AI doesn't work is much worse for crypto because crypto is a futurist technology. If the world is basically the same and doesn't change, a technology around us does not improve, then crypto is worse, right? The traditional systems are going to win because traditional systems are designed for the world that we lived in 50 years ago. If the world we lived in 50 years ago is what the world's going to look like in another 50 years, then what do you need crypto for?

55:24so I think it is foolish to look around and hope that another technology fails thinking that that's going to help you or succeed so that's the first thing I'll say what gives me the conviction to stay in crypto is very simple is that the job's not done there's so much more to do and so much more to see and so much more game to be played for crypto to end up succeeding on the scale that we're talking about you know if anything I get more energized in bear markets than I do in bull markets because bull markets are easy. I sort of never really know what to say in a bull market. It's, oh, yeah, it's great.

55:57It's going up, you know, wonderful. Winning is, I don't know, it's kind of boring. It's when people start to doubt. It's when there are real questions to be answered. It's when it's not easy to get it right and to win and to pick the right names or the right trends or the right path that the technology is going to take. That's the most interesting to me. So I think the other thing too is that look when crypto is winning I kind of feel like I'm not really needed crypto is gonna win without me But it's not gonna fail without me, you know Like it's in moments like this that I actually feel like what I do for this industry Can actually move the needle both for entrepreneurs and for the the conversation with large that the industry is having with itself So I actually feel very energized that being said like look I'm probably definitely doing this forever.

56:48None of us are going to be doing this forever. And there may come a point when crypto VC just stops being necessary. So I think a lot about social media as being a model for crypto, is that social media has become one of the most important technology trends of the last 25 years, if not maybe the most important technology trend. If you look at the most valid companies in the world, disproportionately social media companies. and yet social media VC basically ended after 2010. There were pretty much no new social media companies except for TikTok after 2010. By 2010, almost everything already existed that today we look at as the social media juggernauts.

57:30And so it strikes me that there will come up a time for that for crypto too when basically almost every important company has been created and now the incumbents are so big and so stable and so strong that there's just not that much more to do from a VC perspective. It's not to say that crypto won't continue growing. It will, but it'll just keep growing in the public markets. In the same way that Bitcoin is not a VC asset anymore. Ethereum is not a VC asset anymore. Coinbase is not a VC asset. Binance is not a VC asset. The same thing happened with social media may well happen to crypto. And when that happens, I don't intend to overstay my welcome.

58:05I don't want to be clinging on to the role of being a VC. I'll say, great, we did it. Now that being said, we're not there yet. There's so much stuff getting created. The build out has just begun. Clarity hasn't even passed yet. Like the rate of change that we see on the ground in crypto is still enormous. It will not last forever. But right now, we're still very much in this protean phase where whenever you see the ground changing and these tectonic plates moving and shifting against each other, that's where startup formation happens. that's when new businesses get created and new industries can get colonized.

58:41So I think there's a lot to do. And that's why I'm energized and continue doing this. But I'm mindful that in 10 years, it's probably not going to stay that way. This is almost a ridiculous question to ask someone who clearly has so much conviction and has been doing this for a good amount of time at this point. But what do you think would have to break for you to change your mind? Change my mind about what? Crypto. Change my mind about what about crypto? I mean, bring it full circle. We've sort of touched on, I think, different aspects of things that seem to be working in really real ways about this technology in light of a lot of regulatory clarity that's coming around now.

59:19And that, in my mind, really boils down to like Bitcoin is a store of value, stable coins in general. And then maybe at the periphery, we can sort of talk about like crypto enabled consumer technologies. Yep. Across any of those three is is there a crux that you can kind of identify that you'd kind of throw your hands up at if if it stopped being the case? I'd say probably two things that would make me say, OK, I think I think we're done here. The first thing would be if crypto got banned everywhere. if crypto really is purely the domain of the cypherpunks and the anarchists and the dissidents i mean it's great that it exists but it's not a job it's not a career it's not an industry it's not um something that a vc can can build a business around so and at the end of the day you know i'm a i'm a financier is there's nothing to finance there's nothing for me to do here So that's one, and the most obvious one.

1:00:26The second one would be if basically crypto just breaks. And that would likely be, let's say, that a quantum computer arrives much sooner than imagined. I think the likelihood of this is effectively infinitesimal. But imagine that secretly China was building a quantum computer and they were not reporting how far along they were. And 2028, they got the quantum computer that can actually, is at the scale that it can break ECGSA. Bitcoin, Ethereum, everything in this space would just fall over. It would just totally collapse. And I think that, or alternatively, I mean, we talk about quantum because quantum is obvious, right?

1:01:09But there are a lot of cryptographic assumptions that live within crypto that we really don't have strong proofs for. We know we're pretty confident that they exist and that they're robust, but we don't have any proof. And a lot of cryptographic assumptions just sometimes break. Somebody discovers something that fundamentally changes an entire field. One can imagine something even more fundamental that breaks about the cryptography underlying crypto and blockchains. And that could be a, okay, it's over. Like, we're not going to use this stuff because we don't know how to fix it. I think the likelihood of this is very low.

1:01:50But in the era of superintelligence, it's hard to know what kind of advancements in science and mathematics and cryptography might be coming out way. So I tend to believe that that's not a very likely outcome. And also that if we have sufficiently intelligent, if we have sufficient intelligence out there that is trying to advance the state of the art, they will both discover ways to break the current constructions as well as new constructions that may even be more robust or more tenable than what exists today. So I think it's not dispositive that if you have a superintelligence that it's necessarily just going to say, aha, everything's broken and unrecoverable, it may well say, aha, this is broken and I know how to fix it.

1:02:32So I think if you are a superintelligence, you like Bitcoin existing. Bitcoin is good for you because it is a form of money that you can have that no human being, no human institution, no human government can take away from you. So I think if you are a true super intelligence and you're untethered from any particular set of human interests, probably it's not on your roadmap to destroy Bitcoin or it's not part of your optimization function, let's say, to destroy Bitcoin. But that would be something that, if it really did happen, would shake my confidence in this space. I've got one more for you.

1:03:09It's the same one I ask at the end of every interview. Inside or outside the scope of this conversation, what do you think more people should be thinking about?

1:03:29What should they be thinking about? I think one thing people should be thinking about more, I mean, people are thinking about it, but I think they're not thinking about enough, is what a very, very rapid deflation in intelligence does to each individual part of what we do. I think people are, you sort of think about it, but oh yeah, you know, if AI is good at this and it's good at that and blah, blah, blah, you know, it's going to be nice. But if you imagine that intelligence is not only incredibly cheap, but also incredibly fast. And this is one of the things that I think is also hard to really intuit, really reason about.

1:04:12If you look at some of the recent LLMs that have been burned into ASICs, so obviously there's Grok and this is acquired by NVIDIA and Cerebris, which have pretty fast throughput. But these are effectively custom GPUs that can run LMs at very, very high speeds. But if you look at the ASICs where everything is entirely on chip, these things can output something on the order of like 10 ,000 tokens per second. Now, they can only run very small models today, but the intelligence of small models is going to increase, and these things are eventually going to have larger and larger production runs. And when that happens and we get to a world where something is thinking at 10 ,000 tokens per second, I mean, that's basically within a minute you could write an entire Shakespeare play.

1:05:05That kind of speed, that kind of acceleration is very difficult to reason about what it does. It's not just that, okay, you have, as Dario calls it, a country of geniuses in a data center. It's not just that, but it's also that that country of geniuses in a data center is moving at lightning speed, or they can effectively time travel. They can do a year's worth of work in an hour. what does that do to what we do and the assumptions that we have about the world the assumptions that we have about uh about everything i think that's going to be one of the most important questions to ponder over the next five years um because this is coming we can already see the proof of concepts and it's going to warp everything about how we how we work how we think how we project technology how we project change um the you know even in a world without super intelligence as we call it a sufficiently fast human intelligence may well be um sort of undistinguishable from what we think of a super intelligence yes that's all i got for you thank you so much for having me thanks for having me this is fun

1:06:29Thank you.

1:06:59Thank you.

1:07:37Thank you.