Balaji Opens Up on AI/AGI, Bitcoin & America’s Incoming Collapse w/ Dave Blundin & Salim Ismail | EP #191

24:24But I think we're going to go into a degree of an, not exactly AI winters, that's made too strong, but AI deployment and let's talk about AI polytheistic monotheistic. So that post is really about a constrained view of AI. AI is actually constrained in ways that people haven't been talking about. For example, what didn't happen is a hard takeoff scenario of just building summoning the demon and this one god. And by the way, that was not, you know, you could have imagined someone had that. For example, the US invented the nuclear weapon, the nuclear bomb, and for a period they had it before anybody else.

24:56And had the US being like the Nazis or the communist, they would have conquered the whole world and blown it all up, right? but because it was a genuinely good actor, it didn't do that. It didn't use that power, you know, for as much evil as it could have. But AI isn't like that. AI very rapidly on a grand scheme of things decentralized you in faster than nuclear weapons. And I even think the analogy nuclear weapons only can take you so far. Now you have, which by the way, which was counterintuitive because it's expensive to build these models. But now the Chinese open models, you know, Kimi and Kwen and Deepseek and so on, and as well as Lama, which is, Lama 3 was actually a really good thing that Facebook could out there.

25:33Lama 4 is not being as good, but I give a lot of props to Zuckerberg doing it. And the first way, these are expensive things to put out there. All of those, I mean, there's so many good AI models now, right? And minimum, there's, you know, Chatchy BT obviously, there's Claude, there's Groc is pretty good, at least on the benchmarks, there's Gemini, and then there's Proplexies models, and there's all the Chinese models, right? And there's just more every day. And so that's a polytheistic view. It's not, first one to AGI wins, and it'll just out computer. But I think so that's why. I think the point you made, and I think, and the important point for people to understand here, is these models are all leapfrogging each other, and no one is deviating by orders of magnitude.

26:13And so we're likely to have at the end of this, at least, Dave, what's your guess? How many different large -scale frontier models that are going to be globally five years from now? or two months. Well, I think the natural dynamic actually is one at the end of the day. But we're in this golden era right now of a few months, maybe a year, maybe two years where there are on the order of 10. Why? Because ASI this depresses everybody else. Well, we haven't, we haven't hit true self -improvement. That started about a month ago. It'll go the next, say, four, five, six months. And so we'll know if there's a true singularity, single winner, about five or six months from now.

26:51So you're saying that this is where GPT -5, you know, pulled their punches and they're using their capability for self -improving. There's no doubt, actually, that was a lot of research after that last podcast a week ago, because they definitely sandbagged. I'm not mentioned it on the podcast, then we research, research, research, and it's like, yep, there's no doubt that a huge fraction of the compute is going back to internal self -improvement, all of a sudden across all the foundation model companies. And, you know, they're depriving the consumer experience from that same compute. The backlog of things they want to build and launch is just much, much bigger than the available compute.

27:24Well, we'll find out tomorrow when we're up talking to, uh, maybe, maybe I'll try. This is interesting. I mean, the thing is where can, where can itself improve? In the one of the biggest bottlenecks, one of my points in that post was the bottleneck Sony AI, AI doesn't do it end to end, it does a middle to middle right now, because the bottlenecks are prompting and verifying and are prompt. It's like you think of a very if you had a very fast spaceship you could give it a vector On the two -dimensional surface of sphere like a theta and a phi to point it in a direction, right? Yeah, it was very fast You still need to point in a direction to get it to go there and that's similar to a prompt a prompt is like a high -dimensional vector You're pointing this very fast spaceship to say I in this direction, right?

28:03So the prompt is one bottleneck and specifying that is this is one thing because I was you can prompt to do whatever and Then verifying the output on the other end I think for visual stuff, one of the points I've made in the post is visual things like front end, like images, like video. We have very good GPUs, so we can visually see whether something looks off. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, this is the topic that just absolutely, really, really matters. And I want to get away from the idea that somebody in opening up, I know is the answer, somebody at an anthropic knows the answer. They're not telling us.

28:36It's just not true. They don't know either. Nobody knows. And we're all going to figure it out. Nobody knows what very person nobody knows what like if I said who's going to win the a race if I said that a year ago Everybody would have said well it's gonna take a lot of envidiathips and training time Compute and training time thinking oh wait, you know Bellagy just pointed out a really important point is turning out that inference time compute and Reprompting is turning out to be more important than training time compute So that's a massive shift in who's gonna win and why in just the last few months and so nobody knows how the next six months are going to play out, we do know that it's massively self -improving, but we don't know which components.

29:17Right now, Sam is racing to get Stargate done, because he needs that 100 billion, soon to be $500 billion worth of Nvidia, to be pointed back at the self -improvement problem to maintain that I'm ahead and I'm going to stay ahead loop. And then China's probably doing something very similar. And we don't know if that's the winning move versus inference time compute from AMD, or from some new source versus just raw brain power innovation on the algorithms. It's all going to be moving very quickly. I mean, this may turn out to be wrong in 12 months or a year. And so, or do you have a 12 months or a year?

29:51But I think I'm very skeptical that it's just a matter of spending more money because we've seen, I mean, these companies are highly incentivized to make a lot of money. And we have not seen radical improvements over the last year and a half despite a lot of spend. In fact, we have seen like very sort of, I said, disappointing is a weird way to put it because it's like a hedonic treadmill where the stuff is amazing, right? But I'm very skeptical that it's just a matter of spending more money at this point and number one. And number two is the path the Chinese are taking with deep seek and other things is actually in part because the chip ban or the chip restrictions, which have been just partially lifted with this Nvidia deal, they took a chip constrained view.

30:29So they are using less chips to get the same or less advance ships to get the same result. The other thing they're doing is they're doing a lot more in the way of physical AI, like deployment of physical robots. Like self -driving is obviously working in both the US and in China, but that kind of thing is where they're focusing a lot of their energies. And so insofar as there are some embodiment that is necessary, and other's have talked about this, like the feedback loops that you're mentioning, it may not be just a purely digital form that prompts on the computer, maybe you just need constant haptic feedback, walking around the world to proceed the world, build spatial intuition, essentially do physics experiments.

31:06Let me pause there. So, apologies. One of the points that you make in that first point, I think it's an important one that I wanna understand, and Dave, you may have an opposite point of view here, is there is no, you know, there's no single, let's put it forward, beyond AGI, no single ASI. At the end of the day, biology do you believe there gonna be multiple players out there that are going to be providing equal or similar capabilities compared to what you just had Dave which is there's going to be someone who will be supreme over everybody else. Now we've heard you so you believe it will be multiple players.

31:43How many players? Yeah, here's why. Yeah. I think that the hard takeoff scenario was theoretically possible or would have you, right? But I think that at this point, first of all, there's so much money, so much espionage, so much surveillance, so much mimesis in this space. The thing is very, very, very difficult for someone like that to actually happen at this point. Number one, number two is also that, like, what does recursive self -improvement actually mean? Is it just cogitation within a computer and the thing reflecting on itself? It may mean you physics, new intelligence models, new capabilities.

32:22No, I know what I mean is, like, okay, let me be more prepared. precise. Eliza has put out this thought experiment, which is imagine if there was a computer that could think for every second that you acted, it could think for a billion years and it could compute out every move that you could possibly think and you thought of you do this, but it computed it out and so on. And that actually does work for things like chess, deterministic games where you can enumerate the game board state and things like that. But it doesn't work for a chaotic little and turbulent systems or for cryptographic systems where there are fundamental mathematical constraints on how far out you can forecast it, right, with finite precision arithmetic.

33:00And so you can easily construct systems. For example, you can have turbulent clocks, for example, like you know how people will consume randomness and inject randomness for randomness algorithms. You could literally have physically turbulent clocks that can be can generate things which are impossible for an AI to predict mathematically impossible for an AI to predict, right? And so I don't see people, I mean, I should probably write a paper on this or something, right? But like, you can actually show mathematically that, I mean, it's kind of, I think it's obvious, but for example, if you ask AI, what is the solution to, you know, like the equations to forge a digital signature, right?

33:38Or to invert a hash function and get the pre -image. It can't do that. That's what it can't do. Crypto is what AI can't do. Chaos is what AI can't do. Turbulence is what AI can't do. So because it can't do those things, it cannot be this recursively super self -improving, superintelligence that just wins and dominates everything, because those phenomena exist in the world, and there's aspects of predictability where it's like fundamentally physically and mathematically constrained. Let me pause here. Yeah. Well, the first thing you said really resonates, which is not necessarily a race to the biggest GPU farm and the $100 billion budget.

34:09And we know that because we believe that there's at least a hundred to a thousand X performance gain in the algorithms themselves. And one of the things that drives my friends at MIT nuts, especially the academic types, is that the transformer algorithm is driving all of this AI is not that complicated. And it frustrates the hell out of them because they've been researching all these arcane nooks and crannies for decades, and none of it mattered in what's happening right now. Yet it's clearly intelligent. It's clearly got an IQ of 148 now. It's clearly coming up with its own ideas now. So if you believe there's a 100 to a thousand next performance gain inside the algorithms.

34:47The narrow definition of self -improvement is, do we now have the AI -Alec Radford, the Leopold -Ason Brenner, was talking about in his incredibly brilliant paper? Like, Alc Radford researcher at OpenAI, the guy that comes up with the next idea and implements it. Can AI do that completely self -contained down? I think the answer is yes, plus or minus a few weeks. I guess I really disagree with that. Okay, so let me admit that that is It's possible, potentially possible. But it's similar to, for example, in 2015, let me qualify myself and then let me argue with you a little bit, Dave. In 2015, I remember writing a note internally, I think at A6 in Z, when the chatbot thing was big.

35:24If you remember chatbots in 2015. And I remember saying what people seem to want from chatbots is iterated Google. That is to say, the difficulty of doing chatbots in the 2015 format was something where you could give a query, you could get back Google results, and you could iterate on that. But such a thing, if it existed, would be more valuable than Google. Now I'm not saying that that's not possible, but that was so far beyond what anybody at that time was attempting with chatbots, which were just if then else decision -making trees. What it turned out, as often happens as a case, is that the entire chatbot bubble helped inspire among their things one Greg Brockman, who obviously went and did OpenAI, right?

36:06So and he's written about that how he was inspired by the chatbot thing as a technical problem solve it. But he took it more seriously than anybody else to it. And my view is as of right now, unless there's something that bridges system one and system two thinking, which is certainly possible given that computers are now good at both, unless there's something like that. AI doesn't, you know, it still can't do 9 .11 minus, you know, which is bigger than 9 .1 versus 9 .8, right? Anything that's spatial, that's logical, that's deterministic in the absence of, it doesn't have that verification, it's just a simple generation and probabilistic, right?

36:38It doesn't have an area of putting it, you know, with chemical reactions, if you have a chemical reaction that only goes, you know, like 0 .95 and you try to iterate at 20 times, you have 0 .95 to 20 to be a huge loss. Yeah, exactly, right? And the counterarguments of this is people are saying the tasteration of AI is improving and the benchmarks are improving, but when you use it in practice and it's just not there, right? Like with Billy and Dylan's millenials. I'm going to deviate us into the next subject, but here's an important point for the, you know, first to discuss in the future, which is there is two outcomes here.

37:11One is we have a polytheistic, we have multiple AGIs, multiple ASIs. Dave, you're taking the point that there is going to be one primary ASI in the final result, you know, one digital God to rule them all. We can put, make that a long bet and we'll see what happens. Dave, your timeline for when you think we're going to know that is what? I think most likely six months, you know, out of bounds two years. All right, so this is our conversation. And I also, I wouldn't take that bet because I think government involvement is what's going to force a somewhat policy. I think the natural dynamic is a winner take all, but government involvement hopefully will preserve some balance.

37:53And Dave, your point is that there's so much compute going into the recursive self -learning stuff now that over time one will emerge and shoot past everybody else. I'm telling you, I use this stuff every day and it went from smart to freaking brilliant, mind -blowingly brilliant in the last few weeks. And there's no doubt in my mind it can self -improve now, just because I use it. I mean, just playing with it is just incredible. Alright, I'm going to change the points on your paper. I want to give... Okay, I have lost control of this podcast for sure. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Peter, I'll give you the ball back.

38:29Just want to say one thing. I think that what is really underestimated is AI is not good at time varying adversarial systems, like markets and politics. Today. Today, but. There was just a paper published about AI's accuracy in predictions that was extraordinarily good. I saw that and I just saw it in my peripheral vision just today. I need to dig into that. But let me explain what I mean by this. First is, when you have a labeling of you know cats and dogs, right? Like the English language doesn't vary that conceptual label between the image and the Texas and vary that much. When you have the rules of a game of chess that isn't time varying in the same way.

39:14But markets and politics are inherently and markets politics media and so on is inherently time varying in adversarial in the sense that a post or a trade from a day ago or a year ago or 10 years ago will not necessarily make money or get likes in the same way that it will today. And the moment that anybody has an AI there, they'll start using it against other people so you'll have a bunch of AI's each competing with each other. And so because of that, you're saying it's self -centering. Yeah, exactly. I think another way of putting it is, there's just such strong incentives to decentralize AI at this point.

39:51with all kinds of crazy corporate sort of corporate espionage surveillance people refreshing the papers and so on that How can you have that advantage beyond whatever a few days or months people will just copy it very very quickly Which is what we've been seeing all right? Tell me to shut up cuz I'm gonna go this conversation I'm gonna go there's so much I'm gonna go to the I'm gonna go to your next point I'm gonna cherry pick out of the ten points in your paper the next one is a AI is amplified intelligence, not artificial intelligence. I think this is really important because there's a tendency to have tremendous fear because of the view that AI is out there and it's something which is gonna compete directly with me and it's gonna diminish my role and abilities on the planet.

40:35So amplified intelligence, please, go ahead. Yes, so let me explain what I mean by this. Right now, people think of AI as complete agentic, like you can do a task end -to -end, completely by itself. For many tasks, it is really middle to middle. Now, I want to clarify, self -driving has gotten to the end -to -end point, right? It is now literally end -to -end. It can pick you up and drop you off completely. It took 20 years since the DARPA Grand Challenge, but it was solvable. However, that took billions of dollars and I don't know, it's certainly millions of miles driven and an enormous cap -ix and a lot of time to get there.

41:09There's a lot of actually warning and transition because the real world has friction, right? And so I am somewhere in between, I don't think AI takes all the jobs right away because what happens right now is you find yourself, at least I find myself, the actual reality of AI, without naming them, for example, there's a fair number of founders, for example, who will send over AI Slop slide decks. And I'll be like, it's like the new Laura Mipsum, right? It's Laura M. AI Mipsum, okay? AI, PSU, right? It's like placeholder text. It's like, you know, it's, you know, the new midwit is a super intelligence.

41:45It's a super intelligence yet midwit, right? Me because it's garbage in, garbage out. Like you get a midwit prompt in and you get midwit text out. That's what I mean by amplified intelligence, right? If you're really smart, yes, you can prompt it to figure out new corners of physics or math and crucially, crucially, you can verify it by eye with your domain knowledge. Like I'm sure Terry Tau can search this and find interesting areas of math that he couldn't find before, but he is capable of looking at the stream of symbols coming back, parsing them and figuring out if it's just gibberish or not.

42:16Other people will talk to it and it'll tell them it's discovering all this great physics and so on. But without actually being able to do the experiment, to do the calculations and do the verification step, they're like convinced they've discovered some quantum mechanical insight. It's just all, you know, it's bullshit. So I mean, the point you made here that I think is very important for folks to hear is is this means the smarter you are, the smarter the AI is working with you. And the other half of this, which I keep on trying to shout from the rooftop is ask great questions. Yes, basically if you're good, I mean AI means everybody's a CEO, everybody's a manager, right?

42:55It's a lot like interacting with an employee, especially a junior employee, and you have to check their work. You simply cannot shove it straight to prod. fundamentally that's the thing is as a CEO, as a manager, you're interfacing with the market, especially as a CEO or the founder, right? AI is not interfacing with the market. So it can throw a slot over the end because it's only a satisfy you. It doesn't have to satisfy the unforgiving market. The market will just set it to zero, okay? And... Dave, that's a great point. I think a great point you make is that where you were using a certain type AI now, when you have an improved model, you're just slotting the new model.

43:34And you keep I just stay in the middle of middle. That's right. Yeah, it doesn't take your job. It takes the job of the previous AI. Imperically, once you have a slot in your budget for an AI tech generator, an AI image generator, AI video generation, AI code generation, and so on and so forth, where you find yourself doing empirically is I swap out, you know, you swap out stable diffusion for mid -journey and you swap out, you know, the old, you know, a cursor for cloud code and you swap out this for that. And you really don't want to use more than one, honestly, usually, right? Sometimes you'll use more than one, but it's like easy to have.

44:07What I mean by that is, once you get in the flow of mid -journey, do you want to switch over to Higgs field or Google Vio? You can. Actually, these are all built, by the way, such that a prompt in one will basically work with another one. But they're also suddenly different. It's a little bit like different social networks, where they're similar with the hearts and the posts and so on, but they have some... Usually once you've invested in a tool, you don't want to swap it out right away, but you can swap it out right away. So what that actually means is these things are beating each other's brains in for the AI budget.

44:38And I do think that every company will have AI teams just like you have a social media team. Like 20 years ago is considered, oh my god, only you know, you people waste time in social media. 10 years ago is a novelty -ish to have a social media team. Now it's obviously a core function of every company that creates content for social media. So every company will have an AI team that's just doing constant process optimization, verification of outputs, and so on and so forth. So it does actually create jobs as well. Everything it creates jobs as is in proctoring and verification. Because what AI is doing, look, we all see the positive parts of AI.

45:09A lot of people only see the negative parts. And I'm not talking just about the job taking part or whatever. I'm talking about the slop, the spam, right? The scams would have you. So AI is going to radically increase the budget for proctoring and verification, proof of human being only at the beginning of that. Yeah, let me clean up one thing you said there, because I think it's really important for the audience. And so I think we are in this golden era right now where as intelligent as the AI is, it's far, far better with a human interacting with it. And there's something missing. There's clearly something missing, even though it can solve incredibly hard math and physics problems.

45:40It can do entire hour long tasks for you and come back with new, perfect answers. But there's still something missing in the creativity system too, something, right. But that creates this golden, golden moment of synergy between the people and their AI agents. But the second part, the beautiful thing about AI is it can do 10 ,000 things for you concurrently. And if you can evaluate the answers and cherry pick the best one out of 10 ,000, you get just incredibly good results. So as an analogy, mid -journey you mentioned, you're making a movie and you're trying to create the next scene and you need it to be funny.

46:16If you prompt a GO3 or something like that and a VO3 and you say, hey, make me the next you probably won't like what you get back. If you prompt it a thousand times, you get something incredible back. And it's very easy to set up processes of self -evaluation, self -improvement, use another AI to evaluate the last AI and create these loops. And that's where an enormous amount of compute is an incredible competitive advantage. But that process is working really, really well for code generation, video game generation, movie generation, discovering new physics, discovering new math. As long as you have e -vals that can test the results that come back, you can make ridiculous progress ahead of the curve.

46:57Just turns out that AI self -improvement is one of those types of tasks. It's just software. I disagree with you for the following two reasons. The first is, I think that what will often happen is the eVals will basically just get gameed in the sense of it becomes like the good -hards law, like when a metric becomes a measure and so on. So for example, GROC, look, I like, obviously, I love Elon. I'm you know like it's amazing that he's in the top five with models given how many other things he's doing at the same time It's actually got honestly superhuman right the how good XAI is given how many other things he's doing however like You know when you actually try to use it on a daily basis This is not everything this shows up on the numbers right.

47:44It's like it's fine. It's good But it's really good for a Twitter search and so on but it doesn't like obviously smash relative to to Claude or would have either. Basically comparable. And so I'd say one of the issues is this base is so multi -dimensional that eVals are like, it's like hairs on a very large head, right? So it's like a spike of functionality like this number is up and this number is up and this but the surface is so high dimensional that the kinds of things that you want to do with it, the eVals are necessarily captured. That's one point. The second point is, I think what I would argue you're under rating is those verification steps, those evaluation steps, are not cheap and they are not really that good for main things.

48:25When you do team of experts and stuff like that and you throw a lot of cheap use at it, like grocks super heavy and so on and so forth, like, yes, you can flip the coin, I mean, again, empirically, if I use mid -journey, I have to flip the coin a thousand times before I finally find the image that I actually want. You get in the ballpark very quickly, but then the one that you actually want is an enormous amount of time to get there, right? And it is not obvious to me that Maybe that'll get improved, but I definitely don't consider that to be solved right now Like the verification step in the last few years.

49:00I don't consider that to have Radically improved because you still have to prompt the thing a lot. Another part of it that's an issue is the way these work is they don't actually give a suit or random number C at the beginning to get a reproducible result. So you can give the same input and get different output every single time. What that means is you can only include it in those parts of your process that can tolerate that level of variance, which actually does constrain what it can be a feature of business. Which can be a feature not a bug in many circumstances. Just one narrow point on that.

49:31That is true for us as users of the APIs, but it's not true for the researchers inside OpenAI meta and elsewhere. They get perfect reproducibility. They give it the same rancid. They turn the temperature to zero. They run the test 5 ,000 times. They can debug with exact fidelity. They just don't make that available to us as outside API users. I know. So exactly, that's right. But basically, for our reason right now, in the UX is they have not exposed T equals zero and they've not exposed perfect reproducibility. I mean, you can share chats and so on, but I guess my point is, I guess it's probably some model that you can call with that to get reproducibility.

50:09But I guess my point is, when you've got stochastic output, let me give you an example. Somebody had some AI web browser type thing, okay? Seems cool at first. You're like, wow, it can automate your posting for you and build a whole following. I'm like, I would not do that. And the reason is that, first of all, Well, if it makes even one misstep, that's on you, right? It's like your dog biting somebody, right? You're the owner, you're responsible for this thing. Okay? It's not actually a human being, you're the human being for whom it's responsible for. Number one, so if it likes the wrong thing, it retweets the wrong thing, it posts the wrong thing, which could easily do, the second thing is what it admits often sounds like the parody version of you, right?

50:51People who use AI at chatbots, you know, people have tried this like replicas of people, right? But it's fine for like voice cloning if you supervise it. It can help you scale yourself in that way at times. I have like an AI version of the network state at the network state .com. But I say it's AI biology so there's errors. There's people who know it's AI. So it's like an MP3 audible that updates with the text. So it's okay. However, that's something where you can tolerate some glitches in the audio output. It's like it's an analog output. If it's a digital output, you can't tolerate often that error.

51:24like on the balance that's being sent to somebody or something like that. So the AI web browsing, for example, where is that helpful? It's helpful on automated testing. It's like a better Selenium, right? Internally within your company, you run AI web browsing, you ever click a bunch of things like a monkey hitting buttons like a human. Fine, you can tolerate the success is there and also won't take down your live site. But people who are trying to say, oh, my AI agent will go and make me a million bucks like Renaissance or whatever, just get racked because it's not good for that kind of thing.

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52:31Okay. Now back to the episode. I want to hit another one of your points here and then we're going to shift you to crypto, which is AI doesn't take your job. It lets you do any job. I think that's a really important element here that needs. People need to understand and start to internalize. But what you can do is say, for example, yeah. So for example, you can get to a six or a seven on art on GraphicSign. People who couldn't code can do prototypes of things. You can now do a prototype version in an almost any area. So it's amazing for founders. It's amazing for self -directed people. It's amazing for people who have something in their mind's eye, but they just couldn't get it out, right?

53:09It's also amazing for people who have time on their hands, but not money, because they You can prompt and prompt and prompt and prompt and get like a good image or drawing for something if they lack the budget. But to polish it and to actually get it to like ship and production level, currently, you need somebody who's an expert in the area to actually be able to debug the symbols usually. Again, unless you're smart enough that you can teach yourself with it. So realizing that it actually more, you know, the, the Heinlein quote about, you know, a human being should be able to like, um, chop lumber.

53:42I'll get it wrong, but you know what I'm talking about right exactly. He's like a human being should be able to talk things. You should do it on it. Yeah, go go go. No, no, go on. Hey, I'm paraphrasing you chop lumber right a sonnet like make wine Sing the song etc. Specialization is for insects right he's basically talking about great So in an interesting sense where I think AI does take us towards is a greater degree of robotic autarky Smaller communities can be more self -sufficient. If you take, that's what I mean by the internet versus China going back to that. Like you can have a thousand million person network states where you have robots.

54:20It's effectively decentralizing across the board. Large companies don't, I mean large companies used to gather all the talent and parse them out a little bit at a time. Today a team of one or a small group can do whatever's needed to. That's right. So it reverses the extreme specialization of the 20th century. Your wingspan increases, right? There's lots of things you can do at an okay level, right? You can learn what you don't know and so on. And so long as you're self -critical about it, knowing that the AI can be wrong, you can be wrong and so and so forth, right? So that concept of versatility is there.

54:52With that said, for some kinds of areas that are genuinely just like data entry or something like that, many kinds of midwit -like jobs, like if you're just like a lawyer who's using templates, if you're just a doctor who's reading from the book or would have you. And I can do it, maybe with a higher error rate, actually in some cases with a lower error rate, many cases medical diagnosis, he has got a lower error rate. No, the numbers are staggeringly in favor of AI alone without humans in a loop, right? That's right. So AI in medicine is much cheaper, orders are magnitude faster, because you don't have to go to an appointment and so on.

55:29It's more personal. You can get not just a second opinion, a 20th opinion. So for certain areas, it's a complete transformation, and it's a radical, radical, radical improvement. Medicine is one of them, laws one of them. Because, you know, basically what you do is you use AI, you've write all the contracts, and then you have the lawyers review and sign off and then the end, so you don't have to do the $1 ,000 an hour lawyer, right? Similarly with the doctors, you go and research everything with AI, it's like an ultimate search engine, and then you go and you get your prescription or whatever from the doctor after you've gone and done all your stuff.

56:00So they're the printouts that the final certification verification step. That's how people are using it in practice. But it doesn't mean that you have that MD or JD yet. That state certification is still a dangling thing. And there's going to be enormous pressure from the AMA, the ABA, and others to ban or limit the use of AI, kind of like unions, but why call it unions? Yeah, I think you made a really important point for the listeners too, which is that the different areas of endeavor are moving at very, very different rates. and the two big factors are candidate evaluate itself and the other one is it regulated in some way.

56:35But you know, medicine is moving a billion miles an hour. Law is able to move a billion miles an hour, but you have regulatory issues. Physics and math and coding are moving a billion miles an hour with no barriers. There's no regulatory barrier. Are they, are they, what do you, so give me, like, okay, so a concrete example would be the protein folding, right? like what Demise won the Nobel Prize for. That's genuinely something where there was a huge, it was a well -posed problem of given the primary sequence inferred the 3D structure where the 3D structure comes from PDB and you can verify it with extra crystallography.

57:16So there's a very known objective function where you can map this for. But what other, I don't know. So the four things I named were medicine, philosophy, physics, math and coding. And of those four, the one where Peter's the world expert is the one on biology and chemistry. And you're right, within biology, chemistry, and medicine, there are areas that are very, very discreet and evaluatable and others that aren't. So that one's the one of the four that I mentioned. That's pretty murky. But within that, there's probably 20 different dimensions. So, specifically, if you're reading scans, the fidelity of a scan can be many, many terabytes of data.

58:02No radiologists can read it. But when you find something in the scan, it's crystal clear that you found it. So that one self evaluates very, very easily. It's like, yeah, if I had the time to look at it, I would have found that, but I didn't have the time to look at it. So those are the areas that will move very, very quickly. And then there are these other murkier areas. Can you build a full cell simulator? Well, that's more of a synthetic data and simulation problem. The AI will keep up with it if you can build the evaluator or the simulator. But can you actually build that? Okay, so here's my view.

58:30The areas I know fairly well are bio encoding. And I have, I mean, I know some physics and math, but I haven't kept up with the frontier of it. Here's what I'd say about bio. AI is amazing for, like obviously the protein folding problem, but another thing, biomedical text mining. All the papers that were locked in archives and so and so forth, being able to put together the information about P53 in this paper and that paper and all the contradictions and all the references and so it's over. It's amazing for doing natural language search synthesis summary of large corpora. I feel it's definitely going to accelerate biomedical innovation that since and obviously I was just talking about for diagnosis of both text and for images and mixed kinds of things and so on.

59:08So it's smashingly useful in biomedicine. But I'd say that a lot of that is not the creation really of net new information so much as the synthesis and bridging of existing things. Like you've got a bunch of existing nodes, and then AI's really amazing and interpolating. And sometimes that is in a sense net new because that synthesis is itself useful. That's distinct from points outside the envelope that are like new physics or new math or new biology. And so it's like, let me use this in a particular point. Did you see Demis' prediction of curing all disease by 2035 and then did you see Dario's prediction of potentially doubling the human lifespan in the next decade as a result of AI.

59:47I'm curious if you've seen any of those and what your thoughts are. I've seen those. Yeah. So here's what I think about that. First of all, obviously, there's just smart guys, and I love what they've done, and I'm big fans of both Claude and Gemini and everything they've done. Okay, so let me start with that. Okay, so first is, AI is below the state and crypto is above the state. Okay, what I mean by that is crypto with Bitcoin and with smart contracts and so on is a replacement for the Fed for the SEC and crypto is actually able to have the political strength to go and take over the government and devorulate not just crypto but AI, right?

1:00:19AI is below the state. So therefore all these bi -medium raises are talking. We mean we see below the state, mean controlled by the state. Correct, that's right. Like you know like above the API, below the API, right? Crypto is above the state, AI is below the state. Okay, and what I mean by that, also for the moment. For the moment there is very much potential future on the post side of the society. There's a potential future. Yes. Yes. That's right. There's a potential future where you have like autonomous law and so on and so on. But right now, as it currently stands, the reason I say that is a lot of the AI people as much as I like them, they essentially assume a benevolent or at least functional state.

1:00:56Like for example, they think of the US first China as like a unitary America. Permissive. It felt like a functional government with high state capacity and it's making rational acts as if it was a Cold War or something like that, right? versus a shambolic like blue America, versus red America, versus tech guys, versus everybody yelling at each other and doing adversarial things versus each other, right? And so in the same way, like the cure all diseases thing, if it's not engaging with the FDA, if it's not engaging with the regulatory process, with CPT, with AMA, with all that kind of stuff, I have seen for 20 -something years that the primary blocker on genomics and on biotech is the regulatory state.

1:01:32It is not really the tech system. We're also, you know, eight billion humans across the planet have the same biology and you can get to a geographic arbitrage where if there is a solution that's coming, I can go to, you know, my friend, President Bukheli and El Salvador and have the treatment there. And in fact, it's been, you know, longevity tourism has been something that's been going now for a decade until finally the UFDA has come in. Absolutely. So Prospera, for example, right, which actually has mini -circle, which Altman and others, and you know, I've put some to check in there and so and so forth.

1:02:03So mini -circle is actually gene therapy on existing humans. Farb Nivi has posted about it, how he took that, Patrick's post about it, he feels stronger, like Bezos started following Farb because of that, he saw that Farb's strength and so on. I'm still waiting for the science to get published there. It's a lot of people's opinions, right? It's a lot of people's opinions, but the thing is that we're going back into the era of big, effect -sized drugs. Okay, just to explain what I mean by this. essentially, the entire FDA was really about the entire FDA era. If you go prior to the FDA, you have Banting and Best, who won the Nobel Prize, right?

1:02:41Why they wouldn't know prize? Because they came up with the idea for insulin supplementation to treat diabetes. They tested on dogs. They tested on themselves. They tested on willing patients. Those patients leapt up out of the bed. And then they had scale production with the Elylilie for the entire North American continent. And so they started their work in like 1921, scale by 1923. That was when pharma moved to the speed of software before the modern FDA. And in fact, why many drugs are grandfathered because they were in wide use before the FDA and you just had trial and error over many years figuring out how they worked.

1:03:13Crucially, that was not phase one, two, three, clinical trials. That was not case control studies, right? Like case control studies are like AB tests. You know there's no case control study on? The effect of regulation itself. That's a regulatory state. Go ahead. I mean, I want to, this is a very important point. That's one good point. It's a great point. Okay. You don't have a jurisdiction within without some regulation to see whether the regulation is actually holding something back, right? Or actually sitting lives, right? And the whole point is that you value the lives that you don't kill versus the lives that you don't have.

1:03:44And tort law is totally messed up. Well, if you make one little mistake, it's a hundred million dollar settlement. If a thousand people die when they could have been cured, nobody pays anything. That's exactly right. That's right. So the FDA, the fundamental issue actually gets back even upstream of the FDA is risk tolerance, right? At any big company, risk budget is always scarier than budget, right? It's easier often to spend a huge amount of money than to take a risk because people are just, you know, just one of those things. You have to have founder DNA to have the political capital to take a risk if you fail, what would happen, right?

1:04:17This is why Bezos believes in, doesn't believe in bet the company bets, believes in lots of small bets, right? But you have to have the psychology and legitimacy to do that. So the decentralization of the world and the arising of all of these start societies, network states, and new freedom cities and so on and so forth will mean more jurisdictions where you can actually opt in and you can have a new system of laws, all the special economics zones and so on and so forth. So that's actually the bottleneck, not so much, look, I love AI, it's amazing. I love biotech, that's amazing. But it's really the regulatory state that is the thing that is holding this back.

1:04:52And the issue is that a lot of the guys, not are effectively docile. Like for example, Leopold's paper, right? He writes about the US and China as if like, it's the United States rather than the dis -United States. He writes about it as if like, New sum isn't fighting, Trump isn't fighting, like the New York Times isn't publishing abolish the Supreme Court and pack the judges. As if it's not like a food fight, social war, every single day, right? If you've actually showed the political chaos in the backdrop, it's like, you know, somebody talking about on the eve of China's World War Era that they're going to launch a space program, you know?

1:05:30And you talk a lot about Bitcoin. We're going to get to crypto in the moment. There is a direct correlation between people who are pro, I'd say, they're Bitcoin maximalist or Bitcoin advocates and longevity. I'm curious in your decade a long vision in the future, how much does longevity play into that? How long does expanded health span at all? It's in, so I used to have as my Twitter bio, Immutable Money, Infrafrontier, Eternal Life. And all two of those things go together actually because for example, we're not going to be able to explore the stars without life extension and probably radiation, tolerant genes and other kinds of things.

1:06:07Or sending robots and plugging in. Yeah, you can send robots, you can do other things, but to terraform Mars will probably have to modify ourselves. You know, like you're just not probably, you know, or or send robots first and build the environments for us. Let me tax live in, right? Yeah, that's also possible. This right. So maybe we're, you know, we could figure that out. It might be some some degree of robot, some degree of, you know, self modification. Like for example, there's various groups on the face of the earth that have different altitude adaptations, right? Kenyans, andians, and Ethiopians, each have different altitude adaptations.

1:06:40Some are in the blood, some are lungs and so and so forth. You can imagine stacking those together getting radiation tolerance, this tolerance, similar to how AI synthesizes from different nodes. You can take different genetic mutations. There's a company called Variant .Bio that looks at that kind of stuff, right? Like looking for real life X -Men taking their mutations and adding them. But coming back, what is the connection? There is a deep connection, by the way, between Bitcoin and Life Extension. And actually, it's gone back a long time. And the fundamental similarities as follows. The traditional financial system says that yes, hyperinflation is bad, but a little inflation is good and deflation is also bad.

1:07:20So that's to say, yeah, losing all your money is bad, but the New Zealand target is 2 % devaluation of your currency every year, and deflation is bad. Then people would go to money hoarding and so on and so forth. Right? And so what that basically says is every year you lose 2 % a little bit of wealth. Right? And the traditional medical system says, yeah, rapid death is bad, but trying to live forever is also weird. Right? Reversing death is also weird. Instead, you should die a little bit every year. You lose a little bit of health every year. Okay? So that's the deep similarity, or the traditional financial system says you lose a little bit of wealth every year.

1:07:58and social medical system says you lose a bit of health every year, okay? And none of them really look to first principles and say, why again? Why do we have to do that? Why do we go to? Why is a whole, why is there a whole in our bucket? Why is there a whole in the bucket, right? Because we know you guys have seen the phenotypes for the mouse lunge -abby stuff, you know, you've seen the stuff for - We have case studies with the bohed whale living 200 years in Greenland, chart living 500 years and the issue is how do we repair our software and hardware to get there? and it's not a matter of if it's only a matter of when.

1:08:31Yes. And I think that basically the big thing we have to work on is making the moral case for it and also boosting the risk tolerance. For example, people right now, they'll go bunchy jumping, they'll go sky diving, they'll serve in the military, and they'll take risks with their life. And some of those risks are foolhardy and some of them are further collective in a sense. We should have medical heroes. similar to how, like, you know, for example, the early airplane pilots considered heroes for risking their lives, you know, no plane crashes, no planes, no train crashes, no trains, right? There was somebody, you guys, you guys are all, you know, of a certain age.

1:09:08You remember the CRC handbook of chemistry and physics? I do. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my god. That's what existed before we competed for the engine. Well, exactly. We all had that in high school, right? The CRC handbook of chemistry and physics, if you recall, up to a certain point, the compounds had a smell and a taste list, and then they stop listing them. Why? There was some guy who, you know, is lasting a dead, sniffed sign and wrote down almonds. He took a hit for the team. Okay. Hero of science. That's why we know what it smells like or what. Okay. Right. And so that is actually, in my view, the scarce resource that we need is we need the like risk tolerant people.

1:09:48And um, risk tolerant jurisdictions. Let's go ahead. So let's talk it's time to back to Bitcoin. I put out a tweet last night asking my followers to You know, you propose questions. I got 225 questions back So we're gonna start with number one and I'll march out way through but but seriously Bitcoin and the connection to longevity and then do you see you know when we built the internet We built it without a financial layer. We now have crypto as a financial layer Do you see Bitcoin is the primary currency for AI machine learning in the future? So there's a few questions that are stacked, right?

1:10:24Let's get Bitcoin and longevity first as a correlate. Okay, so you know how power generation works. You have very high voltage at the power station and then there's step down transformers and it comes a little trickle out to power your phone over a cable, right? You see, Bitcoin is like really high voltage money. Okay, and so it's like transferred relatively and frequently it's like digital gold, right? And then you have various proxies for Bitcoin that then you can just blast on chain. Okay? And roughly speaking, Bitcoin is already at the kind of transaction volume of Fedwire. So think of it as like the Fedwire of the free world.

1:11:03Okay? And then on top of that, you can have various layers, you know, for example, Bitcoin scales in a sense off chain and on other chains. I know people will say lightning, let's leave lightning aside for the sake of this argument. Many lightning implementations are in practice, essentially, peering agreements between lightning apps. So it's similar to like off -chain transactions on Coinbase or on Binance. These apps have tens of millions, in some cases hundreds of millions of users. So it's like within France or within Germany, transacting between yourself very, very quickly. And then when you want to transact between Coinbase and Binance, then they can do settlement of Bitcoin like the true ups between them.

1:11:43And then of course you can withdraw from the system as well, right? And so that kind of hub and spoke system is not quite the same as a total pure to pure system, but you can get extremely far with that, I think. And then you've deviated from the primary question, though. Yeah, let's go back. So you said it will be the currency of the internet. Yes. The issue is the transaction volume for pure Bitcoin, BTC, is not the currency of AI. But WBTC, a wrapped BTC, off chain BTC, can get there. It's the same analogy that you have in the main world where if you want to pay with gold as the nightmare and as you get more and more to the lighter transactions you can play with a debit card but you don't have great security.

1:12:23And so you have a trade off there and so you can do many, many more transactions with a debit card that tend to be small transactions and you can do them all you want when you get to the heavier stuff. It's smaller, bigger transactions more heavy, more graded, more secure. So you want rap BTC on Salana, you can blast it on chain as much as you want. It can be a currency. All you want question from the community is if you're willing to say what percentage of your net wealth is in Bitcoin right now? Not willing to say. Okay. But you know, a majority. Well, that would be willing to say. Let's just say, okay, put it like this.

1:13:02Only hold in USD what you can afford to lose. Okay. Fair enough. where else besides Bitcoin would you hold? So, okay, so in terms of USBs, this is your hot wallet. USBs your hot wallet. Well, so in terms of fiat currency, by process of elimination, I would say, SGD or maybe AED, meaning Singapore dollars, or the UE they're on. Those are the two jurisdictions. I would not say Switzerland anymore. The CHF, basically the Swiss after the Russia sanctions and the Cretz -Wist debacle, and Obama kind of kicking in the doors to Swiss bank accounts. Switzerland, ain't Switzerland anymore, right? So the Swiss franc is not what it was.

1:13:43And Western currencies in general, I wouldn't hold, nor do I hold a JPY and probably not the Korean one. But if you must hold Fiat, I would say the AED, the AED is still pegged to the dollar, SGD is soft pegged, but they're independently managed on their own ledger to my knowledge. And so, and they're also global currencies and they have open capital accounts. And I think Western countries are going to have closed capital accounts. So even in 2026, it'd be in proposed like a remittance tax for the USD, right? So I'd say my advice on Fiat would be AED SGD. But if they think of the dollar, you're essentially holding the dollar.

1:14:20Well, for now, but a lot of the, a lot of the east is moving. So one of the things that's happening is bricks is stacking gold bricks. Like states. So you're seeing the Korean DMZ, like we're in North Korean South Korea. Yeah. Yeah. Imagine like, this is not exactly how it is, but imagine like on the Russia China border, there was something like that. And they would just like hand each other gold bricks each day, right? To go on to budget. So they'd actually do physical settlements. It doesn't actually work like that, but conceptually it works like that. Where states can settle back and forth in gold bricks, right?

1:14:54And they can actually afford the security and the trucks and the magnetometers and whatever. are all this kind of stuff to verify that the gold is real and that no one's coming to steal it. And that can back fiat currencies because it used to back fiat currencies, right? So I do think that both gold and digital gold, gold is the currency of states and digital gold is the currency, the reserve currency of the network. Those will both rise, but Western fiat won't, right? So those currencies are currently dollar back. Now with that said, this could be a 10 year kind of thing and it could be something like this.

1:15:26Do you guys remember how first all newspapers went online and then Google News put all newspapers in competition? And then all local papers died because their geographical monopoly went away and NYTW, Shae Washington Post, they survived. And then they basically died against X and internet native social media, right? That exact kind of thing is going to happen to currencies. First all currencies go on chain via currencies. Then most of them die because the only reason they exist is because of their geographical monopoly. Once you can hold in your wallet the best currency in the world, why do you have to hold the currency of your geography again?

1:16:04You don't. Currencies start competing on ideology and features rather than geography, just like news, online news, competes on the base of ideology and features as opposed to geography. Like if the Miami Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle, or Miami Herald and the Chronicle and the poke keeps you whatever, we're all reprinting the same story, that only worked when they had trucks in a geographic advantage. So all local currencies compete with each other. Most of them die. USD, you know, RMB, maybe a few others make it. And then all of those get to value against BTC. All right, let me take this back to A .I.

1:16:38So in a world where A .I. agents are negotiating and contracting and paying each other autonomously, what do you see as the role of crypto in that play? Well, so clearly crypto is the currency of AI. And the reason for that is, crypto is the currency of the internet. Since, for example, when you set up a program, you can have that program access private keys. Like, what do I think about it is, crypto is a 10 or 100x or infinity x or the existing system on many axes that people don't normally think about. For example, you can set up a bank account, equivalent, a crypto wallet, in fractions of a second.

1:17:14You can set up as many as you want. You can bind those to whatever you want, right? All that cannot be done with a bank account. A traditional bank account, you have to go to the store, no, the branch, and present your ID. So to simply set up a program or a robot and give it a wall, it takes fractions of a second. Just that practical thing alone, forget everything else I'm going to say. Just that practical thing alone means obviously crypto is a currency of the robot and of the AI, right? Then going further, like legacy fiat is locked down in so many different ways. You don't notice this is when you just are buying Starbucks or whatever as a mezzanine level transaction.

1:17:51If you want to do transactions that are very large, very small, very fast, very automatic, very international, very transparent, or very complex, you need crypto. And so if you have... Will these banks make it or will they be all displaced by crypto -native banks? They're already getting displaced. It's a good question. They're all becoming crypto exchanges. Crypto exchanges are the new banks because they actually have peering relationships across How many years before we see the current major banks no longer around, when do they become disrupted? When do they become macy's? I think you have to get this very, very, very, and retail banking and the other types of banking.

1:18:26Retail banking really gets really strong. Yeah, totally agree. I was at the Washington Post working for Don Graham for a year right when it was the internet. Google was just taken over the world and there was no turning it around. and that was kind of tragic and all investigative reporting died in the process. I don't see it the same way with banks because you're talking about M1 here. Everything you said is exactly right. It's going to happen, Bellagy, just the way you said. But banks don't just sit there as a place to hold M1. They have a lot more, they make loans to consumers, they evaluate their credit.

1:19:04There's, you know, there's many types of banks, but very little of what they do is impacted by the transition that you just outlined. Okay. And so it's going to happen the way you phrased it. But, you know, what's the subset that's impacted it? So, but I still want to hear your predictions on when we're going to see the current banks we all know and love. I want to name them, you know, disappear. I think, I mean, so disappear, I mean, like, Macy's is, I think it's still around. Yeah, it's still around. And it becomes minor in place. No, irrelevant. Yeah, no. I would argue, I mean, among the power user, it's already happened.

1:19:37Sure. Right. In the sense of you basically, like you could have a crypto, like crypto is being used for, like Thailand, for example, just switch over to accepting crypto for various things. Many countries are... Everybody's made my... Fountain life is now accepting crypto for payments on your longevity treatments, right? Totally. So by the way, China is the exception to everything I'm saying, right? Because China will maintain control, like the great firewall and China's system, like CCP and BTC will be like the USA and USA or the USSR and the USA of this century, right? Because they're like, you know, the centralized party, total control over everything versus the decentralized currency.

1:20:102030, 2035, I'm still looking for that number. 2035, I think, but let me explain why, right? Why do I think it comes faster than you might think. I'm going to keep my hands on the stove. Very short answer. Short answer. I wrote another article on BologyS .com called the billionaire flipping. Okay. And so a long time ago, So Olaf Carson, we use the founder of Polychains, friend of mine for a long time. We calculated that somewhere between $100 ,000 and a million dollars for Bitcoin, half the world's billionaires become crypto. Yes. Okay. And it basically eats everything else of value in their portfolio.

1:20:43That's right. The next 10 X dilutes down all fiat billionaires. Yep. For sure. By a lot. And just including states. That's the people don't get. Like, huh? Go ahead. Including states. Including banks. banks. Right? The next ten - So slow this down for everybody. I want people to understand what this means. Right? So if someone's got, if someone's got a million dollars of crypto in the bank, it becomes, you know, and they had a million dollars of other assets, crypto is 50 % of the portfolio. All of a sudden, if it goes 10x, all of a sudden crypto is 90%, 95 % of the portfolio. That's exactly right.

1:21:21And the purchasing power of it, at a certain point, what happens is it destabilizes and it goes one million, 10 million because people flip and that's actually the new merer. Right? That's already happened in the crypto space where all investments are denominated in Bitcoin terms. Do you see anybody asking for it? Do you see any future in which crypto fails in any fashion or Bitcoin fails in a fashion? We weigh past that right now. I mean, there's definitely ways it could fail. So let me say I can. How it could fail. So first is so quantum is now Okay, let me talk about, so quantum cryptography, that's an area to watch.

1:21:59Okay, the main issue is not that quantum safe, it's a very technical issue, but quantum safe encryption can be deployed in Bitcoin, but moving all of the funds would take a long time, right? Moving them on chain. So there have to be some sort of hard fork or something like that, which, you know, and this is the currency of development as I understand it, I'm not in the bits and bytes, So I'm maybe mispeaking, but the there had to be some significant protocol change to enable that like a giant you know Like air lift out right like a deployment of something that significantly changed the code But miners everybody would have to consent to that they probably would but that would be a thing with that said crypto as a class will not despair from this earth because there's now enough different currencies with enough different protocols and enough different mechanisms that there's a degree of herd immunity.

1:22:54There's enough different immune systems where the kinds of vulnerabilities that proof -of -work has with Bitcoin are distinct from the vulnerabilities that proof -of -stake has and actually complementary. Proof -of -stake, you can have a bunch of humans that are distributed globally, right? In theory, if they colluded, they could rewrite the blockchain. Proof -of -work has requires physical data centers, but they can't rewrite the blockchain, right? So there's different failure modes, and then you can do things where you hash Ethereum state to Bitcoin. and so I think that crypto as a class of things will not disappear from the earth.

1:23:23Any individual chain could be attacked. But then what could happen is you can snapshot that chain and issue it on another chain. So you can have lifeboats. I think the core here is the ones you understand the Byzantine generals problem in that innovation, you can't undo that, it's here. Yeah, that's right. I mean, look, it's also, I think it's very possible that you get something like, see, up until this point, crypto, you know what social media? Do you guys remember the social network movie? Sure, sure. Okay, of course. It's worth rewatching for one reason, which is it came out in 2010. And it's most remarkable from its absence in the movies, there's absolutely no mention whatsoever of politics.

1:24:05No mention whatsoever. Facebook has treated as if it was like universal studios. It's like a theme park and amusement park for people to poke and like each other, right? This was despite the fact that the Arab Spring it already happened or that was happening. There's de -stabilization of governments and so on and so forth. So it was known that Twitter, Facebook, places in the Middle East and so on had been at least partially de -stabilized by this stuff. I may be getting the title on wrong, but there's definitely stuff in the late 2000s before I think there was a run or something the tweets must flow.

1:24:34There was stuff that was before the social network movie came out and obviously all politics became social media in the years after that. And then there was a counter attack on social media and every possible attack vector you You could imagine social media that people thought was unthinkable due to social conventions came out. People were de -platformed. They were censored. They were shadow banned. Like the president was de -platformed. Then he's re -platformed. That whole thing became a battleground issue. We all know for the last, you know. And yet in 2010, if you had told me, even with 500 million people on Facebook that in 10 years, a single most important political issue in the world will be whether or not the president of the United States can tweet.

1:25:07That would still seem like, oh my god, biology, you're taking the internet too seriously. It's just exaggerating blah, blah, blah. Right? Similar to you guys at Singularity University, people will always say, oh my god, you're taking this stuff too seriously or whatever, right? But so with Bitcoin by 2035 or so, maybe sooner or maybe later, just like you're not the president if you don't have a social media account, you're not like a country if you don't have cryptocurrency. Like you're not solvent. Yeah. And you're not able to operate in the accelerating exponential future. That's right. Bitcoin becomes the government of governments.

1:25:40Yeah, I want to get on on hit on networks. I would hit on on network state network state school your your network school You have Basically gone out and built a global talent fellowship in the network school You've launched this and I'm curious about your thoughts around dark talent the idea that you know There's this incredible bidding war going on right now in the US for AI talent, you know, million dollar salaries is $10 million, the hypothetical billion dollar offers. And there's so much talent out there, and it's become so easy for this talent to gain access, to capabilities. Talk to me about what you've called dark talent, if you would.

1:26:23Totally. OK, so I believe in the America that I grew up in. And I think that we're forking where the internet is taking American values, and the land is becoming something very different, right? It's going anti -immigrant, anti -capitalist, and so on and so So I don't think that as an immigrant capitalist, you should build your life in the US. I think it's going to get very, very nasty, unfortunately. And moreover, a lot of people can't get visas. They can't get in there and so it's over. So I moved as far away as I could, right? 10 ,000 miles away. And of course, it varies, you know, huh? How when did you move?

1:26:562020. OK. Yeah, I. OK. There's a lot of reason to continue on that. Yeah, so I'm just giving the motivation, right? So motivation is I believe in America. And just like in the same way that America was like Britain 2 .0, I think of the internet as Britain 3 .0 or America 2 .0. It's like the version 3 .0. Like America was 10x bigger than Britain. America went from common law to constitution. America had many more of the people of the world. America was even bigger and better than it's very, very, you know, accomplished progenitor. And the internet is like America the next version. Why it's like 10x bigger than America?

1:27:31With crypto, it has freedom of contracts, freedom of speech. each, you know, in India, unfortunately, maybe a second class citizen nowadays in the US, but there are first classes in the internet, and they have the same monetary policy and contract rights and smart contracts and all that kind of stuff. And I think that actually lots of Westerners, lots of Americans also believe in that. And so in my own way, I'm trying to stick up for like what I think of as American values and, you know, like, and kind of keep the torch aloft, right? Think of me as a minority report. Maybe hopefully I'm wrong.

1:28:02Maybe all you guys can fix it and that's great and salute and good job, right? But I'm like the parachute, right? I'm the minority report. I'm the backup plan. I'm the hedge, right? And I want to keep the flame of freedom and democracy and capitalism and so on alive. And why don't you even say democracy, by the way? I think lots of Western states are effectively becoming one party state. It's like in California, you can hold elections, but the party always wins. A Democrat party always wins. It's being gerrymandered even further. In response, Republicans are doing the same in Florida. And of course communism in China has a one party state.

1:28:34So Democrats, Republicans, Communists have all built one party states. So democracy is going to be between. Bring me back. Bring me back to. I know. I'm coming back to NSG. Global hit in a couple of seconds. Yes. Okay. Yes. Oh, dark down. Yeah. So they built one party state. So democracy is between those states, right? Meaning you're going to go from the two party system to the thousand community system. And to go to the thousand community system, you need to build one community. And then you have to scale that around the world. And so we're a startup society that's a that's a template for other sharp societies.

1:29:01We are bringing all in all the Stark talent, which has been overlooked from Latin America, from the Middle East, from Eastern Europe. Also, by the way, white kids from the Midwest, Asian kids who get quoted out by Harvard or something like that. Anybody anywhere, if they're working hard, they're online, they're doing well. I will bring them in, fund them, level them up. So, to discuss how many people you're bringing in, how you funding them, and what's your mission? Are they building companies there? Well, so right now it's out of the bank apology and that's a that's that's fairly healthy kind of thing right but eventually we may take outside capital or and so and so forth.

1:29:38You know, Paul Graham did why Comon leader out of his back pocket for a long time right. And and I think that's always the right way of doing things is you know if you can but strap it or whatever you know basically like you know things the world is being fortunate to me so I want to kind of help others up and do that for them as well. You asked, so how many, then you asked, where are the people coming from? And the answer is all over. Basically, anywhere English is spoken. So my feeling is that we hear about everybody in San Francisco and all the talent wars that are going on there. But I have to believe that throughout China, which by the way, 50 % of meadows, AI researchers are Chinese.

1:30:12And we've got this crazy amount of intelligence capability centered in math. And most of Southeast Asia and India, not to mention South and Central America, that there's a huge amount of talent that is not being tapped into that could easily create the next unicorns and the next. Not good, but they will. They will. Yes, they will. Now the thing about that is absolutely. And one I think I'd also say is, and we're going to be rolling the saddening near future, maybe some fraction of people, a small fraction of people will be founders and will create unicorns. And I agree with that, they're very important, we're going to find them.

1:30:47However, the number of people who are unicorn founders globally is less than number of pro athletes. There's like 1500, 2000 -ish unicorns, I'll say 2x, you know, 2 co -founders on average per, so a few thousand unicorn co -founders, and there's easily 10 ,000 -plus pro athletes, depending on how you count, especially. Having said that, something fascinating is the Tiel Fellowship, I think 5 .6 % is the number of Tiel Fellows have become unicorn founders, which is insane. It's amazing. It's amazing. So my view is what I'm, so certainly I do fund companies. And I do fund currencies. What I'm most interested is the third thing, communities.

1:31:28So I think 1994 with Netscape was really the first true internet startup, right? If you remember that moment, because it had all the modern features that you could download the software on the web, you went viral, Billion Dollar IPO, transform the world, all those features of the modern internet startup, multi -billion dollar IPO in the 90s when that was really really money. 15 years later, the first internet currency, Bitcoin, right? And that was a template for things that came after that. And I think what we're doing, the way I think about is the first real internet community. So internet company, internet currency, internet community.

1:31:58Why are internet communities, I think, going to be even more valuable than internet companies or currencies. The reason is that they're actually the platform on which those things are built. Just like, just like fun is the platform upon which all their companies were built. Exactly. That's right. And if you actually did it exactly very good point because I did a spreadsheet and it was the first time I'd ever written one quadrillion on Ironic Okay, here's why if you go so obviously Google's a trillion Facebook's you know a trillion on that order of magnitude And so and that's thought of as the most valuable thing you can do right but I'm pretty sure cryptocurrency Bitcoin is gonna get bigger than that Because it's actually still and it's you know phase like this actually those tech companies can still grow you know beyond that but But if you think of a country and what the country's valuation is, how would you put a valuation on that?

1:32:45So if you take, let's say, Singapore, okay, and you take its number of square miles, okay, and the price per square foot, you do get a valuation, or you take the number of people and their average net worth, you get a valuation on the order of 10 trillion. Yeah. Okay. That's actually kind of seems reasonable, right? Then if you, if you say, okay, what's 10x Singapore, then maybe South Korea, ish, is like about 10x the size of Singapore. It's a little less than 10x, but let's say it's on the order of like 100 trillion. And then what's China? It's like 10x South Korea or will be or dependent. So that's like a quadrillion, right?

1:33:18So I actually do think that all of the startup societies together, when you have a thousand million person network states and they may not all be a million people, some might be 20 millions, some might be 500k. That is actually the next big thing that is actually the startup societies that we're going to have a lot of those in 10 or 20 years. I want to bring this down to your advice and go for entrepreneurs right now and you know people who are employees in America in you know sort of Of course they're they're listening to this. They're excited about technology But it's not this hasn't been their life so far so between the entrepreneurs out there and people just listening who are Tech fans What's your top points of advice as we wrap on here?

1:34:04Before you ask that question, Dave, I know you've got a heart out, but so thank you for your time. I will call you on the phone in just a little bit when we wrap here, continue our conversation. Biology, a lot of fans out there who are going to listen to this podcast probably two or three times to be able to absorb it just like I am. But if you could, what's your most heartfelt advice to both entrepreneurs and the average individual listening to this. Okay, so for entrepreneurs, first, I would say go direct, build your own following on social media, get good at AI, create content, don't give interviews to legacy media, only do tech podcasts and tech shows, but even more than that, basically build your own influential individual voice as a creator, as the authentic voice of your company, don't hire public relations people, only hire creators if you're hiring them.

1:34:58You don't to hire too many, but you know, and basically don't outsource your content creation. Content creation is as important as code and you should be doing that in -house and you should be using all the modern tools. And you don't have to use full AI by the way you can use Half AI. So go direct. That's number one. Number two, moved Florida or Texas. Get there as soon as you can if you can. Okay. Get to a place with you. Do not be where I am sitting here and the people's Republican. I'm saying Monica. You have to be first. I know. I love it. Yeah. Move to starbase maybe where Elon is. right?

1:35:28And you know essentially take it from a company town to a portfolio town and a tech town. If I was in the US I'd be in Texas or Florida specifically Miami or Austin and near Starbase and so on and cluster related folks there. I think property rights have a better chance of getting protected there. Number three, if you have cryptocurrency get your keys off exchanges, get your coins off exchanges, do that now. Figure out your cold storage, figure out all that stuff and don't talk to anybody about the details of it, right? Okay, number four. Can I hit that one? You're concerned about that. You think exchanges are not gonna make it.

1:36:08I'm just saying that basically you don't want to, I don't have any imminent thing, but I'm just saying that do that now. And there are two things, exchanges can be brought. So your government can take them over. Yes, both are, exactly. Like, look, if Bitcoin really, really runs, If it really runs, then at a certain point, people basically start getting scared. And then all kinds of crazy things are going to happen. So basically where property rights are respected, where Bitcoin is, for example, Texas, I think the state legislator had something which is like the right to hold Bitcoin shall not be in French.

1:36:47Right? That's a good place to be with your cryptocurrency and so on and so forth. So A, go direct, B, Mouche -Floritex, C, crypto and cold storage. D, again involved with your local tech community. Tech is a community. And so actually thinking of it as a community, and doing as much offline social, I almost don't have to say this, because people kind of already do it organically in tech, right? But tech is a community. And so, for example, that might mean not simply homeschooling, homeschooling, but crowd schooling, micro schooling, right, where you're educating your kids together, right? Start doing collective action, you know, things with tech people in your spare time because you're gonna want community in I think the years to follow, right?

1:37:36You're gonna want people you can rely on in the physical world, not simply the digital world. That's why I'd go also to those places. Finally, I would say, read as much as you can of BRICS content in translation. Okay, because unless you've actually, and travel, if you have not been to READ, if you haven't been to Dubai, if you haven't been to Shanghai, if you haven't been to Bangalore, if you haven't seen how much better the rest of world is getting and has gotten. At a meteorite? At a meteoric rate over the last five to 10 years. Yes, you aren't calibrated unless you've been to Shenzhen, Bangalore, Dubai, and also Eastern Europe.

1:38:16Go ahead. Yeah. Hopefully there's some peace treaty or something like that. I'd also say hopefully Russia gets to peace and the Russia Ukraine thing gets to peace. I think Moscow has also improved a lot since the Soviet era. But Eastern Europe, Russia, India, China, and Dubai and Riyadh have radically, as you know, from FII, UNI have both been at FII. right? So really calibrate what the world is because movies will not show you that. The only movie that's shown rich non -westerners in recent times is probably crazy rotations or maybe squid game, right? And so they're not really showing it, right?

1:38:54So you have to get the on the ground experience. Otherwise, you're not calibrated. All right. For the general part, we hit that for entrepreneurs. Much of that probably still holds for the general public as well. Let's go to the individual who's in a job in LA, in San Francisco, in, you know, in middle America, what's the most important, you know, things that they need to be thinking about? Okay, so if they are, so first is, are they good at math or are they not good at math? If they are good at math, then they should get offline for a month and totally lock in, get Showns outlines, self -study, maybe use Brilliant .org, and actually learn the details of computer science and statistics.

1:39:33Do whatever lead code problems they need to do, learn everything that you need to learn to actually understand how to implement gradient descent, maybe do Carpati stuff, do fast study AI, and then also you can learn on the cryptoside of things as well. If you're interested in that, there's a various courses on this. Maybe I'll teach another MOOC on this. But basically, one month of just really all in, self -study, focus, focus, focus, focus, focus, focus. Get offline, it'll be there when you get back, you won't miss it. And pencil and paper, totally offline, Faraday Cage environment. This is a big thing I do, by the way.

1:40:07I try to spend, as online as I am, you know how like with cars, I've mentioned this before, but with cars, we advance cars, because we have electric cars and self -driving cars, and even flying cars. But we also have walkable cities. Like we took away the highway from, there's one of the great things San Francisco did do over the last 30 years. They took away the highway from the waterfront, right? And so cities have been made more walkable, more green, the big dig in Boston, right? So you're both pro -car, but you're also, in some case, minimum necessary car. You take the car away in certain cases, right?

1:40:36So, you know, I'm pro -internet, I'm pro -AI, I'm pro -cryptoset, all that stuff. But I'm also pro -offline, right? So pencil and paper, coffee, quiet, focus, you know, like basically that just can't be, you know, it can't be overstated how important this. I think we're going to build buildings that are Faraday Cage buildings. You know how you go into an elevator and the phone turns off, right? Well, build buildings that are Faraday Cage buildings that have phone lockers at the entrances where everybody gives the speaker their full attention. We're actually doing some of that stuff at network school now, right?

1:41:09Just to prototype it. And it's great. It's like almost like freeing that people can just, they're free to focus, right? They're free to be offline because the internet is so addictive. So I would say like offline time is important, focusing. And then the right balance because it's kind of like getting a great night's sleep so you're active during the day. The better you can focus offline, the stronger you'll be online and vice versa. Right? Okay. Number two is, you know, be it, I mean, this is, again, obvious, but be involved in building something. And get involved in tech in some way, right? Like you should be, the reason is the internet is rising, but lots of other things aren't.

1:41:51There's the S &P seven and the S &P 493, right? In many ways, American capital markets minus the internet. Where is all the money going into? It's going into tech companies. And it's now going into all the crypto treasury companies, right? Which is like the Bitcoin treasury companies, but also Ethereum treasury companies, Ton, all this kind of stuff, right? So in a sense, American capital markets are getting sunset in favor of internet capital markets. And actually, if you look, just crypto alone, crypto is the number four global market after Shanghai, NYC, Nasdaq, and gaining fast. and we'll become the number one global market, right?

1:42:24If you don't own crypto right now, begin. I mean, look, I've never given any financial advice in that sense, but as a technology and as a platform, yes, it's taking over, right? Every bank is adopting it and so on. She should definitely understand it. And it's kind of one of those things. Sometimes what happens is people see something in the news and they'll see it says it was a scam or whatever, and they tune out of it and they come back, you know, years later, like wait a second, they actually developed a lot, like the Dockham crash, and then Web 2 .0 was like that. People didn't pay attention to the incident over the 2000s and the whole thing got built back up, right?

1:42:57So that's a related kind of concept is, when you see something in the news, especially if it's like an asset, again, I'm not selling anybody to buy any asset, but a useful thing to do is set like a, if you see something that's interesting, set a calendar reminder for it, and then 30, 60, 90, 120, 150 days, or would have you, you can make a purchase or whatever decision or research decision, when it's not in the news. Because when in the news, it's usually overpriced or underpriced because it's making a big move. When it's outside the news, you're not reacting on emotion and you can reallocate your position accordingly.

1:43:35So that's just something I think is a useful thing to do. You can be hyper, hyper rational about it, especially if you write down what your long -term thesis on is. Relates that, don't gamble. There's unfortunately, there's a lot of day trading type stuff. and I know people like to do that, but I think it's just too hard to, just buy and hold long run, if you're putting something in something. Let's see, other things. I would say realize that from social media, that it's like watching pro sports in the sense of, for example, when you watch tech founders or something like that on X, it's like watching really, really successful athletes on TV, like if you're a dribble -to -ball, it's actually really hard to dribble a ball and run and dunk and they make it look effortless.

1:44:20They make it look so easy to do that. And it's really so, so, so hard, right? So anybody who is building something, well, first you yourself should be a builder, but second, you should also, in general, not attack other builders, right? It's always easy to do that on social media. It's a cheap way to make oneself feel superior. Look at how dumb Elon is. I can't believe he missed a spot on that rocket. There's like a lot of people who do this kind of, you know what I'm talking about, right? And so look if Elon isn't successful, nobody's successful. If Elon isn't smart, really there's very few people who are smart.

1:44:54And so you have to be able to give respect to others to get respect for oneself. And so just like, you know, I'm not saying Slavish, you don't have to flip to the other extreme, just game recognize game. Right? You know, respect people online and try and build. I mean, I know X is just a player versus player environment. Everybody yells at each other all the time. There's sites like Farcaster and so on that are a more healthy and civil atmosphere. So try to seek out online communities as well, the model, the civility that you want to communicate to your friends, to your family members, your loved ones, and community members.

1:45:28Don't behave on, at least try and be a relatively good example. I've recognized by the way that sometimes you have to defend yourself online and it's a dangerous environment and all the kind of stuff. But try not to be the person who's doing the first strike. You know, try to make it a better world for people in that sense. Yeah, and I think that's a good list. May it's not five for each, but it's roughly pretty good list. I appreciate that. A couple of comments here. You know, I think it's awesome you're building the network state movement just because it creates a whole new potential at the edge and as the existing fails over, it fails over more eloquently, right?

1:46:05That's, that's exactly, if you're at foundation. Yeah, of course, isomac has a mob's foundation series. Exactly. So like terminus, right? This is like, this is terminus where the goal is to reduce the duration of imperial collapse. Yeah. There's something you said in that podcast that really blew my mind, which is that less than 4 % of marriages in the US are between Democrats and Republicans. That really shook me because it really shows the depth of the tribalism and how do you come back from that? I think we have to, I mean, so one of my fears, and I think it's already happening, is in the 2010s, it was blue and tech against red.

1:46:46In the 2020s, it was red and tech against blue. And I think by the 2030s, if not sooner, it's going to be red and blue against tech, with socialist and nationalist against international scalpelist. And some of the backlash AI where the slop and scams and some of the backlash to crypto, So there's now backlash to bio and IVF. There's people who are getting mad at data centers. There's people who are mad at Apple for making phones abroad. There's people, you know, Elon unfortunately, people are mad at the internet. We start prioritizing data center electricity over residential electricity. That kind of stuff, right?

1:47:15You know, all of this is due to regulations and other kinds of things. But the tech guys, I mean, for example, doing AI in the blue city, in the blue state, in the union and making billions of dollars while saying you're gonna put a lot of blues out of work is not a good medium term to long term strategy. And so my view is that tech as a group has to actually sort of realize this and it has to kind of realize that the bad version is the teal scapegoating where tech is scapegoated for the decline of the fortunes of red and blue. And the tech guys are very publicly being rich. They're rich online.

1:47:54Oh my god, they're so rich, right? And a lot of people aren't. And they're getting hurt by the inflation and so on and so forth, right? So, Bob, I want to, I would love to have you come back on and continue this conversation. I've got a hard out on a board meeting and I know. My last thing to say is, I think there's hope. I think the internet can lift the boats everybody. I think we can get to an age of abundance and all that stuff and I'm fundamentally a positive person in that way and I just think we have to get through some of the white water that's coming up. It's going to be if nothing else an excited decade ahead.

1:48:26So NS dot com is where people find you. Yes fantastic and if people want to apply for the network school or the fellowship there they can find the information NS dot com as well. That's right just click apply. That's right. All right buddy. Listen thank you for your time. Thank you for your brilliance and again everybody I hope you enjoyed this episode of WTF with biology and I encourage you. Listen to it a couple of times tell your friends it's a chance to up your IQ points 20. It needs three listings. I didn't give any links. I just gave verbal citations, but you can look them all on. Yeah, I know.

1:49:01And by the way, just a quick thing on the 20th, we're doing our EXO 10X shift workshop links below 20th of August. They're all. Yeah. And so I think come to the never see a conference in Singapore, October 3rd, 2025, NS .com conference, and never see a conference for 2025. So you can see all the star of society, October 3rd, 25. Are you going to be at an FII this year in Rihanna? I will. Okay, well good. I'll see you there next. If not, I'm actually giving a talk as well. So we'll both see each other there. Great. Awesome. All right, pal. You well. Thanks, guys. Thanks, everybody. Good stuff. Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology metatrends that will transform industries over the decade ahead.

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