Solana Founder: Crypto Is About to Change Finance Like the Internet Changed Everything Else w/ Anatoly Yakovenko, Dave Blundin, Salim Ismail & Alexander Wissner-Gross | EP #204

30:07Even if your neighbor is not lying to you, they can literally have a fake piece of paper or the company doesn't exist or the company lied about everything that it's doing and there is no actual railroad. So those scams actually happened and fueled a lot of railroad construction and a lot of kind of bad financial decisions in the late 19th century. And a lot of regulatory paperwork. Exactly. So what's cool now is the difference that blockchain creates. It's kind of like the SSL little lock in e-commerce in the 90s. I can transfer you a token. You can cryptographically verify that this token goes back to the issuer, but the issuer's public keys that signed off on their financial statements, all the stuff that they published, their S1, etc.

30:53And you know that you're actually receiving what they're claiming to be their equity. So when you're paying for it, all those guarantees that are solved with regulation are now just solved with math and data. Just like the SSL log tells you when I put in my credit card number here, some intermediary sending this data is not going to steal my credit card. So a lot of stuff that humans do kind of goes away. And the regulators have a hard time getting up to speed to that because there's a lot of stuff that simply works. And there's no reason to change stuff that works when there's a lot of financial risk at stake.

31:28But the fact that the whole crypto industry, outside of support of any regulation, has been able to grow so dramatically to such a large market cap, like with Bitcoin and Ethereum and Solana kind of leading it, is the fact that this stuff actually solves real world problems. The reason why somebody in Singapore can go start a protocol around trading coins and make money and ROI is because people can trust that settlement and execution of those assets. And they're willing to put money at risk. And because the software minimizes the risk, they can maximize the amount of money they actually put at risk into these systems.

32:05So it's happening anyways. It's happening with or without the United States. I think with the regulation on board now and with the Stablecoin Act coming out, I think you're just going to see this accelerating. And a lot of these services and the intermediaries along the stack are all, one, resistant to change, but also there's so many of them. Some of them are always looking for an opportunity to move up and down their vertical and expand. Maybe dwelling for a moment on the regulatory side. So in a paper contract, you mentioned the Y Combinator safe earlier, you have a few parties, and there's a whole societal apparatus built around paper contracts.

32:49You have court systems and rule of law and regulations. With Solana or other smart contract, you have to first order approximately none of that. And so I'm curious, where do you see this going? Do you think rule of law basically moves on chain in some sense with bodies to adjudicate disputes also on chain? How do disputes work in a future where hypothetically everything's on chain? I think you're minimizing the number of intermediaries necessary to go do the right thing. So if somebody raises money and they lie about their purpose of raising those funds, that's fraud. and if they do it on a public blockchain or not, they're still liable.

33:32It doesn't matter whether they do it with a safe or not. What changes is that if you do it on chain is that I don't have to rely on some transfer agent or broker or whatever to facilitate moving these contracts around or to certify that this contract actually does belong to this YC company. You can actually do all that verification. So all the kind of the boring stuff that people don't think about when they think about finance, all those little service layers that all take a few bips off the top, those go away and you're dealing directly with that company as the issuer. They could obviously use some third-party service provider to implement the software to manage all of these things.

34:11And there's a bunch of them, like Squads and Solana is a great example of that, formally verified multi-sig contracts for managing governance and all this stuff. But at the end of the day, if it's a company that's claiming they're doing X and you buy this thing, the end result that enforces whether that company is lying or not is going to be the local jurisdiction where they're incorporated. And they're still just as liable. I totally, totally get it. As a stepping stone toward where Alex is going, the actual, just the safe note itself. So just to take this hypothetical transaction, I want to invest in your company.

34:48You're in Singapore. Here's my money. It's on chain. What about the safe node itself? Do you just store that and hash it and then put the hash on chain? Or how do you deal with the actual terms of the safe node? Or do you not touch that? I mean, this is where you want to draw the abstraction. There are efforts to actually use the ledger as the cap table. So whatever's on the ledger, however these safe nodes are allocated and distributed, those public keys, private keys, that's the actual cap table. and then you can build all the cap table management software on top of that because that's a public data structure you can manipulate and move this around and whatever rules you want around clawing back shares or only allowing transactions if the company agrees you can encode all those in a smart contract reliably and all that stuff is just code it's a pain in the butt because it's a bunch of database kind of gnarly code, but it's all doable.

35:47But this would be the best way to do it because then you're getting rid of all these other layers, transfer agent brokers, et cetera. Like all those people are gone. Not just that, but I don't want to beat this Y Combinator safe note to death, but if you look at the actual terms of the note, because we do these every day, they're not settled in the courts. They go straight to jams or to some third party because the courts will be years before they decide what they want to do. And so it's already, it's not on chain, but it's certainly out of the courts and out of the federal and state system because it's just too slow.

36:20So like, I think bankruptcy could be one of those things that could be dramatically optimized where it took like two years to resolve the FTX bankruptcy. That was a massive bankruptcy in crypto. But because FTX is not, is a centralized exchange that is not as a company, a DeFi company, right? They just bought and sold tokens like any other centralized financial system. When they collapse, it's incredibly messy to go and wind all of that. And like to go through the bankruptcy law and figure out who owns what. When in reality, if it was like a single ledger, even if it was a permissioned one, if they just ran a ledger, one is you would immediately see that the amount of money going out is more than the amount of money going in.

37:06That would be obvious immediately. So you wouldn't even get to that stage where you have bankruptcy. But if you did, like Aave has liquidations, which is effectively the bankruptcy process when you borrow and you can't repay, those are programmatically encoded and run on every block, every 12 seconds in Ethereum. And Camino does it every 400 milliseconds on Solana. So you would never even get to that stage where you have to spend two years to figure out who owns what. It would get liquidated and processed immediately. And I think that is a really critical part in finance. If you can invest knowing that in case of a bankruptcy, that there is this deterministic process that's run immediately, everyone gets the best what you could get out of that process within a minute.

37:56it makes investing a lot more viable, especially across jurisdictions where you may not have the ability to go enforce it in the courts, like in Ukraine or whatever. So I think those FTX investors were getting 50 cents on the dollar, 60 cents on the dollar because of, I mean, it's just an insane amount of money lost in that friction, just in that FTX case. All right, let's go to Salim. Salim, ask a really intelligent question that I'll understand, Okay. Well, I want to make two points and I'll ask a question. The question, the point, one point I want to make is there's a really important distinction around digital and crypto, which is the value of crypto is not the fact that it's digital, it's the fact that it's programmable.

38:39And what Tully talks about when you can do settlements all programmatically, it manages it all, you know, it's all done. You don't have to think about it. And that takes it away from the human layer and it takes it away from all sorts of other things. I think it's worth for our readers at whatever time to just take a step back and understand the Byzantine generals problem, because that's actually sitting at the core of a lot of this. So I'm happy to get into that question, but can I take a minute and describe that, Peter? Sure. Yeah, of course. Okay. I remember you're the first person ever to tell me about it.

39:09This is such a fun foundational thing. So for the viewers that aren't familiar with Bitcoin, blockchains, Solana, etc., the core innovation at the heart of blockchains is what's called the Byzantine generals problem. It's actually the story of Constantinople in the 15th century. There were eight generals circling the city. They're trying to coordinate a siege. And they're sending messages around that network. Who's going to go first? What time should we attack? How are we going to get in, etc.? And the problem they had was one out of the eight generals was a traitor and could send the wrong information, lose the element of surprise, blow the whole operation.

39:40And in computer science terms, that's become known as that problem because in computer science terms, it's how do you send a trusted, secure, authenticated message over a network when you don't trust the network? Really hard problem. 40 years of computer science patients have been trying to solve that problem until the blockchain. and because of the consensus mechanism and the synchronization across multiple ledgers, you can now, if I send Tolly a message, he has 100 % guarantee that it came from me, wasn't double entered, can't be revoked, wasn't tampered along the way. That's a magical thing in the digital world.

40:15And this provides an authentication layer and a validity and a validation layer that allows all of this other stuff to take place. All of the layers that we talked about in the settlement stuff, et cetera, They're all there to validate, secure, ratify, et cetera. This stuff wasn't screwed along along the way. Now that all happens as part of the infrastructure. And so that makes it unbelievably powerful. The broader implications of decentralizing authentication are absolutely profound. And so for folks that aren't aware of this, go check out this particular problem and the nuances around it. I have a question around that specifically.

40:50Selene, add the double spending problem in there too because that was a perfect summary. You can't get into that either, which is, can you stop somebody from double spending in two different places and then doubling up every time? The question I have for you, Tully, early on, there was a lot of criticism of Solana for the decentralization. Over the last couple of years, you guys have solved a lot of that. And I think it would be really great for you to explain what you guys have been doing and the architectural changes that have taken place. Because now it's really solid and robust and on its way to Ethereum-level decentralization.

41:22i think there's a lot of um if you're on crypto twitter people fight about what is what does decentralization actually means um and it just depending who you ask it's whatever coin they own is decentralized and whatever coin they don't own is not but uh the way that i think um i've always approached it is i'm kind of a you know started programming in the 90s i'm a huge open source Linux fan. So it was just awesome for me to be able to analyze the software that I'm running on my computer and know exactly what's happening, know why it's broken, why it's not. So we've always looked at permissionless being as the core part of decentralization, that it doesn't matter if the system is open source, but can I participate in every part of the stack without needing a third party to approve me.

42:18So can I run a validator? Can I make blocks? Can I transact on it? Can I deploy code on it? But can I also own this, like have a copy of that state and be able to recover the entire network if that kind of failure exists? So Solana is always focused on that aspect of it, that everybody, every part of the system that anyone can run, that it's permissionless to go and run it. And I think that is incredibly critical for this idea of a single layer for finance because no matter what, you're still going to be dealing with people. Like if you have the science fiction, futuristic layer of finance for all of the world's execution, it's still going to run in France and England and Spain.

43:02And none of those guys are ever going to really trust each other 100%. So the banks in France will need to be able to participate in every part of the stack. So will the banks in England, so will the banks in New York, even if they're allies or whatever. But they need, because they're people, they want to have control, they will need to have access to every part of the system. And to make it really decentralized, you have to allow for adversarial nodes that are either misconfigured or actually deliberately adversarial, or stereo, like the Byzantine problem that you described, where they're maliciously citing the wrong message, they're trying to double spend, they're trying to create chaos in the network.

43:40The protocol has to be robust to handle that. And you can work it out on paper. You can say, we have all these proofs and formal verification that it actually is robust with the Byzantine actors. And then in implementation, things blow up. I think the Solana journey has been that of we're trying to solve all of these problems at the same time, both performance and decentralization, and doing it as a startup, shipping as fast as we can. There's a lot of trial and error, or I would say growing pains or blood, sweat, and tears that went into making Solana robust. It's incredible. Yeah. Incredible what you pulled off.

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45:25Here's a challenge. What percentage of the world, or let's look at the U.S., do you believe understands crypto at all? If you had to guess. A tenth of one percent of the population? I think anyone that finished calculus can understand it. I mean, like basically. Can understand it. The difference between can understand and do understand. So, I mean, one of the questions is, you know, the idea of Solana as the everything coin that I'm using, let's define what that means first. What would Solana as the everything coin mean? And then what would it take? Yeah, go ahead. The coin itself that runs the network, its only purpose is to prevent spam in the network so fundamentally like the only problem that it can solve is decent decent incentivized spam so as part of solving this byzantine generals problem where an adversarial node can send infinite messages there's a cost to send messages that's the coin but to use it for anything else simply because it is tradable or can be easily sent, it exists as any other coin in the network.

46:34And you can use, I mean, we encourage people to go use dollars for commerce. If you're buying and selling stuff as a merchant, go use USDC or PayPal's USD or any other digital currency. So that to us, it kind of doesn't matter what the coin, the underlying token that provides us crypto economic guarantees that adversaries pays some fixed costs for spam, that doesn't really matter. Like what you use it beyond that. What's kind of been surprising to me, and this has really been like, you know, when you start a startup, not only do you have no idea what PMF is going to look like, but the fact that as soon as you have markets and you have money at escrow and at risk, the opportunity cost to be late to access those markets is so high that the fact that this underlying token is what prevents spam in the network, it can actually capture value that is substantial.

47:33The$2 billion, whatever, that you guys mentioned, captured over the last years on Solana, that is because there's an opportunity cost to be late to send a trade, and you're willing to pay the highest amount to be first in the queue to actually go execute the trade. And underneath the hood, the only thing that the token is doing is preventing spam. So the fact that it actually loops back and allows value capture for this thing, that was not planned and totally unexpected and almost discovered through trial and error of us getting so much massive congestion on the network from NFT trading that that was the only way to solve the problem.

48:10And it was kind of the slight bone moment. Oh, one, this is a classic database hotspot problem. Why didn't I think of this when we started? It's so obvious. And two, it actually works for money. like what was were the was the craze around nfts and meme coins a surprise to you yeah i mean when we started we you know our tagline was blockchain and nasdaq speed and the idea was we're an execution layer which can run arbitrary number of markets and kind of keep them all in a single state machine to minimize to maximize capital efficiency you minimize the arbitrage opportunities. We thought that was like really valuable.

48:51And the fact that meme coins took off was really surprising because those are assets with no value in all price. But it kind of, you know, like, if you look back at like the history of the internet, it makes sense. Like, if soon as you have any kind of shared state that people have, even if like I played Ultima online as a kid, and people would start trading gold and actually like build all these silly scripts that would auto mine like wood and resources and sell them that was richard that was richard garrett's company yeah and those things that that you know ultima online wood is as has as much digital value as a meme coin as smart coin there's nothing backing it but people still wanted to trade and consume it one just for fun but two because you now have this shared state with some economics it just for whatever reason as soon as you have any kind of shared state people create markets and start trading random i just want to be able to trade it to bring those uh gold and the wood between different video games how old are your kids um 10 six and two and a half okay i got two 14-year-old boys and so does Selimah 14-year-old boys.

50:13So it's interesting, right? The entire video game world is teaching an entire generation about the value of digital assets in an extraordinary fashion. Yeah, isn't it funny that video games, you know, that's where the GPU came from that's now driving all of AI and it's where crypto came from to, you know, trade gold for wood or whatever than Minecraft or... Maybe to take the counterpoint to that Before modern video games, we had board games and we had credit systems and sort of fake money systems. So it's not in some sense that new. But I guess maybe a question for Tully, pivoting off of the question, sort of an adjacent question to what Peter asked you earlier about how many people do understand crypto, by which I assume Peter is referring to cryptocurrency and sort of layer one, layer two.

51:07How many should? because I think you were making the point earlier almost like Lamport's slash Sol. This should be sort of under the hood and it should just make everything frictionless. I think of it as like the number of people you invite to your wedding is roughly 200. That's like your core group of people. At least one or two of them understand Linux. One or two of them will understand crypto. And that's enough because you can invite them. To your wedding, you can trust them, right? And they'll explain it to you and they can like tell you, okay, use it like this. This is how you minimize your risk and stuff like that.

51:46So I think the number of people that you actually need to understand crypto in the world is like one in 200, like one per social group. Your extended trust circle. And I think we're probably there. So I think that's striking. what i understand you to be saying is this is not something that retail investors should even be paying attention to which is contrary to a lot of messaging out there that everyone should be paying attention to so what i think i hear you saying is this is actually just infra under the hood to to build the next generation of financial services i think it is very much a b2b system i think there is parts where it touches the consumer so i mean when we built our phone we did a presale and we had credit card or stablecoin as an option half of the purchases came via stablecoin without any incentives because the friction for somebody in southeast asia to use a stablecoin is lower actually than to use their local credit card for like an international purchase so consumers will figure it out and you have demand you know like if you have products that are available over stablecoins people just use those rails on their own but it It was actually the benefit I think was to us as a merchant was really obvious.

53:03We save 2 % on the gross sale amount, which is like three or four engineering salaries, like easily just on that one product. So you as a merchant immediately that you see, oh, if I have this rail, I don't have to pay the 2 % fee. Yeah, I'm going to use it. Like, why wouldn't I? It's money in the bank instantly. So I think that huge improvement that will move dollars and will have people take action, I think, is going to be more in the business end. But consumers will see the benefit of that ultimately. A lot of the work now is going to be for Web3 services. Peter and I talk about going from deceptive to disruptive.

53:46When something becomes exponential, it always has a huge 10x change in usability. right coinbase makes bitcoin easy to buy um solan is making it easy to transact the usability layer has to be there and many web3 services like i fund some liquidity pools uh uh dex liquidity pools the the complexity of going through those and funding a pool etc is so ridiculous i have to have a hardcore uh crypto sherpa standing next to me to make sure i don't screw it up it's insane And so little by little, those will uptick in terms of usability, and then it'll start becoming a very, very powerful tool for everybody.

54:26Alex, you're pregnant with a question. Yeah, no, I'm trying to wrap my mind around this. So this is actually a question both for Toli and Salim. I want to put you guys both on the spot and ask, what do you think? So let's fast forward to the victory state. We've driven the future of financial services to these highly vaunted superconductors for finance. We've driven transaction costs down to near zero from credit card fees of 2 % to 3%. We've achieved victory. What do you view as the singular killer app, the concrete state that we've unlocked in the future that creates radical wealth for all of humankind?

55:05What does that look like concretely? it's hard to to point to saying that like um price like accurate price efficiency globally is that big of a deal to a person like do you care how if you like if the starbucks get gets the best price for their coffee beans and the person making those gets the best price like these are very abstract things that at an end-to-end like my parents are not going to understand to where it really matters to them. But the GDP will move faster. We will make fewer errors in finance. We will grow faster as a world. And fewer and fewer people will be in poverty. I think that is kind of very substantial.

55:50Like if 40%, yeah. Concretely, though. But let me ask you a question. Right now, what differentiates America in so many ways is access to capital, right? Right. Entrepreneurs throughout the U.S. can put forward an idea, reach individuals, get access to capital. And one of the questions I have is, is this going to increase the speed of entrepreneurial creativity and financing and company financing where it just supercharges the economy at a speed? And Alex, we talk about sort of, if I had time, I would rewrite economics for the future because economics are so fundamentally broken and so last century.

56:35So is this about reinventing an economics 2.0 or 3.0? So, you know, like all the companies that are worth over a trillion or like all the assets, they're all U.S. companies or Bitcoin. and I think maybe like the Saudi oil company, right? Yeah. So the other place for finance that can compete with the United States is the internet. And it's happening on the internet through crypto. So you're now seeing the kind of finance and growth that happened in the United States being replicated on the internet through crypto rails. And this is the only place that I think could compete with the United States.

57:17And actually, in my opinion, at a gut level, I think it is effectively helping the United States export its influence because the Internet is truly an extension of all the values that we care about in the United States. And we're so deeply plugged into it. I can give a kind of an anecdote, a real life anecdote that maybe highlights some of this, Peter. And maybe to answer your question, Alex, if you look at, say, the NFT world where they started doing art on the Internet, right? You create a collection of 10 ,000 things, 10 ,000 apes, and start selling those and mint those. You have a community building around those.

57:55All those, by the way, were default EXOs because they would have a big purpose, and they would use cryptoeconomics to incentivize the community to mint. The first people that got to mint got them for very cheap, and then if you minted later, you paid a little bit more, et cetera, et cetera. What then happened was you had a bunch of breakages in the system. There were some rug pulls where people collected a lot of money, and the collection would basically die on the vine, etc. People are now doing turnarounds where they're buying old collections that are really good art and repurposing them, etc.

58:27There's a whole M &A thing going on in the NFT world. What's fascinating about this is that it's art in a different form because it's programmatic art. It's an experience of the art that's not normal. You would look at a painting on a wall. You're engaging with it in a digital mode. So with Bored Apes, for example, they gave the ability to take the, if you own a Bored Ape, you own the intellectual property of that character and you could license it out to people and to TV shows and people started doing that. And that created one new wave of innovation. Then we had CyberCons that created the coins within the thing.

59:04So if you own a CyberCon NFT, it issued bananas to you, which trade as a secondary utility token. but salim i want to challenge you on this though hold on hold on let me imagine doing all of this with lawyers the broader point i'm making is the imagine not doing it at all let me make my bigger point my bigger point is as you get through this all of the stuff that's happening there's a there's a collective level of innovation at scale that's moving faster than almost the ai world it moved faster than anything i've ever seen before it is absolutely profound and when the people kind of did an initial set of rug pulls now when people issue nfts or issue tokens you have to hold the token for six months before you can sell it and evens out the the curves there's all sorts of things happening at unbelievable speed the ecosystem is learning very very fast and so there's something profound happening and incredibly creative what's even more interesting is it's democratized so anybody with a great idea can show up and do something and test it out and see where goes.

1:00:09And so that adds to the collective pool of ingenuity. Why is these examples important? I think it's because when I send money into this contract, I have enough guarantees to know what happens in a catastrophic event. So I can actually go participate in this, even if it's stupid, even if I'm getting bananas out of this. How many bananas do you own, Salim? The fact that I can transfer and transact and sell these bananas, I now have my risk outlined is very different than if I had to do this blindly over eBay to send somebody a cashier's check to buy their wood and Ultima online. That's a very different type of risk involved there.

1:00:54So the chain eliminated a whole bunch of risk that was previously impossible to eliminate. And because of this, yeah, a lot of this stuff is going to accelerate at the tail end. But the things that now have an option to go use lawyers and go through the Figma IPO process through an investment banking now have an alternative. So the price through the traditional processes is going to collapse down to what's available on chain. And right now you have this massive adverse selection problem where if I am Figma, I don't need to go get on chain capital. I can go through the investment banking process.

1:01:30I've been building this company for 10 years. All my lawyers are telling me, minimize risk. You're just going to do an IPO a traditional way. And you shouldn't think about any of these costs because that's the last thing that you should try to innovate on. And that's hard for a CEO to make that decision. But that's going to shift. Like I think, and that's going to shift massively and quickly as you get to this trillion dollar stablecoin number. And then the$10 trillion is going to be way past the shift, I think. Like, yeah, now you're getting to the meat of where I throw some meat to Alex here.

1:02:05He'll eat it like a pit bull.

1:02:10The, you know, Peter's question about, OK, I want to raise money for my company, you know, five million bucks. Why is this so hard? But the assumption underneath that is that your company needs either some physical like iron and something, but it doesn't anymore. What does it need? Well, all it needs is labor for the most part or any of these virtual companies. Well, why am I raising$5 million? Why aren't I raising some virtual thing and paying those people? You know, if those people end up being in Venezuela, Ethiopia, and Ukraine, they don't want U.S. dollars anyway. And the value, if I put a value on their time, you know, which I have to do legally in the U.S., but I don't have to do across borders, they don't want to be valued at something that's taxed.

1:02:55So the economy of, you know, AI just solved every math problem known to man. What's that worth? It's worth a lot. Okay, well, I'm not going to pay for it valued by a 49A valuation from an accounting firm in the US. And so that whole economy of trading AI-generated things with other and even human labor is going to be completely outside the world of normal valuations and normal payroll taxes and normal, because you don't have to value it in U.S. dollars if you don't want to. And that's where the dam is going to break. I think even if you value them in U.S. dollars, and I actually think most markets will go through U.S.

1:03:36dollars, the fact that you have two alternative paths, I can use a safe and go to a YC company and go through that process, or I can buy a token in like an ICO. And the difference with a token is I have immediate access to secondary markets. both events are just as risky you're taking massive risk and basically is this founder a jackass or not like it doesn't matter if it's a yc founder that's a jackass or an ico founder that's a jackass you're going to get screwed either way but the the guarantees you're getting out of out of the safe is competing with the fact that i have secondary markets and this reliable execution and transfer so which one are you going to take as an investor like you you may not actually be able to get any money out in the catastrophic event out of the safe or any value out of that event either way and the success upside is the same in both Yeah, I think most governments think that, you know, regardless of all the transactions you do on chain, sooner or later you're going to turn that into real estate.

1:04:44or labor in my country. And you're going to come back through my regulatory framework, through my treasury department, through my SEC, to turn it into something that you can use to enjoy your life. And I think increasingly that is not true. It's irrelevant because what you really wanted is either compute or virtual entertainment or whatever, and you can buy it outside of that regulatory framework with your Solana. And so that part of the economy today is not a big deal. I think that dam is going to break very quickly. And then that part, it operates across borders frictionlessly. It operates in milliseconds and it operates entirely in the virtual universe.

1:05:23And that economy will grow so much faster than the physical economies that it'll go from a rounding error to dominant in just a few years. That's my guess. If you're in the US, you pay dollars market to market to US dollars in taxes. So even if you make your profit in Seoul, you have to market to market and cover your dollar exposure. Otherwise, you're running debt to the place that can collect it with a carrier ship full of F-35s or whatever. I think totally that speaks to my original question, which is government and governance mostly doesn't live on chain right now. So to the extent that Peter, Dave, and to some extent Salim are aspirationally hoping that we're going to live in an utterly frictionless economy, it seems the elephant in the room is that all of this physical government apparatus and the court system and jams and methods for adjudication, these are all off chain.

1:06:23So I guess it would be your – Alex, let me take it there because this is the conversation we had with Jeremy Allaire from Circle in which I was asking him, when do you think we're going to see the first fully on-chain corporation, right? Where contracts, payments, treasury, governance, and even all of the agents employed by that company are on the blockchain, right? And we have the explosion of a new corporate structure that's operating at light speed compared to everything else. do you imagine we're going to have that when could we have that I think you can go look at kind of the the cool experiments in this would be meta DAO because a few Tarky decision market based DAOs where you effectively every decision that this coin does or this group that holds the coin is using a few Tarky mechanism where should we go invest in this or should we pay these engineers why the way that these decisions market work is you're basically saying if the market decides yes then i'm willing to buy your metadao tokens at price why so i'm willing to pay more for this for apple stock if they go and build uh you know iphone 20 or whatever right but or if it does that make sense this this is like the and i would say the closest thing you're going to get to full on-chain governance and corporate control over funds and assets.

1:07:52Peter, I'd like to try to answer your question, but then forward a sub-question to Tully. I think the answer to your question relies on a sub-question, which is when will we see, at least within the US, the first state government approve a new type of corporation that is an on-chain autonomous corporation it required it would be require an act of a state government at minimum so by some questions texas or florida yeah yeah yeah go ahead go for it yeah wyoming's very advanced in uh crypto adoption and acceptance they actually issued a stable coin where as you interpret the law because they're a sovereign they're neither a person or a corporation And they've issued a stablecoin under the Rome kind of regulatory scheme, which is interesting to think about.

1:08:49But what about Puerto Rico? Puerto Rico is inside the realm of the F-35 circling around, yet completely independent from the federal government. That's potentially a birthplace for this whole thing. Well, to me, you can already... Wait, wait, wait. Let's take this home. So the sub-question then would be, okay, so you have a hypothetical preference for Wyoming, maybe Puerto Rico. When does this happen? When do we see the first, in your prediction, Tully, when do we see the first state-level government in the United States enshrine in statute the ability for an autonomous corporation, which, by the way, could be an AI as a person as well, doesn't necessarily have to be an on-chain entity?

1:09:33I'm not 100 % sure, but I thought there were DAO-friendly bills already being passed in Wyoming, specifically for creating these kind of corporate structures that assign control or parts of the control of the fiduciary duties to a DAO. Yes, there are. We looked into this. Wyoming does allow that. The problem is you're still under the federal SEC issues. But I'll give you this thing. In Panama, there's a couple of other places where you can have foundations that create DAOs. And those are fully decentralized autonomous organizations. And then everything can be run from the DAO. And the DAO owns everything.

1:10:14So it's really, it's almost like a trust with digitized crypto enabled transactions going through it. You actually don't need these things. I think the key part that you need out of, I think, the federal and the government and laws is that if you participate in the smart contract, that your liabilities are not commingled with everyone else that participates. This is kind of like, I think, either needs to be passed through Congress through the market structure bill or kind of figured out in the courts, is that once that's true, the fact that you can now participate in these DAOs and things like that, those effectively become code as law.

1:10:54because if the government says that your liabilities are limited, you're not part of this cohort, that you're responsible for everyone's actions that participate in this mechanism, then the only thing that you have is the code. Then you are solely relying on the code to enforce all the decisions of that thing. So if you go into it and you lose money, tough, right? Like you've actually taken on the risk and there's nobody for you to go after anymore. So this, it's more like, I don't think we need laws to pass to allow it. What we need is laws or courts to figure out that you don't have liabilities if you participate in these systems.

1:11:33And that's about it. And then they exist just by existing. You've put your finger on, I think, the core issue for the future of this entire space, which is what does the future of law as code look like? And I think there are sort of maybe two directions, at least two directions I can imagine it going in. One is, I think, what you're articulating, which is in the future, state plus federal law plus a whole bunch of regulations get encoded in something that looks like future of layer one code. it's basically software. There is another future where future of laws and regulations remain pure natural language, but we have a whole constellation of AI agents that are interpreting them basically AI lawyers, AI regulators.

1:12:18Do you have a sense of which of those two futures or maybe door number three we're going to find ourselves in?

1:12:26I'll answer that question. We start with number two, which is you have AI agents dealing with natural language law. And then over time, we have to develop completely new forms of mechanisms and governance structures to deal with it. Well, those will be on chain. What about you, Tully? I think humans in the loop and kind of how our human egos are designed is that you will have this, I think like the big short as this awesome scene where the higher up the chain of command you go, the dumber the person, the less they understand about what's happening. The same applies to podcast hosts, by the way.

1:13:08Yeah. I think because of just the human nature of politics and leadership and all these things, you're going to see the most sophisticated understanding of how this stuff works at the lowest layer. And then the higher up it goes to the court system, to politicians, to regulators, the more broad strokes they have to control it. And my view is I don't think you're going to have AI agents in that spot because of human ego. I think humans really, really want big orgs under them. I just have to jump on that because I just think it's the coolest thing in the world that you as an individual engineer, you know, come into the country 14 years ago, whatever, settle in San Fran and invent a hundred billion dollar thing out of thin air, just create it out of thin air.

1:14:01And then to figure out how it interacts with the government, a guy, David Sachs, who has nothing to do with the government, ends up in the role kind of overnight. And now you guys figure it out together. Show me any other country on the planet that could ever do that. But it's exactly what you said from the big short. You get to any other jurisdiction and the moron factor, you know, in the way makes it impossible to interact. It's just the coolest story. Hold on, hold on. This isn't quite fair. If you take Switzerland, which has been crypto friendly for longer than almost anybody, they passed legislation quite a long time ago.

1:14:40And a huge number of the crypto founders moved there because it was so crypto friendly. Japan is friendly. Now there's an increasing list of countries, Malta, Liechtenstein, et cetera, et cetera. So countries are jumping on board. And a lot of the Binance, et cetera, a lot of these were created in places where they were crypto friendly first. and then they're worried about the U.S. later. The U.S. has now jumped on the bandwagon in a big way, which is fantastic, but it's a little bit too little too late for some things. I think in other areas, it's going to really take up. You know, Tali, when you started Solana, agentic AI was not even in the conversation, right?

1:15:19It was four or five years out, right? Just transformers. And I can imagine that AI agents are going to be the single biggest transactors of Solana. Can you speak to that? Yeah, I think the fact that you can synthesize a lot of signal around the world through AI, like the amount of cost per intelligence goes down, what that means is you have an army of analysts that can understand all of the signal and synthesize it into a buy or sell signal. You can now create a lot more markets. And I think this is where I think stuff like Futarki can actually potentially become scalable to large organizations.

1:16:10Why I think this is kind of sort of happening already is if you look at me or Vitalik, we're obviously not business people. I'm not a business person that understands. You play a business person on TV. Yeah, exactly. We're engineers. You're like way too candid and honest. He's a researcher. I'm an engineer. Like I understand how memory works and stuff like this. But just simply from this trustless coordination of blockchain, the fact that you could own a part of Sol and you could actually run the systems from Richelieu and participate in it, that actually creates enough incentive alignment for everyone in the ecosystem to move it towards a common goal.

1:16:55Like even if each participant is rationally optimizing their own P &L under the hood, they're maximally trying to just profit and sometimes in a zero-sum way over other participants. But because it's all cryptographically glued together into this one-gen engine where if there's a bunch of markets, it all makes money. Like that forces everyone to move in the same direction. I think that is an example of this class of new organizations that are not quite corporations, not quite a single person, small business, but an internet scalable system that's glued together with cryptography that can all move together for a common benefit.

1:17:37I think that's a very, very unique, cool thing. And as you have AI explode, and the ability to analyze a whole bunch of signal into an action becomes cheaper and cheaper, I think the number of markets that can support this decision-making is going to blow up. And hopefully they all run on Solana and that we make more money from making sure there's no spam. But that... Alex, help me. How many AI agents do you imagine were going to be operating a decade from now? I don't think the question is going to be meaningful a decade from now. Because I think agents is a very 2025 era term. I think we'll look back 10 years from now and laugh at the premise of the question.

1:18:27You have like a continuous information funnel to GPUs that's just constantly looping. Is it one agent or a bajillion? It doesn't matter. How many terawatts or petawatts of intelligence will we have a decade from now? And so we currently measure AI in terms of energy, right? We're talking about gigawatt data centers and so forth. For the moment. For the moment. Are we going to start a new layer of sort of measurement, which is a financial layer of measurement in terms of how much capital is going to be transacting on these systems? because the speed, I mean, the most valuable bits of information are bits of information that carry financial value with them, right?

1:19:13But that's circular, though. Like, that's circular to say what's most valuable is most financialized. Like, ideally, and totally keep me honest on this, I would hope 10 years from now we're in a state where we've not just solved math, but we've solved economics. We have, like, a rigorous science of what wealth is. We have the beginnings of it today, arguably, but if you put 10 economists in a room and you ask them, like, what is real wealth? You'll get maybe 20 different answers. I would hope we have actually like a decade from now a notion of what real wealth is, not just monetized wealth, but actual wealth.

1:19:47And then we could actually trade real wealth. To my knowledge, we don't know what real wealth is. Probably just energy, just jewels. Maybe. Maybe not. Or I'll give you an alternative too, which is transistor flips or flops. Flops isn't right, but it's going to be some metric of compute that's more foundational than the dollar or any concept of currency. Right now we're all trained that wealth is dollars. And the foundation metric is dollars. But that's going to break very quickly. And it will be something either power, electrical power, but I think more likely some metric of compute. Can we talk about it?

1:20:24I'd like to challenge all of this. You know, we've had for the last few hundred years, the main mode of discourse in the world has been business, commerce, money, right? And we run the world on that. And we floated our feudal systems and now the power is in the power of money, which is more liquid, free flowing, it'll funds good ideas, et cetera, et cetera. But we're moving over the last few decades from money to information. A startup today is much more interested in collecting data about its users and then will monetize it later. Facebook maybe has done the best job of taking social data and monetizing.

1:20:56And it's fungible. You can go back and forth. Over time, though, the information becomes the harder bit. And the monetary side becomes less relevant. And so I would think that over time, you'll end up in a Star Trek world where you don't have any money. You don't have any commerce. You're just doing things. And the cost of things becomes so meaningless. The idea of commerce doesn't matter. So that would be my challenge. I'll challenge the challenge. and say this very much feels like a very October 2025 era discussion where we've seen large parts of the West de-industrialized for a couple of decades, and we're just taking it as an axiomatic truth.

1:21:37Oh, well, we're de-industrialized. So of course, it's just about the bits. It's not about the atoms, but actually the atoms are incredibly important. And I would argue if I had to choose my favorite denomination of real wealth, it's going to be something embedded in the physical world. I've argued in the past something about future freedom of action. If we could quantify future freedom of action of humanity in cubits or even classical bits, that's the closest I can come up with for a real definition of wealth. But I'd be curious, what's your best definition of wealth uh okay i'll give like a hot take i think it's like shannon's law how much information we can process um so like our channel capacity to process information is real wealth it'll be a measure of information yeah i agree it'll be measured in units of information time out i'm taking this in a different direction so one of the things i'm concerned about right now given the speed at which we're getting wealth aggregation into the large, you know, hyperscalers and given the fact that we have not in the long term, but in the short term, I think a job dislocation is that there's a lot of people really concerned about civic unrest, right?

1:22:55About we had Bology on the pod talking about, I would not want to be a tech entrepreneur in the Bay Area in two or three years. You guys remember that in terms of, you know, I've have a few of my friends who in the VC world getting death threats right now. It's crazy. I mean, really, really crazy. So my question is, how can we potentially see Solana and the crypto world help ease this tension that we're going to have of this discontinuity? Because I think in the long run, totally, we have you know i all i speak about and write books about is this world of abundance where we're demonetizing and democratizing access to food water energy health care education it's the interim state right the next two to eight years that i'm most concerned about what are your thoughts there i i'm actually i kind of have a very opposite view of biology here probably maybe because i don't know my parents came to the to united states from the ussr literally with$50 per person, like in 92.

1:23:59So I think what we're seeing with AI is a less, a smaller transformation in terms of labor than the steam engine. Like the amount of people that actually became unemployed because of the steam engine was dramatically more. And those were like all fighting age dudes. I think the likely outcome is that we just get better at what we do and the jobs become less easier, less risky, and you can scale up and the amount of wealth that you create for the world and the poverty decreases and people just simply work less. And the difference between the kind of work that my dad had to do as a civil engineer in the USSR versus here was like night and day in terms of risk.

1:24:43And that was just moving across the Atlantic Ocean into a more mature economy. So I think the world is only going to get wealthier and we're blessed to live in this age. So I'm like very optimistic. It's the most exciting time to be alive. Yeah, for sure. Open AI is not shrinking its headcount. And this is the most advanced AI company. They're not hiring less people. They're hiring really smart people and giving them the best tools to accelerate that company. But that's only going to happen everywhere. I think you're going going to end up with a lot of demand for people that understand how AI works, where it makes mistakes and can course correct it and keep it on track.

1:25:24I think that that's probably going to be a super valuable skill. And if anything, I think that comes from experience. My experience with AI tools is that I can keep like half an open eye watching Claude stream its code and know that it's doing something right or wrong, whether like a junior engineer has to actually analyze every commit and stuff like I think you will see the exact same kind of systems that you did with just advent of databases and computers like everyone that was an accountant didn't just like become homeless they just they're super smart people with college education that are like have incredible access to networks that can go and retrain a lot easier than I think everyone else.

1:26:08What's your take on this? Well, I think if we have a kind of a breakdown in society like you're talking about, right, what you end up happening is because it's so easy to build a crypto system today, you could create a local community DAO that circulates tokens just amongst itself and you can spend those tokens on certain things and very quickly boot up a local economy. Note the most monetary transactions, 80%, are local. You're buying supplies, you're getting your haircut, whatever, whatever. Not the amount of money, but the number of transactions. And so crypto, because the cost is so low. It's a strange example for you to use.

1:26:48Sorry? It's a strange example for you to use, getting your haircut. It is a strange example for me to use. So this becomes really powerful to replace. This is why I believe that we're going to move to very granular environments where people will create small communities that self-support. This supports biology's network state idea. We just need to keep enough for the internet to keep going and everything's fine. If that breaks down, then you have major issues. But I remember this wonderful story in the 70s where there was a huge central banking strike in Ireland and there were just no checks getting cleared.

1:27:27No checks were getting cleared. and for two years the Irish just kept going they just kept passing checks around saying well when the central bank comes back online it'll settle on and two years later the central bank went wow nobody's even noticed we're on strike we might as well come back because and then they cleared all the checks and then business went back to usual right and so human beings are incredibly resilient at figuring things out and I think when we get into major issues like that we'll figure it Dave? I'm hugely biased because Tully to me is the most perfect example of the person you want to be.

1:28:02Like after he's done with this podcast, he's going to go debug some code. He's building it. And we're discussing like, you know, what is this AI philosopher who's never done squat over here? Think of it. It's just like your perspective. And especially when you come from a foreign country. You know, I had the same conversation with Thomas Pederfee who was born in Hungary in a basement as the Soviet tanks were coming in. And he can't connect with his own kids who grew up here and they're like, oh, we're destroying the world. You know, Dad, you're polluting by taking a dump. And he's like, what are you talking about?

1:28:34We live in the best time in world history and in the most free and fair place in the world. And you're not taking advantage of it. But what Tully is doing is actually building the future platform from all of society, and it's going to create the abundance that Peter's talking about. And to me, your perspective is exactly the right one. And I'm not even vaguely connected to the alternate perspective. It makes no sense to me. But everything you just said perfectly resonates with me. I mean, it's exactly the right view. Anyway, that's my rant. I appreciate it, yeah. you know uh i i am i am curious about something we've just seen a kazakhstan launch a stable coin on solana um and how do projects like that i mean does that get you excited what projects are getting you excited right now about the use of the technology you created because there might i mean you must wake up in the morning and say holy shit that's amazing what someone just did with solana um i think crypto is going through like technology phases is similar to the internet.

1:29:38You had the punks create the first version. Then you had the hoodies kind of scale it up. And now the suits are moving in. So a lot of the stuff that's happening is driven by suits, which is great. But I'm less connected to that and more to, I think, the low-level experiments. So I think folks, if they really, really want to be a bit deep in crypto, go check out Futarki and Decision Markets on how to run a collective, like an online collective that makes real financial decisions, but fully market-based. So in a way that minimizes risk for investors, participants, etc. I think those kind of things are like what I think are really, really cool.

1:30:20And to me, it's also kind of a physics problem. Can we run a market for every, you know, for the top 10 million important decisions that people make to make in the world every day just to drill into that would be cool right yeah just to drill into that for a second uh what toley's talking about is futarki allows you to use prediction markets to do dow governance okay and one of the big issues with daos was how do you manage governance because it's like you're in a town hall meeting with everybody shouting loudly it's not quite the worst it's not just it's not just dallas salim it's not quite a prediction market it's literally like if apple said that you know i propose apple builds this vr device and i'm willing to buy your apple stock for a higher price than it's currently trading because i'm so bullish on the on this idea that the man that the managers need to do so i'm willing to increase your value if you don't if you disagree with me so this is in fact forces a financial stake for any decision to be made in this DAO, which is different than let's all vote with our shares and say, yeah, we approve this or we don't approve it.

1:31:34Because you literally have to put your money where your mouth is for any decision that this DAO takes. Amazing. So it's a really, really cool idea. Yeah, and they've run a couple ICOs that have gotten like over$150 million in commits, which is pretty crazy. Wow. I asked you a question, didn't hear the answer, though, but in terms of super exciting projects that you're looking forward to on Solana, anything you can share with us? Obviously, Solana Mobile, so go buy a Seeker if you don't have one. Show it to us. Tell us about it. Tell us about the Seeker. We have two goals. One, I think, is because I spent most of my career at Qualcomm, it was just immediately obvious to me that you can have full cryptographic guarantees that a hardware wallet provides in the phone form factor.

1:32:29Like, in fact, all the technology to implement a trust zone and to keep your secret keys stored in an enclave, all that stuff was built years before Bitcoin for DRM, of all things. To keep people from stealing like Netflix or whatever, phones implemented all this technology to prevent any kind of data snooping and maintain encryption from all the way from the deepest secure enclave to the display. So it was just obvious to me, oh, why don't we embed hardware wallet directly into the phone? That was the idea. So we can make it as good from a security perspective, like you get cold wallet guarantees in your hardware device in terms of the kind of security that you get, but the user experience of Apple Pay so you can have a hot wallet that is both secure and great for consumers.

1:33:24That's part of it. But the other part of it is that you have these very mature companies like Google and Apple that have a 20 % rate on all digital spend, at least through their economies. Crazy. And there's no, it's just like, that's a bug in capitalism. That just doesn't make sense. Why isn't it converging down to the lowest cost? So to me, it's an opportunity to use crypto as a wedge because developers want to pay these fees so we can use a different economics where you pay. we can earn, I think, as good of returns as Google or Apple, but through effectively trading transaction fees that are volume-based.

1:34:01It's a protection racket. Is there also a Solana YouTube replacement, like an Odyssey equivalent on Solana? There's people trying to build crypto-based content creation. None of those, I think, have really taken off or proven out. I think that's a harder problem than I think software and software experiences. just the amount of sheer content that you need to generate to get that like 10 % as good as like within like a margin of error as entertaining as YouTube or TikTok is just astronomical. But I think with AI and Sora, like you're going to see that kind of change. It's just that's actually the crux of my question.

1:34:42Does Sora 2 or whatever is next change the math or not? because yeah you're totally right so but like you need like right now it's not good enough and too expensive but like you can see it in five years oh this entertainment stream that i'm getting right the infinite just of like a stream of of entertainment is going to be ai generated and that's kind of a scary thought because i think humans in the loop on what keeps us entertaining is probably an important part of our shared cultural experience but we'll see what happens an amazing future ahead gentlemen I'm jealous of your seeker Salim I'm moving I'm starting to move all my crypto onto it and by the way totally my whole community wants to move our NFT collection onto Solana so I may ping you about that do I have time for a closing question do I get one or but I have one that I think the audience might really care about so totally if the world moves all these transactions to Solana, you know, because it's a thousand times faster than Ethereum, which is a thousand times slower than Bitcoin.

1:35:56So it's like the engine for AI. And the fundamental use of the Solana token is anti-spam, right? It's a way to pay for your transaction to get settled. Is there any way to translate the value of Solana, without giving investment advice, the transaction volume of Solana to the value of the Solana token? What's the math that connects those two things? I think the transaction volume is less important. And what's more important is the opportunity cost of being late. So where the network actually makes more value, like you as a block producer, like you need sold to stake to be a block producer, because if you had no stable resistance, you could create infinite blocks and that would effectively spam the network to death.

1:36:41So you have some Sybil mechanism to prevent infinite block producers. So you have some amount of percentage sold that you stake that gives you X amount of percent blocks you can make. When you're making blocks, people are paying you to be first in the block, to be first to get access to the trade. So the amount that they're willing to pay is based on the opportunity cost of that, of being first. Right, right. So has anyone put together a blog or a white paper or something that says like, well... Yeah, BlockWorks probably has done the best job in terms of compiling all of this data and analyzing it into more traditional, this is revenue, these are network costs.

1:37:19So if you go to BlockWorks, you can look at Solana and Ethereum and do comparisons. And this is true for all proof-of-stake networks because the Sybil mechanism for proof-of-stake is the token itself and you get have x percentage stake you can literally do i have a portfolio do i put a percentage of it into treasury bills that are risk-free or do i risk some of it to run a block producer and get like tips effectively for including transactions and it doesn't actually matter that you're getting tips in seoul or usdc or somebody gives you a sack of potatoes because Because the fact that you have to stake X amount to get access to that revenue is how you can do your Kelly-optimized allocation.

1:38:03So this ties to the intelligent investor, a very traditional, boring approach to do analysis here. You can't do this for Bitcoin because the Sybil mechanism for Bitcoin is energy. And I don't know if it'll ever change or anything like that. So I think Bitcoin is its own special snowflake that I have struggled to come up with a standard model to analyze. But for proof of stake networks, I think you can really put them in the intelligent investor box and do analysis and kind of make your own decisions. Alex, I want to give you a chance to ask a question. Then I have a question and go around the table to ask everybody.

1:38:43I'll ask a fun question, not a serious question. So totally, let's project forward. Say humanity does in the end take apart our solar system to build the Dyson Swarm, and we have lots of computronium. What will be the medium of commerce in a Dyson Swarm future for humanity? Do you think that this is kind of like the central planning communism problem? Is it computationally feasible to solve it just mathematically without markets? at relatively high latencies, right? You're bound by light speed latencies just like we all are. I think this is kind of the question. How many qubits do we have to be able to solve this massive linear algebra problem, right?

1:39:30Can you allocate the resources to everything? You might not need commerce. Then that might be the end of capitalism, and you might only have it just simply for human entertainment. but um i think like personal freedoms are far more important than efficiency in a lot of ways so i would like i would go against i would be very much against it i think it's very important for people to have purpose and competing for tokens whatever they are right bananas out of a meme coin or whatever i think it's something so here's here's my question for the group go around the horn here um you're you're going to follow on alex's question from earlier which is what's your definition of wealth in the future salim what do you think because it's very different looking back historically at the kings and queens and pharaohs it was you know how many how many slaves you owned and your ability to you know sort of have access to agriculture was sort of wealth What do you think is in the future here?

1:40:35I would think it's a combination of time and health spend. Time and health spend. Okay. Dave? I think it's a no-brainer that it's purely tied to compute because, you know, I was asking class at MIT the other day, like, if I offered you$10 ,000 cash, here it is, or a GPU that's worth$30 ,000, how many of you would take the GPU? And they're like, are you crazy? I'll take the$10 ,000 cash. But in the near-term future, compute can be immediately turned into cash. I mean the compute is the universal thing. And when you have AI agents who are the laborers of the world, your number of workers is the amount of compute that you have.

1:41:19So your ability to make yourself happy, whether it's controlling your figure robot, cleaning your house or building something virtual or your customer, it's all bounded by the amount of compute you have access to. So that becomes the universe. And that also determines your health. If you put your compute towards analyzing your scans, it determines whether or not it finds your cancer. And so it becomes your health too. So it becomes the universal foundation. It computes your answer. Alex, WG, what's yours? I think we're suffering from the cliche of the blind philosophers who are touching different parts of the elephant and all overconfident that the part of the elephant that they're feeling is what an elephant feels like.

1:41:59So I'd argue for a more general definition that generalizes all of those definitions. I would argue real wealth will be measured to first order as future freedom of action, which generalizes compute. It generalizes physical resources. It can be measured in units of bits. So it's an information theoretic definition. But it's not just about compute. It's about the ability, some might call it empowerment, but that's a specialized term, to take the course of action you want in the future, not just in the present. I knew I should not have left. The first time Alex said that to me, I didn't get it. But if you go to alexwg.org and you read his paper on the topic and you read it closely, you'll come away saying, oh, my God, he's totally right.

1:42:43I knew I should not. I was going to say degrees of freedom. Yeah. Degrees of freedom. Yeah, it's the same thing. I should have gone before Alex went. I'll answer. I think it's the ability to fulfill your desires, your purpose. And compute is part of it, but nanotechnology is going to be a fundamental as well, a manipulation of the physical universe. So it's not just compute in that regard. You guys are also thinking in scarcity terms. You've got to jump forward to abundance terms and think then all that matters is time and health spend. Hello. I think, Salim, you're thinking in meat body terms.

1:43:23Think in post-biological terms. Come on. All right. Anyway, totally. So your answer here? Degrees of freedom. Degrees of freedom. All right. I think people will never feel satisfied because there's somebody else that has more degrees of freedom than them. So this is like the human condition is always striving for something else. The hedonic treadmill spins faster and faster, doesn't it? Yeah, I think you guys are right, because you can have a lot of compute and still be beaten like a dog every day by some government. So you guys are right. All right, we've reached a conclusion here. Tully, where do people find you?

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