Politics & the Future of Tech with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz

25:05Exactly. It's a great experience if you've called customer service when one of these monopolies has kicked you off their platform. Yes, exactly. And so yeah, it's just that there is something in the nature of monopolies where if they no longer have to compete and if they're no longer Disciplined by the market they basically go bad and then how do you prevent that from happening? Then we prevent that is from forcing to compete the way that they have to compete on some cases they compete with each other Although often they collude with each other, which is another thing Monopoly and cartel are kind of two sides of the same coin But really at least in the history the tech industry is really when their face was startup competition I mean the elephant has a terror hurt his heels nipping at him taking increasingly big bites out of his foot like that's when big companies is actually act and when they do new things.

25:45And so without healthy startup competition, there's a, there are many sectors of the economy where it's just very clear now that there's not enough startup competition because the incumbents that everybody deals with on a daily basis are just practically intolerable. And it's not anybody's interest ultimately from a national policy standpoint for that to be the case. You know, that things can get bad word. It's to the benefit of the big companies to preserve those monopolies would very much not anybody else's benefit. Yeah, not exactly, exactly. Which is such a big impetus behind our or kind of political activity.

26:13Yeah, that's right. Okay, now we're going to future looking. So in what ways do you see the relationship between Silicon Valley and DC evolving in the coming years? And then specifically, and again, we're not going to be making partisan recommendations here, but there is an election coming up and it is a big deal. And it's going to have both what happens in the White House and what happens in the Congress. It's going to have big consequences for everything we've just been discussing. So how do we see the upcoming election affecting tech policy? Yeah, well, I think there are several issues that end up being really important to kind of educate people on now because whatever platform you run on as a Congressperson or as a president, you want to kind of live up to that promise when you get elected.

26:51And so a lot of these kind of positions that will persist over the next four years are going to be established now. I think in crypto in particular, we've been very active on this because we have a big donation to something called the Fair Shake Pack, which is kind of work on this. And And just identifying for kind of citizens, okay, which politicians are on what side of these issues? Who are the just flat out anti crypto, anti -nevation, anti -block chain, anti -decentralized technology candidates? And let's at least know who they are so that we can tell them we don't like it. And then tell all the kind of people who agree with us that we don't like it.

27:32And a lot of it ends up being, you know, look, we want the right regulation for crypto. We've worked hard with policymakers to kind of help them formulate things that will prevent scams, prevent nefarious uses of the technology for things like money laundering and so forth. And then enable the good companies, the companies that are pro consumer helping you own your own data and not have it owned by some monopoly corporation who can exploit it or just lose it, get broken into. And so you now have identity that problems and so forth that can kind of help kind of a fair economy for creative so that there's not a 99 % take rate on things that you create on social media and these kinds of things.

28:20And so it's just important to kind of I think educate the populace on where every candidate it stands on these issues. And so we're really, really focused on that. And I think the same truth for AI, same truth for bio. I'd also like, it's not actually the case that there's a single party in DC that's protect and a single party that's anti -tuck. I definitely not. There's not. And by the way, if that were the case, it would make life a lot easier. Yes. But it's not the case. And I'll just give it some nail sketch of at least what I see when I'm in DC and see if you agree with this. So the Democrats are much more fluent in tech.

28:53And I think that has to do with who their kind of elites are. It has to do with this kind of very long -established revolving door. I mean that in both the positive and the majority of the sense between the tech companies and the Democratic Party, Democratic politicians, political offices, congressional offices, White House offices. There's just a lot more integration. The big tech companies tend to be very democratic, which you see in all the donation numbers and voting numbers. And so there's just a lot more, I would say, tech -fluent, tech -aware Democrats, especially in powerful positions.

29:19Many of them have actually worked in tech companies. Just as an example, the current White House chief of staff is former board member at Metta, where I'm on the board. And so there's a lot of sort of connective tissue between those. Look having said that, the current Democratic Party in a particular certain of its more radical wings had become extremely anti -tack at the point of being arguably, in some cases, outright anti -business, anti -capitalism. And so there's a real kind of back and forth there. Republicans, on the other hand, in theory, in the stereotype would have you believe Republicans are sort of inherently more pro -business and more pro -free markets and should therefore be more protect.

29:51But I would say there again, it's a mixed bag because number one, a lot of Republicans Americans just basically think of Silicon Valley that is all Democrats. And so Silicon Valley is all Democrats. If we're Republicans, that means they're de facto the enemy. They hate us. They're trying to defeat us. They're trying to defeat our policies. And so they must be the enemy. And so there's a lot of, I would say, some combination of distrust and fear on that front. And then again, with much less connective tissue, there are many fewer Republican executives at these companies, which means there are many fewer Republican officials or staffers who have tech experience.

30:20And so there's a lot of mistrust. And of course, there have been flashpoint issues around this lately, like social media censorship that are really exacerbated this conflict. And then the other thing is they're very serious policy disagreements. And there are, again, there are at least wings of the modern Republican Party that are actually quite economically interventionist. And so, you know, term of the moment is industrial policy, which basically there are Republicans who are very much in favor of a much more interventionist government approach towards dealing with business and a particular dealing with tech.

30:48And so I guess to say like this is not an either or a thing like there are really issues on both sides. The way we think about that is that, therefore, there's a real requirement to engage in both sides. There's a real requirement, bend to your point to educate on both sides. And if you're going to make any progress in tech issues, there's a real need to have a bipartisan approach here, because you do have to actually work with both sides. Yeah, and I think that's absolutely right. And just to kind of name names a little, if you like it like the Democratic side, you've got people like Richie Torres out of the Bronx.

31:13And by the way, huge swath of the congressional black caucus that sees, wow, crypto is a real opportunity to equal the financial system, which has historically been documentedly racist against the kind of a lot of their constituents, and then also the creatives which they represent a lot to kind of get a fair shake. And then on the other hand, you have Elizabeth Warren who has taken a very totalitarian view of the financial system and is moving to consolidate everything in hands, a very small number of banks, and basically control who can participate and who cannot in finance. So these are just very different views out of the same party.

31:53And I think that we need to just make the specific issues really, really clear. Yeah. And the same thing we can spend a long time also naming names on the Republican side. So, yes, which we'll give you a do later. But so yeah, well, I should do it right now just to make sure that we're fair on and this, their Republicans who are like full on pro -free market, very opposed to all current government efforts to intervene and markets like A &C. By the way, many of those same Republicans are also very negative and any antitrust action. They're very ideologically opposed to antitrust. And so they would also be opposed to things like the Apple lawsuit that a lot of startup founders might actually like.

32:27And then on the flip side, you have folks like Josh Holley, for example, that are, I would say quite vocally, I would say, I rate it Silicon Valley at a very in -paper of much more government intervention and control, you know, I think a whole administration just as an example would be extremely interventionist in Silicon Valley and would be very pro -industrial policy very much trying to both sort of set goals and sort of have government management of more of tech, but also much more dramatic action against at least perceived a real enemy. So it's the same kind of expect. Yeah, so anyway, I want to go through that though.

32:54This is kind of the long -winding answer to the question of how will the upcoming election effect policy, which is, you know, look, they're, you know, they're, look, there are real issues with the Biden administration, in particular with the agencies and with some of the affiliated senators has been just described. So, you know, there are certainly issues where, you know, that the agencies, you know, under the Trump administration, the agencies would be headed by very different kinds of people. Having said that, it's not that, you know, it's not that a Trump presidency would necessarily be a clean win, you know, and there are many people and sort of that wing who might be a hostile in, by the way, in different ways, or actually it might be hostile in some cases in the same way.

33:29Yeah, and by the way, you know, Trump himself has been quite the moving target on this. He was very, he tried to ban TikTok and now he's very pro -tookt. He has been negative on AI, who's originally negative on cryptos and that positive on cryptos. So it's complex. Which is why I think the foundation of all of this is education and why we're spending so much time in Washington and so forth is to make sure that we communicate all that we know about technology said that at least these decisions are highly informed that the politicians make. Good. Okay. So moving forward. So three questions in one.

34:10So Alex asks, as tech regulation becomes more and more popular within Congress, which is happening, do you anticipate a lowering in general of the rate of innovation within the industry? Number two, Tyler asks, what is a key policy initiative that if passed in the next decade could bolster the U .S. for a century? And then Elliott Parker asks, what's one regulation that if removed would have the biggest positive impact on economic growth. Yeah, so I think that as best if you disagree with this, I don't know that there's a single regulation or a single law or a single issue. You know, there are certainly, I mean, there are certainly individual laws or regulations that are important.

34:42But I think the somatic thing is a much bigger problem or much bigger, if the somatic thing is the thing that matters. Thanks for coming. Or much more serious on the things that have been. I Yeah, I mean, so if you look at the current state of regulation, if it stayed here, there's not anything like we really feel like a burning desire to remove it in the same way that things that are on the table could be extremely destructive. and basically, you know, look, if we ban large language or large models in general, or we, you know, force them to go through some kind of, you know, government approval, or if we ban open source technology, you know, that would have just a devastating, it would basically take America out of the AI game and, you know, make us extremely vulnerable to a military standpoint, make us extremely vulnerable from technology standpoint in general.

35:47And so that's devastating. Similarly, if we don't get proper regulation around crypto, the trust in the system and the business model is going to fade, or is going to be in jeopardy in that it's not going to be the best place in the world to build crypto companies and blockchain chain companies, which would be a real shame. The analog would be the creation of the SEC after the Great Depression, which really helped put trust into the US capital markets. I think that trust into the blockchain system as a way to invest, participate, be a consumer, be an entrepreneur, are really, really important and necessary and very important to get those.

36:36right? Okay, and then speaking, okay, let's move straight into the specific issues then more. So, expand on that. So, Lenny asks, what form do you think AI regulation will take over the next two administrations? B, Sakhandi asks, well, AI regulation result in a concentrated few companies or an explosion of startups and new innovation. E -Ray asks, how would you prevent the AI industry from being monopolized centralized with just a few tech corps? And then our friend, the Beffgizos, asks, how do you see the regulation of AI compute and open service models realistically playing out? Where can we apply I pressure to make sure we maintain our freedom to build and own AI systems.

37:08It's really interesting, because there's like a regulatory dimension of that. And then there's the kind of technological kind of, you know, version of that. And they do intersect. So if you look at what Big Tech has been trying to do, they're trying, they're very worried about new competition to the point where they've taken upon themselves to go to Washington and try and outlaw their competitors. and if they succeed with that, then I think it is super concentrated AI power, making the kind of concentrated power of social media or search or so forth. I'm kind of really pale in comparison. It would be very dramatic if there were only three companies that were allowed to build AI.

37:56That's only what they're pushing for us. I think in one regulatory world where a big tech wins, then there's a very few companies doing AI, probably Google Microsoft and Microsoft, you know, having basically full control of OpenAI as the kind of demonstrators. They have the source code, they have the way to set your awareness for us saying that, we own everything. And then they also kind of control with the CEO, and since they demonstrated beautifully. So if you take that, it will all be owned by three, maybe four companies. If you just follow the technological dimension, I think what we're seeing play out has been super exciting in that we were all wondering would there be one model that ruled them all?

38:46And even with in a company, I think we're finding that there's no current architecture that's going to gain on a single thing, a transformer model, diffusion model and so forth, that's going to become so smart in itself that once you make it big enough, it's just going to know everything and that's going to be that. What we've seen is, you know, even the large companies are deploying a tech they call the mixture of experts, which kind of implies, you know, you need different architectures for different things. They need to be integrated in a certain way and the system has to work. And that just opens the aperture for a lot of competition because there's many, many ways to construct a mixture of experts to architect every piece of that.

39:28We've seen little companies like Mistral field models that are highly competitive with the larger models very quickly. And then there's other kind of factors like latency cost, et cetera, that factor into this. And then there's also good enough. When is a language model good enough? When it speaks English, when it knows about what things, what are you using it for? And then there's domain -specific data. I've been doing whatever medical research for years, and I've got data around all these kinds of genetic patterns and diseases and so forth. I can build a model against that data that's differentiated by the data and so on.

40:11So I think what we will, we're likely to see kind of a great kind of Cambrian explosion of innovation across all sectors, you know, big companies, small companies, and so forth, provided that the regulation doesn't outlaw the small companies, but that would be my prediction right now. Yeah, and I did a bunch of things to this. So one is even on the big model side, there's been this leapfrogging thing that's taking place. And so, you know, There's, you know, OpenA, you know, GPT -4 was kind of, you know, the dominant model not that long ago, and then it's been leapfrog in significant ways recently by both Google with their Gemini Pro, especially the one with the so -called long context window where you can feed it 700 ,000 words or an hour of full motion video as, you know, context for a question, which a huge advance.

40:56And then, you know, the anthropic, their big model cloud is, you know, a lot of people now are finding that to be more advanced model than GPT -4. and you know, and what assumes opening has to come back and you know, this leapfrogging will probably happen for a while. So even at the highest end, you know, at the moment these companies are still competing with each other. You know, they're still this leapfrogging is taking place and then, you know, Ben, as you articulate it, you know, very well. You know, there is this giant explosion of models of all kinds of shapes and sizes. Another, you know, our company Databricks just released another, you know, another, but what looks like a big leapfrog on the smaller model side.

41:29It's the best model now in the benchmarks and it's so efficient that we'll run in a MacBook. Yeah, and they have the advantage of, as an enterprise, you can connect it to a system that gives you not only enterprise quality access control and all that kind of thing, but also gives you the power to do SQL queries with it, gives you the power to basically create a catalog so that you can have a common understood definition of all the weird corporate words do you have? Like, by the way, one of which is customer, like there's almost no two companies that define customer in the same way. And in most companies, there are several definitions of customer, you know, from the department at AT &T, is it AT &T?

42:12Is it, yeah, now some, you know, division of AT &T, etc, etc. I think, I don't want to literally speak for them, but I think if you put the CEOs, the big companies under truth serum, I think what they would say is their big fear is that AIs actually not going to lead to them. And I'll play for them. It's going to lead to a commodity. It's going to lead to a race to the bottom on price. And you see that a little bit now, which is people who are using one of the big models APIs are able to swap to another big model API from another company pretty easily. And then these models, the main business model for these big models, at least so far, is saying API basically paper token generated or per answer.

42:49And so these companies really have to compete with each other. It may be that it actually is a hyper competitive market. It may be the opposite of a search market or an operating system market. It may be a market where there's just continuous competition, an improvement, and leapfrogging, and then constant price competition. And then, of course, the payoff from that is to everybody else in the world is an enormously vibrant market where there's constant innovation happening, and then there's constant cost optimization happening where, and then as a customer down stream of this, the entire world that's going to use AI is going to benefit from this kind of hyper competition that's going to potentially run for decades.

43:22And so I think if you put these CEOs in a true serum, what they would say is that's actually their nightmare. Like that. Well, that's why they're in Washington. That's why they're in Washington. So that's that is what's actually happening. That is the scenario they're trying to prevent. They are actually trying to shuttle competition. And by the way, actually, I will tell you this, there is a funny thing. Tech is so historically bad at politics that I think some of these folks think they're being very clever in how they go about this. And so, you know, because they show up in Washington with the kind of public service narrative or end of the world narrative or whatever it is.

43:54And I think they think that they're gonna very cleverly kind of trick everybody, trick people in Washington and giving them sort of cartel status and that people in Washington don't realize until it's too late. But it actually turns out people in Washington are actually quite cynical. They've been lobbied before, exactly. And so there is this thing and they, you know, they won't, they don't, I get this from them off the record a lot, especially after a couple of drinks, which is basically if you've been in Washington for longer than two minutes, you have seen many industries come to Washington, Many big companies come to Washington and want monopoly or cartel kind of regulatory protection.

44:24And so you've seen this, if you're in Washington, you've seen this play out, you know, in some cases, the guys have been there for a long time, dozens or hundreds of times. And so my sense is like, nine months ago or something, there was a moment where it seemed like the big tech companies could kind of get away with this. I think it's actually, I think actually, I think actually, it's the edge of, I'm still concerned and we're still working on it, but I think the edges come off a little bit because I think the cynicism of Washington in this case is actually correct, and I think they're kind of onto these companies.

44:49And then, you know, look, if there's a unifying issue, there's basically two unifying issues in Washington. One is they don't like China and the others. They don't like big tech. And so, you know, this is a win -able war. Like, this is a win -able war on behalf of startups and open source and freedom and competition. And so I'm actually, yeah, I'm worried, but I'm feeling much better about it than I was nine months ago. Yeah, well, we had to show up. I mean, that's the other thing. I mean, it's tough. Me, a real lesson, which is, you know, expect people to know what's in your head. You've got to go see them.

45:20You've got to put in the time. You've got to say what you think. And then, if you don't have any right to ring your hands with how bad things are. And then I just wanted to know one more thing. Just for this, says, you kind of mentioned the big companies being Microsoft Google Meta. It's worth noting that it is on the open source side of this. And so Meta is actually working quite hard. And this is a big deal because it's very, you know, contrary to the image, I think people have a meta over, you know, prior issues, you know, correctly. But on the open source, I atopic, and I'm freedom to innovate.

45:55At least for now, meta is, I think, very strongly on that side. And so it's, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. It's actually a very interesting point. And kind of I think essential for people to understand is that the way meta is thinking about this and the way that they're actually behaving and executing is very similar to how Google thought about Android, where their main concern was that Apple not have them in Apple and the smartphone. Not so much that they make money on the smartphone themselves, because I'm an Apple and the smartphone on the smartphone for Apple would mean that Google's other business was in real jeopardy.

46:34And so they ended up being an actor for good. And Android's been an amazing thing for the world. I think, you know, including getting smartphones in the hands of people who won't be able to get them otherwise, you know, all over the world. And Meta is doing kind of a very similar effort where, you know, in order to make sure that they have AI as a great ingredient in their products and services is willing to open source it and kind of gives their, all of their very, very kind of large investment in AI to the world so that entrepreneurs and everybody can keep them competitive even though they don't plan to be in the business of AI in the same way that what Google is in the business of Spartan's to some extent, but it's not their kind of key business and meta doesn't have a plan to be in the AI business, maybe to some extent they will, but that's not the main goal.

47:31Then I would put one other company on the concerning side of this and it's to tell, but where they're going to shake out. But Amazon just announced they're investing a lot more money in the Anthropic. So I think they're now basically Amazon is too anthropic what Microsoft just opened AI. Yeah. And so like there's there's a anthropic is very much in the group of kind of big tech, you know, kind of new incumbent big tech, you know, lobbying very aggressively for regulation and regulatory capture at NBC. And so I think it's sort of an open question whether Amazon is going to pick up that agenda as open as anthropic, it becomes effectively a subsidiary of Amazon.

48:04Well, this is another place where we're on the side of Washington, D .C. and the current regulatory motion where the big tech companies have done this thing, which we thought was illegal because we observed it occur at AOL and people went to jail. But what they've done is they invest and start -ups, huge amounts of money, Microsoft and Amazon and Google are all doing it, like billions of dollars. With the requirement, with the explicit requirement that those companies then buy GPUs from them, like not the discount that they'd ordinarily get, but a relatively high price, and then be in their clouds.

48:44So that kind of, and then in the Microsoft case, even more aggressive, give me your source code, give me your weights, which is extremely aggressive. So they're moving money from the balance sheet to their PNL in a way that, at least from an accounting standpoint. It was our understanding, it wasn't legal. And the FTC is, you know, lacking at that now, but it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. Yeah, well, the other is that's one area. Another issue, you know, that people should watch is, you know, that's why that's around tripping. The other one is just consolidation. You know, if you own, you know, half of a company and you get to a point in the management team, right?

49:21Like, is that, you know, is that a, like, is that not a subsidiary, you know, there are rules on that. Like, at what point you're going to be on the company equity, you own the intellectual property of the company and you control the management team. Yeah, is that not your company? Yeah, and then at that point, if you're not consolidating it, like, is that legal? And so the SEC is going to weigh in on that and then, of course, to the extent that some of these companies have not profit components to them, there's tax implications to the conversion to for profit and so forth. And so like there's a lot of, yeah, the stakes in the legal, let's say the stakes in the regulatory and political game that's being played here, I think are quite high.

50:00Quite high, yes. Yeah, extreme. Ben and I, Ben and I, as Ben mentioned, there's been an hour old enough where we do know a bunch of people who go on to jail. So some of these issues turn out to be serious. So Gabriel asks, what would happen if there was zero regulation of AI at the good, the bad, and the ugly? And this is actually a really important topic. So we're vigorously arguing in DC that there should be, basically, anybody should completely capable of building AI, deploying AI. big companies should be allowed to do it, small companies should be allowed to do it, open source should be allowed to do it.

50:28And you know, look, a lot of the regulatory pushes we've been discussing that comes from the big companies and from the activists is to prevent that from happening and put everything in the hands of the big companies. So, you know, we're definitely on the side of freedom and innovating. You know, having said that, you know, that's not the same as saying no regulations of anything ever. And so we're definitely not approaching this. It's kind of a hardcore libertarian lens. The interesting thing about regulation of AI is that it turns out when you kind of go down the list of the things that I would say reasonable people kind of thoughtful people considered to be concerned around AI on both sides of the aisle.

51:02Basically the implications that they're worried about are less the technology itself and are more the use of the technology in practice, either for good or for bad. And so Ben, you brought up, for example, if AI is making decisions on things like granting credit or mortgages or insurance, then they're very serious policy issues around how those answers are derived at, which could have affected it in different ways. The flip side is if AI is used to plan a crime or to plan a bank robbery or something like that or terrorist attack, that's obviously something that people focused on national security law enforcement are very concerned about.

51:35Look, I have a question that's actually very straightforward, which is it seems seems like completely reasonable to regulate uses of AI. You know, in things that would be, in things that would be dangerous. Now, the interesting thing about that is, as far as I can tell, and I've been talking a lot of people and you see about this, if I was able to tell every single use of AI to do something bad, is already illegal under current laws and regulations. And so it's already illegal to be discriminatory and lending, it's already illegal to red line, it mortgages, it's already illegal to plan bank robberies, it's already illegal to plan terrorist attacks.

52:04Like, these things are already illegal, and there's decades or centuries of case law and regulation and law enforcement and intelligence capabilities around all of these. And so to be clear, like we think it's like completely appropriate that those authorities be used and if there are new laws and regulations needed, due to other bad uses that that makes little sense. But that basically the issues that people are worried about can be contained in control of the level of the use as opposed to somehow saying, you know, by the way, as some of the humor activists do, you know, we need to literally prevent people from, you know, doing linear algebra on their computers.

52:35Yeah. Well, I think that's important to point out like what is AI? And it turns out to be, you know, it's math and specifically kind of like a mathematical model. So you can think of it for those of you who study math in school, you know, in math, you can have an equation like, you know, Y equals X squared plus B or something. And that equation can kind of model the behavior of something in physics or, you know, something in the real world, and so that you can predict something happening, like the speed that an object will drop or so forth and so on. And then AI is kind of that, but with huge computer power applied so that you get a much bigger equations with two or three or four variables you could have 300 billion variables.

53:26And so if you get into the challenge without, of course, if you get into regulating math and you say, well, math is okay up to a certain number of variables, but then at the, you know, two billionth and first variable, then it's dangerous. Then you're in a, like, a pretty bad place and that you're going to prevent everything good from the technology from happening as well as anything that you might think is bad. So you really do want to be in the business of regulating the kind of applications of the technology, not the math. In the same way that, you know, you want to want it to, like nuclear power is very, potentially dangerous, as nuclear weapons are extremely dangerous.

54:08You won't want to kind of put parameters around what physics you could study in order to, you know, like literally in the abstract, in order to kind of prevent somebody from getting a like you can no longer study physics in Iran, because then you might be able to build a nuke would be kind of the conclusion. And that has been kind of what Big Tech has been pushing for not because they want safety, but because again, they want them in theopoly. And so I think we have to be very, very careful not to do that. I do think there will probably be some cases that come up that are enabled by AI new applications that do need to be regulated potentially.

54:52For example, I don't know that there's a law that if you recreate something that sounds exactly like Drake, and then kind of put out a song that sounds like a Drake song. I don't know that that's illegal, maybe that should be illegal. I think those things need to be considered, for sure. And they're certainly danger in that. I also think we need technological solutions, not just regulatory solutions for things like deepfakes, that kind of help us get to what's human, what's not human. And interesting a lot of those are kind of viable now based on kind of blockchain, crypto technology. Yeah, so let's just go on the voice thing real quick.

55:32Yeah, so it actually, I believe this to be the case, it is not currently possible to copyright a voice. Yeah, right? You can copyright lyrics and you can copyright music and you can copyright tunes, right? Melody isn't so forth. Right. a copyrighted voice. And yeah, that seems like a perfect example where that it seems like that. Probably it's a good idea to have a while that lets you copyright your voice. Yeah, I feel that way, you know, particularly if people call their voice Drake squared or something, like, you know, could get very dodgy. Oh, yeah, well, again, you know, you get to get into just the details, you know, trademark, you can trademark your name so you could probably prosecute on that.

56:05But by the way, having said that, look, this also gets to the complexity of these things. There is actually an issue around copyrighting a voice, which is, okay, well, how close to the, voice of Drake, there are a lot of people have a lot of voices in the world and how close you have to get before you're violent and copyright. What if my natural voice actually sounds like Drake? Am I now in trouble? Do I, like, Jamie Foxx, imitate and crency Jones and that kind of thing? Exactly. Anyway, yeah, but I mean, look, I agree, and I don't think with you on this, that seems like a great topic, but it needs to be taken up and taken up and looked at seriously from a legal standpoint.

56:38It is actually, is obviously an issue that's elevated by AI, but it's a general idea. kind of concept of like, you know, multi -capariate trademark things, which is a long history in US law. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so let's talk about the decentralization of the blockchain aspects of this. So you know, and get into this. So Goose asks, how important is the development of decentralized AI? And how can the private sector catalyze prudent pragmatic regulations to ensure US routines, innovation leadership in this space? So yeah, let's, so let's, Ben, let's talk about, well, let's talk about decentralized AI and then I'll maybe I'll just highlight real quick, and then you can build on it.

57:10Decentralized AI, like, you know, the sort of default way that the day I systems are being built today is with basically super computer clusters in a cloud. And so you'll have a single data center somewhere that's got 10 ,000 or 100 ,000 ships and then a whole bunch of systems interconnect them and make them all work. And then you have a company that basically owns the controls that and these companies, they companies are raising a lot of money to do that now. These are very large scale centralized kinds of operations. And to train us, state of their model, you're at $100 million plus to train a big one, to train a small one like the Databricks model that just came out, it's like on the order of $10 million.

57:44And so these are large centralized efforts. And by the way, we all think that the big models are gonna end up costing a billion and opt in the future. And so then this raises the question of like, is there an alternate way to do this? And the alternate way to do this is with, we believe strongly is with a decentralized approach. And in particular, with a blockchain based approach, it's actually the kind of thing that the blockchain and the web three kind of method seems like it would work with very well. And in fact, we are already blocking backing companies and startups that are doing this. And then I would say there's at least three kind of obvious layers that you could decentralize that seem like they're you'd Increasing importance.

58:16So one is the training layer. Well, actually, I would say four. There's the training layer, which is you know building the model There's the inference layer, which is the running the model to answer questions There's the data layer Bend to your point on on opening up the black box of where the data is coming from which is there should probably be a blockchain based system Where people who are only can contribute it for training of a eyes and then get paid for it and where you track all that out. And then there's a fourth that you alluded to, which is deepfakes. It seems obvious to us that the answer to deepfakes, and I should pause for a second and say, in my last three months of trips to DC, the number one issue politicians are focused on with AI is deepfakes.

58:53It's the one that directly affects them. And I think every politician right now who's thought about this has a nightmare scenario of, you know, it's three days before their reelection campaign, you know, three days before the deepfake goes out with them, you know, saying something absolutely horrible and it's so good and the voters get confused and like, and then they lose the election on that. And so I would say like that's actually the thing, that's the thing that actually has the most potency right now. And then, you know, the, what would basically a lot of people say including the politicians is, so therefore we need basically a way to detect deepfakes.

59:20And so either the AI systems need to watermark a generated content so that you can tell this is deepfake or you need these kind of scanners, like the scanners that are being used in some schools now to try to detect the something as they had generated. Our view as, you know, I would say both technologists and investors in the space is that the methods of detecting AI generated content after the fact are basically not going to work. And they're not going to work because AI is already too good at doing this. And by the way, for example, if you have, if you happen to have kids that are in a school and they're running one of these scanner programs that is supposed to detect whether your kid is submitting an essay where you use ChatGP to write the essay.

59:57say, like, those really don't work in a reliable way. And there's a lot of both false positives and false negatives after those that are very bad. So those are actually very bad ideas. And for the same reason, like detection of AI generated photos and videos and speech is not going to be possible. And so our view is you have to flip the problem. You have to invert the problem. And what you have to do instead is basically have a system in which real people can certify that content about them is real. And where content has provenance as well. Where you just go ahead and describe how that would work.

1:00:27Yeah, so we have one of the amazing things crypto blockchain is that it deploys something known as a public key infrastructure, which enables every human to have a key that's unique to them where they can sign. So if I was in a video or in a photo or I wrote something, I can certify that yes, this is exactly what I wrote and you cannot alter it to make it into something else. it is just exactly that. And then, you know, as that thing, you know, gets transferred to the world, let's say that it's something, you know, like a song that you sell and so forth, you can track just like with, you know, in a less precise way, but with the work of art, we track the proven answer with a house, who owned it before you and so forth.

1:01:14That's also like an easy application on the blockchain. And so that, you know, kind of a combination of capabilities can make this whole kind of program much more viable in terms of like, okay, knowing what's real, what's fake, where it came from, where it started, where it's going, and so forth. You know, kind of going back, the data one, I think, is really, really important in that, you know, these systems, you know, one of the things that they've done, that's, I would say, dodgy. And there have been a big pushback against it with Elon trying to lock down Twitter, but the New York Times suing OpenAI and so forth.

1:01:55The systems have gone out and just slurped in data from all over the internet and all over people's businesses and so forth and train their models on them. And, you know, I think that there's a question of whether the people who created that data should have any say and whether the model is trained on that data. And you know, blockchain is an unbelievably great system for this because you can permission people to use it. You can charge them a fee, but can be all automated in a way where you can say, sure, come train, you know, and I think training data ought to be of this nature where there's a data marketplace.

1:02:33And people can say, yes, take this data for free. I want the model to have this knowledge or no, you can't have it for free, but you can have it or no, you can't have it at all rather than, you know, what's gone on, which is this very aggressive scraping. And, you know, like you have these very smart models where these companies are making a enormous amounts of money taken from data that certainly didn't belong to them. You know, maybe it's in the public domain or what have you. but that ought to be an explicit relationship and it's not today and that's a very great blockchain solution. And part of the reason we need the correct regulation on blockchain and we need the SEC to stop harassing and terrorizing people trying to innovate in this category.

1:03:17And so that's kind of the second category and then you have like training and inference. And I would say, right now, that push against kind of decentralized training and inferences, well, you know, you need this very fast interconnect and you need it to all be in one place, technologically. But and I think that's true for people who have more money than time, right, which is like, you know, startups and big companies and so forth. But for people in academia, We have more time than money. They're getting completely frozen out of my research. You can't do, there's not enough money in all of academia to participate anymore in AI research.

1:03:57And so having a decentralized approach where you can share all the GPUs across your network. And hey, yeah, maybe it takes a lot longer to train your network or to serve it. But you know what? You still can do your research. you can still innovate, create new ideas, do architectures, and test them out at large scale, which will be amazing if we can do it. And again, we need the SEC to stop, kind of illegally terrorizing every crypto company, and trying to block laws from being put in place that help us, enable this. Yeah, there's actually a really, when you alluded to it, the college thing actually really matters.

1:04:38So we have a friend who runs one of, you know, it's very involved in one of the big computer science programs one of the major American research universities And of course by the way a lot of the technology we're talking about was developed at American research universities And Canadian ones too Toronto and European ones exactly You know historically as with every other way of a technology in the last you know whatever hundred years You know the research are you research universities? It's you know across these countries have been kind of the gems of the you know the wellsprings of a lot of the new technology that have been in a powering you know, the economy and everything else around us.

1:05:10You know, we have a friend involved in running one of these and this friend said a while ago that he said that the, you know, his concern was that his university would be unable to fund a competitive AI cluster basically. So, you know, a compute grid that would actually let students and professors at that university actually work in AI because it's now getting to be too expensive and research and university are just not funded to do have CAPEX programs that big. And then he said his concern more recently has been all research universities together might not be able afford to do that, which means all universities together might not be able to actually have, you know, basically cutting edge AI work happening on the university side.

1:05:45And then I happen to have a conversation in DC. I was in a bipartisan, you know, house meeting the other day with on these AI topics. And I actually wanted one of the, in this case, Democratic, a kind of a sort of women asked me, you know, the question which, you know, comes up, which is a very serious question, always right, which is how do you get kind of more, more members of unrepresented groups, underrepresented groups involved in tech. And I found myself giving the same answer that I always give on that, which is the most effective thing you need to do is you need to go upstream and you need to have more people coming out of the college with computer science degrees who are skilled and qualified and trained and mentored and to be able to participate in the industry.

1:06:21You and I both came out of state schools with computer science programs where we were able to have the careers we've had. And so I found myself answering the question saying, well, we need more computer science graduates from from all you know from every from every group and then but in the back of my head I was like and it's going to be impossible to do that because none of these places are going to be able to afford to actually have the compute resources to be able to actually have AI programs in the future and so like you know maybe the government can fix this by just dumping a ton of money on top of these universities and maybe that's what will happen and you know the current political environment seems like maybe it's not quite feasible for a variety of reasons and then and then And the other approach would be a decentralized approach, would be a blockchain based approach that everybody could participate in.

1:07:05You know, if that were something that's a government we're willing to support, which right now it's not. And so I think there's a really, really, really, central important vital issue here that I think is being lost over by a lot of people and I think should really be looked at. Yeah, no, I think it's absolutely critical. And this is, again, kind of going back to our original thing. Like it's so important to the country thing, America being what America should be to get these issues right. And we're definitely in danger of that not happening because, you know, look, I think people are taking much too narrow view of some of these technologies and not understanding their full capabilities.

1:07:44We get into, oh, VAI could say something racist, therefore we won't cure cancer.

1:07:54I mean, to have a tech forward kind of solution to some of these things and then the right regulatory approach to kind of make the whole environment work. So, yeah, let's go to the next phase of this now, which is the sort of global implications. So I'm going to conjoin two different topics here, but I'm going to do it on purpose. So Michael Frank Merton asks, what could the US do to position itself as the global leader of open source software? You see any specific legislation of regulatory constraints that are hampering the development of open source projects? Arda asks similar question, what would an ideal AI policy for open -source software models looks like?

1:08:29And then Sarah Holmes asks the China question, do you think we will end up with two AI tech stacks, the Western China and ultimately companies will have to pick one side and stay on it? And so, look, I would say that this is where you get to like the really, really big geopolitical long -term issue, which is basically my understanding of things is sort of as follows, which is, you know, basically the, for a variety of reasons, technological development in the West is being centralized into the United States, with some in Canada and some in Europe, although quite frankly a lot of the best Canadian and European tech founders are coming to Silicon Valley.

1:09:02Yeah, and LeCoon is a hero in France, teaches at NYU and works at Metta, both of which are American institutions. So they're sort of an American or let's say American plus European kind of kind of kind of sort of tech vanguard wedge in the world and then there's China. know. And really, it's actually quite a bipolar situation. You know, it would say, you know, the dreams of tech being fully democratized and spreading, you know, throughout the world have been realized for sure on the on the use side, but, you know, not nearly as much on the entrepreneurship side or the invention side. And again, immigration, you know, immigration being a great, you know, virtue, but, you know, for the countries that are beneficial as immigration, the other side of that is, you know, it makes, you know, other countries are going to be less competitive because because they're best and brightest.

1:09:43I'm moving to the US. So, so anyway, so we are in a bipolar, we are in a bipolar tech world. It is primarily a bipolar tech world. It's primarily the US and China. You know, this is not the first time we have been in a bipolar world involving, you know, geopolitics and technology. You know, the US and China have two very different systems. The Chinese system has all of the virtues and downsides of being centralized. The US system has all the virtues and downsides of being more decentralized. There is a very different set of views of the two systems on how society should be ordered and what freedom means and you know what people should be able to do and not do.

1:10:20And then look both the US and China have visions of global supremacy and visions of basically care and agendas and programs, you know to carry forward their points of view on the technology of AI and on the societal implications of AI, you know throughout the world. And so, you know, there is this cold war two. Oh, and then the other thing is just In DC, it's just crystal clear that there's this now dynamic happening where Republicans and Democrats are trying to leapfrog each other every day on being more anti -China. And so, you know, our friend Neil Ferguson is using the term I think cold war 2 .0.

1:10:53Like, whether we want to or not, like we're in cold war 2 .0, like we're in a dynamic similar to the one, was with the USSR 30, 40, 50 years ago. And just to say our hopes is question, it's 100 % going to be the case. there are two AI tech stacks and there are two AI governance models and there are two AI deployment systems and there are two ways in which AI dovetails and everything from surveillance to smart cities to transportation, self -driving cars, drones, who controls what, who gets access to what, who sees what, the degree by the way to which AI is used as a method for population control.

1:11:26They're there are very different visions and these are national visions and global visions and there's a very big competition developing and you know it it's it's certainly looks to me like there's going to be a winner and a loser. I think it's overwhelmingly, and our best interest for the US to be the winner. For the US winner, we have to lean into our strengths. And the downside of our system is that we are not as well organized and orchestrated top down as China is. The upside of our system, at least, Markly is that we're able to benefit from decentralization, we're able to benefit from competition from a market economy from a private sector, right?

1:12:00Where we're able to basically have a much larger number where smart people are making lots of small decisions to be able to get to good outcomes as opposed to having a dictatorial system in which there's a small number of people trying to make decisions. I mean, look, and this is how we want the Cold War against Russia is our decentralized system just worked better economically, technologically and ultimately militarily than the Soviet decentralized system. And so it just seems like fairly obvious to me that we have to lean into our strengths. We better lean into our strengths. Because if we think we're just gonna be like another version of a centralized system, but without all the advantages of the China has with having a more centralised system, you know, that just seems like a bad formula.

1:12:35So yeah, let me pause there and Ben, see what you think. Right. Right. No, for sure. I think that'd be disastrous. And I think this is why it's so clear that if there's one, you know, to answer the question, if there's one regulatory policy that we would enact that would ensure America's competitiveness, it would be open source. And the reason being that, as you said, this enables the largest number of participants to kind of contribute to AI, to innovate, to come up with novel solutions and so forth. And I think that, you're right, China is, you know, what's gonna happen in China is they're gonna pick one because they can and they're going to kind of drive all there would behind that arrow in a way that we could never do because we just don't work that way.

1:13:17And they're gonna impose that on their society and try and impose it on the world. And, you know, our best counter to that is to put it in the hands of all of our smart people. I have so many smart people from all over the world, from, you know, like, as we like to say, universities are a strength. We've got this tremendous different points of view, different, you know, kind of kinds of people in our country. And, you know, the more that we can enable them, the more likely we'll be competitive. And I'll give you a tremendous example of this is, you know, I think if you go back to 2017 and you read any, you know, foreign policy magazine, et cetera, there wasn't a single one that didn't say China was a head and AI.

1:13:58They had more patents. They have more students going to universities. They're their head and AI, their head and AI, like we're behind AI. And then, you know, chat GPT comes out and goes, oh, I guess we're not behind AI. We're ahead of AI. And the truth of it was what China was ahead on was an integrating AI into the government. They're one AI into their government in that way. And, you know, look, we're working on doing a better job with that with American dynamism, but we're never going to be good at that model. You know, that's the model that they're going to be great at. And we have to be great at our model.

1:14:33And if we start limiting that outlawing startups and outlawing anybody with the big companies from developing AI and all that kind of thing, we'll definitely shoot ourselves on the foot. I would say related or like another kind of important point, I think in kind of the safety of the world is, you know, when you talk about two AIs, that's like two AIs stacks perhaps, but it's very important that countries that are in America that aren't China can align A .I. to their values. And I'll just give you kind of one really important example, which, you know, like I've been spending a lot of time in the Middle East.

1:15:10And if you look at the kind of history of a country like Saudi Arabia, they're coming from a world of fundamentalism and a kind of set of values that they're trying to modernize, they've done tremendous things with women's rights and so forth. But, like they're still the fact that they've got people who don't want to go to that future so fast, and they need to preserve some of their history in order to not have a revolution or extreme violence and so forth. And yeah, we're seeing Yalkeita respark up in Afghanistan and all these kinds of things, which are by the way, Yalkeita's real enemy of modern Saudi just as much as their America and enemy of America.

1:15:57And so if Saudi can't align an AI to the current Saudi values, they could literally spark a revolution in their country. And so it's very important that as we have technology that we develop that it not be totally proprietary close source that it be kind of modifiable by our allies who need to kind of progress at their pace to keep their kind of country safe and keep us safe in doing so. And so this has got great geopolitical ramifications what we do here like we go the China model that Google and Microsoft are advocating for this Chinese model of only a few can control AI. We're going to be in big trouble.

1:16:42Yeah, and then I just want to close in the open source point because it's so critical. This is where I get extremely array at the idea of closing down open source, which people in a number of these people are are lobbying for very actively. By the way, I'm going to name one more name. We even have VCs lobbying to outlaw open source, which I find to just be completely staggered. and then clear. Vinod. Vinod. So Vinod Kosla, who is, which is, this is just incredible to me. He's a founder of Sun Microsystems, which was in many ways a company built an open source, built an open source unit set up Berkeley, and then itself built a lot of open source, critical open source, and then of course, you know, was the dot and dot com, which of course, you know, the internet was all built an open source.

1:17:21And Vinod has been lobbying to ban open source AI. And by the way, he denies that he's been doing this, but I saw him with my own eyes when the US congressional China committee came to Stanford. for I was in the meeting where he was with 30, 20 or 30 congressmen and lobbying actually for this. And so I've seen him do it myself. And look, he's got a big stake in OpenAI. Maybe it's financial self interest. By the way, maybe he's a true believer in the dangers. But in any way, I think he proved on Twitter, he was not a true believer in the dangers. I'll get into that. I'll explain that. Yeah, so even within Little Tech, even within the startup world, we are not uniform in this.

1:17:58and I think that's extremely dangerous. Open source, like what is open source software? Like open source software is, you know, it is quite, you know, it's the technological, technological equivalent of free speech, which means it's the technological equivalent of free thought. And it is the way that the software industry has developed to be able to build many of the most critical components of the modern technological world. And then Ben, as you said earlier, to be able to secure those and to be able to have those actually be safe and reliable. And then to have the transparency, you know, that we've talked about so that, you know, how they work and how they're making decisions and then to your last point also so that you can customize AI in many different environments.

1:18:33So you don't end up with a world where you just have one or a couple of the eyes, but you actually have like a diversity of the eyes with lots of different points to do, lots of different capabilities. And so the open source fight is actually at the core of this. And of course, the reason why the sort of people with an eye towards monopoly or cartel want to ban this is open source is a tremendous threat to monopoly or cartel. Like many ways is it guaranteed that monopoly or cartel can't last. But it is absolutely 100 % required for the furtherance of number one a vibrant private sector number two a vibrant startup sector and then Right back to the academia point like without open source then at that point, you know university college kids are just not Being able to let them not even be able to learn how the technology works.

1:19:14They're just gonna be like completely boxed out and so a world Where open source is banned is bad on so many fronts. It's just incredible It means that anybody's advocating for it, but it needs to be I think it needs to be recognized as the threat that it is Yeah. And on the note, you know, it was such a funny dialogue between you and he. So like, I'll just give you a quick summary of it. Basically, you know, he was arguing for close source, you for open source, his core argument was this is the Manhattan project. and therefore we can't let anybody know the secrets and you counter that by saying, well, if this is in fact a Manhattan project then it's like, you know, it's the open AI team, you know, locked in a remote location.

1:19:55Do they screen all their like employees very, very carefully? Is it air locked? Are they, you know, super high security? Of course, that is close to true. In fact, quite sure they have Chinese nationals working there. Probably some are spies for the Chinese government. but there's no any kind of strong security at OpenA. Or at Google or at any of these places, anywhere near the Manhattan Project, which is where they built a whole city that nobody knew about so they couldn't get into it. And once you caught him in that, he said nothing. And then he says back, well, you know, it cost billions of dollars to train these models.

1:20:31You just want to give that away. Is that good economics? Like that was just like final counterpoint to you. But basically I'm trying to preserve them in an athlete here like what are you doing? I'm an investor and I think that's true for all these arguments. Well the kicker band of that story, the kicker to that is three days later, the Justice Department indicted a Chinese national Google employee who stole Google's next generation AI chip designs, which is literally the family tools for an AI program. It's the equivalent of stealing the, if you stretch the metaphor, before, the equivalent of steel is the design for the bomb.

1:21:10And that Google employee took that, just chipped us out of them and took them to China. And by definition, my definition of that means took them to the Chinese government because there's no distinction in China between the private sector and the government, but it's an integrated thing. The government owns a controls everything. And so 100 % guaranteed that that went straight to the Chinese government, Chinese military. And Google, which, you know, like, you know, Google has like a big information security team and all the rest of it. Google did not realize, according to the indictment, Google didn't realize that that engineer had been in China for six months.

1:21:39Yeah, amazing. Well, hold on, it gets better. It gets better. This is the same Google with the same CEO who refused to sell Google proprietary AI technology to the US Department of Defense. So they're supplying China with AI and that's playing the US, which just goes back to, like if it's not open source, we're never going to compete. Like, yeah, we've lost the future of the world right here, which is why, you know, it's the single most important thing I issue for sure. Yeah. And, and you're not going to lock this stuff up. Like, you're not going to lock it up. Nobody's locking it up. It's not locked up.

1:22:19These companies are security Swiss cheese. And like, you know, you're not going to, you know, and you would have a debate about the tactical relevance of chip embargoes and so forth. But like you're you're you're not the the horses left the barn on this not least because these companies are without a doubt riddled with with with with For an assets and they're very easy to penetrate and so we do we just have to be like I would say very realistic about the actual state of play here and and we have to we have to we have to play in Reality and we have to we have to play in reality We have to win in reality and the win as we need innovation we need competition We need free thought we need free speech.

1:22:49We need we need to embrace the virtues of our system and and and not not shut ourselves down in the face of in the pace of the conflicts that are coming. Another one. Why are USVCs so much more engaged in politics and policy than their global counterparts? And I really appreciate that question because it basically, if that's the question that it means that, boy, VCs outside the US most not being engaged at all, because USVCs are very engaged. And then what do you believe the impact of this is in both the VCE ecosystem and society in general? And then directly related question, Vincent asked, are European AI companies becoming less interesting investment targets for US -based VCs due to the strict and predictably unpredictable regulatory landscape in Europe?

1:23:34Would you advise early stage European AI companies to consider relocating to the US as a result? Great question. Well, I think that it kind of goes back to a little of what you said earlier, which is, you know, in Sternoprol, like there's, you know, in the West, there's the United States and then there's everywhere else in the United States is kind of bigger than everywhere else combined. And, you know, so it's natural. And like, you know, in these kind of political things, it kind of starts with the leader and, you know, US is the leader in VC. Yeah, we feel like we're the leaders in USVC, so we need to go to Washington until we go, you know, nobody's going.

1:24:18And so that's a lot of the reason why we started things. On, wow, on European regulatory policy, like it's, I think, I think generally regulatory policy is going to, is likely to dictate where you can build these companies. We've seen some interesting things, you know, France turns out to be leading a revolution in Europe on an eye regulatory where they're basically telling the EU to pound sand, you know, and large reason because they have a company they're a mistral. And you know, they it's a national national jewel for the country and they don't want to give it up because you know, the EU has some crazy safety as them, you know, thing going on there.

1:24:59Yeah, and now try to also note France also of course is playing the same role with nuclear policy in Europe. Yeah, Yeah, the one country. They're the cleanest country. Yeah, probably one of the cleanest countries in the world is result Right, but it's socially pro nuclear and trying to hold off I think in a lot of ways sort of attempts throughout the rest of Europe and especially from Germany to basically bad nuclear Civilian nuclear power Yeah, in the UK the UK has sort of been flip -clapping on AI policy and we'll see where they come out And yeah, Brussels has been ridiculous as they've been on almost everything Yeah, the big thing I think I note here is there's a really big philosophical distinction.

1:25:34I think it's rooted actually the difference between the traditionally spent called I think the sort of Anglo or Anglo -American kind of approach to law and then the continental European approach. And I forget these, it's like I forget the terms for it, but the legal system. Yeah, I'll, there's like common law and then yeah, I think a civil law. So it's basically the difference basically is that which is not outlawed is legal or that which is specifically not legal is legal and anything that's not explicitly legal is outlawed. Right, in other words, by default, do you have freedom and then you impose the law to have constraints or by default do you have no ability to do anything and then the law enables you to do things?

1:26:15And these are sort of, this is like a fundamental philosophical legal, you know, political distinction. And then this shows up in a lot of these policy issues with this idea called the precautionary principle, which is sort of the rewarding of the sort of traditional European approach, which is basically the Prokarshire principle says, new technologies should not be allowed to be fielded until they are proven to be harmless. And of course, the Prokarshire principle very specifically is sort of a hallmark of the European approach regulation and increasingly by the US approach. And it's specifically, it's origin, it was actually sort of described in that way and given that name actually by the German Greens in the 1970s as a means to ban civilian nuclear power.

1:26:57you know with by the way with just catastrophic results and we could we could spend a lot a lot of time on that but I think everybody at this point agrees like including the Germans increasingly agreed that was that was a big mistake. The among other things you know has led to basically your funding rushes invasion of Ukraine to the you know the need for an imported energy because they keep sending out their new plants. And so just like a sort of a catastrophic decision but the precautionary principle has become like I would say extremely trendy like. like it's one of these things, like it sounds great, right?

1:27:24It's like, well, why would you, why would you want anything to be released in the world of it's not pretty to be harmless? Like how can you possibly be in support of anything that's going to cause harm? But the obvious problem with that is, with that principle, you could have never deployed technology such as fire, electric power, internal combustion, engines, cars, airplanes, the computer, right? Like every single piece of technology we have, the power is modern day civilization has some way in which it can be used to hurt people. Every single one, technology is their double edge swords. There are things, you can use fire to protect your village or to attack the neighboring village.

1:28:00These things can be used in both different ways. And so basically, if we had applied the precautionary principle historically, we would not have, we would still be living in mudhuts. We would be just like absolutely miserable. And so the idea of imposing the precautionary principle today, if you're coming from like an Anglo -American kind and of perspective or from a freedom to innovate perspective, that's just like, it's just like incredibly horrifying. The, you know, should basically guarantee to stall on progress. You know, this is very much the mentality of the EU bureaucrats in particular, and this is the mentality behind a lot of their recent legislation on technology issues.

1:28:34France does seem to be the main counterweight against this in Europe, you know, bend to your point. Like the UK has been a counterweight in some areas, but K also has, like I would say, they've received a full dose of this programming. Yeah, they have that tendency. Yeah, and they've been in AI in particular, I think they've been on the wrong side of that, which hopefully they'll reconsider. So again, this is one of these things like this. This is a really, really important issue. And just the surface level thing of like, okay, this technology might be able to be used for some harmful purpose.

1:29:01Like that, if that is allowed to be the end of the discussion, like we are never going to, nothing new is ever going to happen in the world. Like that, well, that will cause us ultimately to stall out completely. And then, you know, if we stall out, that will over timely to regression and like literally, You know, I mean, this is happening like the power is going out like you know Germans aside German German German society German industrial companies are shutting down because they can't afford the power That's resulted from this you know kind of the imposition this policy and the energy sector And so this is a very very very important thing.

1:29:28I think that e to Deurochrocy is lost on this and so I think it's going to be up to the individual countries to directly confront this if they want to Anyway, so I really applauded Francis done and I hope more European countries join them and in kind of being on the right side of this Yeah, you know, it always is funny to me to hear the EU and like the economist and these kinds of things say, oh, the EU may not be the leader in innovation, but we're the leaders in regulation. And I'm like, well, you realize those go together there. Like one is a function of the other. Okay. Good. So, and then let's do one more global question.

1:30:01A lap -gong leong asks, are there any other countries that could be receptive to technical optimism? For example, could Britain, Argentina, or Japan be ideal targets for our message and mission? Yes, so will you all look for work on that in Britain? And look, we've got some pretty good reception from the UK government. There's a lot of very, very smart people there. We're working with them, you know, tightly on their AI and crypto efforts, and we're hoping that's the case. You know, Japan is having spent a lot of time there. You know, they've obviously shown that capability, you know, over time.

1:30:37and then there's a lot about the way Japanese society works that holds them back from that at times as well. Without getting into all the specifics there is, they have a very unusual and unique culture that has a great difference for the old way of doing things, which sometimes makes it hard to kind of promote the new way of doing things. I also think around the world that the Middle East This is very, very kind of subject and kind of on board with technophthymism, the UAE, Saudi, Israel, of course. Many countries out there are very excited about these kinds of ideas and take the world forward and just creating a better world through technology, which I think that, with our population growth, if we don't have a better world through technology, we're going to have a worse world without technology.

1:31:29I think that's very obvious. So it's a very compelling message. And oh, by the way, South America, I should say also, there are a lot of countries who are really embracing techno optimism now in South America. And that's, you know, and some great new leadership there that's pushing that. Yeah, I would also say if you look at the polling on this, what I think you find is what you could describe as the younger countries are more enthusiastic about technology. And I don't mean younger here literally of like when they were formed, but I mean two things. One is how recently they've kind of emerged into what we would consider to be modernity.

1:32:03And so, for example, to embrace concepts like democracy or free market capitalism or innovation generally or global trade and so forth. And then the other is just quite simply the number of the demographics, the countries with a large number of people. And those are often the same countries, right? They have the reverse demographic pyramid we have where they actually have a lot of young people. And young people are both, you know, both, young people both need economic opportunity and are very fired up about new ideas. Yeah, by the way, this is true in Africa as well. In many of the African countries, you know, Nigeria, Rwanda, Ghana, they were there, Tecno Optimism, I think is taking hold in a real way.

1:32:39You know, some of them need governance improvements, but they definitely also have young population. Saudi in 70 % of the population is under 30. So, you know, just to your point that the very, very, very hopeful in those areas. Ben, Gultra asks, do you think the lobbying efforts by good faith American crypto firms will be able to move the needle politically in the next few years? One area is make you optimistic as it relates to American crypto regulation. Crypto blockchain Web 3. Yeah, so I think that I have hope I'm as hopeful as I've ever been. So there's a bunch of things that have been really positive.

1:33:15First of all, the SEC has lost, you think, five cases in a row. So, you know, like some of their arbitrary enforcement of things that aren't laws is not working. Secondly, you know, there was a bill that passed through the House or the House Financial Services Committee, which is a very, I would say, good bill on crypto regulation. And, you know, hopefully that will eventually pass the House in the Senate. There's, you know, we've seen Wyoming, I think, adopt really good new laws around DAO's. And so there's some progress there. And then, you know, there's been, you know, we've been working really, really hard to educate members of Congress and the administration.

1:33:57I'm kind of the value of the technology. There are strong opponents to it, you know, as I mentioned earlier, and, you know, that's, you know, that continues to be where But I think we're making great progress. And the fair shake pack is just a tremendous job of kind of backing pro crypto candidates. And with great success, there were six different races on Super Tuesday that they backed and all six won. So you know, another good sign. Fantastic. I hit a couple of other topics here quickly to get into the wire. So, by the time asks, can you give us your thoughts on the recent TikTok legislation?

1:34:35and if passed, what does this mean for big tech going forward? And so I'll just give a quick swing at that. So the TikTok legislation being proposed by the US Congress and currently being taken up in the Senate, which by the way, and the President Biden has already said, he'll sign it if the Senate and the House pass it. This is legislation that would require a requirement of investment of TikTok from its Chinese parent company, by dance. And so TikTok would have to be a purely American company or would have to be owned by a purely American company. And then failing that, it would be a ban of TikTok in the US.

1:35:04This bill is a great example of the sort of bipartisan dynamic in DC right now on the topic of China, which is this bill is being Incusiously supported by the majority of politicians on both sides of the aisle I think it passed out of its committee like 50 to zero Which you know is basically like it's impossible to get anybody in DC to agree on anything right now except basically Basically this so this is like super bipartisan and then it's you know The head of that committee is a Republican my Gallagher and you know he immediately and he worked in a bipartisan way with his committee members but the Democratic White House immediately endorsed it bill.

1:35:37So this bill has serious momentum. The Senate is taking it up right now. They're going to be like, they're modified in some way, but it seems reasonably likely to pass based on what we can see. You know, I would say, like I said, overwhelmingly by partisan support, and you know, look, the argument for the ban, is I would say a couple different way. Or not the investment of the ban. Number one is just like an app on Americans, on the phones of large percent of Americans with the surveillance and potential propaganda kind of aspects of that. Certainly has people in Washington concerned. And then quite frankly, there's an underlying industrial dynamic, which is the US internet companies can't operate in China.

1:36:17So there's a sort of a very symmetry underneath this that really undercuts a lot of the arguments from bite dance. It has been striking to see that there are actually opponents of this bill who are in an emerge. And I would describe on sort of the further to the right and further to the left and their respective parties. And those folks, and I won't go through detail, but those folks make a variety of arguments. One of the, and I'm gonna make characterise the surface level. I think on the further on the left, I think that there are people who think that it's especially kind of further left, Congress people who feel like TikTok is actually a really important and vital messaging system for them to be able to use their constituents who tend to be younger, their very internet centric.

1:36:56And so there's that, which is interesting. But then on the further on the right, There is a lot, and our friend David Sacks, for example, might be an example of this. There are a fair number of people who are very worried that the US government is so prone to abuse any regulatory capability with respect to tech, and especially with respect to censorship that basically if you hand the US government any new regulatory authority or legal authority at all to come down on tech, it will inevitably be used not just against the Chinese company, but it will also then be used against the American companies.

1:37:24So it's going to, it's, you know, it's from drama, it's surfacing around this, and you know, we'll see whether the opponents can, you know, can kind of pull it through. You know, look, quite frankly, I, you know, I, you know, without coming down, particularly on, I think there's one of those cases where there's actually like, excellent arguments, like on all three sides. Like I think they're like very legitimate questions here. And so, you know, I think it's great that the issue's being confronted, but I think it's also great that's a, you know, the arguments of this surface and that we're going to, you know, hopefully figure out the right thing to do.

1:37:52Couple closing things, close on, let's see, hopefully, a semi -optimistic So John Potter asks, how do you most effectively find common ground with groups and interests that you benefit from working with, but with which you are usually opposed ideologically or otherwise? I mean, I think this is, you know, there's this term in Washington common ground. And I think that, you know, you always want to start by finding the common ground because I'll tell you something in politics generally, is most people have the same intention, you like in Washington, in fact, people want life to be fair. You know, they want, they don't want people to go hungry.

1:38:29They want, you know, citizens to be safe, but have plenty of opportunity. So like, there's a lot of common ground that the differences lie not in the intent, but how you get there, like what is the right policy to achieve the goal? And, you know, so I think it's always important to start with the goal and then kind of work our way through, you know, why we think our policy position is correct. You know, like we don't really have a lot of disagreements on stated intent at least. I mean, I think there are some intentions that are very difficult in Washington, you know, like the, you know, the intention to kind of control the financial system is from the government or nationalize the banks or kind of achieve the equivalent of nationalizing the banks is, you know, when you have that intent, that's tough.

1:39:27But like if you start with, you know, most intentions are, I think, you know, shared between, you know, us and policymakers on both sides. And then we'll close on this great question. Zach asks, would either of you ever consider running for office and for fun, what would be your platform? So I want to just because like, you know, I think being a politician requires a certain kind of skill set and attitude and energy from certain things that I don't possess, unfortunately. Do you have a platform you would run on if you did run?

1:40:08Yeah, I do. Okay, yeah, let's hear your flat for the American dream. So I want to do it now, but I like to put up this chart that shows the change in prices in different sectors of the economy over time and what you basically see is the price of like television sets and software and video games are like crashing hard, right? In a way, this is like great for consumers. You know, like, yeah, I saw 75 inch flat screen ultra high depth TVs now or down below $500, $100 like, you know, it's great. It's amazing. When technology's allowed to work its magic, like prices crash in a way that's just great for consumers and it's equivalent of a giant, basically, you know, when prices drop, it's equivalent of a raise.

1:40:44So it makes human welfare a lot better. The three elements of the economy that are central to the American dream are healthcare education and housing. Right? And so if you think about what does it mean to have the American dream, it means to be able to buy in a home, it means being able to send your kids to great schools, get great education to have a great life and then it means great healthcare to be able to take care of yourself and your family. The prices on those are skyrocketing. They're just like straight to the moon. Don't. And of course, those are the sectors that are the most controlled by the government.

1:41:14They're where there's the most sub -sities for demand from the government. There's the most restrictions on supply from the government. And there is the most interference with the ability to field technology and startups. And the result is we have an entire generation of kids who basically I think are quite rational and looking forward and basically saying, I'm never gonna be able to achieve the American dream, I'm never gonna be able to be able to home, I'm never gonna be able to get a good education or send my kids to good education. I'm not gonna be able to get good healthcare. Basically, I'm not gonna be able to live the life that my parents lived or my grandparents lived, and I'm not gonna be able to fundamentally form a family and provide for my kids.

1:41:46And I think that's the, I think that's, in my opinion, that's the underlying theme to kind of what has gone wrong, sort of socially, politically, psychologically, in the country, that's what's led to the sort of intense level of pessimism, That's what's led to sort of the subtraction, you know, kind of very zero some politics to, you know, recrimination over over over optimism and building and so I would I would I would confront that Absolutely directly and then of course I would announce that I don't think anybody in Washington is doing that right now So Either I would either I would win because I'm the only one singing out loud or I would lose because nobody cares But I think it would I've always wondered whether that actually would with both on the substance and on the message, whether that would be the right platform.

1:42:28Yeah, now it would certainly be the thing to do as a thing. It's very complex in that, you know, healthcare policy is largely national, but education policy and housing policy is also got a very large local component. So it would be a complex, a complex thing to say to the policy that you'd have to enforce. Yeah. We still have a ton of questions that we may do part to. And this is some point when we really appreciate your time and attention and we will see you soon. Okay, thank you.