#16 - Benedict Evans

27:39There's two things about that. The first is, you know, Andy Grove's thing about the paired metrics. So Andy Grove, whenever anybody's optimizing like sales, for example, they will usually start recruiting. They'll start by optimizing quantity. But there's, you know, you can sometimes optimize quantity and then quality drops off. Right. So quantity is easy to measure. It's like just the number of people we hired or whatever. But quality is how good were they. Right. And so that's the second paired metric is usually a quality metric. And so quantity is cheap, right? And people start with cheap. And then quality is best, and they go to best.

28:15So that's another lens on this. A third lens, what I thought, my explanation, maybe it's different than what actually happened, was when people are just trying out a space, they just want the cheap version to try it out. And once they've committed to a space, like, for example, the cheap digital camera, cheap drone or something like that, they want to try it out, right? And they want to try it out at low cost, try it before you buy. and then once they're committed to a space then they're like i want the best drone out there now because i want to the analysis then would be cheap drone versus best drone right um but i think the that's what i thought you were saying so but you're saying cheap versus best overall yes overall but i'd love to see it category by category i wouldn't be surprised to see that happen category by category but maybe not well there's a different point there which is sort of what i was talking about on in our panel this morning which is this infinite product so how do you know what to buy and it used to be that you'd start with a magazine and then you'd go to the internet to find the cheap place to buy it or you know what you wanted and now you go to the internet to figure out what's the right place to do this so the internet has become much more kind of a default but the thought that prompted me to that was you can also go and play with Google Trends and I played with like how, why, where, what like more kind of basic questions and you really need to be inside Google to do that analysis properly But it's that sense of how much are people doing conversational queries into Google as opposed to typing keywords into Google.

29:42And things that are not really a Google query, like what is A is not, probably doesn't help Google, but that's still how people use it. People were trained for years to remove all prepositions, to remove all that stuff and just do keywordese. and now we're trained the opposite to write full and complete English sentences like prompting is the new searching but it's a completely different you know behavior right um go ahead well so this is one of the um there's a sort of tangential point of that like one of the like the early easy obvious things that people have deployed with AI with LLMs on the internet is different kinds of is sort of natural language queries or different not so much natural language but like different kinds of query so that the canonical one people talk about is Walmart saying now you can search for what should I buy to take on a picnic, which isn't a database query.

30:32And for Google, for Walmart or for Amazon five years ago, that search just wouldn't work. Because unless there's a product that's like tagged with picnic, it's not going to come up. Whereas now there's an LLM with a world model that has some sense of how you might answer that question. Yes. Is it a world model? It is. It's at least a web model. It's a different kind of query. Yes. You're not doing a SQL query. You're doing something else. That's right. And I think, you know, one of the things that's interesting is The computers are we knew they were very good at that first kind of deterministic computation The sequel query the calculation that's what they're built for doing math, right?

31:10Yeah And now they've gotten good at probabilistic kinds of things, right? So this would be like System one and system two thinking right probabilistic is like the quick impression and then you know This is like the logical calculation. So it's actually good at the heart. The thing that's harder for humans is is the long and involved mathematical calculation can do that errorlessly. And now it can also do the other kind of thing. And so it does suggest that there would be some synthesis of that eventually where an AI can, I mean, this is like AI tool use or what have you, like it detects that it needs to go to system one and it starts invoking Python for that.

31:46And this is getting better, but it's surprisingly not amazing two and a half years in, when it needs to go deterministic? Well, so the last long thing I wrote about this was about looking at deep research, which OpenAI launched. And one of the kind of traps in looking at the new thing is to test it based on what was important to the old thing. So to look at the Apple II and say, does this match the uptime of a mainframe? No, so it's useless. Well, no, but that's not the right question. Yes. can you build an Excel model on an iPhone? No, but that's not the point. It can still replace PCs. And the reason I mention this is, so deep research, open air launches thing, and it's whatever it was,$100 a month or whatever.

32:32But you look at the marketing page, and the marketing page shows it doing a research project about mobile, which, as we said, I know a lot about. And it got the answers wrong. That's verifying. See, you could tell that it was wrong. But it looked plausible. Exactly. So this is the thing, and it got stuff wrong in several levels. People are remembering now what I wrote like two months ago. And so there was a specific, it was make a table which shows mobile smartphone adoption in a bunch of countries and then the operating system market share. And then this is like an intern teaching moment. Because first of all, what does adoption mean?

33:09Does that mean unit sales share, installed base, app store sales? Like what metric specifically are you asking me for? Then it had given a source for the number it had come up with, which was Statista. And Statista is an aggregator that steals other people's data and repolishes it. And when you jump through a bunch of registration hoops, you discover that the actual source was, I think, Cantar. It's an ad agent. It's part of GroupM. I thought it was part of one of their... It's consumer survey data. So it's a proper company. Yeah. So it was actual proper consumer survey data. But the two things, so then when you go to the Canton chart page, you discover that deep research had got the numbers the opposite.

33:54So it had flipped the percentages. I see. And then it had also said... Right, because it was an app actually said page or it was behind login or something. It had copied them from the website wrong. I see. And then the other source it gave was StatCounter. And StatCounter was... Was just using the same wrong data. Which is a traffic measure. Right. So that's not going to tell you an option because high-end phones get used more and iPhones get used more. And there's a bunch of things in here where you're like, this is what I'd expect from an intern. I would go back and say, no, this is what I mean by adoption and this is a good data source and that isn't.

34:28And it's like a great first version. The problem is, A, I had to copy the number out wrong, which is not what I would expect from an intern, or at least not a good intern. But secondly, I'd have to be a mobile analyst to know any of these things. And that's a verifying thing that I was getting at. This is kind of the core of it is all these people were looking at deep research and saying this is fantastic for researching things you don't know anything about. And I was like, no. No, it's not. It's fantastic if you need a bunch of material about something you know a lot about. Exactly. So that's why I think AI in its current incarnation is better thought of as amplified intelligence because the more you know about a field, the better you are at prompting because you've got better vocabulary, and the better you are at verifying because you know more facts about it and you have more cross-cutting checks and that is less true for the visual area but just identifying that is a very important delimitation where you have a completely different system you can use for the visual stuff which is just your eyes right um you don't have to use the you know we have just different hardware for quickly seeing you know this way the hands or something like that whereas if that was it's a monkey brain it's a monkey brain exactly right so that's now an interesting question this is you know carpathia are discussing this is is there some way to turn some or or a subset of the non-visual things into visual cues where you could see it was wrong immediately so give me i'll give you a small and simple example let's say it generated an audio file right you know you know like a spectrogram of an audio file right you could maybe immediately see if there's some artifact there right that's a trivial example so i think this i'm it's a fascinating concept i'm i'm i would wonder whether that's the right split.

36:07Okay, it's at least one split I found useful for now. What are you thinking? Well, so the split I was thinking was that the natural language generation to make text is perfect. So the text is always grammatically correct. That is true, yes. But the model underneath, like the facts presented by the nut in the text, might be wrong. Yes. And that's sort of deceptive to us because we see the text is correct and it looks confident. Yeah, that's right. Whereas in an image, like you ask it for a picture of somebody and everything's perfect except the person's got six hands. I'm not sure conceptually what is it that that's flattened, is that you're seeing two things in one layer, or is it that, do you see what I mean?

36:53I see what you mean. Or is it that it's a different level? Well, maybe there's a different point here, which is if you ask for an image of a car. Yeah. And the car, I actually did this, ask for a fantasy 1960s French sports car. Right. It will look French. It will look like a sports car. It will have four wheels. It might have two steering wheels. Yes, that's right. The two steering wheels is the equivalent of a grammatical mistake or a spelling mistake in the text generator. Yes. However, it may also be that the balance of the car is all wrong and it would flip over if it tried to go around a corner.

37:29But you'd have to be an automotive expert to know that. So I'm saying there's different levels of error. That's right. What you're saying is the two steering wheels is like a spelling error, but spelling errors are very rare for AI, whereas the two steering wheels is a common error. And I think that has to do with just the way diffusion models work versus how transformers work. That would be one high-level answer I'd give, where it's doing like kind of, it's more local with the diffusion model and you can be locally correct with the steering wheel, but globally incorrect, whereas locally correct with spelling is usually correct.

38:09That's like maybe one. That's useful, yeah. That's one answer. The second is that there's only a small space, I think. Like, for example, we are optimized to recognize faces. So we can detect very subtle differences in faces. But if I gave you, like, five different sheets of, like, static noise, right, even if there are very clear patterns, like mathematically, like these are all, like, Fourier transforms of the same object and this is the one I add, they just look like total noise to you. A computer would be like, these 12 are the same and this one is the odd one out, right? So in a sense, our eyes are optimized for a very low-dimensional set of things, which are the things that occur in the real world.

38:49Like, those are the things we can pick out, right? Which is also that dogs are better at motion than us. Yeah, exactly. So even eyes are different depending on the species. That's right. So because of that, we actually have a, like because they can't detect patterns in static, that's like too high dimensional in space. I think text is kind of like that because it can describe, one of the most, I mean, surprising things to me about how AI has evolved. We were talking about this question before is, I was surprised you could get so much mileage out of pure text. The reason is so much what? So much mileage out of pure text.

39:25Right. And the reason I was surprised by that is, you know, you think. You mean like reasoning and stuff that looks like reasoning. Reasoning and also spatial manipulation, like picking, like having cameras, having eyes, seeing the world, reasoning about it like a baby and so on and so forth. it is amazing how much of that world humans have assigned machine readable labels to with text and the way that you know it's just it's just very surprising how well that worked like language what i'm trying to say is in a few in like 40 words you can describe it's like code you can describe many many many different kinds of things in like 40 words right and and it's just more general um it's one of those things where if you're sometimes when you're really close to a space you're actually more surprised by a breakthrough than if you're farther away and i i should say like you know even looking seeing all the style transfer stuff in the mid-2010s and seeing image net and seeing the benchmarks and so and so forth i was surprised that it got you know a markov chain is it well um if you saw the stuff before gpt3 right uh it was like semi-coherent but it didn't look like it was converging on something you know it just looked like you know it repeated itself many times and what have you and the fact that it broke through to what it did just based on language was so counterintuitive and it's i think it's because it's such a high dimensional thing it captures so many different aspects of the world like anything you can perceive in the world there's a word for it there's many words for it and then we also have billions of people who've been typing those words for two decades right so in a sense like the entire internet the video games and social media were like this bootstrapper for for ai anyway so on the on the other hand ai is very bad at spatial stuff you know this thing called arc francois chalet has this uh benchmark oh yeah that i know yeah and so he is uh he has benchmark that actually got beaten by the recent um you know you know chat gpt uh release and he's got like a new one uh and it's it's almost like a tetris-y kind of thing that's got some degree of logic and spatial type stuff that ai finds it hard but humans still find it easy it's kind of like maybe the next generation captcha um and it's it's visual more than it is verbal right so for every reason is it something that would be hard to explain in words yes i think kind of it it's it's about like this is here and and it's almost like mind sweeper you know mind sweeper where you click and it expands and so and so forth um i i think ai because it started with words it doesn't do well with the spatial side of things now on their hand what the chinese are working on in particular and is physical robotics obviously Elon's working on it and so on and so forth.

42:28But China's way ahead on the physical supply chain. So like physical AI is robots. And those definitely have cameras and XYZ and spatial and rotation and so on and so forth. So there's some eventual fusion. You know, like the self-driving cars have gathered hundreds of millions, billions of miles at this point. So there's some fusion of the web, which is words, and the world, which is, you know, spatial, that will get you like a completely, you know, maybe a fusion set where it can reason about the world as it is. It knows how tall Everest is because some robot has hiked it. You know, like Google Street View?

43:03You might eventually imagine a bunch of humanoids walking the world. Just like that, you know? I wrote a thing years ago about Street View and Yahoo. And the sort of thing I was kind of poking away at is that basically every big internet system is a mechanical Turk. And the question is, where do you put the people? We're just humans, yes. And with Google Search, the people are, A, everybody making a link on a web page, and B, everybody using Google. That's true. Whereas with Yahoo, they tried to have a bunch of people in an office making a hierarchical list of all the websites on the internet, which became impossible.

43:41And with Street View, you just pay a bunch of people to drive down every street in the world, which is actually not impossible. It's just expensive. It's just expensive. It's an interesting computation. It's not obvious that it would be feasible to do it. It's funny. The Yahoo thing, Yahoo, I think, got started in the early, mid-'90s, right? I think 94-ish, 93, something like that. And the thing about it is Yahoo had to kind of get to its limit before it was obvious that you needed something like Google. Because webpages had to be suffused with, at the time they put on-page spam and so on and so forth, you had to kind of top out you had to get enough web pages that the hierarchical model model broke down um you had to get enough economic value that people really incentivized to game the system and so on and so forth before you know maybe yahoo could have self-disrupted but before something like google was there yahoo almost built out enough of the web economy to make something like google necessary you know um anyway so one thing i wanted to talk about uh i'm We're gonna go through various other areas.

44:48But what is AI disrupted? What is AI going to disrupt? So what is it already disrupted? So search, it's taken points off of Google Share. Like Stack Overflow, their queries are down. Image search, because now image search is image generation. Obviously video, obviously many different kinds of specialty apps will, things that are, for example, like various sales tools that make templated emails and things like that, those all change. I'm not sure Salesforce, I mean, Salesforce is, certainly they're using AI, but the entire Salesforce model of spamming people with email, I'm not sure that's gonna last in the age of AI because you can spam so many of them now, right?

45:39Right. So those are some of the, you know, obviously robotics, obviously protein folding and whatnot. What is it going to disrupt that people haven't thought about yet? And I can give some ideas as well. Well, I mean, one answer is we don't know. It's like trying to say that, ask that question about the Internet in 1994. Sure. And the joke is always that newspapers thought the Internet would be great because they'd save on printing. At first, at first it was good for them. Yes, they did. I did a slide in the last presentation I did because it struck me that people would always say, well, Uber didn't sell software to taxi companies and Airbnb didn't sell software to hotels.

46:14They redefined what those things were. So I went and did a chart of what happened to taxis versus what happened to hotels. Actually, rather unsurprisingly. What happened? Taxi medallions crushed. Uber demolishes taxis mostly. Airbnb is mostly additive to hotels. Why is that? I think because Airbnb is a different kind of experience. in a hotel it's not a substitutional experience yeah it's complimentary half of business travel half of hotels are business there's another whole bunch of conferences there's a bunch that's about like i mean just you know okay so two examples like my fiancee works for a kid goes to fly to milwaukee she arrives in town at 10 o 'clock at night she needs a gym she's got a client meeting the next morning and then she's got a flying back to new york she doesn't want to go and stay in some random stranger's hotel which right which she's got no idea what it's going to be like she wants you know a very specific brand promise from you mean ran strange airbnb she won't stay in a hotel yeah she will stay in a hotel she's not gonna stay in an airbnb right um the other side of this is i think there's a more general point and same thing i arrived in singapore at two o 'clock this morning i'm not going to go and work out whether this airbnb is any good i'm gonna stay in a hotel sure i think there's a there's a more general point which is that like everything is probably disruptive to someone at some point in the value chain but it kind of depends on the industry quite how much and in what sense so like the iphone demolished the existing cellular industry really having effect on telcos telcos kind of hoped that they were going to do all these services but that was never going to happen but telco mobile operators today are basically the same companies that they were 20 years ago with more basically the same share price because their business was not in anything that the iphone changed except that they're providing massively more data than they were in the past but the business is basically owning sites and owning spectrum and connecting them up and selling that to consumers the same thing with like online travel booking completely demolished the travel agent industry didn't really change the airline business and airlines had to do a bunch of stuff around loyalty and pricing and maybe pricing became much more transparent and so on but the end of the day their business is owning or leasing airplanes and there's a front And buying fuel and owning landing slots.

48:27Right. And maintaining the aircraft. And so now, of course, the counter-argument would be you could have looked at taxis and say, well, clearly that's not going to get changed by the Internet. Except maybe you'll be able to book a taxi more efficiently until it becomes long and changes it. But the point is, there's this sort of very naive view that says, oh, well, the software will just destroy everything. Right, right. And the answer is, well, it kind of depends. It's Pat's opponent. And one of the ways that I sort of think about this is that the tech industry kind of comes and changes everything in an industry and resets how it works and then leaves and goes off and works.

49:06You know the joke about how consultants are seagulls? Yeah, they come and pop and they fly in crap everywhere, make lots of noise and fly out. Right. And so if you think about what happened to books or music, no one in the tech industry cares about music anymore. Right. Well, yeah, Spotify does. Yeah, Spotify. It's not the main event. Yeah, recorded music is like$20 billion a year. It's like a rounding error in the scale of the tech industry. It has no, streaming means it has no strategic leverage for Apple or Google. Suno is interesting, though. So the AI created music. But for the last 20 years, 20 years ago, the internet completely screwed the music industry.

49:37And since then, it left and doesn't care. Same thing in books. Like all the conversations around books right now, some of which are about Amazon, are book industry conversations. I think there's something similar happening now with video generation and Hollywood. Like everybody in Hollywood got over the panic. And now everyone is sitting and looking at this and thinking, okay, well, this saves a bunch of second unit stuff. But all the questions for what does this mean are questions for people in LA. So one way of thinking about it is conversation is proportional to derivative rather than absolute value.

50:10So let's say you have a sigmoid that's going like this and then it flattens out, right? Yeah. So when it's like a nullity or ubiquity, you know, when it doesn't exist or when it's everywhere, when 0 % or 100%, it's just not notable. It's not worth talking about, right? People use Uber or Dropbox a lot more today than when they were talking about Dropbox and Uber a lot, right? So the conversation is maximum at the time of maximum growth. And then it's just much less because now it's like not notable. it's just a feature of the environment right so you can do um google engrams yeah that show exactly this i think that'd be a great that'd be a great graph so you can do them for like steel or and some of these oh yeah railroads yeah because it starts in 1800 um and of course some of them you look at it you go oh i'm actually seeing a chart of world war ii in some ways where you see steel suddenly does that or shipping suddenly does that and that's not obvious right Because conversations or attention is focused on change rather than absolute value.

51:16Well, I always used to be fascinated by elevators. I get these kind of autism spectrum fascinations about things. And there's a chart I did of the number of people employed in the U.S. as elevator attendants, which is a perfect bell curve. Oh, interesting. It's all curves up and down. And this is because first half of the 20th century. You didn't have any elevators. You deploy a lot of elevators. Right. Second half of the 20th century, they become automatic. You have a button. And you can go and find all this advertising. Why were they at the beginning? Was it just like switchboard operators? That was how it worked.

51:47Was it technical enough? There was no button. Well, if you think about what it actually takes to have an automatic elevator system in a building, you've got to have all the dispatching. Uh-huh. Oh, you've got to have the dispatching and the queuing. I see. There's an interim stage where you have an elevator attendant who would just stand in the elevator and you would say, I want floor five, please. And they'd press the button for five. Right. But if you get in, you know, an originally elevator. What was it originally before the buttons? There was a lever that's an accelerator and a brake. Oh, so it was like a car almost.

52:18Exactly. It's a streetcar. There's a vertical streetcar. I didn't know that. So there's a fantastic book I have called The Cultural History of Elevators, which is all about how weird this was. So it was a vertical train. Yes. It's a vertical train. Wow. That's how people thought about it. Yeah. And so an elevator attendant, you can kill people. and there's this wonderful story I tell everybody, which is that you press the buzzer to summon the elevator, but it's literally you're just ringing a bell and a light goes on in the elevator car. And there's this story from the war department. It's like hailing a taxi.

52:56Yeah. There's a story from a war department or ringing for a servant. There's a story from the war department in D.C., which is that you would buzz more based on how senior you were. So imagine you're like a lieutenant and you get into the elevator on the second floor and you want to go to the 10th floor. But on the way, the buzz rang, it rings four times. That's a general. So he has to stop at the 6th floor and go down to the 1st floor and then a major gets in. So theoretically, this call of 10, it could spend the entire day in the elevator going up and down. So interesting. And we don't see any of this now, which is your point about conversation.

53:30You don't get into an elevator now and say, it's an electronic elevator. It's automatic. It's just an elevator. It simply said something like, there's a phrase which is, civilization advances as you can do more things without thinking about them. Like they quote just work, right? The classic one is light people always talk about. Yeah, electricity. Light gets cheap. Yes, that's right. I think, you know, the age of internet. Now, sometimes what happens is these things get really ubiquitous and they're out of the conversation. And then there's this now that you can treat them as like at 100 % adoption, then the new thing arises.

54:10For example, all of the craziness of the last 10 years is in part a function of the fact that social media got such ubiquity in the early 2010s such that it was no longer the novelty was, oh, I'm on social media. I'm using it. How do I use this Twitter app or whatever? Everybody knows what Twitter is. Everybody knows how to use it. They know what a like is, whatever, whatever. and then you start getting news articles. Then you get the second order effects. The second order effects. That's right. So it's almost like it's like installing a device driver and then you can install the next one and the next one.

54:41But it's like the device driver is the percentage of the population that has adopted something. And once it gets to 100 % or 90-something, then you can – I'll give you an example. During the pandemic, there's just the assumption that everybody had a mobile phone, right? And they could QR code scan this, that, and the other. In Asia, that was a really big thing, right? that's how you'd show your health checker. Yeah, that made QR codes work in the West as well. Yeah, that's right. But basically, obviously 10 years ago, you know, 10 years beforehand, they wouldn't be able to do that. They would have to have some other paper system or something like that.

55:12In 2010, you couldn't assume everybody on the planet had a smartphone. It was getting big, but it wasn't yet there. It's certainly 15 years ago. Yeah. Nobody would have it, right? So that was something where the ubiquity of something, maybe sometimes the next step comes from that ubiquity. Or you could have two or three things at the same time. Yeah, I mean, you could think about TV and radio, all forms of mass media in the past. And, you know, the growth of pop music requires recorded music and requires radio. And, you know, the growth of mass democracy kind of goes hand in hand with literacy in cheap newspapers.

55:50Right. But you need newspapers before you can have... A vote. Other stuff has to happen. Right. For that to come. And then, of course, you have backlash. actually so it sort of think there's something interesting in looking at stuff like the arts and crafts movement in the late 19th century because here's a bunch of people who say we hate all this mass manufactured stuff that's handcrafted things it's funny that that's not a statement that would make any sense in 1800 well well it's it's funny because um there's this what you're talking about like people were farmers that are artisans and are like oh my god this automation is disrupting us we hate it so much we want to go back to the old ways and and now what's funny is those manufacturing jobs that all these workers were so mad about in the late 1800s and early 1900s all the strikes all communism and so on those are now the things are looked back on romantically by a lot of mega types where they were like oh that was such a great job i wish i had that i hate this information job kind of thing i hate this you know these these uh these desk jobs and so on and so forth so it's interesting because there's a romanticization sometimes of the past thing even as millions of people are exiting that for the next thing now this is a little more complicated obviously by the fact that china has a lot of those quote manufacturing jobs but yet a lot of them are being automated in china as well with robots um so it's funny the thing that people were so mad about that they were getting seemingly pushed into which was manufacturing out of farming into manufacturing are things that at least some fraction of this generation wants to go back to or they think they do you know um i think it's interesting some of those things i mean the luddites are those one of these sort of misunderstood movements because a lot of what the luddites are about is self-employed high status artisans losing that status and being pushed into low status commodity jobs so this is going to be the big thing with i think um have you seen the elephant graph so the elephant graph and some people dispute the graph but I think it's probably gesturing at something that's right it shows percentiles or deciles of the world in terms of income and it shows over the last 20 something years I think from 91 to 2008 or something like that where the growth went like whose incomes rose and basically most of the world so the lower 10 percent in Africa didn't gained that much but like maybe from the 10 to 20 percent through the 70 to 80 percent had huge growth then it drops off in the 80 90 percent almost zero and then it picks up again at the very top right and so that means is the like global you know elite in every country did great and so did china india vietnam eastern europe all these countries are no longer socialist communist et cetera, right?

58:31But the Western middle class didn't. And that is a big part of, I think, the societal instability now. One way of looking at it is, you know, in America, they have, you know, obviously red versus blue. But one way of thinking about it is starting in, you know, certainly in 2008, there's a ramp where China flips U.S. manufacturing. And so China puts all this pressure on red America, and that leads to Trump and trade war. And you've seen that graph of print media disruption, right? That's the internet suddenly rising after 2008 to flip blue America, and it takes all the ad revenue away. And it's not just ad revenue, it's also Craigslist, it's classified ads, a bunch of other things.

59:11So the internet disrupts blue America, and that leads to wokeness in the 2010s, I think, and also tech lash, right, which is the anti-tech movement. So we look at it as red and blue, but there's also China and the internet over here where the internet is disrupting blue and China is disrupting red. So the thing I think that's coming next is AI disrupts blue America and robots disrupt red America. And so Chinese robots and internet AI. And so that artisan movement kind of thing is going to accelerate where people are going to be mad about that happening. I think on balance, there's going to be a lot more productivity in the rest of the world, but it's possible, for example, that a job that's at, let's say 200K or something like that in the US, and there's somebody in India or Mongolia or Vietnam or something who's at$2 ,000 a year, that that equilibrates at like 20K, right?

1:00:03For like somebody supervising medical results or something like that, right? Where the licensure is no longer as important. The Western licensure, the Western state can't really protect it as much because it's all on the internet. And that's a boon for everybody who's a customer of that. Like healthcare costs go down around the world. You've got a great doctor on tap at any time. Most people benefit from it but those people who lost you know relative status relative money and that get super angry and i think the burning of the waymos and like the extreme anti-ai sentiment that i see among some people um is is kind of a precursor to that let me know your thoughts so i think this is a general observation that like when europeans live in europe probably the similar something similar in asia when europeans live in europe we all feel different so like germans are very different to italians and different to british people different french people and so on and when europeans live in america they all feel european and america is buried is in a different place to the aggregate of of of europe and the u.s has its own sort of political culture and political questions ah yes that are different to the questions in france or germany or britain i do think some of what's happened and i don't wouldn't call myself political analyst but i think some of what's happened is that certainly in the u.s to some extent the uk there were coalitions particularly there was on the progressive side or the left side there was a coalition of urban upper middle class highly educated people with a certain set of social attitudes and working collar blue collar working class blue collar people has been totally busted in a different part of country right often with rather different social and political attitudes yes and The same thing I think in the US and the Republican Party on the right was a coalition of sort of Wall Street Journal and reading capitalists.

1:02:14Yeah, like Mitt Romney and... Military guys. That has split apart completely. And all of those, you know, center-right, economically conservative, socially liberal people who are Republicans kind of don't have a political party anymore. Right. And equally, people who were sort of... Bloomberg central... You know, Bloomberg centralists kind of don't have a political party anymore. And there's a lot of those coalitions have kind of broken apart. Now, what you have in a bunch of European countries is partly because of proportional representation is it's viable to have half a dozen different parties.

1:02:54And the US and the UK, because of the first past the post system, you don't have multiple. It's never been viable to have five different political parties at different points on the spectrum in the same way. The U.S. has got, the U.K. has got this kind of weird hangover, the Liberal Party, which no one's ever been quite clear what it was for, sort of in the middle, quote, unquote, called the Liberal Party. There's an interesting sort of sideline there, which is the Liberal Party in the U.K. in the 19th century was one of the two parties of government, and it was socially liberal and economically conservative.

1:03:24But in the 19th century, what we now call economically conservative in the 19th century meant pro-free trade and against regulation. Right. Whereas now economically conservative is the other way around. So all of those labels kind of shift and move and change in different things at a time. It's interesting. I would say MAG is certainly against retrading, but they're also against regulation. So it's like half, right? But finish what you're saying. I agree with you. Of course, the labels do change. The labels change. The coalitions break apart. I think there's always this tension in looking at progressive ideas and saying, because if you look at the last hundred years the social progress the progressive ideas have always won um like nobody today says like being gay should be illegal like so you know a little bit like what we were saying about ai a while ago today you you could deterministically say that what is woke today in 30 years time will be what every far-right conservative agrees with Yeah, people have said that kind of thing.

1:04:30Theoretically, in 50 years, you know, maybe, maybe not. But you also have these kind of overreaches around this. It does strike me that one of the differences between the US and UK politics is that what happened in my lifetime is that the right, for want of a better term, won the economic argument that state ownership and government control of the economy is bad. Right. and the left won the social arguments that like gay marriage is okay well it's and and so on and in what happened in the uk was the the right embraced that and the conservative party is the party that brought in gay marriage in the uk whereas in the left in the us it's kind of the other way around the republicans kind of never brought in kind of yeah and he brought in the level economics whereas what happened in the u.s is that the republican party in the u.s never kind of accepted that it had lost the social arguments well it's interesting i think um from 1950 like the moment of 1950 you do have something where um because communism fell basically because nazis was defeated the world moved socially to the left and then when communist as communism was defeated It moved economically to the right.

1:05:44And so thus, for example, like the immigrant billionaire or gay billionaire is like in a sense— Can be white wing. Well, they're far to the left of 1950 socially. And they're far to the right in an economic right in a sense of 1950 economically. Because 1950, yes, the Soviet Union had 100 percent taxes because it was communism. But the U.S. had 90 percent marginal tax rates. And you really couldn't get rich mid-century in the U.S. You could be a corporation man. You could work for NASA or GM, General Motors, General Mills, General Electric. But you're sort of funneled, channeled into like these gigantic things.

1:06:20You had more freedom in the U.S. than other places, but you're still very stealthified. It was too capital intensive to be an entrepreneur and so on. And then gradually with, you know, I think the transition was the mirror moment where that's begun a decentralization arc. And history is running in reverse since that moment. But and so I think a lot of things are happening this century that are like a reversal of things in the past. I think it would be interesting, and I have no opinion about this at all, but it would be interesting to ask what is behind the growth in billionaires? Is this an unlocking of a new kind?

1:06:52Is this a wave of company creation? Do you see what I mean? Yeah, I do have a thesis on this. Which is to your point, is why are there new billionaires? Is that because there are a bunch of new companies and there are first generation owners? And where did those come from? And certainly some of them came from Google and, you know, when it's global, when it takes all effects, and some of them didn't. I don't know. I mean, I'm not sure how much value I can kind of add to that conversation. There's a bunch of statistical questions where I've just not spent the time looking. I can give some thoughts on that, which is that has a U-curve, right?

1:07:31Where, for example, like who is the richest guy in the Soviet Union? Like, didn't exist. communism, you know, basically Stalin, you know, didn't need money because he could just requisition anything. Well, the Soviet Union is kind of a bad example of creating billionaires. No, no, no, cut the country up and gave it to 20 people. Well, no, well, it's right. But that's starting in the 90s, right? Then it wasn't. So that was Russia then. Right. But basically, the number of like independently wealthy men who could do things in the US, for example, a lot of the great fortunes, the robber barons and captains of industry were forced into foundations.

1:08:00That's why you have the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, because in the 1930s, Roosevelt didn't want any other powers besides him. So he, you know, went after Andrew Mellon, all these people. Ida Charbill went after Rockefeller. And those fortunes were corralled and basically controlled by the state in these foundations. In the Soviet Union, in communist China, they were just seized, right? So basically, let me give the normal way of talking about this is inequality is rising and that's terrible, right? Another way of thinking about it is what is the state right the state is in a sense it's like all the people who are its citizens and they kind of crowdfund the state right and the question is are they do they have a choice in doing that can they opt out of that um like what set are they part of you know for example if they're on the franco-german border can they call themselves part of the german side of the french side you know how about the polish uh the polish german border with that kind of thing.

1:08:55And how much does the state take and how powerful is it? And mid-century, because of mass media and mass production, the states were more centralized they've ever been in history. I can show a bunch of graphs on that. That's a quantitative thing. So you had these geiga states, you had fewer sovereign units on the planet than at any time before or since, like only like 50 UN countries. Today there's like 196. So things have decentralized since then. If you go backwards in time, you go to like Germany under Bismarck, you've got all these principalities, you go to France before the revolution, you have all these things, Italy before Garibaldi, you have all of these little, you know, city states and so on, right?

1:09:29So you go backwards time and forwards time, it's decentralized. And the same thing happens where you've got lots of fortunes, you've got lots of, you know, individual potentates and what have you, right? So in a sense, like the world is sort of returning to what it used to be, with the big exception being China. I think China is the, like, the 20th century centralized state that will keep scaling into the century. So anyway, the reason I just say that is I think there is something real going on, which is that the state is just capturing less of the wealth of its individuals. People are sort of breaking away on the borders of it and then being able to do their own thing.

1:10:05And so it's like Elon, not NASA. It's like Travis, not taxi medallions and so on. And there's a good to that where there's a lot more room for individual initiative. But there's a bad to that as well, which is then people don't feel as bought in on the collective project and they're not included in it. It's some guy's thing. It's not their thing. It's not like America lands on the moon or it's Elon. OK, fine. You know, and they don't feel as bought in. Right. So it's a complicated kind of thing. I think we're going to have to renegotiate all that stuff in the future. I think there's a lot of this outside, again, outside of sort of US politics, which is that.

1:10:37Partly because the US, you know, the liberal part of the nature of the US economy, partly because the US is a big domestic market, partly because the successful Internet companies are in the US and have global winner takes all effects. people outside the US for the first time think well we've got all these giant US companies that are running stuff in our country and that was kind of true for like General Motors or Coca-Cola but not really you know General Motors sold cars but you had a lot of your own car companies as well and IBM didn't decide how you built roads or anything and there's certainly a sort of a you know you go to European events now and there's people saying well do we need our own Google and at one level those are like dumb questions But they're dumb questions about like a real issue, which is you have this other layer of stuff that you're using, which didn't used to be globalized and used to be subject to local democratic control.

1:11:31And now, well, it's not quite clear how that works. Yeah. So actually, it's very important. I mean, where you're hitting on there is I think one of the core questions and I'll actually ask it in reverse, which is, are those American companies? Basically, is the Internet American? Right now, on one level, you'd say that's a weird question. Well, there's two parts to that. Are they American? But also they're not in our country. If you're Swedish or Italian, it's not a Swedish company. That's right. That's right. So, like, you know, my view is the Internet is to America, but America was to Britain.

1:12:04It is like the version 3.0. Because the early Americans actually considered themselves, as you know, British, right? All the folkways and stuff came from Britain. And the American War of Independence is essentially a civil war. Yeah, exactly. That's right. So they had a people and they had a land, but they didn't have a government, right? Because the government was in London, right? And when they had all three, they became Americans. They had a sense of self. And I think with the internet, we have actually a lot of tribes that actually have a people and a government, but not land. And the reason they have a government is they have a blockchain, they have a social network, they have with moderators or forums.

1:12:44And now increasingly, they have like an AI agent or like a central Oracle or something like that, where it almost takes a role of like a god, which they all ask questions to, right? So you think of every large enough online community that has its own social network, whether it's a Discord or a forum or something like that, its own cryptocurrency, which has its smart contracts and currency, and its own AI, which is sort of like its oracle or search of all the community's knowledge. right and that's like a digital community that actually has a fair amount of strength and then because you know where are your communications happening they're happening online whereas your where your transactions are online more and more of your wealth is stored online like crypto is at trillions of dollars now it wasn't wasn't that 15 years ago it was at zero basically and um so the significance of these cloud communities i think is underappreciated and eventually they're going to be able to have enough money to crowdfund territory and so the because the tension between your primary identity is online, your social network is online, your currency is online, your information is online, and then not being grouped offline.

1:13:45That will resolve, in my view, in terms of the descent of the cloud to the land. So it's interesting. I mean, I probably take a sort of more prosaic view of this, but listening to you talk, I am reminded of distant memories of being at university and looking at social history. There are a lot of social history is about the kind of joining into groups yes and so the the joining i think about you joining and yes what is the sort of form of sort of self-expression yes why do people want to fund monasteries why do people form lay brotherhoods around the church why do people like there's a whole 19th century british thing of like all sorts of social joining why do people want to join um militias and you know why do they want to form all these kind of former guild why do they want to form um all of these kind of different social groups and social clubs and ways of getting together um and what are they trying to achieve and some of it is about you know self-defense you know or putting not not in a kind of military sense but about you know forming your group to protect your group's interest some of it is about establishing status some of it is about you know self-expression and self-actualization you know kind of classic Maslow hierarchy stuff.

1:14:58But it's not new to have lots of communities. What is new is that they're not necessarily kind of physically co-located. Yes, exactly. And they're not necessarily centered around, I mean, things like women's suffrage, they're not necessarily centered around a movement or some specific political objective. I think they will be. I think they will be. Well, there may be, but we've had those in the past, you know, the Cornwall League or women's suffrage, all of those kinds of anti-slavery movements and so on. So those senses of social organization and joining and grouping in clubs in different forms, in different aspects of society for different reasons is kind of a recurrent pattern of human society.

1:15:37Yes. And now it gets expressed, which is the sort of thing we always talk about, is the Internet is human behavior. Yes. And it expresses and channels it in new ways. and that's everything from people being horrible on Twitter or doing terrible things on the internet through to people forming groups, clubs and societies on Discord or Reddit or whatever it is. That's right. By the way, I have an explanation, which you might find funny, as to I used to wonder why are people so crazy on Twitter? Why are they so crazy on social media? Because like starting fights and stuff, just as a sidebar, I was able to explain it in the following way.

1:16:11You know the Unabomber in the early 90s? Yeah. so he blew up all these people yeah but you know the reason he did that was to get an op-ed in the washington post right so he killed all those people for the distribution he killed all those people just to get his message out there so you realize there's people like that then it actually makes it more understandable how many crazy people there are on social media if if someone is willing to kill all these people to get you know just his message out there a lot of other people would be willing to be very nasty on social media to get their message out yeah i always thought a lot of it was about context collapse which is sort of actually a fuzzy word that doesn't mean yes yes i felt like some of it was you don't know who that person is and you haven't understood what they've said and what else they think and you presume they think x it's like it's lossy compression you kind of compress three paragraphs there's no subclause there's no nuance you can't say of course i'm not a nazi and right now some of it is also which and in fact they can't take that for granted because you're not in their tribe yeah well oh yeah or or basically they're like uh you know they have no context on you they can't read 5 000 posts they don't know where to trust you and so yeah some of it is also just what's his morgan house all i think yeah morgan house yeah he wrote a book that quoted me and that gets endlessly re-quoted where i'd said something like like the internet means that basically you're confronted with people who disagree with you yes and you're all the time and you didn't realize there were all these people who like the particular thing i always found was weird was there were people who were like very very far left There are people who are communists and they're like, you'll say something that isn't communist and they'll be like amazed.

1:17:41They were like, oh, the thing was always, I always thought it was weird. It's like, I can, I think it's weird that you're a communist because at this stage you have to be an idiot to be a communist. Yeah, yeah, right. But it's even more weird that you don't know that most people aren't. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're like shocked by it. They're like amazed that anyone doesn't agree with their tiny minority opinion. Yes, that's right. And a lot of Twitter was that. It was like, you're amazed that I don't think everybody should own a car. You're amazed that I don't agree with, I don't necessarily share your opinion on every possible matter.

1:18:11Yes, that's right. And I think the way that it's going to reconcile is you're going to get a lot more, I think, smaller. I mean, in a sense, Twitter doesn't exist anymore, right? X. Twitter fragmented. Exactly. It's a Tower of Babel moment, right? So Twitter no longer exists. There's X and there's Truth and there's Gab and Blue Sky on the left and Mastodon and Threads. and then the crypto ones like Farcaster, Lens Noster. A lot of stuff went to things that didn't look like that. So stuff went to LinkedIn. TikTok. Or it went to TikTok or it went to Instagram. And people make fun of LinkedIn like there isn't a bunch of bullshit on Twitter.

1:18:47But I realized that an awful lot of corporate people were sitting quietly using LinkedIn when they just didn't feel that they could use Twitter. Yeah, because basically the funny thing is, it's interesting. Something about LinkedIn means people are artificially polite. and something about x or twitter especially twitter i think even more than x in some ways meant that they were artificially negative hostile right and the funny thing about it is artificially hostile reads to people as more sincere like that's to say of the two there's something about the artificially polite like like for example a good review is not a rave review a good review is i love you know ben's book it was great but he could improve x y and z that's like the best review you'll get yeah you know i mean usually whereas a hater will be like just just complete crap on you right so the the negative is generally much more negative than the positive is positive and so when you see a linkedin style post it's often like super positive and it feels fake immediately but people don't apply the same filter they think negative is real but they don't negative could also be fake i always like a mental you know there was a thing that went viral a while ago of some surgeon who'd got a they'd got a review and it was like he saved my life he's the most wonderful surgeon in history it's amazing it's wonderful four out of five stars yeah yeah yeah exactly exactly wow what did i have to do to get five stars yeah exactly that's right like you know i forgot to give the mint chocolate under the pillow or something yeah yeah um okay so So let's change gears.

1:20:20Let's talk about just survey of tech, just things. You can tell me you've been thinking about this. You haven't been thinking about this. So we talked about gadgets. So we talked about the glasses. We talked about. Did we talk about glasses on the podcast or in the car? We talked about glasses a little bit on the pod, but basically, well, tell me your thoughts on glasses. Oh, so. AR, VR glasses. Yeah, XR glasses, yeah. So I've made this point a bunch online. As far as I can see, you have the VR experience. You think it's amazing. It's not clear to me that this... My base case of VR is that it may end up like games consoles in that you see a games console, it's amazing.

1:21:02Most people don't buy it. There's a portion of people that don't understand that games is actually quite a small industry in terms of number of people. It's a lot of money, but there's like 200 or 300 million people play games console games. And so it may be that VR, you have the experience, it's amazing, you put it down, you walk away, most people don't buy it. no matter how good the hardware gets. I think it's much easier to see something like what I'm wearing now being a universal device at the level of a smartphone. Clearly, we don't have the optics for that yet. It's improving every year, though.

1:21:33It is. Yeah, it is. The question is, is that next five years' time? Is that two years' time? Is that ten years? It's not clear yet. Yeah, there's a few people I know who just like they almost subscribe to this space in the sense of they're constantly just getting the latest glasses, usually out of China. And they're just trying them out, right? Or getting prototypes. There's various prototypes people are making. And this is something that I feel there's some value in tracking because it's almost being ignored by the world right now. It is because it's like it's one of the S-curves. It hit that Gartner hype cycle thing.

1:22:09It's the S-curve that's bumping along the bottom and hasn't quite happened. Yeah, or it's a trough after the hype of metaverse. And there's a subset of that, which is, okay, clearly you want a wide field of view. Do you need to have something that looks like it's 3D, like it's really there? So do I need to have glasses that could put something on the table in front of us that looked like it was there? And that's radically harder than having a really good heads-up display that could put like an iPad display hovering in front of me. I think it helps a lot with things like repair. like you know for example you open the hood of a car and well that but that's still a hud that's still like a hovering label over the thing versus does it need to work in broad daylight does it need to have black does it need to be able to occlude a bright white table like this right maybe maybe not i think there's a range of outcomes there where you maybe it ends up like a watch that it says to be clearly to begin with it'll be a smartphone accessory just to have the yeah yes yes but does it end up like a watch where there's hundreds of millions of people who have but the smartphone is the main device.

1:23:10Or does it end up, no, actually, a couple of billion people are wearing this. Let me ask you another question. Does a watch top out? Because the thing is, wearables are another thing that has huge traction. And it's kind of like there's a lot, a lot, a lot. We could fill this table, this whole room now, with IoT health stuff, right? Because there's watches, there's rings like the Oura Ring, there's um you know wristbands like it depends it depends on the question is yeah and nickley white like mark zuckerberg bought oculus board sorry mark zuckerberg bought oculus because he thinks this is the next smartphone he didn't buy it to be a games device or yes 100 million people using it he bought it because he thinks this is the next smartphone yeah because also he had been hit by the platform so hard yeah he wants to own the platform for sure it makes sense so there's My base case is that VR might crap out at 50 or 100 million people, and I struggle to see it being 5 billion.

1:24:11I can see glasses being a couple of hundred quite easily once it works. The optics are there. I can imagine it being 5 billion. I think that's harder, but you can't know. Yeah, AR slash XR is probably bigger than VR. But as we were talking about, VR is very, you know, the new thing they're doing for controlling military drones. like uh there's loads of vertical stuff where absolutely that's gonna nail it definitely no question that's right so all the telepresence yeah and you know the guy up the telephone pole the guy in the oil glasses yes absolutely that will be that is a thing already that's right and i think have you seen this movie uh it's called surrogates it's actually you know pretty good sci-fi movie from like almost 10 15 years ago and essentially like people are like uh they stay at home and they pilot a good-looking version of themselves as a surrogate walking around outside so you can take more risks and so on because if that thing gets in a car crash or whatever, nobody cares.

1:25:04And then they can just do another star or get in a runner on set, right? So I do think, what are the use cases for like a proper, the VR control of a remote thing. So it starts with, I think, drones. And have you ever done a VR headset with a drone? It's an experience. You should definitely try it. It's a wow moment because it really does feel like you're flying, right? Which is very cool and an interesting experience. So I think it starts with drones, but I think it eventually gets to something where you've got gloves and maybe an omnidirectional treadmill or something like that. There's various kinds of things like that.

1:25:39And you are able to control a humanoid anywhere, right? So you control a humanoid and you can, I don't know, clamber up a telephone pole and fix something. And you're training the AI as you're doing this, right? You could have a maintenance worker with skill in the art. And we're not there yet. It'll be years before we're there. But eventually you have all these humanoids around where you can just go into this, like animate the suit and start doing things, you know. So that's a pretty important use case for VR, like physical telepresence. You have to nail a bunch of technology for that. But I could go through the gloves.

1:26:13I could go through the haptics. A lot of those things are moving forward. Right. And, you know, a lot of people are pouring money into this. That's something I give a lot of credit to Zuck for. He's just continuing this. I don't know how many tens of billions of dollars have been put into this. He's probably put the thick end of$100 billion into that. Something along those lines. Like$75 to$100. Yeah. I mean, they are actually selling a fair number of units now. It just hasn't come close to keeping up with the spend. The sales are just bouncing along. It's like it's not good enough to break out of VR enthusiasts.

1:26:47Yeah. And it's funny, you go back to what you said about Twitter. there's almost like a test which is if you say that something probably isn't working yet and you get a bunch of people shouting at you on social media then that proves you're right because if it was working they wouldn't care yeah yeah that's right well so if you went on social media and said nobody uses tiktok then people would just say this guy's an idiot yeah on social media and say yeah and there aren't actually any consumer use cases for drones you'll get like the 10 people who love their drone okay there's the one exception which i will argue with you on which crypto yeah yes right so that is something where people will say there's no use for crypto you will say there's yes but then there's just a huge number of idiots on every side that's also true yes right that's right so so um okay so we did so i don't say there's no use for any use case of crypto i have the most unpopular position possible which as i say it's kind of useful but not completely useful which means i get both sides screaming at me every yeah that's funny that's this perfect position so um actually what is ben evans on crypto then i'll tell you biology on crypto there's several answers to that question one of them is and this is sort of more observation which i hope you won't tell me i'm wrong is like there's a bunch of clever people working away building like all the tourists left like the whole nft thing was all nonsense and that all there that all all the tourists left the tourists and the grifters basically all moved on to ai yeah a lot of them yes um and all the kind of people trying to build content brands saying this is all wonderful or this is all bullshit they all moved off to ai um there's a bunch of people sitting and doing like abstruse very clever very technical stuff um there's a bunch of stuff working or being built that may work around a financial the finance industry around finance rails around stable coins various kinds of financial instruments most of which is storing money or speculating in money or moving money around yeah there is a thesis that you could build instagram on this that this is sort of an open source computer in which you could write software that consumers would use and i have a bunch of questions about how that would work whether that would work whether you would need to abstract the open sort the crypto stuff away so that the consumers didn't see it and if you did that then why would they care totally so and but none of that's kind of there yet like there aren't billion scale consumer apps built on blockchain yet um so there's a sort of watch this space around that and then there's the finance side which i think is sort of theoretically very interesting but i struggle to get very interested in it just personally it's sure not what i'm interested in and i struggle to see ways that i could add value in talking about it um so i kind of pay attention to it and every now and then i I point out like my newsletter on Sunday, I pointed to the Shopify and Stripe announcements and said like, there's stuff happening here and you should pay attention to this and there's people still interested in trying to build things.

1:29:48So if you've just written this off as all bullshit, you're kind of wrong. Right. But as a writer and an analyst, I haven't moved it on to something that I feel I should write about. Totally. So, okay, so that's very helpful. It's always helpful for me to kind of triangulate on an area, you know um the so here is my basic view you may have heard me say this 12 years ago i think this is still true uh crypto is good for transactions that are very large very small very fast very international very automated very complex or that need to be very transparent and um the reason for that is, like for example, a Starbucks swipe, like of a credit card is none of those things.

1:30:33It's not very large or very small. It's like a mezzanine transaction. It doesn't need to be very automated because you can just talk to the cashier and see your receipt. It's not international. Both you and them are in the same room at the same time. It doesn't need to be transparent. You don't need a receipt on the blockchain for everybody to see and so on and so forth, right? So the reason that people think about the coffee transaction when they think about crypto is it's one of the most common transactions people do. They pay for their coffee every day, right? So it's like, I don't know, 10 % of your transactions, 20 % are maybe coffee, because it's very few things you buy every day.

1:31:04Coffee is one of those things people buy every day. So where crypto really shines is the alternative forms of traffic. Actually, let me take your mobile example, right? The internet can do telephony, but that was actually the thing that was best served by the existing system, right? We still have like local telephone calls, right? you can still use a telephone network to place telephone calls. Where the internet shined, and telephone calls were sort of like mezzanine amounts of information, right? Especially local was like between people in the same country. It wasn't very international. Where the internet shined was, for example, moving really large files like Dropbox or very small files like tweets, right?

1:31:46Being very international, like across borders, being very automated. So it wasn't a human on both sides of the call, right? It's shown for, you know, being very transparent. you're broadcasting the web page to everybody. It's not a phone call just between two people and so on and so forth, right? So that I think is a good analogy where like, yes, now today, eventually the internet took over long distance telephony because that was Skype and then WhatsApp and what have you. But even still today, telephony is well captured by the current system, right? And like the existing phone lines still exist.

1:32:19That I think is a useful analogy for crypto where crypto, for example, if you're a power user of money, right? If I want to receive or send a wire to a startup in Japan, USDC, I can do that in seconds. And then I can refresh the page. They can refresh the page and they can see it's cleared. That is a real use case. It's international wire transfers from anybody to anybody. And by the way, the bank account setup also is instant. So think about what we've done. We've taken it from days to get a US and Japanese bank account set up to seconds. We've taken it from paying money to do that. for the transfer itself to free.

1:32:57We've taken it from taking multiple days for a wire transfer to clear to seconds. And we also, by the way, the uptime, it's not nine to five banking hours. You can do it 24-7 and you can do it on any device, right? That's a lot of improvements just for the important use case of international wire transfers, right? Then you also have the digital gold use case. That one you'll only believe in if, I mean, I can just point to the graph. Bitcoin is appreciated from 0.1 cents per Bitcoin to$100 ,000. So there's enough people who believe in it who have gone up 100 million X, right? Yeah, it's also, I mean, digital gold, I think it's also something that, there's a kind of country mapping here.

1:33:37Because some of what you're talking about is a much bigger problem in, say, in the US than it is in countries with different banking systems. Yes. Some of it is also - Yeah, CEPA, you guys have CEPA in Europe, and it's not terrible. Yeah, you send the money, it arrives for free. So also, this is a point about PayPal. But the SEPA works within Europe though. SEPA would not work for wire transfer to Brazil for example. So you saw the same issue I think there's another point which is like I remember reading about People in Argentina. Yes, literally keeping their money in bricks. Exactly. That's right.

1:34:08So it's Argentina, Nigeria You actually can't trust your government. Yes, and there are kind of places a lot of places like that. Unfortunately. Yes, there's also a bunch of places where nobody's worried about that for 100 years. Exactly. That's right. So the more middle class, stable, and so on you are, basically crypto is for the power user of money and the powerless, right? The person who's reinventing what a bank account even is and the person who's just trying to hang on to a bank account. So it's like a U-shaped coalition, right? Similar to the people who actually benefited most from the global economy.

1:34:42Remember what I said is like the elephant graph, right? You had the basically 10th to 80th percentile of the world who grew and you had the top 1 % who grew and the Western middle class didn't. That coalition is actually also the crypto coalition. It's like the people who are just, you know, intranet, as Tim Ferriss put it, James, what's his name? Jason Bournes of the intranet, right? Like just intranet hackers who are just trying to move money. Like, for example, I'll give a concrete example. So Brian Armstrong, my friend, CEO of Coinbase, one of the reasons he got into crypto, he had a few different life experiences that led him there.

1:35:22One was actually lived in Argentina for a while, so he saw what a failed state would be like. The second, though, was actually being an Airbnb engineer. So the thing is, Airbnb, even still today, has the problem of transactions that are very large, very international, right? And also very one-time, low trust, right? Because you've got somebody from Denmark, staying with someone from Japan and it's a one-time transaction of maybe on the order of a thousand dollars, which is actually a fair amount of money. And like the wire system is simply not set up for that frequency of use between unrelated parties.

1:36:00And so there's a lot of friction on something like that. And to a surprising extent, Airbnb had a lot of forex risk, like, you know, cause they had to hold currencies and all these different things. And And the thing you thought was a solved problem, like just moving money from one country to another, it's like, well, Airbnb has to do its accounting in USD, but it's got income in, you know, if they're an American company and they've got somebody transferring money from Denmark to Japan, there's three currencies in that transaction just right there, right? So there's at least three currency pairs which fluctuate, and you've got at least two or three banking systems and all the delays and fees.

1:36:38You start to see if people are like, wow, this sucks so much. we need an internet first banking system, right? We need something which is payments as packets, right? So that was the second thing that motivated Brian to do it, right? There's other things as well, right? But so where would I put crypto today, right? I'd say there's at least three applications. There's more, but I'd say at least three that are at the trillion or multi-hundred billion range. And those are a digital gold, right? Just whether you believe in gold or not, like that's there, people do. Even if you just consider an insurance policy.

1:37:12It's a thing that people are doing. It's a thing that people are doing. That's right. B is, it's like, even if you didn't believe in luxury cars, that's a market, right? So there's a market for it, right? Okay. B is international wire transfers. I think stable coins are now there at this point. There are now 1%, 2%. There's$250 billion. There's trillions. Stable coins have passed Visa. They passed MasterCard, right? And then third is actually crowdfunding, right? So if you look at the largest crowdfundings of all time, most of them are crypto. and the reason is that capital formation online like if you think about something like kickstarter or what have you it's actually more geographically limited and more limited by the credit card rails than you might think for example it's not that easy for somebody in brazil and japan and india to put five thousand bucks into your kickstarter right they the credit card rails may not accept it might be fraud hit go ahead yeah i was just gonna say i wonder with some of the there's a certain amount of swapping paper for paper in some of that go ahead well in the sense of um here is a new crypto project yes a bunch of people who've speculated oh totally made a bunch of crypto money for sure put their paper gains in bitcoin into this new crypto yes that's right that's right but but but i'd say you're right a bunch of it is like that um which is what a lot of nfts was yes that's right but but even if we even if you're totally right what was funded off just the The mechanic of crowdfunding shows that that mechanic for capital formation.

1:38:39What they spent it on, I would agree with you, many of those projects didn't go somewhere. Some of them went really far, like Ethereum was a really, that paid for all the rest in a sense. If all the ones went to zero, that was so successful. But just the mechanic of capital formation where you have, so that gets me to number four, right? If you look at, now you may start disbelieving. So at least those three markets, gold, wire transfers, crowdfunding, those are very large markets. markets. Those are$100 billion, trillion dollar markets. So then you go to like other cases. Now, if I just look at trade volume, right?

1:39:12Crypto today is actually the number four stock exchange in the world in terms of volume. Number one, NYSE. Number two, NASDAQ. Number three, Shenzhen. Number four, crypto. And it's rising fast. The thing that has held it back for almost 15 years is doing the obvious things was pathologized, meaning like literally yesterday or like a day or two ago, we finally fully legalized, very clearly legalized putting a dollar on chain, right? Now that we can put a dollar on chain very clearly, such to the point that Amazon and Walmart are like, okay, congressional legislation is perfectly good. Let's go time, right?

1:39:48Now we can finally put an equity on chain and we can put a fund interest on chain. We can put every paper kind of thing on chain. That is a very big deal, right? That means that crowdfunding thing I talked about says that an intranet company can issue intranet equity and anybody in the world can be part of that cap table. Whether you choose to accept them or not is another thing, but the capital formation mechanism, it's now possible for somebody in Japan or Brazil or Mexico to invest in your company once you have intranet equities, intranet capital markets. That is now within sight. Now that we have the stablecoin thing, boom, done.

1:40:24There's nothing, you know, now it's just a mechanical thing to get the legal system going to make the on-chain equities work. And There's already work on that. So that is a big deal, right? Because the U.S. doesn't want to be the center of global financial empire anymore, right? It's like, it's very conflicted about this, but with the tariffs and the trade war and, you know, tourist visas, work visas, student visa bans and so on, it like is very conflicted about whether it even wants foreign money coming in to America, right? And they've got remittances, taxes coming up, like one for 5%. So U.S.

1:40:58financial markets, I don't think, are going to be there in the same way by 2035. I think Chinese markets are rising. Chinese stocks are rising. That's going to be one thing that's there. But I think the internet capital markets will take over from American capital markets. And that's a very, very big application. Let me go through a few more. Is this interesting so far? It's interesting. I mean, we've got numbers now. Yeah, there was a thing that I was, I'm leaning away from the microphone, We were chatting about it in the car this morning. I have a sort of a mental Venn diagram of stuff I feel I can add something to.

1:41:34Sure. Stuff that I feel I understand and stuff where there's an audience. Yes. And the challenge I always had in writing about crypto, this is kind of a practical question as an analyst, is all AI, all kind of crypto questions, it felt like they were either very, very technical conversations about, about, it was kind of like writing about Linux. So I actually always think that like crypto reminds me a lot of open source. Yes. And you are either. It is open source. But just in the sense of the general movement. Yes, yes, yes, yes. It was sort of, it reminded me a bit of like either I write something about like the new kernel memory management thing in Linux where I don't understand it and the people who do aren't interested in what I'm going to say and no one else cares.

1:42:18Yes. It gets better. Right. Or it was like, imagine what will happen when, it's like talking about open source in the early 90s, imagine what is going to happen when software is free. And there's not, I've struggled, and actually it's a thing I've also had writing about AI, because it's not specific about what you think about this. is what i'm most good at i think all the stuff that i write that people seem to like most is kind of talking about the product strategy of how is this going to work who's going to win who's not going to win how is a corporation or consumer going to buy this what would you do with it right and i struggled for a while to accept to write about lms on that point because it was either like what are the 30 new papers this year yeah or like this is going to transform humanity right and it was kind of hard to find anything in the middle is in in the weeds or super macro but the mezzo is super kind of messianic but not much about like product strategy in the middle and i have the same challenge in writing about crypto in that it's either very very technical okay i've got something for you though or it's you know imagine in 30 years okay or it's about finance where i don't you don't care that much about it's not just that i don't care it's like i would have to spend six months to get to the point that i know what all the acronyms for moving money between banks are and have an opinion about them.

1:43:40Totally, totally. So I've never seen, well, is that, in a completely different analogy, it's also like talking about chips. Should I get to the point that I understand what's going on in chips? Is that a good use of my time? Would I be able to say anything of value there? And so far I've kind of felt, no, there's a bunch of people who know way more about it. Like the semi-analyst guys have got it. So let me actually empathize with you in a certain way, which is I was actually a very late user of social media, right? I only got on Twitter in like December 2013, okay? Which is like a decade. Like a Hello Boomer.

1:44:19Huh? Hello Boomer, exactly. That's right. No, I mean, the thing is I got onto Facebook very early because it just was like moving around universities or what have you at the time. But I didn't really use it. And the reason is that until 2013, I essentially believed that there was absolutely I was just a very private person you know I was just like you know it's weird because I now post a lot or what have you I was just a very private person and I never I didn't give any public talks until late 2013 and so on and um I just thought social media was a complete waste of time and all that mattered was genomics and math and you know like, like heart, like what people call hard tech now.

1:45:01Like I was doing genomics and robotics and I'm proud of that work. I think it was important stuff. And I didn't see the utility in tweeting my breakfast and I didn't see the utility in just, you know, petting each other's fur, which is a lot of what people do on Facebook or whatever, you know? Right. So I didn't see the value in any of that. Um, and it was only once, uh, all of that was what bootstrapped the space. All of the fur petting got hundreds of millions of people on there, all of the breakfast tweeting and so on, until what actually made it useful and interesting to me was I saw somebody tweeting a summary of a genomics conference at Cold Spring Harbor that I didn't have the time to attend.

1:45:42And they gave a much better account of it than any layman would have. It's like someone tweeting a mobile thing, and you're like, oh, those are really great details, and you're skilled in the art, right? And as then I was like, oh, wow, I can get like really detailed information here. Okay, now this is valuable to me as a reader, right? What's my point? My point is I think the parameter that you want to track when you're looking at crypto is block space. Have you heard that parameter before? Okay, that is the most important parameter in crypto that people outside crypto don't realize governs crypto.

1:46:12Block space is to crypto what bandwidth is to the web. So if you think about the early internet or the early web, I should be more precise, in the 90s, like it was very bandwidth constraints. It was 288, 576 modems. And so that's why Google was 10 blue links. And I think Amazon even had many images at all. And in fact, you remember Six Degrees? It was a social network, right? So that was a text-based social network. It didn't take off because without images, people didn't really. Yeah, you got nothing to share. You got nothing to share, exactly, right? ICQ was a chat app that did work. AOL and some messenger worked because that was just text that could be sent on that low bandwidth thing.

1:46:48It was only in the 2000s that you started to get more graphical things when bandwidth increased. Like Facebook, the reason it took off at Harvard, everybody had a T1 connection being at Harvard. And they finally had digital cameras so you could have photos. And as digital cameras propagated out, so did Facebook, right? And you go further and further and like, you know, the internet only, or internet explorer only got disrupted by Firefox in like the late 2000s, right? It was only really by the early 2010s that you had the full JavaScript stack of like jQuery and then only later for React and what have you.

1:47:20So this concept that we have today of like a mobile web app where you can download JavaScript and run an app in the browser on a phone was a vision in the 90s, but it took a long time together because bandwidth had to increase for that. So what's the analogy here? Block space. Basically, block space is the amount of storage that you have on a blockchain. Like think of a blockchain as like an armored car for data, right? Because this is data that people want to corrupt, right? In a sense, if it's a file on disk, it's important to you. If it's a file online, it's important to others. And if it's a file on chain, it's really important to others.

1:47:56And it's so important that they might try to screw with it. And so Bitcoin came up with like an armored car for data where you could guard the minus one or plus one of who had what Bitcoin. And over time, that block space increased so that you could do some basic smart contracts on Ethereum. And now it's increased enough that you can blast millions of stablecoin transactions a day on like base and Solana and so on and so forth. And so you should conceptualize it as, oh, why hasn't this happened yet? And instead think of, OK, these applications are gated by the amount of block space. And so they're coming online similar to the amount of bandwidth you had like text only apps.

1:48:37Then you had images. Then you had videos. And like Netflix only did streaming video in like the early 2010s. Right. I mean, we think about all that as recent. I don't I don't I don't know. That's the way of thinking about it. I don't have a problem with the idea that you couldn't build Instagram on this because the infrastructure isn't fast enough yet. I think there's a bunch of like interesting conceptual questions around what would happen when we got there. Yeah. So so here's a few things. There will be also kind of you're sort of speculating five years in advance. Yeah. So my view is I'm not sure if it'll be exactly Instagram, you know.

1:49:14Well, I think we can be sure it wouldn't be exactly Instagram. Right, right, right. But just kind of conceptually. What is the app? You could build consumer applications. You could use, I mean, this is the phrasing I remember you using years ago, that one should think of a blockchain as a distributed virtual machine. Yes. And it's another layer of abstraction. That's right. And every layer of abstraction is always slower and crapper than running on the bare metal, except that it allows you to do a bunch of stuff that you can't do if you run on the bare metal. That's exactly right. That's exactly right.

1:49:47And the thing is, blockchains are, in a sense, one of the frontiers of operating systems research. Like in the same way, like there's an operating system like Windows. There's a browser, which is itself an operating system because you can run apps in it. It's got a full programming language. Like that's how Chrome layered it. Were you at A16Z when Martin Casado was there? Yeah, we overlapped just a bit. And we invested a bunch of things together, yeah. Well, Martin had this great observation. You remember when YC said that, like, for a quarter of their companies, 90 % of the code was written with AI?

1:50:18Yeah. And he responded to this by saying, yes, but if you write an iPhone out, 90 % of your code is written by Apple. Yes. And so there were all those levels of abstraction. Prompting is just a higher level of programming. That's right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so there's a, the, I suppose the, you know, another way of answering your question is like the finance stuff is there. I can see it. I get it. I'm not sure I can add any value to that. It's interesting. And I will tell people it's kind of interesting. But you should pay attention to this. I think you'll be a leader. Go ahead. The running, the building more generalized consumer applications on it is conceptually more, more interesting to me as something that I could make money telling other people about.

1:50:56Yes. Except that it isn't happening yet. And it probably will at a certain point, the curve will curve up, the block space will expand, the stuff will get faster and cheaper and can store more stuff, and people will be able to build stuff on this. Deterministically, it won't be exactly Instagram. I think that's just kind of a useful mental model for thinking that you could build something like that. You could build consumer network apps like that on this. At that point, then I think you have a bunch of kind of new, interesting questions like, well, is it a good idea to have a social network where all the users have a vote?

1:51:29What would that look like? What problems does that create? Right, right, right, right. Yes. Well, DAOs are that already. Yeah, exactly. Which struck me the other day that all the arguments against that are basically all the argument and say, no, you need a CEO in charge. They're basically all the same arguments to say, no, you don't want mass democracy. You need a king. And you can have some balance, like representative democracy, right? So you have the vote and they vote for somebody for a term. You can mix constitutions, which again, like look at Africa to see how Latin America, to see how mixed constitutions work out.

1:51:55Well, I'm saying mixed constitutions, but just representative democracy where you have a leader, but they've got a fixed term and there's a vote for them, for example. All of that stuff is fascinating. It's like we don't have it yet. And no one's going to pay me to go to a conference and give a presentation. Totally, totally, sorry. So it's kind of tough for me to write about. Yeah, totally. I will say, all I'll just say is to put on your radar. If you go to like snapshot.org or Vote Agora, there are actually very large treasuries where all that voting stuff is happening, on-chain cryptographic voting and so on and so forth.

1:52:24So that's growing. Like stablecoins kind of, people that ignored stablecoins for a while, they just kept compounding. So the on-chain voting stuff is there. But what I will say is that I think, just like I was like a late adopter of social media since I just, it had to get to a certain level of significance before I cared about it for the kinds of things I care about. Just, I think the kinds of people interested in crypto are either A, they're engineers and they just like the developer aspect of their power users, b their financiers right or or in some sense financiers or day traders whatever it is both the high and the low and then c in the part we didn't say is just like they're political right it's like a political motivation so i kind of mean like being a protestant or a catholic they have a certain world you all say very happy to souls yeah that's right exactly so so like i have that you know we both like enterprise sass type stuff product type stuff that kind of discussion and but i also like a bunch of things and you like you like art museums and things like that Which I'm like, okay, that's cool.

1:53:18You know, go have fun, right? And so we have our own Venn diagram kind of thing, right? So, okay. So switching gears, I think you'll be more interested in crypto as block space increases. And once crypto wallets, let me actually give you an example of something which it's useful for right now where the block space increases enough. You know Open Router? That allows you to try a bunch of different AI models and it just uses crypto to pay for all of it. Okay. So this way you don't have to have 500 different accounts at 500 different, because there's so many different AI models. You don't necessarily set up accounts and all that stuff, right?

1:53:48So it just takes all that account setup process and you just have one account, you pay crypto, and it settles it with all these other guys, right? There's a kind of completely tangential thing that just occurs to me as you were speaking is, you know, Alamarina as this distributed voting system. The thing I always thought would be interesting would be to flip that and say, can you pass a double blind test? Yeah, yeah. If you take a model that's on the top 20 on Alamarina and give me a bunch of responses, how many people would pass a double-bind test to know which is which? There's probably some kinds of question you would tell very easily, but an awful lot I bet most people probably wouldn't.

1:54:24So the most fundamental one would be, what is the private key to this? Basically, what is the private key to this wallet? That's something that, depending on how it's set up. We were talking about this in the car, but basically another major use case for crypto is AI makes everything fake, crypto makes it real again. Because AI can fake all kinds of stuff and give you this very convincing thing on like the deep research thing where it said 40 % of the phones or whatever you're saying. But it cannot fake the private key. So it cannot show a non-zero Bitcoin balance or non-zero Ethereum balance without actually having the cryptographic solution there.

1:54:59Yeah, but it could probably just tell you that the balance is zero because it might be. Yeah, sure, sure. But what I mean about that is like, for example, all kinds of, let me give you, you know, CAPTCHAs, right, websites. websites. So AI can bust a lot of CAPTCHAs now. It can get through. It can, am I a robot? It can figure it out, get through. But if you had to log in with a crypto wallet that had$1 in it or$10 or$100, AI can't fake that. It cannot fake the possession of that cryptography, right? Like to give you one, here's one motivating example for why crypto will get, maybe this argument will convince you.

1:55:31Maybe not, but it's fine. Google login, you agree is it billions of users, right? But Google Login, when you log into a website, you only can log in basically with your email address and the permissions to your Google account. There's something very obvious that somehow even Google, with all of its strength, has not been able to implement, which is an international balance, a spendable balance. Google Login could not have, for whatever reason, a spendable balance across different countries. They've solved that for Google itself, where everybody can pay Google and subscribe to Google with a zillion credit cards in all these different countries.

1:56:03but somehow they couldn't make it work so you could log into a third-party site with a spendable balance. Crypto did solve that. Just that alone means that every Google and Facebook login will eventually be either augmented or replaced by a crypto login. so i'm going to pick up something you said which i you mentioned which i mentioned in the car around what's fake and what's real. Yeah. So if you're buying an apartment and, well, so going back a step, like I think most of what most people follow on Instagram is no longer their friends. It's interest graph. Yes, that's right. And so do you care if that photo is a photo of a real thing or not?

1:56:47Sometimes you really do and sometimes you really don't. Exactly. Yes. And I think that's kind of interesting. it's a sort of not so much generative search as generative content exactly if you're decorating your apartment and you want a mood board and you can specify some styles and you can say i like this and this and this and this and it gives you more and you look and you say oh more like that or more like this it doesn't necessarily matter at all if those images are real it does if like maybe you want to buy that table and it that table doesn't exist it just looks like those kinds of tables or it looks like those kinds of chairs or whatever but if what you're looking for is no i want to be more like this or more like that and you keep going until you get a mood board of exactly what you want doesn't may not matter at all whether those images are real that's right so so if it's pinterest on the one hand then just inspiration or what have you but if it is if it's shoppable then maybe it does unless you it's then there's an extreme case here which is i just send that dressed as she and she will make it for you that's right or or let's say you know there's some photo of a fire somewhere right and quite a lot of times people will post photos of fires and it's from like some like a concrete example the brazilian fires from a few years ago there's like a fake photo like from um that that macron tweeted out because he he was told it was a photo of the brazilian fires but someone was able to show that it was actually like a like a i think it was like a reuters image or something but from a photographer who had died years ago yeah it wasn't that image Well, this is the funny thing about people complaining about deep fakes.

1:58:16It's like we don't listen. The problem isn't the picture. The problem is the label. The label, exactly. That's right. So the thing is that with crypto, you can do what I call chain of custody, blockchain of custody, where you can have a camera. And by the way, this is also important in scientific work as well. There's this huge replication crisis with all these labs and data. People fake the data. Yeah, exactly. Or something, right? So you could have something called pre-registration of studies, where if you're doing a study, you have to describe in some places who you're doing it on, what you're doing.

1:58:50It's monitored to make sure that people report the results, whether they're positive or negative. So let's say it's a study or it's a camera. You can have either crypto software or hardware in there, such that when the frames of images are recorded, they're instantly hashed and put on chain, either directly or as a digest of some kind. right that basically is like tamper proofing such that before the data is even like collected or analyzed this internet connected thing is doing something now it's possible maybe to hack the firmware and mess with that but it would be pretty hard to depending on how you do this it'd be pretty hard to do that we also have this on you know google and so on trying to watermark um generated images so the challenge is if the image isn't watermarked that doesn't that won't stop people believing it true that's right but but i think over time this type of stuff where it'll gain traction at first are crypto oracles for prediction markets because if you're making a financial decision i don't know if you've seen that stuff alex tabarok has talked about this um when people have money on the line their partisanship reduces and they actually get a different chip in their head where they're like is this true or not they're trying to dispassionately figure it out, right?

2:00:02They're not just cheering my tribe, your tribe, whatever. And the, is this true chip basically means, okay, I'm going to double click into this. I'm going to verify this. I'm going to look at this. And that's where like oracles come in. They're like feeds of data that have some degree of verification. And right now they're like mostly price data, but people use it for weather data. They use it for this, that, and the other, right? All these different feeds of information that people trade on. And over time, I think those feeds, once you can guard price data weather data you know health data etc eventually you can guard any kind of data and then now you've got like a chain of custody for data like the scientific data rough you know rough off it um anyway why don't we we should we should wrap but this is actually awesome conversation um anything you know what's your latest stuff what should people go and check out anything uh well i've been publishing a newsletter every week since 2013 and i always welcome more subscribers to that you should write where is it is there gonna be a benedict book google benedict heavens my parents had good seo book is interesting i've had publishers approach me every now and then about doing a book i have to work out what it would actually be and why it would be worth reading honestly if you just i don't know maybe a history of tech like because all your slide decks are very good right and there's um one of the things i learned from you know my friend novel like the novolmanac right yeah that sold a million copies why did it sell a million copies i was surprised by that.

2:01:21It was Eric Jorgensen went and curated Novel's old content and turned it into a book. And I was really surprised. I was like, wait a second, isn't that all available on Twitter for free? Didn't people already see it? They did. However, if you say, what is the one work that represents like the best of Novel's thought over years? You know, just to see his latest tweets is not the entry point for that. You want to kind of collect all of them, sort them, filter them, organize them thematically style them and so on and so forth and i think you could have a pretty good book if you do that let me know well that's one thing on the list and yes the other thing is i i used to do an annual presentation i've now shifted my cadence so i did a new ai presentation last month that i published which i was just in town to present and then i will do another one in the autumn the fall for american listeners great on a sort of e-commerce advertising marketing brand, like all the other stuff that's being transformed by AI right now.

2:02:20And in general, what do I do? I try and work out what's going on and how to explain it and how I can explain it. And then I go and do presentations and speak at events and talk to companies. And I do slides for money, basically. Well, that is similar. I do a lot of slides, too. I do a lot of speaking. So, you know, I mentioned the cloud communities thing and materializing those cloud communities. So that's what I'm working on at NS.com, like network school. So if people are interested in this kind of stuff, we talk about that there. So subscribe to Benedict's newsletter at, is that benedictevans.com?

2:02:51Ben-evans.com. Ben-evans.com. Okay, great. And then if you want to check out Network School, come to ns.com. Sure. There you go. So benedictevans.com is another Benedict Evans. No. Who is a photographer. Really? And so my profile picture is taken by him because I used to get his email. Oh, my God. Obviously, this is a blockchain use case. There is a contact form on my website. And he won't tell it to you. And I redesigned it. I don't need to ask. I redesigned my website recently, so it's clearer who I am. But it was quite generic. And people would go to the contact form and they would say, hey, Benedict, we really liked your work photographing Harvey Keitel.

2:03:24Would you like to go to Mexico next week and take pictures of Robert De Niro? And I would look at it and go forward. Well, you know what's funny? You know what's funny? There's actually probably maybe even more abolish history of Austins than are. Because there's like 12 people last I checked in the SF Bay Area alone with my first and last name, you know. So just, I feel your pain. Okay, well, this is great. Really great seeing you in a while, and we should do this more. Yeah, great. Thank you, sir.