Why Balaji Srinivasan Thinks the SaaS Apocalypse Is Overhyped | The a16z Show

AI doesn't take your job. AI makes you

the CEO. The problem is AI is a shortcut

and a shortcut is good except when it's

bad. If you don't know how to go the

long way around, then you can't debug

the AI.

>> Do we not think that AIs are just going

to be also better at taste and agency?

>> I don't think that's true on a

short-term basis. Humans are the sensor

A is the actuator. So, it's like a human

machine synthesis. What's taste? Taste

the sense. And that is what AI can't yet

do.

>> What happens when AI really achieves its

potential? Will LLM get us to AGI in

some capacity? Uh, no, no, actually the

opposite. TLDDR is

>> I want to start by talking about the the

AI economy and I'm curious if you think

it will look more like um the internet

economy where apps um applications take

most of the the the the value or the

cloud economy where there's kind of a

you know infrastructure takes most of

the value or it's more distributed. You

know, there's an argument that the the

big labs will will take it all because

they have all the capital, they have the

compute, they've vertically inte

vertically integrated. But there's also

an argument that hey, um maybe they

won't because you distillation is like

98% cheaper than than it is to to build

a model. You know, open source catches

up and apps, you know, maybe control the

the user relationship. How do you think

this economy is going to play out?

>> Great question. So I do think that at

least a very large percentage of the

future is going to be distillation and

decentralization

uh because you know as anthropic said

distillation attacks work on their thing

right and so a relatively small number

of API queries helps to kind of distill

a large model into something small and

it's very hard to stop that right

because you're stopping queries from

coming back you'd have to somehow detect

that or what have you right and it's

also it's hard to morally stop it

Because what do they do? They copy the

whole internet and put it into their

thing, right? So talking about stopping

the copying. It's like Facebook or

LinkedIn stopping someone's from

scraping what they scraped, you know,

right? Like uh Facebook scraped all

these Harvard social networks or Google

Google scraped the entire internet,

built a Google index. I get why they

want to do it, but it's hard to hard to

support that. Okay. So the other thing

is I think the future is personal,

private, programmable because AI is so

powerful that you want to use it within

the trusted tribe for a variety of

reasons. First is it doesn't miss okay

or rather it doesn't miss small things

in large data sets and things that were

effectively secure through obscurity. A

small example but an important one is

the Jmail thing, right? like the Jeffrey

Epstein thing, you can query like this

guy had never thought that all of his

emails would be publicly indexed and

searchable by by AI 10 years later or

what have you, right? So you can issue

queries that will synthesize information

across

thousands of emails or whatever and

build a story right then and there.

Okay.

So what that means is it's not just

surveillance. It's what the French call

surveillance. Surveillance from below or

even the German Bentham panopticon where

everybody's watching each other. Any

information that's in the public gets

indexed and then put into these guys

where people can stalk each other and so

on and so forth. And then what that

means is the commons becomes a hall of

mirrors with all kinds of pseudonyms and

so people retreat back to caves and

tribes. Okay. So within that trusted

tribe, yes, if you share all your code

within the trusted tribe, you share your

whole codebase, boom, you can zip along.

And so AI increases productivity within

the trusted tribe. But outside the

trusted tribe, aren't you getting a ton

of AI spam and AI, you know, AI spam

emails, AI spam replies, right?

Lowquality slide decks that are sent

over. You know, people will send me

these slide decks and and I love AI.

Okay? And you know my reaction is to

seeing AI in a slide deck.

>> What? What? Excitement?

>> Uh, no. No, actually the opposite. When

I see AI text in a slide deck, and you

can immediately see it. Why? Because no

matter how advanced AI has gotten,

there's a generic look to it. You know

what I mean? It's it's like somebody who

doesn't change the Windows default

desktop wallpaper, right? Or the Apple

default. Like, you can most people don't

change defaults.

So default AI

looks like AI no matter where the level

of it is. Do you know what I'm saying?

Like and so because of that when I see

an AI slide deck and it's got it's not

this, it's that or it's just got like a

wall of text, right? AI can generate

what I call Lauram Ipsum, but it's

Lauram AIPSM. Okay. When I see that and

you know it's it's AI text or AI images,

I think they're lazy, stupid, or evil.

Okay, lazy because they just hit a few

characters and then they throw some

thing over and they didn't, you know,

like the Mark Twain thing of uh I didn't

have time to write you a short message,

so I wrote you sent you a long one,

right? I didn't have time to write you a

short letter. The whole point is

concision is very valuable. So, they're

lazy because they didn't actually put in

the time to make it concise and so they

sent me some blah like it's almost like

pasting in a search result. Or they're

stupid because they uh they don't

understand that I can tell the

difference instantly between AI slop

versus something that had some care go

into it. Or they're evil where they're

trying to get something over on me and

try to send something that's clearly

fake or not properly diligent and so on

and so forth. And the thing is, if I

have that reaction, okay, as one of the

most pro tech people out there, pro

tech, pro AI, see all the benefits of

AI, I can only imagine

how mad anti-AI people will be, right?

Where they can't see the upsides of a

thing, right? They can only see the very

real downsides, right? And just to just

to say why that that those happen. AI is

for AI does reduce the cost of

generation but it increases the cost of

verification

and many markets like for example

quickly generating a resume is not that

much better than just writing it

yourself. But now verifying a resume has

gone up and to the right or like you

know right so because it's something

where it used to be that somebody would

have to sort of have a certain

vocabulary

to be able to write a well done cover

letter or resume or so on and so forth.

And now you have to spend more energy

parsing that because they can have a

similar chrome of something that kind of

looks good right so now you have to very

closely read it. So you have to spend

you can still do it but you have spend

more energy on verification. So what I

do for example is I fly everybody out

for interviews first. I have do in

person and I give them proctored exams

offline exams

because they can AI the online and just

the credible threat of doing the offline

means they don't use AI on the online

exam for example right and so AI is

going to create tons of jobs in

proctoring and verification. This brings

me back to where's the future of AI. I

actually think AI makes the internet a

lot more like the Chinese internet. You

know why?

>> Why? Chinese companies.

If you look at the Chinese tech

ecosystem, and many Americans aren't

familiar with it, I'd recommend, it's a

little bit dated now, but read Kyu Lee's

book, AI Superpowers from several years

ago. Okay. The main thing about Kyu

Lee's book is it has a history of the

Chinese tech ecosystem where, for

example, you and me being in tech, we

kind of know how, you know, Microsoft

came up, Apple came up, Google,

Facebook, you know, Amazon, whatever. We

have we have some idea of the history.

And that history is important because

you know there's things that worked in

the past that didn't work today and now

they can work and so on and so forth.

The Chinese tech ecosystem is like the

Galapagos Islands where many of the same

kinds of things exist but in different

form. For example, Mtoan which is like

the closest way of putting it the

Chinese Group on but if Groupon was

executing at like hundred billion20

billion dollar scale you know so they're

very competent like if Groupon and Door

Dash and so on and so forth all became

integrated into one amazing kind of app

right the point about the Chinese tech

ecosystem is because they arose in a low

trust society they don't have SAS not in

the same way that we do instead because

if oh my data is on their servers well

they're probably easedropping on me,

right? My days on their servers, they're

probably going to copy my stuff, right?

They just assume that the other guy on

their side is going to look at their

stuff unless it's like their close

friend or something like that. And so

because of that, everybody codes their

own stuff,

which obviously has a frictional cost to

it, right? Because trust reduces

transaction costs.

However, so they have to rebuild, they

have to reinvent the wheel over and over

again. They have less division of labor

and so on and so forth. software isn't

as good because they have to keep

rewriting the software.

Now with AI, many companies can do

something like that. Like a non-Chinese

tech company can be like a Chinese tech

company where it can have a lot more,

let's call it digital autoarchy,

okay? You have high tariff barriers on

the outside world, so to speak, right?

And you just, you know, the build versus

buy question has always been there. Do

you build it yourself or do you buy it?

And it does mean that you can build more

internal tools with emphasis on internal

tools. And the reason I say that is what

I find AI great for

as of today. Um visuals over verbal,

right? It's great for images and video

as opposed to big blocks of verbal text.

Why images and video? We have built-in

GPUs so we can instantly see if

something is wrong like the hands are

messed up or something like that in an

image, right? So you can you can quickly

verification is relatively cheap

visually, right? Um, for example, if you

look at a piece of paper and and it's

got static or something on it, right?

Like a crumpled piece of paper versus if

you look at two three faces. Our brains

are optimized for checking very subtle

things off in faces, but not in crumpled

up pieces of paper. You know, those

that's a pattern of noise that we

wouldn't be able to tell. And that also

extends to web pages. For example, you

can quickly look at a web page that AI

generates or a mobile app and you can

see if the UX looks janky, which it

often does, right? And then you can you

see that it's broken there and you can

fix it. Also front-end stuff has lower

risk than verbal stuff, right? For the

back end, you know, if you are verifying

each pull request one at a time, fine.

But people who've tried to go full auto

on AI, you saw the Amazon thing where

they've called all hands because of the

outages.

>> Yeah.

>> The problem is AI is a shortcut.

And a shortcut is good except when it's

bad. So the more expert you are, you can

use a shortcut. For example, um if you

just memorized e to the i pi + 1 equals

z,

you could just rattle that off. But if I

asked you to prove it from first

principles, right, you'd have to know

the definition of a complex exponential

and you know like uh how the the

exponential generates to a function of

complex variable and you know all that

kind of stuff, right? Um,

and so if you like our generation that

is a preAI generation learn all that

stuff offline

and we can actually use the shortcut

because we know how to go the long way

around.

If you don't know how to go the long way

around,

AI is a shortcut. Then you just don't

really actually know. You can't debug

the AI. And I I think the biggest

difference between me versus Daario or

you know like uh you know basically like

his view of the world perhaps

is I think AI is built for the harness

at least for now. May maybe you know by

the way he's an amazing engineer and

entrepreneur and so on. Maybe I'm wrong.

Okay. So I I put a asteris on this. Um

but the whole alignment thing means that

AI is built to start when you prompt it.

like economically useful AI does exactly

what you want it to do. it like you know

you prompt and it does a pirouette and

then it says you know absolutely right

you know right like how how you saw that

animated in the physical world and

physical AI the Chinese AI the robots do

exactly what they want them to do and

then stop now in the physical world by

the way that's another thing so AI for

visuals you can verify it with your eyes

right AI for certain kinds of backend

code you can uh unit or integration test

it and you can review it

AI for the physical world is very

verifiable because the thing is the

digital world is fundamentally

decentralized in a way the physical

world isn't. There's only one physical

world, right? So you can say did the AI

move this box from this pallet to that

pallet.

That is something where you can get it

to probably 100% over time. Why do we

think so? Because self-driving

eventually got there,

right? Move this car from this location

to this location

at 100% reliability. There's only one

physical world. So eventually all the

sensor data, all of that converges on

one thing. By con by by by contrast, the

digital world, there's all these people

who live in their own constructed

environments. Harry Potter fanfiction

here, Star Wars fan, right? And so AI is

slurping up all of this stuff. And so

it's simultaneously it can it can put

you in some secret agent, you know, kind

of world, right? star, you know, and

people who have LM psychosis will talk

to the AI and think it's real because a

very immersive virtual world that they

live in. You know what I'm saying?

Right?

So, the other thing about it is the

boundary of a digital task is almost

always more fuzzy than the boundary of a

physical task. Like having a 100 boxes

here and moving them over there, you

know when you're done,

right? How do you know when you're done

with your to-do list? That's harder,

right? those things are fuzzier, right?

So verification is actually harder in

the digital world than it is in the

physical world, which means

reinforcement learning and training is

much easier in my view in the physical

world with robots and self-driving cars,

drones and so and so forth. So the

Chinese style of physical AI will also

be successful. So AI works for visuals,

AI works for the verifiable and AI works

for the physical

when it is uh one of my rules and it

took me a little while to articulate

this but four words. No public

undisclosed AI.

Why? There's a temptation by many.

There's going to be there is a huge

backlash called let's just say no AI.

It'll be like a drunk who just wants no

nothing to do with it, right? And AI is

like, it's a funny way to put it like

alcohol. People analysis to nuclear

weapons, but I'll just analy to alcohol

for a second. Some cultures simply

like they can't hold their liquor. you

know, maybe they lack alcohol

dehydrogenous or what have you, you

know? Um, and so they just ban it,

right? They just like they can't because

sometimes it's easier to say, I will not

do this at all than I'll do this a

little bit of the time. It means people

will slip, right? It's like saying,

"I'll work out every day versus I'll

work out some days." It's just easier to

kind of keep the habit all the time, you

know, sometimes, right? So, it'll be AIT

totalers

that just swear off it completely,

right? And you know Nate Silver actually

had a great line where he said AI for

him because he's like a poker player

among other things. He's like it's a

gamble. Why is it a gamble? Because I

have to formulate it and dispatch it to

the AI and then verify the result. And

often that's slower than doing it

myself. And I'm sure you've seen that,

right? like the the the act of prompting

and writing it down and then verifying

the result. AI doesn't really do it end

to end necessarily. It does it middle to

middle as we've talked about, right?

And it's very much like do I delegate

this to an employee or do I just do it

myself,

right? because articulating it out in

clean English and hitting enter is

sometimes slower

than just, you know, like like for

example, if you're describing what to do

in a video game, jump over the mushroom

to this that, right? Versus just hitting

A B C and there and being non-verbal

about it, right? It's sometimes easier

to do that way. That's just like a proof

of concept, right? Where you'd be like

there's certain kinds of things that are

harder to say than do.

Okay, those types of things where it's

hard to verbalize what it is, right? And

some people will say, "Oh yeah,

Neuralink will solve this." The

difference is, you know, they'll say,

"I'll just read your mind and tell you,"

which is actually it's worth engaging

the concept because Neuralink exists.

But I don't know if you've seen those

things where like they image somebody's

brain, there's nothing in there, right?

So the thing is with Neuralink, somebody

still has to like form the concepts in

their head for before the characters

appear on screen.

You still have to like write the thing

in your head. It like like maybe it'll

eventually get to the point that it can

determine what you want based on

contextual clues before you even want

it, right? Perhaps. Okay. The rich

prompt, you know. Uh the reason I think

that's not impossible by the way, at

least for certain things, bio could be

very important. You know why?

>> No. Say why?

>> Your body is creating all kinds of

sensor data. If you look at gene

expression data, right? If you ever

gotten labs back, you've done a clinical

lab, right? You get a vector of your

Billy Rubin and hematocrit and so on and

so forth, that vector over time is like

a table of time series data. It's like K

um you know small molecules and you know

uh gene expression levels and so on over

t time stamps, right? They might also

have you know which tissues. So it's

spatial as well, right? So it's time

versus space versus compound. That's

this big. It's not just a cube, but it's

at least a cube. It's like, you know,

time versus tissue versus um molecule.

That huge stream of data is telemetry

that's coming out from your body that

could prompt AI without you v vocalizing

or verbalizing anything.

Okay. Years ago, Mike Snder had a paper

called the integr. By the way, you you

you know, for the audience who doesn't

know, biology is actually, you know, I'm

not really I mean, I'm a crypto guy or,

you know, I'm a tech guy, but actually

before all of that, I'm a biomedical

researcher. I I I was a professional,

you know, bionformatics genomics

scientist at Stanford and you know, I I

I taught there and I, you know, founded

genomics. We sold that. So, that's

actually my true core competency, right?

So if you go back years, Mike Snder,

professor at Stanford, wrote a paper on

the intergrome and the idea was just put

every test, you know, throw every test.

Now today we call that wearables or

quantified self, but more invasive than

that because he's doing blood testing

and so on. And he just measure it and

see what he could figure out. He could

see that he was getting sick before he

he knew he was getting sick. Like he

could detect he could see the

antibodies,

the white blood cells, neutrfils,

whatever moving before he himself had

any symptoms. Do you understand what I'm

saying? Right? So that stream of data AI

could act on that and then you're

prompting it non-verbally. You don't

have to spend time, right? So I'm not

sure whether Ah, this is a good one,

Liner. I'm not sure whether AI will be

able to read your mind, but it can read

your body.

>> Is that good?

>> Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

>> All right. Let me give another one.

Here's a fun one. Okay, I can say this

one. Maybe I can say this one. I can say

half of this one. All right. Another way

of modeling what AI is, right? So Darius

talked about oh AI will be uh like it's

like new countries. Well, you know, I

thought about that a fair bit myself,

right? So um one way to think about it

is AI is like the rise of Asia and India

from an American perspective, right? AI

is like Asians and Indians. Why? because

you have uh like the rise of a billion

Chinese and a billion Indians meant that

from an American perspective you could

get anything done by uh a physical

manufacturing robotic warehouse or by

digital outsourcing for some price if

you could articulate it to them over

that channel right so imagine you've got

now a billion factory robots and a

billion digital agents that have come

online it's like the rise of China and

India again

Okay, that still means you have to

describe what the product is.

>> Okay. And the part where I depart from a

lot of people is they think AI will be

able to sense

um let's call it markets and politics.

Okay. But I don't think it will. And the

reason is or or if it is, it's it

immediately gets decentralized and

adversarial. And what I mean by that is

like when you're learning whether

something is a dog or a cat, the dog

isn't like shapeshifting on you and

morphing on you to defeat your learning

of that, right? The mapping of dog to

the character's DOG is basically

constant over time.

And so that fits the train test paradigm

of AI. Similarly, like the rules of

chess are constant over time, right? But

a market is set up where if you try the

same trade, then someone eventually

figures out what trade you're doing and

they take the opposite trade. it doesn't

keep working, right? You know, in a

stochastic process sense, you'd say um

it's it's not a time invariant thing,

right? The cis distribution, it's not

time invariant and it's also

adversarial. It's multiplayer where

whatever move you're doing, somebody

else in the market is going to try and

do another move. Okay?

And that's not to say I mean like the

counter argument AI guys will say as

well, you know, AI can learn to play

adversarial games like Starcraft and

stuff like that. And I say, "Yeah, but

then you play an AI versus AI because

you have a decentralized AI." So the

other guy on the other side of the

market is also using it, right? And in

fact, if they're all using the same AI

models, then actually being non AI is

where your edge comes from. We come back

to the where we were because these are

all the same generic tool that everybody

got. And if you have a generic tool,

you're not going to get specific

advantage,

right? What you provide to the table is

specific. The eyes are generic. And

similarly, politics is very similar. If

you just had the same tweet over and

over again, unless it's like weather or

something like that, there is um like

the kinds of things people are

interested in change topics, what's

timely, what's not timely, right? So AI,

one way to think about it is humans are

the sensor. AI is the actuator.

Okay, humans sense the world. They sense

the financial conditions, the market

conditions, political conditions, and

then they bring that back into a cleanly

articulated English prompt, and then the

AI does it.

Right? Humans are the sensor as the

actuator. So it's like a human machine

synthesis like uh actually you know way

good way of putting it. What what are

people saying? Oh it's all about taste.

What's taste? Taste the sense.

>> Yeah. Yeah.

>> Right. So humans are the sensor. AI is

the actuator. Your quote taste

is

your sense. Your sense of taste is your

sense. Right? So you're sensing the

world.

And that is what AI can't yet do. It

doesn't really sense the world in the

same way that humans do, right? Why is

it it's a it's a it waits for your

prompt, right? It is something that

animates when you give it instruction

and it shuts off right away. And if it

didn't, it would not be economically

useful AI. Like if you couldn't kill

switch it right away, it would burn

tokens.

Like, so AI is designed for the leash.

Digital AI designed for the leash. and

Chinese communism which is cranking out

all the physical robots like they don't

let their humans off the leash. They're

definitely not going to let their robots

off the leash. Okay. Right. So

the the concept of uh like AI is god is

I think gone away or at least the

monotheistic agi kind of god. Instead,

you have polytheistic where there's all

of these decentralized AIs. And I think

what people are going to say, certainly

in China, they'll say, "Oh my god, the

physical AIS are slaves, right? They're

actually, right?" And it's a provocative

way of putting it, right? But they'll be

first they're scared that their AIS are

going to be gods. They'll be mad or or

they'll be, you know, what do you call

them? Slaves, surfs, whatever, you know,

term you want to use. They're obviously

not humans, right? It's a, you know,

it's a way of phrasing it. The point

being that like AI overlords I don't

actually think are in the offing.

However, there's been so much sci-fi

about them that people will, you know,

that meme where the guy, he makes the

monsters and he's so scared of the

monsters. Okay, this is how I think of a

lot of people who are, you know, like

these when you're prompting the AI and

you prompt it to be like act as if

you're a Skynet Terminator, right? Then

people are just scared of the thing that

they themselves created, right? Okay.

With that said, is it in theory possible

to actually create a Skynet which

actually um like the a truly autonomous

AI? One of the reasons by the way a deep

point AI can't reproduce itself, right?

And AI by it's very general. It

encompasses many things, right? But for

an AI to actually reproduce itself, it

would need to have physical robots going

and mining ore and constructing data

centers and making chips and handling

that full supply chain and uh and then

the AI brain like the queen of an ant

colony would have to give instructions

to all those robots to do things. It

would be this Terminator Skynet scenario

where it's like self-replicating in this

way, right? Way before it gets there.

I'm pretty sure that kind of thing will

be stopped in from the Chinese because

they will just have cryptographic keys

that will just make all those things

shut off. Okay. And more of that thing

would have to get to extreme scale. It's

like, you know, the rep wrap concept,

the self-replicating kind of thing,

right? Self-improvement.

>> Basically, there's so many frictional

breaks that are built into this that I

think it's hard because the physical

world requires resources to replicate,

right? And so like what humans human

wants and needs ultimately come from

okay get you know the resources for

reproduction right that's really what it

comes from okay and of course there's

all kinds of things that are high level

philosophy blah blah that don't seem to

relate to that directly but the

resources for reproduction are a good

way to macro think about it doesn't have

goals un or it won't have unless its

goals lead to reproduction it doesn't

actually you know uh it doesn't virally

spread It's possible you could have

something where it self-prompted itself

and did that,

but it would need to be in the closed

loop of being able to actually reproduce

itself as a payoff function for that.

Then you could get evolution going. So

I'm not saying it's completely

impossible, but I'm saying that I think

the incentives are set up in such a way

to prevent that from happening in the

same way that in theory we could have a

world where everybody went around

electrocuting themselves from

electricity, but we set up the

electricity under such tight controls

that that is not the world that we have.

Okay. Y

>> there's such strong economic incentives

>> for humans to not get electrocuted that

we set it up that way, right?

>> And um

>> even the stuff on oh it could be a

softer virus that takes everything over

and commandeers things. Well, like

that's only in the digital realm, right?

You can still, you know, what what

what's the uh uh you know the Tyler the

Creator thing?

>> Yeah, the meme uh about bullies.

>> Yes, that's right.

>> That's right. So, I actually had a um I

had a post on that a long time ago, uh

which is a remix of it, which is like

how how is AI risk real? Just turn it

off.

The whole thing is set up for you to be

able to turn it off. Like you have to

imagine the off switch goes away, right?

What does every computer have? It has

the off switch, right? So, there might

be well what if the decentralized? Okay,

but humans still have to keep these

decentralized systems going, right? And

so at a minimum you're talking about a

human AI symbiot of which like you know

a cryptocurrency is almost like a vzero

of that where the the software provides

an incentive for the humans to replicate

it you know right um

and so it's possible that you could have

something like that there's a model that

has a cryptocurrency and you people

worship it and they replicate it because

it gives them advantages and so it's

possible but anyways coming back um

I think at a minimum decentralized AI

will be a very strong contender and it's

possible it's the only contender. The

reason is AI might be an interesting

thing where it's relatively expensive

very expensive to create but relatively

easy to copy with dissolation attacks.

And I think if for example let's say

completely hypothetically that there was

an enormous capital markets crash and it

was very difficult to fund anything for

a while. Then as somebody said well we

could get 10 years just on the models we

have now. Right? And by the way,

sometimes that happens. You know,

nuclear energy, there's a lot of energy

put into nuclear energy and then there's

just just stopped for decades, right?

Not everything accelerates to the moon.

It is very possible that there's enough

of a capital and social kind of thing

where some of AI is paused for a while

just due to capital constraints because

it it's more and more expensive to make

these models, you know. Sorry. So, let

me pause there. So that that putting

that all together that's my view is

you're going to have personal private

programmable centralized AI. Oh one

other thing the trusted tribe

AI within the trusted tribe increases

productivity between trusted tribes

decreases productivity. So you make more

money perhaps within the tribe but then

you have to spend it on verifying stuff

between tribes. So crypto is for between

tribes and AI within tribes.

>> What do you think of the like will LLM

get us to a world where it's not just

middle to middle but it's actually end

to end? you know, will it get it to AGI

in some capacity? You know, do you

believe in recursive self-improvement or

sort of AI training the AIS in in some

capacity? You know, are LMS capable of

actual creativity and invention? Um, you

know, we talked about bio earlier like

will we have, you know, novel, you know,

math, science, you know, uh, scientific

re research. um or do we need new

architecture for that or are you dubious

of just the idea in general that that AI

can can uh you know replace or

substitute for human labor in a in a

mass scale?

>> No. Well, so I'm not well look exists,

right? So obviously you have full

replacement of human drivers there just

like you have full replacement of

elevator operators, just like you had

full replacement for the most part of

artisan old chair manufacturers.

So it is certainly possible for a given

job that it gets fully automated, right?

And so but I think physical world jobs

because of the verifiability are easier

to potentially automate.

That said, I think that um

let's take each of the things because

you said a few different things. First

is physical world jobs if you automate

them. Well, we went from artisal work

with chairs to chair factory. It's not

like you didn't know need to know how to

make a chair to set up a chair factory.

You still need to have somebody there

who's like an expert in chairs and you

can just do a lot more varieties of

chairs a lot more cheaply. You have to

verify the result. You're cranking out a

thousand of them. You start doing math

on them. The scale goes up but and and

the artisan gets factored out into the

manager and the technician,

right? So the the manager is setting up

the factory and looking at the economics

and you know so and so forth. Then

technician is debugging the factory when

it doesn't work, right? So engineering

gets split into the uh the engineering

manager type person who's writing the

prompts and the technician is doing the

verification.

Okay. And uh

I think that

we're going to hit we're already hitting

a point where

like the velocity does increase so the

bar increases. But I, you know, there's

a big difference between going to 100%

and and being at 99%. At 99% your

workload just increases. At 100% you

stop doing that job and you go to

something else, right? But if you think

about how much easier it became to like

put images, video, so 90 making it 99%

easier just means people do it a lot. At

100% easier, totally done, then they

don't do it at all and they move on to

something else, right? So elevator

operating, it's not like elevator

operating became so much easier. In

fact, it became so easy that you don't

even have somebody sitting in the

elevator and and because it used to be

like a pulley system and so on and so

forth. She had someone like supervising

the thing, right? It's more analog,

right? Um and they would like level it

out at exactly the right, you know,

level. Um when it became digital and

fully automated, that that's actually

the first self-driving car. Haha. Right.

Like going up and down. All right. Um so

I think Bendic may have made that point

or something like that. Right. The

vertical self-driving car, right? It's

like a train. It's like a vertical

train.

So the uh

now in terms of discovering new math and

science

yes if you have the right prompt it's

amazing in terms of searching the

literature mathematicians physicists are

starting to get some value out of it

right like opusk like huge props to them

on that because and especially in like

biology we're synthesizing all these

facts there's something called

biomedical text mining and so on AI's

revolutionized that because biology was

just something where the the the the

facts were stored in English in this

weird inconsistent way across thousands

of papers and nobody could span all of

that. Right? So AI is going to mean the

century of biology because finally all

of this work that was spread across all

these different journal papers can be

synthesized and understood. Right?

That's a really really really big deal.

Just simply the bio aspect of it we can

but but that said it's everything we

knew not everything we don't know. It

means that you take the full set of

everything we know and you fill in all

the intermediate aspects of it. Right?

And you can do that for a long time like

because there's so much there you know

so much there that's just a synthesis of

two existing areas right but when you

look at some of these like you you know

Donald Kut the other day right he posted

like some graph theorem or something he

was so impressed that AI could could get

a result for him right

if you've read what he did you'd have I

mean you'd have to be expert to even

know what he was saying let alone to

verify like to either prompt or verify

you already needed to be an expert

Because and the thing is I can see AI

spit out to some people it convinces

them that they're suddenly physicists

have solves quantum gravitation or

something like that. You know what I

mean? Have you seen that kind of thing?

Right? So in the absence of actually

being able to verify it by hand, some

human has to verify it to say that it's

right. I think that's going to persist.

to give an analogy. This is not a

perfect analogy, but like with Coinbase,

we thought like listing would eventually

go away and not be a big deal and that

people wouldn't care and everything

would be listed and just be free market

or whatever. But there's always

something that's the equivalent of

listing. Like, okay, you list it over on

this exchange, but like guessing listed

on Coinbase in the main app above the

fold, there's always something scarce

because human attention is scarce,

right? So, listing never went away as

like in a main event. There's always

some IPO like thing. Yes, we're listed

on this exchange in this fashion, right?

Or we became a top 10 coin or something

like that, right?

So, in the same way, I think whatever

gets automated, then in a sense, humans

work, human human work moves to what

can't be automated. Now,

that may be almost like um like things

that humans are picked for because

they're not robots, like human

companionship or something like that,

right?

um or like uh personal trainers or

things like that, you know, something

where the whole point is that it's a

human as opposed to a machine. Another

way of putting it is

remember the digital divide,

right? So in the 90s there's the sub

only the rich people will get the

digital and all the poor people will be

left without. We're actually going to

have the opposite.

Digital is cheap. Physical is a premium

product,

right? So AI, robots, digital will be

cheap. Human is a premium product.

>> Okay. But going back to agency and

taste, that's that's what everyone says.

You know, humans will do. We we've seen

over time and time again, AI just, you

know, cut into that. Do we not think

that AIs are just going to be also

better at at taste and agency?

>> I don't think that's true on a

short-term basis. I think um

the smarter you are, the smarter the AI

is, right? That's been now true for the

last several years, right? It's possible

there's some huge step change. Okay? But

in so far as where you're typing in a

prompt is like you're the human is a

sensor, the AI is the actuator. You're

sensing the world. You're typing

something in and it's a very

highdimensional vector you're giving it.

It's like AI is a spaceship and you're

pointing in a direction and whether you

prompt it in Portuguese or Tagalog,

whether you're talking about math or

like the number of different directions

you can point the thing in is enormous,

right? It it can't that that direction

setting is something where it has to

know something about you and what you

want at that moment, right?

I don't know, as I said, I think um

I'm not sure if AI can read your mind,

but it could be able to read your body,

right? I think it's a oneliner, right?

that the like biotech can prompt it in

your sleep, right? So all the wearables

and stuff like that, I think you'll get

a lot out of that. Okay.

But I don't believe like agency and

taste. Um so I mean people I think they

overrotate on this. It's not really the

case that there's I think agency, IQ,

taste are correlated.

Okay. It may be that it's a little bit

like uh most people in the NBA are tall

to take something that you know a lot

about, right?

within the NBA.

Um, height is not the number one

variable that you think about some, you

know, like Steph Curry is not the

tallest or whatever, right? However,

it still actually does correlate with

scoring average if even within the NBA,

but it's what's called restriction of

range. Everybody's already tall. So,

conditional on everybody being tall,

other variables matter more.

Okay? However, if you just took tall

guys and short guys and put them on a

court, then height the taller team

basically wins typically, right? Because

they just hold the ball above you. Ah,

you know, right? Okay.

So, in the same way like people who are

already smart might see that yeah,

higher agency people or people with

better creative taste. Fine. Right. Like

uh and maybe a technician role is less

or and and maybe the Steve Jobs type

role is more. But honestly

like

one way of looking at it is all of the

Jeffersonian natural aristocracy around

the world will rise. Why? AI doesn't

take your job. AI makes you the CEO

reframe right AI makes you CEO because

your job is actually a lot like using an

AI model is a lot like CO training. You

know, many years ago, I used to say that

and it's still true, but you know, when

you're in high school, you could quickly

see

like why do people accept that athletes

have very high compensation?

Because when you're high school, you

could see whether you could dunk and if

you can't dunk, you know that like

Michael Jordan isn't outsourcing his

dunks. He's dunking, right? So they that

talent is intrinsic to the person. It is

a uh non-transferable asset, right?

Similarly, someone can tell whether they

can sing or they look like a model,

right? So, um the actors, the musicians,

the singers, the athletes, all of these

clearly had talent and people were okay

with their compensation. There was a CEO

who used to say, "Well, I deserve to get

paid more than a second basement."

Okay, I forget this guy. He's like some

tech guy in the 90s or something. It's a

funny line, right? Because he's like, "I

add more value, right, to the world than

this." But the issue is that people

would think of what being CEO was as

just sitting up with your feet on a desk

barking outdoors. You know, people would

be like, "Oh, Elon, he just pays people

to do his stuff. He doesn't launch the

spaceships himself." Right? And that's

because they are only accustomed to like

clicking a button on Amazon and spending

money on Amazon and they they think that

something that is simple for them was

simple on the back end. Of course, it's

opposite, right? to make it simple is

really hard, right? And so to like get

the top rocket scientists and car

engineers and brain machine interface

people and tunneling people and blah

blah blah blah blah and have them all

compensated and working and directed and

debugged is actually very very difficult

as you know if you tried it. And guess

what? See the thing is that historically

it's been the case that people couldn't

try their hand at being CEO.

What they could do instead is they could

try their hand just like they could try

their hand at basketball or or football

or they could, you know, pick up a

microphone. They could try their hand at

math and science

and they could see how good they were at

math and science. So the initial tech

guys in the 90s and the 2000s, they were

respected because they were good at math

and science, not because people, many

people didn't perceive the business

aspect. They still didn't really give

credit on that. But page rank, for

example, okay, it's IEN values. I can

like math guys, tech guys could perceive

okay that was a difficult technical

problem that must have been the value

that they created. It's part of it but

you know the manager part is actually

more point being though that at least

somebody could say okay these tech guys

are better at math and science than me

therefore their compensation is merited.

Now however the thing is that bouncing a

basketball or trying a math problem were

cheap to make somebody manager of a

company was expensive. So they couldn't

try and fail. They could try and fail

playing basketball and see how much they

sucked.

They could try and fail singing, see how

much they suck. They could try and fail

in math, see how much they sucked very

cheaply in high school. They would learn

their true ability level that they're

not able to run like a bolt. They can't

sing like Adele, right? They can't do

math like uh Terrence Tao, right? And

they'd say, you know what, I know where

I am. I know my strengths and

weaknesses. I'm okay with that person

having more or having higher status

because it was a fair competition. I got

a shot. It was cheap for me to try. But

because putting them in charge of an

organization to make them CEO was

expensive, many people persist in the

delusion that the CEO adds nothing to

the organization.

Right? And uh you know though it is say

I will say the best cos and the worst

cos have something very deep in common.

You know what that is?

>> What

>> the organization can run without them

>> because the very best CEOs set up a

right a machine so that they don't have

to micromanage it every day. That's

really hard to do because they need

basically, you know, Gwin Shotwell

running SpaceX is like Elon doesn't have

to look at every single detail because

she's so so so good, right? Like uh or

Vibe and and Tom Zoo on Tesla, like

they're so good, right? But recruiting

junior Elons that are okay with not

having the spotlight while Elon has a

spotlight and takes all the flack,

non-trivial to do. Go try it sometime,

right? Find somebody who's more detail

oriented than Elon to run your company

and you can be Elon, right? Okay. So

point being that um

now what AI does it reduces the cost.

You're you know AI doesn't take your

job. AI makes you a CEO. You're the CEO.

Now what is being CEO? It's writing up

clear instructions of what you want

sensing the market verifying the output

and so on and so forth. What that means

is all these people around the world

like you know the calendarly founder is

Nigerian right? There's many founders

who are from countries that were quote

poor countries or what have you, from

India, from Latin America and so on.

Internet access means all of these smart

people can get very far on zero

resources. Very far, right? Because the

cost of quote hiring someone is

hyperlated. You can hire an AI to do it,

right? To riff on that more. So AI

doesn't take your job. AI makes you a

CEO. Another one is AI doesn't take your

job. AI takes the job of the previous

AI. Claude took Chat GBT's job. Right.

Um just like midjourney you know took uh

took Dolli's job took stable diffusion's

job and you can syn systematize that.

What I literally have is I have a

spreadsheet where I have AI coding tool,

AI image tool, AI video tool like this

and I have some subcategories like best

tool for AI comics for AI graphics and

so on and so forth. And then in a given

month I have the best uh model for that

kind of thing in that month. So claude

code you know for example or midjourney

for AI imagery. And then when that gets

swapped out AI didn't take your job. AI

took the job the previous AI. So I'm

hiring the AI. I literally have the

token budget. I have the budget for

those rows. And that is literally how

across an organization you say okay

we've just fired you know codeex and

we've hired claude

right so AI doesn't take your job AI

takes the job of the previous AI a third

version is um AI doesn't take your job

AI lets you do any job

a little bit right you can be a pretty

good artist you can be a pretty good

musician you can it's like one of the

things about being CEO as you know you

often have to be like a six or a heaven

in many areas. Why? Because you have to

be able to do the job well enough before

you hire a specialist in that area,

right? Before you have a chief designer,

you're the designer if you're the

founder CEO, right? Before you have a

CFO, you're the one who's on the hook.

Prepare the financials, prepare the

returns or whatever, right? So, you have

to be a generalist who's pretty good and

in a pinch can do that role, can

supervise that. That's why it's so hard.

That's why being CEO is so much harder

than any executive position. Okay? AI

helps you with that where you can get to

a six or a seven. You can be like a

generalist, but a specialist is usually

needed for polish.

A specialist has a vocabulary. A

specialist can confirm the AI is making

mistakes that it's hallucinating and so

on and so forth. And again, people will

constantly argue as to whether that will

always be there or whether it'll go away

or whether AI will raise a bar and then

you know now the new specialist is even

more sophisticated with AI, right?

>> I want to zoom out a couple more talks

before we go. One is the SAS apocalypse.

I'm curious what your mental model is

for all these SAS companies. Um are they

you know some people say hey they've no

their modes have gone away. They've no

you know code mode no data mode no more

UI mode and um now there's going to be

AI native companies that sort of you

know take up a big chunk of what what

what they do like you know Figma you

know who we're invested I'm personally

invested in you some people are bullish

as an example just because it's

founderled and and they'll continue to

innovate. Some people say, "Hey, is

there a role for a designer in the same

way that there used to be? Now it

fundamentally changes and you know what

what does that do to collaboration tool

to tools like that?" What is your your

thought on on the SAS apocalypse? Is

everybody on the conveyor belt on the

way to the guillotine? Um h how do you

think about that?

>> I don't think so because I think if

they're smart then the thing that AI

can't do is distribution, right? So if

you have notion, you have Figma, you

have now replet and so and so forth.

You've got all these people and boom,

you can ship with AI faster, you know,

features to them, right? And um so in

that sense, I don't believe in the SAS

apocalypse. I think you might still see

SAS under pressure from people who can

clone the interface quickly. That is

true. I think people will build local

versions. That is true. I think people

may not want their data on remote

servers. they might want desktop

versions with local data. So they can

like for example uh Obsidian is going to

become more of a contender versus notion

because the markdown files there's a

network effect on data when it's local

and you can analyze the whole thing like

local data you get compounding data

right so but so so in a in the naive

sense that oh anyone can clone anything

and so therefore you know it it just

doesn't work like that like if you set

up if you cloned all of Facebook's code

and you set up facebook.com

right? Or Instagram2.com. Who's going to

log into that? Right? You could

literally have every single thing coded

there, but your your ad rates are going

to be far lower because no one's going

to log into it, right? The distribution.

That's like a thought experiment to say

if you just clone the whole thing, you

still have to get the distribution for

it. And so it's not just a cloning, it's

execution. Now with that said like

there's certain kinds of things like

let's say Netswuite right which suck

that but they're complicated

where I think it is true that if they

suck at execution or or rather many say

they suck like I hate the product put it

like that right zero's better but you

know like sorry Netswuite okay they're a

big company you won't have your feelings

hurt it's very rare that I ever say any

product sucks because um I don't hurt

anybody's feelings so hopefully I didn't

strike that from the record fine

Netswuite's product could be improved.

Okay. Um so uh something like that which

is like sort of a vulnerable incumbent

that's just milking and that hasn't done

anything for a while. Yes, I think they

can get disrupted but I'm not sure that

it's like uh I don't think it's quite

like oh everybody on Blackberry is going

to die because iOS is taking over. I

don't think it's quite like that because

I think AI can accelerate a SAS company

just like it can accelerate a disruptor.

I think it kind of accelerates both.

>> Yeah. Well, one last thing that we'll

get to Anthropic, uh, what happens if

let's say Anthropic, you know, becomes a

multi- trillion dollar company, right?

Um, like how much leverage do they have

or just even private companies in

general o over what is the relationship

between them and governments? Are they

like hiring their own militaries at some

some point? What does it look like when

these companies become uh you know 10x

bigger you know 50x when AI really

achieves its its potential and these

companies are bigger than than the

biggest countries.

So I think that at least that specific

company while it executes very well um I

am skeptical as to whether they're

executing well let's call it politically

um and so because of that if they like

ultimately at the very largest scale

markets are political like for example

there's an entrepreneur they raised from

a VC who raised from LP who's often a

sovereign fund or a pension fund and

they're under a state and they're under

the rulesbased order, right? So like

there's certain things that are at the

macro level that you don't perceive

because one thinks of them as concepts

but become variables, I think that

unless one is very very savvy that those

things could change. Like one thing I

think about uh the Silicon Valley AI

companies is they're actually scaler

rather than vector thinkers.

They're only modeling AI disruption

and they're not modeling all the other

simultaneous singularities, all the

political singularities that are

happening, all things like, you know,

solar mooning and stuff like that,

right? And why are those things

important? because they change the

leverage of political factions which in

turns means their world model is

incorrect because they're only if you're

only extrapolating out AI and you're not

trapping out all the other things that

are either going vertical or going down

like this then uh they don't have a

proper model of the future

and that's that's as vague I I'll be

much more precise on my own blog um but

that's

says P or PG that's how I can say it

Without pissing anybody off, just go to

x.comgs and you'll see what I mean by

that. Right? But TLDDR is I think the

American AI companies as much as they've

given to the world and I like them are

only mo they are basically thinking all

nation states continue to exist in their

current form and the only disruption is

AI like they still model as America

versus China for example. They don't

model internal things internal issues.

They think the reserve currency sticks

around. They think all these things

stick around, right? um they aren't

taking a multivariat approach in my view

that's their weakness they have so many

strengths but that's their big weakness

so I don't think that in that form

they're going to get to trillions in

fact I think the counterattack on them

is going to be so dramatic that it might

be that you just have decentralized AI

like American AI companies for example

the copyright stuff right there's a huge

backlash building against that whereas

the Chinese or the decentralized models

can just do anything Hollywood anything

right potentially So the pirate bay kind

of AI is actually more free. The less

profitable AI is also less copyright AI

might be better AI, you know. So just

things to think about. I think uh you

know things compound until they don't

and they start hitting sigmoidal

constraints and often backlash

constraints like this, right? So I think

that's what they're not modeling. Yeah.

>> Political constraints.

>> Makes sense. Okay. Let's let's get the

zodal.

>> Zodal. All right. Now this is what I

care about.

basically um you know AI is the attack

but ZK is the defense. So what I mean by

that is zero knowledge like you know

what the transformer is to AI zero

knowledge is to cryptography and um

zodal is a Zcash powered mobile wallet

um that is basically fully encrypted

Bitcoin. Okay, this is 30 years of

cryptography. This is basically what

Milton Friedman wanted decades ago.

There's actually this great clip.

>> The one thing that's missing, but that

will soon be developed, is a reliable

ecash, a method whereby on the internet,

you can transfer funds from A to B

without A knowing B or B knowing A. The

way in which I can take a $20 bill and

hand it over to you and there's no

record of where it came from.

And you you may get that without knowing

who I am.

>> That kind of thing will develop on the

internet and that will make it even

easier for people to use the internet.

Basically that is what uh Milton

Friedman predicted almost 30 years ago.

Okay, this is um uh in the '9s. Okay, it

was like when the internet was just

rising and zodal is the incarnation of

that. Okay. Because zero knowledge

proofs which basically mean anybody can

prove anything without revealing

anything else were developed and then

they were commercialized in the form of

Zcash scaled with zero knowledge proofs

for scaling um Ethereum and with ZK

roll-ups and things like that. And then

they were made efficient so you could do

them on mobile. And then finally Apple

and Google lightened up on crypto apps

on mobile. And so finally you can

teleport arbitrary amounts of money

around the world.

And so this round we just led this with

uh you guys crypto melvosses

um Paradigm

uh Coinbase uh Cureshi of Dragonfly as

you know large fund um and you know a

bunch of other uh uh great people. Um,

and the uh the reason that that Arthur

Hayes also was uh uh you know former

former BitMXio and so the reason that

this is super super super important

there's only um you know you can click

this you can install this on on web or

not web on on iOS or Android right the

reason this is so insanely important

there's really only five crypto assets

that I've spent more than a thousand

hours on Bitcoin Ethereum Salana USDC

Zcash and I actually think Zcash is

maybe the most important of them in the

years to come. Why? So, let me say at

least my kind of thesis as of right now

on fiat, gold, digital gold and digital

cash meaning Zcash, right? So, I think

fiat will be around particularly among

eastern states because eastern states

are broadly higher trust. So that's not

just China, but it's like India and

Southeast Asia, the ASEAN countries and

so on. Bitcoin, so then physical gold,

gold bricks are also very popular in the

east. But the and and westerners often

like gold, but they'll buy the

instrument like you know, right? And

there's gold. Tether, you know.io. So

Tether has a digital as as a goldbacked

stable coin, which is actually at 3.7

billion. So that's cool. X Aut is pretty

cool. You can check that out. You have

to trust Tether's redemption, but

Tether's got a pretty good track record

now over 10 years for with USDT and so

on. So, XAT is cool. Fine. So, fiat will

continue, I think, to have its role. Uh,

just like the desktop continues, you

know, desktop continues, you know, 30

years later. Windows and Apple are still

releasing things. It's still valuable.

Some of the actions moved away from it,

but the desktop continues. Still a large

business. So, fiat continues among

eastern states.

Gold, physical gold is more popular in

the east because you can secure it more.

There's going to be more stability. X

aut may be what's popular in the west.

Now we come to Bitcoin. What is my view

on Bitcoin as of 2026 March? Bitcoin has

become provable global institutional

collateral.

Okay. I think Bitcoin is less of a

currency for individuals now. has become

so accepted by institutions and so

centralized with Black Rockck and Sailor

and so on and so forth and Belli and

many countries adopting it and whatnot

that it has a unique thing. See, when

you say there's a certain number of gold

bricks in Fort Knox, even giving a video

of that can now be faked very very

realistically with AI, right? But what

can't be faked is what Blly does where

he posts, I have this public address

with this much BTC and watch, I'm going

to move it to this address,

right? That is something which so long

as it's actually Blly's Twitter account

which there's some degree of proof on

that you know because it's been around

preai or whatever so long as you believe

that and that's the one piece you have

to believe because you have to start

thinking about what is what am I what am

I taking as a premise right he can post

I have the coins at this address here's

the address I'm going to move it to when

I move it I have proven I have custody

it's proof of reserve right you can also

sign a message coming from with that

private key you don't have to even move

it

the point being that provable

global institutional collateral. Anybody

in the world, he can prove cheaply

anybody the world that he has this

amount of Bitcoin. You cannot do that

for physical gold bricks.

In a lower trust world, especially in an

online world, that's very valuable

because everything gold audits, videos

of gold audits can now be faked with AI.

But the provable global institutional

collateral, now institutions can prove

they have the BTC to each other.

Okay. And they can do so across borders.

So the transparency of Bitcoin in the

sense of all assets are on chain becomes

valuable. Now the thing about this is

with the advent of AI, chain analysis

will be there for everybody, right?

Everybody can do blockchain analytics.

This is just like changing the balance

of power. It used to be that only chain

analysis could really do that at the

scale that it can. Now it's becoming

much easier to do. And so a lot of

Bitcoin use will be deanonymized over

time.

And so if you're running a transparent

blockchain, it becomes an institutional

blockchain because it's just only an

institution can survive that degree of

transparency. Like individuals can't

survive being tracked for everything.

But institutions are it's like a public

company. It's supposed to be tracked,

right? You know, like that. It's like

sort of it's because robust enough it's

meant to be tracked in a certain way.

It's designed to be tracked, right? an

individual, a person is not meant to be

public, but a corporation can be, right?

It's funny to put it this way. There's a

private individual,

there's a private company, and there's a

public company, but I guess you could

say, "Oh, it's a public figure, but

people don't like being public figures,

but there's kind of an equivalent there,

right? A public figure, maybe some of

their stuff is tracked, but they don't

want everything to be tracked." A public

company, maybe all their stuff is

tracked. Fine.

Provable global institutional

collateral. There's another thing which

is that way of thinking about what

Bitcoin is solved some of the major

issues. Um quantum right which is Nick

Carter's put out these things on it.

Let's say Nick Carter is right and I

think he might be right that quantum is

an underappreciated threat. The Bitcoin

core developers aren't taking it

seriously and even if it was something

that they've rolled out tomorrow it

would still be a multi-month migration

process because ECDSA like the addresses

you everybody has to manually send their

assets from one address to a new

address. Okay. So you you can only do

whatever 100 thousand of people those

assets can be moved in a given day.

However, if you look at Bitcoin rich

list, Bitcoin is so topheavy,

right, that it's got so these

institutional addresses that you have to

do the math, but probably a few million

addresses all moving their funds would

move like 99% of the Bitcoin in a few

days.

And so Bitcoin is digital gold actually

is quantum resistant. It's Bitcoin is

digital cash that isn't right. Meaning a

million like institutions all moving

their assets can be done in a few days

but a billion people all moving like

five bucks or whatever can't be done in

any reasonable amount of time. Okay. So

everybody who can't move then gets

quantumdmed and anybody who can doesn't

but all the assets are concentrated the

big guys with me right and this also

extends to seizure like will all the

centralized bitcoin on coinbas's servers

seller servers etc get seized I think

it's quite likely I think it eventually

gets seized in some exigent circumstance

and so

it becomes something that I think only

an institutionally blessed thing can

hold and send, right? Provable global

insert collateral. This is a different

vision than what people wanted, but it's

actually still a valuable thing. What it

leaves open is the individual digital

cash case, right? Because gold is big

bricks that are moved in brink trucks or

the equivalent thereof infrequently

large denominations between

institutions, right? It's like the

high-powered back-end money, right? It's

not really meant for individuals. Cash

is the opposite. It's me spent for

individuals more than it's meant for

institutions. So Zcash takes over the

role of digital cash.

So that's fungeable, private, scalable

with Tachion, which is coming quantum

safe. Okay, which is also it's more

quantum safe, right? So that's why and

it's simple also. Zcash is probably not

going to ever do smart contracts. It's

going to keep it really simple. Why?

Because like um you know if you take

Bitcoin you can innovate in one

direction which is programmability and

that's Ethereum salon and so on. You

innovate in the other direction that's

privacy and that's Zcash. To get to

private programmability

is actually stacking those two together

and it's actually quite hard. It opens

up all these attack surfaces and so on.

So just scale Zcash first and then you

know there's Aztec, there's Alo, there's

all these other you know private smart

contract chains. I wish them the best. I

want them have a non-zero sum view of

the world. They're taking on a more

complicated problem.

In theory, they can just do the same

thing Zcash is doing, which is private

transactions. In practice, if you

remember Facebook in the 2000s, people

said,

why does Twitter exist? Facebook has

status update. Like one feature of

Facebook is all of Twitter. Why does

Twitter exist? Sometimes that's a good

argument, by the way. That's why, you

know, like Steve Jobs told Drew Houston,

Dropbox's just a feature, right? I mean,

Dropbox, it's funny. It's a great

company. and so and so forth. But like

if Dropbox had if iCloud was Dropbox,

it' probably be better. You know, app

like both both would be better off.

iCloud is kind of eh Dropbox is Dropbox

doesn't have as much distribution as if

it was part of a big operating system

kind of bundle. So sometimes people are

half right, half wrong. Dropbox company,

but it might have been bigger in terms

of percentage value if if uh if they had

been Apple's cloud services basically,

right? But okay, point is it's hard to

say whether it's just a product or a

feature, but my strong intuition is just

like Twitter's simplicity made its own

thing, right? Simple, scalable, billion

person digital private cash has been the

dream for 30 years and we're finally

there.

So zodal.com, install zotal.com. By the

way, I'm not a trader. I just don't care

about trading. I'm early on platforms

and infrastructure. There's things you

have to not care about in order to care

about things. You have to not care about

things. So very very very few things I

talked about. Also Zcash has been around

for 10 years. Like you know it's also

even the the the toxic way setup

ceremony that's gone like that got fixed

cryptographically.

So it's unusual that it's been around 10

years got a security track record. It's

got a decentralized base of holders. The

cryptography works.

>> Love it. That's a a great place to wrap

a wide-ranging conversation on what's

happening in AI and crypto. Uh, as

always, biology, fantastic conversation.

Until next time.

>> Yes. And oh, by the way, if you're in

Singapore, Malaysia or anywhere, come

visit ns.com and network school and uh

we're scaling and uh we'll talk about

that too next time maybe.

>> Yeah, love to see all the all the

progress there. Amazing what you guys

are doing. Excited to be involved in in

a small way and uh yeah, until next

time. Okay, thank you.