Balaji on the State of AI/AGI, Bitcoin & America’s Incoming Collapse w/ Dave & Salim | EP #191

And so your first point is there is no AGI. There are many AGIs.

Where I think AI does take us towards is. AI means everybody's a CEO, everybody's a manager. It's a lot like interacting with an employee, especially a junior employee, and you have to check their work.

As intelligent as the AI is, it's far, far better with a human interacting with it.

Yes.

This means the smarter you are, the smarter the AI is working with you.

It reverses the extreme specialization of the 20th century. Your wingspan increases.

At the end of the day, Balaji, do you believe they're going to be multiple players out there that are going to be providing equal or similar capabilities compared to what you just said, Dave, which is there's going to be someone who will be supreme over everybody else.

So here's what I think about that. Now that's a moonshot.

Ladies and gentlemen.

Welcome to Moonshots. Get out your second cup of coffee and pump up your IQ score by 20 points. We're about to jump into another incredible episode of WTF just happened in tech. I'm here with my amazing moonshot mates, Dave Blunden and Salim Ismail. Gentlemen, welcome. And today we're joined by one of the most extraordinary and outspoken thinkers on the future of AI, crypto and society at large, Balaji Srini Dasan Biology. It's a pleasure to have you. But before we jump into this deep conversation, allow me to give a proper introduction to Balaji. If you already know his work, you know how extraordinary he is. If you don't, you're in for a real treat. Balaji is an entrepreneur, investor, futurist, formerly the CTO of Coinbase and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He's also a deep thinker in biotech and longevity, founder of Council, one of the earliest consumer genomics companies and an investor in biotech startups at Andreessen Horowitz. And he taught genomics at Stanford, which I found really cool. Most recently, Balaji is the author of the Network State, the founder of the Network School, offering a bold blueprint on how online communities can evolve into self governing sovereign entities. I want one of those. I definitely want one around abundance. Today we're going to speak about his recent paper, AI is polytheistic, not monotheistic. Super important point. And we'll dive into bitcoin and crypto. We'll make a right turn down longevity lane, end up talking about how insanely different the world's going to look in 2035. So like I said, hold on tight. We're going to jump in. Balaji, I think it's good evening for you. You're in Singapore area today at, at the network school.

That's right, I am ns.com, baby.

Yeah, we'll, we'll go there and Salim, Dave, you and your normal, normal spots, normal habitat.

There is no normal spot. But yeah, as close as you can get.

All right, well, you know, it's been another incredible week across the board on everything but Balaji, you know, last time you and I saw each other physically was in Saudi at the FII Summit. But then before that was in New York. We were talking about longevity. We were just getting the idea of the longevity of the healthspan X Prize up and going. It's since launched. We have 630 teams competing to add 20, 30 healthy years onto your life. I want to talk about that. I talk about how the future of extended human health span is going to mix in with bitcoin, crypto network states and all of that. But I think one of the most important papers you put out recently was this conversation around AI being polytheistic and not monotheistic. And you put out 10 points and I want to dive into that. But before I do. Salim and Dave, any opening thoughts?

Really curious about that. Stanford class seems kind of non sequitur. Like you said, Peter, most wide ranging bio I think you could ever have, but that was interesting.

Sure.

So, yeah, let's jump in. So you had 10.

I was looking through some of your podcasts and listening to them Biology. And I really love the idea of fighting for Mars. Bitcoin and Life Extension covers a lot of the bases we look at here. So really awesome.

That's right. Infinite frontier, immutable money, eternal life.

What could possibly be better? Let me start with a broad ranging question. Do you think the world is going to be recognizable 10 years from now in 2035?

I mean, in the sense that like the continents will exist, yes. But in terms of the superstructure, like societal layer above it, I think very few institutions that predated the Internet will survive the Internet. And I look at it as this. It's in a sense the single most important force in the world, yet still underestimated. It's like it's upstream of AI, it's upstream of crypto in a real sense, upstream of China, upstream of robotics, upstream of what we're doing right now. It's in front of your face when you wake up and it's on your watch when you go to sleep. And it's yet it's in Front of politics. You know, Twitter elected Trump and Twitter deplatformed Trump and then X reelected Trump. And. And that happened in every other country. Twitter caused Brexit, and Twitter, you know, caused every political fracas we've seen. And that's just like one rivulet of the Internet. And so. So, yeah, I think the world is going to be radically, radically different. I mean, if you think about it, I mean, you guys, you know, we're. You guys maybe a little bit older than me, but I think kind of the world was relatively static from 1980 to 2015 or so. And then it really started changing quite rapidly over the last 10 years. I don't know if you guys feel the same way.

Well, I had. I had Ray Kurzweil on our stage at the Abundance Summit, and he said, we're going to see as much change between now and 2035 as we saw between 1925 in 2025. A century's worth of progress, I think that's right. Yeah. And so while continents are going to be the same and probably our biology may be the same, society's structures, when you say those will all disappear, you mean political systems, financial systems? What systems?

Yeah. So my view on the world is Internet first. And so I think that essentially. So, okay, I'm going to give a very quick macro structure and then go from there. Right now, the two kind of growing powers in the world, in my view, are China and the Internet. China is everything physical. The Internet's everything digital. The Internet has disrupted blue America and taken over media and money. China's disrupted red America, taken over manufacturing in the military. So Chinese robots, Chinese drones, that's on the physical side.

And.

And then AI on media and crypto on money, that's on the digital side. And these two kind of forces are just growing stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger. And a lot of the 2010s is about trying to resist them with the trade war and the tech clash, respectively. But the resistance was actually overcome, and China and the Internet are actually winning. And so I think the future is China and the Internet. And again, actually, that is communism versus capitalism. Much as, for example, in the early 1900s, Europe was the center of the world, and then it just sort of buckled in and it was American capitalism versus Soviet communism, splitting Europe down the center with the West Germans on the capitalist side, East Germans on the communist side. I think America was the center of the world in the early 2000. And it's sort of involuting. And you'll have the Chinese on one side and you'll have the Internet on the other side, like a lot of Chinese communist backed factions and bitcoin maximalist factions and you'll have lots of different startup societies around the world. One of the reasons for this is that since you asked my view on this, people talk about what money is and people talk about as a unit of account, a medium exchange, store of value. But Andreas Antonopus had a good line with the fourth purpose of money, which is system of control. And so that is to say you can freeze accounts, you can seize accounts, you can direct printed money, you can give banking licenses or not. That's actually in some ways an even more powerful tool than the police system because the police aren't as scalable as the monetary system. Monetary system is everywhere and it directs people silently and there's not really a vote over who gets a banking license or not or what have you. That entire system, the Fed's control over that system, which is the US dollar, but also the Canadian dollar, the Japanese yen, the British pound, the German mark and so on. If you look at the yields for all Western currencies, they're rising like this. And the yield for China is going down like this because all kinds of money is going into China and, and conversely Bitcoin is also appreciating. So all the capital is going into RMB and btc. And so that means that the like, it's not just like the US dollar, but the Canadian dollar, the British pound, all the things that are in the US greater sphere. We call it the American empire or the west or the international community that what Putin calls a golden billion people have different names for it. All of that kind of crashes at the same time in real terms. And so that means control is lost over a very large swath of formerly wealthy territory.

Two and stability is two clarifying questions very quickly. One is when you say Internet, I'd love for you to kind of describe what do you see as the Internet, because that's very amorphous. And secondly, yes, when you say Internet and, and China, would you also equate centralization and decentralization in that equation?

Roughly, yes. Correct. So, so China is. Roughly. So when I say China and the Internet, that is a shorthand for China is like it's China itself, but it's also the physical world, it's the past, it's the land, it's gold, right? It's bricks, both in the sense of gold bricks and B R, I C s, it is minerals, it's mining, it's roads, it's the giant cities and so on coming out of the ground. Right. And what is the Internet? The Internet is the virtual, right. In a sense, actually China is the 19th century. Right. So it's the past. Or you could also say it's like 1950s America, like the girders and stuff coming out of the ground. The Internet is the virtual. And really when I say the Internet, I mean the free Internet, the anglospheric Internet, the unregulated Internet. And that is, it's obviously cryptocurrency, it's AI. And of course you can say once you define these polls, there's obviously a Chinese Internet. There is in many ways that's like the front lines, right? The front lines are where do the Chinese tech founders go? Like are Jack Ma's purged by China or do they go abroad and start startup cities? A Chinese capitalist party to compete with the Chinese Communist Party? I think we'll see some of. Or did they integrate with the Chinese regime? I think that's a very important sort of thing. Sort of how? Like, you know, Germany was a border zone for communism versus capitalism. That's one very important border zone. Another border zone is India where there's like the physical India which is in BRICS and there's Internet India in the Indian diaspora. Right. And in this way you can identify border zones between the kind of physical and digital all over the world. And I think that if you apply that lens to many things, it's also state versus network. Right. So it's land versus cloud, it's state versus network, it's physical versus digital, it's past versus future. Uh, it's gold versus digital gold. But what's, what's going away is the basically the quote rules based order, the post war order. Right. There's another very important graph. If you Google apology.

I'm going to, I'm going to stop me and jump. I'm going to slow this down because I'm sure our listeners are spinning as well as I am. I'm probably going to come back and listen to this at 0.8 speed just to hear it one more time. Dave, you wanted to say something?

Yeah. Well, look, the whole time that I was growing up, Japan was going to take over the world. The Japanese economy was skyrocketing. It was about to catch up to the US it was going to bypass us in per capita GDP any day. And my brother actually went to Japan to learn Japanese because of the imminent takeover. And then it all stopped cold largely because of an aging demographic that no one had factored into their math. And so now, you know, China's per capita GDP is way behind the US still. But the, you know, the total GDP country GDP is catching up fast. But if you look at the underlying aging demographic, it's even worse than Japan. Actually, by far it's the worst in world history. The reason the US has stayed strong for so long is largely immigration. We have incredibly talented people from all over the world, including China, coming into the country and creating new companies, creating new ideas, and China has none of that. They have virtually no immigration. So curious to get your take on how that's going to play out. You know, if, if you view the world, you know, the ten year future of the world as Internet and China. Yeah, but is China going to grind to a halt like Japan did?

Totally. So let me actually take all your points in reverse order. First of all, I'm very sympathetic to your kind of worldview. I like that America, that's America we both grew up in and spent a lot of time in. So I'm only saying these things from an analytical lens, not a, this should be the thing, but this is the thing that's okay. So first, in reverse order, China's just actually introduced a so called K visa, which actually they are using to recruit global tech talent. So, so taking your points in reverse order, the US is cutting off H1B, is cutting off researcher visas, cutting off student visas, cutting off even tourist visas. Europeans, Australians are reporting getting strip search tourism has crashed. The U.S. the nationalist faction is cutting off visas. And unfortunately a lot of socialists are also very much against tech and they're not really going to be that enthusiastic about more tech guys coming in regarding Japan. The reason that they lost in the 80s was actually because of something called the Plaza Accords at that time. Remember, the US still occupies Japan. It has the US military in Japan. It nuked Japan and wrote its constitution, and so on and so forth. And so the Plaza cords, among other things, stop Japan from actually using the JPY to go and buy US property and so on and force them to instead buy worthless treasuries and the money printing stuff and so on that began at that time began the Japanese great stagnation. One way of putting in contrast the big difference between Japan and China. China is genuinely sovereign. What does that mean? For example, in 2010, actually in 2017, the New York Times reported that in 2010 the Chinese had actually gone and killed many American spies in China. They had rolled up a, a bunch of rings there. Now of Course, you know, spy versus spy happens. China obviously spies on America and there's all kinds of this thing going back and forth. But the reason that's an important contrast. Japan could never kill American spies, right? Because it could never do that. It can never have communications or operations that, that were not seen by America. It was not truly sovereign. America had root control over Japan in a way it doesn't over China. In fact, that's the common thread of kind of Chinese policy over the last 50 years. You know how like certain founders, like Zuck for example, he may have sold some of his company, but he never gave up control. Right. He always wanted to maintain voting rights, even if he gave up some financial rights. In the same way, at many times, if you say the last 50 years, China has taken worse financial terms to retain control. They have always pushed for sovereignty. That's something where their culture is the century of humiliation and they were crushed for many years. They can never give up sovereignty. They'll never do that again, no matter how much it is very similar to a founder who's very motivated to keep control of their company. So as a consequence, China's sovereign and it has surveillance proof deliberations in a way that Japan doesn't. And as one concrete example of that, last year, the year before, when Gina Raimundo, who was the then commerce secretary, went to China, they launched this Huawei phone on the day that she arrived that had chips that showed that China had at least partially gotten out from underneath the chip ban. And that kind of thing could never be done by Japan because Japan couldn't do anything in stealth. Right. China can do things in stealth, Japan can't. Finally, I would say within tech we often see something that kind of half works and it's a bubble and then people discount it, and then it comes back five or 10 or 15 years later, then it really works. Example, webvan didn't work, but then Doordash did. Example, you know, the Palm Pilot kind of worked and then the iPhone did. Right. Example World of Warcraft kind of worked and then Fortnite really did. And so if you think of China as like the real version of that, where it's actually working, then that's another thing where past performance may not guarantee future results. Let me pause there.

I can ask you about timelines on this too, because, you know, a lot of the trend lines are ten year trend lines. And Peter's question was a ten year question, but AI is like a two or three year thing. And so. So if I use the analogy of World War II, you know, Pearl Harbor Day was December 1941. The war was over, effectively over. 1944, truly over. 1945. So start to finish for the US it was only a three or four year journey. I think AI is on that same kind of trajectory where the declaration of war was essentially the chip ban against China. So we're about a year into it now. And the timeline from here to a resolution I think is going to be similar, very, very short because of the exponential rate of change. So, you know, when we look at demographic trends, long term demographic trends, that's always going to be 10, 15, 20 years to resolve. But I think the actual action is in a much, much shorter timeline. Do you agree?

Okay, so let me give, I've got four more counterarguments here and then I'm.

Going to move us to the paper that started this conversation.

Of course.

I really want to hit on that pretty hard.

Of course. So I'll be brief.

I have 20 questions, but I'll wait.

Okay, great. Me too. So first is China's demographic problems have robotic solutions. And the thing is that why did the south lose the civil war? Because the north industrialized. The north didn't have slave labor. And many times, if you look, societies that have lots of, for example, illegal aliens aren't slaves, but they're often paid under table wages and so on. So they're exploited in different ways. If you have a society that's got an abundance of cheap labor, it often fails to industrialize, fails to automate. And China is using its kind of demographic pressure to automate, automate, automate, automate as like a 1% shock every year to force them to automate. If you ever been to China, like it's, it's already ahead on that kind of thing. They already have the delivery drones, they have the hotel robots, they have all of that kind of stuff. So that's kind of point number one. Point number two is if you actually look at other metrics besides dollars, one of the issues is dollars are controlled by the U.S. government. And so you have to actually look at physical production. China, for example, has, you know, one shipyard, as the U.S. secretary of the Navy Carlos del Toro said, produces more ships than the entire US Navy combined. Hegseth, who's the current Secretary of Defense, has said Chinese hypersonics can sink all US Aircraft carriers. The Raytheon co said that the US can't decouple from China. And there's a Govini study that was commissioned by the Pentagon, $400 million study that basically showed the US military is made in China. If you go and look at the Tomahawk or the jdam, the famous American weapons, their supplier, supplier are all Chinese factories. So the war is actually already over. It's actually already been lost because China can just hit a button and just shut off supply chain. Right. That's why what's going on with the rare earth elements and so on and so forth. This is something that the, in a sense, the war was fought with the trade war in 2015 and the US lost because what China did is it diversified its revenue streams outside of the West. Only 15% of its revenue comes from the U.S. 85% comes from non U.S. sources. So even if the tariffs chopped it in half, they still got 90, 95% of their, their revenue left. And so I think that even the chip ban, for example, challenging the Chinese to a test of quantum mechanics and like semiconductor production, when all four, you know, of the major chip companies, you know, look, can the Chinese as a culture, can they do chip making? Of course. It's like challenging the Italians to a pizza making contest. And so, you know, this was like, this is right in their wheelhouse, like do math and computer science and manufacturing for national pride and Chinese sovereignty. Right. You know, it would be much better to challenge them on, for example, arguing in English. That's not their strong point, like making international media their only success. On me. Go ahead.

No, that's funny. That's funny.

It's funny. Right.

I'm going to, because I want to really hit where our audience wants to hear about. Of course, I want to dive into to AI and crypto in particular here.

One thing I will say, I'll just say one last thing is I do believe the Internet can balance China. But MAGA is trying to be more China than China. We have to be more America than America. That's what the Internet represents. It represents free speech, it represents free markets, it represents decentralization, it represents things that China can't clone internally without breaking its whole system apart. Right. So I think that a lot of what MAG is doing is like China envy, trying to out manufacture China, even having mimetic rivalry over Taiwan. But we can play our own game, which is the Internet. So I'm hopeful, but I think the hope is on a different axis than people think. Let me pause.

I have a quick question before you switch topics. Peter Balaji, I've heard you talk about China, Internet, Democrats, Republicans, Right?

Yes.

I'm assuming in that overall equation, Europe is irrelevant. India is mostly irrelevant. Brazil is Irrelevant. Much more minor.

I think Eastern Europe. So let me be more granular. I'm actually fairly bullish on Eastern Europe. I'm extremely bearish on Western Europe. I think it'll be the opposite of the 20th century. Roughly every country that did poorly in the 20th century because they suffered through communism, socialism, they now are capitalist and, or, you know, rationally nationalist. Conversely, every country that was wealthy in the 20th century, they became degenerate and they started fighting amongst themselves. So I actually think Latin America, you know, like El Salvador especially and maybe Argentina, is actually on the ups because they've sort of gotten immunized against a century of, you know, drugs and so on. I'm not saying everywhere gets there, but I think Bukele could be like, gosh, who's the guy who unified four states names Simon Bolivar Bekeli is young in his career. He could be the Simone Bolivar of Latin America. I think he's like Bakel, Lee Kuan Yew. I'm actually very bullish on him. I'm actually very bullish on Indians and moderately bullish on India on many metrics. If you look at like nuclear, if you look at steel, China's far and away number one. But India is a real but distant number two. It has come up a lot and it's radically different from when, from my youth, when my youth, it really was like, you know, like a third world country. It's really not that anymore in big pieces of it. Right? So I'm moderately bullish on India, extremely bullish on Indians. I'm bullish on the Middle east in the form of Dubai and Riyadh, and bullish in Eastern Europe. It's basically just an involution, almost a flip of the 20th century. All right, let's go to the AI post. All right.

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Sure. So let me preface it by saying I actually take the super intelligent stuff seriously in the sense of I think it's worth engaging. Like some people will dismiss it as, you know, oh, that's obviously not a thing. But clearly intelligent human beings exist, dolphins exist, octopuses exist. Like intelligence could exist outside of like a human brain. Right. Obviously it could, you know, so. But I think that actually existing AI over the last two and a half years as it's settled down a bit and there may be, you know, another like, you know, dogleg up in the future. Right.

It may be another evolutionary tree that brings us beyond what current systems can do.

Yes, exactly. Because right now LLMs and more generally probabilistic models are actually very good at system one thinking, sort of the instinctive thing. You know, Andrew used to say machine learning is what a human can do in one second and AI is maybe what a human can do in like one minute or 10 minutes. Right. You know, it's like extended the time. Conversely, computers historically have been very good at system 2 thinking, logical chains of reasoning, you know, for long periods of time. Right. So it is not impossible to imagine something like the tool former that could use system one thinking to route tools for system two. And some of the stuff with replit and some of the CO generation stuff is kind of there. But, but I think we're going to go into a degree of not exactly AI Winter, that's maybe too strong, but AI deployment. And let's talk about AI polytheistic, monotheistic. So that post is really about a constrained view of AI Like AI is actually constrained in ways that people haven't been talking about. For example, what didn't happen is a hard takeoff scenario of just building, summoning the demon and this one God, you know, and by the way, that was not, you know, you could have imagined someone had that. For example, the US invented the nuclear weapon, the nuclear bomb. And for a period they had it before anybody else and had the US being like the Nazis or the communists, they would have conquered the whole world and blown it all up. Right. But because it was a genuinely good actor, it didn't do that, didn't use that power, you know, for free, for as much evil as it could have. But AI isn't like that. I, very rapidly, on a grand scheme of things decentralized even faster than, than nuclear weapons. And I even think the analogy of nuclear weapons only can take you so far. Now you have, which, by the way, which was counterintuitive because it's expensive to build these models. But now the Chinese open models, you know, Kimmy and Quinn and Deep Seek and so on, as well as Llama, you know, which is llama 3 was actually a really good thing that Facebook put out there. Llama 4 is not being as good, but I give a lot of props as like for doing it in the first place. These are expensive things to put out there, all of those. I mean it's, there's so many good AI models now, right? At a minimum, there's, you know, ChatGPT, obviously there's Claude, there's Grok is pretty good, at least on the benchmarks. There's Gemini and then there's Perplexes models and there's all the Chinese models. Right. And there's just more every day. And so that's a polytheistic view. It's not first went to AGI wins and it'll just outcompute everybody.

But I think, I think the point you made, and I think an important point for people to understand here is these models are all leapfrogging each other and no one is deviating by orders of magnitude. And, and so we're likely to have at the end of this at least, you know, Dave, what's your guess? How many different, you know, large scale frontier models that are going to be globally, you know, five years from now or two years.

Well, and I think the natural dynamic actually is one at the end of the day. But we're in this golden era right now of a few months, maybe a year, maybe two years where they're on the order of 10 why?

Because aside depresses everybody else.

Well, we haven't, we haven't hit true self improvement. That started about a month ago. It'll go the next, say four or five, six months and so we'll know if there's a true singularity single winner about five or six months from now.

So you're saying that this is where GPT5, you know, pulled their punches and they're using their capability for self improvement.

There's no doubt. Actually that was a lot of research after that last podcast a week ago because they definitely sandbagged. Imad mentioned it on the podcast. And then we research, research, research and it's like, yep, there's no doubt that a huge fraction of the compute is going back to internal self improvement all of a sudden across all the foundation model companies. And you know, they're, they're depriving the consumer experience from that same compute. The backlog of things they want to build and launch is just much, much bigger than the available compute.

Well, we'll find out tomorrow when we're up talking to Kevin.

We'll try.

That's interesting. I mean, the thing is, where can, where can itself improve? And one of the biggest bottlenecks, one of my points in that post was the bottlenecks on AI. AI doesn't do it end to end. It does a middle to middle right now because the bottlenecks are prompting and verifying and a prompt, it's like if you think of a very, if you had a very fast spaceship, you could give it a vector on the two dimensional surface of a sphere, like a theta and a phi, to point it in a direction. Right. And even if it was very fast, you still need to point in a direction to get it to go there. And that's similar to a prompt. A prompt is like a high dimensional vector. You're pointing this very fast spaceship, this AI, in this direction. Right. So the prompt is one bottleneck and specifying that is one thing because obviously you can prompt to do whatever and then verifying the output on the other end. I think for visual stuff, one of the points I made in the post is visual things like front end, like images, like video. We have very good gpu so we can visually see whether something looks off. Visually.

Go ahead.

Yeah.

This is the topic that just absolutely, really, really, really matters. And I want to get away from the idea of somebody at OpenAI knows the answer, somebody at Anthropic knows the answer. They're not telling us. It's just not true. They don't know either. Nobody knows and we're all going to figure it out. Nobody knows what very, very soon, but nobody knows. Like if I said who's going to win the AI race, if I said that a year ago, everybody would have said, well, it's going to take a lot of Nvidia chips and training time compute and training time thinking, oh wait, Balajai just pointed out a really important point. It's turning out that inference time compute and reprompting is turning out to be more important than training time compute. So that's a massive shift in who's going to win and why in just the last few months. And so nobody knows how the next six months are going to play out. We do know that it's massively self improving, but we don't know which components. Like right now Sam is racing to get Stargate done because he needs that 100 billion, soon to be $500 billion worth of Nvidia to be pointed back at the self improvement problem, to maintain that I'm ahead and I'm going to stay ahead loop. And then China's probably doing something very similar. And we don't know if that's the winning move versus inference time compute from AMD or from some new source versus just raw brain power innovation on the algorithms. It's all going to be moving very quickly.

This may turn out to be wrong in 12 months or a year, or 12 months or a year. But I think I'm very skeptical that it's just a matter of spending more money because we've seen diminishing. I mean these companies are highly incentivized to make a lot of money and we have not seen radical improvements over the last year and a half despite a lot of spend. In fact, we have seen like very sort of disappointing is a weird way to put it because it's like a hedonic treadmill where this stuff is amazing. Right? But I'm very skeptical that it's just a matter of spending more money at this point, number one, and number two is the path the Chinese are taking with deep seek and other things is actually in part because of the chip ban or the chip restrictions which have been just partially lifted with this Nvidia deal. They took a chip constrained view, so they are using less chips to get the same or less advanced chips to get the same result. The other thing they're doing is they're doing a lot more in the way of physical AI like deployment of physical robots, like self driving is obviously working in both the US and in China. But that kind of thing is where they're focusing a lot of their energies. And so insofar as there are some embodiment that is necessary. Andrew and others have talked about this, like the feedback loops that you're mentioning. It may not be just a purely digital form that prompts on the computer. Maybe you just need constant haptic feedback walking around the world to perceive the world, build spatial intuition, essentially do physics experiments. Let me pause there.

So, Balaji, one of the points that, that you make in that first point, I think it's an important one that I want to understand. And Dave, you may have an opposite point of view here is there is no, you know, there's no single, let's put it forward beyond AGI, no single asi. At the end of the day, Balaji, do you believe they're going to be multiple players out there that are going to be providing equal or similar capabilities compared to what you just said, Dave, which is there's going to be someone who will be supreme over everybody else. Now we've heard, yes. So you believe there'll be multiple players? How many players?

Yeah, here's why. Yeah, I think, I think that the hard takeoff scenario was theoretically possible or what have you. Right. But I think that at this point, first of all, there's so much money, so much espionage, so much surveillance, so much mimesis in this space that I think is very, very, very difficult for something like that to actually happen at this point. Number one. Number two is also that, like, what does recursive self improvement actually mean? Is it just cogitation within a computer and the thing reflecting on itself?

It may mean new physics, new intelligence models, new capabilities.

I know, I know, but what I mean is like, okay, let me, let me be more precise. Eliezer has put out this thought experiment which is, imagine if there was, you know, a computer that could think for every second that you acted, it could think for a billion years and it could compute out every move that you could possibly think. And you thought you'd do this, but it computed out and so on. And that actually does work for things like chess, deterministic games where you can enumerate the game board state and things like that. But it doesn't work for chaotic, let alone turbulent systems or for cryptographic systems where there are fundamental mathematical constraints on how far out you can forecast it with finite precision arithmetic. And so you can easily construct systems. For example, you can have turbulent clocks, for example, like, you know, how people will consume randomness and inject randomness. For randomized algorithms, you could literally have physically turbulent clocks that can generate things which are impossible for an AI to predict. Mathematically impossible for an AI to predict. Right. And so I don't see people, I mean, I should probably write a paper on this or something. Right, but like you can actually show mathematically that. I mean it's kind of, I think it's obvious. But for example, if you ask the AI what is the solution to, you know, like the equations to forge a digital signature, right. Or to invert a hash function and get the pre image, it can't do that. That's what it can't do. Crypto is what I can't do. Chaos is what I can't do. Turbulence is what I can't do. So because it can't do those things, it cannot be this recursively super self improving, super intelligence that just wins and dominates everything because those phenomena exist in the world and there's aspects of predictability where it's fundamentally, physically and mathematically constrained. Let me pause there.

Yeah, well, the first thing you said really resonates, which is not necessarily a race to the biggest GPU farm and the $100 billion budget. And we know that because we believe that there's at least 100 to 1000x performance gain in the algorithms themselves. And one of the things that drives my friends at MIT nuts, especially the academic types, is that the transformer algorithm that's driving all of this AI is not that complicated and it frustrates the hell out of them because they've been researching all these arcane nooks and crannies for decades and none of it mattered in what's happening right now. Yet it's clearly intelligent, it's clearly got an IQ of 148 now. It's clearly coming up with its own ideas now. So if you believe there's 100 to 1000x performance gain inside the algorithms, the narrow definition of self improvement is do we now have the AI Alec Radford, that Leopold Aschenbrenner was talking about in his incredibly brilliant paper? Like Alec Radford, researcher at OpenAI, the guy that comes up with the next idea and implements it. Can AI do that completely self contained now? I think the answer is yes, plus or minus a few weeks, I guess.

I really disagree with that. Okay, so let me admit that that is possible, potentially possible, but it's similar to, for example, in 2015, let me qualify myself and then let me, you know, argue a little bit. Dave, in 2015 I remember writing a note internally, I think at a 16z when the chatbot thing was big, if you remember chatbots in 2015, and I remember saying what people seem to want from chatbots is iterated Google. That is to say, the difficulty of doing chatbots in the 2015 format was something where you could give a query, you could get back Google results and you could iterate on that such a thing, if it existed, would be more valuable than Google. Now I'm not, I'm not saying that that's not possible, but that was so far beyond what anybody at that time was attempting with chatbots, which were just if then else decision making trees. What it turned out, as often happens is the case is that the entire chatbot bubble helped inspire, among other things, one Greg Brockman, who obviously went and did OpenAI. Right. And he's written about that, how he was inspired by the chatbot thing as a technical problem solving, but he took it more seriously than anybody else did. And my view is, as of right now, unless there's something that bridges system one and system two thinking, which is certainly possible given that computers are now good at both, unless there's something like that, AI doesn't, you know, it still can't do 9.11 minus, you know, which is bigger, 9.1 versus 9. 9.8. Right. Anything that's spatial, that's logical, that's deterministic in the absence of, it doesn't have that verification. It's just symbol generation probabilistic. Right. It doesn't have another way of putting it, you know, with chemical reactions. If you have a chemical reaction that only goes, you know, like 0.95and you try to iterate it 20 times, you have 0.95 to 20, you have a huge loss. Yeah, exactly. Right. And the counterargument to this is people are saying the tool, the task duration of AI is improving and the benchmarks are improving, but when you use it in practice and it's just not there. Right. Like with billions of billions of dollars.

I'm going to deviate us into the next subject, but here's an important point for the, you know, for us to discuss in the future, which is there is two outcomes here. One is we have polytheistic, we have multiple AGIs, multiple ASIs. Dave, you're taking the point that there is going to be one primary ASI in the final result, you know, one digital God to rule them all. We can put, make that a long bet and we'll see what happens. Dave, your, your timeline for when you think we're going to know.

That is what I think most likely six months, you know, outer bounds two. Outer bounds two years.

All right, so this is our conversation.

And I also, I wouldn't take that bet because I think government involvement is what's going to force a somewhat polite. I think the natural dynamic is a winner take all. But government involvement hopefully will preserve some balance.

And Dave, your point is that there's so much compute going into the recursive self learning stuff now that over time one will emerge and shoot past everybody else.

I'm telling you, I use this stuff every day and it went from smart to freaking brilliant. Mind blowingly brilliant in the last few weeks. And there's no doubt in my mind it can self improve now just because I use, I mean just playing with it is just incredible.

All right, I'm going to move, I'm going to cherry, I'm going to cherry pick points on your paper biology. Okay, I have lost control of this podcast for sure.

Good.

Sorry, sorry. I just want. Peter, I'll give you the ball back. I just want to say one thing. I think that what is really underestimated is AI is not good at time varying adversarial systems like markets and politics today. So today.

But it was just, there was just a paper, there was just a paper published about AI's accuracy and predictions that was extraordinarily good.

I saw that and I need to dig into, I just saw it in my peripheral vision just today. I need to dig into that. But let me explain what I mean by this. First is when you have a labeling of cats and dogs, the English language doesn't vary. That conceptual label between the image and the text doesn't vary that much. When you have the rules of a game of chess that isn't time varying in the same way, but markets and politics are inherent. And markets, politics, media and so on is inherently time varying and adversarial in the sense that a post or a trade from a day ago or a year ago or 10 years ago will not necessarily make money or get likes in the same way that it will today. And the moment that anybody has an AI there, they'll start using it against other people. So you'll have a bunch of AIs each competing with each other. Right. And so because of that you're saying it's self centering. Yeah, exactly. I think I, I another way of putting it is there's just such strong incentives to decentralize AI at this point with all kinds of crazy corporate, corporate espionage, surveillance People refreshing the papers and so on that. How can you have that advantage beyond whatever a few days or months, people will just copy it very, very quickly, which is what we've been seeing.

All right, I'm here, Peter, tell me to shut up because I'm going to love this conversation. I'm just going to go.

There is so much.

Give me your.

All right, all right. I'm going to go to the. I'm going to go to one of your next points. I'm going to cherry pick out of the 10 points in your paper. The next one is AI is amplified intelligence, not artificial intelligence. I think this is really important because there's a tendency to have tremendous fear because of the view that AI is out there. And it's something which is going to compete directly with me and it's going to diminish my role and abilities on the planet. So amplified intelligence, please, go ahead.

Yes. So let me explain what I mean by this. Right now, people think of AI as completely agentic. Like you can do a task end to end completely by itself. For many tasks, it is really middle to middle. Now I want to clarify. Self driving has gotten to the end to end point. Right. It is now literally end to end. It can pick you up and drop you off completely. It took 20 years since the DARPA Grand Challenge, but it was solvable. However, that took billions of dollars and I don't know, certainly millions of miles driven and an enormous capex and a lot of time to get there. And there's a lot of actually warning and transition because the real world has friction, right. And so I am somewhere in between. I don't think AI takes all the jobs right away because what happens right now is you find yourself, at least I find myself the actual reality of AI without naming them, for example, there's like a fair number of founders, for example, who will send over like AI slop slide decks. And I'll be like, it's like the new Lorem Ipsum. Right? It's Lorem AI Ipsum. Okay. AI P S U M. Right. It's like placeholder text. It's like, you know, it's a. It's, you know, the new Midwit is a super intelligence. It's a super intelligence, yet Midwit, right? Me. Because it's garbage in, garbage out. Like you get a midwit prompt in and you get midwit text out. That's what I mean by amplified intelligence. Right. If you're really smart. Yes. You can prompt it to figure out new corners of Physics or math. And crucially, crucially, you can verify it by eye with your domain knowledge. Like, I'm sure Terry Tao can search this and find interesting areas of math that he couldn't find before. But he is capable of looking at the stream of symbols, coming back, parsing them, and figuring out if it's just gibberish or not. Other people will look at, will talk to it, and it'll tell them it's discovering all this great physics and so on. But without actually being able to do the experiment or do the calculations and do the verification step, they're like convinced they've discovered some quantum mechanical, you know, insight.

And it's just all, it's bullshit all the way gibberish. So I mean, the point you made here that I think is very important for folks to hear is this means the smarter you are, the smarter the AI is working with you. And other, the other half of this, which I keep on trying to shout from the rooftop rooftops is ask great questions.

Yes, basically, if you're good at, I mean AI means everybody's a CEO, everybody's a manager, right. It's a lot like interacting with an employee, especially a junior employee, and you have to check their work. You simply cannot shove it straight to prod. Fundamentally, that's the thing is as a CEO, as a manager, you're interfacing with the market, especially as a CEO or the founder. Right? AI is not interfacing with the market so it can throw slop over the end because it only has to satisfy you. It doesn't have to satisfy the unforgiving market. The market will just set it to zero. Okay? And.

I think a great point you make is that where you are using a certain type of AI now when you have an improved model, you just slot in the new model and you keep stay in the middle of middle.

Yeah, that's right. AI doesn't take your job, it takes a job of the previous AI. Empirically, once you have a slot in your budget for an AI text generator, an AI image generator, AI video generation, AI code generation, and so on and so forth, what you find yourself doing empirically is I swap out, you know, you swap out stable diffusion for mid journey and you swap out, you know, the old, you know, maybe cursor for Claude code and you swap out this for that. And you really don't want to use more than one, honestly, usually. Right. Sometimes you'll use more than one, but it's like easy to have. Like what I mean by that is once you get in the flow of midjourney. Do you want to switch over to Hicksfield or Google vo? You can. And actually these are all built by the way, such that a prompt in one will basically work with another one. But they're also subtly different. So it's a little bit like different social networks where they're kind of similar with the hearts and the posts and so on, but they have some. So usually once you've invested in a tool, you don't want to swap it out right away, but you can swap it out right away. Right. So what that actually means is these things are beating each other's brains in for the AI budget. And I do think that every company will have AI teams just like you have a social media team, right? Like 20 years ago is considered, oh my God, only, you know, people waste time on social media. 10 years ago is a novelty, ish to have a social media team now. It's obviously a core function of every company that creates content for social media. So every company will have an AI team that's just doing constant process optimization, verification of output and so on and so forth. So it does actually create jobs as well. The other thing it creates jobs as is in proctoring and verification because what AI is doing. Look you, we all see the positive parts of AI, A lot of people only see the negative parts. And I'm not talking just about the job taking part or whatever, I'm talking about the slop, the spam, right, the scams, what have you. So AI is going to radically increase the budget for proctoring and verification. Proof of human being. Only the beginning of that.

Yeah. Let me clean up one thing you said there because I think it's really important for the audience. I think we are in this golden era right now where as intelligent as the AI is, it's far, far better with a human interacting with it. There's something missing. There's clearly something missing. Even though it can solve incredibly hard math and physics problems, it can do entire hour long tasks for you and come back with near perfect answers. But there's still something missing in the creativity system too. Something ain't right. But that creates this golden, golden moment of synergy between the people and their AI agents. But the second part, the beautiful thing about AI is it can do 10,000 things for you concurrently. And if you can evaluate the answers and cherry pick the best one out of 10,000, you get just incredibly good results. So as an analogy, you know, midjourney, you mentioned you're making a movie and you're trying to Create the next scene and you need it to be funny. If you prompt a Geo3 or something like that and you say, hey, make me the next scene, you probably won't like what you get back. If you prompt it a thousand times, you get something incredible back. And it's very easy to set up processes of self evaluation, self improvement. Use another AI to evaluate the last AI and create these loops. And that's where an enormous amount of compute is an incredible competitive advantage. But that process is working really, really well for code generation, video game generation, movie generation, discovering new physics, discovering new math. As long as you have evals that can test the results that come back, you can make ridiculous progress ahead of the curve. Just turns out that AI self improvement is one of those types of tasks. It's just software.

I disagree with you for the following two reasons. The first is I think that what will often happen is the evals will basically just get gamed in the sense of it becomes like the Goodhart's law, like when a metric becomes a measure and so on. So, so for example, Grok, I look, I like obviously I love Elon. I'm, you know, like it's amazing that he's in the top five with models given how many other things he's doing at the same time. It's. It's actually honestly superhuman, right? The how, how good Xai is given how many other things he's doing. However, like, you know, when you actually try to use it on a daily basis, this is. Not everything necessarily shows up on the numbers, right? It's like, it's fine, it's good, but it's really good for a Twitter search and so on. But it doesn't like obviously Smash relative to Claude or what have you, they're basically comparable. And so I'd say one of the issues is the space is so multidimensional that evals are like. It's like hairs on a very large head, right? So it's like a spike of functionality. Like this number is up and this number is up and this. But the surface is so high dimensional that the kinds of things that you want to do with it, the evals don't initially capture. That's one point. The second point is, I think what I would argue you're underrating is those verification steps, those evaluation steps are not cheap and they are not really that good for main things. When you do team of experts and stuff like that, and you throw a lot of GPUs at it, like Grox, super heavy and so on and so forth. Like, yes, you can flip the coin. I mean, again, empirically, if I use Mid Journey, I flip the coin a thousand times before I finally find the image that I actually want. You get in the ballpark very quickly, but then the one that you actually want is an enormous amount of time to get there, right? And it is not obvious to me that maybe, maybe that'll get improved. But I definitely don't consider that to be solved right now. Like the verification step in the last few years. I don't consider that to have radically improved because you still have to prompt the thing a lot. Another part of it that's an issue is the way these work is they don't actually give a pseudo random number seed at the beginning to get a reproducible result. So you can give the same input and get different output every single time. What that means is you can only include it in those parts of your process that can tolerate that level of variance, which actually does constrain, which can be a feature.

Which can be a feature, not a bug in many circumstances.

Just one narrow point on that. That is true for us as users of the APIs, but it's not true for the researchers inside OpenAI, AI Meta and elsewhere. They get perfect reproducibility, they give it the same ran seed, they turn the temperature to zero, they run the test 5,000 times, they can debug with exact fidelity. They just don't make that available to us as outside users.

I know, exactly. That's right. But basically, for every reason right now in the UXS, they have not exposed T0 and they've not exposed perfect reproducibility. I mean, you can share chats and so on, But I, I guess my point is, I, I guess there's probably some model that you can call with that to get reproducibility. But I guess my point is when you've got stochastic output, let me give you an example. Somebody had some AI web browser type thing, okay? Seems cool at first. You're like, wow, it can automate your posting for you and build a whole following. I'm like, I would not do that. And the reason is that, first of all, if it makes even one misstep, that's on you, right? It's like your dog biting somebody, right? You're the owner. You're responsible for this thing, okay? It's not actually a human being. You're the human being for whom it's responsible for number one. So if it likes the wrong thing, it retweets the wrong Thing, it posts the wrong thing, which could easily do. The second thing is what it emits often sounds like the parody version of you, right? People who use AI chatbots, you know, people have tried this, like replicas of people, right? It's fine for like voice cloning if you supervise it. It can help you scale yourself in that way at times, right? I have like an AI version of the network state@the network state.com, but I say it's AI biology, so there's errors there. People know it's AI, right? So it's like an MP3 audible that updates with the text, right? So it's okay. However, that's something where you can tolerate some glitches in the audio output, right? It's like it's an analog output. If it's a digital output, you can't tolerate often that error, like on the balance that's being sent to somebody or something like that. So the AI web browsing, for example, is that helpful? It's helpful in like automated testing. It's like a better selenium, right? Internally within your company, you run AI web browsing, you have to click a bunch of things like a. Like a monkey hitting buttons, like a human. Fine, you can tolerate the Stacy there. And also it won't take down your live site. But people who are trying to say, oh, my AI agent will go and make me a million bucks, like Renaissance or whatever just get wrecked because it's not good for that kind of thing.

Everybody. There's not a week that goes by when I don't get the strangest of compliments. Someone will stop me and say, peter, you've got such nice skin. Honestly, I never thought, especially at age 64, I'd be hearing anyone say that I have great skin. And honestly, I can't take any credit. I use an amazing product called OneSkin OSO one twice a day, every day. The company was built by four brilliant PhD women who have identified a 10amino acid peptide that effectively reverses the age of your skin. I love it. And like I say, I use it every day, twice a day. There you have it. That's my secret. You go to Oneskin Co and write Peter at checkout for a discount on the same product I use. Okay, now back to the episode. I want to hit another one of your points here. And then we're going to shift to. To crypto, which is AI doesn't take your job. It lets you do any job. I think that's a really important element here that needs. People need to understand and Start to internalize. Why don't you give your favorite examples? Yeah, so.

So for example, you can get to a 6 or a 7 on art on graphic sign. People who couldn't code can do prototypes of things. You can now do a prototype version in almost any area. So it's amazing for founders, it's amazing for self directed people. It's amazing for people who have something in their mind's eye but they just couldn't get it out. Right. It's also amazing for people who have time on their hands, but not money because they can prompt and prompt and prompt and prompt and get like a good image or a drawing for something if they lack the budget. But to polish it and to actually get it to like ship and production level currently you, you need somebody who's an expert in the area to actually be able to debug the symbols usually again, unless you're smart enough that you can teach yourself with it. So realizing that it actually more. You know the Heinlein quote about, you know, a human being should be able to like chop lumber. I'll get it wrong. You know what I'm talking about, right?

Exactly.

He's like, he's like a human being.

Should be able to basic things.

You should be able to sonnet.

Yeah, exactly.

No, no, go on, I'm paraphrasing. Chop lumber, write a sonnet, like make wine, sing a song, etc. Etc. Specialization is for insects.

Right.

He's basically talking about.

Right.

So in an interesting sense, where I think AI does take us towards is a greater degree of robotic autarky. Smaller communities can be more self sufficient. If you take that's what I mean by the Internet versus China. Going back to that like you can have a thousand million person network states where you have robots.

It's effectively decentralizing across the board. Large companies don't. I mean large companies used to gather all the talent and parse them out a little bit at a time. Today a team of one or a small group can do whatever's needed to.

That's right. So it reverses the extreme specialization of the 20th century. Your wingspan increases. Right. There's lots of things you can do at an okay level. Right. You can learn what you don't know and so on. So long as you're self critical about it, knowing that the AI can be wrong, you can be wrong and so and so forth. Right. So that concept of versatility is there. With that said for some kinds of areas that are genuinely just like data entry or something like that, you know Many kinds of midwit like jobs, right? Like, you know, if you're just like a lawyer who's using templates, if you're just a doctor who's reading from the book or what have you, I can do it maybe with a higher error rate. Actually in some cases, with a lower error rate. Many cases, medical diagnosis, AI has got.

A lower error rate. No, the numbers are staggeringly in favor of AI alone, without humans in a loop, right?

That's right. So AI in medicine is much cheaper, orders of magnitude faster because you don't have to go to an appointment and so on. It's more personal. You can get not just a second opinion, a 20th opinion. So for certain areas it's a complete transformation and it's radical, radical, radical improvement. Medicine is one of them, law is one of them. Because you know, basically what you do is you use AI, you write all the contracts and then you have the lawyers review and sign off and in the end so you don't have to do the thousand dollar an hour lawyer. Right. Similarly with the doctors, you go and research everything. With AI, it's like an ultimate search engine. And then you go and you get your prescription or whatever from the doctor after you've gone and done all your stuff. So they're the printout step, the final certification verification step. That's how people are using it in practice. But it doesn't mean that you have that MD or JD yet. That state certification is still a dangling thing. And there's going to be enormous pressure from the ama, the ABA and others to ban or limit the use of AI. Kind of like unions, but white collar unions. Yeah.

I think you made a really important point for the listeners too, which is that the different areas of endeavor are moving at very, very different rates. And the two big factors are can it evaluate itself and the other one, is it regulated in some way? But medicine is moving a billion miles an hour. Law is able to move a billion miles an hour, but you have regulatory issues. Physics and math and coding are moving a billion miles an hour with no, no barriers. There's no regulatory barriers there, are they?

What do you. So give me like, okay, so let me. A concrete example would be the protein folding, right? Like what Demise won the Nobel Prize for, right? That's genuinely something where there was a huge, you know, that was a, it was a well posed problem of given the primary sequence, infer the 3D structure, where the 3 structure comes from PDB and you can verify it with x ray crystallography. So there's A very known objective function where you can map this far. Right, but what other, you know, I don't know.

Yeah, so the four things I named were medicine, biology.

Yeah, go ahead.

Physics, math and coding. And of those four, the one where Peter's the world expert is the one on biology and chemistry. And you're right within, within biology, chemistry and medic. And there are areas that are very, very discreet and evaluateable and others that aren't. So that one's the one of the four that I mentioned that's pretty murky, but within that there's probably 20 different dimensions. So specifically, like, if you're reading scans, the fidelity of a scan can be many, many terabytes of data. No radiologist can read it, but when you find something in the scan, it's crystal clear that you found it. So that one self evaluates very, very easily. It's like, yeah, if I had the time to look at it, I would have found that, but I didn't have the time to look at it. So those are the areas that'll move very, very quickly. And then there are these other murkier areas, like, can you build a full cell simulator? Well, you know, that's more of a synthetic data and simulation problem. The AI will keep up with it if you can build the evaluator or the simulator. But can you actually build that?

Okay, so here's my view. The areas I know fairly well are bio encoding. And I have, I mean, like I know some physics and math, but I haven't kept up with the frontier of it. Here's what I'd say about bio AI is amazing for like obviously the protein folding problem, but another thing, biomedical text mining, all the papers that were locked in archives and so on and so forth. Being able to put together the information about P53 and this paper and that paper and all the contradictions and all the references and so on and so forth. It's amazing for doing natural language search, synthesis, summary of large corpora, I feel it's definitely going to accelerate biomedical innovation in that sense. And obviously, as just talked about, for diagnosis of both text and for images and mixed kinds of things and so on. So it's smashingly useful in biomedicine. But I'd say that a lot of that is not the creation really of net new information so much as the synthesis and bridging of existing things. Like you've got a bunch of existing nodes. And then AI is really amazing at interpolating. And sometimes that is in a sense, net new because that synthesis is itself useful. That's distinct from points outside the envelope that are like new physics or new math or new biology.

And so let me use this as a jumping old point. Did you see Demis prediction of curing all disease by 2035? And then did you see Dario's prediction of potentially doubling the human lifespan in the next decade as a result of AI? I'm curious if you've seen any of those and what your thoughts are.

I've seen those, yeah. So here's what I think about that. First of all, obviously these are smart guys and I love what they've done, and I'm big fans of both Claude and Gemini and everything they've done. Okay, so let me start with that. Okay, so first is AI is below the state and crypto is above the state. Okay. What I mean by that is crypto with bitcoin and smart contracts and so on is a replacement for the Fed for the sec. And crypto is actually able to have the political strength to go and take over the government and deregulate not just crypto, but AI.

Right.

AI is below the state. So therefore all these biomedical breaks.

Meaning when you say below the state, you mean controlled by the state, Correct?

That's right. Like, you know, like above the API. Below the API, Right. Crypto is above the state. AI is below the state. Okay. And what I mean by that, for.

The moment, there is very much a potential future on the post side of the potential future.

Yes, yes, that's right. There's a potential future where you have like autonomous law and so and so. But right now, as it currently stands, the reason I say that is a lot of the AI people, as much as I like them, they essentially assume a benevolent or at least functional state. Like, for example, they think of the US versus China as like a unitary America. It's got like a functional government with high state capacity and it's making rational acts as if it was a cold war or something like that. Right. Versus a shambolic, like blue America versus Red America versus tech guys versus everybody yelling at each other and doing adversarial things versus each other.

Right.

And so in the same way, like the cure all diseases thing, if it's not engaging with the fda, if it's not engaging with the regulatory process, with cpt, with ama, with all that kind of stuff, I have seen for 20 something years that the primary blocker on genomics and on biotech is the regulatory state.

It is.

It's not really the technology.

We're also, you know, human. 8 billion humans across the planet have the same biology and you can get to a geographic arbitrage where if there is a solution that's come up, I can go to, you know, my friend President Bukele in El Salvador and have the treatment there. And in fact it's been, you know, longevity tourism has been something that's been going now for a decade until finally the UFDA has come in.

Absolutely. So, so Prospera for example. Right. Which actually has mini circle, which Altman and others and you know, I've put some to check in there and so on and so forth. So mini circle is actually gene therapy on existing humans. Farb Nivi has posted about it, how he took that patriot's post about it. He feels stronger. Like Bezos started following Farb because of that. He saw that, you know, Farb's strength and so on.

I'm still waiting for the science to get published there. It's, it's a lot, it's a lot of people's opinions. Right?

It's a lot of people's opinions. But the thing is that we're going back into the era of big effect size drugs. Okay. Just to explain what I mean by this, essentially the entire FDA was really about the entire FDA era. If you go prior to the fda, you have banting and best. Who won the Nobel Prize?

Right.

Why they win the Nobel Prize? Because they came up with the idea for insulin supplementation to, to treat diabetes. They tested on dogs, they tested on themselves, they tested on willing patients. Those patients leapt up out of the bed and then they had scale production with the Eli Lilly for the entire North American continent. And so they started their work in like 1921, scaled by 1923. That was when pharma moved at the speed of software before the modern fda. And in fact why many drugs are grandfathered because they were in wide use before the FDA and you just had trial and error over many years figuring out how they worked. Crucially, that was not phase 1, 2, 3 clinical trials. That was not case control studies. Right. Like cases are like A B tests. You know, there's no case control study on the effect of regulation itself. The regulatory state. Go ahead. This is a very important point.

Yeah.

Okay. You don't have a jurisdiction with and without some regulation to see whether the regulation is actually holding something back. Right.

Or actually saving lives. Right. And the whole point is that you value the lives that you don't kill versus the lives that you don't.

Well, and tort law is totally messed up if you, if you make one little mistake, it's $100 million settlement if you, if a thousand people die when they could have been cured, nobody pays anything. It's totally.

That's exactly right. Yeah, that's right. So the fda, the fundamental issue actually gets back even upstream of the FDA is risk tolerance, Right. At any big company, risk budget is always scarcer than budget, right?

Sure.

It's easier often to spend a huge amount of money than to take a risk because people are just, you know, it's just one of those things. You have to have founder DNA to have the political capital to take a risk. If you fail, what would happen? Right. This is why Bezos believes in, doesn't believe in bet. The company bets, believes in lots of small bets. Right. But you have to have the psychology and the legitimacy to do that. So the decentralization of the world and the arising of all of these startup societies, network states and you know, new, you know, freedom cities and so on and so forth will mean more jurisdictions where you can actually opt in and you can have a new system of laws, all the special economic zones and so on and so forth. So that's actually the bottleneck, not so much. Look, I love AI, it's amazing. I love biotech, that's amazing. But it's really the regulatory state that is the thing that is holding us back, right? And the issue is that a lot of AI guys not, you know, are effectively docile. You know, like for example, Leopold's paper, right? He writes about the US and China as if, like it's the United States rather than the disunited states. You know, he writes about it as if like Newsom isn't fighting, you know, Trump isn't fighting, you know, like, like the New York Times isn't publishing. Abolish the Supreme Court and pack the judges. As if it's not like a food fight, social war every single day. Right. If you actually showed the political chaos in the backdrop, he it's like, you know, somebody talking about on the eve of China's warlord era, that they're going to launch a space program.

You know, you talk a lot about bitcoin. We're going to get to crypto in a moment. There is a direct correlation between people who are pro, say they're bitcoin maximalists or bitcoin advocates and longevity. I'm curious, in your decade long vision in the future, how much does longevity play into that? How long does expanded health span at all?

It's incredible. So I used to have as my Twitter bio, immutable money, infant frontier, eternal life. And all three of those things go together actually, because, for example, we're not gonna be able to explore the stars without life extension and probably radiation tolerant genes and other kinds of things.

Or sending robots and plugging in.

Yeah, you can send robots, you can do other things, but you know, to terraform Mars, we'll probably have to modify ourselves, you know, like you're just not probably, you know, or send the robots.

First and build the environments for us meat sacks to live in. Right?

Yeah, that's also possible. That's right. So may, maybe we're, you know, we could figure that out. It might be some, some degree of robot, some degree of, you know, self modification. Like, for example, there's various groups on the face of the earth that have different altitude adaptations, right? Kenyans, Andians and Ethiopians each have different altitude adaptations. Some are in the blood, some are lungs and so on and so forth. You can imagine stacking those together, getting radiation tolerances, tolerance similar to how AI synthesizes from different nodes. You can take different genetic mutations. There's a company called Variant Bio that looks at that kind of stuff, right? Like looking for real life X men taking their mutations and adding them. But coming back, what is the connection? There is a deep connection, by the way, between Bitcoin and life extension, please. And actually it's gone back a long time. And the fundamental similarities as follows. The traditional financial system says that yes, hyperinflation is bad, but a little inflation is good and deflation is also bad, right? So that's to say, yeah, losing all your money is bad, but the New Zealand target is 2% devaluation of your currency every year. And deflation is bad. Then people would go to money hoarding and so on and so forth, right? And so what that basically says is every year you lose 2%, a little bit of wealth, right? And the traditional medical system says, yeah, rapid death is bad, but trying to live forever is also weird, Right? Reversing death is also weird. Instead you should die a little bit every year. You lose a little bit of health every year. Okay, so that's the deep similarity. Or the traditional financial system says you lose a little bit of wealth every year. And traditional medical system says you lose a bit of health every year. Okay? And none of them really look to first principles and say, why again, why do we have to do that?

Why do we go, why is there a whole. Why is there a hole in our bucket?

Why is there a hole in the bucket? Right? Because we know you guys have seen the phenotypes for the mouse longevity stuff. You know, you've seen the stuff.

We have case studies with the bowhead whale living 200 years and Greenland shark living 500 years. And the issue is how do we repair our software and hardware to get there? And it's not a matter of if, it's only a matter of when.

Yes. And I think that basically the big thing we have to work on is making the moral case for it and also boosting the risk tolerance. For example, people right now, they'll go bungee jumping, they'll go skydiving, they'll serve in the military, and they'll, they'll take, you know, risks with their life. And some of those risks are foolhardy. And some of them are for the collective, in a sense. Right. Fight. You know, we should have medical heroes. Similar to how, like, you know, for example, the early airplane pilots were considered heroes for risking their lives. You know, no plane crashes, no planes, no train crashes, no trains. Right. There was somebody, you guys, you guys are all, you know, of a certain age. You remember the CRC Handbook of chemistry and physics?

I do, yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

That's what existed before Wikipedia, before the walls of them. Well, exactly. We all had that in high school. Or the CRC amp chemistry and physics, if you recall up to a certain point, the compounds had a smell and a tasteless and then they stopped listing them. Why? There was some guy who, you know, his last thing he did, sniff sign. He wrote down almonds. He took a hit for the team. Okay, Hero of science. That's why we know what it smells like or whatever. Okay, Right. And so that is actually, in my view, the scarce resource that we need is we need the like, risk tolerant people and risk tolerant jurisdictions.

So let's, let's, let's tie it back to Bitcoin. I put out a tweet last night asking my followers to propose questions. I got 225 questions back. So we're going to start with number one and march our way through. But seriously, Bitcoin and the connection to longevity. And then do you see, when we built the Internet, we built it without a financial layer. We now have crypto as a financial layer. Do you see Bitcoin as a primary currency for AI machine learning in the future? So there's a few questions that are stacked. Right. Let's get with Bitcoin and longevity first as a correlate.

Okay. So you know how, like, you know how power generation works? You have very high voltage at the Power station and then there's step down transformers and then it comes a little trickle out to power your phone over a cable. Right. In the same way, Bitcoin is like really high voltage money. Okay. And so it's like transferred relatively infrequently. It's like digital gold. Right. And then you have various proxies for Bitcoin that then you can just blast on chain. Okay. And roughly speaking, Bitcoin is already at the kind of transaction volume of Fedwire. So think of it as like the Fed wire of the free world. Okay. And then on top of that you can have various layers, you know, for example, Bitcoin scales in a sense off chain and on other chains. I know people will say lightning. Let's leave lightning aside for the sake of this argument. Many Lightning implementations are in practice essentially peering agreements between Lightning apps. So it's similar to like off chain transaction on Bitcoin. Off chain, Bitcoin transactions on Coinbase or on Binance. These apps have tens of millions, in some cases hundreds of millions of users. So it's like within France or within Germany, transacting between yourself very, very quickly. And then when you want to transact between Coinbase and Binance, then they can do settlement of Bitcoin like the true ups between them. And then of course you can withdraw from the system as well. Right. And so that kind of hub and spoke system is not quite the same as a total peer to peer system, but you can get extremely far with that.

I think you've deviated from the primary question though.

Yeah, let's go back because you said it will be the currency of the Internet.

Yes.

The issue is the transaction volume for pure Bitcoin. BTC is not the currency of AI, but WBTC wrapped BTC off chain, BTC can get there.

It's the same analogy that you have in the main world where if you want to pay with gold, it's the nightmare. And as you get more and more to the lighter transactions, you can play with a debit card but you don't have great security and so you have a trade off there. And so you could do many, many more transactions with the debit card. They tend to be small transactions and you can do them all you want. When you get to the heavier stuff, it's smaller, bigger transactions, more heavy, more graded, more secure.

Wrap BTC on Solana, you can blast it on chain as much as you want. It can be the currency.

Exactly.

One question from the community is if you're willing to say what percentage of your Net wealth is in Bitcoin right now.

Not willing to say okay, but it'd be a majority. Well, that would be willing to say. Let's just say okay, put it like this, only hold in USD what you can afford to lose.

Okay, fair enough. Where else besides Bitcoin would you hold?

So, okay, so in terms, so USD is your hot. Don't ask me this. Huh.

USD is your hot wallet.

Well, so in terms of fiat currency by process of elimination, I would say SGD or maybe AED meaning Singapore dollars or the uae. There on those are the two jurisdictions. I would not say Switzerland anymore. The chf basically the Swiss after the Russia sanctions and the Credit Suisse debacle and Obama kind of kicking in the doors of Swiss bank account. Switzerland ain't Switzerland anymore.

Right.

So the Swiss franc is not what it was. And western currencies in general I wouldn't hold, nor do I hold the JPY and probably not the Korean won. But if you must hold Fiat, I would say the AD is still pegged to the dollar. SGD is soft pegged, but they're independently managed on their own ledger to my knowledge. And they're also global currencies and they have open capital accounts. And I think western countries are going to have closed capital accounts soon, even in 2026 is being proposed like a remittance tax for the USD. Right. So I'd say my advice on Fiat would be AD sgd.

But if the fact of the dollar, you're essentially holding the dollar.

Well, for now. But a lot of the, a lot of the east is moving. So one of the things that's happening is brics is stacking gold bricks like states. So have you ever seen the Korean dmz, like where North Korea and South Korea are. Sure, yeah. Imagine like this is not exactly how it is, but imagine like on the Russia China border there was something like that and they would just like hand each other gold bricks each day. Right.

To balance their budget.

Yeah. So. So they'd actually do physical settlement. It doesn't actually work like that, but conceptually it works like that. Where states can settle back and forth in gold bricks. Right. And they can actually afford the security and the trucks and the magnetometers and whatever, all this kind of stuff to verify that the, that the gold is real and that no one's coming to steal it. And that can back fiat currencies because it used to back fiat currencies. Right. So I do think that gold, both gold and digital gold, gold is the currency of states and Digital gold is a currency, the reserve currency of the network. Those will both rise, but western fiat won't. Right? So those currencies are currently dollar back. Now with that said, this could be a 10 year kind of thing and it could be something like this. Do you guys remember how first all newspapers went online and then Google News put all newspapers in competition and then all local papers died because their geographical monopoly went away and, and nyt, wsa, Washington Post, they survived and then they basically died against X and Internet native social media. Right. That exact kind of thing is going to happen to currencies. First all currencies go on chain fiat currencies, then most of them die because the only reason they exist is because of their geographical monopoly. Once you can hold in your wallet the best currency in the world, why do you have to hold the currency of your geography? Again, you don't. Currencies start competing on ideology and features rather than geography. Just like news. Online news competes on the base of ideology and features as opposed to geography. Like the. If the Miami Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle, or Miami Herald and the Chronicle and the Poughkeepsie whatever, are all reprinting the same story that only worked when they had trucks in a geographic advantage. So all local currencies compete with each other. Most of die USD, you know, rmb, maybe a few others make it, and then all of those get devalued against BTC.

All right, let me take a 2, 3 question, let me take this back to AI. So in a world where AI agents are negotiating and contracting and paying each other autonomously, what do you see as the role of crypto in that, in that play?

Well, so clearly crypto is the currency of AI and the reason for that is crypto's currency of the Internet. Since, for example, when you set up a program, you can have that program access private keys. Like one way to think about it IS crypto is a 10 or 100x or infinityx or the existing system on many axes that people don't normally think about. For example, you can set up a bank account equivalent, a crypto wallet, in fractions of a second. You can set up as many as you want. You can bind those to whatever you want, right? All that cannot be done with a bank account, traditional bank account, you have to go to the store, not sort of the branch and present your id. So to simply set up a program or a robot and give it a wallet takes fractions of a second. Just that practical thing alone. Forget everything else. I'm going to say Just that practical thing alone means obviously crypto is a currency of the robot and of the AI. Right. Then going further, like legacy fiat is locked down in so many different ways. You don't notice this is when you just are buying Starbucks or whatever as a mezzanine level transaction. But if you want to do transactions that are very large, very small, very fast, very automatic, very international, very transparent or very complex, you need crypto.

Well, Brett Williams Banks make it or will they be all displaced by crypto?

Native banks, they're already getting displaced. It's a good question. They're all becoming crypto exchanges. Crypto exchanges are the new banks because they actually appearing relationships across borders.

How many years back in how many years before we see the current major banks no longer, you know, around when do they become disruptive? When do they become Macy's?

I think you have to retail banking and the other types of banking. Retail banking really gets.

Yeah, I totally agree. I was at the Washington Post working for Don Graham for a year. Right when it was, you know, the Internet. Google was just taking over the world and there was no turning it around. And you know, that was kind of tragic and all investigative reporting died in the process. I don't see it the same way though with, with banks. Because bank, you're talking about M1 here. Everything you said is exactly right. It's going to happen Balaji, just the way you said. But banks don't just sit there as a place to hold M1. They, they have a lot more. You know, they make loans to consumers, they evaluate their credit. There's, you know, there's many types of banks, but very little of what they do is impacted by the transition that you just outlined. Okay, so it's going to happen the way you phrased it, but what's the subset that's impacted it?

But I still want to hear your predictions on when we're going to see the current banks we all know and love. I won't name them. Disappear, I think.

I mean, so disappear. I mean like Macy's is. I think it's still around.

Yeah, it's still around. Okay. And become minor in players.

No, irrelevant. Yeah. I would argue, I mean among the power user, it's already happened.

Sure.

Right. In the sense of you basically like you could have a crypto. Like crypto is being used for like Thailand, for example, just switched over to accepting crypto for various things. Many countries are.

Everybody Fountain life is now accepting crypto for payments on your longevity treatments.

Right, Totally. So. So by the way, China is the Exception to everything I'm saying, right. Because China will maintain control. Like the great firewall in China's system, like CCP and BTC will be like the USA and USSR or the USSR and the USA of this century. Right. Because they're like, you know, the centralized party, total control over everything versus the decentralized 2030.

2035.

I'm still looking 2035, I think. But let me explain why. Right. Why do I think it comes faster than you might think?

I'm going to keep him. I'm going to keep his hand on the stove.

Very short answer. Short answer. I wrote, I wrote Another article on biology.com called the Billionaire Flipping. Okay. And so a long time ago, Olaf Carson, we was the founder of Polychain, is a friend of mine for a long time. We calculated somewhere between $100,000 and a million dollars for bitcoin. Half the world's billionaires become crypto.

Yes.

Okay.

And it basically eats everything else of value in their. In their portfolio.

That's right. The next 10x dilutes down all fiat billionaires.

Yep. For sure.

By a lot. And that's what people don't get like, huh. Go ahead. Including states, including states, including banks.

Yes.

Right. The next ten.

Slow this. Slow, slow this down for everybody. I want people to understand what this means. Right. So if someone's got, if someone's got, you know, a million dollars of crypto in the bank, it becomes, you know, and they had a million dollars of other assets. Crypto is 50% of the portfolio all of a sudden. If it goes 10x, all of a sudden crypto is 90%, 95% of the portfolio.

That's exactly right. And the purchasing power of it. At a certain point, what happens is it destabilizes and it goes 1 million, 10 million, because people flip. And that's actually the numerator. Right. That's already happened in the crypto space where all investments are denominated in bitcoin terms.

Do you see, everybody ask, do you see any future in which crypto fails in any fashion or bitcoin fails any fashion? Are we way past that right now? I mean, one of the things, there's.

Definitely ways it could fail. So let me see how it could fail, please. So first is so quantum is now. Okay, let me talk about so, so quantum cryptography. That's an area to watch. Okay. The main issue is not that quantum safe. It's a very technical issue. But quantum safe encryption can be deployed in bitcoin. But moving all of the funds would Take a long time, right. Moving them on chain. So there'd have to be some sort of hard fork or something like that, which, you know, and. And this is the currency of development, as I understand. I'm not in the bits and bytes, so you may be misspeaking, but the. There'd have to be some significant protocol change to enable that. Like a giant, you know, like airlift out, right? Like a deployment of something that significantly changed the code. But miners and everybody would have to consent to that. They probably would, but that would be a thing. With that said, crypto as a class will not disappear from this earth because there's now enough different currencies with enough different protocols and enough different mechanisms that there's a degree of herd immunity, right? There's enough different immune systems where the kinds of vulnerabilities that proof of work has with Bitcoin are distinct from the vulnerabilities that proof of stake has and actually complementary proof of stake. You can have a bunch of humans that are distributed globally. In theory, if they colluded, they could rewrite the blockchain. Proof of work requires physical data centers, but they can't rewrite the blockchain. So there's different failure modes. And then you can do things where you hash Ethereum state to Bitcoin. And so. So I think that crypto as a class of things will not disappear from the earth. Any individual chain could be attacked. But then what could happen is you can snapshot that chain and issue it on another chain, right? So you can have lifeboats.

I think the core here is that once you understand the Byzantine General's problem and that innovation, you can't undo that. It's here.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, look, it's also. I think it's very possible that you get something like, see, up until this point, crypto. You know what social media. Do you guys remember the Social Network movie?

Sure, sure.

Okay. Of course it's worth rewatching for one reason, which is it came out in 2010. And it's. What's remarkable from the. From its absence of the movie is there's absolutely no mention whatsoever of politics. No mention whatsoever. Facebook is treated as if it was like Universal Studios. It's like. Like a theme park, an amusement park for people to poke and like each other. Right? This was despite the fact that the Arab Spring had already or that was happening. Like there's destabilization of governments and so on and so forth, right? So, like, it was known that, you know, Twitter, Facebook, place in the Middle east and so on had been at least partially destabilized by this stuff. I may be getting the timeline wrong, but there's definitely stuff in the late 2000s, before, I think it was, whether it was Iran or something, the tweets must flow. There was stuff that was before the social network movie came out. And obviously all. All politics became social media in the years after that. Right. And then there was a counter attack on social media. And every possible attack vector you could imagine on social media that people thought was unthinkable due to social conventions came out. People were de. Platformed, they were censored, they were shadow banned. Like, the President was deplatformed then he's replatformed. That whole thing became a battleground, as we all know, for the last, you know, and yet in 2010, if you had told me, even with 500 million people on Facebook, that in 10 years, the single most important political issue in the world will be whether or not the President of the United States can tweet, that would still seem like, oh, my God, biology. You're taking the Internet too seriously. It's just exaggerating. Blah, blah, blah.

Right.

Similar to you guys at Singularity University, people will always say, oh, my God, you're taking this stuff too seriously, or whatever. Right. But so with Bitcoin, by 2035 or so, maybe sooner, maybe later, just like you're not the president if you don't have a social media account. You're not like a country if you don't have cryptocurrency. Like, you're not solvent.

Yeah. And you're not able to operate in the. In the accelerating exponential future.

Bitcoin becomes the government of governments.

Yeah. I want to hit on. I want to hit on networks. I want to hit on network state. Network state school. Your network school. You have basically gone out and built a global talent fellowship in the network school.

Yes.

You've launched this. And I'm curious about your thoughts around dark talent. The idea that, you know, there's this incredible bidding war going on right now in the US for AI talent. You know, million dollar salaries, 10, 100 million, you know, the hypothetical billion dollar offers. And there's so much talent out there, and it's become so easy for this talent to gain access to capabilities. Talk to me about what you've called dark talent, if you would.

Totally. Okay, so I. I believe in the America that I grew up in, and I think that we're forking where the Internet is taking American values and the land is becoming something very different, right. It's going anti immigrant, anti capitalist and so on and so forth. So I don't think that, that as an immigrant capitalist you should build your life in the us I think it's going to get very, very nasty unfortunately. And moreover a lot of people can't get visas, they can't get in there, and so on, so forth. So I moved as far away as I could. Right. 10,000 miles away.

When did you move?

Of course, you know, huh.

How, when did you move?

20. 20.

Okay.

Yeah, I, I, there's a lot of reasons.

Continue on.

Yeah, so, so I'm just giving the motivation, right. So motivation is, I believe in America just like in the same way that America was like Britain 2.0. I think of the Internet as Britain 3.0 or America 2.0. It's like the version 3.0. Like America was 10x bigger than Britain. America went from common law to constitution. America had many more of the people of the world. America was even bigger and better than its very, very, you know, accomplished progenitor. And the Internet is like America the next version. Why? It's like 10x bigger than America with crypto. It has freedom, freedom of contracts, freedom of speech, you know, in Indian unfortunately may be a second class citizen nowadays in the US but they're a first class citizen on the Internet and they have the same monetary policy and contract rights and, and smart contracts and all that kind of stuff. And, and I think that actually lots of westerners, lots of Americans also believe in that. And so in my own way I'm trying to stick up for like what I think of as American values and you know, like, and kind of keep the torch aloft, right? Think of me as a minority report. Maybe, hopefully I'm wrong. Maybe all you guys can fix it and that's great and salute and good job. Right? But I'm like the parachute, right? I'm the, I'm the minority report. I'm the backup plan. I'm the hedge, right? And I want to keep the flame of freedom and democracy and capitalism and so on alive. And why do I even say democracy by the way? I think lots of Western states are effectively becoming one party states. Like in California you can hold elections but the party always wins, the Democrat party always wins. It's being gerrymandered even further in response. Republicans are doing the same in Florida. And of course communism in China has a one party state. So Democrats, Republicans, Communists have all built one party states. So democracy is going to bring between.

Back, bring me back to, I Know.

I'm coming back to ns. One second. Yes.

Okay.

Yes. A dark town. Yeah. So they built one party state, so democracy is between those states, right? Meaning you're going to go from the two party system to the thousand community system. And to go to the thousand community system, you need to build one community and then you have to scale that around the world. And so we're a startup society that's a, that's a template for other sharp societies. We are bringing in all the stark talent which has been overlooked from Latin America, from the Middle east, from Eastern Europe also, by the way, white kids from the Midwest, right. Asian kids who get quoted out by, you know, at Harvard or something like that. Anybody, anywhere. I, you know, if they're working hard, they're online, they, they, they're, they're doing well, I will bring them in, fund them, level them up.

How many people you're bringing in, how are you funding them and what's your mission? Are they building companies there?

Well, so right now it's out of the bank of biology and that's fairly healthy kind of thing, right? But eventually we may take outside capital and so on and so forth. You know, Paul Graham did y combinator out of his back pocket for a long time, right. And I think that's always the right way of doing things is, you know, if you can bootstrap it or whatever, you know, basically like, you know, things. The world's been fortunate to me, so I want to kind of help others up and do that for them as well. You asked, so how am I? Then you asked, where are the people coming from? And the answer is all over, basically anywhere English is spoken.

So my feeling is that they're, you know, we hear about everybody in San Francisco and all the talent wars that are going on there, but I have to believe that throughout China, which By the way, 50% of Meta's AI researchers are Chinese, right? And we've got this crazy amount of intelligence capability centered in math and most of Southeast Asia and India, not to mention south and Central America, that there's a huge amount of talent that is not being tapped into that could easily create the next unicorns. And the next.

Not could, but they will.

They will.

Yes, they will. Now the thing about that is, absolutely, and one other thing I'd also say is, and we're going to be rolling this out in the near future, maybe some fraction of people, a small fraction of people will be founders and they'll create unicorns. And I agree with that. They're very important. We're going to find them. However, the number of people who are unicorn founders globally is less than number of pro athletes. Right. There's like 1500, 2000ish unicorns, let's say 2x, you know, two co founders on average per. So a few thousand unicorn co founders and there's easily 10,000 plus pro athletes, depending on how you can especially.

Having said that, something fascinating is the Teal fellowship, I think 5.6% is the number of Teal fellows have become unicorn founders, which is amazing.

Yeah, it's amazing.

It is possible.

So my, my view is what I'm. So certainly I do, I do fund companies.

Yeah.

And I do fund currencies. What I'm most interested is, is the third thing, communities. So I think 1994 with Netscape was really the first true Internet startup. Right. If you remember that moment, because it had all the modern features, you could download the software on the web. It went viral. Billion dollar IPO transformed the world. All those features of the modern Internet startup. Multi billion dollar IPO in the 90s when there was really, really money. Fifteen years later, the first Internet currency, Bitcoin.

Right.

And that was a template for things that came after that. And I think what we're doing, the way I think of it, is the first real Internet community. So Internet company, Internet currency, Internet community. Why are Internet communities, I think, going to be even more valuable than Internet companies or currencies? The reason is that they're actually the platform on which those things are built.

Just like China is a platform upon which all their companies were built.

Exactly. That's right. And if you actually did it. Exactly. Very good point. Because I did a spreadsheet and it was the first time I'd ever written one quadrillion unironically. Okay, here's why. If you go, so obviously Google's a trillion, Facebook's a trillion on that order of magnitude and so on, and that's thought of as the most valuable thing you can do do. Right. But I'm pretty sure cryptocurrency, bitcoin is going to get bigger than that because it's actually still in its, you know, phase like this. Actually, those tech companies can still grow, you know, beyond that. But if you think of a country and what the country's valuation is, how would you put a valuation on that? So if you take, let's say Singapore, okay. And you take its number of square miles, okay. And the price per square foot, you do get evaluation, or you take the number of people and their average net worth, you Get a valuation on the order of 10 trill. Yeah, okay, that actually kind of seems reasonable. Right, then if you, if you say, okay, what's 10x Singapore? Then maybe South Korea ish is like about 10x size. Singapore, it's a little less than 10x, but let's say it's on the order of like 100 trillion. And then what's China? It's like 10x South Korea or will be or depending on. So that's like a quadrillion. Right. So I actually do think that all of the startup societies together, when you have a thousand million person network states and they may not all be a million people, some might be 20 million, some might be 500, that is actually the next big thing. That is actually the startup societies that we're going to have a lot of those in 10 or 20 years.

I want to bring this down to your advice and for entrepreneurs right now and you know, people who are employees in America in, you know, sort of, they're listening to this, they're excited about technology, but it's not. This hasn't been their lives so far. So between the entrepreneurs out there and people just listening, who are tech fans, what's your top points of advice as we wrap on here?

Great.

Before you answer that question, Dave, I know you've got a heart out, buddy, so thank you for your time. I will call you on the phone in just a little bit while we wrap here, continue our conversation. Balaji, a lot of fans out there who are gonna listen to this podcast probably two or three times to be able to absorb it just like I am. But if you could, what's your most heartfelt advice to both entrepreneurs and the average individual listening to this?

Okay, so for entrepreneurs, first I would say go direct. Build your own following on social media, get good at AI, create content. Don't give interviews to legacy media, only do tech podcasts and tech shows. But even more than that, basically build your own influential individual voice as a creator, as the authentic voice of your company. Don't hire public relations people, only hire creators. If you're hiring them, you don't have to hire too many, but you know, and basically don't outsource your content creation. Content creation is as important as code and you should be doing that in house and you should be using all the modern tools and you don't have to use full AI, by the way, you can use half AI. So go direct. That's number one. Number two, move to Florida or Texas, get there as soon as you can. If you can, okay, get to a.

Place, do not be where I am sitting here in the People's Republic of.

Santa Monica you asked me for.

I know, I love it. Yeah.

Move to Starbase, maybe where Elon is. Right. And you know, essentially take it from a company town to a portfolio town and a tech town. If you're. If I was in the US I'd be in Texas or Florida, specifically Miami or Austin and near Starbase and so on. And cluster relationship folks there think property rights have a better chance of getting protected there. Number three, if you have cryptocurrency, get your keys off exchanges, get your coins off exchanges. Do that now. Figure out your cold storage, figure out all that stuff and. And don't talk to anybody about the details of it. Right. Okay.

Number four, Can I hit that one? You're concerned about that? You think exchanges are not going to make it?

I'm just saying that basically you don't want to. I don't have any imminent thing, but I'm just saying that. Do that now.

And there are two things exchanges can. Governments can take them over.

Yes, both. Exactly. Like, look, if bitcoin really, really runs, if it really runs, then at a certain point people basically start getting scared and then all kinds of crazy things are going to happen. Right? So be in a state like, basically like where property rights are respected, where bitcoin is, like, for example, Texas, I think the state legislature had something which is like, the right to hold Bitcoin shall not be infringed. Right. That's a good place to be, you know, Right. With your cryptocurrency and so on and so forth. So, A, go direct. B, move to Florida, Texas. C, crypto and cold storage. D, get involved with your local tech community. Tech is a community. And so actually thinking of it as a community and doing as much offline social. I almost don't have to say this because people kind of already do it organically in tech. Right? But tech is a community. And so, for example, that might mean not simply homeschooling, but crowd schooling, microschooling, right. Where you're educating your kids together. Right. Start doing collective action, you know, things with tech people in your spare time, because you're going to want community in, I think, the years to follow. Right. You're going to want people you can rely on in the physical world, not simply the digital world. That's why I'd go also to those places. Finally, I would say read as much as you can of bricks content in translation. Okay. Because unless you've Actually, and travel. If you have not been to Riyadh, if you haven't been to Dubai, if you haven't been to Shanghai, if you haven't been to Bangalore, if you haven't seen how much better the rest of the world is getting and has gotten.

At a meteoric rate over the last five to 10 years.

Yes. You aren't calibrated unless you've been to Shenzhen, Bangalore, Dubai and, and also Eastern Europe. Yeah, right, go ahead. Yeah, I, I, hopefully Russia, there's some peace treaty or something like that. I'd also say, you know, hopefully Russia gets to peace and the Russia, Ukraine thing gets to peace. I think Moscow has also improved a lot since the Soviet era. Right. But Eastern Europe, Russia, India, China and, and, and Dubai and Riyadh have radically, as you know, from fii, Right, you and I have both been at fii, Right. So really calibrate what the world is, because movies will not show you that. The only movie that's shown rich non Westerners in recent times is probably crazy rich Asians or maybe Squid Game. Right. And, and so they're not really showing it. Right. So you have to get the on the ground experience, otherwise you're not calibrated.

All right, we, you hit that for entrepreneurs, much of that probably still holds for, for the general public as well. Let's go to the individual who's in a job in la, in San Francisco, in, you know, in middle America. What's the most important, you know, things that they need to be thinking about?

Okay, so if they are. So first is are they good at math or are they not good at math? If they are good at math, then they should get offline for a month and totally lock in, get Shams outlines, self study, maybe use brilliant.org and actually learn the details of computer science and statistics. Do whatever lead code problems they need to do. Learn everything that you need to learn to actually understand how to implement gradient descent, maybe do carbothy stuff, do fast AI. And then also you can learn on the crypto side of things as well if you're interested in that. There's various courses on this. Maybe I'll teach another MOOC on this. But basically, you know, one month of just really all in self study. Focus, focus, focus, focus, focus, focus. Get offline. It'll be there when you get back. You won't miss it. And pencil and paper. Totally offline. Faraday cage environment. This is a big thing I do, by the way. I try to spend as online as I am. You know how like with cars I've mentioned this before with cars. We advanced cars because we have electric cars and self driving cars and you know, even flying cars. But we also have walkable cities. Like we took away the highway from. This is one of the great things San Francisco did do over the last 30 years. They took away the highway from the waterfront. Right. And so cities have been made more walkable, more green. The Big Dig in Boston, right. So you're both pro car, but you're also in some cases a minimum necessary car. You take the car away in certain cases. Right? So be, you know, I'm pro Internet, I'm pro AI and pro crypto, so all that stuff. But I'm also pro offline, right? So pencil and paper, coffee, quiet, focus. You know, like basically that just can't be, you know, can't be overstated. How important this. I think we're going to build buildings that are Faraday cage buildings. You know how you go into an elevator and the phone turns off. Right. Will build buildings that are Faraday cage buildings that have phone lockers at the entrances where everybody gives the speaker their full attention. We're actually doing some of that stuff at network school now, right. Just to prototype it. And it's great. It's like almost like freeing that people can just. They're free to focus, right. They're free to be offline because the Internet is so addictive. So I would say like offline time is important, focusing and, and then the right balance because it's kind of like, you know, getting a great night's sleep. So you're active during the day, right. The, the better you can focus offline, the stronger you'll be online and vice versa. Right? Okay. Number two is, you know, be, I mean this is again obvious, but be involved in building something and get involved in tech in some way. Right? Like you should be. The reason is the Internet is rising, but lots of other things aren't. There's S&P7 and the S&P493. Right. In many ways, American capital markets minus the Internet, where's all the money going into? It's going into the tech companies and it's now going into all the crypto treasury companies, right? Which is like the Bitcoin treasury companies, but also Ethereum treasury companies ton all this kind of stuff, right? So in a sense American capital markets are getting sunset in favor of Internet capital markets. And actually if you look just crypto alone, crypto is the number four global market after Shanghai. Nice Nasdaq and gaining fast and will become the number one global market. Right.

If you don't own crypto right now, begin.

I mean, look, I, you know, I've never given any financial advice in that sense, but as a technology and as a platform, yes, it's taking over, right. Every bank is adopting it and so, so you should definitely like understand it. And it's kind of one of those things. Sometimes what people, what happens is people will see something in the news and they'll see it says it was a scam or whatever and they tune out of it and they come back, you know, years later like wait a second, it actually developed a lot like the dot com crash and then web 2.0 was like that. People didn't pay attention to the Internet over the 2000s and the whole thing got, got built back up. Right. So that's a related kind of concept is when you see something in the news, especially if it's like an asset. Again I'm not telling anybody to buy any asset but a useful thing to do is set like a, if you see something that's interesting, set a calendar reminder for it and then 30, 60, 90, 120, 150 days or what have you. You can make a purchase or whatever decision or research decision when it's not in the news because when in the news it's usually overpriced or underpriced because it's making a big move. Right. When it's outside the news you can kind of, you're not reacting on emotion and you can reallocate your position accordingly.

Right.

So that's just something I think is a useful thing to do. You can be hyper, hyper rational about especially if you write down, you know, what your long term thesis on it is, relate to that, don't gamble. Right. There's a lot, unfortunately there's a lot of you know, day trading type stuff and, and you know, I know, I know people like to do that but I think it's just too hard to like just buy and hold long run. You know, if you're, if you're putting something in something, let's see other things. I would say realize that from social media that it's like watching pro sports in the sense of for example, when you watch like tech founders or something like that on X, it's like watching really, really successful athletes on tv. Like if you're a dribble the ball, it's actually really hard to dribble a ball and run and dunk and, and they make it look effortless, they make it look so easy to do that. And it's really so, so, so hard. Right? So anybody who is building something, well, first, you yourself should be a builder. But second, you should also in general not attack other builders. Right? It's always easy to do that on social media. It's a cheap way to make oneself feel superior. Look how dumb Elon is. I can't believe he missed a spot on that rocket. Like a lot of people who do this kind of, you know what I'm talking about. Right. And so look, if Elon isn't successful, nobody's successful. If Elon isn't smart, really, there's very few people who are smart.

Okay.

And so, you know, so you have to be able to give respect to others to get respect for oneself. Right. And so just like, you know, I'm not saying slavish, you don't have to flip to the other extreme, but just game recognized game.

Right.

You know, respect people online and try and build. I mean, I know X is just a player versus player environment. Everybody yells at each other all the time. There's, there's sites like for Caster and so on that have a more healthy and civil atmosphere. So try to seek out online communities as well. The model, the civility that you want to communicate to your friends, to your family members, your loved ones and you know, community members. Don't, don't behave. At least try and be a relatively good example. I recognize by the way that sometimes you have to defend yourself online and it's a dangerous environment and all the kind of stuff, but try not to be the person who's doing the first strike, you know, try to make it a better world for people in that sense. Yeah, and I think that's a good list. I mean, it's not five for each, but it's roughly pretty good list.

I appreciate that.

Couple comments here. You know, I think it's awesome you're building the network state movement just because it creates a whole new potential at the edge and as the existing fails over, it fails over more elegantly.

Right, that's exactly. Have you read Foundation?

Yeah, of course.

Foundation series.

Yeah, exactly. So like Terminus, right? This is like, this is Terminus, where the goal is to reduce the duration of imperial collapse.

Yeah. There's something you said in that podcast that really blew my mind, which was that less than 4% of marriages in the US are between Democrats and Republicans. That really shook me because it really shows the depth of the tribalism. And how do you come back from that?

I think we have to. I mean, so one of my Fears and I think it's already happening is in the 2010s it was blue and tech against red. In the 2020s it was red and tech against blue. And I think by the2030s, if not sooner, it's going to be red and blue against tech with socialists and nationalists against internationalist capitalists. And some of the backlash AI, where the slop and scams and so on, and some of the backlash to crypto, there's now backlash to bio and ivf. There's people who are getting mad at data centers, there's people who are mad at Apple for making phones abroad. There's people, you know, Elon, unfortunately, people.

Are mad at will we start prioritizing data center electricity over residential electricity.

That kind of stuff. All of this is due to regulations and other kinds of things. But the tech guys, I mean, for example, doing AI in the bluest city in the bluest state in the union and making billions of dollars while saying you're going to put a lot of blues out of work is not a good medium term to long term strategy. And so my view is that tech as a group has to actually sort of realize this. And it has to kind of realize that the bad version is the teal scapegoating where tech is scapegoated for the decline of the fortunes of red and blue. Because tech guys are very publicly being rich. They're rich online. Oh my God, they're so rich. Right. And a lot of people aren't. And they're getting hurt by the inflation and so on and so forth. Right.

So biology. I want to, I would love to have you come back on and continue this conversation. I've got a heart out on a board meeting and I know, last thing.

To say is I think there's hope. I think the Internet can lift the boats for everybody. I think we can get to an age of abundance and all that stuff. And I'm fundamentally a positive person in that way. And I just think we have to get through some of the whitewater that's coming up.

It's going to be, if nothing else, an exciting decade ahead. So NS.com is where people find you. Yes, fantastic. And if people want to apply for the network school or the fellowship there, they can find the information ns.com as well.

That's right, just click apply. That's right.

All right, buddy, great. Listen, thank you for your time. Thank you for your brilliance. And again everybody, I hope you enjoyed this episode of WTF with Biology. And I encourage you listen to it a couple of times. Tell your friends it's a chance to up your IQ points 20 it needs three listings.

I didn't give any links, I just gave verbal citations. But you can look them all up.

And by the way, just a quick thing. On the 20th we're doing our EXO 10x shift workshop. Links below.

20Th of August.

One more thing. Come to the Network State conference in Singapore October 3, 2025 ns.com conference and never see a conference 2025 so you can see all the star of societies October 3, 2025 are you going to.

Be at in FII this year in Riyadh?

I will.

Okay, well good. I'll see you there next.

If not, I'm actually giving a talk as well. So we'll see each other there. Great.

Awesome. All right, pal. All right.

Thanks guys.

Thanks everybody.

Good stuff.

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SA.