Alex Blania on Worldcoin, AGI, and Future Predictions

On this week's episode of Upstream, I'm joined by Alex Blania, co-founder and CEO of Tools for Humanity, the organization behind Worldcoin. We do a deep dive on Worldcoin, including proof of personhood, privacy, and the role of cryptocurrency in a world with AGI. Please enjoy the episode.

Alex, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for joining.

Thanks for having me.

So for those of you, for those of the audience who are unfamiliar, can you explain what Worldcoin is and how you came to start it? And I understand it's taken quite the evolution since the initial idea. So why don't you unpack your journey a little bit?

I will actually start at the beginning of the journey, then we'll get to what it actually is, because I think it kind of helps to set the Kind of going 4 years back, I was actually in AI and I was working on how to use very large models to predict quantum systems at Caltech in Los Angeles. And I suddenly— To kind of make it short, I was in AI and kind of how to use deep learning to predict quantum systems, which is like a really hard thing to do and we really need it for quantum computing and other things. Then I actually met Samo, who's actually a big part of that story. And somewhat because I met Samo and some other coincidences, I got introduced to Max and Sam. And Max and Sam were already working on Worldcoin back then. So Sam Altman, who you certainly know from OpenAI, and Max Neuenstein. And there was like a conceptual paper of what Worldcoin should be. And The 2 main ideas were, well, for one, AGI is going to come and it will change everything. It will impact society in a very meaningful way. And we will need to build tools to kind of actually make that a good transition, an exciting transition that is kind of good for all of humanity. And we'll talk much more about what we think these are. And then the second piece is that actually crypto itself, kind of the whole idea is is very important. And I think no one can disagree with that idea of economically empowering everyone, but it's now around since a long time and somehow it didn't have that breakthrough moment. It somehow did never get to a billion people. So what can we do to get there? And the idea was very simple. That's the one thing about Sam, like the ideas are always very simple. It's just very hard to get to them, right? Building AGI and it's like, it's clearly good and it's a very simple idea, just building it is really hard. And Worldcoin was somewhat similar. And the idea was, well, what would happen if we would relaunch something like Bitcoin and we would give ownership in it to literally every human being just for being a human being? And that would be billions of dollars of incentive alignment around just creating a really large network. And maybe that's all you need. Maybe you just need a really large network to kickstart network effects and make crypto suddenly much more useful, to somewhat be the Tesla of crypto. And on the other hand, to do that, however, you need to solve another important primitive, which is proof of personhood. So how can you verify your humanity to the internet? And that matters in the crypto sphere because you need it to get to incentive alignment, because if you don't have that, bots and malicious actors just claim everything and something like Worldcoin would break down immediately. And it matters for the normal world because Well, AI is here. And as we know from X or Twitter is that, well, bots create a lot of experiences and we will certainly need kind of a human gate for the internet for many applications. For other applications, it's super cool to interact with AI, but we don't have that. And it's very, for a lot of reasons, it's dangerous to rely on KYC only. And it's also not a global solution. So we took all of those things together, all of those ideas together, and kind of spent a year doing research and built prototypes for pretty much everything you could imagine, and kind of within that sphere of ideas. And we realized a couple of important things. We realized that proof of personhood itself is actually a much harder problem than it maybe sounds initially. And that kind of those 2 things together, so like if you actually launch a digital currency, And it has billions of dollars of value and you use that to bootstrap a network that it actually is probably much more profound than we initially thought because just PayPal launched with distributing $70 million, I think, like in these like $20 referrals and like, okay, if you scale that to $20 billion, it would be pretty incredible. And so this was like a rant, but— Maybe you jump in first before I go much deeper into anything.

No, no, no, please go on the overview. I want to hear more about— so you talked about where it started, but I want to hear more on the implementation. What was the evolution in terms of like, hey, what's the exact product here that should be offered?

Yeah, so there was an initial set of ideas and we're like, okay, it all goes down to first we need to solve this proof of personal problem because otherwise none of it really makes sense. Within proof of personhood, you can essentially think about 3 potential ideas to solve the problem. One is KYC. So you rely on government infrastructure, essentially. Second is what people call web of trust. So you build out kind of a trust graph of digital signatures and kind of digital properties and behaviors and things like that. And the third one is biometrics, of course, right? You actually measure what it means to be a person. And We threw away the KYC situation almost immediately, right? Because that kind of, for one, it goes a little bit against the anti, kind of against the fundamental idea of crypto that you want to build infrastructure that is resilient against even governments colluding. And on the other hand, it's just with improve a person, what is very important to understand is the weakest link in the chain can make everything break, right? And so you just need one or two governments to don't have a reliable infrastructure and everything will break because they can just insert a lot of fake identities and kind of everything breaks down. So threw that away. Second was web of trust. And we kind of talked to early teams at Facebook that did these kinds of things and tried to build that out in kind of a Facebook manner. So you have friends and you have people that send messages. So they have a lot of information, but even they were not able to crack that problem because Everything that is purely digital is just somewhat, you're somewhat able to engineer that. And especially with AI, my simple rule for AI is like everything that is purely digital will break or will be very easy to fake. It's going to be somewhat easy to just send out a lot of agents and emulate human behavior on the internet. That's not going to be a challenge anymore. And so we threw that away too. And then within biometrics, the first thing that is important to understand is the problem that we have to solve to build such a human gate for the internet is a very different problem than what your iPhone is solving for. Because what your iPhone is solving for is, okay, this is Alex logging again into the iPhone. So it's a one-to-one matching. So there's an embedding stored locally on the phone of who I am, who I look like. So a 3D point cloud and a picture. That is compressed. And I try to log in again, a new embedding is created, matched to this one previous one. And if that works, I can use my phone. But to solve proof of personhood, we need to compare one person against everyone else because we want to make sure that you only have one account. And that is something that currently only the government really does. And all the other startups, they build on top of that somewhat. And so it goes from 1-to-1 to 1-to-N. And you can just kind of draw a line of entropy. So how much information you can generate with different sources of information. So it could be face, could be fingerprint, things like that. And if you want to get to a billion people, most of those things actually break. So face or fingerprint, things like that, just don't have enough information to be able to scale to so many people. Just like the error rate explodes exponentially. So you don't have a constant error rate, but you literally hit a wall and your whole system breaks down. And of course DNA would work, but I think that would freak out people quite a bit. And somewhere in the sweet spot, and the only thing that really we learned can work is the human eye. It has a lot of entropy in it and a lot of information in it. And so we realized, okay, if we actually think that this is seriously a very important problem and we think the upside is really high here, then that's probably the only way we can do this. And so we went down this path and then we had one other important constraint is that, okay, the one thing that biometrics always has is a concern around privacy. And Then we learned that there's— back then, like, this now sounds like a joke, but back then zero-knowledge proofs were still very early and very expensive. But within cryptography, there's a thing called zero-knowledge proofs that allows you to essentially prove something to another party without actually revealing that information. And so then with these zero-knowledge proofs that back then were very expensive still, we could kind of draw a system diagram of something that would be able to scale to a billion people or more, would be completely anonymous and privacy-preserving, and we think AI safe. And kind of that then ended up being Worldcoin. So we essentially built a biometric device, kind of a, it's called the Orb, which actually predates me. It was not my decision, but it's called the Orb and it's Chrome. Which at least, well, people care. It makes some people freak out, other people love it. But it is a biometric device that first has a lot of sensors in front to make sure that whatever it sees is an actual human being, so not a display. So it's relatively hard to attack and has a lot of neural networks on the device to check that you don't try to attack it. And then it takes a picture of the eye, calculates a unique embedding code out of it. And deletes the images. And that's the only thing that actually leaves the device. And then you as a person, you verify that you're a unique user with zero-knowledge proofs. So you actually stay anonymous. And when you do that, you also receive ownership in the digital currency called Worldcoin. So that's how the whole thing comes together. And we now, we spent a lot of time building this because we actually had to build our hardware device completely from the ground up because like such a use case is just nothing that currently exists. And We were very paranoid about AI, which turned out to be a very good decision. And 4 years ago, it didn't sound like an obvious decision. And so, yeah, we spent $50 million and a couple of years in building these devices and the whole infrastructure around it. And we launched it in July and are now kind of sprinting to roll it out globally, which is a very different challenge and kind of what I learned recently.

We'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsor. The tech world turns to the Brave browser for its unbeatable privacy protections, but did you know that Brave also has a private ad platform? Brave Ads offers first-party targeting, and it's been cookieless since day one, so you can relax while third-party tracking cookies disappear from the web. Today, millions of people turn to ad blockers to avoid being tracked and pestered online, but Brave's new ad model aligns incentives for users and advertisers. Users earn rewards for viewing ads, which they can save, spend, or pass along to their favorite creators. And advertisers score points for respecting user privacy, generating ROI without invasive tracking. So, whether it's high-impact announcements on the New Tab page or keyword-targeted ads in Brave Search, Brave offers diverse, private, future-proof ad formats for all your business goals. Join the future of advertising at brave.com/ads. Mention MOZ when signing up for a 25% discount your first campaign. Hey everyone, Erik here. At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from our AI and investing cluster of podcasts to shows that drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, investors, and influencers. Like Econ 102 with Noah Smith. We're launching new shows every week and we're looking for industry-leading sponsors. If you think that might be you and your company, email me at erik@turpentine.co. That's erik@turpentine.co. And let's partner together.

What do you think people misunderstand or underappreciate or not get about Worldcoin?

Well, I think it really depends on kind of where in the curve you are. So I think the first thing is, okay, this is not a problem. So you could believe that. I think you will be proven wrong relatively soon if you're not already are. Second, kind of that's one. So meaning proof of personhood, and we will need a human layer on the internet. The second one is certainly privacy. And I think that's like 99% of the critique that we face. And kind of what kind of the initial explanation I have to do is like, okay, it sounds like the exact opposite of what it actually is. It sounds like, okay, you build a biometric database of the world and et cetera, et cetera. And it sounds like you kind of seek control versus it's actually the exact opposite. It doesn't collect data. It's anonymous. It empowers people. It doesn't do the opposite of that. And so I think that's second. And then 3 is that I think that the fact that if we succeed, the mission is actually much bigger than even just the proof of personhood. It should be the biggest financial network on the planet.

Why would it become the biggest financial network on the planet?

That's why we actually started it in the first Sam's initial idea was, what can we do to create this large network? And it would be around incentive alignment. So you spend billions of dollars to actually bootstrap a really large network. And then we realized we have to solve the proof of person problem. And what this actually means is, because we have proof of person and because we have a digital currency that is valued at over $20 billion, we have a lot of capital to actually onboard a lot of people and kind of go deep in markets and actually scale a financial network. So proof of personhood is one piece, but also these people have a wallet and can interact value. So that's why.

Got it.

So you were explaining some of the misunderstandings people have and there are a variety of different misunderstandings.

Yep.

Yeah.

Worldcoin is a controversial project. Some, some people love it, some people, uh, have real problems with it. Why do you think people have, uh, have problems with it, or why do you think it elicits such a negative reaction to some people?

Well, I think one thing is certainly what we already discussed. I think it's the— it's kind of the privacy concerns around biometrics. I think that, that certainly, I think, is the major one. I think another one is certainly that just like me personally, I think I'm pretty good at technology and even running a company. I think I'm reasonably okay, but I'm really bad with marketing. And so I think that's also something we just need to get much better in. One interesting question I actually want to hear your thoughts is is the decision to kind of build a Chrome orb. And kind of, what do you think? Like, do you think this was like overall a good idea or a bad idea? And I kind of give you the quick context, but like one of the funniest and most kind of looking back, one of the more interesting comments that Sam had on Rollcoin in the beginning was, quote, my biggest concern about Rollcoin is that no one cares. And funny enough, I think at least we took care of that. Right. But certainly one thing I observe is that it's— and it's actually very culture dependent. So for example, if you go to Japan, people just love this aesthetics. They just like love this like chrome orb and it's weird and it's like interesting. But in the US, I think it's somewhat different. Or at least it's like, it's so sci-fi, it's so futuristic that I think kind of the people that are very tech forward and tech leaning, they kind of love it. But I think others are like then double freaked out because the rest of the project is also so futuristic. So what do you think?

I think the Chrome, the Orb is awesome. I think that's not the reason, in my opinion, why people have challenges with Worldcoin. I think when something is potentially really scary, people need it to be humanized. I think people need to hear more from the founders. They need to hear more about the story. They need to hear or be reminded of why it's critical, why it's crucial.

Yeah.

As opposed to some sort of, you know, either grab for money or grab for power or whatever. People assume the worst when they don't hear more about the story. And so that's why I love your going on this podcast and investing a lot in comms and marketing more generally going forward, because you do have such an inspiring story, both you as a founding team, but also your mission. And you just have to remind people.

I think that's true. Yeah, I think in general, that's something we really want to change in the coming months. But I think we just have to get out there much more. It's like, Sam and me as founders, just like talking about it. And, and the rest of the team as well. Like, we have a lot of great engineers and people that can tell that story. So I think that's, that is true.

How did you build this thing? Talk about what it's like to, to build this kind of organization. It requires so much expertise on so many different fronts. Talk a bit about that journey.

Yeah, it actually was, I think, a very surprising story in terms of at least what people expect. Because first of all, in terms of timing, we started the company 3 months before COVID So I think we started working it in January. So I decided to leave Caltech in October or something. Then in January, we started working on it, and in March, COVID hit the world. And so we had like a 3-month period that felt fairly romantic. We were sitting in an apartment in San Francisco. First time for me to be in San Francisco really for kind of a meaningful amount of time. Rest of the founding team are like a lot of my friends from university. Both from Caltech and from Max Planck in Germany. So a lot of theoretical physicists, which is the first funny piece of it. And so we started in San Francisco and had these 3 super fun months brainstorming with Max and Sam and just trying a lot of things. And then in March, I was flying to Germany with some other members of the founding team to actually interview hardware companies that could help us to kind of build the whole hardware piece. And on the flight, like literally on the flight, Donald Trump announced that he's closing the borders for COVID. And so we saw it on the screen while we literally were walking in the plane and I lost my visa. So I was on ESTA because I left Caltech. So I knew that this would be a one-way flight. And then Talked to Sam and Max when we landed, and we're like, and Sam was like, "Oh, this is just going to be a couple months. Don't worry about it." And of course, that was not true. But what that led to is we essentially had to rent an office in Germany, and we decided to do that in a fairly small town outside of a small town. So like, I think 500 people or something live there. It's a city called Tenenlohe near Erlangen, and we rented like. pretty large office space there and apartments and houses around that, and then flew everyone we hired during the time in COVID. We just flew to this little town in Germany. And so what it did is that essentially we were working 7 days a week and living together in this office in the middle of Germany and all these people from California and New York and Boston and whatever. So it was like the first funny situation. And so we worked really hard and very intense, which I think was really good. And I actually do think Worldcoin would probably not have happened if that time was not the case, because it was just like so much work and so small amount of people. Then I think the first moment that really shaped the company was it leaked. I was like, we were back then these 15 people in this little town in Germany, and Most of us, I mean, it was my first serious startup. I had a vertical farming company when I was in high school, but the first actual serious venture-funded startup. And on Friday night, I got an email from a journalist from Bloomberg that they will publish that story on the COVID page in an hour, and I have time to respond now. Now, this sounds like a normal thing for me, but back then, for kind of a small company and first-time founders, was like a crazy thing. And of course, because Sam is a co-founder, they created this massive, massive news situation. And so that was crazy. And that somewhat really shaped the company because we then realized, okay, this is very sensitive and we have to be very cautious in terms of whatever we do because the scrutiny will be very different than any other startup has. And so we became, for some amount of time, very secretive. And yeah, it's hard to describe. It was just like a crazy time. And then, of course, the other piece of it is just that it was like so much technology in one early-stage company. It was like a complicated piece of hardware that we had to build from the ground up. And then all this protocol crypto stuff that also was back then fairly new. And so yeah, it was back then kind of 5, it was the whole company was just engineering and research and it was essentially 5 teams working across the stack. And then at some point we switched to actually testing this and talking to users. And then yet again, kind of the company went through a transition phase where we had to build up, hire people from Airbnb and Uber and kind of really change the whole operating entity and then we raised a Series B. And well, I think the much more interesting piece about Rollcoin is just that it changed fundamentally, I think, 3 or 4 times, like from a research organization to a product organization to a scaling organization. And that might be normal for a company, but it was definitely an interesting experience for me to go through. Yeah.

Talk about what it's like to work with foreign governments, or what advice would you give other founders who are building something in this way that requires coordination? Because what you're doing is both deeply technically complex, but also politically or regulatorily complex as well, potentially. So talk a little bit about what that's been like.

Yeah.

And what advice you might give to other founders?

That is actually a very good question. Yeah. Yet again, I think this is something where Worldcoin was very unusual because usually when you're a startup and you enter a country, you have quite some time until kind of the leaders of a government are actually aware or become aware of you. Right. But again, because of Sam and because of kind of all the PR, Whenever we entered or enter a country, we essentially have to immediately talk to the leadership of a government. And so that was something that I think took us some months to learn. And we had a lot of really crazy situations. For example, I was testifying in front of Kenyan parliament, which was a very unique experience. It was just crazy. So it's like a lot of these things, just like situations that it's just really hard to get across how crazy they have been. And in our case, there's like 15 countries we discuss on a weekly basis. So there's like a lot of these situations. And I think that the one general takeaway that I have is cultures and countries are so— especially if you go completely out of your zone, like, whatever, Europe, I think, is somewhat easy to understand as an American and vice versa. But if you go to Asia and you go to Africa and These cultures are so wildly different that you can just not rely on your intuition at all. You really have to find someone locally on the ground that you can trust and really question all your assumptions. Just start from the beginning and explain, this is what we're doing. What do you think could go wrong? Who should we talk to? And some of these Asian countries just behave very different. They're worried about very different things, care about very different things. So I think that's— question all your assumptions, I think, is the summary that I have.

Yeah, that's good advice. How do you make sure Worldcoin isn't used for negative ends and that it's— how do you protect against any possible negative use cases?

Well, build a system that can just fundamentally not do that. It's like, I think you want to You don't want to rely even on your own kind of— I don't want to even need to trust myself essentially because I might lose my job for whatever reason or something else might go wrong. So I think we build everything from the ground up in a way that fully decouples all potential biometric data from profiles.

Yeah.

Keeps you anonymous while you use it, doesn't store data. And now we really have to decentralize everything even much further. So like our servers are not a blocker for anything. So yeah, I think that the short answer is just build something that cannot be used for anything bad.

Alex, I understand Vitalik was influential in you decentralizing Worldcoin.

Talk a bit about that.

I mean, Vitalik was influential in many ways, I think. But one perspective that Vitalik added to my overall thinking is just he always immediately goes to the extreme case, right? I think just living through Ethereum and kind of this becoming this extremely influential $200 billion thing, right? Vitalik immediately jumps to, okay, what happens if government attacks you? What happens if this protocol becomes fundamental infrastructure for society? What are all the things that can go wrong? And that just amped up, I think, all of our urgency drastically to kind of decentralize everything, et cetera, et cetera. So it's just Similar to when, as a founder, you talk to a founder that is like a couple stages ahead, I think. We felt like it's the same thing for kind of a protocol. And so it was like a lens into the future almost. And that got us to put like, I don't know, 60, 70% of our engineering resources around decentralization. So it's pretty serious. So yeah, he's a very smart guy.

Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of very smart people, talk more about your partnership with Sam. What are some of the biggest lessons you've taken from him? Maybe something non-obvious.

Yeah, actually the funniest takeaway actually from working with Sam is Actually, that there is not much in obvious. It's like, I think the power of Sam is like incredible simplicity. Like we always joke at the company that Sam never says anything surprising or very rarely, but always gives a very simple answer, but with a lot of conviction. So I think it's that combination of simplicity, but incredible conviction that other people just usually would not have, and just follow that conviction over a year timeframe. So it's actually, that was my inspiring takeaway, that there's no magical skills that you kind of fundamentally have to learn, but rather just need to be smart, work really hard, Think first principled and just walk through it. Don't give up, essentially. And yeah, he's just— well, and the other thing is the level of ambition. It's just Sam mentally always goes to the absolute extreme, right? It's like, how can this be the biggest financial network on the planet? Like, that's a very normal question to ask. And that's, as a first-time founder, nothing you would usually do or something that just takes you a lot of time to build up.

Talk about what scares and excites you about a world after AGI. Like, let's get into the future a little bit.

Well, I mean, let's start with the exciting piece. I think the exciting piece is that very obviously, It might solve pretty much every problem that we think of. It will accelerate science drastically. It will accelerate engineering and kind of overall productivity drastically. So on the one hand, it will very likely be the best thing we ever invented. On the other hand, the existential risk of it actually worries me quite a bit. And Yeah, it's just really hard to calm me down around that, I think. It just feels like a really— I understand all the arguments and I mean, fundamentally I'm an engineer, so I understand all of this thinking, but abstractly aligning something that is much more intelligent than you are is just a really, really hard problem if it actually gets to that. So kind of my dream state would be A system without any internal goals or ambitions or feelings that is just incredibly intelligent and can solve whatever problem you throw at it. Something like a hyper-intelligent calculator. That would be the dream. And so the question is, will we get there or will these systems build out internal consciousness goals that might not align with ours. So that's nothing new, but I think, yeah, I have nothing, I have no incredibly new thoughts to add here. I think this probably resonates very much with what you think, is my guess, because I think we all somewhat think the same around this topic. What do you think?

I mean, I think it really depends on what timescale. On a shorter timescale, there's just the human labor meaning.

question.

Yeah.

If humans get automated, what are, you know, how do we find our sense of purpose in the world? How do humans intersect with AI? But there are much more, you know, concerning things like, you know, sort of, you know, humans using AI as weapons or sort of, you know, even more sort of sci-fi scenarios that could go wrong. So I think it really depends on on the timescale and the degree and what team you're on. If you're on team human as opposed to team like, you know, evolution or something, then, you know, indifferent of kind of what is the winner, who are the winners and losers, etc. So yeah, lots of interesting philosophical— conundrums that we'll have to face in the future?

Yeah, look, sorry, I immediately went to kind of the extreme ASI situation. So, okay, let me actually start maybe a little earlier than that. I think you're right. So I think the first, talking about timescales, my guess is actually that it's whatever. I don't think it's more than 10 years away that you at least will get to AGI. Probably would not surprise me if it's by 2030 or even a little earlier than that. That being said, I don't think AGI itself will already transform everything. In fact, it might be almost surprising in terms of how non-transformational that step is because I think Until then, the next 5 years, we will just build more and more capable systems over time and we'll just build better products and startups will slowly adopt and things like that. So I think all of this will be very manageable and honestly very exciting. I think the question is, at some point, which you mentioned as a kind of a sci-fi situation, and that is true, but will there be sometimes of a self-improvement cycle at some point that leads to self-improvement and just exponential takeoff? That's where I think things will get very unpredictable. But yeah, so until then, I think the internet will be a very interesting place, right? I'm talking about proof of personhood. I think in a world in which, whatever, like a large percentage of all content on internet will be AI generated, which I think will be the case relatively soon, I think the internet will foundationally really change, not necessarily in a bad way, but it will, I think. Yeah, work is going to be certainly the most meaningful. All right. It's like the whole economy will transform and it will be good for some, bad for others. Crazy time.

Speaking of, if you weren't working on Worldcoin and you had to be working on some other technology that you think would be game-changing, starting a company and something that you think would be very important, what other things would you consider or work on?

4 things. It would be either fusion, synthetic biology and genetics, because I think that's kind of AI will actually transform that field drastically and kind of getting genetic engineering from a science to engineering discipline. I think it's going to be incredible. It's like it's going to solve so many diseases and things like that. Third would be BCIs. But it's like, I actually do think Neuralink is quite far ahead, so I'm not sure I would start a company there, but I think that's going to be one very exciting and very important kind of at the same time. Yeah, these would be the top 3. So genetics, synthetic biology. Genetics, synthetic biology. Uh, BCIs, uh, fusion.

You mentioned 4 ideas.

Well, the last one would be way less important, I think, but probably very profitable is like, if you, if you're able to raise that capital, it would be chip manufacturing and things like that. So, so I think everything around AI infrastructure, right? It's like, if you start very from the bottom energy and you go to the chips. Then you go to the data centers and the actual clusters. I think whatever you capture along that stack, if you're a very capable founder and you have a lot of capital, that's probably a good place to build a big business. Yeah.

And say more about BCIs. Like, what do you expect? Where are we right now? I haven't been following. Where are we right now? Are we close to something that's interesting? And where is it all going? What will it mean?

I actually started reading much more about this the last 2 weeks. I'm still far from an expert, but I asked myself the same question 2 weeks ago. My interesting takeaway is that I think there is no kind of foundational things missing. There's no, like, sometimes in engineering you have these really big questions and you just have no idea what the answer will be and you just walk work towards them. I think fusion has been one of them a couple of years ago. I think in BCIs, that's actually not the case. I think we understand everything reasonably well, and I think there's a path for everything. And it really comes down to pure engineering and material science. It's just like if you go to Neuralink specifically, it's just how do you make these electrodes even smaller? How do you make the robot even more accurate and are able to put much more electrodes and into the brain? And then how do you build the whole system to actually read out these signals? I mean, there's different ways. Neuralink is kind of the most direct way, right? So I can literally put electrodes in the brain. There is other ones that are like you essentially put a PCB on the brain and you try to stimulate it, but readout is much harder with that. And then, of course, you can also try to do it noninvasive. But I think input is just really hard. Output is somewhat possible. You can read out the brain, but it's really hard to put information in it. But yeah, I think Neuralink is actually kind of the coolest approach. And then there's other companies that do somewhat similar to that. But it was very surprising to me to learn that it really is all about engineering. That's a pretty crazy statement if you think about it, because that makes it pretty likely that in 5 years we will actually have these things, or like 5 to 10 years. It's hard to say how long, but you can at least say that, okay, very definitely we will have these things. So that was my takeaway.

Yeah, fascinating. In closing, what plugs do you have for Worldcoin? What do you want listeners to know about it or potentially do? If they're curious to learn any more or get involved?

Oh, that's a good question. I think follow me and Sam on Twitter. And in the coming months, just everything will scale up. So I think that's fundamentally what you have to expect. Many more countries will launch, many more devices will go live. We're still kind of in the very, very early phases of that. Yeah, just, just, just follow us and see what, see what happens. And hopefully it's going to be a great year for us.

Cool.

Let's wrap on that. Alex, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

It's been a great episode.

Thanks for having me.

Upstream with Erik Torenberg is a show from Turpentine, the podcast network behind Moment of Zen and Cognitive Revolution. If you liked the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store.