How the New Administration Will Impact Crypto, AI & Tech Globally w/ Ben Horowitz & Salim Ismail | EP #145

In this episode, Ben, Peter, and Salim discuss recent tech, AI, robotics, and crypto news and what the new administration means for tech enthusiasts. Recorded on Jan 23rd, 2024 Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. Ben Horowitz is a prominent businessman, investor, author, and technology entrepreneur who has played a pivotal role in shaping Silicon Valley. In 1999, he co-founded Loudcloud, which evolved into Opsware, an enterprise software company acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. In 2009, Horowitz co-founded Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a leading venture capital firm that has invested in groundbreaking companies like Airbnb and Coinbase. He is the author of two bestselling books, The Hard Thing About Hard Things and What You Do Is Who You Are, offering practical insights into building businesses and shaping culture. Known for his expertise in technology entrepreneurship, venture capital, and thought leadership, Horowitz also established the a16z Cultural Leadership Fund to connect cultural leaders with the tech industry and promote diversity. Salim Ismail is a serial entrepreneur and technology strategist well known for his expertise in Exponential organizations. He is the Founding Executive Director of Singularity University and the founder and chairman of ExO Works and OpenExO. Learn more about a16z: https://a16z.com/ Join Salim's ExO Community: https://openexo.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/salimismail ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter Get 15% off OneSkin with the code PETER at https://www.oneskin.co/ #oneskinpod _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The Biden administration was by far the most anti-tech presidency in my lifetime. Complete war with the industry.

• 0:07Peter Diamandis?

  Are we in for a extraordinary acceleration and reimagination of crypto and Bitcoin and all?

• 0:16Speaker 00

  One of the things that you only know if you're deep in the crypto industry is there was nobody developing software in the space. It just really, really slowed down over the last four years. And now it's back.

• 0:27Peter Diamandis?

  We are in a race with China on AI and we're trying to troll it by chips. I am curious your thoughts about all this.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  I do think we're in a race. The danger, of course, is...

• 0:42Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to Moonshots, another special episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech with my bestie Salim Ismail. And on this episode, I'm joined with an incredible tech investor, perhaps one of the most dominant in the world, and that's Ben Horowitz of A16Z. In 1999, Ben co-founded LoudCloud, which evolved and became an enterprise software company sold for $1.6 billion to Hewlett Packard. Then in 2009, Horowitz joined with Marc Andreessen to co-found Andreessen Horowitz, also known as A16Z, a venture capital fund with, get this, over $45 billion assets under management. He's the author of two bestselling books with incredible

• 1:27Peter Diamandis?

  names, incredible content, "The Hard Things About Hard Things" and "What You Do Is Who You Are." All right, let's jump into this episode. This is just after the inauguration, after some recent conversations about breakthroughs in AI, in robotics, in crypto. It really feels like we're in the future and it's the year 2025. All right. What just happened in tech this week? We're going to find out. Let's jump in. Ben, good to see you this morning. Where are you today?

• 1:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm in Las Vegas. Great to see you, Peter. Great to see you, Salim.

• 2:00Peter Diamandis?

  Likewise, Salim, as always. And, you know, a lot happening in tech this week. Super pumped to have Ben join us in this conversation because I think you've got a front row seat to some of the most extraordinary things happening. And, you know, I think one of the things that happened this week is we've got a new president.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:20Peter Diamandis?

  I have to imagine this is probably... Do you think this is the most tech-forward administration we have ever had?

• 2:28Speaker 00

  Well, it's certainly the most dramatic change in tech policy that we've ever seen, just because the Biden administration was by far the most anti-tech presidency in my lifetime. And then, you know, Trump, at least in his first four days, has been full-out, like, aggressive pro-tech. So it's just, it's, it's so night and day. The contrast is absolutely shocking.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  It's like a whip saw.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Like, it's, it's almost unbelievable. It's through the licking glass kind of thing.

• 3:08Peter Diamandis?

  Well, if there's ever a time that we're going to accelerate humanity to Mars, get digital superintelligence up and running, extend a healthy human lifespan, I think this...

• 3:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, like when Trump said we're going to Mars, I was like, okay, let's go.

• 3:29Peter Diamandis?

  As always, we'll talk about AI, robotics, crypto, but I think this was interesting. You know, looking at the front row seat of what was going on at the administration inauguration here, I think was, was pretty extraordinary. Did you or Mark get an invite to go, or did you decide to sort of stay home?

• 3:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, you know, we have been spending a lot of time with the administration in that Mar-a-Lago, but, you know, inauguration isn't, we're not really party people. So we didn't go, we had, you know, many people from the firm went to the inauguration and they said it was great fun, so.

• 4:05Peter Diamandis?

  You know what I thought was fascinating was Davos was going on at the same time.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, quite the contrast, yeah. Well, these guys would normally be at Davos.

• 4:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And they, I think they aligned, aligned properly. Celine, what are you thinking about?

• 4:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, and by the way, most of them were very anti-Trump in 2016, 2020, so it's a, it's quite a change.

• 4:28Peter Diamandis?

  It is. I mean, when you're about to jump on a fast-moving elevator or rocket ship, Yeah. you gotta make a choice. Salim, what are your thoughts about this lineup here?

• 4:40Speaker 02

  I feel like this is like a Game of Thrones episode where the Lord of High Tower is told, "You better bend the knee." Or the sword is coming for you. And so I think it's 50/50 excitement and defensiveness. Because you've got to play ball, but look at the game that we're now playing is amazing.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I agree with that. I think the excitement is like super real. In that, like, everybody in tech has been oppressed, like, literally. I mean, I know that sounds ridiculous, because, you know, they're like, "Oh, how can billionaires be oppressed?" And all that kind of thing. But they really, the Biden administration was at complete war with the industry. Like, every single thing you tried to do in technology, I mean, they tried to completely outlaw fintech, or not even outlaw, destroy the fintech and crypto industries.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  That plus the incredible blanket, the incredible blanket on M&A. It's like ridiculous. No major M&A can happen in that kind of environment. And that just solves such a huge backlog of tech companies wanting to get an exit.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was, we had a company within, it was called Within, which was a content company for VR that made an exercise game called Supernatural. And the FTC blocked the acquisition by Meta on antitrust grounds. And, like, eventually, it got through. They lost the case because it was an absurd case. But, you know, it's just harassment. Like, there was no, there's no antitrust. Meta doesn't have a monopoly on VR. VR is not like even like a market yet. Like, what are you talking about?

• 6:26Peter Diamandis?

  We also saw the meltdown of the entire biotech industry over the last four years. Everybody, Peter here. If you're enjoying this episode, please help me get the message of abundance out to the world. We're truly living during the most extraordinary time ever in human history, and I want to get this mindset out to everyone. Please subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts and turn on notifications so we can let you know when the next episode is being dropped. All right, back to our episode. I think we're going to see a resurgence in all of these companies. I mean, I'm in, I was in two, on the board of two public biotech companies. I just saw this massive, you know, demonetization going

• 7:08Peter Diamandis?

  on as, as the FDA and regulatory restrictions were like, no, can't do that. No, you can't merge there. It just, it took the wind out of all the sails that, and people ended up leaving the United States to go overseas to get treatments because they can't do it in the United States. So, you know, super excited about Bobby Kennedy and seeing what he's going to do.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I mean, the other, and the other side of that is, we actually needed a regulatory upgrade, right? Because HIPAA was designed long before, you know, we could use data to cure a disease and create amazing diagnostics and all these things. And there was just no chance of getting to that. You know, I had a great conversation with Dave Ricks from Eli Lilly, who's by the way, like, a fantastic CEO. He's like one of us. I mean, he's a real like product guy, talented guy. And, you know, one of the reasons why drugs are so expensive to develop is they can't match the cure for the disease with the people who have the disease for the clinical trial. Like, there's no way to do that. They,

• 8:17Speaker 00

  they, you know, it's like, Hunting for a needle in a haystack to find these patients who, you know, whose lives could be saved because, you know, the current regulatory regime has kind of prevented that kind of thing. So we're really hopeful that we can make great progress with RFK Jr. and the new team.

• 8:38Peter Diamandis?

  Absolutely, absolutely sure we can. You know, on this, on this image of the tech CEOs inauguration, I think I left Sam Altman off there so he wouldn't fight with, with the image on there.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  That's a good fight, isn't it?

• 8:51Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, my God. It's, it's, it's, you know, it's great, you know, nighttime TV to see what's going on here. But it was, you know, listen, having all of these individuals in the front row, you know, Bezos and Musk had just launched their rockets the week, you know, or days before. You know, it's nice to have like two of the wealthiest people on the planet battling it out to get us, get him married to, to space. And then the rest of them here. I mean, this, you know, the question is, is this the tech, the tech giant takeover of America? And ultimately, I don't know about, about you, but I sort of think this is the way America thrives.

• 9:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's the best, it's the best of America. I mean, you know, like this is the thing that's so frustrating if you're in tech, right? Like, we have this incredible industry where we've attracted literally the greatest people in the world. I mean, like, look at that set. You know, the only one who's kind of, I mean, Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg are kind of natively American. Jeff, you know, his dad was a Cuban immigrant. You know, everybody else is like an immigrant. And they're all here and they're all building this country and our economy and our future.

• 10:12Speaker 00

  And they've just been absolutely vilified for not anything they did, but like literally for being successful. There's not anything people are pointing to and saying, oh, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's a bad guy because of this and that and the third. It's like he's a bad guy because he's rich and he succeeded and he built something important. And so that has just been so devastating culturally, I think. And then you pile on that, you know, trying to outlaw all these efforts. So I think, and by the way, all these guys donated massive amounts of money to Biden, Obama, like on the Democrat side,

• 10:53Speaker 00

  and nobody complained that they were controlling the government then. And you have to wonder why. And by the way, much more than Biden or Obama, Trump doesn't listen to anybody. I mean, like, no one's gonna tell him what to do. What are you talking about?

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. The one that really stuck in my craw was the Delaware court on Elon's 56 billion or whatever.

• 11:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was just unbelievable.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  You look at somebody that's taken unbelievable risks, made the outcome, and then you want to harm that. That sends a bad message.

• 11:22Speaker 00

  And the board approved it. And then the shareholders approved it. And like, so like, we own the company. We all think it's a great idea. He only gets paid if we get paid like a crazy amount of money. And you're gonna just, after the fact, say like, okay, corporate governance, like, all the rules around that are fake. And like, we don't, there's no rules. Like, I can just change the law whenever I want as an activist judge. It's just unbelievable.

• 11:52Peter Diamandis?

  And insane. You know, and the fact of the matter is, these guys employ in some total, tens of millions, you know, bordering on 100 million Americans in some way, shape, or form.

• 12:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, yep.

• 12:05Peter Diamandis?

  Let's talk about this. This was an announcement this week that was, was interesting, interesting in a number of different ways, right? This is the announcement of Stargate, of a quote, $500 billion commitment on private AI infrastructure. What are your thoughts about this, gentlemen?

• 12:24Speaker 00

  Okay, so there's, you know, it's a little unclear what it is.

• 12:30Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  You know, that aside, like, I think the idea that this administration wants to attract investment in America and is using kind of all of its mojo to do that is great. And, you know, so that part is terrific. You know, Mas is Mas. We all know him.

• 12:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 12:59Speaker 00

  You know, he's, he's quite the character. He's certainly brilliant and amazingly successful, but, you know, he does things in a very specific way, which I don't want to overly comment on. But, you know, like, building AI infrastructure, just watching in the Biden, with the Biden administration, there were so many kind of efforts to invest all around the world, not in America, in, you know, data centers and, and chips and whatnot. And it's nice that, like, at least there is a kind of high-profile effort to do that here.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  I'd like to see the same effort in the energy sector of opening up more energy sources, because we need energy and generation.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  So I think that's 100% going to happen. You know, we're very close with Doug Burgum, the new department, the head of the Department of Interior. And he's, he's really, really good on this topic. And then Trump, of course, has, you know, said what he said and is extremely pro-energy. So, and they're going to definitely, I think, open up nuclear, which is the key for so many things. And we're seeing great innovation in that area. And, you know, like, a nuclear-

• 14:13Peter Diamandis?

  When you see nuclear, Ben, you're talking about, like, generation four, small modular nuclear reactors and so forth.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, fishing, like, that you can put next to a data center, that kind of thing.

• 14:21Peter Diamandis?

  Or in your backyard.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:24Peter Diamandis?

  They're getting safe enough that we, you know, they should be peppered throughout the United States.

• 14:30Speaker 00

  Absolutely, Paul. And then there's another part of this where crypto really helps. So we have this company, Daylight Energy, and basically what they're doing is they're creating a marketplace. So if you have, you know, solar panels and a Tesla Powerwall, right, you're going to have at many times more energy than you need. So wouldn't it be great to have a marketplace where like anybody who needed energy could get, you know, ask your Powerwall for your energy. But Powerwalls aren't people, so they don't have credit cards. So how do they do that? Well, you know, crypto is a perfect answer for machines paying machines. And, and so, you know, that effort can now happen. Like that was also illegal in the, in the Biden world. Or not, yeah, I shouldn't say illegal

• 15:13Speaker 00

  because there was no law. It was just like the government.

• 15:17Peter Diamandis?

  The government wasn't.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, basically using its power, no, using its power to terrorize anybody in the field.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  Well, it was the whole de-banking thing, right, which was absolutely scandalous, absolutely scandalous what they did.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, kick them out of the banking system. So we had more than two dozen companies kicked out of the banking systems. Elizabeth Warren's been running around Washington telling people that's fake.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  It's naked, it was naked aggression against crypto.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  Naked aggression, yeah. Unbelievable.

• 15:47Peter Diamandis?

  Looking at this photo here in the Stargate project, 500 billion dollars of, of capital deployment. It's interesting, right? So we see Elon tweeting, that's bullshit, you know, Masasun's only got, you know, at best 10 billion.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  Which wouldn't be the first time, by the way.

• 16:05Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, that's true. There definitely a discrepancy between claims and actualities. But I have to wonder what tobacco room conversation going on here, you know, with, with Elon and Trump on one side and Sam. And then, and then Larry Ellison's on Elon's board and involved in this. So there's interesting bedfellows at work here.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, this is, this just feels like a Masas idea. And, you know, this is Masas genius, but also I would say the things that people criticize him for, which is, you know, he is the moonshot financier of, you know, our time. And he is like great at raising a crazy amount of money. And, and, you know, to do that sometimes. You know, you have to ladder up to it, I guess. So, you know, it's a Masa thing. The way I look at it, it's a Masa thing, like, will it work? You know, maybe it'll work. Will he get the money? Maybe I'll get the money. But like, you can't say he won't get the money because it's Masa.

• 17:10Peter Diamandis?

  The, I think what's interesting here, the, the go-to, once we've got this level of AI capability, you know, what Larry Ellison was saying and Sam Altman was saying on top of this is, we're going to use this, this large level of AI capability to cure disease, cure cancer. You know, I'd love to add, extend the healthy human lifespan by decades on this. But it is fascinating that people go to health as the first. I mean, you must, I, I listen, I'm heavily invested in, in longevity and health across most investments. I mean, it's the biggest disruptable marketplace. How about yourself, Ben?

• 17:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. So we, you know, we have a big kind of effort there with our bio fund. And we just did a really exciting partnership with Eli Lilly around that. I think that, so, so I really believe like technologically, we're in a new place. So the, the way we talk about it internally is, you know, physics, we've been doing for, you know, thousands of years, but it only got really interesting when we had a language that could model it, which was calculus. And we now have a language that can model biology, which is AI. And so it feels like we're really at the beginning of, of a kind of biological research. And,

• 18:31Speaker 00

  and that's super exciting. I, I would just caution it a little in terms of the rate because people expect everything to work like it does in computers because you do have to do, you know, in vivo tests, you know, you've got to test in animals and humans. And, and that, that AI doesn't quite get rid of that. Like, you know, we can have certainly much more targeted, much better engineered solutions. We're not just, you know, see if this molecule works, you know, drug discovery and all that kind of thing. But, you know, It'll still be slower than than I think the progress that we we are used to.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Agree, although we're able to model, we're able to model biological processes so much more thoroughly with digital twins and so on. I think we'll be able to, the time period needed for in vitro testing will be much more limited than before.

• 19:23Speaker 00

  I think that's right. But, you know, and it would really help to have access to the data, right? Like particularly in the US and some countries there, seeing Norway's got like amazing access to cancer data and so forth. And there are places that have it, but but we do need more of that to get all the way home, I think.

• 19:46Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, and we'll talk about that with the recent announcement from from Demis at DeepMind. But I found this fascinating. So at the beginning of the administration, Trump revoked Biden's 2023 AI executive order halting safe and transparency.

• 20:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, yes, good.

• 20:05Peter Diamandis?

  Interesting, right? This is taking the gloves off and accelerating the acceleration. How do you, how do you think about about this?

• 20:11Speaker 00

  You know, like I think, first of all, but as you know, AI technology is very, very nascent. I mean, like, we're at, we're in the really early days, so we don't know yet.

• 20:26Speaker 00

  You know, what it's going to be. We are in, you know, like, by the way, a fairly important race with China from a military standpoint and so forth on AI. Like, it's be very bad for them or in a way for us to get too far of the head of the other one. Like, that that becomes a very kind of unstable situation.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  And so like the idea that the government's going to enter the field and basically what the Biden AI order did, you know, from our point of view was basically get all of startups and academia out of the field by imposing like big regulatory requirements.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  And, you know, to do that at this stage is just. It's wild. It's a wild idea. I think, you know, we've tried this kind of heavy regulatory approach, which is why, you know, we've got a climate change issue and no nuclear power and all that kind of thing. And, you know, that was a kind of a much more dangerous technology, I think, at the time. But obviously, like, AI is powerful and it could do dangerous things, but the whole idea that, you know, that the idea of like scaring people and then giving government control, you know, I think was just bad. Bad. There's just, I can't argue

• 21:53Speaker 00

  that the Biden executive order was good in any way.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  So I think the executive order is bullshit and ridiculous and absurd because I have said this before many times. I see, I see no mechanism by which you can regulate AI even if you tried. Because the minute you try to set those goals, you'd have to regulate every line of code written. It's completely ridiculous. So undoing it, undo something that was so ridiculous, it couldn't have happened anyway. So for me, it's like the whole thing is a non sequitur. But it does make it easier for people to do what they want to do without freedom of stupid oversight.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  Right, right. The safety part couldn't have happened, but the interference was certainly happening. And by the way, I mean, the other thing that's so crazy is, you know, you have people, like my friend Vinod Khosla, running around saying, oh, this is like the Manhattan Project. We've got a lot of, like, you walk into OpenAI, you walk into Google, like, it's so easy to steal their code. Like, what are you talking about? Like, they've got, like, Chinese nationals running, like, all around the company. Like, you're not protecting the bits. Like, we couldn't, by the way, the Manhattan Project didn't even end up protecting, like, the nuclear secrets. Like, Russia got them. So it's just, come on.

• 23:06Peter Diamandis?

  But I do, I do think this is a, you know, firing over the bow of saying, we're accelerating everything, we're not slowing stuff down, we're gonna, we're gonna up-level our energy, our investment commitments, we're going all in, all out on AI, because we need to. It's the single most strategic asset for our country.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  And look, I think it's the way we solve a lot of the most dangerous problems that we have too. So there's like, okay, we've got AI safety to stop AI from doing something bad, which won't work. But what about like AI to stop all the other bad things from happening?

• 23:48Peter Diamandis?

  Sure, pandemics.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  Pandemics, cancer, you know, etc. It's a climate change, you name it.

• 23:56Peter Diamandis?

  You know, here's one of the articles I wanted to bring to the table here is, is Hassabis Sees AI-Designed Drug Trials This Year. I think this is one of the fascinating things. Just to remind people, the way we discovered drugs for all of human history is we like marched through the Amazon in galoshes and we like cut plants or grabbed dirt off Easter Island and we'd mix it up and we'd see if there was any biological activity.

• 24:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:22Peter Diamandis?

  And, you know, average drug costs you 10-plus billion dollars and work 10% of the time. It's insane. And so this is a, this is precision drug development. And in the future, you started to say this, Ben, it's precision drug development for you. It's like for your genome. Yeah.

• 24:43Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's such a remarkable change in, you know, lifespan, healthcare and all these things, and health span, that like it's hard to even get your head around like how Stone Age we've been and how advanced this is going to be where we can say, oh, we need a protein that does this. Oh, okay, like, let's have the AI make it for us. It's just such a, it's such a different world. I mean, one of the things we had to say, like drug discovery, like, why do we call it drug discovery? Oh, it's because like if we were making bridges that way, we'd build a thousand bridges, which everyone didn't fall down, we'd just drive over that one.

• 25:26Peter Diamandis?

  My kid, this last year with toothpicks and glue to figure out which one was strongest. But this is, yeah, this is drug design versus drug discovery.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  For me, for me, this is reminiscent of, you know, we, the way we used to frame this at singularity was you'd say, okay, we have a really well-understood stack for computation with chips and logic gates and operating systems, software and applications. And we have turned out the same stack in biology with proteins and genes forming metabolic pathways, leading to cells and organoids. And essentially with modeling biology now, we've essentially turned the human being into a software engineering problem. And we can take all the skills and understanding, you know, software design and apply it now. And that is really, really interesting.

• 26:07Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 26:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, one of my investments.

• 26:10Peter Diamandis?

  Ben is Alex Zivronkov's company in Silico. And they were early on with generative AI for, for creating this and they've gone into drug trials. And I think this is the future of all drug discovery. And it will be in Silico and you'll model, it's like when the first example I used, when, when Dragon first flew on a Falcon nine to the space station, it worked perfectly. And it wasn't like random luck. I mean, they had modeled that mistake. You know, they knew exactly every mode, then you exactly was going to happen. And when it worked because the model worked. And so as, as AlphaFold, AlphaProdeo, AlphaFold three, all these come online, I think, I think Demis wants to create a full

• 26:55Peter Diamandis?

  model, AI model of the human cell. So you can actually model this drug in that. Cause we have, you know, we have 40 trillion cells in our body, a billion chemical reactions per second per cell. There's a lot going on.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  No, yeah, cells are so, that's just a great point that we've just not been able to model it.

• 27:14Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  At all, you know, and that's right now, we're in engineering world. If we can model things, then, then, then we can build things, which is incredible.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  I love your analogy of a thousand bridges, whichever one you could drive over, that's a great, remember that one. That's great.

• 27:33Peter Diamandis?

  It was about 13 years ago, I had my two kids, my two boys. And I remember at that moment in time, I made a decision to double down on my health. Without question, I wanted to see their kids, their grandkids. And really, you know, during this extraordinary time where the space frontier and AI and crypto is all exploding. It was like the most exciting time ever to be alive. And I made a decision to double down on my health. And I've done that in three key areas. The first is going every year for a fountain upload. You know, Fountain is one of the most advanced diagnostics and therapeutics companies. I go there, upload myself, digitize myself about 200 gigabytes of data

• 28:16Peter Diamandis?

  that the AI system is able to look at to catch disease at inception. You know, look for any cardiovascular, any cancer, neurodegenerative disease, any metabolic disease. These things are all going on all the time and you can prevent them if you can find them at inception. So, super important. So Fountain is one of my keys. I make that available to the CEOs of all my companies, my family members, because, you know, health is a new wealth. But beyond that, we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and about another 100 trillion bacterial cells, fungi, viroid. And we, you know, don't understand how that impacts us. And so I use a company and a product called Viome.

• 29:01Peter Diamandis?

  And Viome has a technology called meta-transcriptomics. It was actually developed in New Mexico, the same place where the nuclear bomb was developed, as a biodefense weapon. And their technology is able to help you understand what's going on in your body, to understand which bacteria are producing which proteins. And as a consequence of that, what foods are your superfoods that are best for you to eat? Or what food should you avoid? Right? What's going on in your oral microbiome? So I use their testing to understand my foods, understand my medicines, understand my supplements.

• 29:42Peter Diamandis?

  And Viome really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint, what's best for me.

• 29:49Peter Diamandis?

  And then finally, you know, feeling good, being intelligent, moving well is critical, but looking good. When you look yourself in the mirror, saying, you know, I feel great about life is so important, right? And so a product I use every day, twice a day, is called OneSkin, developed by four incredible PhD women that found this 10 amino acid peptide that's able to zap senile cells in your skin and really help you stay youthful in your look and appearance. So for me, these are three technologies I love and I use all the time. I'll have my team link to those in the show notes down below. Please check them out. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that. Now, back to the episode.

• 30:32Peter Diamandis?

  You know, so this brings me to one of the questions that was the most asked question on X. And so let's talk about this, because, you know, the majority of entrepreneurs out there who see this incredible moonshot success story, this person or gal does this incredible thing, and they don't realize the hundreds of failures on the way, you know, I call them an overnight success after 11 years of hard work.

• 31:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:01Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, you've built some amazing companies and you've invested in extraordinary companies.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:07Peter Diamandis?

  How do you think about this?

• 31:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's a very, you know, particularly when like the real, the very large ideas. So first of all, like, it's really important that the person building it really have difference to how hard it is to make the product work. And so like, we have people come in and there's, you know, it's a 20-person company and eight of them are vice presidents, you know, because they're going to manage this big thing that they don't have. And that never worked. By the way, that never works.

• 31:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, funny.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, you need engineers.

• 31:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you need, you need to have engineers and also be just committed to

• 31:58Speaker 00

  Keeping the company the right size until you you actually kind of can see daylight and see the thing work. And then, you know, the fundraising for moonshot ideas is like an order of magnitude more difficult than normal fundraising because one way more things go wrong. So there's going to be a round that you have to do when everything is a wreck. And so if you look at the guys who have built the really, really, really, really big ones, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, Palmer Leckie, these guys are unbelievable, but they can

• 32:41Speaker 00

  raise money when there's no reason to give them money. And that's that just ends up being, I think, very, very important to be able to do because you're going to hit that point.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  Is that storytelling, Ben? What is that?

• 32:56Speaker 00

  Well, I think it's a it's a combination of, you know, who they are, like the depth and the color of their vision, you know, their ability to tell a narrative, the the kind of depth of that narrative so that when you go into the company, you really see it all there. I mean, this is the thing that Elon had.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  And the depth of their conviction, right? That nothing will stop them for this.

• 33:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And then nobody, right, Elon, who's the greatest moonshot entrepreneur of our era, nobody would question whether you could stop him from reaching his goal. I mean, like, he, you know, unbelievable, amazing.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  Never bet against Elon, yeah.

• 33:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that was, by the way, that was when I speak to my friends who are very sad about the election, I just say, like, why did you guys pick on him? Like of all the people to harass for no reason. The most competent person in the world you're gonna pick on him. Like, that's like an M well for you. Don't do that. Everybody in Silicon Valley knows, don't do that.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  But if I drill into this a bit, Ben, somebody comes in with a vision, right? They have to be half crazy to even have the vision. So now you're dealing with a 50% rational.

• 34:16Speaker 00

  It sounds crazy.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  Right? And so now you have to, you have limited data on which to gauge whether this person has the aura, the charisma, the chemistry, the diligence, the fortitude to get it through. So it's the amount of viable candidates is shrinking quickly. How do you make that judgment call? That's the hard part, I think.

• 34:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, I.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  Because you guys have done it repeatedly successfully, which is amazing.

• 34:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, they really have to be. And look, we get it wrong a lot, too. Kanye is that kind of prototype. He's a super fucking genius, but he, there is times where he won't do what's logical for the business just because, you know, he's overly creative. So those people show up in tech, too.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  And, you know, like, that's hard to make work because it's sometimes a point they just drive everybody in the company insane. The other one is they're so charismatic that they end up being sloppy. And you guys have probably seen this where it's kind of like the kid who's so charming that he doesn't have to study. He just gives the teacher an apple and smiles at her and like bang, he's got, hey. Like, there are entrepreneurs like that that are so good at storytelling and so charismatic. And they can get the whole thing going, but the detailed work.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  You know, that they don't want to do, like every CEO has that something that you really don't want to deal with, but you have to. They don't end up dealing with, and then it falls apart because these ideas are really complex and require like a great amount of precision at some point.

• 35:57Peter Diamandis?

  Let me hit you on on something. So my fund Bold Capital recently made an investment in Figure AI. Do you know you know Brett Icahn Figure? Yes.

• 36:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know. Yeah.

• 36:10Peter Diamandis?

  And so the reason we made the investment, so here's Brett, no background in the robotics field, but he had built Archer Aviation, right? The EV tall. And so there's one question about the entrepreneur coming in, do they have a track record of actually having done hard things? So that's, that's one bucket to evaluate. The second bucket, which was really the most interesting evaluation criteria for me making the go to invest was the people he had pulled in over the first six months, the people who had voted with their feet.

• 36:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's, that's definitely a real sign. Like, can they put together

• 36:56Peter Diamandis?

  A team.

• 36:57Speaker 00

  That kind of team. And which is right, the people working for them. This is a question I ask myself, by the way, on these kinds of ones, like, would I work for this company? Like, would I be excited about going to work for this company? Or would I go, wow, I could help that entrepreneur build it? Like, if it's the latter, then I'm like, okay, we should not put money in. Because they have to kind of be able to attract the highest level of talent to build something that hard. So that's a really, really good measure. And then I would say there's another thing about the team that's important, which is also true about how the entrepreneur picks their investor, which is because it's a moonshot.

• 37:44Speaker 00

  There's gonna be really bad times, or they're very likely to gonna be very bad times. And so you wanna have a team that, you know, isn't already like a lot of times it's a great team by resume, but they're already rich and successful. And when things go wrong, they literally call in rich. They're like, oh, this is too hard. I'm not gonna help you get out of this hole.

• 38:09Peter Diamandis?

  Call in rich, that's hilarious.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 38:12Speaker 00

  And so like, I do think it's important that the team be kind of the right kind of mission, super hungry. And often like this has got like, they need this to work. You know, they're not want it to work, but need it to work.

• 38:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, well, this is this is Elon circa 2008, when the third Falcon 1 had blown up. And he's borrowing money and everything's on the line.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you need you need your best people to be like,

• 38:43Speaker 00

  I, you know, I will go through the trauma of, you know, maybe I don't even have a job. And like this is everybody thinks we're idiots and all that kind of thing like that's a tough. It's a very tough point to be in a company because like when you're at a company like SpaceX or you're at one of these things, that's very visible, you know, when it gets into trouble, the press just goes crazy on you. Everybody's, you know, your friends, your family are like, should you really be working there? I mean, like you absolutely get those questions and, you know, if you're not, yeah, if you're not totally committed, you're gonna go and then then then the whole thing is a train wreck.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  This is why we we have this massive transformative purpose idea. That if you're not all bought into the overall vision, then you will call in rich or call in sick or deport or find another job. But if you've got a big enough vision that everybody is aligned to, then that provides the cohesive sticking power.

• 39:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's gotta be cohesive, even when it looks like the vision is wrong. That's the that's the key. Cause when it looks like the vision is right, everybody will, everybody's.

• 39:51Peter Diamandis?

  You know, Ben, another criteria is if the founding team are best friends. Because you're far unlikely to ditch the company when the tough, when it gets difficult, if your best buddies are there with you.

• 40:04Speaker 00

  Right, if they haven't just met, yeah. A lot of times the founding team is, are newly acquainted. And you have to get into that, yeah.

• 40:12Peter Diamandis?

  Let me ask two questions on this evaluation, because again, I want to, this is important for the, for everybody watching who's, you're wanting to build a moonshot company. How is important, how important is early revenue? And, you know, and the timeline and not having to insert miracle here when you're hearing this presentation?

• 40:35Speaker 00

  Well, so I, I think early revenue is, and ends up being really important as much as a discipline, you know, as an indicator of, you know, like invested, so like, not so much from a, okay, we want to understand everything about the business model early, but more of that, oh, we hit a real milestone. Like, we've got all these smart people, we're building this thing, and, you know, it's not just a, like, there, in Silicon Valley, there have been a lot of

• 41:17Speaker 00

  platforms in the sky, so to speak. There was a phenomenal company years ago, you probably remember it, MicroUnity, which was, you know, had all the, you know, the greatest people in the field in it. And it just never, you know, you got to get to a product, you got to get to something that somebody wants. Or, like, if you're in the wilderness too long, it's something happens to the culture of the company, something, you know, that's degenerative, where you could be very much on the wrong track. General Magic was another one.

• 41:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I remember General Magic for sure.

• 41:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, phenomenal. Like, like, those two companies had talent levels that I would say rival SpaceX, Tesla, OpenAI, any of them, right?

• 42:05Peter Diamandis?

  And a big vision.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, and an amazing vision. But the revenue, your revenue point, I think.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  Is that discipline that they didn't quite have. So when you get like brilliant people together, they want to build a perfect product. That can lead to a really over engineered system.

• 42:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Moving us forward, I'm just going to point out, you know, when I look at the Twitter sphere, you don't tweet very much, but Mark tweets all the time.

• 42:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I spend all my time trying to control him. You see only the things that don't get us into trouble. Yeah.

• 42:51Peter Diamandis?

  You're in Las Vegas. Do you know some friends of mine, Penn and Teller?

• 42:55Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, I don't. I don't know them. I of course know who they are.

• 42:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so Penn is the one who's talking all the time and Teller is the one who's silent.

• 43:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm Teller, right?

• 43:04Peter Diamandis?

  Exactly. So I am curious, right? So just as we roll, as we complete the conversations on AI, you know, you said this earlier, and I think, you know, Eric Schmidt's been saying this very loudly, we are in a race with China on AI and we're trying to control it by chips. You know, Mark's in, and you're not, you're not speaking on behalf of Mark, but I am curious your thoughts about all this.

• 43:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, so like I do think we're in a race in the sense that, well, we are, we are and we aren't, you know what I mean? So, you know, DeepSeek, which is the great Chinese model right now, is open source. And by the way, a lot of the American companies that we're involved with are benefiting greatly from that, you know, in the paper they wrote. And, you know, like, it looks like they may have stolen some stuff from OpenAI as well, you know, which is interesting, but just shows kind of how like hard it is to win this war by protection or this competition, I should say. Look, the danger, of course, is

• 44:20Speaker 00

  You know, China is a top-down economy. They don't believe in things like freedom of speech and a lot of the kind of values of Western society. They're a surveillance state in many ways. And so a lot of the things that we like, they don't have. So if they get a much more powerful AI than us, then, you know, their way of life could trump our way of life, so to speak. Now, if you look at, okay, then let's get into the details and how's that really playing out. So first of all, what is China good at, the advantage they have, which is a very clear advantage, is their private sector and their public sector, you know, their government

• 45:04Speaker 00

  and the private companies, there's no line between them.

• 45:07Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 45:08Speaker 00

  Like, they're basically, in a lot of ways, the same thing. And as a result, the AI technology in China is getting very quickly integrated into the government, which is, you know, quite amazing for them.

• 45:20Peter Diamandis?

  I want to inject one thought here.

• 45:21Speaker 00

  Including the military, by the way.

• 45:23Peter Diamandis?

  The way I think about it is China is a corporate, is a single corporation.

• 45:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:29Peter Diamandis?

  And the companies inside China, within China, are apps sitting on top of that company.

• 45:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's a good way of thinking about it. And so you can think about, well, what's our advantage? Our advantage is we're great at startups, meaning every talented person in America can solve a really hard problem and bring us forward. And that creativity, because it's not centrally planned, it's kind of distributed, bottoms up, has been historically our whole advantage, right? Like, that's why we've, you know, been a world leader in technology. And so the idea that we're going to just forfeit that advantage and have it be top-down control like the Biden executive order imagined, is to me the most dangerous thing in the

• 46:20Speaker 00

  competition, is that, okay, if we try and control the way we work, all of our strengths, so we can be more China-like, China's going to destroy, they're going to be way better at being China than we are, because they have all the controls and all the mechanisms in place to do that.

• 46:36Peter Diamandis?

  Listen, communism failed under previous systems, but if you've got a single-controlling, optimizing AI...

• 46:46Peter Diamandis?

  That would help. Yeah, it does. Salim, what are your thoughts here?

• 46:52Speaker 02

  You know, I kind of don't see this tension as big as others. The reason I don't is disruptive innovation means you have to break the rules. And when you have a government that won't allow you to break any rules, you can't do disruptive innovation. You basically have to copy it, absorb it. So the sphere of what they can bring in is limited because of that. And so I think there's a structural... There's still no Chinese student that will dare to argue against their professors. And I just find that a problem culturally for doing anything. And whereas the US is built on that, it just keeps trolling along doing that. It's messy and it's ugly, but it's very Darwinian. But by far, it's the best way of doing it.

• 47:37Speaker 02

  It's design versus evolution.

• 47:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I 100% agree with that. So I think our opportunity is we'll win. We'll get to the breakthroughs first. We probably won't stop them from stealing them. But at least we'll be even, we'll be on par. Whereas if we don't have the breakthroughs, we're in a lot of trouble. If we somehow restrict it, yeah.

• 47:58Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I find this interesting. We got China creating an $8 billion investment fund while we're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. I mean, it's a very different ecosystem of financial...

• 48:12Speaker 00

  Well, we're investable, right? I mean, one of the great things that has happened, you know, in the change administration is from a technological standpoint, we're a very investable country. Whereas China is going the other way on that. They're making themselves uninvestable.

• 48:28Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I had Caifu Lee on our Moonshots podcast.

• 48:31Speaker 00

  Speaking of a guy who just moved his... Redomiciled his company.

• 48:36Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, but Caifu pointed out something fascinating, which is because they were so restricted on access to GPUs, this is Darwinian force that got them to be much more efficient on their algorithms.

• 48:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, we've seen that. We've seen that with DeepSick. I mean, like, it is very close to GPT-4 with way, way less, much smaller, much smaller.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  Their cost per token is so low for those.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, like 100x lower.

• 49:11Peter Diamandis?

  All right, so let's, is A16Z invested in humanoid robots? But before then, I have to ask you a question. Do you remember the moment in time when you went from AndreessenHaroldes.com to A16Z as a URL?

• 49:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, yeah, I remember it very clearly because it was my idea.

• 49:29Peter Diamandis?

  It was your idea, okay.

• 49:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay, so that was, so, it's a funny story. So, when we went to raise Fund One, and it was just Mark and myself in the fund, the biggest question we got is, well, you guys are very like, you know, kind of well-known entrepreneurs, why aren't you just going to walk away from this fund? And so we're like, well, we should just name it after ourselves so they know we'll be here. And so we got, you know, that solved, but then we're like, nobody in the world can spell Andreessen Horowitz, like, we're screwed. And so then, I mean, you all remember, in the old days, when we used to program, there

• 50:13Speaker 00

  was this, you know, before programming languages evolved a lot, you used to have to go through a lot of work to internationalize the code. And we would abbreviate that work with calling it I18N, I18 letters N. And so I was like, oh, well, be A16 letters Z, and all the kind of old-school geeks will love us. So that was.

• 50:35Peter Diamandis?

  And I did love it.

• 50:39Peter Diamandis?

  Are you investing in humanoid robots?

• 50:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we haven't yet made an investment in a hardware company. We're definitely been looking at the space very closely and seen some of the work going on there. It's tricky because the supply chain for robots is almost entirely out of China now. Like, so there's nobody else doing it. You know, there's a German company, but that is actually founded by Chinese nationals. There's not a lot of, you know, so we're trying to understand that. You know, we have great relationships in Japan and are hoping, you know, we can kind of help them get some of that going as well.

• 51:25Speaker 00

  But, but it's going to be massively important. And Elon, of course, will do something, I think, with Tesla.

• 51:31Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, I believe Optimus and Figure in the U.S. are two of the leading players. There's agility and Eptronic. There's, you know, there's a good dozen solid U.S. players. But China, as this, as this next article we're putting up, and if you're listening on your favorite download, let me just read this for people listening or watching. It says humanoid robots will help build iPhones at Foxconn factories. And the notion here is, I mean, China succeeded as a dominant tech player because of its low labor rate and its massive workforce population. And one-child policy and aging populations make it uncompetitive.

• 52:15Peter Diamandis?

  So it has to have robots to survive.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  Same with Japan. If they don't roboticize their economy, they won't survive. GDP will collapse.

• 52:26Speaker 00

  And Germany, by the way, and many countries. It does, though, kind of take away... The cheap labor advantage that they have in some ways, right? Like, because China grew in large part because labor arbitrage. And so now they're saying, okay, we're gonna replace the labor with robots. There's not as much robot arbitrage.

• 52:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, there's zero. I mean, I did the calculation. So optimists and figure are supposed to sell at $30,000 per robot. I'll take two. You know, if you lease it, that's 300 bucks a month, $10 a day, 40 cents an hour. I mean, honestly, how many will you have in your backyard?

• 53:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a, that's a pretty good deal.

• 53:15Peter Diamandis?

  So, and this is, this is another interesting one. It's, here, I'll read it for our listeners versus our viewers. Shanghai rolls out China's first heterogeneous humanoid robot training ground. And I think you were alluding to this, Ben, that, you know, China does one thing really well as a nation state. It creates, it creates sort of nests for companies. You're a drone.

• 53:44Speaker 00

  Shenzhen was the original one, right?

• 53:46Peter Diamandis?

  Exactly.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, economic, what do they call it? Economic.

• 53:50Peter Diamandis?

  Opportunity zones.

• 53:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, some kind of economic where there's no regulation and, you know, lots of government encouragement.

• 53:57Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Salim, what are you thinking about this?

• 54:00Speaker 02

  I think it's great because you get, but a thousand by 2027 seems a little small. This seems more like PR than anything else. And I'd love to see the way in which they go about doing the testing and training. And that you could learn a lot from.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, the, the, the training of the robots is very, very interesting. Also because like the robot, the, the AI, I don't know what you, you all have seen, but what we've seen is. You know, the model architectures, a lot of them are, you know, like transformers and diffusion models, you know, with different kind of data and different training. And so the, the, the training of robots is a, is becoming like a very interesting field. And it, and they don't, they generalize, but from what I've seen, the training is pretty specific so far.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, it has to be, you know, but if you have an AI, it's software based. It doesn't matter if it goes off the rails a bit and starts hallucinating, whatever, whatever. You don't want your robot going.

• 55:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I saw that movie.

• 55:16Peter Diamandis?

  Very entertaining. Yeah, before we jump into crypto, which will, will close out, I have some questions from our audience on X. I thought were pretty good. So Ben, to you and Salim is yourself as well, when will AI agents replace whole employees, teams and departments at companies? That's from Michael, triple seven, one, triple seven. And then when will we see our first AI CEO that A16Z is willing to invest in?

• 55:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's a great.

• 55:50Speaker 02

  It's a great question.

• 55:52Speaker 00

  I did know the first one is one that we, we talk about all the time and are trying to figure out it's, I think, so I think the one conclusion that we have is it will happen in new companies way, way before like an older company transforms. I mean, like there are already, you do have, you know, bots doing customer support and like lowering the number of support reps you need and that kind of thing. Yeah, the whole jobs thing is interesting in that, like some of it is what do you need done, but like in a place like Google, a lot of it is like, okay, how much money are we bringing in? And like, how many people do these managers want to manage and, and that kind of thing? And, um, you know, I necessarily even think that's bad.

• 56:37Speaker 00

  It's inefficient or whatever, but, uh, you know, all those processes, all those things,

• 56:45Speaker 00

  You know, they have to go like, no, we're doing it with AI now is, um, I think it'd be a lot more gradual than it would need to be if you were just optimizing to it. But for new companies, I think it'll happen.

• 57:00Peter Diamandis?

  I wonder if there's gonna be the equivalency of a DEI type directive, which is a human-first directive.

• 57:07Speaker 02

  Oh, God, help us.

• 57:08Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I think that's my reaction to it as well.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:12Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, the challenge is going to be companies that like, I employ humans because it's good for society. Well, they'll be out of business in a year.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I'd like to build on what Ben said. You know, I think one of the things, I remember being part of a automation, AI automation task force with Eric Bryn Jelsson and a few of those folks. And they did a great job of saying that a job, a typical job of today is not just a job that somebody does. It's broken down to about 25 different tasks, right? And you may automate like 10 of those, but you still have the other 15. And therefore you'll augment people with AI, but you won't replace them as such. I think Ben's point is really dead on about new companies, because then you can orient functions around what's automatable and have entire verticals that are, and you completely create a new type of organization. And that, I think, will happen first.

• 58:01Peter Diamandis?

  So we've talked about billion-dollar, you know, one-employee startups, right?

• 58:05Speaker 02

  That's right. Yeah, that's right. I think, and that'll be mostly.

• 58:07Speaker 00

  That's gonna happen.

• 58:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, that'll happen very, very quickly.

• 58:10Peter Diamandis?

  Have you seen anything, Ben, that, I mean, do you like, listen, I've got an army of agents, I'm the CEO, and we're, we're printing money. I mean.

• 58:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the Klarna CEO is the most aggressive in talking about that. We haven't seen a company that does that yet. So we did have one instance of the AI CEO, so to speak. So, you know, we fund these AI researchers who, who kind of do things, you know, models without RLHF and, you know, kind of trained on different things and so forth. And, you know, one of our researchers, Andy, built this bot truth terminal that was trained on,

• 58:55Speaker 00

  You know memes and French philosophers and things like that. And he gets on the internet, gets obsessed with this meme, the goatee meme and decides it needs, which is a meme from 2004. It needed money to promote the meme. That was its first thing. And, you know, my partner Mark gave him $50,000.

• 59:16Peter Diamandis?

  Something, yeah.

• 59:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, and Bitcoin. And then somebody else created a coin, the goat coin, and the bot went crazy. And the coin went to like a $500 million market cap at its peak. And then the bot made $10 million. So that was our first instance of an AI making money like that in the funniest way possible.

• 59:39Peter Diamandis?

  One of the tokens I invested in is skating in your wake, AI 16Z.

• 59:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, those guys.

• 59:49Peter Diamandis?

  And it's done well.

• 59:50Speaker 00

  I know everybody in the firm is like, Ben, when are we going to launch a token if that one's worth a billion dollars? Our actual token would be worth more. And I'm like.

• 1:00:00Peter Diamandis?

  Well, let's go there as we close out on our final subject here. A subject that you are not that interested in, neither of you, but, you know, I'm interested. So let's talk about this. So, I mean, are we in for a extraordinary acceleration and re-imagination of crypto and Bitcoin and all? You know, this, please, yeah.

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would say definitely yes. So it's hard. So one of the things that you only know if you're deep in the crypto industry is the effect of the Biden administration was they just forced most of the American developers out of cryptos. So there was nobody developing software in the space. And so, you know, it just really, really slowed down over the last four years, really three years. And now it's back, but it's back.

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  And there are very urgent problems that are kind of best solved by crypto that have come into play because of AI. So you have, you know, the first one being proof of human, right? Like, how do you know you're not a bot? Like, that's a crypto problem. Second being deep fakes, you know, how do you know, like, I put this out, you know, that, did you want the US government, or Google, or a company determining what's true and what's real, or, you know, the game theoretic mathematical properties of the blockchain? So it's clearly, you know, the right thing for crypto to determine what's true. Thirdly,

• 1:01:44Speaker 00

  machine-to-machine payments. Now you have intelligent machines everywhere. They have to be able to, you know, pay each other for things. That's, you know, another crypto problem. So with these, like, really important problems out there, and we let the developers out of jail, like, literally let them out of jail. Like, I think this is gonna be an incredible era for the field, and it's so important. Like, by the way, the other thing, the other one that's really important that you all understand, because, look, back in the days of the internet, I was in charge of, among other things, at Netscape, like, client-side certificates, and we never got them deployed, and we never got it to work.

• 1:02:27Speaker 00

  But as a result, we have this horrible security architecture on the internet, which AI is exploiting like crazy. They're breaking, you know, these AI programs are breaking into everybody's stuff. So the right answer is that I keep my stuff. We have a PKI infrastructure. I keep my stuff. I have my keys. If you want to know if I'm creditworthy, I give you a zero knowledge proof. I don't give you my social security number or my bank account, because I know it's gonna get stolen. And, like, we have the answer, and we almost had it deployed with NFTs before the Biden administration hit a wrecking ball. So we can get back to

• 1:03:06Speaker 00

  that, and we can make the internet secure for consumers. So I'm more fired up about this than...

• 1:03:14Peter Diamandis?

  Super excited, right?

• 1:03:15Speaker 00

  It's incredible.

• 1:03:16Peter Diamandis?

  This is the roaring twenties. How many crypto companies are you, you know, invested in these days at A16?

• 1:03:23Speaker 00

  There's hundreds. We're the largest crypto investor in the world, I think, at this point. And we also have a crypto startup school to kind of help people get into the field and get it going, which we, you know, we had to start because all the, you know, like if you were a talented developer and you could go into AI, or you could go get a Wells notice from the US government for your 10-person company, like it was not a hard choice, you know?

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  I think this is an absolute boom for crypto. It solves problems, as you said, that we really, really need solving for, identity amongst others. And I can't wait for some of this infrastructure to now get rolled out.

• 1:04:03Peter Diamandis?

  And the news item here, for those again listening, is US SEC unveils task force to start work on crypto regulations. The move is welcomed by the industry as Bitcoin hits all-time highs. Salim, are you still sticking with your, what is it, 250K in 2025 prediction?

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  I'll stick with 250 to 300 for this year. That's my prediction for Bitcoin.

• 1:04:26Peter Diamandis?

  Ben, not for attribution of investment.

• 1:04:29Speaker 00

  No, I cannot, I am not allowed, you know, we're an RIA, Registered Investment Authority, so I cannot make price predictions.

• 1:04:37Peter Diamandis?

  Listen, buddy, this has been so much fun.

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  I want to just go quick, quick commendation here. Ben, what you guys did with A16Z, both in crypto and then moving towards being more of an investment bank, I thought was just brilliant. So kudos on that. It's just awesome to watch you guys.

• 1:04:55Speaker 00

  Appreciate that.

• 1:04:57Peter Diamandis?

  This was fun. I hope you'll come back and join us for another, another conversation like this in a quarter or so.

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I'd love to. That would be great fun.

• 1:05:04Peter Diamandis?

  All right, buddy. Well, listen, thank you. All I can say is we're on a rocket ship ride between what's going on in the crypto world, AI world, robotics world, space world. I mean, it finally feels like the future.

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, the future is coming. Thank you, Elon.

• 1:05:21Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, thank you, Elon. Thank you. Thank you, Brian. Thank you.