The Pomp Podcast - Ben Goertzel, Founder & CEO of SingularityNET: The Intersection of Bitcoin and Artificial Intelligence

Episode Date: September 19, 2019

Ben Goertzel is Founder & CEO of SingularityNET, a blockchain based AI marketplace. In this conversation, Ben and Anthony Pompliano discuss the current state of artificial intelligence, how it could impact the world moving forward, what Ben's doing to build up the two-sided marketplace, and where he sees Bitcoin, crypto, and AI intersecting in the future. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. CRYPTO.COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine.  Visitcoinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Ben Kortzl is the founder and CEO of SingularityNet, a blockchain-based AI marketplace. In this conversation, we discuss the current state of artificial intelligence, how it could impact the world moving forward, what Ben is doing to build up the two-sided marketplace, and where he sees Bitcoin, crypto, and AI intersecting in the future. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. Want to know who has the best URL? Crypto.com. That's right, Crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal, motherf***ing mass adoption. That's why

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high rate. It's the best rate in the industry. I highly suggest you go check out BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Again, that's BlockFi.com slash Pomp to sign up and start earning crypto today. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital, or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Ben here on the podcast. Super excited about this.

Thanks so much for taking the time to do this. Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to being on your show. Absolutely. All right, let's start with your background. You've been working on a lot of this stuff for a long time, so maybe just walk us through your career before SingularityNet. Sure thing. I mean, I got a PhD in mathematics in the late 1980s, and I've been basically doing AI research and development for 30-plus years. I mean, I was academic for eight years in math, computer science, and cognitive science,

But since the late 90s, 20-plus years, I've been doing applied AI, so helping big companies and government agencies solve their AI problems. And, yeah, at the same time doing AI research and development aimed at the grand goal of artificial general intelligence, AIs that can think more like people. and you know this last few years has been amazing for ai development more and more things are working now than ever before due to you know more data faster computers and more people working in the field so that that both makes those of us who've been in the field a while really excited that you know the next five to ten years are going to be legendary we may see the breakthrough to ais that really can think better than people on the other hand it also makes us worry about

like who controls these first really powerful AIs and what are their goals and biases, what's on their minds. And so this is what led me into SingularityNet, which is aimed at making a decentralized foundation for AI And so that there's more of a democratic participatory dynamic underlying not only practical AIs being rolled out now to help companies and people do their stuff and help people with their lives, but also more of a democratic and participatory basis underlying superhuman AI minds once those finally emerge. For sure. Now, before we kind of dig into some of the nuances here, you know, artificial intelligence gets talked about all the time. Maybe describe a little bit, you know, when you say artificial intelligence, what are the criteria for an actual system that is artificially intelligent versus maybe something that is automated with algorithms or maybe just like machine learning type environment? Yeah. I think the concept of AI is very, very broad, right? And, I mean, intelligence doesn't really have a widely accepted exact definition that works across, like, different species and different kinds of systems. So, I mean, the field of AI has come to encompass pretty much everything that software or hardware can do that we would consider intelligent if people were doing it, right? And there's a joke in the AI field that as soon as something has been done by machines, then it's considered not AI anymore, right?

So, like, we would have considered solving algebra problems or even dividing huge numbers intelligent. now we have calculators and programs like MATLAB that's not intelligent so we consider driving a car down the street in traffic to be an AI problem but now now that it seems to be on the verge of being solved we say well that's not really AI it's just an automation problem so I mean there there's a lot of vagueness there so that a distinction that I introduced in 2004 or so which i think is valuable is the distinction between narrow ai and a gi or artificial general intelligence and i think that that's not the only important distinction but it cuts through some of the confusion a narrow ai is an ai that's good at doing one very narrowly defined set of things

and i mean it could be just place chess or just played board games or you know it just drives cars or just diagnoses diseases based on medical data an AGI is a system that a bit more like a human can deal with new problem domains new concepts new aspects of existence that it didn't even know were there before and that were not present in its programming or in its training data and you know that kind of general intelligence isn't yet there in any software programs that we've created but that's that's what those of us in the AGI field have been working on for years and now we're seeing more traction in that direction like Microsoft invested a billion dollars in open AI specifically to pursue AGI oriented development and to do it on Microsoft

azure and i mean deep mind that was bought by google five years ago or something also was explicitly pushing in an agi direction so i think what we're going to see in the next five years or so is a gradual transition like from narrow ais like we have now through sort of narrow agis that have more and more general intelligence we're just still kind of focused on one application area and then full-on artificial general intelligence finally which uh i mean then that will quickly lead to what ray kurzweil called the singularity because once you have an ati that can really think creatively like human beings but you know also as an ai with all the ability to access huge amounts of data and use and do precise computations that that implies i mean then that then you're

to have an ai that can improve its own programming and and get smarter and smarter and smarter and so that's that's what's been called super intelligence that's the grand vision obviously we're not there yet and what you know what i've been involved in with singularity net is practical steps now that are just sort of the next natural steps in the progression toward the evolution of really really smart AGI and super intelligence systems. The amazing thing is, I really think this progression may unfold within our lifetimes. Like we may have, you know, general intelligence as smart as human beings within five to 10 years, and then smarter than humans a few years after that. And that is obviously extremely revolutionary. The upside is amazing. The

possible downside is terrifying, right? And so that's sort of what incensed me when I get up in the morning to work so hard on what we're doing. For sure. And I think one of the AGI stories, I think it was confirmed, but it was definitely reported, was that Facebook had created some software and the two different systems started to create their own language. Yeah. Unfortunately, that story was a complete load of crap because these were random, trivial, formal languages rather than sophisticated languages like humans used to communicate. I mean, I think that illustrates a broader point that we're getting into a domain where the important technologies in the world are ones that almost nobody understands. And that leads to a bunch of issues. So, for example, I worked for three years on the Sophia robot, which created by Hanson Robotics with some AI from my OpenCog project and from SingularityNet used in it from time to time.

But, I mean, this robot, it's the world's most sophisticated humanoid robot, amazing human-like emotional expressions. And, you know, her AI system has a mix of some sort of canned content that's programmed in by people and some learning and reasoning. And that's just too subtle for most people to understand, even for many researchers to want to grapple with. So, I mean, she's an amazing robot. And these are going to be rolled out in the next few years as practical service robots for homes and offices. but it's very hard to get people to understand what's going on behind the scenes. And that's true even now. How much truer will it be as we move toward general intelligence or superintelligence?

I mean, that gets us once again to the power of decentralized networks because if you're dealing with technologies that people can't understand, who do they place their faith in? Either they place their faith in the company that made them or the government that regulates them, Or do they place their faith in the, you know, the reputation system of the decentralized network that they belong to? And I mean, the latter option is a little subtler, but I think ultimately it's going to be the best option. Because, I mean, large governments and large corporations certainly have their place and they do some things very well.

But I think the regulation of emerging general intelligence is going to be better done by global decentralized participatory networks. For sure. What are your big fears about artificial intelligence? You've been working on this a really long time. Like when you sit back, what are the fears that you agree with are real and you share versus ones that maybe people are worried about and aren't actually legitimate? I mean, most of the fears are real in the sense that there's a lot of bad things that could happen, but we don't have any reason to think bad things have a high probability of happening. I mean, the one fear that I think is total BS is like machines are going to enslave people to work for them or use them as batteries or something like in the Matrix. I mean, of course, if a machine was smart enough to do that, it would also be smart enough to create machines to do whatever work it needed, right?

I mean, that I think is very unlikely. The idea that we're going to have machines that are hostile to people and want to fight people, very unlikely. I mean, some idiot would have to build machines and program or teach them to want to hate and fight people and could happen, not likely. the possibility that we create super intelligent machines that are kind of indifferent to people and treat us like we treat ants or squirrels i mean that that seems a plausible fear to have right i mean we we don't we don't wake up every morning like how can i kill more ants or kill more

squirrels on the other hand if we want to build a house we don't mind flattening a bunch of ants and destroying a bunch of squirrels homes because we just consider ourselves superior and more important to them right and then we we preserve some of them in national parks and stuff but we want to preserve the species of squirrels we don't really care about preserving each individual squirrel very much so i mean it's plausible that a superhuman ai eventually could view human beings in in in that in that sort of way like some respect for the human species as as its creators and you know not malevolence toward us on the other hand if they're like a billion times smarter than us they may not care about us any more than we care about much simpler life forms and i mean

if if we want to ward off that kind of problem we need the superhuman ai to be more compassionate and kind and ethical than than humans are which may be considered a low bar in a sense if you look at human society but i mean it's not a foregone conclusion so we we need to be training the first ais to really be compassionate and loving toward all sentient beings so that they'll be nice to us once they're more powerful than us so then then you look at you know what is ai being used for in the world today and i like i sum it up as uh spying killing selling and gambling basically i mean it's surveillance applications it's it's military it's financial market prediction and and trading it's advertising so all of which are parts of humanity and they're going to keep

existing but it will be good to sort of shift the shift the balance a little bit so that there was more focus on applying ai for loving and and compassionate applications and that's i mean yeah we can't we can't obviously change everything the world is doing with with ai but we can shift the balance in a more positive direction and that can help things in the near term as as well as hopefully filling the early stage mind of the emerging super intelligence with more more positive stuff right and so i mean these are all sort of some of the broader motivations behind the very nitty-gritty practical work that that we're doing now absolutely maybe let's talk a little bit about uh what you're building at singularity net

Absolutely. So what we've built in the last year and a half is two years, really. It's a decentralized blockchain-based AI platform and marketplace. So, I mean, it's a singularity net platform now in the beta version 2, not the 1.0 release yet, but there's a version that works. It's reasonably scalable. There's a bunch of AIs working in it, doing various vision processing and biology data analysis and so on. So this is basically an AI marketplace. So anyone can put an AI agent into the marketplace and then it will advertise its services to anyone who needs AI services and wants to use the marketplace to get them. But also there's a novelty that the different AIs in the marketplace can all communicate with each other and talk to each other. And an AI in the marketplace can outsource work to another AI in the marketplace. So then you have what AI pioneer Marvin Minsky called a society of minds, where the different AIs in the network, they're sharing information, they're outsourcing work to each other, they're cooperating. And then the whole network of AIs in the SingularityNet, you know, in itself has an intelligence beyond the intelligence of the individual AIs in the network.

So, I mean, where we are now, we built this platform, we put some cool AI tools into the platform, the presence of a cryptographic token, the AGI token, which is a payment and incentive token for transactions in the marketplace, That gives us an additional tool to play with for sort of incentivizing suppliers, incentivizing developers, because we can use like AGI token bonuses. We can do do contests with AGI token rewards and so forth to spur AI developers to use the platform. And then on the demand side, we're doing a bunch of different things. But one thing is we formed a spinoff company called Singularity Studio, which is a separate for-profit company. And it's sort of like you have Ethereum and ConsenSys, so you have Linux and Red Hat, right? So we have SingularityNet, which built the open decentralized platform and which has the AGI token powering it. Then we have Singularity Studio, which is building enterprise products on top of that platform.

So, Ben, explain a little bit. We talked about this two-sided marketplace, some of the challenges of building. What are the services that I, as a user, come into? What are the services that I'm looking to use, and what's that user experience like for me? Yeah, so in terms of use of the marketplace, I think the AI services offered in the marketplace are really, they're mostly aimed at relatively knowledgeable developers who are, they're building products, they're building websites, and they need an AI component to their product. And, you know, they could use an AI service in Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services, but an alternative is to use an AI service from SingularityNet platform. So let me give just one example. Like we have some AI services in there now that do image style transfer.

So you can sort of map the style of one image to another one. Now, if you were, say, a modeling agency and you wanted to do something like take the head and face of a star model and sort of morph it onto the body of a less famous model, but who was cheaper to get to pose in various places, right? So then you're making a mashup of different models who are all in your own portfolio so that you can show the star models in a lot of different poses and locations without having to pay them to go all those places. So if you're a modeling agency who wants that, I mean, you might hire a software developer to build that application for you and train it on all the photos you have of models, but you might not have the AI component to actually do the image magic that you need to combine the different images together. then we have a service on the SingularityNet marketplace that a developer could actually use to provide the AI component inside that application. And that example illustrates some fairly common aspects, which is you often have business customers who have their own data that they want to use to drive some AI application, but they don't have the ai wizardry to leverage their data to do to do what they want and so we can provide ai tools a developer can integrate and apply to the customer's data to deliver the

function that they need so i mean that if you were a modeling agency and you had data with images of a bunch of models and you wanted to sort of map the face of one model into the body you have another model because you had a photo of Model A by the beach, but Model B wasn't available to go to the beach, right? So if you want to do mapping of one model's face to another model's body, we have image style transfer services and stuff that can help with that, and you can then access this software on our platform, provide the AI wizardry inside your own domain-specific application.

Or if you're a biologist who's analyzing DNA data and you have a bunch of DNA for people with prostate cancer, you want to understand, you know, what genes are important for prostate cancer and why to help develop new therapeutics. Again, we have bio-AI analytics tools on the platform that can help you interpret your data. Similarly, let's say you're a bank who wants to do credit scoring for small-medium enterprises based on all sorts of different data, social media data and financial data. Again, financial analytics tools on the platform can help provide the AI component deep inside your product. So I think that the platform in itself is really geared toward technical people, toward product developers who would otherwise either have to build their own AI code or use some service on Google Cloud or Amazon Cloud or Microsoft Azure. We're giving an alternative to build it yourself and an alternative to big company AI services.

And I think as the platform grows bigger and bigger, we should be able to get a much wider and longer tailed set of AI services on the platform. Because we don't just have the things that a big company decided to provide to their users. because we have whatever anyone in the world decided to put onto the platform. So I would say the other set of customers we're looking at is large corporates, and that's a bit different. So I think a small company or an AI startup is going to just use the AI services in our platform directly, and, you know, that's the cheapest thing to do, and you can be very creative and then you combine different ai services together

on the other hand if you're a large corporation you may just want you know a very polished product that serves exactly the functions that you need that integrates with all your databases that has someone maintaining the product for you and then the back-end ai may come from the decentralized decentralized ai network but you don't even want to think about it you just want to think about the the product that you're buying so we're we've spun off a company called singularity studio which is a for-profit company aimed just at building commercial applications for large corporations where the ai back end draws on the decentralized singularity network and i sort of i view this as uh you know the best of both worlds it's somewhat analogous to you have linux which

is free and open source then you have red hat which was doing you know enterprise linux and it was a for-profit company recently acquired by ibm for like 34 billion dollars or you have ethereum then you have consensus which is is sort of a venture studio building out applications on top of ethereum so we have singularity net which is our free and open platform with some agi rnd in it and some useful low-level ai services then we have singularity studio which is is building uh you know polished corporate applications on on top of the singularity net network and i think that can help with the demand side of the problem of platform community growth that we face right because with with singularity net i mean having launched the beta version 2

which is a scalable version of the singularity net platform you know it it works it allows us to to deliver ai services at scale it allows different ais to talk to each other and coordinate with each other but for such a thing to really flourish you need supply which is people putting ai into the network and demand which is users using the network to get their to get their ai done and i mean the token ecosystem with agi token this can be used to drive supply to a significant extent by giving token rewards to ai developers putting ai in the platform to drive demand i mean one way to do it is just to do do developer workshops and make slip developer tools and you want to get ai developers to use the platform another way to do it is to do something

like singularity studio where you're building heavily polished domain specific products aimed at big companies to get them get them using the platform and i mean we've been as as one example within singularity net we've been working closely with with cisco systems and we've been working with them on some applications aimed at car traffic analytics so using deep neural nets together with some abductive logic like logical reasoning a different kind of ai we've been putting logic together with neural nets and working working with cisco to better understand what's happening in street scenes, like between cars, pedestrians, bicyclists, and so forth.

So this is a case where we are working directly with a big company to help solve some of the problems using the AI tools that we have developed, which are then made available on Singularity Net Marketplace. And right now, it's been a sort of custom thing we're working on together with Cisco. But then AI on SingularityNet platform for car traffic analytics, a next step will be to productize that. And then we have a product which we could potentially license to Cisco or to anyone else who needed car traffic analytics. But then, like, what the customer sees is just, well, we have some car traffic data feeds, and we need some output telling us what's happening in this roadway situation. And that's all they care about is they have something that sucks in their car traffic data and spits out car traffic analytics.

It happens on the back end. The AI is being supplied from this decentralized blockchain-based platform using some neural nets and using our OpenCog AI tools. But the customer, I mean, they may think it's cool that there's this blockchain-based decentralized network and some AGI technology behind it. But ultimately what they care about is they're getting their problem solved, right? And so I think that's an example of the type of approach we're taking in Singularity Studio where we're taking the trouble to develop a pretty full-featured vertical market specific product for some customer that backends on the network. But you also want like a vast teaming pool of, you know, more small scale developers who are directly using the low level AI code right on the platform to solve their problems. And these developers may be putting their own stuff available for sale on the platform also. So, yeah, I think, you know, the stage right here is a stage a bunch of blockchain-based projects are going to be at in the next couple of years.

It's like, OK, we built some infrastructure. We built some platforms. We've actually worked through a bunch of technical headaches to make tools that are decentralized in their infrastructure and actually do something useful. now you know now we're we're in the situation of competing with the big boys right because we need to get we need to get developers to use our tools and need to get customers to use the stuff the stuff on our platforms so which is you know it's a good problem to have to have a scalable decentralized platform that works and be at the stage of growing the network of users on the other And that's, it still is a challenge, right?

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Ether at BlockFi and receive 6% annual interest paid monthly in cryptocurrency. This rate actually compounds so you receive a 6.2% APY which is very attractive given the alternatives. So you can actually take your Bitcoin, you can deposit it with BlockFi and get paid an interest rate of 6% in return go check out blockfi.com slash pomp again blockfi.com slash pomp to sign up and start earning interest on your crypto today what what do you think is uh kind of the end goal or end state of singularity net right when you look and you say hey five ten years from now as you continue to build it what does this end up looking like i mean the end the end the end goal the end goal is to foster the emergence of benevolent superhuman general intelligence right so i mean

the end goal is a beneficial singularity that's why it's called singularity then but obviously there are there are a few intermediate sub goals along the way right so i mean an intermediate sub goal which is still very big is i want to see a substantial fraction of the ai on the planet running in decentralized networks that are controlled in a democratic and participatory way. So, I mean, we don't need to monopolize all the AI on the planet any more than Linux has monopolized all the operating systems on the planet. But, I mean, if SingularityNet was as big for AI as Linux is for operating systems,

then I think we would be quite successful, And we would have made it so that decentralized, participatory, secure, privacy-respecting systems are a big chunk of how AI happens on the planet Earth. And I mean, I think that's the right platform for the next stage, which is the transition from narrow AI to general intelligence and the emergence of benevolent superintelligence. So then practical stuff like analyzing genetics data or helping a modeling agency do image transfer of faces from one scene to another or helping Cisco with car traffic analytics, these very practical nitty-gritty projects across many vertical markets, I mean, these are part of the process of getting decentralized AI to be a significant part of the picture in terms of how the transition from narrow AI to AGI happens on the planet. Got it. And then in terms of the actual services and the AI functionality that you have on the marketplace, how are you creating that? Are you guys creating that in-house? Are you using kind of some sort of incentive tool to get others to create it and contribute?

You know, where is that coming from if you consider that kind of the supply side? So, so far, the tools on the beta version 2 marketplace, I mean, these are either in-house or they're developed by other groups that we're pretty close partners with. So, I mean, we've used token-based incentivization, but it's been more on a bespoke basis. Like there's a company called Moza AI, which builds bioinformatics to standardize genetics data. And, I mean, we've worked with them, and they put some genetics AI tools on the platform. So there's been some in-house and some developed by close partners. And really, the services on there now, I mean, they're useful.

They do valuable things, but they're mostly, you know, examples of what the platform can do. And we're going to be launching later this year a request for AI portal, which basically has a list of, hey, if you develop this, then we'll reward you with this many tokens. If you develop that, we'll reward you with this many tokens. and then then we're inviting the community to post new requests for ai on that portal like if you if you want some ai developed post a request here you know post uh a criterion for what does someone have to do to to have their ai be good enough for you and how many tokens does reward you willing to give someone for for developing this and then that that it's a little bit like cattle but it but but it's more flexible in what kinds of uh of ai can can can be

can be requested so that's that's the next stage which we're going to get to this fall which which we're pretty pretty excited about i mean we've we're doing things in-house and with close partners because the development tools have been a bit raw but now that the beta version two is much more mature and easy to use so with the yeah with the launch of the request for ai portal later this fall we're gonna we're gonna make a big push to get third-party developers to put stuff on the platform and then that i mean that's at the same time as working with cisco with picc which is china's largest insurance company which we have an mou with and we're working out the contract details now for some special work there.

And Domino's Pizza, who's working with us on optimizing pizza delivery in Malaysia and Singapore. So, I mean, on the one hand, getting corporate customers on board through Singularity Studio and through contracts with specific corporations, getting large corporates. On the other hand, launching the request for AI portal this fall to make a sort of systematic way to guide the token-incentivized AI development, I mean, that's building demand and supply on the network. And, I mean, that's what we need to do to really make this grow. So, I mean, our big goal in 2018 and 19 was building stuff because the current blockchain tools are a horrifying pain to work with. So, like, getting a decentralized AI network that actually works is a very hard technical problem. So, now there's still loads of more tech development to do.

But our big goal for, you know, this fall and then 2020 is more on the community development side. So we want to come out of 2020 with a bunch of users and a bunch of third-party developers and a sort of flourishing ecosystem there. And then that's where you have the conditions for really radical exponentially growth over the few years after that. For sure. One of the things that to me is so interesting here is these businesses can get very big, very fast because of the global nature of them. How do you think about, you know, kind of focusing on one geography or jurisdiction versus a global expansion from day one or the early days? It's got to be global. And we're very global in the first place.

I mean, I'm sitting in Hong Kong. Our biggest AI team is in St. Petersburg, Russia. And our product development is between St. Petersburg and Bangalore for the core platform. We have a team in Brazil, a team in Ethiopia. And I think that's actually very important to the model overall, because if you look at what we're trying to do with getting a lot of different AI into the platform, so the supply side, part of what will make our platform successful is that we can take contributions from brilliant AI guys, you know,

in Russia, in Mongolia, in India, in Azerbaijan, in Ghana, in Honduras, wherever they are, right? So if you have a brilliant AI developer with a new idea for a new AI algorithm, you know, if you're sitting in Azerbaijan or Honduras or Ghana, you're probably not going to get a job at Google or Facebook or Tencent. I mean, you might, but not many will, right? On the other hand, you can take an AI that you designed and you can put it online in our platform, and then you can make money for it,

you can earn tokens for it, and you can build a reputation for it. So the ability to draw on AI contributions on the supply side from developers all around the planet, that's extremely valuable, and that's something that comes along with being a decentralized network that's not tied to a very specific corporate business model or jurisdiction. And, I mean, on the other hand, that naturally will lead to serving customers all around the world. Because, I mean, if you have a bunch of AI developers in Azerbaijan who are contributing AI to the SingularityNet platform,

I mean, of course, the AI they created could be used by large companies or startups anywhere on the planet. But there's going to be an incentive then for companies in that country to use some of the AI that's put in the platform by developers in that country. So I think something like this can be global by nature. And I mean, in the same way that Linux has become very global, even though the initial developers were located in mostly northern Europe and U.S. Got it. Before I wrap up, I always do rapid fire set of questions. What do you think is the most important company in crypto other than your own? I've been very excited by the Choda ecosystem, T-O-D-A. I think the TOTA guys have solved the scaling problem that has plagued blockchain technologies.

And we're working on an experimental port of SingularityNet off Ethereum onto TOTA. So, I mean, that's not launched yet. We're just playing with it. But what they have is very cool. They got rid of the replicated ledger and they found a clever way to do secure, decentralized transactions of value. And so that's very cool. I've been playing with that a lot lately. Got it.

What's the one regulation you would change or improve if you could wave a magic wand? Oh, one regulation. Well, I mean, the regulations that annoy me most actually aren't about crypto. They're more about experimentation regarding biology. I mean, I would love to see regulations change so if any sane, non-retarded, consenting adult wanted to try some medical therapy, they're allowed to do so. That would advance us a lot toward super longevity and conquering aging and death. You wouldn't have to have medical tourism and boutique medical facilities on super yachts in the ocean and so forth. But, I mean, in the crypto domain, I mean, clearly you want to see just free ability for anyone to experiment with altcoins, utility tokens, or radical new forms of value exchange that haven't been invented yet.

I mean, these shouldn't be regulated as securities. There should be freedom of anyone, whether they're an accredited investor or not, to invent or to invest in or purchase or whatever, like any cryptographic entity they want. And, you know, the government can protect against fraud and people lying and saying something is what it isn't. But if you clearly describe what something is and someone else wants to pay their money for it, they should be allowed to do so. I don't see why the government needs to be that paternalistic. And, yeah, probably the most offensive thing, though, is like in many countries like the U.S., if you're above a certain level of net worth or income, you're allowed to buy certain things. And if you're poor, you're not allowed to buy certain things.

I mean, that's just, that's insanely ridiculous. Like, why should the government be so paternalistic toward anyone who's not rich enough? I mean, just because you're not rich doesn't mean you're mentally retarded. But, I mean, it will be such a long list of ridiculous paternalistic laws that exist for historical reasons and are preserved through either stupidity or because they help to increase the advantage that the highly wealthy have over everyone else. So, yeah, I'm very excited. Like Patrick Friedman, a friend of mine in California, has recently raised a venture fund for charter cities and seasteading and so forth.

So I'm very psyched about that. I hope we can see like hundreds of startup countries floating in international waters with much more complete freedom to experiment, both with medicine and with different forms of social organization and economic exchange. While we're at it, we should legalize all psychedelics so people can trip out and expand their minds whenever and wherever they want. But there's a long list.

So once the super AI takes over and becomes a benevolent ruler on the planet, it can get rid of all these stupid laws. I'm really looking forward to it. Got it. And so what's the most important book you've ever read? Most important book I've ever read in my life. Well, probably the book that influenced me most was Thus Faked Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, which my oldest son is named Zarathustra, probably because I enjoy the philosophy in there so much.

Got it. And then aliens, believer, non-believer? Aliens? What kind of aliens are we talking about here? Well, I've never seen one, but I ask everybody if they believe in aliens or some form of intelligent life outside of humans on Earth. Well, if you take DMT, you'll encounter a lot of aliens. But these guys seem to live in a different dimension. I mean, if you're talking about aliens in this four-dimensional space-time continuum, hiding in Area 51 or whatnot, I mean, I haven't met any yet, but I'm highly open to the possibility.

I mean, in general, my feeling is we understand far less about the universe we live in than we think we do. Like I think about when my dog is sitting in the study where I work, watching me type on the computer, he just thinks I'm sitting there wiggling my fingers randomly and guarding my desk or something. Like he has no idea I'm controlling server farms elsewhere in the world or communicating with other people, right? So similarly, once our intelligence is upgraded by fusing our minds with superhuman AI systems, I mean, what aspects of reality are going to become apparent to us that are completely opaque to us given our stupid brains right now? I mean, aliens may be the least of the weird things we discover. For sure. And then I end each podcast letting the guest ask me one question. What question do you have for me?

what do you see happening in the crypto ecosystem in in in the next couple years do you think we're going to see like a flourishing of of of that's overtaking the world economy or or do you think there's going to be sort of a long a long uh winter of sorts well i you know look for me it's I put this recently on Twitter, take the financial applications. I tend to think more about automated finance rather than decentralized finance. And same thing with applications. There are definitely a place for decentralized applications, but I tend to think more of it as automation applications. And all that means or what the nuance there is, some of the automation applications will be decentralized, but not all of them. But every decentralized

application will be automated, right? And so why that's important is when you think of a blockchain, in my opinion, it's simply triple entry accounting, right? And it can count a whole bunch of different things that you want it to, but it works in a way that ultimately will allow all assets of value. So stocks, bonds, currencies, and commodities to be digitized. And ultimately when those assets are digitized, you will then see true automation, right? I joke all the time and say the idea that we're having automated systems try to interact with electronic money, Right. That has, you know, one or two day settlement times or other non natively digital asset. It's like trying to put a CD-ROM in a cassette player. Right. It just doesn't really work.

And so, you know, there will be a time where a lot of this stuff is important and kind of comes to fruition. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the decentralized applications or the ideas around the applications, uh they're probably a decade early just like we saw on the internet right we saw people try streaming we saw people try um food delivery etc in the late 90s that stuff really didn't happen well yeah what's interesting is you know the economy is everything's advancing faster than it used to right so what took a decade between like 98 and 2008 that might take three years now or something because i i think i think processes are happening are happening faster so maybe maybe even if we are ahead of our time and

that fundamental dynamic is there maybe it's not 10 years it's only a few years for sure yeah look maybe saying 10 years is too literal right but it's just it's before it's time um and i definitely agree that things can grow faster um and and um kind of trends might uh accelerate given the fact that uh technology is pretty uh pervasive um today versus uh you know in the late 90s people were just kind of coming online yeah it's amazing how fast things can rise and fall now compared to 10 or 20 years ago right so i mean you can see you can see potentially you can see just like we saw IBM and

Wayne Computers and Honeywell fell from dominance to being sidelined I mean you can see the Googles, Amazon Facebooks and Tencents fall from dominance to being sidelined by something totally different in like a five year period or something

I think the pace of change is going to accelerate and I think you're right that the current batch of blockchain technologies is in some ways premature and prototypish. I mean, that's why I got excited about TOTA lately because I look at that and it's like,

well, this is the next generation. Actually, why did we need a distributed ledger at the base level of our secure decentralized protocol? You didn't. You can do secure decentralized communication without a ledger and then if you need a ledger you build it on top of that so that's that's one example of like a totally different architecture than than what's commonplace now so yeah i think there's definitely there's another phase of experimentation with the core protocols and

architectures before you get get super super wide adoption but that phase may go through faster than one expects based on historical precedence because the whole economy is just speeding up in an insane way for sure i uh i completely agree man well listen i really appreciate you taking the time to do this um i i've uh been fascinated with um all sorts of aspects of artificial intelligence and to talk to somebody who's been working out so long is a real treat for me and then obviously what you're doing um in terms of applying that uh is pretty cool. So thanks so much. And we'll have to do it again in the future. All right. Yeah. Thanks a lot. Hey, everyone. Pomp here. If you like this episode of Off The Chain and want to help us

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