Speaker 1: Right now, there was Bitcoin, which is slow as balls,
Speaker 1: then if the Ethereum, which was still sort of slow
Speaker 1: but offered like the ability to become programmable, and then
Speaker 1: sort of moved on for there we got we got
Speaker 1: l twos to go solve the etherium like transaction speed problem.
Speaker 1: And then we have all kinds of novel novel systems
Speaker 1: which are less and less decentralized, but more and more practical.
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Speaker 2: welcome into the Thinking Crypto podcast. I'm your host, Tony Edward,
Speaker 2: and joining me today is Bailly Wang, who's the co
Speaker 2: founder and CEO of Prisma X. Billy, great to have you.
Speaker 1: It's pleasure to pleasure to be here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Bailly, I'm really excited to speak with you and
Speaker 2: learn about what you and the folks at Prisma X
Speaker 2: are doing with robotics and AI, and of course there's
Speaker 2: the convergence with blockchain and crypto. But let's kick it
Speaker 2: off with your background. Tell us about yourself, your time
Speaker 2: at MIT, and your professional background as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so, i I've been a founder on my life.
Speaker 1: I was a robotics research at MIT for a long time.
Speaker 1: I worked on a robot called the MIT Mini Cheetah,
Speaker 1: and the Mini Cheetah was very influential in the industry
Speaker 1: because it got the cost of the hardware down about
Speaker 1: one hundred x and really enabled people to do things
Speaker 1: like focus on applications and use cases and software. But
Speaker 1: when push came to shove, there wasn't really enough automation
Speaker 1: to make the robots do anything useful at the time,
Speaker 1: so that project was retired. The researchers left, went and worked,
Speaker 1: went and worked at other companies. So ultimately, that's what
Speaker 1: we want to solve. We want to at prism X.
Speaker 1: We want to give these machines the intelligence they need
Speaker 1: to be able to interact with the real world to
Speaker 1: be able to complete real tasks, and we think that
Speaker 1: crypto and blockchain are a great way to coordinate the
Speaker 1: tasks that need to happen to make this takeoff. I've
Speaker 1: also been involved in blockchain for quite some time now,
Speaker 1: since I mined my dollar bitcoins back in the early
Speaker 1: twenty tens. I was one of those guys who went
Speaker 1: to spent ten bitcoins on a pizza and felt really
Speaker 1: happy about it because it was it was free money, right.
Speaker 1: We used that Mitax electricity the mind bitcoins and used
Speaker 1: the bitcoins to buy lunch. Felt great when we were
Speaker 1: poor undergrads. Now that those pizzas are worth a million dollars.
Speaker 1: It's maybe a little a little less great, but that's
Speaker 1: that's that's that's why I've enjoyed crypto. Like through it
Speaker 1: all the narratives have shifted, the industry has changed a lot.
Speaker 1: We've seen everything from selling plots of land in the
Speaker 1: metaverse to decentralized lending systems to and everything in between.
Speaker 1: And the one thing that's remained constant is that crypto
Speaker 1: has the ability to captivate and engage a million people
Speaker 1: and something completely new, very very very quickly, like literally
Speaker 1: literally overnight, over over over a week. You could have
Speaker 1: a million people be excited about what you're doing. And
Speaker 1: I think that's really important for emerging frontier technology like robotics,
Speaker 1: where we do need new ways of working with things.
Speaker 1: We do need new types of jobs, new types of interactions,
Speaker 1: and crypto is a way to get these people engaged
Speaker 1: and to coordinate what they're doing.
Speaker 2: Billy, that's amazing that you were mining bitcoins so early
Speaker 2: at a dollar, that's incredible. Were you part of the
Speaker 2: MIT Crypto Club, I know they had formed that over
Speaker 2: the years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I was part. I was part of the
Speaker 1: original community. I saw the first rise of bitcoin to
Speaker 1: thirteen hundred dollars a coin hundred thousand dollars. Bitcoins were
Speaker 1: a pipe tream back then. We laughed about it, but
Speaker 1: no one thought it could happen. We were part of
Speaker 1: this thing called the Experiment where we gave a third
Speaker 1: of a bitcoin to every MIT undergrad. When this price
Speaker 1: is slumped, we wanted to inject some life back into
Speaker 1: the ecosystem and see whether we could get any applications
Speaker 1: coming out of it.
Speaker 2: Wow, this is going to sound like a weird question,
Speaker 2: and there's a lot of people who hate this guy.
Speaker 2: But Gary Ganser, former SEC chairman, he was teaching at MIT,
Speaker 2: I believe around twenty eighteen. Were you there? Did you
Speaker 2: attend any of his courses by any chance?
Speaker 1: I was not there. I was in eighteen. I was
Speaker 1: still in Cambridge, but I was more on the robotic
Speaker 1: side of that point. Point.
Speaker 2: Got it okay? I had to ask because that's a
Speaker 2: big controversial time, you know, against her in the last
Speaker 2: under Biden. You know, they had attacked crypto and at
Speaker 2: one point he was teaching about it at MIT. So
Speaker 2: it's just a weird change that took place. But I
Speaker 2: guess it was all politically driven.
Speaker 1: Politics is a weird thing.
Speaker 2: So Billy, you know, I really want to get your
Speaker 2: perspective as an entrepreneur and a builder on kind of
Speaker 2: the future economy. Right, you have all these technologies converging, AI, robotics,
Speaker 2: E V space exploration is booming, you have crypto and blockchain,
Speaker 2: and it seems like this is an industrial revolution that
Speaker 2: we're part of the fourth and these technologies are converting
Speaker 2: and they kind of have a symbiotic relationship where you know,
Speaker 2: as you mentioned, like I don't foresee robots transacting in cash,
Speaker 2: but maybe with stable coins in there, and they're running
Speaker 2: on blockchain networks to power the data that they need.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think you put it right. It's a
Speaker 1: new industrial revolution. And with these revolutions, they're not bad.
Speaker 1: They don't displace people, but they make people change what
Speaker 1: they do and how they work, and I think that's
Speaker 1: important for robotics. One of the core beliefs we have
Speaker 1: at Chrisma X is that in the future economy, people
Speaker 1: will work new roles alongside of robots rather than being
Speaker 1: displaced by the robots. There's clearly things humans are good at,
Speaker 1: Like we have a lot of experiences we can be
Speaker 1: responsible for own actions. We are really good at this
Speaker 1: sort of external environmental perception and decision making that's really
Speaker 1: hard for computers to do. But ultimately the robots are
Speaker 1: also great because it means that these people no longer
Speaker 1: have to be in dangerous positions lifting heavy objects. They
Speaker 1: can do what they're actually good at, which is sit
Speaker 1: in the control making controlling the robots and making sure
Speaker 1: the robots are behaving properly. And these machines, which are
Speaker 1: you know, they're good at outputting high amounts of force
Speaker 1: and working twenty four to seven. They're the ones who
Speaker 1: are out in the field actually doing the physical labor,
Speaker 1: and we see that as a really good relationship, like
Speaker 1: it's it's it's very positive, right, Like no one actually
Speaker 1: says I enjoy cleaning sewers or hammering nails into two
Speaker 1: by fours. But if you can make the same amount
Speaker 1: of money or even more money controlling five robots that
Speaker 1: are doing the same thing, that's a that's a huge
Speaker 1: wen for everyone.
Speaker 2: And to your yeah, continue, I didn't mean to interest you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And to you to your point, I think that's
Speaker 1: where that that's similar for things like blockchain, where we
Speaker 1: are sort of at the cusp of a transition in
Speaker 1: financial systems where because information is more freely accessible, being
Speaker 1: able to have more decentralized financial systems is now a
Speaker 1: possibility and can be done safely and safely and reliably
Speaker 1: right like there were like there were problems like one
Speaker 1: hundred years ago where like you, you just didn't have
Speaker 1: access to enough information to be able to make decisions intelligently.
Speaker 1: But now with the blockchain, with everything be one hundred
Speaker 1: percent transparent, with the Internet, with data analytics tools, it's
Speaker 1: become a lot better. And I think that the machine
Speaker 1: transactions to are a really interesting aspect. There's clearly a
Speaker 1: space for machines to be able to rent time on
Speaker 1: other machines to complete more fleet oriented tasks, and that
Speaker 1: can only happen through blockchain. I don't think the traditional
Speaker 1: financial system is going to allow that kind of computerized
Speaker 1: transaction into the system. It's just their risk profile on
Speaker 1: how they make money is not aligned with what the
Speaker 1: system needs right now, which is speed and transparency and
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: And also is there this safety component that Look, you
Speaker 2: have these robots, they're going to be powered by a
Speaker 2: network where data is coming in and look, we've seen
Speaker 2: the dystopian movies, right with the dystopian scenario of these
Speaker 2: robots being taken control of. But blockchain and encrypted network
Speaker 2: using cryptography immutable and all these things, could that help
Speaker 2: police the network, so to speA, because you're building on
Speaker 2: a better infrastructure versus Web two infrastructure.
Speaker 1: I think it's more that the actual humans that control
Speaker 1: the blockchain are much more diffused than with a centralized
Speaker 1: Web two infrastructure, so you can't have a single bad
Speaker 1: actor make a bad decision. Right. The whole point of
Speaker 1: blockchain is that it's unless fifty one percent of the
Speaker 1: entire community believes that an action should be done, the
Speaker 1: chain should reject that state. And I think that's really
Speaker 1: important because it means rather than you could imagine a
Speaker 1: dystopian future, like the typical dystopian future is like the
Speaker 1: CEO of some evil ABC Mega corporation decides to go
Speaker 1: bad and commands all of his lackeys to go bad,
Speaker 1: and there's like a wash and effect down the line.
Speaker 1: But it's much harder to attack with a decentralized system,
Speaker 1: where even for like a modern stake based validation system,
Speaker 1: you still have thousands of validators that all have to
Speaker 1: form a consensus and convincing every fifty one percent of
Speaker 1: those to follow your plans is very challenging, right that
Speaker 1: that's the whole underpinning behind modern networks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, I personally don't view the world
Speaker 2: as this dystopian thing terminator I robot. I viewed more
Speaker 2: as the Jetsons. Like you said, there's going to be
Speaker 2: bad actors that has existed throughout time, right and will
Speaker 2: continue because humans will be humans. But if my grandma
Speaker 2: could be helped by a robot where it's monitoring, doing
Speaker 2: the heavy lifting, if dangerous jobs are done by robots,
Speaker 2: and it can even free me up in my daily
Speaker 2: life to do things I want to do versus Okay,
Speaker 2: I don't need to go mow the grass, the robot
Speaker 2: can do it, or you know, as a simple example,
Speaker 2: it just seems like it's going to open up more
Speaker 2: opportunities for us to do the things we love, right right.
Speaker 1: I think the terminator scenario was one that was unfortunately
Speaker 1: popularized like three decades ago by media that did media,
Speaker 1: a media that didn't quite understand the technology and be
Speaker 1: technology that didn't quite understand itself at the time either,
Speaker 1: like robotics was mostly a pipe tream thirty years ago
Speaker 1: when Terminator came out right, So I don't really see
Speaker 1: for variety of reasons, I don't really see robots as
Speaker 1: being a physical safety hazard, not the least of this
Speaker 1: there there. It's actually very easy to stop a robot,
Speaker 1: especially like a modern dynamic humanoid robot, where if you
Speaker 1: cut the power, it just falls over. Uh, It's not
Speaker 1: like it would be a different scenario. I think if
Speaker 1: we were deploying like huge autonomous for cliffs rolling rolling
Speaker 1: around to go move things around there there, you would
Speaker 1: have a real real safety issue if there was a
Speaker 1: if there was like a security problem. But I think
Speaker 1: with modern, modern compliant robotics it's much less of an issue.
Speaker 2: Now. Before we continue a conversation, I want to make
Speaker 2: sure folks know what Prisma X is. Get give us
Speaker 2: the overview to history and your mission.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So our our our sort of long term vision
Speaker 1: is to drive mainstream adoption of robotics by helping the
Speaker 1: industry scale the things that has a lot of trouble
Speaker 1: scaling right now. More specifically, that means right now we
Speaker 1: provide things like a unified platform for robot taler operation,
Speaker 1: mostly focused on data collects right now, but potentially real
Speaker 1: world stuff as well, scalable data filters for vision for
Speaker 1: vision data collection, and things like guild ownership of robotics
Speaker 1: which will help the hardware side of the pictures scale. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: we see Prisma access backing a lot of the man
Speaker 1: machine interactions in the future, where you would go through
Speaker 1: things like remotely operate robots to complete tasks, be the
Speaker 1: guy who ensures that the robots are safe, coordinating a
Speaker 1: lot of the ownership, leasing, access mech mechanics behind robotics.
Speaker 2: Interesting. So, you know, we talked a bit earlier about
Speaker 2: certain jobs being taken out by robots that maybe are
Speaker 2: more dangerous to human beings and they can work around
Speaker 2: the clock. But do you see new jobs being created
Speaker 2: where people are going to have to fix these robots.
Speaker 2: There's a financialization, the leasing, the buying, and all that jazz.
Speaker 2: What do you see as far as jobs being created
Speaker 2: out of the robot industry.
Speaker 1: I think like the actual hardware maintenance will be no
Speaker 1: different than existing equipment leasing, but there's going to be
Speaker 1: a lot more of it. It's going to exist at
Speaker 1: a too orders of magnitude higher scale than existing leasable equipment,
Speaker 1: which is going to require the creation of new structures
Speaker 1: in order to manage these things. Right, you can go
Speaker 1: manage a million bulldozers, but one hundred million robots is
Speaker 1: a whole different picture. Beyond that, the real position we
Speaker 1: see being created is this idea of the human behind
Speaker 1: the robot who drives the machine, but he doesn't have
Speaker 1: to drive the machine one hundred percent of the time.
Speaker 1: The robot drives itself ninety percent of the time, but
Speaker 1: ten percent of the time someone needs to come in
Speaker 1: and make sure that the robot's doing its job or
Speaker 1: do a spot check. And if you do the math,
Speaker 1: if there's a billion robots or even one hundred million robots,
Speaker 1: we're talking millions to tens of millions of positions being created.
Speaker 1: And ultimately we think that's where a lot of the
Speaker 1: existing sort of like gig worker demographic. I would say,
Speaker 1: like people who right now make money doing repetitive tasks
Speaker 1: will eventually be able to occupy themselves. And it's a
Speaker 1: much better use of humans as well, because, as I
Speaker 1: said earlier, people are good at making decisions and learning
Speaker 1: about the environment. People are actually quite bad at doing
Speaker 1: things like lifting heavy items. Like we're not built for
Speaker 1: that kind of work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it seems like we're in this transition period
Speaker 2: away from that, right and the old Industrial Revolution, the
Speaker 2: old way of doing things, and look, we needed to
Speaker 2: do it is what it is. We have to do
Speaker 2: it at that point because the technology wasn't there. But
Speaker 2: it's like this brave new world where you have AI
Speaker 2: as like this virtual assistant that give you knowledge point,
Speaker 2: you give you ideas, and then you have the physical
Speaker 2: component of the robots to help execute some of it,
Speaker 2: and you as a human being, you get freed up to,
Speaker 2: like I said, do more things that you love. Maybe
Speaker 2: I don't have to spend all day doing maintenance on
Speaker 2: my yard or my house or whatever it is. You know.
Speaker 2: I know it's a very simplistic example, but I can
Speaker 2: go fishing, or I can go work longer things like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I mean driving an analogy with existing
Speaker 1: gen AI. Right, there's like a lot of concern especially
Speaker 1: like AI content generation is going to displace a lot
Speaker 1: of jobs. But the top content creators are like really
Speaker 1: jumping on the AI because it means they can spend
Speaker 1: more time being creative and less time and money doing
Speaker 1: things like correcting the color and their videos or a
Speaker 1: masking out objects like it's a it's a powerful tool
Speaker 1: for people who right now are already ahead of the
Speaker 1: curve to do better. And what that means is that
Speaker 1: the whole curve gets pulled up right. You've displaced the bottom,
Speaker 1: and now in order to continue to compete, everyone has
Speaker 1: to move up and that ultimately, ultimately that makes people
Speaker 1: better at what they do. And it's happened in every
Speaker 1: industrial revolution. The first industrial industrial revolution took us from
Speaker 1: subsistence farming on like like planting corn and wheat, to
Speaker 1: manufacturing goods. Then sort of like the information revolution, move
Speaker 1: people away from doing small manual tasks into doing things
Speaker 1: like more service oriented things, and overall, like in the
Speaker 1: long run, that was like we look back on that happily,
Speaker 1: like we're everyone is very happy that ten percent of
Speaker 1: the population doesn't sit in a room for fourteen hours
Speaker 1: leading socks, which is just it was not a good world, right,
Speaker 1: Like everyone agrees that was a bad world, and we're
Speaker 1: happy to be out of it. And I think it's
Speaker 1: gonna be the same thing. You're not gonna have people
Speaker 1: going and like manually masking things out in photoshop or
Speaker 1: being robotics like like clipping burgers or mowing lawns, and
Speaker 1: they're gonna be going off and doing something new.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. And then when you throw into the mix the
Speaker 2: next frontier, so to speak, which is space. We see
Speaker 2: SpaceX and all these companies, right Virgin Collecting, So everybody's
Speaker 2: trying to build their best rockets do space flights. And
Speaker 2: then Elon's trying to colonize Mars. I can't imagine they're
Speaker 2: gonna send humans first. They're gonna send robots, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: And that I think is a big hidden gem in robotics,
Speaker 1: having robots do things which are completely impossible for humans.
Speaker 1: There's like a whole lot of business considerations you have
Speaker 1: to think about, right, like what is the commercial value
Speaker 1: of being on Mars? How can we get to Mars?
Speaker 1: Launching the robot to Mars is very annoying, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's a lot of mass to put on Mars. But
Speaker 1: I think it's an active field and research which more
Speaker 1: companies should go explore.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, and you don't even have to send
Speaker 2: a ton of robots. I mean you send three. That's
Speaker 2: still because they don't have to sleep or eat and breathe.
Speaker 2: That's it's probably the equivalent of what fifty human beings.
Speaker 1: I don't know, and you don't. You don't need spacesuits.
Speaker 1: They can grow more freely like a person in a
Speaker 1: spacesuit is not a very dexterous thing. Yeah, so the problem,
Speaker 1: the problem with robots on Mars has always been the
Speaker 1: few minutes of latency between the Earth and Mars. Like
Speaker 1: the speed of light is finite. So it's a little
Speaker 1: bit troublesome, and they're trying to figure out how to
Speaker 1: deal with that.
Speaker 2: Oh. Absolutely, Now tell us how Prisma X is executing
Speaker 2: on robotics. Are you do you actually are you building
Speaker 2: the actual physical robots? I saw on the website the
Speaker 2: fleet tell us a bit about that.
Speaker 1: Do not build physical robots beyond what's absolutely necessary to
Speaker 1: kickstart the platform. We partner with external robotics companies. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: one of our short term midterm visions is to drive
Speaker 1: a little bit more standardization in the robotics industry in
Speaker 1: order to make it easier to build applications. When you
Speaker 1: have three dozen different types of robot, each with their
Speaker 1: own quirks, it's hard to decide what to do. But
Speaker 1: by pushing the platform and the data and the operators
Speaker 1: to be skilled on a few embodiments which we think
Speaker 1: are we think are the best embodiments of that class.
Speaker 1: We can make things a little more efficient. So we
Speaker 1: do offer some robot access right now, and as the
Speaker 1: platform grows, there will be more access and more community
Speaker 1: owned robots which will be made available through the platform
Speaker 1: for everything from data collection to task completion. There's like,
Speaker 1: if you like in not too long, I think if
Speaker 1: you want a human oild robot to come mow your lawn,
Speaker 1: there will be potential to go on the platform and
Speaker 1: try to hire a humanoid and find an operator to
Speaker 1: mow your lawn. Whether the early platform, in the early
Speaker 1: hardware be efficient at actually getting a lawn mode is
Speaker 1: a different question, but it's it's right, it's a it's
Speaker 1: that's that's a nice thing about building something decentralized. The
Speaker 1: community gets to grow and discover what's valuable. Like we
Speaker 1: offer the tools to hire a robot, hire an operator
Speaker 1: and make them do things, and what you want to
Speaker 1: build on top of that is up to you. Like
Speaker 1: it could be anything from collect data to mow your
Speaker 1: lawn to who knows what else, put on a song,
Speaker 1: put put on a show, which is probably going to
Speaker 1: be actually a big use case. Or you go hire
Speaker 1: a humanoid to stand in front of your restaurant and
Speaker 1: like wave around like people will come either just look
Speaker 1: at the robot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's man like I said. A brave new
Speaker 2: world is so fascinating. It's exciting. Which blockchains or blockchain
Speaker 2: or blockchains are you using to power your network?
Speaker 1: It's still a bit TBD right now. We do a
Speaker 1: little bit of collaboration with some of the more prominent projects.
Speaker 1: The nice thing about the way the current ecosystem is
Speaker 1: set up is that you do have the potential to
Speaker 1: have different deployments of robots and different communities on different chains,
Speaker 1: depending on depending on where the communities are, what they're
Speaker 1: interested in, and then use technological means that tire reading together.
Speaker 2: And you know, I know the future is interoperable. We're
Speaker 2: seeing a lot of folks issue stable coins and doing
Speaker 2: different things on multichain right because you have these chains
Speaker 2: that maybe have different swim lanes, like an example be
Speaker 2: etherorem is more on the enterprise corporate level salon and
Speaker 2: more in the retail meme coin n FT level Bitcoin
Speaker 2: in its own lane, and you know some folks are
Speaker 2: targeting sports, the sports industry, so maybe it makes sense
Speaker 2: to be on multiple blockchains. Until you said targeting different communities.
Speaker 1: Yeahl L wonder ferentiation right now is a very interesting thing.
Speaker 1: Like I've seen the entire industry well before the concept
Speaker 1: of L one L two was a thing, and that
Speaker 1: was bad because you needed to become a node to
Speaker 1: have a wallet, and uh right, like coinbases, original product
Speaker 1: was a wallet where you didn't have to go download
Speaker 1: the entire chain in order to have a bitcoin, and
Speaker 1: it moved on from there. So I think as the
Speaker 1: industry moves forwards, we're going to see more clarity and
Speaker 1: what the what the chains differentiate as right now, there
Speaker 1: there were there was Bitcoin, which is slow as balls,
Speaker 1: then if the ethereum, which was still sort of slow
Speaker 1: but offered like the ability to become programmable, and then
Speaker 1: sort of moved on for there we got we got
Speaker 1: L twos to go solve the ethereum like transaction speed problem,
Speaker 1: and then we have all kinds of novel novel novel
Speaker 1: systems which are less and less decentralized but more and
Speaker 1: more practical. So we'll we'll see, we'll see where that
Speaker 1: grows in the end.
Speaker 2: Do you envision Let's say I buy a robot right
Speaker 2: five years so, now, just an example, that robot would
Speaker 2: have a crypto wallet built in. It's powered on maybe
Speaker 2: multiple blockchains where there's a primary blockchain, but it can
Speaker 2: do interoperable things with different blockchains. I tell it, hey, robot,
Speaker 2: whatever or whatever name I give it, can you go
Speaker 2: to home depot get me this part, and it will
Speaker 2: go do that and it will pay because it has
Speaker 2: maybe a wallet that has stable coins, and because stable
Speaker 2: coined legislation and crypto legendis at the cusp of passing,
Speaker 2: it will all be you know, into the payment rails,
Speaker 2: the credit card companies and so forth, and it will
Speaker 2: that robot will come back with the product that I
Speaker 2: asked it to buy and able to have executed a
Speaker 2: payment and everything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's actually interesting. I think that you will
Speaker 1: be able to buy a robot which contains some sort
Speaker 1: of credits, and those credits can be used for a
Speaker 1: variety of tasks machine to machine. Obviously, the robot completing tasks,
Speaker 1: the robot making some sort of external transactions, and it's
Speaker 1: up to the world and the regulators to decide whether
Speaker 1: those credits will be stable coins, which can be used
Speaker 1: to also pay for most real world services. I think
Speaker 1: there's a lot of potential with the new legislation because
Speaker 1: people are there's a lot of new services which MasterCard,
Speaker 1: Visa discover refuse to touch. Like fundamentally, the value of
Speaker 1: the stable coin outsid Like obviously one thing is international transactions,
Speaker 1: which are just sort of bad right now, like the
Speaker 1: financial system was not set up for high speed international transactions.
Speaker 1: But the other one is being able to do things
Speaker 1: which the three big credit card processors and the merchant
Speaker 1: banks are uncomfortable doing because of chargebacks and risk, and
Speaker 1: I think I think robotics is one of them. But
Speaker 1: maybe if things don't go well, you're just going to
Speaker 1: prepay for API credits which will be usable. They'll be
Speaker 1: like uber bucks or whatever, which will be usable and
Speaker 1: selects words. But I think I and everyone else really
Speaker 1: hope that the it will be a lot more universal
Speaker 1: in terms of adoption. And I think Stripe moving in
Speaker 1: that direction really helps because they're a big back end
Speaker 1: processor for a lot of SMBs. I like stripe board
Speaker 1: process for big shops like home depot, but for stuff
Speaker 1: like hey, can you go buy me breakfast from this
Speaker 1: my favorite restaurant. That guy probably uses a stripe terminal
Speaker 1: to go do their processing. So that kind of integration
Speaker 1: will really really help. The key I think there is
Speaker 1: to go hide the crypto side from the from the merchants,
Speaker 1: Like the merchants have no business learning or understanding that
Speaker 1: there's cryptography. Right, it's just another payment system and it's secure.
Speaker 1: Like no one knows how swift for credit cards work,
Speaker 1: or people who build the systems do. But like in general,
Speaker 1: like when you process a credit card payment, you don't
Speaker 1: know what happens behind the scenes, but you don't need to.
Speaker 1: It's just another way to eventually you get dollars exactly.
Speaker 2: And you know, often people ask me, okay, what's what's
Speaker 2: the purpose of blockchaining, crypto and stable coins right, because
Speaker 2: they don't know, like to your point, how money is settled,
Speaker 2: what happens behind the scenes. And look, a lot of
Speaker 2: people don't want to know how the sausage is made.
Speaker 2: But once they understand the crux of the issue of
Speaker 2: swift and the days it takes to settle and messaging,
Speaker 2: this technology solves all of that, makes it more efficient, faster,
Speaker 2: and you can lower fees as a result, right.
Speaker 1: Right, Its exactly right. There's like a lot of moving
Speaker 1: bits when you swipe your card in a restaurant. It
Speaker 1: like there's a merchant bank and ah settlement system your bank,
Speaker 1: and there's just a lot of moving parts that are
Speaker 1: really inefficient, and the different parts of the stack all
Speaker 1: disagree as to what they want to do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, does your platform allow for the creation
Speaker 2: of tokens or is that not necessary?
Speaker 1: Uh? Yeah, yeah, so right right now, we're going through
Speaker 1: a point system for some of the some of the
Speaker 1: early early early interactions. But eventually we're going to have
Speaker 1: a native token.
Speaker 2: And I know you mentioned you're still trying to figure out, uh,
Speaker 2: you know what, what which direction you go? Are you
Speaker 2: gonna build your own layer one? Are you gonna build
Speaker 2: a layer two like on Ether or something like that.
Speaker 1: It will probably start as an L two probably probably
Speaker 1: not probably probably Solana or some some one of the
Speaker 1: newer one of the newer chains with a bigger community,
Speaker 1: like the Youth community, has a very well defined, well
Speaker 1: defined set of features right now, which is mostly focused
Speaker 1: on technology development and as you said, enterprise use cases,
Speaker 1: which is not not a not a super good fit
Speaker 1: I think for the more community oriented transactional stuff that
Speaker 1: we're doing. I love etherory and like, if you're there,
Speaker 1: they're great guys. They really got us wherever we are.
Speaker 1: They do a lot of amazing research, but they have
Speaker 1: their Every chain has its own personality to your point, right,
Speaker 1: like we really that's what differentiates the chains. It's not
Speaker 1: the technology or the settlement speeds, or the validation scheme
Speaker 1: or the security. It really is the people who have
Speaker 1: gathered around each chain and that that that that that's
Speaker 1: that that gives them different personalities. And for us, I
Speaker 1: think it's because we're doing for for now, we're doing
Speaker 1: a lot of more offline transaction settlement. Things like transaction
Speaker 1: processing speeds are a bit less important dust than if
Speaker 1: we were, say doing real time payments where you actually
Speaker 1: need like some second settlement worst case for everything.
Speaker 2: Man, it's just I go into deep thoughts sometimes thinking
Speaker 2: about all these things with robots and blockchain and how
Speaker 2: it's all going to work. Now. You guys recently raise
Speaker 2: eleven million dollars from a sixteen Z and we know
Speaker 2: Andres and Howitz they are. They are big time believers
Speaker 2: in tech. They have been since the nineties. Crypto as well,
Speaker 2: tell us about that fundraise.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so, and A sixteen Z is a great
Speaker 1: is a great fund for a project like ours because
Speaker 1: they're very plugged into the frontier of every piece of
Speaker 1: technology and that includes robotics as well. Like they but
Speaker 1: by virtue of being a sixteen Z, they've interacted with
Speaker 1: many robotics startups. They have a good they have a
Speaker 1: good pulse on good pulse on what the industry is
Speaker 1: going to grow, and they like they just really immediately
Speaker 1: saw value of what we're doing. Like behind robotics, there's
Speaker 1: a huge late set of human coordination and human services
Speaker 1: that are needed in order to make the industry take off.
Speaker 1: Uh then hence hence the investment mm hmm.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I often watched their portfolio to see what
Speaker 2: they're investing in because it's also uh it's it's kind
Speaker 2: of like showing where the direction the puck is heading in. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: they were early to obviously the web one point oh,
Speaker 2: Web two point zero and now three point h and
Speaker 2: then you got these other technologies. So Billy I wanted
Speaker 2: to circle back to you know, the impact of robotics
Speaker 2: on society and the economy and so forth. You know
Speaker 2: what if someone came up to you and said, okay, Bill,
Speaker 2: I have seen all these movies Terminator and so forth,
Speaker 2: and if you wanted to play Devil's Advocate, what would
Speaker 2: you say are some of the potential risks? And once again,
Speaker 2: every technology brings risk with it, so I want to
Speaker 2: make sure you know, we give the nuance there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think the I think an interesting thing
Speaker 1: which I expect to see a bit of case law
Speaker 1: soon is if a tele operated robot makes a mistake,
Speaker 1: who's liable the operator or the operator or the manufacturer
Speaker 1: of the robot. To me, it's clearly the operator. But
Speaker 1: it gets a little more nuanced if the operators are
Speaker 1: being like hired through a platform service, right like say
Speaker 1: you hired an operator through task grab it, which is
Speaker 1: what a lot of companies do. Now, who's responsible for
Speaker 1: for for the operator's actions? And you know as well
Speaker 1: as I do that once robots take off, there's going
Speaker 1: to be like some incident where a robot is teleor
Speaker 1: operated and goes and like club someone in the head
Speaker 1: and there's like a big ruck us around it. It's
Speaker 1: not going to be a huge issue, I think, because
Speaker 1: in general society is not full of people clubbing each
Speaker 1: other on the head, Like even in the absence of punishment,
Speaker 1: It's is not beneficial for you to go like get enough,
Speaker 1: get enough fight with people. It's a lot of risk
Speaker 1: and there's no guarantee you're gonna win that fight. So
Speaker 1: it's I don't think it's it's I don't think it's
Speaker 1: natural for people to go do that kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: but there will be isolated incidents and we're gonna have
Speaker 1: some sort of legislation legislation around that, I think, And
Speaker 1: it's it's Decentralization helps there because it makes people individually
Speaker 1: responsible for their own actions. Like it's it's there's no
Speaker 1: like central hiring agency, so there's less of a target
Speaker 1: and you can build up the network obviously, like if
Speaker 1: people misbehave, they're no longer well come on them on
Speaker 1: the network.
Speaker 2: And then with these different robots, right, and you have
Speaker 2: different ais, you get your chat gpt is and much more.
Speaker 2: And all these AI agents that are going to be created,
Speaker 2: what category if I'm phrasing that right, what of AI
Speaker 2: would power these robots to help them do what they
Speaker 2: need to do?
Speaker 1: There are a new emergent class model. They internally look
Speaker 1: a little bit like the large language models the power
Speaker 1: chat EPT, but they learn how to plan a factions
Speaker 1: in a very abstract mathematical space. They like understand the
Speaker 1: concept of moving your arm to the left and then
Speaker 1: picking up an object, but they do so without explicitly
Speaker 1: writing that down. They're just they're just numbers which describe
Speaker 1: the concepts of leftness, armness, and picking upness. So the
Speaker 1: model will go learn those and then finally, different hardware
Speaker 1: vendors will go adapt those backbones to their own hardware.
Speaker 1: Is the current is the current paradigm? And I think
Speaker 1: it's here. I think it's here to I think it's
Speaker 1: here to stay. I think I think that's a good approach.
Speaker 2: And in addition to the physical aspect of helping human
Speaker 2: beings to execute different tasks and saving us time and
Speaker 2: like I said, freeing us up to do what we want,
Speaker 2: can these robots also be a companion and smart enough
Speaker 2: to have a conversation like we are right now where
Speaker 2: once again I give the example my grandma that the
Speaker 2: robots there, and she can ask it questions, You can
Speaker 2: ask it to make a phone call, so you can say, hey,
Speaker 2: can you remind me when is this happening. Can you
Speaker 2: put this on the calendar and it can have that interaction.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the helpful the helpful companion has been
Speaker 1: a vision of a lot of even the software only
Speaker 1: companies without the hardware embodiment. And I would say the
Speaker 1: biggest challenge there is this idea of talking like building
Speaker 1: an AI system where you can interrupt it halfway and
Speaker 1: it knows how to respond properly. If you've ever tried
Speaker 1: to like speak to an LLM, like not like chat
Speaker 1: with one, but like actually talk with one, it's very
Speaker 1: unnatural because you have to finish, pause and wait for
Speaker 1: the model to respond, and if you then interrupt the
Speaker 1: model as it responds, it just like really goes south
Speaker 1: from there, like it doesn't really know how to handle
Speaker 1: injecting outputs, as injecting additional input as it generates output.
Speaker 1: And I think it's a problem that it's a whole
Speaker 1: can of worms that I think is also right for decentralization,
Speaker 1: where you could go collect the training data needed to
Speaker 1: train this kind of interaction. So like, if anyone's listening,
Speaker 1: I think it would be a helpful thing for the
Speaker 1: industry to be able to really train that model because
Speaker 1: right now just isn't enough conversational data to do the
Speaker 1: training right now, Like the technology is there, but the
Speaker 1: training data isn't.
Speaker 2: This is a bit dystopian and gets into kind of
Speaker 2: the liability aspect. Let's say these robots have the guardrails
Speaker 2: in place. You cannot attack human, you can't hurt a human.
Speaker 2: What if I tell my robot to go attack my
Speaker 2: neighbor's robot? How do you how do we stop that?
Speaker 1: It'll be resolved through the traditional legal system where if
Speaker 1: you go, like break your neighbor's possessions, you have to
Speaker 1: pay for them, Like like what stops you from like
Speaker 1: taking a hammer to your neighbor's car, right, the answer
Speaker 1: is you have to pay for his car plus like
Speaker 1: triple damages, So you're not going to do it. And
Speaker 1: as I said, I don't think I don't think humans
Speaker 1: are like society. Seems that I have read a human
Speaker 1: which is not like naturally conflict seeking at least in
Speaker 1: like ninety nine percent of humans are not confluence seeking,
Speaker 1: and the bad actors can be dealt with through the
Speaker 1: traditional means, Like fundamentally, a robot is a tool, and
Speaker 1: using a robot to hurt someone or using a robot
Speaker 1: to damage someone is like, if you're in control, that's
Speaker 1: no different at all from using like using a hammer
Speaker 1: to go beat your labor on the head. Like it's
Speaker 1: punished by the same mechanics, and the thing which guards
Speaker 1: you from doing that is like society and penalty is
Speaker 1: not the fact that clubbing your neighbor with a hammer
Speaker 1: is difficult. Right.
Speaker 2: And also I'm assuming the robots are going to have
Speaker 2: kind of what a black box like airplanes do. It's
Speaker 2: going to record all of these things, so the evidence
Speaker 2: is there and it's actually be something you don't want
Speaker 2: to do if you're trying to do something nefarious and
Speaker 2: keep it as sea.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, Like if I think it's pretty clear that
Speaker 1: if if you personally own own it's your robot, and
Speaker 1: it goes and does something bad, it's it's your problem,
Speaker 1: regardless of how it happen, Like it's you're the It's
Speaker 1: the same way like if you if you own a
Speaker 1: knife and it gets something it gets used for something bad,
Speaker 1: or you own a gun and it gets used for
Speaker 1: something bad, you'll get looked at and especially if you
Speaker 1: are the one behind the knife or the the or
Speaker 1: the trigger. Right, And I think it's the same thing
Speaker 1: for machines, Like the robots are just tools in the end,
Speaker 1: and they have a little more autonomy, but you're still
Speaker 1: like the people are still responsible for the actions the
Speaker 1: machines take.
Speaker 2: Billy hard question, what's your best guess as to the
Speaker 2: timeline when we're going to see robots in our homes?
Speaker 2: Is it ten years from now? More than that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think ten ten years is a good estimate
Speaker 1: for when you'll really see them in your homes as
Speaker 1: something that you can go buy off the shelf and
Speaker 1: be reliable enough and comfortable off to work with. There
Speaker 1: is a bunch of software problems that need to be
Speaker 1: solved along the way, and probably some some hardware problems
Speaker 1: as well. Dev definitely is. I would say like social
Speaker 1: acceptance is also also one that we need to step into.
Speaker 1: We can't just drop robots and everyone who everyone's houses
Speaker 1: call me maybe a pessimist. There's at least one prominently
Speaker 1: venture funded company that said that we'd have robots in
Speaker 1: your home last December. The robots currently aren't. You aren't
Speaker 1: in your house right now, So that's how it's shaping up.
Speaker 2: Do you think it might actually start in the business sector? First,
Speaker 2: right Amazon's warehouse and whether before it even makes it
Speaker 2: to our.
Speaker 1: Homes, absolutely, and for for deep like deep scalable stuff
Speaker 1: like Amazon's warehouses, I think we're gonna see automation happen
Speaker 1: very soon because they can go rebuild the entire warehouse
Speaker 1: in order to make the machines fit and reap the
Speaker 1: ten year returns on that investment, like they have the
Speaker 1: money to do so. I think where you're going to
Speaker 1: see the first deployments of what I call advanced robots,
Speaker 1: like modern robots with complicated actuators, is in small, small
Speaker 1: to medium businesses like things like corner stores, convenience stores,
Speaker 1: maybe grocery, maybe maybe restaurant back end to some extent,
Speaker 1: but there's a lot of like human interaction there, so
Speaker 1: maybe maybe not as much. I think that's where you're
Speaker 1: going to see the first deployments where there's it's it's
Speaker 1: complicated enough of a scenario to justify a modern robot,
Speaker 1: but straightforward enough and sort of enclaves enough that you
Speaker 1: can deal with some of the reliability issues early on
Speaker 1: and then we're going we're going to move on in
Speaker 1: there once Once again, there are a few highly opinionated
Speaker 1: companies that will definitely tell you differently, But that's sort
Speaker 1: of my my take on the situation right now, and
Speaker 1: I think I think it's the realistic way for things
Speaker 1: to grow for sure.
Speaker 2: The other component that this is energy, right uh, And
Speaker 2: maybe that's kind of solved because we have car batteries
Speaker 2: and the alternators that keep powering it and you could
Speaker 2: charge your vacuum. You can charge this device and that
Speaker 2: device now, But what do you think the initial lifespan
Speaker 2: of a battery in the robot would last? And is
Speaker 2: it just a home charger that it just goes and
Speaker 2: stands and plugs itself in.
Speaker 1: I think it's going to be around two hours, maybe
Speaker 1: three hours for the for the first robots, So you're
Speaker 1: going to need some sort of fast charging technology to
Speaker 1: really get at the takeoff. Batteries are a trick Batteries
Speaker 1: are a tricky thing. I did a stint as like
Speaker 1: a sort of traction like electrification engineer some some time ago,
Speaker 1: and there's really a lot of laws of physics that
Speaker 1: make it hard to make the battery two times better
Speaker 1: than what it is now, and that puts a lot
Speaker 1: of like there's a lot of hard physical laws and
Speaker 1: we're like getting pretty close to the optimum I think
Speaker 1: for actuation and battery and power draw and I think
Speaker 1: we can recover some of the battery life problems by
Speaker 1: changing the form factor, Like if you accept that the
Speaker 1: robot doesn't have legs, which I think is a great
Speaker 1: idea in the in the short to medium term, you
Speaker 1: can pack a lot more power, it becomes a lot
Speaker 1: more efficient in moving itself around, and you can maybe
Speaker 1: squeeze a day of battery life out of a reasonable machine.
Speaker 1: But it's engineering is a series of trade offs, right,
Speaker 1: And who knows what will happen in the future, like
Speaker 1: maybe probably batteries in the un foreseeable future, fuel cells
Speaker 1: if you're still that kind of guy, Like if you're
Speaker 1: still if you're still interested in hydrogen in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: which you get like a startup a year that tries
Speaker 1: to play that game.
Speaker 2: Yeah, man, it's just fascinating. I'm just thinking, like I
Speaker 2: have a seven year old daughter. I my wife, of course,
Speaker 2: and I'm just thinking, how would that robot fit in
Speaker 2: our home? Obviously it will get things done, it will
Speaker 2: be productive, but how would my daughter interact with it?
Speaker 2: And would that be you know, helpful for her where
Speaker 2: she can have some sort of companionship, not replacing us
Speaker 2: as parents of course.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you know, she can ask it random questions
Speaker 2: and I can ask it random questions kind of like
Speaker 2: what I do with the Amazon Alexa or to Google
Speaker 2: Home and things like that, but get even more value.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think there's a lot of human interaction problems
Speaker 1: that people will need to think about once we're past
Speaker 1: the baseline of getting the robots to actually complete physical
Speaker 1: tasks the whole, Like h CI aspect and the product
Speaker 1: experience are things which no one's thinking about right now,
Speaker 1: and I think there's a lot of work to be
Speaker 1: done there, especially for domestic robots.
Speaker 2: And then I'm assuming you can choose a personality, right
Speaker 2: if it's a male, female and different things like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And a lot of it is like like
Speaker 1: companion chat and like interactive AI systems which talk like
Speaker 1: humans are a that they're a It's an interesting space, right,
Speaker 1: There's like a lot of things you can do. There's
Speaker 1: some good, some bad, and there's a lot of social
Speaker 1: risk of as well. Uh. There there are a lot
Speaker 1: of people who actually don't understand they're talking to a machine,
Speaker 1: like people who aren't tech savvy, people who aren't so
Speaker 1: tech savvy and aren't plugged in, And I think it's
Speaker 1: a it's going to be a bit of an issue
Speaker 1: once we have these machines to teach people that there
Speaker 1: isn't a human at the other end, like it literally
Speaker 1: is a computer talking to you. Uh, Like context hallucinations,
Speaker 1: long term memory. These are all things that like that
Speaker 1: they align well with like the traditional text AI space.
Speaker 2: I think you may have answered this, but I want
Speaker 2: to make sure I ask you this question. There's always
Speaker 2: the question of something becoming self aware AI and so forth.
Speaker 2: Is it blockchain that will once again police that if
Speaker 2: something becomes self aware and truly becomes autonomous. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think, oh, man, the whole consciousness in AI systems
Speaker 1: is an interesting question. The way AI works right now
Speaker 1: is it's a statistical model of everything that's seen in
Speaker 1: the past. So it's very difficult for these systems to
Speaker 1: become cautious in the traditional sense. They do exhibit a
Speaker 1: lot of emergent behavior. And I think you're right that
Speaker 1: blockchain or some variant of it should be the tool
Speaker 1: that controls what behavior is acceptable and what behavior is
Speaker 1: not because it fundamentally aligns with the community and it's
Speaker 1: its values, rather than with the risk profile of a
Speaker 1: trillion dollar technology company, which is obviously very limited in
Speaker 1: what it can do. And I think once you start, uh,
Speaker 1: once you start understanding the fact that these systems are
Speaker 1: going to be interacting with different cultures, some of which
Speaker 1: have vastly different beliefs from yours, it makes sense that
Speaker 1: the policing is done in a like more more local way,
Speaker 1: the decisions are done more locally and more specifically. I
Speaker 1: think it's it's the the community will be able to
Speaker 1: select what data goes into the training splits of these robots,
Speaker 1: of these models, and and that really determines, to a
Speaker 1: very large extent, the personality of the resulting model and
Speaker 1: what it can do.
Speaker 2: Mm Billy, have you seen the movie Chappy've any chance
Speaker 2: which which movie Chappy?
Speaker 1: I have not?
Speaker 2: So in that movie, it's it's it's a world where
Speaker 2: robots exist, and that one of the robot engineers he
Speaker 2: uploads his consciousness to the robot. That super sci fi.
Speaker 1: Stuff here, right, Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: However, I'm currently exploring, and some other creators are as well,
Speaker 2: creating an AI avatar of ourselves where it has learned
Speaker 2: my speaking patterns, my you know, my quirks, uh and
Speaker 2: and a lot of my knowledge. So I like, I
Speaker 2: upload a lot of my transcripts from my podcast and
Speaker 2: so forth. Right, So let's say I create that avatar,
Speaker 2: and eventually I upload that into a robot. And let's
Speaker 2: say I pass away one day. You know, I'm of
Speaker 2: old age, but my grandkids want to have a verse
Speaker 2: this is this is kind of weird, but that AI
Speaker 2: avatar is in the robot and they can have me
Speaker 2: around in that way.
Speaker 1: It has been explored in the in the like non
Speaker 1: embodied sense, this idea of a magic box that carries
Speaker 1: on your uh personality when you're when you're gone, when
Speaker 1: you're not available. Uh. There's probably a solid mark it
Speaker 1: for everyone, you know, everyone. People do two things with me. Certainly,
Speaker 1: we're born and we die, so everyone that lives dies, right,
Speaker 1: so your your market's like the entire world. The social
Speaker 1: impact of that technology is curious, and right now it's
Speaker 1: not widespread enough to go beyond science fiction. But I
Speaker 1: think there's gonna be a lot of like uh like
Speaker 1: teaching people that it's really just an avatar and not
Speaker 1: something it's not like the actual person, and it's not
Speaker 1: as capable of learning from new experiences as a human can.
Speaker 1: And I mean there are ways of there are ways
Speaker 1: around this you can go learn from you can go
Speaker 1: like literally make the model learn from its new experiences.
Speaker 1: But no one's shipped that product yet. It's kind of
Speaker 1: expensive to ship.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it's it's like weird, but it's also
Speaker 2: interesting at the same time, because if you love somebody
Speaker 2: and you kind of want something of them around, let's
Speaker 2: say they pass away at a very early age or
Speaker 2: whatever it may be, and you've seen bits and pieces
Speaker 2: of this in movies, you know, that could be very interesting.
Speaker 2: But also, like I said, socially, I don't know if
Speaker 2: we're ready for stuff like that.
Speaker 1: Hopefully very strange, very very strange.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, what's on your roadmap? But what can we
Speaker 2: expect for the remainder to year.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so we're going to launch more on our platform
Speaker 1: very soon. There's going to be robots that people will
Speaker 1: be able to remotely drive. We're planning on scaling up
Speaker 1: the standard platform and a few standard embodiments that we
Speaker 1: really will be able to collect a lot of data
Speaker 1: on and hopefully be able to show real progress on
Speaker 1: the frontier technology front through our partners. That being able
Speaker 1: to scale the data to rather than dozens of operators,
Speaker 1: hundreds or thousands of operators really gives you like new
Speaker 1: new magic and what these machines can do and help
Speaker 1: move the needle forwards and as we say, move robots
Speaker 1: when we're into the mainstream by giving them the same
Speaker 1: kind of flexible lily that the language models have.
Speaker 2: You know, you were mining bitcoin very early, so here
Speaker 2: in OG you've seen this asset class grow significantly multiple cycles.
Speaker 2: What are you expecting, as you know, crypto legislation comes
Speaker 2: into play, expecting a lot of innovation this industry to
Speaker 2: grow significantly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's going to be really good. The
Speaker 1: generally like crypto friendly, and I would say that the
Speaker 1: current administration is just more friendly to advance financial instruments
Speaker 1: than the previous administration, and that means you're going to
Speaker 1: see a lot more exposure in marketing and education about
Speaker 1: this new asset class. Stable Coins for sure are really
Speaker 1: useful because they do like every want to read. Stable
Speaker 1: coins do have utility, and there's going to be a
Speaker 1: lot of investment around building new stable goin driven platforms
Speaker 1: but beyond that, we're going to get a lot of
Speaker 1: clarity on what differentiates securities from tokens, and I think
Speaker 1: that's going to encourage a lot of building in that
Speaker 1: space as well. So sort of like one of my
Speaker 1: it's very much an opinion, but I think a lot
Speaker 1: of us would agree, right, It's like we think it's
Speaker 1: good for people to be able to invest in new
Speaker 1: technologies more directly than they do now. Like there's a
Speaker 1: lot of frustration that open ai and Nvidia and these
Speaker 1: open Ai especially right, they're a big private company. The
Speaker 1: people who work there are making billions of dollars off
Speaker 1: of their work, but you don't have any way to
Speaker 1: engage with this progress other than losing your job to
Speaker 1: the AI. So being able to let people participate earlier
Speaker 1: through through tokens, or through network incentives, or through decentralization,
Speaker 1: I think is going to be a really good thing
Speaker 1: for sort of equalizing things and getting people more engaged
Speaker 1: in frontier technologies. Like once you have skin in the game,
Speaker 1: everything changes. Like I can guarantee you that if you
Speaker 1: had open ai shares, you would not say a single
Speaker 1: thing bad about open ai. But there's like a lot
Speaker 1: of concern that like ohai is going to displace jobs,
Speaker 1: and just like being able to interact with the development
Speaker 1: and the growth of the industry as a whole is
Speaker 1: is really cool. I'm really healthy for everyone. And as
Speaker 1: I said at the beginning, with in this modern information
Speaker 1: age where information is a lot more accessible, I think
Speaker 1: the world is ready for people to be put like
Speaker 1: ordinary people to be able to participate in the frontier
Speaker 1: of technology development in whatever way they want, and like
Speaker 1: that that's what we do. That's a lot of what
Speaker 1: the AI AI plus crypto platforms do right, Like you
Speaker 1: can contribute, not necessarily through like writing ithon code or
Speaker 1: building models, but like through data, through contributing your experiences
Speaker 1: or your chat logs, And that's your way to get
Speaker 1: a little bit of skin in the game. And when
Speaker 1: everything takes off, you'll benefit and you'll feel a lot
Speaker 1: better about it, like you're part of the project. And
Speaker 1: I think that's really good. And I think ultimately the
Speaker 1: legislation that's shaping up is going to be really helpful
Speaker 1: in guiding companies, especially in the US, to offer more
Speaker 1: access to be able to participate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely great perspective and it's just fascinating man, I'm
Speaker 2: so excited to see how all these technologies roll out.
Speaker 2: And that have a seven year old daughter, so I'm
Speaker 2: trying to educate her about all these things and right right,
Speaker 2: just prep her so to speak, like this, the world
Speaker 2: is going to be very different, and obviously she'll find
Speaker 2: her a way. But if I can, you know, teach
Speaker 2: her a bit about robotics earlier, AI and all these
Speaker 2: things to give her Yeah, yeah, exactly, Yeah awesome, Uh, Billy,
Speaker 2: I have some wrap up questions here for you. First,
Speaker 2: if you could create your own metaverse, what would the
Speaker 2: theme be.
Speaker 1: My own metaverse? That's interesting.
Speaker 2: It'd be robot themes.
Speaker 1: Probably probably robot theme, probably sort of frontier tech themed. Metaverse?
Speaker 1: Is a metaverse? Is an interesting question right now, and
Speaker 1: I think there's a lot of potential for that space
Speaker 1: to come roaring back to life once people build more applications.
Speaker 1: The first attempt to build the metaverse was it didn't
Speaker 1: go very well. People were selling plots of land and
Speaker 1: video games that didn't exist yet. But I think the
Speaker 1: second time around, we're gonna see it. Honest would probably
Speaker 1: be like gaming the like recreating, recreating the incredible virtual
Speaker 1: worlds of the early MMO era, like there were real
Speaker 1: communities where that people really enjoyed based on in the
Speaker 1: world of Warcraft and RuneScape and all of these big
Speaker 1: decentralized MMOs, and by and large they've they've gone by
Speaker 1: the wayside as people have switched to like the sports
Speaker 1: type games. But I think there's potential for these things
Speaker 1: to make a comeback. Like people lived their lives and
Speaker 1: like were happier because of it in these virtual worlds.
Speaker 2: Oh for sure. Yeah. I mean the first iteration not great,
Speaker 2: but you know, version one point zero of anything is
Speaker 2: not great. But yeah, yeah, as again later version.
Speaker 1: I think there is potential, Like there's already precedent, like
Speaker 1: there were in the early MMOs, like the the in
Speaker 1: game money was monetized, just not officially for like legal reasons,
Speaker 1: but like you could go buying game credits using real money,
Speaker 1: and there was like a whole economy of in game
Speaker 1: items and communities, like people built cities and there were guilds,
Speaker 1: and like replicating all of that into the modern era
Speaker 1: I think would be really freaking cool.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm, yeah, that would be awesome. All right, I
Speaker 2: got some rapid fire questions here for you.
Speaker 1: Favorite food, favorite food, probably some sort of sushi.
Speaker 2: Favorite musician or band.
Speaker 1: Uh none at the moment. It used to be Taylor
Speaker 1: Swift a few Taylor Swifts ago.
Speaker 2: My daughter would be happy to hear that. Favorite movie,
Speaker 2: Avengers Endgame.
Speaker 1: Favorite book. That's a good question. I don't really have
Speaker 1: one at the moment. Found Asimov's Foundation, if You're familiar,
Speaker 1: is a good one. It has a lot of interesting concepts.
Speaker 1: It's a It's a sci fi piece from the late sixties.
Speaker 1: I think I'll.
Speaker 2: Check that one out. I haven't. I haven't heard about it.
Speaker 1: I think there was an Apple TV series based on Foundation,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't wasn't particularly true to the true to
Speaker 1: the story.
Speaker 2: Ah, when you're not working at prismat X, what are
Speaker 2: you doing for fun?
Speaker 1: I'm still building robots, I think.
Speaker 2: Bailly, absolute pleasure chatting with you, and I love to
Speaker 2: have you back on because I'm so fascinated by all
Speaker 2: this technology and the direction the world is heading in.
Speaker 2: But thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, absolutely absolutely. I love discussing frontier technology and
Speaker 1: how it will change the world, and I'm happy it'd
Speaker 1: always beyond