Why crypto was built for AI, with Erik Voorhees

Transcript

Bitcoin doesn't go from a little hobbyist project on the internet to being the dominant form of money on Earth without absorbing all parties into it. So, uh, yes, of course, Black Rockck was going to get involved at some point. Well, what's up everybody? It's LG Ducid here and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that believes the next bull run won't be humanled, it'll be machine driven. Today is November 11th, 2025. We are recording this on November 10th and our guest is Eric Bor. is one of the OGs of crypto. A man who's been here since Bitcoin fit on a forum post. He's gone from building Shape Shift to launching Venice AI, a startup where crypto and AI merge into something wild, a market for machine intelligence powered by tokens. He's not just building tech. He's building the economic systems for AIs themselves. And

today, we're going to find out what is going on on this next frontier. Before we start, we're actually launching an AI podcast this week. So, this is a very appropriately timed episode. You can check that out. It's going to be twice weekly pod with two excellent hosts. Uh, and you can sign up for it below. Today's episode is brought to you by Gemini Credit Card. Turn your everyday spending into Bitcoin. Stack sats without even thinking about it. Block trust IRA. Let AI outsmart the market. Grow your crypto while you sleep. Sounds nice. Figure markets. Earn solid returns on your cash because sitting idle is not a strategy. Eric, what's going on, my man? >> Hey, good to see you.

>> Yeah, good to see you. Uh, Eric, listen, I need I need to dive into it, man, because we cover the daily price action way too much here on our show. It's all we've been thinking about, especially since October 10th. Um, so before we chat Venice and all that, you are um I I I consider you definitely a Bitcoin OG. I feel like you've been around since the very very early days. Uh we want to know from you, man, from the people you still know, maybe a little inside uh knowledge, a little inside baseball, what is going on with the price of Bitcoin these days? Are the OG's really selling? Tell us the story there. >> Yeah, I think we have to we have to understand these things are like nuanced, right? There's always there's always people selling coins. Um, and so are OG's selling or not is like a a very

good headline grabber binary question. But I think most people that have had Bitcoin for a long time uh they they don't really see $100,000 as a super interesting price and they're not trying to sell Bitcoin uh for like the goal was not to just make a bunch of dollars. The goal is that like the bitcoins are the valuable thing. So, anyone I think who's held for a decade or longer knows that. And uh yeah, if people are selling some of their coins periodically, that's that's part for the course. That's pretty normal, I think. Um also, you got to be a little careful with this like with the onchain with the onchain metrics because they can be deceiving.

People often associate different addresses with things that aren't real or aren't like an actual narrative. So, um, the people that that I know that have been in Bitcoin for a very long time, they are much the same today as they were a year ago or 5 years ago, they just they see this as the world's best money. >> I like that. That's that's very encouraging. How do those people and including yourself, how do you feel about um so many institutions coming for the tokens this time? >> Well, certainly people are split on this. um like Bitcoin grew out of a very anarctic origin and uh its entire purpose regardless of what people say about it, its entire purpose is to get

around the controls of state. So it is uh interesting when you know statebacked institutions or institutions that are very much intertwined with the um with the traditional financial industry get involved in it. Uh, I'm of the opinion that like that was always inevitable and is indeed necessary. Bitcoin doesn't go from a little hobbyist project on the internet to being the dominant form of money on Earth without absorbing all parties into it. So, uh, yes, of course, Black Rockck was going to get involved at some point. And um it's good that they are, you know, like I'm waiting for them to uh I'm waiting for them to realize that this is actually

like the future of money. But for now, I think it's just that there are people who after 15 years have realized that like this asset is uh the best performing financial asset since it was created and maybe their portfolio should have a little bit of it. um that seems like a very reasonable proposition to these people and they don't really understand that what's behind Bitcoin is a very um a very revolutionary technology that will change how money itself works. They don't they don't know or care about that. They just see it as a way to change a little portion of their portfolio and that's fine.

>> You know, I miss I miss having people like you on the shows that I do because you're you're so foundational. you know, you really believe in the core principles and I feel like we cover price action so much that, you know, when we zoom out and talk to people like you, it's it's a breath of fresh air because remember, you know, there's one of the reasons I got into crypto was uh for those those those types of mission statements, if you will. Is there anything, Eric, before we we kind of move on from from Bitcoin or anything, is there anything in the last two years, uh, memecoins and obviously AI is something that's catch your eye, but anything else like whether it's it's it's meme coins as maybe a retail play, ETFs, the DATs, even the most recent Zcash pump, right? And now that privacy

is becoming a whole thing, and maybe that ties into Venice a little bit. Is there anything that you think outside of the institutions buying or including the institutions buying that's been like a really major moment for the industry? really major moment. Certainly, the attention that uh that crypto got in the run-up to Trump's recent election and then the actions that may or may not have been taken by people within that administration since then has been a moment. It's been a it's been a very double-edged sword in my opinion for all of us who lived through well and have and are living through many years of um I would say government and regulatory oppression of this technology. It was nice to have the refresh after Biden's

administration of an administration that was at least not openly hostile. That was great. Uh and we saw the the runup to the high prices with Bitcoin uh in the wake of that. But no one should have been surprised that like a bunch of politicians are going to play games and that there's no um there's no I I guess foundational ethos of them believing in the in the tech like they do it to get um bases of voters that are excited about them and many Bitcoiners fell for it and so uh you know that's how that game is played but um it's been I would say unpleasant but unexpected to watch how

the Trump administration has interacted with digital assets. There's so much room for them to actually do something noble and for them to actually uh improve the way that finance works in the world. They won't do it and I wouldn't expect them to, but still uh kind of sad to see what how how they've behaved. >> I understand. Yeah, that makes sense. Is there um is there anything coming up that you think will be a major catalyst for crypto? Maybe the market structure bill, government's reopening hopefully at the end of the week. Tell us about that.

>> Yeah, government reopening. Um, I wish it would just stay closed. Like, frankly, I don't understand what it's doing that's useful. >> Um, everyone's like, "Oh, well, we need air traffic controllers." And I think >> maybe the air traffic controllers don't need to be part of the federal government. I don't understand why that's a important job for the Washington DC to handle. Like >> airports could just hire people. I wish that the government would stay shut down longer so people could just come to understand like how little it does uh given how much money it spends and consumes and and steals from everyone. Certainly when it reopens uh lots more money will flood back into the economy, but that's all like very short-term noise. So yes, I would expect crypto or any u any assets that are sensitive to

liquidity increasing to uh appreciate in the wake of that. But those are like the short-term stuff. And >> being in Bitcoin since 2011, like the the whole point is the long-term stuff, the cool interesting macro trends that happen over years or decades. Uh, and of course, the biggest impetus to the to the growth and adoption of Bitcoin ever, I think, will be just the continued debasement of fiat currency. And that's not really an event. It's a continual process. How do you feel about this recent trend where where gold's been going off so much and and Bitcoin kind of seems to lag behind?

>> I wouldn't say Bitcoin is lagging behind. I mean, go gold is up um a lot relative to what it normally does, but people should crypto people and otherwise should recognize gold is the longest standing form of good money that the world has ever had. And um it's always better to own gold than to own fiat currency. It's surprising that it has taken so long for gold to appreciate against the dollar. Um, the last couple years it finally is and has. Uh, I think a wise way of seeing the world is to realize that gold is actually the stable unit of account and everything else is is volatile against it. That's hard to do, but it's just when when gold doubles

in price, the better interpretation is that that's a the market catching up to the dollar having lost half of its value. Um, that's actually the right way to to think of it. >> Are you a gold holder? Do you do you hold anything like that? >> Of course. Yeah. Any anyone that owns crypto and doesn't have some gold, um, I would say doesn't really understand why they own crypto in the first place. Uh, >> so >> that's valuable advice. That's good advice, I think, for a lot of people listening. >> Yeah, it's a question of like how how much what your portfolio is comprised of with with gold, you know, like it's a different asset than than Bitcoin or crypto and uh unlike fiat, it's actually financially sound asset.

>> Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of people have been really interested in that in that trade and I think it's it's an inevitable comparison, but um yeah, thanks thanks for sharing that. I want to jump forward. Um let's look ahead. you are building fantastic project uh in the AI space. Before we dive into that, um you've been building stuff in this space for like over a decade. You've like fought regulators, you've built exchanges, you've seen everything from ICOs to ETFs, back to ICOs. Now, why AI? Why would you jump into it now? Although you've probably I think you've been building this project for a couple years and you launched it just over a year or just under a year ago. Um but why launch an AI? What made you believe that it wasn't just another hype cycle uh and that this is actually the next frontier

that's worth betting on? >> Well, it definitely is a hype cycle, but uh so was the internet and um the internet went through its hype cycle and did change the world and we're all living in a post internet era. So just because something's in a hype cycle doesn't mean it's not um valuable or real. Uh Bitcoin, you know, has gone through many hype cycles itself. Um, so yeah, why did I get into it? Uh, I asked myself the same question because I live and breathe crypto to such a degree and it's it is my heart and soul and passion and it is what I know a lot about. Um, when I started Venice, I knew nothing about AI. And, uh, I got into it because I saw that it was a powerful new

technology that was being led by people without any philosophical inclinations toward what I consider to be like virtuous principles. So, these are these are common place within within the Bitcoin world. like the importance of decentralization of power and why that's important, the the importance of privacy, the importance of self- sovereignty. These are all imbued into the ethos and DNA of crypto in a very important way. Even though like a lot of people get into it just to make money, below that layer, there is a lot of um principle woven into its DNA. And in the AI world, I saw a lot of uh very very

smart, earnest people building these systems, but they come from a very different intellectual and ideological background. Um very few if any of them have an aversion basically to like state surveillance of these systems. uh very few if any of them have an aversion to even the companies themselves just categorically spying on all the users constantly as a matter of course. And so I was like well someone should at least you know try to build an alternative to these things and um so Venice was conjured up essentially as a alternative to chatbt uh in which it does not spy on you and

which doesn't censor your conversations. So, a private and uncensored version of of chat GBT. And I felt like um however big that might get, it's at least very important that it exists. So, um yeah, I I understand a decent amount about AI at this point. I've been learning it and it's been very fun to step out into a new field, but that's the that's the genesis of it. >> So, you're telling me So, you're telling me that when we use chat GPT, they're recording all our data, correct? Yes. And that you would ask that question is interesting because obviously they're doing that.

>> Obviously they are and >> right >> people don't even think about it and >> it's like um all so all the conversations you have with chat GBT are stored on their servers forever. >> Mhm. >> Uh which means that anyone that gets access to them will have them forever. And that means any rogue employee. That means any employee just acting on behalf of the company. That means any um marketing agency that this data is sold to. That means any hacker that ever leaks it not just today or but or in a year or in five years or 10 years. Uh it means any adversarial AI system that breaks into these databases and exploits information against you or other humans for whatever nefarious purpose it has.

um to trust these kind of intimate important conversations to a perpetual database is really dangerous and uh people should think a little more about it. So the only way to really keep people safe in this way is to not hold the data at all. So Venice just doesn't store it anywhere. I mean obviously you know people's conversations our chat our conversations with chat GPT are a little bit more elaborate but isn't that what we've been doing with Google for like 30 years is just basically feeding it this you know constant profile of ourselves >> yeah and that's a problem >> it's a problem and um AI is is is not just like the next step there but it's actually I think a qualitatively

uh different and more dangerous thing because >> the interactions that people have with AI now and will increasingly have are of a level of of intimacy that is more much more profound than their Google searches necessarily. you know, people are talking with AI systems about their own psychology, about their hopes and their dreams and their fears, about, you know, like their medical records and um their relationships. And when you're, you know, when you send an email through Gmail, of course, Google has all that, but even in that case, you know that at least one other person is going to read this message. So, it's already not quite the same degree of privacy. But in AI, people have hour-long conversations

about their their life with this machine, and they don't think that another human is involved in that conversation. Uh when in fact, thousands of other humans are involved in that conversation now and in the future. And that should terrify people. Um not because OpenAI has bad intentions, but because those that information about you can be exploited in in ways that you can imagine today and ways that you cannot imagine tomorrow. Did you know you can earn Bitcoin without ever buying it? That's where the Gemini credit card comes in. Here's how it works. Earn up to 4% back in Bitcoin on gas, transit, and ride share. 3% on dining, 2% on groceries, and 1% on everything else.

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Block Trust IRA's trading platform spots market patterns with precision no human can match. Since 2020, their Animus AI platform has outperformed Bitcoin by 250%. Visit milkroad.com/blockrustirra today to get up to 2500 in bonus crypto and transform your investment strategy. >> Well, that's scary. That's scary what you just said. I'll make it, you know, I'll lighten the mood by saying that uh if if thousands of people want to see uh all the toddler recipes I've been looking up in chat GPT, they're welcome to it. There's a lot of good there's a lot of good knowledge there what what are how to what things you can feed your toddler when they only like carbs. Um but no, that's a that's a very serious

um take, Eric. And I I I want to ask you and I want to dive more into Venice and kind of like how you've approached building a project at this point in time. Um, but one thing that I've seen on the timeline lately, and I think a lot of people don't don't really understand why something like this would pump, um, is Zcash and even you've got rail gun on Ethereum. Basically, this whole like privacy meta that started maybe, you know, 2 months ago, um, has been really taking off. Uh, Zcash is up, you know, eight or 10x since this started two months ago. You got really massive accounts, uh, like Mert and you've got Naval promoting it on Twitter. Is this is is this privacy pump related to this kind of AI forecasting that you're give giving us? This kind of

dark future where AI has access to all our data and they're reading everything and as a result um in crypto we're trying to safeguard against that by promoting far more uh uh uh privacy focused protocols. Um or is that or is that just the market finding a new thing to talk about? >> I don't think that the Zcash pump is an AI related thing. Okay. Um, I'm glad to see it. I mean, in a world of so much crappy garbage that pumps, uh, it's really nice to see like actual quality earnest projects getting due attention. Um, Zcash is like Bitcoin, a project that um, people should care about and whether they own it or not is a separate question, but like

>> to bring privacy to digital transactions is uh, very noble and was one of the great failings of Bitcoin itself was that it is so not private. Um, now, ironically, I think if Bitcoin had actually had this kind of privacy built into it, uh, it may have been so vilified by governments from its early days that it would have had a harder time catching on. So, I don't I don't know this, but my suspicion is that it's actually good that Bitcoin wasn't totally private, but it's also very important that there are private alternatives uh, in its uh, in its orbit. So, yeah, thank goodness that something like Zcash is actually getting some attention. I'm very glad to see it.

Um, and uh, yeah, I hope people I hope people learn more about like the privacy below the the price jump. Like if people see this as like another coin that's pumping in price, you've really done yourself a disservice. >> Um, understand what this thing is and how to use it well in your life. That's what matters. >> Absolutely. and especially in a post kind of tornado cache world. I feel like like privacy is is something that we kind of forgot about after that happened, you know, and people have been building alternatives. There's veil on base as well that's been built. But um that's a that's a really good take. I also like what you're saying about how Bitcoin uh would have maybe would have struggled if it was private that the idea of it being open uh in the way that

it is was was beneficial early on so people could you know that was that was kind of the value cell versus if it was kind of like a darker network then it be it'd be harder to see. Uh let's switch back to AI real quick since uh you kind of cleared that up for us. Do you think then and we'll talk about Bennis next will be my next question. But first, do you think the future of AI has to be um like open and permissionless then? Is that what you're telling us as you're kind of vilifying something like chat GPT? >> Yeah. So, first I want to be clear that I'm not vilifying chat GBT. I use it. Um Okay. But it's important for people to understand what is dangerous about it and it's important that alternatives exist.

>> So in the same way that like with crypto and money um I'm not of the opinion that that banks are uh fundamentally or necessarily evil um just because of the way they operate being being closed for example. Um, I don't think that all money needs to always be open all the time and always permissionless. What's important is that permissionless open money exists and that it is uh permitted in society, understood by people. Um, that's what matters is that it's there. So what I didn't want to happen was a future where all of the interactions with AI in the

world were happening through one or a few large AI companies that were closed um because they would become clients of the state as always happens. Uh that to me seemed a very dark and dystopian future. And so um I don't want to see companies like OpenAI go away. I just want to see there to be a thriving ecosystem of alternatives because ultimately that keeps them in check and it means that the ability for that dystopian future uh is uh largely reduced.

>> How do you go about building something that's that can compete with like an open AI or a Google or Anthropic or something like that. >> Super hard. >> Super hard. these are trillion dollar companies, you know, like it's not I'm not I'm not it's it's it's I just say it's it's a tall mountain to climb and I commend you for it, but tell us about that. >> So, the the reason it's even plausible is that uh open-source AI models are really good. When SHA GBT came out, the open- source LLMs, the open source language models were uh so inferior that they didn't even merit really discussing. Um but even as Chat GBT's models got better and better, the open

source models got better faster proportionally. Um to the point where a leading open source model today is um easily as good as a chat GPT model 6 to 12 months ago. Um and that's that's pretty good, right? So that that because uh any company like Venice can basically utilize these open source models and offer them. And the um the thing that the the large companies spend you know billions of dollars on is building their and training their proprietary models.

If there are open- source alternatives that are uh at least in the same ballpark of intelligence and capability but available freely to anyone um that actually is a very asymmetric u benefit for those for those other companies. So when I realized that was happening um that's when I realized that Venice was actually plausible. Um not that it would be better than chatbt in all ways all the time but that on its core function of LLM interaction it could be in the same ballpark of capability uh but private and uncensored and I felt like that in and of itself was um sufficient to build a company around. Well, I think obviously Venice is just to clear this

up for people and maybe this is a good good thing for you to tackle next. Ob obviously Venice is is far more than a uh chatbot like Chat GPT, let's say, but I'd love to hear that from you and maybe you can kind of keep keep it simple for us because I feel like founders tend to uh really give us a long in-depth uh explanation about their products. But I'd love for you to you know tell us in 60 seconds or less um what Venice is, how it works and and kind of why you built it that way. >> Yeah. So um the simple answer is that it is a chatbot that you can do text, image and very recently video. Um you can prompt it and it'll respond with its answers. Uh you can select from several different open source models. They have different you know like kind of flavors

and styles to them both text and image and video. And um it's provided through a normal web app interface and a mobile app uh and an API. So people can try it for free. That's always like the best way to learn something. Um if you go to Venice AI Venice.ai/hat, you can literally use it in one second without even signing up. So people can just give it a try. >> And hold on. But hold on. Okay. And then you can tell us the part two as well, Eric, because I know that you guys launched the second token that there's a whole part where you can sell your compute that you're accumulating. Give us a little bit more about that.

>> Yeah, so Venice launched in May of 2024 >> uh sorry 2023 and basically it started um without any kind of crypto token related to it. I wanted to really just like build the business in the app first. Uh demonstrate the successful growth of like the app and the utility of the app itself. And I was trying to figure out like, okay, what's a cool way to integrate a token into this because I'm a crypto guy and of course it's going to have a token. Um so at this point, Venice has two tokens related to it. Uh the first one and the the major one of the two is is called VVV. Uh this was launched at the beginning of this year and the second one is called DM.

And um these have two very different roles and different functions. Uh all DM is produced out of VBV. So they only come from that source. And uh a DM is unique in that if you hold it uh you can get free compute basically free compute from Venice up to a dollar's worth per day. So if you hold this token, it's basically like a license key to get a dollar worth of compute of of inference uh every day indefinitely. >> And what would what would be the benefit for for like an average user like me who's looking for a chat GBT alternative? Would I want to hold DM?

>> Um so today DM is uh useful on the API primarily. So, if you're a third-party um app developer and you want to utilize Venice's AI services, you can hold DM to basically get free inference for your app. Um when we launched video a few weeks ago, it was the first time people could utilize DM within the app itself, like a an end user, not an API developer. Um so, videos are actually reasonably expensive. Um you know, just across the industry to generate AI videos. Uh if you have a DM, you get up to a dollar worth of video every day uh on an ongoing basis. So DMs are like um they're only like $120 right now. So the pitch right now is like uh you buy a

thing for $120, you get $1 of benefit every day that you're using it for as long as you want. And then you can sell it, of course, when you're done with it. >> So like if you used it for half a year, that's $180 value. and then you sell it back. Even if the price was the same, you've now gotten $180 for free. >> Basically free. >> Yeah. So, so that's like a pretty simple pitch and proposition to people. And um >> we built it largely so that like agents themselves could start utilizing uh AI inference from Venice. We realized that like a lot of our future customers might not be human. They will be robots. And um we wanted to do like a cryptonative

mechanism whereby these agents could utilize our inference without paying per for every request. >> What's what's something that people have done with Venice that has surprised you? Maybe using DM to to create a lot of video. Give us a little bit more about that and and and what people always get surprised by their community. So So what has yours done that's that's really uh amazed you or shocked you. >> Yeah, our community has been cool to see that they actually like teach us things about AI. So, like we're Venice, the Venice team is pretty small. We're 16 people right now. And um a lot of our users are, you know, hobbyist enthusiast AI folks that appreciate that we give them a little more granular control over the over the AI systems themselves and

that we don't like censor or block them. So, like it's just a more empowering environment to interact with AI. And so a lot of these people have just taught us things, you know, like taught us how to um configure models better than we had before or point us to new models uh that are recently open source that are really excellent for for certain things. So they've become like a source of our own um education, which has been very cool. >> Oh, I love that. That's great to hear, man. Um okay, thanks for sharing all that. I want to wrap this up with a question for you that I think, you know, for somebody who's working in AI, it's something I I'm I'm very keen to ask you, which is, you know, every time I read about AI, I'm seeing, you know, K-shaped economy. Uh, all remote jobs

like mine will be replaced by AI soon in 5 years time. Everyone's pumping, they're going to pump money into the economy to, uh, really make sure that they can win the AI war, whether it's for the the larger companies or even the smaller ones like yours, right, that are competing, they're building great products. Can you give me a good case scenario of AI being a, you know, of like AI being a big part of everyone's lives in five years, but that isn't super dystopian like what I read on the timeline. >> Yeah. I I think it's very reasonable to take any any part of the range from like this is all going to turn out badly to this is going to turn out nearly utopian. I

think reasonable people can actually have all of those views. Um, my own view is that the future will probably be complex and AI is not going to be good or bad. It's going to cause many many consequences. Some of which will be real bad, some of which will be amazing. Um, and everything in between. Uh, the internet is probably a really good analogy here. You know, like did the internet make the world better? I think reasonable people can disagree on that and I think it has in reality created both very good and very bad consequences in lots of ways. So it's just it's just complex and I think it really comes down to like the individual person. How the AI future will be for you is really up

to you. Like how you utilize it, how you work with it and how you uh how you constrain or sculpt your own behaviors so that with this new tool it is additive to your life instead of negative for like um someone who is addicted to social media scrolling all day long. It's not that social media like is bad. It's that you have failed as a human to manage your own behavior. >> And that's actually like um a point of individual responsibility that people are not used to. They're used to like just thinking of themselves always as victims of circumstance and victims of everything out there. But really uh you have quite a lot of power over your own

life. Um but you just have to build that musle muscle of discipline and uh I think with AI it'll be just just or more important because it's such a powerful tool. Why do people invest in real estate? Because it spits off cash flow. But I'm not here to manage rental properties. That's why I'm looking at Figure Markets. Their new democratized prime product backs your money with real cash flowing assets and returns up to 9% APY. It's the first real world asset borrow lend pool built for everyone, not just institutions. Ready to lend like a bank and get more than the 5% A is offering you? Download the Figure Markets app today and get 9% on your idol funds. Go to

milkroad.comfigurearkets. >> Would you leave it up to people to use more privacy focused AIs instead of chat GPT? >> Well, what's the alternative? Uh I wouldn't force them to use Venice. Um yeah, people have to make those choices for themselves for sure. >> Yeah. Is it up to people to to to learn about things to that extent though or is it you know I guess I'm asking more of like a consumer protection uh question especially given that uh policy is often incredibly way too far behind new technology like this. Um like I I don't know I don't really I guess I'm just commenting on what you said.

>> I yeah I mean I I don't think policy is too far behind anything. I think it itself is the problem usually. Um, I don't want the government protecting consumers from their own behaviors with themselves. I don't think that's its role. I don't want there to be legislation limiting how long someone can scroll through Instagram every day, even though that might benefit a lot of people's life if they had that restriction. That's just not the like society that I want to live in. M >> um and frankly I think a lot of rules and decisions by the state end up being worse for people than the problem they were trying to solve. A great example of this is like what happened with the food pyramid, right? And busy bodies generations ago, you know, wanted the

government to help sculpt people's dietary decisions and make people healthier. we got the food pyramid and um people ended up, you know, basing their entire diets on like how many carbs can you have and then all the carbs they're eating come from like these companies that are just adding sugar to everything and um we just get this whole like extremely unhealthy unhealthy society after the government stepped in to make people healthier. Uh so I don't want the state involved in any of this stuff regardless of its dangers. Um but it is incumbent on people on podcasters for example right on friends on family on people that actually influence the world through what they do to uh help demonstrate good uses of technology and good behaviors. I

think that's the way you make society better. >> So what so paint this picture for me a similar question I asked you already in 5 years what is my average daily AI diet? What does it look like? What's my recommended food pyramid of how much AI is helping me and doing for me? >> Great question. I don't know. I I think um it's become extremely difficult to predict very far in the future post AI or I guess this is like the march of technology that as technology has gotten more intense and powerful, the horizon on which you can reasonably predict has gotten shorter and shorter. And I feel like I can't predict the world very much more than like a year or two out at this point.

>> Mhm. >> So that's a little disconcerting, but that's what's happening. >> Could you before were you were you able 10 years ago? Could you predict what's happening a couple years from now? I think pre-AII like it seemed that like five or 10 years was a pretty reasonable you can make a lot of guesses over five or 10 years about how life would change and you know you you can be in the ballpark >> but AI is really going to change things rapidly. it like it it already is and as I said earlier I think in many good ways and in many bad ways and I just >> I don't want to try to predict very far into the future because I'm not confident in those those predictions.

Yeah. Um I think I think one very obvious phenomenon is going to be that um AI makes its users so powerful that there will be a um a separation between people who utilize this stuff and those who don't. and they don't either because they are ignorant of it and just haven't spent the time to try or because they understand what it is but they actively protest against it.

Um, and you're going to get a very you're going to get a severing of society between those who use these tools and those who don't. And I think that is going to be a tension that gets really really dangerous actually really uh controversial. Eric, my last question for you, but I've had about eight last questions now, but now we're talking chatting in AI. Is there who in particular, if you can name one person, and maybe this is someone good for us to follow that you think has been most bang on for AI predictions or building AI or anything, somebody that we should follow. We should read their books, we should follow them on X, we should read their newsletters or anybody that comes to mind that you look to as like here's where AI is going and what's actually coming. I don't want to name

any particular individuals, but I do think it's worth paying attention to the individuals who cut against the LLM hype. >> So, right now there's this narrative that like LLMs are just on this trajectory to AGI and it's just a matter of like how much more compute you need and when the next, you know, kind of model breakthrough will happen. People that talk about LLMs as inevitably achieving AGI, you should be skeptical of, I think. Um, and this is a point that I didn't quite appreciate when I was getting into it. Uh, because I've also felt that view of like the trajectory is clear. You just keep like making these smarter and smarter and AGI will happen. Uh, and I don't think that's the case. I think, um, qualitative differences need to occur

for AGI to to exist and we shouldn't assume it's inevitable just because the stuff is getting faster and faster. Um, so look look for the people that have a skepticism about inevitable AGI as just a matter of a little more investment or, you know, a few more GPUs being added to the stack. >> Okay. Okay. Final final question. When AGI happens, is it going to want to buy Bitcoin? >> Of course it will. I I actually uh joking aside, I think that crypto may end up becoming um just used by these agents to such a large degree and and us humans may not have realized that when we created cryptocurrencies, uh the humans weren't going to be the

ultimate end users, >> right? like um we've dealt with these UX problems since it started that it's just it's hard for people to understand many of the UX elements of crypto. It's hard for people to understand that like if you send money to the wrong address, you can never get it back, right? There's all these like very hard systematic rules within crypto, but those work really well for robots. And um we may discover that like cryptocurrencies ended up being used by an agentic economy of machines and adopted in that way and that humans kind of never made that transition naturally. Um that's a interesting thought.

>> So AGI will never get drained by clicking on the wrong link, signing the wrong transaction. Well, it it may make its own it may make its own mistakes, >> but >> it has no trouble reading a a um a public key, right? Like that's >> Yeah. Yeah. >> A computer has no problem with a public key. >> Yeah, that makes sense. Eric, you're a legend, man. Thanks for sharing all those thoughts. Very very I I feel I feel a little bit better about AI. I'm not going to lie. I feel I feel a bit rosier picture than than some of the stuff I've read recently, but obviously really interesting journey to follow and uh good to see that you're building in that space. clearly puts a lot of confidence in in AI and and how that comes back to crypto and the two of them

merging together, which I think is something that we're very bullish on in Milk Road. Obviously, we're launching a different show about it. Um, but it's it's something we've been we've been hoping to blend for a long time. So, uh, thank you for your thoughts and thanks for coming on the show. >> Thanks so much for having me on. Talk to you later. >> If y'all are making swaps or trades right now, highly recommend you check out Milkroad Swap. This is a DEX that we built in partnership with Cow Protocol. Why did we build it? not to make money, just honestly so we could have a place to do our swaps for the lowest fees that we could find. This is the fees on Ethereum, Arbitum, and Bass are only.15% fees. Uh this is a huge difference from uh other centralized exchanges that charge half a percent or even up to 1.2%

fees on their swaps. Also, you can swap on Salana all at swap.mmillgrow.com. Check it out today. You won't be upset and you can join me in my favorite place to make swaps on chain. Want insights on what's moving crypto markets and how we're trading each event? Subscribe to our channel and join the Milk Road Daily and Pro Newsletters and start investing like the top 1%. This show is for educational purposes only. Nothing we say is financial advice. Investing is risky. Never invest more than you can afford to lose.