(electronic music)
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>> All right.
Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Cube.
Coming up, Bryan Talebi will be here with Ahura A.I?
>> Ahura A.I.
>> Ahura A.I. Bryan Talebi here with Ahura A.I.
We are at The Cube post party networking event,
special on the ground, extended coverage.
Bryan, we were at The Futurist, not The Futurist Conference,
The Future of Blockchain which was the Monaco Crypto Summit
over at the Grimaldi Center.
Now we're at the VIP gala, the prince is here,
a lot of action's happening.
You had a chance to look all the presentations
we have all the heavy hitters here,
kind of a movement going on, right?
>> Absolutely. Well, first of all,
I think it's absolutely amazing
that Prince Albert II put this all together.
He obviously understands the future
and understands technology.
It's absolutely brilliance.
And Julio as well, I mean is incredible.
So I take off my hat to all the people
that put this event together
and the speakers were brilliant.
I mean, did you see all the speakers
the technologies that they've built have the
potential to radically transform billions of people's lives.
>> It's interesting, you know,
I've been covering crypto for a very long time
and watched it emerge and then start exploding.
And there's always been,
and I saw this with the web too early on,
legit versus not legit.
And all early markets have the hype cycles
go down and up, and you always kind of have that
but now you're starting to see
legitimate tie-in between physical digital assets
where, and the confluence of the business value,
societal value, government value, all across the spectrum.
Every vertical, every use case is got a decentralized vibe
going on right now because it's a forcing function.
And, and here in Monaco, the price and the king
they're leaning into it cause I think they see the future
because they could answer their legacy.
>> Yeah. Absolutely.
And look, you're absolutely right about this
because this downturn that we're facing, especially
this new crypto winter, I think is the best thing
that could possibly have happened to the crypto space
because what it's doing is pushing out
the let's call them the less than honest brokers
within the crypto community, the people that were just in it
for a buck, the pump and dumpers and so forth
it's really pushing those folks out.
And the companies that remain are the true technologists
that aren't looking at crypto as just a speculative asset,
but rather an underlying technology
that can transform the way that we engage
with the world in a decentralized way.
>> Bryan, you know, we didn't mention in the intro
but you also do investment.
>> I do.
>> You also have a lot of things going on.
You got a great history, great pedigree
of seeing the waves of innovation the best.
That's something, an investment question,
like are you in it for the money
or are you in it for the make it happen mission?
That becomes kind of like the probing question.
Someone comes to the table,
"Hey, I need some cash. We do funding."
What's your exit strategy?
"I want to make an exit in two years."
Okay. You're out.
(Bryan laughs)
(John) But it's almost that easy now, right?
>> Sure.
>> (John) To figure out who's in it for the money.
>> Sure.
>> (John) Who's in it for the mission.
Yeah, the mission's successful. You make a lot of money.
>> That's exactly right.
Look, one of my mentors once taught me is,
money like power is only amassed in great amount
if indirectly sought because money by itself
is not intrinsically a motivator.
And so, what we do at our AB+ Ventures,
my venture capital fund,
is we only invest, not only in companies
that are impact driven and have the capacity to
impact a billion people,
but we invest in founders
that are climbing their third or fourth mountain.
So these are people who've already made their money.
They either had a couple big exits
at over a hundred million dollars
or they became rock stars or they became astronauts.
They did things where they achieved
the highest levels of achievement.
And now are building technologies because they believe
that they're going to impact the world in a meaningful way.
>> They kind of know it's important, right?
They made some money, they've been successful.
They have scar tissue and experience to apply almost
I want to say for the legacy of it, but more for value.
>> Yeah.
>> For everybody.
>> Absolutely.
>> All right. So I got to ask about what your current venture,
I know you got some good action going on.
It's growing pretty good.
As they say in golf, it's middle of the fairway.
It's growing, got momentum.
It's a turbine market.
You probably has some offers on the table.
I mean, I could imagine all the AI you got going on.
Blockchain, very attracted.
It's a hard problem, but it's the first inning. Not even.
>> Yeah.
>> What going on with the company?
>> We're very early. Look, we've been building
our technologies, the deep tech platform
we've been building for four and a half years.
There's a whole bunch of offers on the table to buy us.
But look, the reality is
right now is a fantastic hiring opportunity.
There's a lot of amazing talent out there
that now wants to come to us, which is great.
Number one, number two, if you look back
to the 2000 Dot-com bubble, what you saw
is all of the companies
that didn't really solve real problems
went away and it left a more oxygen in the room
for the companies that were really solving problems
that needed to be solved.
And those are now all trillion dollar companies. So,
>> Well, Brian, you and I both got a little gray hair.
So let's talk about the Dot-com bubble.
The other thing, I'll add to that,
by the way great commentary, is that everything
that was like bullshit actually happened.
People bought pet food online,
>> Right.
>> Groceries delivered to their house.
So to your point, the things actually happen.
See the visions and the aspirations were correct,
timing and capital markets spree.
>> Sure.
>> Is there similarities going on in crypto?
Is it the crypto winter, weeding out those pretenders?
Is that what you're saying?
>> Well, there's definitely a lot of similarities there
but if you look at the example that you use, right,
pets.com versus Amazon,
people are still buying pet food online.
I buy all my pet supplies for my two puppies online.
However, if you look at the reason that Amazon works
is because of their supply chain
and the innovations that they created
on being able to deliver anything to you
within a day or two days
in an extremely cost effective manner.
It wasn't just because they had a website
and they did some hand wavy stuff
to say isn't this a good idea.
You actually have to have the underlying
operational capability and innovation
from a technology standpoint to make it happen.
And so, when we talk about crypto
over the past number of years, and I've been
in the crypto space for a long time, as you have
there's been a lot of hand wavy stuff.
There's been a lot of people like,
"wouldn't this be a good idea?"
but then you have the true operators
that are able to find the underlying competitive advantages
that actually make it work.
And that's what I'm interested in.
>> I'd love to get your thoughts on that.
First of all, great point
if you look at like, I was just commentating earlier
I was asked the question what I think,
and I said, well, I do a lot of
lot of reporting and analysis on cloud computing.
I watch what Amazon Web Service has done
from many, many years ago.
And all the followers now.
Scale data, higher level services, they're all happening
and it's creating a lot of value.
Okay? That's going to come to crypto.
And so, okay, the dots aren't connected there yet,
but you've got this, but one of the things
that has proven to be a success criteria, ecosystems.
When you have enabling technology
like DigitalBits, for instance,
is kind the main powering of this ecosystem here,
the value that's being created on top of it
has to be a step function or multiple
of the cost or operational cost to deploy the platform.
Okay, so that's kind of in concert with everyone else.
You product decentralized, what's your thoughts on that?
Because now you have a lot of potential ecosystems
that could connect together
cause there's no one centralized ecosystem.
>> (Bryan) Absolutely.
>> But what is, what, how do you get that?
How do you square that circle? So to speak.
What's your take on that?
How does ecosystems play into defi, decentralization,
de-apps blockchain?
>> So what you really talking about
is interoperable, right?
So again, if we use an analogy, if we look back
to the late nineties, when Web 1.0 was really flourishing
and then in the 2000s where everybody
created their own websites,
people went to the world wide web,
but every company had their own website.
They had their own social media platform.
They had their entire Salesforce platform or what have you.
So everyone had their entire separate organization.
And so, I suspect that the future of crypto is going to
be very similar, where there's going to be
a bunch of different metaverses,
a bunch of different ecosystems,
but someone's going to come along,
and I think there's a number of people on the back end
that are actually working on this,
Some of them are really brilliant, that are going
to create an interoperable mechanism for people
that jump from metaverse to metaverse from chain to chain
in a completely easy experience
from a user experience standpoint
where you don't have to have a PhD in crypto,
so to speak, that doesn't exist,
but you don't have to have that level.
>> Well, if you're working on crypto
for the past five years you've got a PhD.
>> Basically.
>> The thesis is, you're still alive producing.
(Brian laughs)
Well, that's a good point.
So I'm looking for like, this defacto enabler, right?
Because TCP/IP was an example in the old days, you know,
the levels of the stack that never,
TCP/IP is part of the OSI model.
It's just interconnect.
That layer, nothing got above it, was open.
It was just hard and top that TCP/IP
the rest was all standard.
Ethernet, token ring add that data layer and then cards.
That worked, the industry could galvanize around that.
I'm waiting for the crypto moment now, where,
what is going to be that cloud (indistinct), Kubernetes
and service matches and whatnot.
What, is there anything on the horizon that you
see that has that kind of coalescent ecosystem,
let's get, if we all get behind this,
we all win. Rather than chasing crumbs.
>> Sure.
>> You know, the bigger pie, rising tide, all that stuff.
>> Well, so I think there's a really interesting analogy
from a couple of hundred years ago on this.
So most people don't realize
that when the United States first had their railroad system
which was the innovative infrastructure play at the time
each state or each region had their own systems
they had different size railroad.
So what would happen if you were trying to ship
a bunch of grain from one part of the country to the other
you would take it by a train.
You get to a train station,
you'd have to take everything off,
put it on a different train,
on a different set of train tracks.
You would go a couple states over.
You'd have to do that again, go a couple states over.
You have to do that again.
Eventually what happened is the federal government
came in and said, hey, we need to create
a system of policies around one set of rules
for all trains and all logistics across the country.
And so, I do think there's a role for governments
to come together, along with the operators
and the companies to work collaboratively together to say,
hey, what are the regulations?
What are the rules of the road?
How do we make sure we get
all the scam artists out of the system?
How do we create a system that actually works for everybody?
Now, there's always dangers there, right?
You have regulatory capture.
Sometimes the government, oftentimes they're slow,
they don't understand the technology.
So they come down with a heavy hand.
And so if it's done properly, and it's not just
the United States alone, by the way,
it's all the countries in the world.
Now at this point, it's a global effort.
>> There's money involved, too.
>> Exactly. But if we are able to bring together
people that are much smarter than me
from the public and private sectors
as well as the nonprofit sectors,
together to come up with one set of rules
I think that will enable crypto to massively expand
across the entire globe.
>> What are you passionate about right now?
I know you got the investment fund for, you know,
helping society and the planet,
you get your project with your startup company,
AI is in a hot area.
What's going on? What's your top goals for the year?
>> So there's two things.
Number one, my company, Ahura A.I. is my baby.
It's where I spend 70, 80 hours a week.
We invent a technology that enables people
to learn three to five times faster
than traditional education.
>> (John) Is that so?
>> Because I believe that education is the first step.
It's the first variable, that impacts
all of the sustainable development goals,
impacts the world in a very real way.
>> And you're not wearing your UA pin.
>> I'm not wearing my pin, I always point to it.
>> I wanted to grab it, I saw it earlier.
>> But then the second thing I'm super focused on
is existential risk.
Look, so I throw a lot of events
where I bring together four categories of people,
CEOs of impact driven companies,
investors, whether they're VCs or billionaires
or family offices, global experts,
and celebrities that want to use their influence
for good in the world.
And one of the speakers that I had
at one of my events is a guy at Stanford
who runs their lab on existential risk
and what he told the group, and what he told me,
is according to Stanford and all the researchers,
there's a one in six chance
that we're all going to go extinct by 2050.
One in six, that's a dice roll.
And so to me, the most important thing I can do
is bring people together that have capacity, have resources,
have capabilities, to address
these drivers of existential risk because selfishly,
I don't want to live in a dystopian Hellscape.
>> Exactly, yeah.
Bryan, thanks for coming on.
We're going to get back into dinner.
Great to see you.
>> Thank you very much.
>> The Cube after dark, extended hours.
Look at us, we're going the whole day.
VIP gala, Prince Albert, the team, DigitalBits,
The Cube, all here at the Yacht Club in Monaco.
I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.