 Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage at Bryant-Talaby here, with Ahana AI. Ahara AI. Ahara AI. Bryant-Talaby here with Ahara AI. We are at the CUBE post-party networking event, special on the ground, extended coverage. Brian, we were at the Futurist, not the Futurist Conference, the Futurist Blockchain, which was the Monaco Crypto Summit over at the promotion. Now we're at the VIP Gala. The Prince is here, a lot of actions happening. You had a chance to look at all the presentations, look at all the heavy hitters here. Kind of a movement going on right now. Absolutely. Well, first of all, I think it's absolutely amazing that Prince Albert II put this all together. He obviously understands the future, understands technology. It's absolutely brilliant. 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 watching it emerge, and then it started 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 we're starting to see legitimate tie-in between physical digital assets, where the confidence of the business value, societal value, government value, all across the spectrum. Every vertical, every use case has got a decentralized vibe going on right now because it's a forcing function. And here in Monteville, the price of the team are leaning into it because I think they see the future because they can 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. Yeah, Brian, we didn't mention the intro, but you also do investment. I do. I do a lot of things going on. You got a great history, great pedigree of seeing the ways of innovation in the past. That's the investment question. Are you looking for the money or are you looking to make it happen, mission? That becomes kind of like the probing question. Someone comes to the table, hey, I need some cash, would you fund me? What's your exit strategy? I want to make it exit in two years. Okay, you're out. It's almost that easy now, right? To figure out who's in it for the money, 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 if money like power is only a mass in great amounts if indirectly soft. Because money by itself is not intrinsically a motivator. And so what we do at AB Plus 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 $100 million, 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 what's important, right? They made some money, they've been successful. They have scar tissue and experience to apply, almost say for the legacy of it, but more for value, for everybody. Absolutely. All right, so I got to ask you about your current venture. I know you've got some good action going on, it's growing really good. As they say in golf, it's middle of the fairway, it's growing, it's got momentum. It's a turban market, it probably has some offers on the table. I mean, I could imagine all the AI you've got going on, the blockchain, it's very attractive, it's a hard problem, but it's the first inning, not even. Yeah, 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.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. Brian, you and I both got a little gray hair, so let's talk about that. 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, groceries delivered to their house. To your point, the things actually happened. So the visions and the aspirations were correct. Timing and capital markets, green. Sure. Is there similarities going on in crypto? Is it the crypto winter leading 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 used, right? Pets.com versus Amazon. People are still buying pet food online. I buy all my pet supplies from my two puppies online. However, if you look at the reason that Amazon works, it's 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 commenting earlier, I was asking the question, what I think. And I said, well, I do a lot of reporting and analysis on cloud computing. I watch what Amazon Web Services has done from many, many years ago and all the followers now. Scale, data, higher level services are all happening and it's bringing a lot of value. Okay, that's going to come to crypto. And so, okay, the thoughts aren't connected there yet, but we've got this, but one of the things that has proven to be a success criteria, ecosystems, when you have enabling technology like digital bits, for instance, there's kind of a 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 the concept that we're in. You've got to decentralize. What's your thoughts on that? Because now you have a lot of potential ecosystems that could connect together because there's no one centralized ecosystem. But 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, DApps, blockchain? So what you're really talking about is interoperability. So again, if you use an analogy, if we look back to the late 90s, 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 to 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 of- Well, if you're working on crypto for the past five years, you've got a PhD. Basically. I mean, this is, you're still alive producing. Well, that's a good point. So I'm looking for that fact to enable it, right? Because TCPIP was an example in the old days, you know, the levels of the stack that never, TCPIP is part of the OSI model. It's just a interconnect. That layer, nothing good. Above it was open. It was just hard and tough, but TCPIP, the rest was all standard. Ethernet, token ring, data layer, and then end 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 need is Kubernetes and service connection 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. 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 sized railroads. 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 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 of states over, you'd have to do that again, go a couple of states over, you'd 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, exactly. But if we're 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 helping society on the planet. You can do a project with your startup, start a company, AI, it's in the hot area. What's going on? What's your top goal for the year? So, there's two things. Number one, my company, or her AI, 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. 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. I'm not wearing my pin, I always point to that, yeah. 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 a 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. 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 gonna 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. All right, thanks for coming on. We're going to get back on the dinner. Great to see you. Thank you very much. theCUBE after dark, extended hours. Look at us, we're going the whole day. VIP Gallup, Prince Albert, the team, Digital Bits, theCUBE, all here at the yacht club in Monaco, and John Furrier. Thanks for watching.