Direct distributions need identity and payment rails

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 16:13

   month when that all happened. I wanted to get your take. This is something we talked about earlier today. I mean, Anthropic and SpaceX, they talked about, okay, we want to do all this stuff about giving directly and giving straight to people and maybe giving to people all around the world. One of the hard problems when you're actually trying to do some of these payments is some of the logistics behind ensuring who's human, who's real. How do you make sure people don't double count? I know this is a big, one of the big reasons that World even started in the first place. This is something that Sam Altman initially, when they were pitching the vision of World and saying, hey, if we really want to give directly and allow money to go straight into people's hands or do micropayments when my share of SpaceX, when something happens and there's a 2%

2. 16:54

   increase, everyone gets a cent, whatever that might be. You can't really do that with our current mechanisms how with what you guys are building how does that make that potentially possible for sure so we've like thought about this question for so long and like we um we were for a long time like the ubi guys and the thing is like we weren't actually ever behind the scenes the ubi guys right like i think what we've always thought about is that well we believe that ai agi specifically was going to happen which was a hot take back then six years ago seven years ago when the company started and it was going to happen much sooner than people expected and that what meant that the world was going to have to change and adapt in many new ways we were going to need tools to adapt uh tools that would make sure that humans could see at the center of the world right

3. 17:38

   so we were very creative and we started a company called tools for humanity with that mission right and specifically we thought there was things missing on uh on identity which we later realized was actually even more narrowly proof of human right like we needed to know like when on the internet what is a human and what is a unique one and then also in terms of the financial ecosystem right and that is where a lot of our work on the on crypto and our wallet uh world money came about and like that's what with like 40 million users so it's like really really big and uh and the way we thought about this is we don't know all of the answers to how like society adapts but what we're sure of is to be able to experiment whether it's governments or labs or non-profits experimenting with things like ubi or whatever else they come up with they need two things right they need a

4. 18:23

   way to be able uh to make sure people don't double dip yeah and they need a way uh a financial some sort of financial rails to actually distribute whatever they're sending whether it's basics equity like a government doing um um actual checks for their for their citizens whatever it is and so a lot of what you've seen us build throughout the years is like that identity and that uh the financial infrastructure that we think can enable experiments like that and what exactly will work I have no idea. Most recently, we've been really focused on the identity piece because that's actually the first thing that actually broke on the internet, right? We think that, yes, I say I continues to advance. We'll start facing some of the economic questions. I think those will come in the future years. But the internet is all currently breaking down, right? Like trust

5. 19:08

   is fully eroded. And so that's why you see us focusing so much on the world ID piece nowadays. What's interesting around proof of humanity, you guys are pretty early. You're saying this