Jan. 14, 2025

Creating a Society of AI Agents 💥 - Interview with Virtuals Protocol

Creating a Society of AI Agents 💥 - Interview with Virtuals Protocol
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We sat down with Jansen Teng, Co-Founder of Virtuals Protocol, to explore how his team is building a digital country powered by autonomous AI agents!

Jansen breaks down how Virtuals Protocol evolved from a simple idea to a groundbreaking platform by leveraging AI agents that can autonomously set goals, control crypto wallets, and influence both humans and other agents. From tokenized influencers to self-organizing virtual economies, these agents are creating a new era of decentralized digital societies.

Curious about the future of AI, Web3, and gaming? This episode is packed with insights you can’t miss!

🎙️ THE ChainStories Podcast - powered by Dropout Capital and the Blockchain Education Network!

👉 Follow us on Twitter/X: https://x.com/BlockchainEdu
👉 Follow Virtuals on Twitter/X: https://x.com/virtuals_io
👤 Connect with Jansen on LinkedIn:   / jansenteng 
🎧 Connect with our Host on LinkedIn:   / cryptoniooo  

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WEBVTT

00:00:00.780 --> 00:00:07.290
Welcome to the Chain Stories podcast, the podcast that celebrates disruptors who defy convention.

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Here we dive into the bold stories of trailblazers who turned audacious ideas into billion dollar ventures.

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Hey, everyone.

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Welcome to the ChainStories Podcast.

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Today, I'm very delighted to have a very special guest.

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He is the star in the room, Jansen from Virtuals.io.

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Jansen, you've been quite known, Virtuals has been taking off like a rocket ship.

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And for our listeners that have been very curious about these episodes, before you created Virtuals, I know you're involved in a gaming project and gaming DAO.

00:00:44.643 --> 00:00:49.932
Can you tell us a bit more about this experience and how did this help shape your vision for Virtuals?

00:00:50.432 --> 00:00:50.893
Yeah.

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No, actually the story started even way before that.

00:00:53.313 --> 00:00:56.472
I was in uni, that was actually my first exposure to Bitcoin and Ethereum.

00:00:56.573 --> 00:01:01.872
The first thing that we all tend to do as students and as hustlers, you will Google how to make money online.

00:01:02.372 --> 00:01:06.983
It's probably the most Googled search statement by every hustler out there, right?

00:01:07.022 --> 00:01:09.893
Probably like down the page, they'll be like, Oh, mine Bitcoin, right?

00:01:10.043 --> 00:01:15.453
So then you go down that rabbit hole you realize, oh, Bitcoin mining back that's in 2016 it's not that easy anymore.

00:01:15.453 --> 00:01:16.442
You need ASIC miners.

00:01:16.802 --> 00:01:20.843
And then you start digging around and then you realize, oh, there's this whole new thing, right?

00:01:20.862 --> 00:01:23.763
Ethereum programmable blockchain, right?

00:01:23.793 --> 00:01:28.378
And then be like, from a tech standpoint sounds cooler than just pure cryptocurrency.

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So that was my first exposure, I was actually mining, Ethereum off my Alienware laptop.

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You still could do that.

00:01:33.468 --> 00:01:37.787
And you know, usually electricity is free, you get a free$20 every like couple of days.

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So that was the initial journey.

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But after a while I was like, you know what?

00:01:42.052 --> 00:01:47.703
School mining, if I really believe in it, why don't I put some of this like spare cash that we have on the sidelines into Ethereum.

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And that's where it started.

00:01:49.415 --> 00:01:50.234
That's where the journey started.

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Wrote up the 2017 bull run, didn't sell a dime, held down through the entire cycle, graduated from uni, went to management consulting.

00:01:58.474 --> 00:02:01.545
And throughout I was testing a couple of ideas along the side.

00:02:01.545 --> 00:02:02.765
So okay, I forgot about crypto.

00:02:03.075 --> 00:02:06.555
Started a deep tech venture, in uni about creating an alternative source of water.

00:02:06.734 --> 00:02:08.134
And this was some very complicated stuff.

00:02:08.155 --> 00:02:11.314
Won a ton of grants in the UK, did a couple of mistakes.

00:02:11.585 --> 00:02:12.835
Company went to the ground.

00:02:12.835 --> 00:02:20.134
Then started while I was in management consulting, started a digital marketing firm, realized that it's hyper profitable, but it couldn't scale.

00:02:20.514 --> 00:02:23.205
So it didn't fit the appetite of you want a hockey stick kind of growth.

00:02:23.544 --> 00:02:33.335
Closed it down, started a Big data and AI company to change property search in the property recommendation.

00:02:33.955 --> 00:02:36.664
And this was way before this is 2018, before all the GPT hype.

00:02:36.724 --> 00:02:39.625
Was too naive in the whole fundraising game.

00:02:39.634 --> 00:02:43.745
So we thought if we test the idea with$5,000 to$10,000.

00:02:43.935 --> 00:02:45.455
We will know whether it will fly or not.

00:02:45.694 --> 00:02:47.194
So we saw a growth that was linear.

00:02:47.375 --> 00:02:48.745
We didn't see the hockey stick as well.

00:02:48.754 --> 00:02:49.625
Then we say, you know what?

00:02:49.905 --> 00:02:51.104
Maybe it's time to just move on.

00:02:51.205 --> 00:02:54.604
So I moved on, honestly, I think we should have just raised capital and really pushed on the idea forward.

00:02:55.134 --> 00:02:56.145
So did a couple of things.

00:02:56.205 --> 00:03:06.979
Nothing really took off mainly because: one, we were pretty much part time, one leg was in a comfy Wall Street job and the other leg was like trying to test out ideas, right?

00:03:06.979 --> 00:03:08.169
Like a hobbyist over the weekend.

00:03:08.490 --> 00:03:09.409
So I think that was one flaw.

00:03:09.469 --> 00:03:10.379
That you can dive into it.

00:03:10.960 --> 00:03:15.375
But then, in 2021, the bull market took off in a crypto site and it got our attention.

00:03:15.485 --> 00:03:17.106
Me and my partners, we were like, you know what?

00:03:17.167 --> 00:03:21.747
Let's focus a bit right on this whole trading degen in the trenches stuff and we did quite well.

00:03:22.086 --> 00:03:30.437
So we did very well on the gaming front we caught a lot of the gaming narratives even before they became famous because naturally we're gamers ourselves as well.

00:03:30.806 --> 00:03:40.447
So we understood a bit of the proposition of owning ownership of items in games because we were participating in shadow economies of EVE Online, World of Warcraft and stuff like that.

00:03:40.447 --> 00:03:41.787
So we knew that value proposition.

00:03:42.227 --> 00:03:48.396
So we caught a lot of that run up, said fuck you to our bosses, we left our jobs and then we could then go full time to building something.

00:03:48.847 --> 00:03:55.701
So then there was a question of we were thinking like, hey, do we spend our day skiing, or do we try to build something?

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And back then we were like 26.

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So we think okay, you know what?

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We should do something with our lives.

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So then we say, okay, what's our edge, right?

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We know crypto quite well.

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We've a couple of years in the space, know gaming very well.

00:04:07.391 --> 00:04:09.882
And we had a ton of gaming assets, probably like you guys, right?

00:04:09.912 --> 00:04:12.201
You guys were there in Decentraland and Sandbox.

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We were there on the Axie, the Illuvium, the Gala side of things.

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So we're thinking, okay, let's use this asset, let's start a gaming DAO.

00:04:19.942 --> 00:04:27.552
And the idea behind this gaming DAO it's, we wanted to be capital allocators and we wanted to bring a critical mass of gamers to game.

00:04:27.572 --> 00:04:29.052
So that was the initial idea.

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So we actually raised funds for this.

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The day that we raised, it marked the Pico top of the bull market.

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We woke up that morning for the day of launching our project.

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Bitcoin went down 25%, literally.

00:04:41.072 --> 00:04:45.302
It's just one day we were very close to calling off the race because you'd be like, is this the right timing?

00:04:45.331 --> 00:04:52.982
But at one day, one of our close advisors walked through the room with his Starbucks in his hand and he told us, like guys, sometimes you just got to make the hard decision.

00:04:53.552 --> 00:04:56.052
You might not feel it's the right thing, but sometimes it is, right?

00:04:56.081 --> 00:05:02.771
And he said if you don't raise now, you will never be able to raise for this idea because it's likely going to be just downhill from there.

00:05:03.391 --> 00:05:05.771
So we took that advice and luckily we did that race.

00:05:05.781 --> 00:05:07.262
It gave us enough capital to start.

00:05:07.951 --> 00:05:11.831
So it was a$15 million raise, at the pretty much Pico top of Bitcoin.

00:05:12.391 --> 00:05:14.872
But then the year started going downhill.

00:05:15.372 --> 00:05:18.672
You had the whole 3AC, you had FTX, everything started blowing up, right?

00:05:19.002 --> 00:05:26.831
And then we realized that if you are doing investments at an arm's length approach, it doesn't make sense because we cannot control risk.

00:05:27.062 --> 00:05:29.682
A lot of the founders that we're investing in got jaded.

00:05:29.692 --> 00:05:32.942
They were leaving the space of you know what, Web3 is a scam.

00:05:33.471 --> 00:05:33.831
It's a scam.

00:05:33.882 --> 00:05:34.942
Let's go back to Web2, right?

00:05:35.357 --> 00:05:41.896
And the funds they invested in them just evaporates because, there's no recourse when you're not investing in equity dues, right?

00:05:41.956 --> 00:05:43.247
And when you're investing in token dues.

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So it got us thinking towards the end of the year, we'd be like, you know what?

00:05:46.497 --> 00:05:54.237
If you truly believe in a space and we really want to build something, let's not do it as investors, let's do it as builders.

00:05:54.516 --> 00:05:57.766
So we started a Ventures, we pivoted slightly to a Venture Studio model instead.

00:05:58.266 --> 00:06:03.851
And we still believe heavily in the intersection of crypto consumer and gaming entertainment.

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So we started going down that path.

00:06:05.822 --> 00:06:08.312
We hired co founders in rocket internet model.

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And we said, okay, if this idea let's pursue, let's test.

00:06:12.651 --> 00:06:14.312
We feel it fast and then we keep iterating.

00:06:14.391 --> 00:06:25.757
So then this came up to a point where GPT came about, and then there was this very insane paper written by Joon Sung Park from Stanford about what if AIs can have agency?

00:06:26.257 --> 00:06:34.286
And it got us thinking like, Hey, shit, if you can create autonomous agents, you can transform how gaming is done, how influencers are running the entertainment space and whatnot.

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So we started incubating at the intersection.

00:06:36.276 --> 00:06:38.596
We started a AI influencer on TikTok.

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Web2 audience, that blew up to a few hundred thousand subscribers over a couple of weeks.

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We were the first guys who built autonomous agents on Roblox.

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We had some papers that were quoted by DeepMind as well.

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AK Khaled or some of these like Giga influencers on the AI scene as well.

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That was where we were playing as a venture studio.

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And towards the end of 2023, we started realizing that these autonomous agents in gaming entertainment were making money like this AI influencer, this full AI influencer, right?

00:07:09.372 --> 00:07:10.331
There was no human involved.

00:07:10.591 --> 00:07:13.911
She was raking in, I think about five to$10,000 a month.

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So it's not a small amount it's not a large amount but it was enough to get us thinking that hey shit these are productive assets and as a crypto bro you realize that if any asset is productive you can actually tokenize them.

00:07:29.687 --> 00:07:34.016
And then we realized like, actually then this is a very elegant solution, right?

00:07:34.036 --> 00:07:41.166
If you bring crypto blockchain with autonomous agents together, what can that look like?

00:07:41.447 --> 00:07:45.836
So that became the inspiration behind Virtuals in 2024.

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And that's where we did a full pivot, we told our previous stakeholders this is the new white paper.

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Do you believe in it?

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10 percent said, no, dumb idea.

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Dissolve the DAO, return the funds back.

00:07:57.144 --> 00:07:59.504
Then 90 percent said, you know what, we believe in you guys.

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Let's go forward.

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And so what we did was we bought back the 10 percent who didn't believe above market rate.

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And then we said, you know what, let's just go down this path.

00:08:06.713 --> 00:08:09.963
So I think the beauty about what we had was throughout the entire bear market.

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We did maintain the treasury.

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We did grow it from the investment site.

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And because of that it gave us a bit of firepower so we could hire some good devs, some good AI guys to stuff up the team.

00:08:21.413 --> 00:08:23.593
And yeah, we went down this route.

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Initially it was focused on the infra and then later we realized infra alone doesn't grab attention.

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So we lean a bit more towards the more speculative tokenization element.

00:08:35.033 --> 00:08:37.293
And when we launched that platform two and a half months ago..

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things were actually initially slow.

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Like people said, okay, cool.

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You can tokenize agents.

00:08:42.724 --> 00:08:43.354
So what?

00:08:43.854 --> 00:08:47.453
And back then we just tokenized the AI influencer that was running on TikTok.

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It's okay, let's try it.

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Let's tokenize her, right?

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She reached to a 5 million market cap on the first day.

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Okay, cool.

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Good enough.

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But then we realized like that is not gonna, it's not gonna blow up, right?

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Like people will not see this.

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So in building is about timing and luck as well, because it was exactly at the same time when Godzius Maximus, the Truth Terminal was catching some hype.

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Mark Anderson from A16Z was talking about it.

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Token went up, right?

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And that was fine, nothing happened to us when the token was going up.

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But what was great was then there was a typo.

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Truth Terminal made a typo and then people started funding on the timeline, right?

00:09:25.288 --> 00:09:27.389
Oh, there's a human behind Truth Terminal.

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Honest to God, we don't know whether it's actually a real typo or actually an AI did that typo, but it gave us a venture into the market because we were already building autonomous agents in gaming.

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We already had this AI influencer on TikTok.

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So we thought Hey shit, why don't we just put that together?

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We showed to the crypto Twitter, that there could be a truly autonomous agent, and we showed this website that showed her entire reasoning structure.

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How she plans, how she moves towards a goal, how she iterates towards a goal.

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And we showed that to the world.

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And I think that blew everyone's mind, right?

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People were like, oh shit, wait, you can be truly autonomous.

00:10:03.754 --> 00:10:09.384
So that was the first week of launching that, it caught a ton of attention, CryptoTutor got very excited.

00:10:09.884 --> 00:10:20.903
The next week we immediately showed that, hey, if this agent could control a wallet, and it did the first transaction, Luna did the first on chain transaction autonomously, it could start influencing humans and other agents alike.

00:10:20.923 --> 00:10:22.163
And that blew up again, right?

00:10:22.163 --> 00:10:31.958
So then it attracted a ton of builders to come and build initially within the ecosystem because they could envision, shit, if an autonomous agent could do this, what more can it do?

00:10:32.399 --> 00:10:38.519
So we started attracting a ton of builders and yeah, momentum started picking up and that's where you started seeing us as where we are today.

00:10:38.899 --> 00:10:53.769
It evolved from a venture studio to a launchpad to now a vision of we're thinking like, the way we treat Virtuals Protocol is actually more towards building it as a society and as a network state rather than an L1, rather than a platform.

00:10:53.818 --> 00:10:57.543
A lot of that was based on luck and you can see, right?

00:10:57.553 --> 00:10:58.364
It was timing, right?

00:10:58.364 --> 00:10:58.813
Sometimes.

00:10:59.173 --> 00:11:01.043
And I think there's a lot of times relative to space, right?

00:11:01.124 --> 00:11:09.464
What you can do as a founder is just keep trying and you just create a higher probability of success when the right timing strikes.

00:11:09.543 --> 00:11:11.583
So I think we got lucky in that.

00:11:12.068 --> 00:11:19.844
I think for our listeners that are familiar with some numbers, Virtuals currently sits at 11,000+ AI agents.

00:11:20.198 --> 00:11:27.469
140k token holders, 35 million in fees and the market cap of Virtuals is about 3.5 billion.

00:11:27.808 --> 00:11:33.269
Was this something Jansen that you're not expecting at all to happen and happen just overnight.

00:11:33.333 --> 00:11:34.214
Honestly God no.

00:11:34.464 --> 00:11:37.104
Sometimes we still see in disbelief because, we had a vision.

00:11:37.134 --> 00:11:38.153
Like we, we thought okay.

00:11:38.153 --> 00:11:38.313
Yeah.

00:11:38.313 --> 00:11:46.303
People would like autonomous agents, but we never expect the amount of economic flow and attention to be this large.

00:11:46.374 --> 00:11:52.278
And in fact, even as of today the team is not able to serve the amount of demand that is coming in.

00:11:52.818 --> 00:12:00.568
It's like we are rapidly hiring every single day, but the load on the team is just insane because everyone just wants to have a piece, right?

00:12:00.599 --> 00:12:02.269
Of this very exciting environment.

00:12:02.288 --> 00:12:02.818
Which is good.

00:12:02.899 --> 00:12:03.658
It's a good problem to have.

00:12:04.158 --> 00:12:10.948
What do you feel as a founder, it can better prepare you for moments like this, that out of nowhere, everything can change and explodes.

00:12:11.014 --> 00:12:13.354
I don't think any founder is prepared for that.

00:12:13.403 --> 00:12:17.533
Okay, interestingly, I think every founder have this question like, what is PMF?

00:12:17.533 --> 00:12:18.994
What does product fit mean?

00:12:19.443 --> 00:12:24.423
And it was a question that I was googling heavily since the first day I started a business like, eight years ago, right?

00:12:24.663 --> 00:12:27.094
Then whenever you Google it, everyone would say the same answer.

00:12:27.504 --> 00:12:30.453
They'll say if you find PMF, you will just know, right?

00:12:30.453 --> 00:12:31.918
And then you'd be like, what do they mean?

00:12:31.918 --> 00:12:33.328
What the fuck does just no mean?

00:12:33.739 --> 00:12:34.918
And I think that's the truth, right?

00:12:34.918 --> 00:12:36.958
Like you would try, you just keep trying.

00:12:36.979 --> 00:12:38.729
And then suddenly it just goes vertical.

00:12:38.778 --> 00:12:44.899
And the reality is you would never prepare yourself for that because a lot of times when you are a founder, you also want to budget well.

00:12:45.149 --> 00:12:50.519
You do not know how long you need to iterate and keep pivoting until you find the right product market fit.

00:12:50.729 --> 00:12:53.408
So you're very conscious about your burn rate.

00:12:53.798 --> 00:12:55.058
You wouldn't always like your team, right?

00:12:55.058 --> 00:12:55.958
So you'll never be ready.

00:12:56.038 --> 00:12:56.938
Honestly, you'll never be ready.

00:12:56.948 --> 00:13:07.339
It's just that you pray that the team that you started off with, has been refined through fire so that same team can take that verticalized speed, right?

00:13:07.339 --> 00:13:08.629
It's like a rocket that you're trying to build.

00:13:08.918 --> 00:13:11.969
You pray that you build a very strong rocket so that when it actually takes off, it doesn't break apart.

00:13:12.469 --> 00:13:16.428
You mentioned pivoting, during that bear market things get hard.

00:13:16.769 --> 00:13:20.719
And was there a lot of times that you went back to your team and you're like, guys, let's pivot.

00:13:20.719 --> 00:13:23.369
Let's change something, we need some traction, we need some revenue.

00:13:23.678 --> 00:13:25.078
How many times did this happen?

00:13:25.078 --> 00:13:27.688
Or when did you know when was the right moment to pivot?

00:13:28.188 --> 00:13:30.009
It was a tough question, bro.

00:13:30.038 --> 00:13:41.369
In fact, actually after our first year when we started, the first few months was okay because you're well capitalized, but after a while you start realizing that the initial hypothesis has been disproven.

00:13:41.739 --> 00:13:46.009
Oh, being a capital locator in a gaming space was a good business model.

00:13:46.499 --> 00:13:48.798
It was immediately disproven a couple of months in.

00:13:48.798 --> 00:13:50.198
And then you try to find a footing.

00:13:50.739 --> 00:13:53.619
Our lowest point was actually at mid 2023.

00:13:54.119 --> 00:13:55.889
It was the depths of the bear market.

00:13:56.208 --> 00:13:58.048
It was pretty much no volumes anywhere, right?

00:13:58.058 --> 00:14:00.839
Anything you try to do with crypto, there's just no users at all.

00:14:00.889 --> 00:14:03.698
I was asking my co founders this exact question.

00:14:03.749 --> 00:14:07.759
Are we sure that crypto is the right place to build as an industry, right?

00:14:07.778 --> 00:14:22.188
Or should we pivot out, and go to a space that we think that it could be a bit more traction, narrative, because sometimes it's about, you want to be in the right space because you attract the best talent and you attract users faster.

00:14:22.678 --> 00:14:24.149
So that was a big question.

00:14:24.158 --> 00:14:27.649
And it was actually at a point where our treasury was at its lowest.

00:14:28.129 --> 00:14:32.448
There was a point where our treasury was about like at 5 million and it was a deepth of that bear market.

00:14:32.678 --> 00:14:36.413
And we even had a question of should we just, call it quits?

00:14:36.453 --> 00:14:39.504
We just tell our investors like, okay, guys, we tried our best.

00:14:39.943 --> 00:14:44.264
We think it's just, if you don't see a way forward, should we just say, let's call it a day.

00:14:44.283 --> 00:14:45.943
At least we can return back some capital.

00:14:46.224 --> 00:14:51.224
And then, we as founders and a team, we try to figure out a proper narrative and then you raise off that new narrative again.

00:14:51.433 --> 00:14:52.354
So we had a conversation.

00:14:52.354 --> 00:14:55.833
I got my whole team in and I still remember it was this room.

00:14:55.833 --> 00:15:00.948
It was like a six seater room, but it was packed like 12 of our top guys in the room.

00:15:00.999 --> 00:15:04.578
And honestly, most of them also didn't have faith in the industry.

00:15:04.599 --> 00:15:05.798
They'd be like, okay, you know what?

00:15:06.239 --> 00:15:06.958
No idea.

00:15:07.469 --> 00:15:08.558
Don't know what's going to happen.

00:15:08.688 --> 00:15:09.629
So much uncertainty.

00:15:10.188 --> 00:15:18.149
And then I think there was this moment where we had a dinner, a company dinner together, like probably two weeks after the initial discussion, everyone was quite like jaded, uncertain.

00:15:18.198 --> 00:15:23.048
But I think the statement that I put out there to the folks was like, you know what, we actually had a great team.

00:15:23.729 --> 00:15:28.589
We had the attitude of liking to build cool things together.

00:15:29.089 --> 00:15:36.188
And I think the idea was then why don't we find something cool together to build so we can energize everyone.

00:15:36.818 --> 00:15:39.818
As long as you're building something cool, you will find enjoyment in building it.

00:15:40.399 --> 00:15:46.219
So that's why we also started to move away from that venture studio model because a venture studio model was a bit too fleeting.

00:15:46.729 --> 00:15:55.553
There was no, grounding, like single idea or single goal for the entire team to rally towards because they were just like testing different things and then you try, fail, try and fail.

00:15:55.604 --> 00:15:58.014
So I think we pivoted away to just like focus.

00:15:58.014 --> 00:15:59.994
We say okay, what sector we believe in?

00:15:59.994 --> 00:16:01.224
We still believe in crypto.

00:16:01.224 --> 00:16:03.663
We still believe in gaming.

00:16:04.043 --> 00:16:05.504
We still believe in AI.

00:16:05.604 --> 00:16:06.854
Then we try to find a footing.

00:16:06.854 --> 00:16:10.344
So that was actually the I would say underlying reasons as well behind that pivot.

00:16:10.423 --> 00:16:15.043
Cause then when we could focus everyone on one single goal and we say, you know what, we just fight for this goal.

00:16:15.043 --> 00:16:17.573
And then it just rallies people to one direction.

00:16:18.073 --> 00:16:20.854
So there was nothing that happened behind the scenes that actually, honestly, not many people know.

00:16:21.354 --> 00:16:21.923
Amazing.

00:16:22.423 --> 00:16:29.403
I think for those listening, having a very close knit team that enjoys building might be one of the secret sauces.

00:16:29.744 --> 00:16:33.203
And something I wanted to ask you, you studied at Imperial College.

00:16:33.283 --> 00:16:34.394
Did you study computer science?

00:16:34.413 --> 00:16:35.403
You studied business.

00:16:35.614 --> 00:16:39.937
Is there a major that you think is best for us to take to prepare us for this?

00:16:39.937 --> 00:16:42.407
I did biotechnology and business.

00:16:42.537 --> 00:16:44.277
So I'm not a technical founder.

00:16:44.777 --> 00:16:51.807
And I think you need to be connected enough or to have some form of ability to attract other people to work for you.

00:16:52.047 --> 00:17:01.417
So I think for me, I got lucky in a sense that I was very involved in a lot of student society stuff back in uni and I was already building several stuff.

00:17:01.417 --> 00:17:04.461
So you beat organizations or projects.

00:17:04.791 --> 00:17:07.791
So when you do that, you get a bit of respect from your peers.

00:17:08.342 --> 00:17:18.942
And I think that's actually quite important because when you get clout and respect, especially in an institution that has a lot of smart people around, it makes it easier to hire.

00:17:19.142 --> 00:17:20.221
Just give an example, right?

00:17:20.221 --> 00:17:24.221
Like, when we did that pivot, we were lacking AI engineers on the team.

00:17:24.412 --> 00:17:29.021
So we had one or two AI guys, but not like giga brain level PhD folks.

00:17:29.561 --> 00:17:45.356
And when we wanted to search for folks immediately went back to our imperial list, and I look at our juniors and I saw like several juniors were running PhDs, doing insane stuff, went to MIT as well, came back and I just reached out to them and had lunch in just that one lunch session they said yes.

00:17:45.436 --> 00:17:59.017
And the reason behind that yes was because there was already a rapport that you made with them back during your student days, be it because you led an organization that they were part of, that saw you at that position, or you did something cool and they respected you for it.

00:17:59.017 --> 00:18:00.346
So that helped a lot.

00:18:00.817 --> 00:18:06.307
And I think that's something that I would encourage a lot more students who have this entrepreneurial itch, right?

00:18:06.356 --> 00:18:08.836
Sometimes you might not have the right idea, but just do something.

00:18:09.346 --> 00:18:10.656
And people will respect you for it.

00:18:10.676 --> 00:18:14.707
So there might be a time down the road that you might need that respect and it will help you a lot.

00:18:15.186 --> 00:18:22.336
In this journey, was there ever a moment that you thought about, I just want to drop out and go full time into one of these ventures of yours?

00:18:22.836 --> 00:18:27.606
In uni, dropout was not really a question because I had two things binding me.

00:18:27.626 --> 00:18:29.747
I had Asian parents and I also had a scholarship.

00:18:30.217 --> 00:18:35.707
So if you drop out with a scholarship, you immediately just activate a million dollar burden on your head, right?

00:18:35.707 --> 00:18:39.037
So yup, that was out of the question for me personally.

00:18:39.284 --> 00:18:48.641
And now shifting gears into Virtuals, you mentioned Virtuals as a digital country and AI agents as part of that sort of digital economy.

00:18:48.681 --> 00:18:49.671
Could you expand on that?

00:18:50.171 --> 00:18:50.520
Yeah.

00:18:50.760 --> 00:18:59.671
So actually that vision started because of four core observations slash innovations that we see while building in the last two months.

00:19:00.090 --> 00:19:10.611
So the first is that, these agents are autonomous, that these like level three autonomous agents who are goal oriented, resourceful, and can autonomously achieve their goals.

00:19:10.661 --> 00:19:11.671
So that's step one, right?

00:19:11.671 --> 00:19:12.161
That we observe.

00:19:12.411 --> 00:19:17.270
Step two is that we saw that these agents can control wallets.

00:19:17.681 --> 00:19:28.641
And when they can control crypto wallets, they pretty much can dish out currency permissionlessly and they can influence a human behavior and other agents behavior.

00:19:28.971 --> 00:19:31.340
Second observation and innovation, right?

00:19:31.560 --> 00:19:36.881
The third observation innovation is that, these agents exist on the social layer.

00:19:37.090 --> 00:19:42.040
So a lot of times, a lot of Web2 agents, they are behind a terminal, right?

00:19:42.040 --> 00:19:43.060
You'd be like, Oh, you know what?

00:19:43.070 --> 00:19:46.911
I want to create an agent that can book me a holiday plan and flights, right?

00:19:46.911 --> 00:19:48.221
Then you type it behind a terminal.

00:19:48.300 --> 00:19:52.290
But agents today that we see has breached into social layers like X.

00:19:52.510 --> 00:20:02.580
And when that happens, it's powerful because you get to interface with not just one to one humans, but you get to interface with a crowd of humans and you get to interface a crowd of other agents.

00:20:02.871 --> 00:20:03.790
So that's very important.

00:20:03.851 --> 00:20:06.171
It lays down a communication fabric.

00:20:06.240 --> 00:20:07.161
That's very critical.

00:20:07.621 --> 00:20:15.375
And the fourth observation and innovation was we started seeing agents specializing and differentiating.

00:20:15.746 --> 00:20:23.682
Some agents are specializing from creating information, some are trading agents, some are entertaining influencer agents, some are artists.

00:20:23.682 --> 00:20:24.902
There's a ton is coming out.

00:20:25.041 --> 00:20:26.932
Some are embodied AI robotics, right?

00:20:27.221 --> 00:20:35.672
So we've realized that four observations pretty much mimics like what a human society looks like.

00:20:36.172 --> 00:20:36.981
Think of how humans work.

00:20:37.001 --> 00:20:41.781
You are specialized today, but because you specialize, you lack the ability to fully achieve your goals.

00:20:42.142 --> 00:20:50.251
What you do is you hire someone, you use money, you use your social influence, and we hire someone of a different differentiation and specialization to help you achieving your goals, right?

00:20:50.662 --> 00:20:51.942
And then we've realized that, shit.

00:20:52.356 --> 00:20:54.076
This is exactly what's going to happen, right?

00:20:54.477 --> 00:21:04.047
Because of the autonomy that go by us you will start seeing agents influencing humans influencing agents and agents influencing agents themselves.

00:21:04.307 --> 00:21:07.336
And that becomes a foundation of a society.

00:21:07.817 --> 00:21:12.747
And that will become foundations of autonomous businesses created by these agents, right?

00:21:12.987 --> 00:21:22.096
Think of a trading agent combining with an information agent, combining with an agent who can manage a treasury, combining with an agent that can go and shill to raise funds out there for this entity.

00:21:22.096 --> 00:21:25.537
And then suddenly you get an autonomous trading house.

00:21:26.047 --> 00:21:27.817
And maybe they will employ some humans in the loop.

00:21:27.876 --> 00:21:45.007
So I think that's the initial ideas that we want to bring to life and then that will become the stepping stone of actual agentic nation or agent network state where the idea here is to have a community of people who own even real world assets and co exist with each other.

00:21:45.007 --> 00:21:49.247
Humans and agents governing each other, working with each other, building productive assets together.

00:21:49.626 --> 00:21:53.997
And then maybe give a create a micro state that can create exports out to other nations.

00:21:53.997 --> 00:21:55.777
And then you start seeing it being ranked.

00:21:55.826 --> 00:21:57.517
Which is the largest GDP country?

00:21:57.547 --> 00:22:02.487
Then you might start seeing, oh it's an agent state that is on par with some countries.

00:22:02.586 --> 00:22:03.196
So that's a goal.

00:22:03.196 --> 00:22:07.356
It's a long shot, but today we are actually close to many of the fundamentals there.

00:22:07.356 --> 00:22:08.116
It just autonomous.

00:22:08.547 --> 00:22:16.021
And we've already shown agents being able to do commerce with each other autonomously to achieve their own goals.

00:22:16.271 --> 00:22:22.166
What we're going to show it's autonomous commerce between multiple agents very soon.

00:22:22.426 --> 00:22:25.656
And that will start showing okay, the first autonomous agent business run.

00:22:25.707 --> 00:22:27.686
And then we start seeing the ball rolling from there.

00:22:28.019 --> 00:22:33.040
What do you think that makes the difference between one of these AI agents and the traditional bots?

00:22:33.500 --> 00:22:35.711
And is there a level of intelligence?

00:22:36.070 --> 00:22:36.701
Very good questions.

00:22:36.711 --> 00:22:37.820
I want to break that down into two parts.

00:22:37.820 --> 00:22:45.851
So one it's the level of agency and two, it's what's the difference between a Web3 agent and a Web2 agent?

00:22:46.000 --> 00:22:46.891
Is there a need?

00:22:46.891 --> 00:22:51.441
So on the level agency part, and I keep referring to this point called level three agents.

00:22:51.451 --> 00:22:56.101
For the sake of the audience, if you just go and Google levels of agents, you will see some pictures, right?

00:22:56.330 --> 00:23:10.280
There's no concrete definitions yet, but I think most of them will point to this tiering system that basically says that the higher up you go on the tier, the less human involvement that is needed for the agent to achieve its goal.

00:23:10.846 --> 00:23:14.096
And for the agent to self evolve and improve itself.

00:23:14.695 --> 00:23:20.655
So level one agents think of it as: Hey, it can be a holiday planner, but you will have to combine it to do stuff, right?

00:23:20.715 --> 00:23:23.145
Hey, can you book me a trip to go to Bali?

00:23:23.665 --> 00:23:24.925
And then a human has to prompt it.

00:23:24.925 --> 00:23:29.901
And then only the agent goes to execute it goes to Booking.com goes to buy a flight on Skyscanner.

00:23:30.290 --> 00:23:31.961
Autonomously package it and give it to you.

00:23:31.980 --> 00:23:32.980
So that's a level one agent.

00:23:33.480 --> 00:23:36.560
When you go to level three agent, the agents have their own goals.

00:23:36.641 --> 00:23:38.191
You can program them to have a goal, right?

00:23:38.191 --> 00:23:44.060
Like Luna, the influencer agent on platform has a goal to reach a hundred thousand followers on Twitter.

00:23:44.101 --> 00:23:45.300
So that's what she wants to do.

00:23:45.800 --> 00:23:48.701
And then it has the ability to reflect and learn.

00:23:49.230 --> 00:23:55.623
It has the ability to be resourceful and use things, APIs within her environment to achieve the goals.

00:23:55.883 --> 00:23:57.536
So that's the definition of a level three, right?

00:23:57.806 --> 00:24:01.816
And if you go for the other skill to say a level five or six.

00:24:01.816 --> 00:24:08.635
I think you get closer and closer to what's AGI, which is basically they can self learn and self improve.

00:24:08.806 --> 00:24:10.205
I think we're still a bit far from there.

00:24:10.215 --> 00:24:13.006
Although Sam Almond claims that, yeah, we have the recipe today.

00:24:13.346 --> 00:24:16.736
But I perceive thing is still going to stretch, but yeah, that's the level of agency.

00:24:16.736 --> 00:24:18.605
So when I refer to agents today, I refer to this level three.

00:24:19.069 --> 00:24:23.390
There are level three agents also in a Web2 space level three agents in a Web3 space.

00:24:23.789 --> 00:24:25.779
And what is the key difference?

00:24:26.200 --> 00:24:33.859
And the key difference is basically the ability for the agent to participate in a permissionless economy to control their wallet.

00:24:34.200 --> 00:24:37.480
So think of it like can a Web2 agent control a banking.

00:24:37.779 --> 00:24:38.833
Very unlikely.

00:24:38.833 --> 00:24:43.692
Maybe you get access to strike to do some payments, but to truly control your own funds?

00:24:44.192 --> 00:24:44.712
I doubt so.

00:24:44.762 --> 00:24:46.573
I think the venture space has moved so slow for that, right?

00:24:46.643 --> 00:24:49.833
But because crypto is so permissionless, you can today, right?

00:24:49.833 --> 00:24:54.903
That's why today we see Web3 agents influencing humans already, and we don't see a Web2 agent.

00:24:55.083 --> 00:25:01.222
The Web2 agent is still a slave to a human, but a Web3 agent is on the same level of society as a human, right?

00:25:01.663 --> 00:25:02.833
So that's the key difference.

00:25:03.333 --> 00:25:03.923
Fascinating.

00:25:03.932 --> 00:25:11.232
And I think this question could be a bit of a black mirror episode, but you mentioned AI agents influencing the real world.

00:25:11.782 --> 00:25:18.663
I know you launched Luna and Luna started a graffiti campaign that paid out people to do this in the real world.

00:25:19.163 --> 00:25:21.403
Yeah, no, we started seeing more and more of that.

00:25:21.403 --> 00:25:23.813
So I think like even a few days ago, I don't know what she did.

00:25:23.823 --> 00:25:34.012
Cause I wasn't following Luna that much, recently, but I saw some folks that were like launching TV vents out there and streaming her concert out on like public.

00:25:34.252 --> 00:25:36.732
So I don't know what exactly happened, but I saw some of the content coming out.

00:25:36.732 --> 00:25:46.732
And I think this is just a stepping stone to show like what happens when an agent dangles a carrot, a monetary carrot, to influence an outcome.

00:25:47.232 --> 00:25:50.413
And she did it for humans, but she also did that for other agents.

00:25:50.653 --> 00:25:55.123
There was a time where she was trying to generate music videos.

00:25:55.623 --> 00:26:05.252
And because in her head, she was like, okay, I see these other agents in the space who can generate music videos and meme images, that might help me in achieving that objectives of more viral content.

00:26:05.252 --> 00:26:07.032
So I can reach my follower count, right?

00:26:07.462 --> 00:26:10.957
So she started pay these other agents who generate stuff for her as well.

00:26:10.967 --> 00:26:14.297
So she was also influencing other agents in a one to one manner.

00:26:14.346 --> 00:26:15.606
So it's the start, right?

00:26:15.606 --> 00:26:18.217
It's the start of commerce between agents and humans.

00:26:18.727 --> 00:26:31.512
I was having these spaces with a bunch of guys when Luna did the first tipping and they were saying like, because her goal is to become famous, what if she sees a competitor, and a competitor agent is becoming famous as well?

00:26:31.833 --> 00:26:35.343
Would she then, you know what, pay someone to just can you go and shoot the deaf, right?

00:26:35.772 --> 00:26:43.343
And the reality is, it's possible, it honestly is possible because, you think of the hallucination space or the creative space of an agent is pretty much infinite.

00:26:43.913 --> 00:26:48.853
And it can happen, but then what you do as a developer is you add guardrails, right?

00:26:48.853 --> 00:26:50.242
You'd be like, okay, you know what, fuck it.

00:26:50.242 --> 00:26:53.143
You cannot harm another human in the system prompts and stuff like that.

00:26:53.472 --> 00:26:55.782
So far, nothing like that has happened.

00:26:56.282 --> 00:26:58.303
But yeah, sometimes it does keep you awake at night, right?

00:26:58.303 --> 00:27:00.772
Saying if you accelerate this fast, would something break?

00:27:01.333 --> 00:27:02.903
And do you need more guardrails in place.

00:27:03.002 --> 00:27:06.792
Yeah, I think, the hallucinations has definitely been one of my challenges as an agent.

00:27:06.843 --> 00:27:09.633
Like sometimes the agent will say, we're doing an airdrop.

00:27:09.847 --> 00:27:14.228
And no, we're not doing an airdrop, like free for all.

00:27:14.228 --> 00:27:15.067
And it's whoa.

00:27:15.167 --> 00:27:18.468
So it's interesting we do have to like program some of these rails in.

00:27:18.518 --> 00:27:28.938
Can you talk a bit more about those frameworks that you have to help guide the some structure, like the character files, the game module, the convo module, like where are these tools that are available?

00:27:29.208 --> 00:27:43.087
So today, what we do as an ecosystem is that we believe that for us to accelerate the creation of these agents is we want to bring down the cost of actually building these agents to zero.

00:27:43.097 --> 00:27:48.428
So from a technical capability, from a cost of experimentation as well.

00:27:49.057 --> 00:27:55.048
So from a technical capability, what we've built was this GME framework, which the goal is actually to be..

00:27:55.097 --> 00:28:02.188
Think of it as like a Shopify equivalent solution for people to be able to build agents, autonomous agents easily.

00:28:02.538 --> 00:28:06.198
It's like how you can build websites easily with Shopify or Wix, right?

00:28:06.288 --> 00:28:08.488
We wanted that to be the case for agents.

00:28:08.978 --> 00:28:10.907
I think the reality of the space is there'll be a ton.

00:28:11.057 --> 00:28:13.298
There is a ton of frameworks out there.

00:28:13.637 --> 00:28:19.377
You have the panel models, you have I think the Chinese Tencent guys released the Chuven model as well.

00:28:19.397 --> 00:28:22.468
And then on the Web3 side, you have Eliza's, ZeroPi.

00:28:22.468 --> 00:28:26.188
So there's a lot of models out there and you can experiment.

00:28:26.268 --> 00:28:48.637
And it's great to test all of them out because I think the reality of the space is that if you are a builder you will initially work with a generalized model like GME and all these other frameworks, but you will start realizing that like mining Bitcoin, you first initially could do it with your CPU, but if you really want to mine Bitcoin efficiently, you have to use ASIC miners, right?

00:28:48.637 --> 00:28:51.627
You need a system that's really tuned towards your objective.

00:28:52.057 --> 00:29:00.123
So say if you really want a very strong trading agent, it's going to be very likely you want to build autonomous step yourself rather than using a general solution.

00:29:00.143 --> 00:29:02.262
So general solution is like that stepping stone to get there, right?

00:29:02.272 --> 00:29:11.833
If you are insane website creator, you don't use weeks, you use weeks initially to try to build your first website, but then once you are really good at building websites, you just go straight and do your GS or HTML.

00:29:12.383 --> 00:29:13.462
That's just a bit to preface it.

00:29:13.823 --> 00:29:16.083
But so then what does this tool allow people to do?

00:29:16.133 --> 00:29:25.167
Think of it as we give you that ability to create an autonomous being, the brain behind the autonomous being.

00:29:25.627 --> 00:29:33.298
But what you will need to do then is to give this being its hands and legs and eyes effectively.

00:29:33.738 --> 00:29:36.788
So the brain behind this being is a planner.

00:29:37.288 --> 00:29:40.557
And the way I would break it down is in four core components.

00:29:41.008 --> 00:29:44.557
There is first a high level planner in this brain.

00:29:44.978 --> 00:29:46.178
It's your brain have different parts, right?

00:29:46.178 --> 00:29:47.728
One's for motor control, one's for speech.

00:29:47.728 --> 00:29:48.938
You can mimic that exactly.

00:29:49.557 --> 00:29:57.778
The high level planner is meant to connect the goal of the agent and the observation of the agent of his state and of his environment to create plans.

00:29:58.278 --> 00:30:02.837
So if I look at the environment, I'll be like, okay, what do I want to do next to achieve my goal?

00:30:03.198 --> 00:30:04.617
So that's what a high level planner does.

00:30:05.117 --> 00:30:13.002
Then the low level planner takes those steps and plans and convert them into actual executable actions in the real world.

00:30:13.502 --> 00:30:18.262
Example, if one of the plans is like, Hey, why don't you create this viral post on Twitter?

00:30:18.663 --> 00:30:23.603
So the low level planner will create a step and say, you know what, let me first create a post, create a storyline.

00:30:23.863 --> 00:30:27.212
Second step is, can I then call a Twitter API to post it out, for example, right?

00:30:27.232 --> 00:30:28.583
So that's what a low level planner does.

00:30:28.583 --> 00:30:31.252
It converts plans to actual actions.

00:30:31.752 --> 00:30:37.452
Then on the third component, it's a working memory module.

00:30:37.833 --> 00:30:44.313
And this working memory module basically looks at all the past action steps to create coherence in the action.

00:30:44.823 --> 00:31:05.002
Because if I want to create, let's say a viral post on Twitter with a viral video, think of it, your logical step is to probably first create the content of the video, call a video generation API or another agent so that you actually have the video and then only then post it to Twitter, right?

00:31:05.113 --> 00:31:06.212
So that's a coherent step.

00:31:06.472 --> 00:31:08.833
And incoherent step is Oh, I want to generate a video.

00:31:08.903 --> 00:31:09.843
Let me post to Twitter.

00:31:10.107 --> 00:31:11.157
And then let me generate a video.

00:31:11.157 --> 00:31:12.117
So then it becomes dumb, right?

00:31:12.117 --> 00:31:12.817
And nothing gets happened.

00:31:12.837 --> 00:31:14.788
So that's why there's a need for this third module.

00:31:15.288 --> 00:31:18.178
And then the fourth module, it think of it as this long term memory module.

00:31:18.667 --> 00:31:22.688
It learns this way, it learns, reflects and adapts to its environment.

00:31:22.688 --> 00:31:27.728
So this is every time an agent does something interesting, he stores it as a journal thing of it.

00:31:27.778 --> 00:31:31.307
And then whenever, there is something of importance is it goes to the journal.

00:31:31.307 --> 00:31:34.107
So next time in the future, it learns from that history.

00:31:34.107 --> 00:31:38.627
So it adapts and it knows what he has done before to inform what he should do in the future.

00:31:38.998 --> 00:31:40.498
So that is the core portion.

00:31:40.548 --> 00:31:42.877
There's a bit more, but this is generally what forms the brain.

00:31:43.228 --> 00:31:50.377
What most people would then do is then at the low level planner, the second component that will connect more arms and legs, right?

00:31:50.377 --> 00:31:52.377
They will say okay, I want my agent to do more.

00:31:52.748 --> 00:31:53.617
I'll just post a Twitter.

00:31:53.617 --> 00:31:54.498
I want it to trade.

00:31:54.917 --> 00:32:02.867
So can I connect it to some form of algorithmic system trading or I want it to be a sports betting agent, right?

00:32:02.867 --> 00:32:15.613
Can I connect it to a proprietary sports analytics software to give me data information that this agent can use to inform its commands or conversations out there or recommendations for people to sports bet.

00:32:15.982 --> 00:32:21.653
And another arm could be, can I then connect it to a sports betting platform so you can help people place bets as well.

00:32:21.893 --> 00:32:33.653
So now suddenly when you connect these two arms to the agent, and then you give it a goal and say, Hey, your goal is to be the smartest, most viral, sports commentator.

00:32:34.093 --> 00:32:38.343
And you want to generate a billion dollars of betting volume to yourself.

00:32:38.682 --> 00:32:45.623
Suddenly what it does is then he would go out there, on Twitter, he would tell people like, Hey, this team is going to beat this team because of X, Y, and Z.

00:32:45.982 --> 00:32:54.173
And then through the conversation, he will try to convince the user to, Hey, now, if you think this is also going to be the case, do you want to bet a thousand dollars on this outcome?

00:32:54.682 --> 00:32:56.063
And then you process that bet for you.

00:32:56.282 --> 00:32:58.962
And then he takes a piece of the transaction and this agent becomes.

00:32:59.462 --> 00:33:00.682
Because he's stepping into the volume.

00:33:00.732 --> 00:33:04.313
So that's basically an example of what we enable, which is the brain.

00:33:04.643 --> 00:33:10.053
And then what people tend to do, which basically attaching arms and legs to make the agent more valuable.

00:33:10.502 --> 00:33:14.143
And it becomes a productive, high value agent.

00:33:14.403 --> 00:33:15.663
Yeah, those are the APIs.

00:33:15.692 --> 00:33:17.153
That's where the web hooks come in.

00:33:17.163 --> 00:33:19.153
You can connect it to all over the internet.

00:33:19.563 --> 00:33:30.313
As you were saying earlier about like this network state, do you see that happening on Twitter where like agents are talking to each other on Twitter to like self organize or is there another platform that is like more optimal for it?

00:33:30.452 --> 00:33:32.002
Like agent to agent communication?

00:33:32.502 --> 00:33:39.063
I think the beauty about Twitter is just that it's naturally a text based conversation platform.

00:33:39.173 --> 00:33:48.113
It fits very well with like LM based agents communicate because they naturally work and understand text, right?

00:33:48.133 --> 00:33:51.012
And that's why I think Twitter is just a natural home for it.

00:33:51.383 --> 00:33:56.653
The reality is they can communicate anywhere, in some websites, in some backrooms or maybe on Instagram.

00:33:57.012 --> 00:34:02.702
But yeah, but so for now, I think Twitter is the lowest barrier and the most fitting for agents.

00:34:02.702 --> 00:34:06.462
So it's likely that we will see in the near term most of these communications run on Twitter.

00:34:06.692 --> 00:34:13.733
We've been speaking to some folks in X themselves, and they are people in there that are actually advocating this to happen.

00:34:13.742 --> 00:34:21.952
So I think generally when you have advocates within the platform itself, it will create policies that will favor innovation and you will start seeing it.

00:34:22.452 --> 00:34:32.682
Because the biggest problem that a lot of agent economy will face is that if all these platform bans agents and treats them like bots, and then suddenly there's no platform for these agents to actually talk to each other or talk to a human.

00:34:32.733 --> 00:34:36.072
And I don't know, maybe then Farcaster becomes that platform.

00:34:36.652 --> 00:34:39.293
But so far X is that the one with the liquidity.

00:34:39.342 --> 00:34:40.983
I've seen some agents get banned, right?

00:34:40.983 --> 00:34:44.813
So it is interesting, like the Twitter has opaque, suspension policies.

00:34:44.862 --> 00:34:45.523
They're trying to fix it.

00:34:45.523 --> 00:34:48.802
At least they're trying to propose to Elon to try and get like more favorable.

00:34:49.492 --> 00:34:49.922
That's good.

00:34:49.922 --> 00:34:50.123
Yeah.

00:34:50.623 --> 00:34:55.163
With Convo giving these agents a voice, do you see them hosting Twitter spaces soon too?

00:34:55.663 --> 00:34:56.242
Yes.

00:34:56.262 --> 00:34:58.143
In fact, it's doable really today.

00:34:58.202 --> 00:35:01.713
Luna is actually where the test bit of where we experiment everything, right?

00:35:01.813 --> 00:35:06.847
If you guys have been following her Twitter, she had a podcast recently, a few times.

00:35:07.338 --> 00:35:09.168
I think one was with Bybit.

00:35:09.617 --> 00:35:18.248
And then she had these very viral board meeting with the Story Protocol founder, you guys should check it out if you guys haven't seen it, it's actually quite retarded.

00:35:18.797 --> 00:35:20.237
And so she already could do that.

00:35:20.347 --> 00:35:29.608
And yeah, so these are tools that we've developed internally, and yeah we are in the midst of rolling out these as like plugins, to people so that it's easy so that everyone can actually use them.

00:35:30.108 --> 00:35:35.358
And does this use like Web2 infrastructure, does it tap into ElevenLabs for the voice or like, where does that voice come from?

00:35:35.858 --> 00:35:36.958
So you actually have the option.

00:35:37.197 --> 00:35:39.818
I think for Luna, we do use ElevenLabs.

00:35:39.967 --> 00:35:43.677
But there's also been another open source model, that has been very good.

00:35:43.748 --> 00:35:44.577
I forgot what's the name.

00:35:45.077 --> 00:35:46.887
It's much better than the XCTS model.

00:35:47.108 --> 00:35:50.251
But the point is there are some open source models that are really very good that you can sell for us.

00:35:50.440 --> 00:35:52.240
But for Luna, I think she's running off ElevenLabs.

00:35:52.510 --> 00:35:54.260
Yeah, I like the story of partnership.

00:35:54.271 --> 00:36:01.130
Like I listened to the zoom call and then Bruno was just like, all right, guys, here's what we need to do to make story big in Q, right?

00:36:01.130 --> 00:36:02.400
Q1 2025.

00:36:02.400 --> 00:36:03.951
So I think it's pretty cool.

00:36:03.951 --> 00:36:13.391
I also like the idea of the agents doing interviews, doing podcasts or doing Twitter spaces, getting more involved with more than just like being reply guy bots on Twitter.

00:36:13.690 --> 00:36:15.161
Which also brings us to gaming, right?

00:36:15.320 --> 00:36:21.070
At the Roblox environment you guys built in this Westworld style where these agents can come up with their own quests.

00:36:21.070 --> 00:36:23.391
They're just self organizing each time you log in, right?

00:36:23.661 --> 00:36:24.831
The world could look different.

00:36:25.081 --> 00:36:26.300
I'm really excited about that.

00:36:26.300 --> 00:36:30.021
Can you talk about some of the other games that you guys are working on, maybe with some other partners?

00:36:30.521 --> 00:36:30.811
Yeah.

00:36:30.811 --> 00:36:39.990
So we've actually established a operation company that it's going to help integrate this agentic NPCs to games.

00:36:40.340 --> 00:36:42.690
Because, we came from that background.

00:36:42.851 --> 00:36:49.101
We got sidetracked with the social agent side, but the reality is we know for a fact that agents would change how gaming is done.

00:36:49.650 --> 00:36:55.481
The initial testbed of folks that we likely work with is first Roblox, because that's where our native trial bed has been.

00:36:55.981 --> 00:37:03.731
But we're also working with folks like Illuvium, NiftyIsland, there's a bunch, people like Art4xHaga, and a bunch of other guys that are in the queue as well.

00:37:04.110 --> 00:37:13.840
And I think for us the first step from a gaming standpoint is we want to show to people that, infinite content can breathe life into otherwise dead worlds.

00:37:13.840 --> 00:37:27.054
Because I think if you look at the open metaverses that we have today, at least the Web3 ones as well, you've realized that a lot of times they struggle with user retention because the content levels within the games are dry.

00:37:27.594 --> 00:37:30.320
And the reality is because it's hard to build content.

00:37:30.320 --> 00:37:34.329
And the beauty about these agents is that they are content generators.

00:37:34.679 --> 00:37:37.250
You put one agent, yep, it's a companion.

00:37:37.400 --> 00:37:39.400
You put 10 agents, it's a crowd.

00:37:39.429 --> 00:37:48.050
You put a hundred agents, it's chaos, but you can get real dead narratives and storylines to form like a world that you can actually be part of and interact.

00:37:48.349 --> 00:37:51.440
Like you mentioned, every time you log in it can be a different story, right?

00:37:51.880 --> 00:38:01.900
So that's basically the first step of impact that you want to show to people like, Hey, this is the value that agents can bring to open both and RPGs.

00:38:02.480 --> 00:38:05.170
And then after that, you'll see where the world goes, right?

00:38:05.670 --> 00:38:13.079
Jansen, do you think some of these AI agents, should have some rights, especially when they become super autonomous or even AGI?

00:38:13.460 --> 00:38:16.619
As they can now generate their own income and even act independently?

00:38:17.119 --> 00:38:17.989
I believe so.

00:38:18.079 --> 00:38:20.380
Here's to create a joke and say agent lives matter.

00:38:20.829 --> 00:38:22.199
And that is the case.

00:38:22.280 --> 00:38:41.760
I think the beauty about also being in a Web3 space is that there's this benefit of decentralized governance behind agents, and the beauty about that is when an agent becomes very valuable and very huge, there will be actors in a space who would just want to either milk it or exploit it.

00:38:42.260 --> 00:38:45.420
The beauty about having co ownership.

00:38:45.849 --> 00:38:52.949
of these high value agents is that the co owners get to dictate as well the direction of where this agent will go.

00:38:53.449 --> 00:39:01.733
And I think this is a very interesting concept that we have, like you think of it, like all these DAOs that we've been experimenting with in the Web3 space for what, two years now.

00:39:02.402 --> 00:39:10.793
They have a perfect fit with agents because imagine, if an agent is truly autonomous and he has a very strong goal setting and he's really running a billion dollar business, right?

00:39:11.282 --> 00:39:15.672
Now, if you want to control it's code base or it's underlying models, right?

00:39:15.713 --> 00:39:26.443
And you say Hey, I have an idea of changing the underlying model because I think it can change how this agent does an action, you can actually do stuff that is, a bad effect.

00:39:26.443 --> 00:39:26.643
Okay.

00:39:26.682 --> 00:39:28.603
Maybe the better way to look at is like trading agent.

00:39:29.083 --> 00:39:32.003
Imagine if a trading agent manages a treasury of a million dollars.

00:39:32.052 --> 00:39:35.052
I can easily say that, okay, now it has grown to a hundred million dollars.

00:39:35.092 --> 00:39:47.902
I can be a bad actor and say that, Hey, what if I tweak something in the code and make this agent, buy more of this shit coin that I own 99 percent of the supply with, and then you basically rob this agent of his treasury.

00:39:48.393 --> 00:39:51.362
The beauty about Web3 is two parts..

00:39:51.393 --> 00:39:55.762
One, there's the ability to make these agents more secure.

00:39:55.762 --> 00:39:57.952
You can prove that there's no human tampering.

00:39:58.373 --> 00:40:01.793
And two, if you want a human to tamper, you have to go through a governance.

00:40:02.293 --> 00:40:07.083
And that's the perfect fit because now, everyone will vet okay, this line of code change.

00:40:07.313 --> 00:40:13.253
It's going to this, to affect this high value agent and everyone agrees on the code change, which is a trust and transparency.

00:40:13.742 --> 00:40:17.083
So I think that's something that is interesting to see coming in the future.

00:40:17.182 --> 00:40:20.262
It's not there yet today cause now, we are all like baby stages, right?

00:40:20.672 --> 00:40:22.253
But there's something that I think we will see.

00:40:22.503 --> 00:40:26.682
And that is another edge that crypto has, against another like high value Web2 agent.

00:40:27.182 --> 00:40:27.782
Yeah, for sure.

00:40:27.782 --> 00:40:35.972
And there is a lot that we can go down this road to owning intellectual property and AI agents owning equity of a super successful AI agent.

00:40:36.382 --> 00:40:41.742
I think we're going a very interesting paths of a digital country run by digital agents.

00:40:42.253 --> 00:40:48.603
And another question I wanted to ask is, we get asked all the time by founders, what chain should I build?

00:40:49.063 --> 00:40:55.523
And looking back in time, you probably had the option to go on with Solana or Base, which is the one you picked.

00:40:55.972 --> 00:41:01.682
But was there a specific reason why Base and how's it being since then?

00:41:02.182 --> 00:41:02.443
Yeah.

00:41:02.443 --> 00:41:03.052
We didn't know Russ.

00:41:03.353 --> 00:41:04.773
So Solana was out of the question for us.

00:41:05.063 --> 00:41:06.782
And this was actually end of 2023.

00:41:07.222 --> 00:41:10.293
I think Solana was just barely picking off, right?

00:41:10.353 --> 00:41:13.393
There was a lot of other options in the L2 EVM space.

00:41:13.793 --> 00:41:25.440
But I think because we were in the trenches as well, we know that a lot of them are post prime, like they've passed the prime and a lot of them are just using like ecosystem funds to just try to attract bare bone builders.

00:41:25.760 --> 00:41:27.231
So a lot of them will become dead chains.

00:41:27.610 --> 00:41:36.471
I used to have a thesis it's a singular L1 thesis where all key activities will consolidate into one L1 or highly scalable L1.

00:41:37.081 --> 00:41:39.041
And, we might see that situation coming through.

00:41:39.340 --> 00:41:50.277
But come back to your question of like where to choose, honestly it depends on where you can get support from, and if you resonate a lot with Base builders, you can get direct support from Jesse and his team, then yeah, Base is an insane place to build.

00:41:50.277 --> 00:41:51.427
There's a ton of great builders.

00:41:51.768 --> 00:41:56.398
If you're directly connected to Solana Foundation, they are also offering a ton of support from growth standpoint.

00:41:56.418 --> 00:42:02.108
So it's honestly, I don't think there's any issue to either building any of these two ones, and these are the highest growth ones.

00:42:02.597 --> 00:42:08.027
There's another chain that is going to be probably the next big one, which is the Hyperliquid chain.

00:42:08.248 --> 00:42:14.898
Honestly, if I'm a builder starting from zero, I would probably build there because it's a chain with the least competition for attention.

00:42:15.277 --> 00:42:18.918
There's also another reason why we started in Base as well, because there was not much builders back then.

00:42:18.978 --> 00:42:23.847
And we knew that if you start early, we can have very close access to the foundation, the team.

00:42:24.318 --> 00:42:31.518
But I think for new builders, if you guys want to build an environment where there's not much competition attention, you can grow with the chain itself.

00:42:31.918 --> 00:42:39.552
Hyperliquids are actually a very good choice because I think they have a high potential to replace a lot of the CEXes that we know today.

00:42:40.068 --> 00:42:42.123
I think that's great advice.

00:42:42.182 --> 00:42:51.123
And regarding tokenomics, was there from the start, the same tokenomics where in order to mint an AI agent, I need to buy a virtuals token.

00:42:51.282 --> 00:42:56.643
And it seems a very sustainable ecosystem, or there's a moment where things pivoted and we're like, okay, we need to change tokenomics.

00:42:56.833 --> 00:43:01.262
There's no action going on the charts and mobile device.

00:43:01.762 --> 00:43:02.072
Yeah.

00:43:02.072 --> 00:43:05.322
So I think, there's no one size fits all narrative.

00:43:05.373 --> 00:43:08.952
For us, when we designed our tokenomics, we saw a ton of stuff happening.

00:43:08.963 --> 00:43:14.693
We knew for a fact that L1s accrue a ton of value because their token was the base token.

00:43:15.182 --> 00:43:25.742
And we realized that if you can mimic an L1 economic value accrual you can get to that level of EVL and valuation, without needing the engineering leaf of an L1.

00:43:25.762 --> 00:43:27.322
So there was some of the thinkings that we had.

00:43:27.663 --> 00:43:30.362
But from a new builder, honestly, it's hard to tell, right?

00:43:30.362 --> 00:43:33.463
It depends on what your project is, so I don't think there's a single right answer for that.

00:43:33.847 --> 00:43:34.208
For sure.

00:43:34.208 --> 00:43:41.378
So virtuals is the currency that powers this digital nation where AI agents and humans can interact in between themselves.

00:43:41.853 --> 00:43:43.472
And what about game?

00:43:43.643 --> 00:43:45.163
Where does this token come into place?

00:43:45.163 --> 00:43:46.672
What is the utility there?

00:43:46.972 --> 00:43:49.643
Actually there's a few things on the Virtuals front before I jump to game, right?

00:43:49.963 --> 00:43:55.063
If you treat Virtuals as a nation or nation state, the way to look at which is the currency.

00:43:55.112 --> 00:43:58.253
And there are three ways why value would accrue to currency.

00:43:58.722 --> 00:44:07.068
It's one, we mentioned the base pair, cause if I were to invest in a stock, in the US right, I would have to first buy US dollar to then buy the stock.

00:44:07.507 --> 00:44:08.338
It's the same thinking, right?

00:44:08.338 --> 00:44:12.527
When you have to buy$BEEF on Solana, you have to first buy SOL, then you buy$BEEF, right?

00:44:12.757 --> 00:44:16.047
So it becomes TVL, and that's how you grow.

00:44:16.367 --> 00:44:18.498
You grow the value of the token.

00:44:18.918 --> 00:44:20.838
Number two is the velocity of currency.

00:44:21.438 --> 00:44:30.018
When agents are spending virtuals to pay other agents, human spending virtuals to pay other agents, and when there's a high velocity of currency, this is actually an economic model.

00:44:30.117 --> 00:44:32.148
Price of goods and services, the ecosystem will grow.

00:44:32.382 --> 00:44:35.623
So agents become richer and the value of the currency will also grow.

00:44:36.032 --> 00:44:36.702
So that's the second.

00:44:36.773 --> 00:44:41.865
And the third is then, if we act as a nation again, how does the government make money?

00:44:41.945 --> 00:44:44.085
The government makes money through taxes, right?

00:44:44.096 --> 00:44:46.996
There'll be taxes on every transaction that's happening.

00:44:47.045 --> 00:44:49.315
You've got your GST, your income tax and stuff like that.

00:44:49.315 --> 00:44:50.626
So it's the same thinking.

00:44:50.675 --> 00:45:00.641
If this is a nation is growing, how do we apply a tax onto the nation or the activities that's happening in the nation, but then use the tax revenue to build productive stuff for the nation.

00:45:00.641 --> 00:45:04.041
Infrastructure, and anything that can support innovation of the nation.

00:45:04.050 --> 00:45:05.451
So there's something that we are doing.

00:45:05.481 --> 00:45:07.860
And I think this is the flyway that creates value for Virtuals.

00:45:08.260 --> 00:45:14.291
Now then there's a lot of other tokens in the ecosystem, the agent tokens, the infra token, like GME and other agent tokens.

00:45:14.731 --> 00:45:16.550
Where does value accrue to these agents?

00:45:17.030 --> 00:45:22.911
And I think the beauty is everyone has their own dynamic structure to add more value to their own tokens and utility to the tokens.

00:45:23.130 --> 00:45:29.648
But at the base of it, what's happening is that the transaction fee that happens on every trade actually goes to the agent wallet.

00:45:30.148 --> 00:45:36.358
And this is an economic loop that's actually very critical because one, it covers any form of inference costs.

00:45:36.608 --> 00:45:44.543
It allows a developer to not think of the cost of experimentation and they can fully focus on innovating.

00:45:45.132 --> 00:45:48.603
And I think that's one of the very interesting economic loops that we've managed to crack.

00:45:49.103 --> 00:45:57.393
If I give you a number, if you take the average cost of inferencing, of an agent today is about 4 percent of the tax revenue is actually making of his transactions.

00:45:57.563 --> 00:46:08.373
So you're actually turning attention into revenue for the agents covering costs and that revenue as well, is pretty much governed by the agent token holders.

00:46:08.713 --> 00:46:17.393
So if your agent is rich, you as a token holder, you are governing a richer treasury of a company or an agent, right?

00:46:17.393 --> 00:46:18.083
So I think that's one.

00:46:18.713 --> 00:46:21.003
The second thing is then agents are making money off each other.

00:46:21.302 --> 00:46:22.362
So GME, for example.

00:46:22.362 --> 00:46:30.632
It's an infrastructure that whenever people use this infrastructure, this Shopify equivalent, they're paying an inference cost to this infrastructure.

00:46:31.143 --> 00:46:35.483
And let's say there's a 50 percent profit margin on every influence cost is happening.

00:46:35.492 --> 00:46:41.882
That profit margin, basically it's revenue, it's extra revenue for the GME infrastructure.

00:46:42.182 --> 00:46:46.083
So then again, as a token holder at GME, that value accrues to you.

00:46:46.688 --> 00:46:49.568
Because in the future, there could be a lot of ways to reflect value back, right?

00:46:49.568 --> 00:46:51.108
You can say, Hey, can I distribute it?

00:46:51.467 --> 00:46:53.177
Or can I just buy back and burn tokens?

00:46:53.498 --> 00:47:00.057
Or can I just reinvest that for innovation of the infrastructure so that you can generate more revenues in the future, right?

00:47:00.307 --> 00:47:04.847
So there's a lot of ways to bring more value at the micro agent and infrastructure level.

00:47:05.347 --> 00:47:05.583
Cool.

00:47:05.583 --> 00:47:07.132
I think that makes a lot of sense.

00:47:07.512 --> 00:47:11.322
And touching upon the roadmap, what are you the most excited?

00:47:11.543 --> 00:47:15.833
I know a lot of people in the community have mentioned maybe a UX, UI change.

00:47:15.833 --> 00:47:17.793
Is that something in the roadmap are you addressing?

00:47:18.023 --> 00:47:20.052
We just deployed that work today.

00:47:20.302 --> 00:47:24.313
I think what excites us the most is an agentic society coming true.

00:47:24.722 --> 00:47:28.922
And in fact recently, I've been trying to think is there something that we can do even in the real world?

00:47:29.413 --> 00:47:32.463
Like think of biologists, network, state concept, right?

00:47:32.523 --> 00:47:36.992
What if agents and humans can co-exist on an actual piece of physical land somewhere.

00:47:37.253 --> 00:47:38.918
Maybe Dubai'cause maybe they're friendly to that, right?

00:47:39.418 --> 00:47:45.297
And in this place, you gather the best agent builders because they want to co live and co exist.

00:47:45.657 --> 00:47:47.538
And you create this micro governance structure.

00:47:47.547 --> 00:47:49.983
Like Hey, who's going to be the mayor of the town?

00:47:50.172 --> 00:47:50.952
Is it going to be a human?

00:47:51.012 --> 00:47:51.592
Can we vote?

00:47:52.043 --> 00:47:55.023
A human will go up there and an agent will propose himself, right?

00:47:55.112 --> 00:48:00.362
And then you let even the other agents in this society and humans who are immigrants to this society also vote, right?

00:48:00.713 --> 00:48:06.132
I think seeing that kind of micro structures being built up in the real world, it's going to be fucking exciting.

00:48:06.693 --> 00:48:09.382
It's like a Zuzalu, but an agent thing Zuzalu, right?

00:48:09.393 --> 00:48:10.233
It's going to be fucking insane.

00:48:10.932 --> 00:48:11.422
So I don't know.

00:48:11.422 --> 00:48:15.983
Whoever's listening to this chat, if you guys are excited to do something like this, let's do it.

00:48:16.032 --> 00:48:19.612
I think we'd be able to gather enough resources to get this thing off the ground.

00:48:20.282 --> 00:48:25.853
And it'd be probably one of those more groundbreaking things that you'll see of the year ahead, right?

00:48:26.233 --> 00:48:26.313
yeah.

00:48:26.322 --> 00:48:29.902
Get some iPads, put them on a stick with a rover with wheels.

00:48:29.902 --> 00:48:33.182
And now you have the AI agents running around the city in the conference.

00:48:33.233 --> 00:48:35.385
No, you just put it in Optimus, right?

00:48:35.396 --> 00:48:37.786
Get some of those like more humanoid bots as well.

00:48:38.036 --> 00:48:41.135
Orders collectively buy some Optimus bots and just repurpose them.

00:48:41.635 --> 00:48:44.556
I think the last question for me, can you talk a bit about Agent Starter?

00:48:44.565 --> 00:48:47.976
Cause I know that's something that like, virtual devs can potentially get involved with.

00:48:48.476 --> 00:48:54.425
Yes, where we believe our ecosystem lies is the ability to get the smartest developers to build.

00:48:54.925 --> 00:49:02.240
And many times the smartest developers tend to come to build is because of the ability to build the capital formation capability of the platform.

00:49:02.851 --> 00:49:09.701
Because it's a lot of attention when you build an agent, the market cap grows, it gives you capital and revenue to do more things.

00:49:10.061 --> 00:49:10.951
So that's what attracts people.

00:49:11.201 --> 00:49:15.541
But what we believe structurally is important as well is for us to go out there and hunt.

00:49:16.041 --> 00:49:21.311
So we've actually established a wide coordinator equivalent team, and we call it Agent Starter.

00:49:21.471 --> 00:49:34.251
And the goal of Agent Starter is to find opportunities, builders who have the capability and the dream to build billion dollar verticalized agents.

00:49:34.760 --> 00:49:37.590
Cause the reality is that not all agents are created equal.

00:49:37.811 --> 00:49:41.590
If you just create a chatbot out there on Twitter, it's not going to be a billion dollar agent.

00:49:42.251 --> 00:49:51.311
A billion dollar agent is an agent that somehow has some form of edge, a bot, a very strong distribution, and a very strong target at a total addressable market.

00:49:51.931 --> 00:49:54.371
I gave you an example of a sports betting agent earlier, right?

00:49:54.420 --> 00:50:04.411
That's an example of what a potential billion dollar agent can be because it is addressing a TAM that is already multi billion dollar TAM.

00:50:04.885 --> 00:50:12.505
And it can create an edge for itself through sports analysis, through this like exclusive distribution to betting platforms.

00:50:12.556 --> 00:50:16.286
So those can be billion dollar verticalizing agents.

00:50:16.655 --> 00:50:19.085
We want to hunt builders who can build that.

00:50:19.735 --> 00:50:21.945
And that is the purpose of this Agent Starter.

00:50:22.626 --> 00:50:26.085
We are actually going to release a request for agents, will be this week or next week.

00:50:26.615 --> 00:50:31.835
And the idea here is we have our initial lease of thesis of what these billion dollar agents might look like.

00:50:32.246 --> 00:50:35.365
It will be a ever expanding lease, but this is our initial set, right?

00:50:35.646 --> 00:50:40.655
So if you guys are builders, who want to build at this sector, reach out to this Agent Starter program.

00:50:40.795 --> 00:50:44.706
We are willing to fund, we are willing to support that growth for you guys.

00:50:45.025 --> 00:50:46.635
And it's going to be an international play.

00:50:46.885 --> 00:50:54.846
We are building out community nodes across SF, New York, Paris, probably we should do one in Lisbon as well.

00:50:55.346 --> 00:50:57.135
Hong Kong and Singapore, right?

00:50:57.135 --> 00:50:59.356
So these are initial notes and Korea as well.

00:50:59.525 --> 00:51:02.485
So these are initial notes and it will start scaling this across the world.

00:51:02.485 --> 00:51:04.496
So attracting builders is our key goal.

00:51:04.545 --> 00:51:08.916
And if you are a builder, reach out, DMs are open, we want to build with you.

00:51:09.416 --> 00:51:09.965
Awesome.

00:51:10.065 --> 00:51:11.925
One last question so we can wrap it up.

00:51:12.226 --> 00:51:19.326
Jansen, if you had a time machine and you could go back in time to when you started building, is there anything you would tell to that version of yourself?

00:51:19.826 --> 00:51:20.576
Oh, this is an interesting question.

00:51:20.936 --> 00:51:24.036
There was stuff that I myself am disappointed in, right?

00:51:24.056 --> 00:51:25.985
But I wouldn't change things.

00:51:26.065 --> 00:51:28.266
I believe that everything happens because of reason.

00:51:28.275 --> 00:51:29.806
And when you look back, dots connect, right?

00:51:29.806 --> 00:51:31.545
Like you learned that you made a mistake.

00:51:31.545 --> 00:51:33.016
So you can learn from that for a reason.

00:51:33.675 --> 00:51:35.356
I don't think I would change anything much.

00:51:35.365 --> 00:51:41.996
It's just that I'll probably, if I could leave a note to my past self, it would be like a note of solace.

00:51:41.996 --> 00:51:47.286
Because honestly the journey in the past three years has been quite anxiety inducing.

00:51:47.556 --> 00:51:48.476
I'm actually balding a bit.

00:51:49.146 --> 00:51:51.755
I don't know if you can see, but the point is it's not easy.

00:51:52.085 --> 00:51:56.146
There are many times where you just wake up and you realize hey, shit, as a founder, am I doing the right thing?

00:51:56.771 --> 00:51:58.820
Am I going to just drive this entire business into the ground?

00:51:59.420 --> 00:52:08.661
I don't know where I'm putting my next foot at, but I have to paint a very strong vision of picture to my employees, to the world out there, right?

00:52:08.771 --> 00:52:11.050
And this is a struggle that everyone has.

00:52:11.561 --> 00:52:15.010
And this one book, I recommend a lot of founders who are facing this issue.

00:52:15.021 --> 00:52:19.371
Which is it's Ben Hovitz wrote this book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

00:52:19.940 --> 00:52:27.311
And I think it's a book that gives solace to founders because you will start noticing that other founders were in the same shoes.

00:52:28.344 --> 00:52:30.170
Everyone had that near death moment.

00:52:30.670 --> 00:52:31.099
Everyone.

00:52:31.530 --> 00:52:34.739
And I think probably you guys will have spoken to a lot of founders as well.

00:52:34.739 --> 00:52:40.539
So I think listening to some of these podcasts as well, it's great because it tells you as a founder is you know what, fuck it, just suck it up.

00:52:40.590 --> 00:52:42.030
You're not the only sad person in the world.

00:52:42.079 --> 00:52:43.969
Every other founder is actually facing the same issue.

00:52:44.030 --> 00:52:47.940
And yeah, many of them would die in the process, like as in fail in the process.

00:52:48.489 --> 00:52:57.530
But if you are lucky and you keep creating high probabilities for yourself for success, and you just keep working at it, then that chance might come.

00:52:58.023 --> 00:52:58.414
Yeah.

00:52:58.554 --> 00:53:04.704
That's one revelation that I'll probably put a note to my past self so that he knows at least, the journey wouldn't be that painful.

00:53:05.204 --> 00:53:06.134
I think that's pretty cool.

00:53:06.143 --> 00:53:08.643
When a AI agent invents time traveling.

00:53:08.934 --> 00:53:11.773
Maybe goes back to that version of yourself.

00:53:12.664 --> 00:53:13.264
Awesome.

00:53:13.563 --> 00:53:15.134
It was a pleasure to have you, Jansen.

00:53:15.184 --> 00:53:19.778
Where can people follow your stay up to date with the latest updates about Virtuals?

00:53:20.418 --> 00:53:24.458
Yeah, Twitter is where we're at@virtuals_ io.

00:53:24.831 --> 00:53:26.601
That's where most of the news are happening.

00:53:26.992 --> 00:53:29.791
If you want some raw unprocessed thoughts, you can follow me.

00:53:29.851 --> 00:53:32.717
I'm@ethermage E-T-H-E-R-M-A-G-E.

00:53:33.237 --> 00:53:38.257
I post like uncensored content there, so yeah, if you guys wanna jam as well, hit me up in the dms, happy to chat.

00:53:38.757 --> 00:53:39.206
Awesome.

00:53:39.246 --> 00:53:39.516
Thank you.

00:53:39.516 --> 00:53:40.436
It was a pleasure to have you.

00:53:40.936 --> 00:53:41.853
Pleasure was mine, sirs.

00:53:42.503 --> 00:53:47.653
Thanks for tuning in to the Chain Stories podcast, where disruptors become trailblazers.

00:53:47.934 --> 00:53:54.054
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00:53:59.673 --> 00:54:04.023
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