Ryan & David debriefing the Worldcoin episode.
 
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Hey guys, this is called a debrief episode.

It's an episode that David and I record right after the podcast.

I think it took us a while to catch up after the episode with WorldCoin.

But we wanted to release this on the public feed so everyone has access to it and you can see our thoughts coming out of the conversation with WorldCoin.

Usually this debrief is available only for Bankless citizens, available on the Bankless Premium RSS feed, but today we are releasing it publicly.

This should give you some insight into the conversation we just had with WorldCoin.

Hey guys, welcome to the debrief after the episode that I wasn't on with WorldCoin.

thing about debriefs is it doesn't matter.

We had on Sam Altman and Alex Boulania of WorldCoin.

First time Sam Altman's been on the show.

And so yeah, it was, so you weren't there, so I have to tell you about what the episode was about.

So it was just a straightforward download on WorldCoin.

So for people who had never heard about word world coin before this would be a great episode for them talked a little bit about like the drama about world coins launch which we actually had a not like a Wasn't like we how we had a play in the we had like a quick story about the the Worldcoin launch way back when because they were gonna come on the show And then their PR company canceled because you sent out the tweet what the fuck is going on with the world coin and the PR company Thought it was hella hostile so they were out.

Yeah, you don't remember you guys bring that up

Not in the recording, but afterwards yes And Alex was like oh yeah, we fired those people for like a long ago, and like, they were terrible.

I like, Okay, so that put a bad taste in my mouth when that happened.

The only 2 times that's happened, actually, besides maybe, I won't count Charles from Cardano, but Gavin Wood.

We were like, hey, could it, and then could Gavin come in the podcast haven't explored the polka dot ecosystem and Then like I think maybe a few days before

Yeah, the the comms lead at polka dot reached out and was like, hey I you know, we went back through some of your previous tweets years ago, and we don't like what you, I mean, and Gavin's not going to come on the podcast, so we should cancel this.

And tried to substitute someone else at Polkadot in the podcast.

And I think I asked for what the offending tweets were,

Anyway, that kind of puts a bad taste in my mouth when projects do that, but yeah, I guess they're saying It

was a PR firm It was a company and I knew that it was we knew that it was because like when the PR company like cancelled on The show originally on us that I went to Alex just straight on Twitter and I was like, hey, fuck your PR company.

Like you need to, you're getting, WorldCoin is getting the absolute shit slammed on them right now.

Like the backing away from like the public spotlight is, this is not the right time

Everyone is asking the questions that we would ask you on a podcast.

And so I basically said that to Alex and DM.

I was like, you need to ignore your PR company.

Mainly, A, that was very valid and real and authentic advice, and B, I also did not want to emergency find another up He just like he he didn't he didn't go for it anyways The cool trivia about that episode is the episode that came out of that was ultra scalable aetherium Which turned out to be an absolute banger?

Anyway, so that was the precursor to this whole story.

So finally, that was like, that had to have been over a year ago.

Now, WorldCoin is still around, still building, has won some hearts and minds to have joined the team and support the effort.

DCBuilder, I don't know if you know that name floating around on crypto Twitter.

Zero-knowledge cryptography researcher guy that everyone generally trusts and appreciates in this space.

Optimism and WorldCoin are collaborating on OP mainnet slash OP stack stuff.

I think they still have a major uphill battle.

Okay, so let me just say 2 things about this.

1 is I am very excited to listen to this episode, actually, and thankless listeners should know, I'm coming in the debrief not having listened to the episode.

So we actually are recording this because schedules, David was in Zuzalu and just schedules permitting.

We're recording this, I think like weeks later, really, this debrief, but I still haven't listened to the episode and I am excited to listen to it.

And I intend to go into this episode with an open mind.

I also don't think it will answer all of my questions.

Yeah, it'll open up the door for other questions.

And I think 1 of my big questions is around sort of probably the privacy of this network.

Probably like how decentralized really is it?

I'm actually not sure what series of questions this will completely unlock.

But I guess I don't want to hear a VC marketing machine tell me these things.

I want to hear like independent community, like representatives in that people that I respect in privacy and decentralization talk about these things.

The other part I would say, I think that they are just, it's just hard.

I mean, I said this on the roll up last week, David, but like the crypto bros wanna orb you, right?

mean, to what, to capture identity and who's behind it?

It's the guy who's building the most powerful AI in the world, Sam Altman.

And Like, I don't know, that's an uphill marketing battle, I think.

If you're going to do something of this type of magnitude and make these types of vision commitments, then I think like, you owe the world a commensurate level of transparency, auditability, openness.

And they say all of that stuff is on their roadmap.

I think like there are some projects out there that are very in the crypto world that are very like beloved Like get coin comes to mind Protocol guild optimism I would say it has some of this world coin has like the opposite of that It's like ooh Whatever it's the opposite of beloved.

I don't know but it's like it's easy to hate world coin just by a nature of what it is, which is like if you trust world coin and believe world coin, then it's like totally unfair because they're doing the same thing.

But you just said so you just said, David, you're trusted.

Why are you a trusting individual after all the shit we've gone through in crypto?

Like, why would you trust anybody in this space to do any like...

I was a trusting individual before crypto, first off.

Hasn't crypto kind of like shown you to be less trusting in some cases, particularly when you have sort of the setup of large VC allocation, a coin, super ambitious kind of promises, lots of ways to cut corners.

Like, I'm not saying, but WorldCoin could be fantastic.

But I'm just saying the pattern fits many patterns we've seen in the past of like this not working out very well.

And I think that's what the white blood cells, the immune system of crypto is just kind of like indiscriminately attacking.

And I think if you want to get more precise in the white blood cells, you really have to go dive deep.

Most people don't have time to do that, including myself, honestly.

It's like, I'm going to be relying on third party privacy researchers, people in the crypto community I trust.

I'm going to do a little more, like, I'm going to be able to do levels of due diligence, but I can't vet this thing from the ground up.

Anyway, this trust, like, why should we trust what they say at all?

Like, why shouldn't we default posture to like, oh, this is a bunch of bullshit, and then, you know, work our way out of that.

So I will, I'm not going to make the case for why 1 should trust world coin, but I will make the argument for, let's see, I'm not, okay, let me just say that, start that again.

I'm not saying that you should trust WorldCoin, but here is the argument for like why you could, why there are some green flags here that are different from like all of the 2022 like mess that we don't want to go back to.

1 is like the idea, If you accept that the idea that biometric scanning is the most civil resistant mechanism to produce proof of humanity, then you get something like the orb.

And so you can start to like cast away the negative connotation that iris scanning and the orb has, which is like a source of like distrust.

It's just like the whole aesthetics of the whole thing.

So you can like try and shave that from your brain.

Then there's like, okay, VC, like allocation, serializing humans, like all that kind of stuff.

Like Maybe, what does Sam Altman have in it that like 3 Hours Capital or Doquan or SPF, he just doesn't fit those types.

Like, maybe if Alex Blania was loud on Twitter and- And they're not populous.

There's not, it doesn't seem like a get rich quick scheme.

They actually have a roadmap to produce something uniquely valuable and unique in and of itself to crypto.

I don't think it maps onto the whole things that we should.

VC, alternative layer, 1 that we've seen so many times?

I know it's not actually an alternative layer 1, so that alone makes it kind of different.

But we've seen many just ridiculously funded alternative layer ones that kind of like go liquid.

And then you just sort of get this feeling and kind of see the data that the VCs just dump on you once it gets into the market.

There's no builders, there's no community.

And so I guess where that usually turns into is not an outright scam, but just like, I don't know, exit, you become exit liquidity in some cases for VCs and then it becomes sort of a zombie chain, which is not like the worst outcome.

That's not like a SBF, FTX style outcome or Lunatera outcome, but it's still not a, It's not a great outcome.

There's 2 things that, there's 2 ways to approach like VC weighting.

There are like the easy, like, yo, let's fork Ethereum, fork the EVM, which the Ethereum researchers have been building for like almost a decade now, more than a decade now.

And then like, let's raise on it and then like, keep all the tokens for ourselves and dump on the followers.

So like, get other people to do the lift work, pump the token ourselves with our VC marketing dollars and then dump.

You're saying it's not like a fork, it's not like a Me Too of something else.

Right, like the VC raise, the amount, the VC dollars are legitimate because there's no way that they could get the orb mass produced in a way that other people can produce the orb.

And there's no way that they could get people to scan other eyeballs that aren't in the WorldCoin employees.

That whole Lyft side of things requires VC dollars.

It's a very legitimate use of a capital raise.

And then like the whole, like, so that just checks out to me.

So it still doesn't fit the mold of a typical VC exit scam kind of thing.

And I put scam in quotations because it's usually just ghost chain, low product market fit, where you become exit liquidity if you buy this particular token, but you don't have to buy this particular token.

And also it's not even the point of WorldCoin isn't even the token.

Proof of humanhood, the coin, and a missing 1.

There's the World App, which I think is pretty similar to World ID.

It's like, yeah, it's the wallet, your authentication.

But I guess that's pretty similar to World ID.

So right now they're deploying on OP mainnet and eventually they will make a OP stack chain.

And so this will be their own sort of, will it be like a layer 3 type chain or?

Which in theory like fits into the Optimism Superchain model.

So like as an OP stack chain, the app, so it's like an app specific chain.

And what does that app specific chain do?

It provides proof of humanhood the World Coin way to the OP superchain, which is eventually just Ethereum.

And by the way, the reason I'm coming in a little hotter in this is because I think this is how the white blood cells are.

I guess maybe the last, we don't have necessarily full satisfactory answers on what you just raised already, but I think you are offering some valid points of how this kind of breaks the pattern, typical pattern we've seen.

And I think that's what the crypto community is doing, pattern recognition.

But there's this third kind of negative pattern that I think people see, and that is the figure of Sam Altman, which is like, All right, tech bro.

In Congress, I mean, he has no equity in open AI.

Like, I just don't even know how this works.

I think that you can't necessarily take that at face value because like he could have no equity in open AI and then open AI could get liquidity and then he could get like a billion dollar grant from open AI.

So There's like roundabout ways where that doesn't really matter.

He feels like the Mark Zuckerberg of the 2020s in that he has created this technology that is clearly going to change everything about the fabric of the way humans organize and interact in open AI.

And so he is sort of this, and now we're at a phase I think in the world where like tech bros from Silicon Valley are like all kind of grouped into this parasitic extractor type of motif.

I think the majority of society though, just doesn't trust that sort of individual at this point in time.

And so I guess a question to you is like, or maybe just a question to mull over is like, is this guy legit?

Or is this guy going to be like somewhat evil or somewhat influenced by Moloch traps and all of the things that we've seen tech billionaires get influenced by leading to like bad outcomes for society.

I guess the question is, can you really trust Sam Altman is what it comes down to.

So yeah, the archetype of like the Web 2 extractor, the Zuck Web 2 idea, like I'm reminded of this quote from Sam Harris, where he was talking about how everyone is like, there are fewer people in the, like there's a modern movement to ignore expertise.

Like experts like told you to wear masks and they're wrong.

And so he was throwing a flag at that whole like movement that's going on in

So yeah, exactly Okay He's like the way that society progresses is like there are experts and then they say things and then we prove those experts wrong That's how society moves forward, but who actually proves experts wrong?

Other experts, like more experts, not the masses.

And so like in the, to carry over this analogy, Zuckerberg is the old expert, Sam Altman, who knows if he's a better, newer expert who proves the old archetype wrong, but as me as a trusting individual, I would like to leave that door open that the way through that bad branding for tech bro, VC tech bro founder innovator type is actually we find 1 that like does good for the world, like who fixes the problems.

Like it's not gonna be like the average Joe that solves proof of humanity, proof of humanhood in the AI world.

That's why he's a VC tech bro, is that's how you solve these problems.

And what was your impression of him during the conversation?

I'm slowly liking him more and more and more.

He see he seems authentic he seems nice He seemed he's he's not running away from the alignment problem

if he if he is good in the front and then bad in the back He is a world-class sociopath what

what does the the AI safety community think about this guy?

You can't ski is like burn down all the GPUs like,

I haven't really seen AI safety and alignment groups come out and like torch open AI or Sam Altman very publicly.

Is there the general impression in AI alignment communities that, hey, well, open AI is not perfect.

And they're not completely ignoring safety.

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DEBRIEF - Worldcoin