CRYPTO: Is It Quietly Transforming the Global Economy?

I'm Rufus Griskem, and I'm Kayla Bissinger, and this is the next big idea. Today, the crypto revolution is quietly happening. Is it actually Rufus? Yeah, I think it is. Rufus, if you pulled 50 people on the street, do you think they'd actually agree with that assertion you just made? You know, I'm not sure that they would. It's a great point, and it's a classic Gartner hype cycle case study. You have a new technology that is at first overhyped. Then when it doesn't deliver on its promise, it goes through what's called the trough of disillusionment. Right, so I think we saw this most clearly with driverless cars. In 2016, Elon Musk said, "I think we're less than two years away from complete autonomy." And yet here we are 10 years later, and we're still waiting. Exactly. And the trough of disillusionment in the case of driverless technology was brutal. Apple spent a decade and ten billion dollars trying to develop a self-driving car. They abruptly canceled the project. Uber and Lyft sold off their self-driving divisions because they were too expensive. They weren't seeing the return. The last 1% of driverless capability has turned out to be harder than the first 99%. But it's actually beginning to happen now. So Waymo is approaching half a million driverless rides a week in San Francisco, LA, and Phoenix alone. Yup, and Tesla has about 30 fully driverless robo taxis picking up passengers in Austin. It's a small number, but we're beginning to see a truly viable driverless car technology servicing. This is the phase that's called the slope of enlightenment in the Gartner hype cycle. And this is actually a really interesting place to be if you're an entrepreneur or an investor. Because the hype is still relatively low, but the potential of the technology is visible out there. Just right on the horizon line. Totally. And I would argue that that's where crypto technology is right now. We already remember the hype. Right, in 2017, though, Winkle Voss twins were declared the first Bitcoin billionaires. Yeah, in 2022, Justin Bieber bought a board 8 NFT for $1.3 million. Sandbagman-free appeared on the cover of Fortune, hailed as the next Warren Buffett. Web 3 was all about blockchain, and Web 3 was the future. And of course, we know what happened next. Bieber's NFT, like many others, lost 98% of its value. FTX imploded going from $32 billion to bankruptcy in 72 hours, I think it was. And Sandbagman-free went to prison. Where he still sits. And Bitcoin value has bounced around. But the public narrative has remained pretty bearish. Meanwhile, however, in parallel, as the hype has died down, the real work of building a blockchain-based infrastructure has been underway. Last July, the Genius Act, I looked this up, it stands for Guiding and Establishing National Innovation Through US Stable Coins. The Genius Act basically gave the green light for private US companies to issue digital versions of the US dollar. In this super safe format, mandating one-to-one reserves with US treasuries and cash. This was, despite rumors to the contrary, a bipartisan bill that predated Trump that's actually an aggressive move by US legislators to further solidify the US dollar as the global reserve currency. This is like critical. And export US technology as the backbone of the future global financial system. Now, there are a number of US companies building this new infrastructure. But the most interesting to my mind is this company called Circle. Circle issues USDC. It's the leading US dollar-denominated stablecoin. Yep. Circle went public last June, quickly blew past 20 billion dollars of market cap. It was widely described as the hottest IPO of the year. And our guest today, Wade for it, is Jeremy Alair, the CEO of Circle. He says they are just getting started. Now, I think it's important to say here that this episode is not a business or a stock market story. Now, we invited Jeremy on the show because he explains, in my mind, more clearly and persuasively than anyone else I've heard, what is happening? Not just here in the US but globally with blockchain technology and where it's headed. And I think also why it's critical to the future of artificial intelligence. Two P's in a pod, Jeremy likes to say, the combination of these technologies, AI and blockchain, it's pretty mind-blowing stuff. Over the next three to five years, the number of AI agents that exist in the world will explode. It might be 100 million, it might be a billion, it might be 500 billion. What's happening now with this new digital currency tokenization, blockchain infrastructure and AI is sort of the engines of a new economic system that's coming. I'm so excited to be having this conversation with you today. I have a cup of coffee here and I don't even need it because this conversation is my caffeine. That's all coming up after this quick break. Today's episode of the next big idea is sponsored by Shopify. Shopify gives you everything you need to sell online and in-person, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com/NBI. Jeremy, a layer welcome to the next big idea. Thank you. It's really great to be on the show. Jeremy, you've built from the ground up over the last decade, a company called Circle that has its mission to raise global economic prosperity through the frictionless exchange of value. You're setting out as far as I can tell to revolutionize the global financial system and you've had some success. Circles now, a public company with a market cap over $20 billion. You had a great last quarter. You announced a big new deal with Visa yesterday. This must be pretty gratifying after this long journey. It's been an exciting journey and as I like to say, Circle is still very much an early stage company and we're very early in kind of realizing that a lot of the ideas that we even had when we started the company and we're starting to see this kind of, you know, we can use whatever metaphor you want. This crossing of the chasm moment and the slope of enlightenment as they say in terms of this technology and the adoption of this technology all around the world. I'm really glad that you shared the company's mission, which really does animate everything that we do. I think when we started, we thought this technology, if realized in the ways that we thought, could do for the economic system, what the internet had done for information and media and communications and software delivery. That's pretty big because the economic system is a really big thing. There's still another 10 to 20 years to realize the ideas that we have. It's gratifying to be where we are, but it's also grounding as well because we're just getting our footing in some respects. I think it's interesting to start maybe at the very beginning, which is I believe this all began if we're taking a historical perspective with a layer sports cards, with baseball cards. You want to start at the beginning and tell us about your journey. Technically, a layer sports card was my first business venture when I was, I don't know, 14 or 15 years old. My brother and I had received some money from one of our grandparents passing away, a very small amount of money. My parents said, you should put in mutual funds and then you'll help pay for college expenses or whatever. I had gotten really immersed in baseball, but also very specifically, baseball cards. Lots of people have had that experience, but I got very excited about how you could apply what we now would call predictive analytics to look at the long term performance of baseball players and build models to then sort of say, either this rookie or this player is going to do well this year and therefore the value of the cards is going to go off. And you were using spreadsheets, I believe, right? This would have been the 1980s, so you were actually applying. This was an Apple 2 computer, but then it's interesting and I learned about arbitrage, I learned about all kinds of things, but it was fun. Actually, I did pretty good and I still have a huge amount of baseball cards, which I've promised my kids I'll never throw away. And then you went on, I mean, you had great historical timing, didn't you? I mean, I think of like, you know, Bill Gates had this early access to computers in the late 1960s and your timing was kind of perfect to stumble upon the early precursor of the internet just arguably at the right age. You want to tell us a little bit about that? I mean, look, I think there are kind of two things. One was I was able to embrace the personal computer revolution and all of its tools and everything at a very young age. And that was before everyone had PCs, right? So it was, it was that inspired me and sort of this concept of the democratization of technology, the democratization of computing. Even the early examples of online connectivity and things like that. So I was very inspired by all that the timing I think that you're describing is sort of I got really lucky in 1989 90 when I started college that my roommate worked for the college IT department doing system administration of their VACs, many computers, which meant that we got a direct line and ethernet, you know, directly into our dorm room. The college was connected to the internet, not because people had access to the internet, no one had access to the internet. It was there for research. And so research organizations within universities were connected with the government and then it became a research network and then research networks around the world were also set up and then they interop through TCP IP. So that was the early, that was the internet, it was sort of government and academic and research institutions, but I got access and it was just like boom, this incredible opening up of ideas and and I just literally became obsessed and kind of pivoted almost all my academic work to have something to do with the internet. And then when I graduated in 1993, my degree in political science and philosophy was not that useful coming out of a recession or in a recession at the time, but my deep passion about the internet as an infrastructure. And made it everything and it was very natural for me to become entrepreneurial around that I've read that you were specifically interested in tech protocol. And maybe this notion that interactive software running through these emerging web browsers can create a kind of metacompute. I mean, did you see that later? Yes, very early. So a couple of things I'd say, so in sort of learning about the internet, I wanted to literally understand every layer. And so like, what is an IP packet? What does that actually consist of? What does the transmission control protocol? What does it do? But you know, these abstractions that could allow structured information to be exchanged and discovered in different ways. And so there was the information sharing and communications protocols that I was like, holy cow. And what really got me interested was that these were open networks that were open protocols that had open public specifications. Most of them had open source libraries. And they were these permissionless global networks. I call it the DNA of the internet, this sort of DNA of the internet of open networks, open IP, open protocols, open source software. And understanding that and the power of that, that was the profound thing. We had Chris Dixon on the show. And he loves this notion of blockchain technology, not as a financial technology, but rather a form of distributed computers. It's like one big computer effectively, right? That establishes trust and enables computers to engage in transactions. And this really connects very directly to what you were just describing, which is the open protocols of the early internet. Because Chris's narrative is that we went from open protocols to these closed sort of Disneyland, corporate networks of Facebook and Google and all these big platforms. And he sees it as essential to the future of humanity, right, that we return to open protocols, but also that there are all sorts of advantages and how they operate. How does this connect to what what circle is doing what your mission is with circle and in broad strips, the future that you're all aiming to build? There are very few like big aha moments in my career, where I experienced a technology and sort of like this big bang, right? And so accessing Bitcoin, downloading and synchronizing a blockchain, conducting a transaction with that for the first time was absolutely one of those moments. I looked at that and said, holy crap, this is like a major missing layer of the internet. And the more I dove in and the more I was immersed in the technical subculture and the more people were talking about how you could evolve Bitcoin from where it was to a future state of blockchain networks that had, that were compute environments that could deploy programmable money and smart contracts where you could issue all kinds of data and assets. And you could actually turn these into economic engines, that got me excited. And so my co-founder and I, Sean, like we looked at that and said, oh, okay, like that's going to happen, like we could see exactly how that could happen. We didn't know exactly when that would happen, but we knew like there was energy around these ideas and they just made huge amounts of sense. And it was a necessary condition to evolve the role of the internet in society, to evolve the role of the internet to become the intermediation layer of economic activity and value exchange writ large. And that was incredibly compelling because it was like, wow, this is a kernel of a technology that will logically evolve into being a much more generalized operating system, basically. And now today, we're 12 years, 12 and a half years in and I think we're now entering a phase where this technology is maturing, the legal and regulatory frameworks are maturing, entrepreneurship is maturing, all this is maturing. And I think we're going into this era where we now have a new operating system platform or set of operating system platforms like we had with mobile operating systems or we had with web or cloud or other alongside another set of operating systems, which are AI foundation models and inference and come back to that. Like these these two piece two piece in a pod, there's a reason why these are emerging at the same time. Yes, yes, or or or at least it's it's felicitous that they're emerging. I actually believe in and this is sounds a little kooky, but I think of the internet as so that can organism that is has its own like kind of DNA and biological evolution to it. And I think this is a evolution of the organism of the internet and I think AI and absorbing machine learning and scale data and blockchain infrastructure and trustworthy compute and data and the kind of penetration of these deeper into what society is. I think there's a reason these kind of happen alongside each other. Interesting. Well, that's yeah, no, I buy that argument technologies in organism. What I think this will come back again later in our conversation. I have a cup of coffee here and I don't even need this conversation is my caffeine because I think that there are what you're describing is a kind of you know idealistic hopeful vision for a future more open more capable internet that's empowering to people around the world. There are also a lot of people right now who see crypto blockchain technology as something that's sort of a cynical they associate it with pump and dump you know NFTs right and we certainly had I think you were referring earlier to to gardeners. The gardener's hype cycle right which is you have these early inflated expectations of a new technology which we had with web three you know blockchain was going to be the whole next revolution you know a decade ago. Then AI kind of eclipsed the blockchain revolution you might say we've had sort of a trough of disillusionment a lot of people are still in where based on my conversations with friends in that trough disillusionment we're climbing out of it right now because we're starting to see the capability. Like people say where are we by historic analogy and I think we're in 2003 we had the dot com boom and bust we had people doing IPOs with PowerPoints you had massive hype cycles pump and dumps I mean frankly the stock market was was completely irrational and there were some very strong companies being built and technology companies being built and their stocks went down 98% and there's some of us in the world today but you know what's interesting about the analogy is that there are a lot of ideas about what this could do and how it could be transformative but the technology itself the legal reality of how to how to kind of safely use the technology and the technology itself were not ready. And if you go back to 1999 in 2000 it was the world wide weight no one had broadband there was why there were no mobile devices like you know the promise was people forgot the air and so you had a cat backs boom so we have some AI echoes here right you had a cat backs boom that then was latent for several years from 2000 2001 2002 2003 and then absorbed and then never never look back but you had a set of. Technology improvements that happened during that trough of disillusionment because people kept building and then the utility hit because there were enough conversion things happening that's where we are with crypto as well it's hit that point where the technology utility the legal clarity and the robustness of the infrastructure it's now and so we're we're now starting to see the apps. And the institutions and the major major parts of the global economic system connecting to this and governments actually realizing like this is actually a strategic technology area we need to support industrial development in this that's all kind of happening. I would say one other thing here which is maybe two things that are think a really important one is that crypto is a technology it is just a technology it is using applied cryptography to provide systems distributed and decentralized network systems for provable data provable transactions and provable compute that's what it does and that is incredibly powerful and in fact in a world where we've dealt with. Systems where data is hacked where the integrity of transactions is challenged where compute is very centralized like these are profound improvements to the materials that we have to work with to build software last thing I'll say is the bad actor side of all this is very real and there's the sort of financial bad actor side of it which is like this is because it's been unregulated in many areas. It's sort of led to like the worst behaviors of you know of an unregulated financial system right and so that people see and it's just like that's awful. But the other thing I say on that is the internet is the home of an incredibly diverse array of applications like we've got salesforce dot com which is this amazing thing or we've got. Open AI or you know whatever you think and then you have you have TikTok and Instagram yeah that are basically meme engines and you could argue that these are destructive they're addictive they're they're actually creating loneliness pandemics or whatever really really problematic things that are wasting people's time all this kind of stuff and I like NFT trading or meme coin trading is the same thing. But there's there's there's there's a there's a gambling part of it as well or or or other but like collect which is why we need regulation exactly because there I mean people will gamble people will exploit one another these are platforms but I think another layer to this that is confounding to a lot of people and confusing people's understanding of what's happening is this political layer right that we've had. The crypto bros and a lot of technologists in Silicon Valley become you know Trump supporters do you see this as politically charged yes and no I think. It was politically charged before the Trump administration I think that there was a set of political interests that were. Back by dimensions of industry that we're trying to destroy this technology or this development of this technology. Just speaking from my own experience here when I started circle I knew that to realize our vision that we would need to over time change global policy like literally G 20 policy we'd have to change the structure of law. In the biggest countries in the world in order to realize our vision and I was like well that sounds really hard most startup founders don't go yeah I'm going to go change some G 20 policy but it was clear that that would be needed and so we've always taken a position that. This is a breakthrough technology innovation it's going to have profound impact on society in the economy we need to have good policy making around this and so I was always walking in through the front door always talking to policy makers and educating them not just on either side of the quote unquote aisle but in China in Japan in the Middle East in Europe in markets all around the world meeting with governments and trying to explain what we're trying to do. And how to manage risks and what you know good policy making would be and so as I like to say circle is purple and it's actually one of the primary colors in our in our color palette and that's the reality I've you know we've been through three presidential administrations but how many changes in governments around the world like we're trying to do this on multi decade in a multi decade way trying to build a long term sort of systemic change in the infrastructure of how the economic system works like. You're going to you're going to be dealing with a lot of you know pivots and this and that policy environments and so on and so a binary point of view on this I just I think it's just really simplistic and I would say you know the other piece is whatever you may think about family members of an administration getting into a business area that is also being regulated at the same time whatever you may think of that. The actual regulations like the genius act like we worked on that for five years. The stable coin bill was driven by the Democrats like they really pushed for this for many years this really was a bipartisan. And it was totally bipartisan super majority in the Senate 300 some votes in the house you know only major piece of bipartisan legislation passed in Congress period and so I think like you know you have to kind of look at all that together. 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I think I'll just sort of step back and there's the financial system and then there's the kind of the economic system and their their shades on a spectrum or whatever they're slightly different the economic system is sort of how does capital get organized how to firms exist how are they governed who participates in that governance and then how do they participate in in the exchange of value to create things and or service things around the world the economic system is something where we want. More participants in the economic system we want more people to be productive in the economic system and to have fair value exchange in that and to access it and that economic system is becoming more internet native and so whether you're a graphic designer in Argentina or you're a prompt engineer in India you want to participate in this economic system and so the there's going to be change in the nature of the economic system to be more internet native. That's a key concept right it's like we went from companies being offline to being online and that actually was a big change you completely re engineered what it was to even be a company we're going to have companies go from where they are today to being on chain and and that's going to be a complete change in the structure of what a corporation is and how labor works and capital works and how AI interacts with that that's like a whole thing. Yeah, but then yeah, and it also affects just the velocity the speed the cadence at which businesses does and so I use this analogy with the internet as well which is when the marginal cost of storing and publishing information went to zero the amount of information published in the world like million next and when the marginal cost of sending and receiving a message went to zero the amount of messages sent in the world like million next when the marginal cost of creating and distributing software went to zero the amount of software created in the world like million we have these enormous things and so when the marginal cost of storing and moving value or the marginal cost of executing a financial contract when those go to zero and are available on global open interoperable platforms the amount of economic activity will million I actually believe we're in the decades ahead economic velocity and therefore I hope if we do this right economic participation could be dramatically different than it is today and so it's with that backdrop that you know that we're focused and I think it's in our mission statement literally and when people hear you increase global economic prosperity through the frictionless exchange of value that phrase frictionless exchange of value people think we mean payments no we don't the exchange of value is all aspects of what it is to have economic coordination and activity exchange of value is I have labor you have a need it's every facet of of the contracts that exist and the capital formation that happens and the ultimate participation in the governance and the rewards of governance and ownership it's like all this stuff is value exchange so it's a bigger bigger concept so I think coming back to the heart of your question which is what what needs to be addressed so there's this you know like I said there's a forward looking view of like what could the future state be and that's exciting we should go build that but then there's there's the more mundane which is the global financial system is a whole bunch of walled gardens that are siloed off and countries are like that and payment systems are like that and the reality is that whether you're a global corporation that's got to move money around for your your multinational operations and deals with many participants in many countries that deal with many currencies and the like and you're optimizing for the time value of money and there's huge amounts of trapped capital that's tied up in settlement systems are posted as collateral or you know not generating yield and then time delays and inefficiencies that affect your supply chain and affect your laborers and like all this stuff that's like the the hairy hairball of like the global money infrastructure for the biggest companies but then all the way down to to the individual which is you know I'm an individual I want a secure store of value I want to be able to save easily and I want to be able to exchange value with anyone in the world instantly without any of these time delays or fees or exorbitant costs and so the cross-border examples are obviously one that a lot of people talk about where you know the average cost of you know remitting money is still incredibly egregious and the markups that go into that and the like and the time delays that really so specifically here we're talking about an immigrant in the United States who wants to send a remittance back to their support their family overseas and they're just extortion at fees that they're paying that's exactly right and and their time delays and their fees and it's unsafe because they're literally picking up cash and their criminal targets in many cases like those people in those home countries are are getting currencies that are being debased and are losing value all the time and there's the you know that they're there that's a real problem right so as an example you know usdc today it's growing all around the world and it's growing in places where people want digital dollars they want to use money like they use WhatsApp like I can just like use this this and it doesn't matter if I'm in Bolivia or Venezuela or in you know Spain or Africa or wherever I am doesn't matter and then the you know the small medium enterprises who are in you know say companies in Latin America buying goods from suppliers in Asia like the suppliers in Asia actually want to receive usdc because it's instant they can settle directly over the internet with each other and so there the businesses are saying I want to do this likewise they're like I want my working capital in digital dollars I don't want to take my local bank risk because there's bank failures are consistent I want to hold like a fully reserved digital dollar and now I have a medium of exchange a store of value and something that from an efficiency perspective really great and now you're seeing the biggest companies in the world say wait a minute I can actually do this differently it be helpful to describe what usdc is that this is this is a stable coin fully secured a core product of circle could you explain the listeners what the product is absolutely so so circle operates the largest regulated stable coin network in the world the most popular is usdc but it's as a network we all understand networks like from other areas but it's a network in that there's a set of network protocols that are public and on the internet like HTTP is an example the web protocol right so the usdc itself is a public protocol it exists on top of all the different blockchains that are out there and as an end user like I have a browser where I can access an HTML webpage if I have a web through wallet or a wallet that can access the usdc protocol I now have the ability to store and transact directly in usdc on this network and so there are tens of thousands of products and services that are integrated to this network and they're all kind of nodes on that network and if I've got you know cash app is just adding usdc if I've got cash app and then you're over here and you've got new bank in Brazil now I can just beam you usdc directly and so there's this network and that's all around the world in 190 countries through tons of different products and services that are connected and then we also actually issue the digital dollars that flow on this network so circle is the issuer of usdc usdc is known as a dollar stablecoin and it's designed differently than a bank deposit it's actually much safer so if you give us a dollar we then hold that dollar in the safest underlying dollar assets short term US government treasury bonds and a limited amount in cash held basically at the safest cash custodian banks in the world like Bank of New York Mellon as an example so we hold this one for one we don't take your money and invested in mortgages or invested in loans or proprietary trading which is what your other banks are doing right very fractional reserve. So we hold it one for one and you get the digital currency from us and then it gets into circulation and then on that network of all the products and services and protocols and exchanges and all these things in the world that support it it now has utility. Okay, and so it's it's much faster and it's much cheaper right people can do these transactions instantaneously now what some people would say here is do we need the blockchain to have faster cheaper currency we know that we have you know digital currencies emerging all over the world many of us use Venmo or sell or Apple Pay but why can't we have centralized systems that can do this instantly and cheaply or arguably they'd be even less cumbersome in terms of process. This is like why I have a well and they have all the content on there that I need like why would I need the web like why would I when I have a well it's because there's more content than than what a well cares about right like the internet has delivered an expectation in society that we are always on always connected and we can exchange whatever it is directly with anyone in the world whether it's information or communications or software or media that that's what's there we don't have that in the financial system we don't have anything remotely close to that like try to use Venmo to send 500 million dollars to a corporation that you're buying oil from you're not going to do that it's not designed for that okay well you know so you need a general purpose general architecture system of money on the internet that can scale from an AI agent paying another AI agent 25 cents for some tokens to be able to execute some AI work in an automated trustworthy way and you need that to all scale up to the biggest trading firms in the world settling multi hundred million dollar transactions in capital markets and everything in between and that's literally what usdc supports it's scalable across all of these and it's unlike these wall gardens that exist that are either country specific or company specific this is an open public internet infrastructure and not only that but by building on this open infrastructure and in particular on blockchains blockchains provide that that assurance layer that I can deal with the counterparty without trusting an intermediary and so that buyer of widgets in Brazil from you know Vietnam or whatever like I have a direct way to conduct business now together and that's very powerful and then the next piece of it is that money has never itself been like a native type of data on the internet and now it is and because of the because of blockchains and the ability to write smart contracts we now have programmability of money which will unlock incredible new utility for money that has existed before so now we have programmable money which is the highest utility form of money that's ever been invented and so we get the creativity of software creators and engineers and entrepreneurs to kind of innovate with money in completely new ways and so you know you're building a more open more global more accessible more efficient scalable model that also is a creative surface for software creators and entrepreneurs to build on top of that you don't get with these other things but still you would say you can have every country in the world can create their own digital currency but they're not interoperable you're going to have to have a foundational system and there's also the question of security right and we've seen in our conventional system like we we've covered the advantages of speed and efficiency low cost interoperability and there's also this question of security we had I think you know Silicon Valley bank you know collapsed a few years back I think you all actually had had an account there there for a few billion markets you were hit by that this gets into sort of the financial stability characteristics as well which is you know what we're pursuing is a model where you have full reserve money that is used as the money in kind of the payment system and then you have credit and lending separate from that right now they're intermingled right and so you create the situation where people have money that they think is there but it's actually not there it's been lent out 12 times and so if everybody who had their money deposited wants it back at the same time it's not there only a fraction of it is actually there which is the very nature of a fractional reserve banking system a full reserve banking model is the dollars of the dollar is the dollar you could lend the dollar but you can't lend it twice you can only lend it once and so there is still the ability to perform the function of lending and issuing credit similar like private credit today private credit is not fractional reserve models it's I'm an investor with money who is willing to lend that money to a borrower of money and agreed upon interest rate in a fund structure what have you and there are lots of examples like that and so I think this gets into you know our our goal of trying to create a safer financial system and then at a security level cryptographic computing networks actually provide security assurances that are very different than the centralized systems that we've had in the past and so these sort of decentralized networks with security models on them is a big breakthrough innovation we needed crypto in order to be able to get real value on the internet real value was never actually on the internet real value was stored in proprietary databases behind you know centralized systems that were that had UX on top of them real values yeah actually now on the internet it's natively on the internet for more than 20 years J Eric Oliver has taught a course at the University of Chicago that students call life changing now he's turned it into a book it's called how to know yourself the art and science of discovering who you really are in it Eric draws on neuroscience psychology physics and ancient philosophy to explore the big question what is this thing we call me this is not a book of quick fixes or live hacks it's a deeper look at what it actually means to be a person to have a self and how that understanding can change the way you live Nicholas Eppley one of my favorite researchers calls it a tour to force full of interesting facts and findings that yourself will be happy to have read and won't forget you can get a copy of how to know yourself wherever books are sold or by following the link in the episode notes the genius act which just passed in July was a really big deal for you guys it's a big deal for the future of our financial system and it's quite a departure as I understand it from how other countries around the world have been approaching this sort of digital revolution of money as I understand it most you know the EU Japan most of these countries around the world are issuing their own digital money the US is made a decision that this should be we should have private sector companies like circle issuing stable coins it's not something the government's going to do and that we're going to embrace this this blockchain foundation for the internet and for the future of money I mean so that's that's a pretty big deal what do you see is the consequences of that and how does it that there's going to be a process that there's a little bit of tension really between the US and other countries in terms of how this is going to play out there actually was kind of a G 20 mandate almost five years ago where the G 20 got together and said we need to have stable coin regulations put in place by all G 20 members and there was a sort of policy recommendations about how to do it and then G 20 members went off and started working on it Japan was first they got stable coin rules in place Europe was second and the US is working on as I said for like four years like working on a stable coin bill and so it was being worked on and I think you're you're right in that in the background there was this sort of well there's like blockchains and stable coins and what that represents and then there's like government issued digital currency but there really hasn't been any government issued digital currency at all and even the biggest experiment with that in China has just not it's just dump in successful it barely does any transactions known uses it but people are using alley pay which does also go through a centralized system. So alley pay and 10 cent yes are like PayPal and cash app to their domestic market and so they're like the kind of classical fintech but users in China they prefer the private sector products basically is one was another way to put it but I think coming back to the genius act and what this means is the gear exactly right that the genius act in shrines in federal law a model for a new form of dollar electronic money in the global financial system which is this full reserve digital currency blockchain enabled money that's a big deal that is now here it's part of the financial system it's now going to be able to be used by everyone I mean earlier this week J.P. Morgan for example launch day new tokenized money market fund and you use USTC as a way to you know purchase redeem it. Yes you noted at the intro right visa is making USTC like part of the back plane of how they actually settle with card issuers around the world which is really really cool. So genius act sort of unlocks that as like this is now a new representation of a dollar and a new infrastructure for transacting and remediating etc. Now the US model is actually not that different from the Japan laws or the EU laws or the UAE laws there are variances amongst them and now there's like stablecoin laws coming in Turkey in Brazil in you know Kazakhstan in you know in in many many places. And I think what we'll see over 2026 all over the world there's going to be stablecoin laws and they will have to deal with US dollar stablecoins that have that are regulated on supervised under the genius act and the genius act actually creates a framework for reciprocity. So if your regime is substantially similar to the US regime then let's say you're a stablecoin issuer in Japan and it's substantially similar those yen stablecoins can come and transact in the United States. And so it's kind of creating a regulatory a baseline in a sense and yeah it will probably take another four or five years to get kind of harmonization of this and it may not be total harmonization but it will be some harmonization. But I think it's a pivotal moment in an attorney point and I think the other piece which is I think is the geopolitical kind of in due economic dimension of this I just was at the council on foreign relations doing a talk on this topic or having a leading dialogue on this topic which is you know the genius act is an expression of a national security national economic agenda which is it creates a way to export digital dollars around the world to strengthen the role of the world. Try to continue to make dollar digital currency the primary currency of the internet and advances the United States into doing it. Part of what's at stake we had Ray Dalio on the show and he convinced me that that most of us don't understand how critical it is that the US dollar is a global reserve currency that our ability to you know bounce back from recessions and have influence all over the world is profoundly stronger because the US we take it for granted. But it's a major major deal of the exorbitant privilege right exactly and there was a time when there was fear the Bitcoin might might replace the US dollar now it looks like stable coins are more likely to undergird you know future digital currencies. I read an article on on the IMF website making the case that the introduction of USD peg stable coins could further strengthen the US dollars a global reserve currency other countries around the world may have mixed feelings about this and I imagine that's part of why the genius act got the bipartisan support that it did is that. I think that's correct there's also you know embedded in the genius act is this introduction of the concept of narrow banking which is essentially this full reserve banking you know earlier this week or last week we announced that we had received conditional approval for a new national trust bank that circle is establishing called first national digital currency bank. So first national digital currency bank will be a full reserve digital currency bank that is structurally a trust bank so we don't make loans we can't make loans we can only hold safe custody of reserves and issue this digital currency so it creates a construct for a new building block. For how the financial system could work so it's not only exporting the dollar it's sort of exporting this kind of notion of a new form of safe money issuance and distribution but I think we have to ask ourselves in 10 years in 15 years what is the future state of the international monetary structure in a world where the. The internet is in the core fabric of the economic system and in a world where the vast majority of corporate forms that exist exist primarily in software and where the vast majority of work that's conducted an economic coordination is amongst AI agents and incredible velocities like yes what we're designing for does it make sense to have like 990 currencies are we going to be in a different place. And are we going to be coordinating differently at a global level in that word I sure think we will and so you have to step back and think about where we're headed and if you just look back at the last 50 years or 75 years or whatever and say well this is the way it's been it's going to we have to defend that I just I just think that's wrong. The architecture of the global economic system is going to change it's being driven by these technological revolutions just like the industrial revolution and the development of the joint stock corporation and modern capital markets were engines for. Industrial revolution like I think what's happening now with this new digital currency tokenization blockchain and for an AI is sort of the engines of. A new economic system that's coming this gets into what in my mind is really the most exciting part of the conversation which is some of the new things were we're going to be able to do it we're starting to do before we do that I just want to ask very quickly. As it affects circles specifically arguably the genius act is a huge tailwind for you guys at the same time I was somewhat surprised looking at the markets to see that circle heads market cap hit a high and June and is now like a third that level and clearly part of what's happening is the market is saying. The mode is reduced it's much easier for many different companies to issue US dollar denominated stable coins I asked Gemini three wire stock was down it said the markets repricing circle from a high growth tech monopoly to a low margin public utility. By Gemini's view here at all just for perspective in fact it was announced this morning by an independent organization that focuses on capital markets that circle was the most successful IPO of 2025 we feel great about where the company is obviously we see huge amounts of latent value in the company and future value in the company I would say a couple of things I think one is we saw the stock obviously trade. A thousand percent I mean you have to kind of ask yourself what's going on with that and I think the circle IPO many people feel like kicked off an IPO frenzy and kicked off an opening of a market cycle and all that and so on the other is we've delivered great results we've expanded our market share we've had very strong growth and. We see tremendous opportunities in growth and the number of amazing companies that want to partner with us and built things with us and our opportunities internationally. There's strong as ever and technology advancements as strong as ever and so the market is going to do different things and you're going to have macro cyclical stuff and interest rate fears and you're going to have tech sell offs and you know all this sort of stuff and there's all these like factors but like you got to look out and look at what is the true the true long term potential here and that's what we're focused on is building that and the bad would be because you're likely to have the JP Morgan's and pay pals and other entities. Issue competitors to US DC potentially in terms of like you know dollar pegged stablecoin currencies but you guys are arguably the tech innovator I mean there's so much innovation that will need to happen that's underway is that is that the argument. I mean there's a couple things I think one is there's yes there's a huge amount of innovation to happen the other is that I don't think people understand that stablecoins are a network business and the stablecoin networks. Have massive network effects they have kind of end user utility network effects so tens of thousands of products and services are integrated that then create utility and so if I'm someone who's saying hey I want to utilize stablecoins in my product or service. Like you're at a huge disadvantage if you don't plug into the US DC stablecoin network because you get interoperability with everything that's already there and then that drives developer flywheel so developers say okay. It's sort of like I'm going to build for iOS I'm going to build for Android because that's where the users are right so you get user activity interoperability at scale. And so you get these very powerful developer flywheels and then you've liquidity network effects people fail to understand that as well which is there is a massive amount of work to build scaled liquidity in a stablecoin and that's like primary liquidity and infrastructure around the world it's secondary liquidity in platforms and all around the world and that's really essential that's sort of like the network effects of a currency is it easy to get the currency is it easy to transact the currency is it. Is it widely available all around the world into banking systems around the world and so on and so these are very and that has to do also with the the infrastructure build to make it available on all these blockchains the infrastructure build to connect it into the financial plumbing of of regions around the world so there's a huge amount there and then the second is you know circle itself we're building a full stack internet platform. Yes we're building an operating system infrastructure we're building this digital asset layer which is our core today and we're building application utilities as well and we have two application utilities that one is launched we have another that will launch. And we're in the process of launching this economic operating system arc and these all represent very significant opportunities for us and in fact in many of these we're completely stablecoin neutral we want there to be. A thriving market of stablecoins including stablecoins and other currencies especially so that you can actually seamlessly have convertibility in real time on the internet amongst these and so it is layer of our stack right there's a kind of market neutrality to what we do and some people interact with us at different layers and so we're becoming a very different company and obviously that we have to execute all that and grow it but right now I think yeah we're very excited about. This diversification and becoming a broader internet platform business. Let's talk about the intersection between AI and the blockchain how do you think about this like I said earlier two piece in pod. These are technologies that are literally made for each other and and why so there's kind of two big dimensions of this one dimension is that one of the greatest problems that people see with AI is about what is truth. And how do I know that the work that's being performed is accurate and how do I know as a creator of data for example how do I know that my data is being accessed fairly blockchain infrastructure allows you to have a number of things that allows you to have cryptographic proof of the provenance of data. So it makes it possible for people who would say supply data to AI models to have proof of that and then to also create compensation schemes around it as AI conducts work it allows you to effectively have cryptographic kind of proofs of the work performed as well. And that kind of truth machine aspect of of blockchains is very important and I think having kind of open global publicly available infrastructure that AI systems can interact with becomes very very important and so I think you'll see more and more of that kind of pairing together for that dimension. The other dimension which is one that we are very focused on is what is economic coordination and what is economic value exchange look like in a world of mass proliferation of AI agents and this is a fundamental premise is one of the design centers of arc for circle is we believe over the next three to five years that the number of AI agents that exist in the world. We'll explode it might be a hundred million it might be a billion it might be five hundred billion because the marginal cost of of an AI agent coming online is effectively zero that's right on the horizon and I think the entire structure of corporations will get redesigned around this corporations today are a formation of capital. They are a system of governance over that capital the treasury function of that capital and then there's a like a nexus of contracts and it's historically in a capitalist or even a Marxist ideology around the relationship of capital and labor labor manipulated things. Capital control the labor and you got output and you can decide who's got more you know does capital have more power does labor have more power what happens in a world where corporate forms are capital and labor is machines like what does that look like and it's really different and the number of human laborers obviously in those environments might be really different as well. I don't want to get side railed on on what happens like what do we do about that because I think that is that is part of our future but a world where. AI needs to conduct economic activity whether it's coordinating something between another AI agent where there's value exchange or you participating in or orchestrating or executing a contract of some sort to for for the production of something or work. That's going to get intermediated by these economic operating systems. This is happening right I we're already seeing wallets for AI agents AI agents using your currency US DC one astounding example of this is in the last two months an AI bought named I love circle which holds US DC made 2.2 million dollars betting on polymarket making thousands of trades with a 74% win rate. Right so we already have AI we do have a yes in fact I just tweeted yesterday this really cool video clip from this partnership that we've formed with this company called open mind and open mind is software for robots. And they basically integrated you know usdc and blockchain info that we're we're building as kind of the the medium of exchange for the robots and so these are robots that need to go. Get pay for charging and they're paying in micropayments to the charging device or the robots that need to coordinate between each other and they're paying each other directly as machines. In usdc you know we're an investor in a startup that is building an AI needed bank that can provide banking services to a eyes all kind of stablecoin usdc. You know based and and so you know a eyes will need banking services to and it's nascent but I think it will you know the rise of AI agents and the rise of the use of of blockchains and stablecoin infrastructure by AI agents I think they will be on parallel growth curves. And so not only do we see you know AI agents starting to become extremely good investors right I mean placing trades and hedge funds are deploying AI at scale and again starting to see AI agents. Making money on polymarket and making predictions about the future but this is also you said you referred to it earlier as a truth machine. It's also a way some people think now apparently that AI can solve for hallucination can self correct and effectively spend money in exchange for the truth right that this basically like polymarket forces AI to attach a probability to a belief. Yeah compare its assessments to the market place bets learn from mistakes so we I mean it starts to become possible to imagine a whole ecosystem of billions of AI agents trading data compute services with each other and using usdc potentially. And right writing and deploying and intermediating contracts as well right this is this is like the compute layer right there's a compute layer and there's a money movement layer. And the contracts are also really really critical like I want to create a contract for some set of deliverables by an AI agent and the contract fires on different events that occur that then automate different economic releases and the like and provide the contract can observe. Cryptographic proofs of of data events that for example are there and so it's not just the hey I can move I can move money it's actually the performance of the work and the contracts for the work written in code intermediate by these blockchain software machines that are intermediate by these AI agent machines. And so here we start to see how AI and blockchain and stable coins becomes the foundation for a new kind of economic organism effect that we can just basically imagine new kinds of companies effectively that are internet native where let's say you have a half dozen humans but you've got thousands of of AI agents and they're able to. I mean because the cognitive velocity of AI is one to two million times faster than the speed of a human brain right the ability to make decisions engage in transactions. And so it all of the extend legal contracts for a given organization and just move orders of magnitude faster I mean it seems that it's going to be very hard for human only companies to come totally with these hybrid organisms and you need this blockchain trust layer yes in order for that to work and in fact I believe that the those corporations will exist entirely on chain. There will be digital tokens that represent ownership and governance of those corporations all the money of those corporations will be on chain all the contracts will be in smart contracts and you know the entirety of those organizations from a from a kind of financial and economic perspective will will be executing as software on chain. And that will be the smartest way to construct a corporation this again coming back to Christian and we have three and why the upcoming clarity act which is the next major piece of legislation the United States is so important is it begins to establish a legal basis for digital tokens as mechanisms of of something that can go from capital formation to governance and incentive design that can then coordinate work. And have stakeholder participation in them really creates the basis for these new corporate forms that are that are not yet fully realized but that will yeah. So to me this this sounds extremely exciting and a little bit scary right because I mean at at some point one thinks like okay this all makes sense we can see this dramatically faster pace of action and execution of of these new kinds of you know blockchain AI powered companies effectively but to the humans become a liability are the are the humans in this new kinds of internet native companies actually providing more value. What points is that change how do you think about that I mean look this is in my mind as I kind of travel around the world and interacting with a lot of different leaders policy leaders technology leaders. There's economic leaders this is top of mind we have a K shaped economy right and it's going to be further K shaped right where capital continues to a crew at the top and capital crews to the people who have you know the capital to to implement this infrastructure there may be mass labor displacement globally right what we do about that is really the question so these are broader social political economic questions and I think. These are going to require novel policy solutions right I'm not of the view that like we're just going to grow away through it and you know they're going to be ten times more new jobs that are created from this than there are eliminated I think the social contract needs it needs an update global yeah it's an interesting moment to look at just this just kind of extraordinary reflection point we're at in terms of technology what's becoming possible. And also the necessity of being really thoughtful about the decisions we make as a species and I'm guessing you would say that the blockchain layer of this kind of future economy and global tech stack. We'll have the benefit of providing more security more truth more transparency and that it's a net positive in this it also has the significant potential to provide greater participation in these economic organisms and greater roles for participants to be involved in governance like when I think about you know there's these new corporate forms I also think about how do we evolve governance what a stakeholder governance really look like. And I'm excited about the material that we have to work with in terms of of decision making and governance of these new kinds of economic organisms and I think that's a place where we should encourage. Significant innovation and the interlinking governance amongst these these corporate forms as well so I think like that's one of the things that blockchains and smart contracts and digital tokens give us is innovations in voting and governance participation. And that are existing systems don't really provide so there's opportunities there that can be tremendous not just to make this kind of AI blockchain world work well but also to bring the benefits of that to more humans as well. And hopefully we can use these technologies for distribution of both resources and agencies in the world to come. Thank you so much for your time this morning what what a fascinating conversation really enjoyed it really enjoyed it thank you. You know rivers I think I owe you an apology because when you first pitch Jeremy as a guest I was a little bit dubious obviously I really respect where he's done and what he's built but I was like it's not really the show we don't only have CEOs on he hasn't written a book but wow that was just totally a mind expanding conversation he was great you guys covered so much ground it really knocked my socks off so apologies. Apology accepted yeah you know when you think about the fact that he had to persuade you know not only investors central bankers legislators you know he's been at this for more than a decade and it's not surprising that he's become one of the most effective if not the most effective communicator on this topic that we've encountered totally. There is a lot to digest there if technologies or organisms I hope they're nice ones. Yeah I kind of feel like the blockchain is maybe loyal dog but AI is more like a wily cat. Yeah hopefully the domestic varieties you know we talked for almost two hours with Jeremy and we didn't even get to some of my favorite applications of the blockchain. We talked about tokenization of US dollars in the form of stable coins like USDC but we didn't talk about tokenization of illiquid assets like real estate fine art carbon credits. Wouldn't it be cool if you could buy a little slice of your favorite van go painting and get the upside or 5% of a country house with friends you could schedule time in the house through a smart contract and avoid lawyers. And I think you can already do this to some extent but it's early days and it's still like wildly cumbersome. True the clarity act which Jeremy mentioned is a major piece of legislation coming on the heels of the genius act that will provide the legal framework for tokenization. It's already passed the house and it's moved to the senate black rock and JP Morgan are already preparing tokenized real estate and tokenized private equity funds that are designed to launch the moment this law is signed. And then there's health care so we're starting to see the rise of on chain medical records where you own your data but when you visit a new doctor you can grant them temporary access via private key so they can look into your records so cool. I'm particularly fond of these sites decentralized science you can fund your favorite scientists and own a stake in the future value of the drugs or technologies they create. Oh I like that how about deep high where you fund your favorite podcasters and you own a stake in the future episodes they make now you're talking. Today's episode was produced by Kayla Bissinger that's me sound designed by Mike toda special thanks to Jeremy a lair Amy Dudley and the team at circle. I'm Rufus Griscum see you next week.