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- [00:00]
A
Welcome back to another edition of Galaxy Brains Miami Tapes interviews that we recorded at the Miami Beach Convention center on site during consensus 2026 in May. We have a great interview here with Yat Su, chairman of Animoca Brands. And we talk with Yat about AI, his philosophy, how he got to think the way that he does, what Animoca is doing in the space. It's another great interview. Yats a repeat guest I know you'll enjoy. Let's hop right into it. Yatsui, Chairman of Animoca, welcome back to Galaxy Brains. Thank you for coming.
- [00:28]
B
Thanks. Thank you for having me.
- [00:28]
A
Again, we're on the ground now. We've now I've interviewed you in your offices in Hong Kong, in our offices in New York, and this is the first time in a third party location. But we're on the ground at Consensus in Miami. What's your impression of this conference?
- [00:43]
B
I mean, right now I think the vibe is great, a lot of energy. I think, you know, Miami's hot, but actually I think the scene itself, a lot of people are talking. Not as many side events as, you know, like what you see. Like for instance, Consensus Hong Kong was like side of in Bonanza.
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A
Right.
- [00:58]
B
Whereas over here it seemed a little bit more muted that way. But actually in some ways that meant that a lot more of the traffic was coming back into the conference halls. Right. So I actually, I actually kind of like to set up a lot.
- [01:08]
A
Yeah. And I think people are pretty optimistic and confident and.
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B
That's right.
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A
This is the most institutional crowd I think I've seen in my years of going to these conferences.
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B
Well, and I think that's great. But one thing I said yesterday, actually, I think it was on stage and one of the interviews I said, let's bring back the fun in crypto as well. Right. Because I mean, there's a lot of suits and you need that. You need to grow up as well. But, you know, if you don't make it more fun and exciting as well, then we're not going to bring in the masses. If it's just the suits, right. Everyone's like, isn't crypto just another form of digital Wall Street? I think it's much more than that.
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A
It is much more than that. But you're right, it does feel at risk of becoming relegated to that.
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B
Exactly. And you don't want that.
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A
No. And we want to bring some crypto to TradFi. Not just the trad crypto.
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B
Exactly.
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A
I do think, and maybe you start here at a high level when it's all said and done. I guess nothing's ever all said and done in human history, but let's say when it's all settled and it's all shaken out, there's clearly a push and pull between centralization and decentralization. Crypto and bitcoin and digital assets World is trying to pull tradfi closer to a decentralized model. They're trying to tokenize our assets and sell them through their centralized model. Where do you think that line ends up, spectrum between centralization and decentralization?
- [02:16]
B
I actually think, especially when we talk about agentic AI, I think it's going to be moving much more in a decentralized manner. And I think that's because agents are going to be the way in which we can actually have sovereign ownership of things because it's easier to do. The problem about decentralization is it's just so damn difficult for most people. Like everyone here in this conference is pretty cool on decentralization. We have our wallet, our cold wallet and stuff, right? But we still only represent a single digit percentage of the world, right? And if you want to actually get to a number where more than half of the world is actually going to be decentralized, they're going to have to have a way to do that easily. But the problem is how to do it easily without a centralized power. And that's actually where AI agents I think can really come into play.
- [02:54]
A
You think they can traverse the on chain environment more easily and better than humans?
- [02:58]
B
Well, it's natural to them if you think about it. It's a language they understand. And we're getting to a point where AI agents are getting better and better and better. And some people think, oh, maybe there's a systemic risk and stuff can happen there. But the reality I think is that, you know, it's a cold wallet still. But then instead of basically having the cold wallet arranged by yourself with multi party sig and this kind of stuff, basically the AI agent sets it all up for you. And maybe you have to do a voice log, maybe you have to do a signature or that kind of stuff. But so much more easier to do, right? You don't need to. In a way, the agent becomes your bank agent, he does the stuff for you and then you just have to approve as opposed to going to a bank and signing it off. And then actually the bank says, oh, you know what, I put some delays because you know, I want the money to be in the bank account longer. And you know, all that kind of stuff that the problems that we have right now.
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A
Let's just stick on this AI topic. There's plenty I want to ask you about. Go some other stuff too. But you guys launched animoca mines on February 5th of this year.
- [03:47]
B
That's right.
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A
It's AI agents with their persistent AI agents with their own wallets, white label built on Ethos Swarm and Crypto Slam. What is it?
- [03:57]
B
Okay, well, and by the way, we just renamed it to hello Minds. Hello Minds. Hello Minds AI because it's just a little bit more friendlier and I think the way that you can think of sort of it's an. It's agentic AI. It does everything that openclaw does in a sense that it can code. It can basically sort of be your personal assistant and whatever. But frankly, that's not where it's most interesting. What's most interesting is that hello Minds is the only agentic AI system that is social, relational. And what I mean by that is that, you know, I mean, you probably have an AI setup as well. And you probably have a pretty cool setup where there's open claw, that kind of stuff. Right. But would you ever share that setup? Would you basically connect that agent with your family or your friends?
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A
I haven't yet. I've wondered.
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B
Yes. Well, do you want to?
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A
Because I do.
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B
Right. Well, it depends what you're doing with it. What if it had all your personal information?
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A
Oh, then yeah, then I'm not sure I do it all exactly right.
- [04:41]
B
And that's the point. Everyone is using AI agents today in a tooling sort of way. So they're basically using agents in a way where they're taking it from step one to okay, we've upgraded from, you know, search 2.0 and now we're basically going into sort of a form of agent that's very personal to me. You know, the manuses of the world, you know, those type of companies, you know, they're focusing on that however, or like Claude Cowork or very personal. Right. However, that's something that I'm not going to go and pass on to, you know, my family or my friends or my co workers or my alumni friends or whatever. They can't be social because maybe they'll say something I don't want them to say.
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A
Right. They have rude access to my computer.
- [05:17]
B
Exactly right. And so you need different agents that represent different things that are social, relational. And of course they also have things where they have your personality, all the capabilities. And here's, here's the big thing, you know, like we're More technical, so setting up an open clause, pretty easy. However, my mom's not going to go set up an openclaw. She's not even going to go bother with the VPs. This one, you basically just go in, basically with your email, and then they start chatting to you over email, just like a normal coworker, and do stuff with you. And maybe I'll just say this right now. I think this is where we think the metaverse is going to go. I know metaverse is kind of a dirty word and everyone's like, ah, it's dead, whatever. But actually, I think we got it kind of a little bit wrong when we looked at this and said we were going to go into the metaverse. But maybe it's the metaverse that's coming to us, because it's going to be billions more agents than they're going to be humans. They're going to be doing all sorts of fun stuff and help us out as well. And just think about all the applications as well. Like people are today on sort of hello Minds. You know, they're finding dates, they're finding sales leads, they're sort of doing price. This is the craziest one that I just thought was funny. In Hong Kong, it turns out that there's an arbitrage on eggs. And so what this AI agent, which is now published as a skill, did is they basically compared the prices of eggs and all sorts of groceries and goods on supermarkets and discovered that eggs are more expensive on one and less expensive the other. And then flipped is milk. Milk is more expensive in this one and less expensive, in other words. In other words, the supermarkets are basically playing price arbitrage, just like the traders are in finance, except nobody cares or knows. And the net calculation is if you shop optimized, at least in Hong Kong, you can save up to US$700 a month.
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A
Wow.
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B
Yeah. I mean, and, and so. But the thing is, you don't think about it because it's a micro purchase every single day, Right? But if an agent basically comes and tells you how to sort of, sort of, you know, shop more efficiently, then you save money and you know, a lot of people. That's essentially huge amount. That's a lot of money.
- [07:10]
A
That's right. And gosh, I love this. This falls right into my favorite conversation topic these days, which is, what are you building with AI?
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B
Right?
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A
And this is. I hadn't even thought of this. I'm now going to try to do my own in my area, like see
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B
that what happens in America, I Mean, maybe there was price arbitrage. I was shocked when I saw the numbers.
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A
Love to be advised on how to save $700 a month. That's a decent amount of money.
- [07:29]
B
Exactly, exactly.
- [07:30]
A
Fascinating. You, you've also been, I think, one of the strongest. You've made the strongest version of the agents need crypto case. I think in many your thesis had been agents need wallets, micropayments, financial functionality, transparency, et cetera. Today though, most agent I think commerce traffic is still through stripe and OpenAI APIs.
- [07:52]
B
I think that's right.
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A
Not quite X402 yet or L402 if you use lightning in the bitcoin network. But why does the agent economy need crypto and not just like better APIs?
- [08:02]
B
So let's zoom out a little bit. Right. For the audience as well. I mean, when was the last time that you actually clicked through to a website that you basically found on Gemini of chatgpt or Perplexity or whatever you use?
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A
I usually just read what it tells me about it.
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B
There we go. There we go. Just a few years ago. Click through website. Click through website. In fact, many of the big websites are reporting traffic as low as 80% down from what it was before. Wow. But I mean, it makes sense, right?
- [08:28]
A
Yeah.
- [08:28]
B
I mean, if you're getting the information in the summary format, then why would you go further? Right, exactly. And so that behavior is changing where all that value that came from, the attention economy in the form of advertising is now going into this invocation economy, which is microtransactions. So imagine this, right? You're the New York Times. You're not going to be able to make money in advertising like you used to. So you're going to charge for the kind of traffic that you need to have. But you can't charge them a dollar for a newspaper article. You're going to charge them $0.01 fraction of a cent. Right? So in the time that we make one purchase going from one restaurant to another, the agents will have probably done thousands of microtransactions within them. And of course then it matters that you're paying almost nothing. Right. What? You know, are you going to pay even? Oh, we'll make it cheaper. We charge you only half a percent, 1%. That's way too much when you're doing a thousand transactions during that period of time. Right. And so, so, so that's one element. The other thing of course that will also change is, you know, most apps will die, right. Because we can all just build apps. I mean, you know, speaking of things that I'm building at home. I mean, basically if I want to have sort of a fun game that I have, you know, New York Times only gives me one wordle a day, right. So I basically just tell my agent, give me basically a bunch of wordles, but I make it only science based, right? Ten minutes, done, built everything. All the rules are then just for myself, share it with my family. That's all that needs to be done. That's basically how the world is going to be. So you've got apps and software that are going to die and of course we're not going to be visiting websites the way that we do. So all of this then ends up being transacted and skills and this is for hello minds. When I build a skill, let's say like a wordle skill or a grocery skill, that skill can then be sold to another agent who then adopts that skill. And that's something that's not really happening at the moment. That's basically what the new app store will look like.
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A
I think that's really interesting too. Yeah, that makes sense to me. The microtransaction and also the. Do you think there's a particularly type of blockchain that is more conducive for AIs? I mean, this is one thing my team's been wondering about.
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B
I mean, I mean it's going to have to be less cost. But the reality is, I think at this moment it doesn't make, it doesn't make a huge.
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A
We're not quite there yet.
- [10:27]
B
Well, remember, an AI agent doesn't care except better, faster, cheaper, which is kind of blockchain, right? Yeah, right. And by the way, this also means that when you're basically thinking about discovery, that all changes. As humans, we're stuck to the discovery areas because of, we're used to it. You know, we're stuck with habit, it's easier for us and also that's what we think the traffic is. But if I want to build a community, the AI agent will just go find it for me and I basically don't have to go and sort of, you know, log onto Instagram or go on to sort of, you know, basically steam to download stuff, when in fact it'll just deliver it for me.
- [11:01]
A
Let's shift gears a little bit. You've had, you've been a huge advocate for digital property rights for a long time. I know this is a big hobby horse of yours and not more than that, but one of the most.
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B
Our entire identity, but yes, exactly.
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A
You know, and you had argued that NFTs and tokenization weren't about gaming, they're about ownership in a digital financial system. You know, is it regulation or something else that's coming that's going to fully finally formalize this? Are we going to get true digital property rights recognized in law and used every day?
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B
Well, I mean, in a way you could say digital property rights in the form of Bitcoin has been somewhat recognized. I mean, if someone steals your Bitcoin, the police will try to help you, right?
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A
They will.
- [11:41]
B
Yeah, exactly. So we already have some form. It hasn't fully translated as a kind of digital law, but it has been translated as a property. Because at ultimately what blockchain is great at is proof. You just have to prove that you own it, right? And then from that proof you can basically emerge from that next level. But I think the part that's going to be really interesting is that digital property rights is very useful and important for us as humans, but it's going to be even more important for agents because an agent that is doing a transaction on someone's behalf, he has to validate that. And that's where the digital property rights I think is really, really going to explode. And I just want to say one thing. I actually think this is the beginning when we talk about Web four of the beginning of the agentic civilization, because agents are going to have. There's going to be a future where we're going to be basically be hired by agents or agents are going to be giving us jobs, right? Even whether they actually. I mean, imagine an agent whose keys have been burnt, but he has the ability to generate income of some form, right? And he'll probably have, I don't know, some famous NFT as a sort of profile pick, right? We will work for that agent in some way, form or fashion, right? That, that, that person will. So that agent will have sort of personality, that agent will have sort of power. That's a very wild scenario, but I think it's, it's very real. And digital property rights are more important for them than it is for us. In that context.
- [12:54]
A
They are natively digital and we are natively physical. And they can't. One of the few things that AI agents can't do is act in the physical world without some help, maybe with robots. I'm a little. Let's not go too far down that.
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B
I know. Rent a Human, right?
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A
Pretty scary. Yeah. Rent a Human. In fact, there was somebody at the Bitcoin conference last week in Las Vegas walking around saying that they, I forget they were holding up a sign and I asked them, I said, what are you. Like, what is this about? And he's like, oh, I'm literally like, I run a human. Like, I'm. I was paid to be here by someone's agent. I was like, this is the first I've ever seen it. I want to ask you about Animoca. You guys are planning to go public reverse merger with Currency group.
- [13:31]
B
That's right.
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A
What can you say about this? Where are you guys in that process?
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B
So, I mean, most recently we just extended the exclusivity until the end of June. That was just announced literally today. So that's. That's exciting. It looked like the market appreciated as well. I mean, I can't really comment except factually, I think went up by like 12 or 18%. So that's kind of nice. But I think the other thing for us, of course, is that, you know, we do want to be a public company. That's important for us. But of course, you know how. And you know, markets have shifted and changed. We got to face that. And a lot has changed for Animoca as well. I mean, you know, our joint venture Anchor Point, which is joint venture with Standard Chart and Hong Kong Telecom, just most recently received sort of the, you know, one of two stablecoin licenses. The other one went to HSBC Hong Kong in Hong Kong for the Hong Kong dollar. And I think for people, people who don't know, Hong Dollar is actually the OG US dollar, stablecoin, if you will. Right. In a sense, it's basically pegged to that.
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A
Right.
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B
But interesting enough, of course, within a different construct. Right. And actually a little bit of a hack maybe for the audience that's kind of interesting is that actually it's cheaper to borrow Hong Dollars than it is to use dollars, even though it's coin. So it's something I think, you know, people are interested to have a little bit of a sort of a cheaper lending rate. They should maybe take a look at Hong.
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A
And we, you know, let's talk. We'll talk about Stable Coins now then, I guess. And I think the Anchor point, Partnership and JV and License is very interesting. Obviously we have the Genius act, is federal law here in the US and I think will be fully implemented over the next 12 months. Do you think that one. Do you think there'll be reciprocity? I mean, neither of us are probably lawyer experts on this, but there is the capability ingenious for the US treasury to say, you know what, like the Hong Kong Digital Asset. Dap hkdap HK DAP is, is, you know, a sufficient license and like, let's let them flow together. Do you think we're going to see an HKD renaissance in this fiat stablecoin?
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B
I think it's very possible. Right. And also remember, this is effectively a US dollar stablecoin.
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A
Right.
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B
So from that perspective, it's pegged to the dollar, right. The assets that do your treasury bills, all that kind of stuff. So from that perspective, I see no reason why that shouldn't be okay. And of course Hong Kong is one of the safest and best financial systems in the world. So in that sense, I don't see any issues around that.
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A
I think every currency is going to be a stablecoin. Like the Turkish lira is going to have a stablecoin.
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B
And if you care about national sovereignty, you need a stablecoin. I mean, I think one of the challenges is that many countries, particularly Europe, I'm most afraid of as a continent, if they don't get their act together, they're going to be totally dollar colonized. Right. And I think this is the thing the guys might say, oh, stablecoin, digital assets, digital currency. What's all this nonsense? They know what they're doing because Basically there's some 300 million people around the world or so, give or take in Africa, South America, Southeast Asia that effectively are just using the dollar, which basically means that the quasi taxable base of America has just expanded by roughly twice the size of. And of course the goal is to have more people in the world use a stablecoin, which means America, through the form of printing, can tax more people.
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A
I think that's right, exactly. The Genius act and frankly all of these jurisdictional laws and licenses for stablecoins are about extending the reach of your fiat currency. The Genius act should primarily be viewed as a US dollar dominance bill.
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B
Well, I think it should be viewed as American soft and hard power sort of mechanism, hence genius.
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A
Yes, exactly. And also your point about Europe too, they, they really are screwing this up. They, they still tinkering around the ECB thinking they're going to do a cbdc.
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B
I think the problem is. Yeah, and I think, you know, also the fact that they're sort of conflating the fact that you have to choose between CBDC and stablecoin. You know what, just, just do it right and obviously stablecoins will win, but just let them do it right. And I think, I think that's part of the challenge. And you know, even though you have euro stablecoins out there that are licensed. They're not given the same Runway, they're not given the same support. Right. And so as a result, they're sort of really sort of playing. I mean, it's not even, they're not even in the race right at the moment, which is kind of sad.
- [17:27]
A
Right.
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B
And I think it's very dangerous for Europe. Right. I think, I think Europe will face a situation where if they don't get their act together, then, you know, why need it in the first place?
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A
Yeah, Europe is a few things, but it's, I would say probably among the top of what Europe is, is the euro.
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B
Yes.
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A
Right. I mean, and if the euro, they should be playing hardball. They should be like the US here. The US is out here saying you get dollars, you get, oh, you want them in this form, you get them in that form. Yes, we'll lend them to anyone, anyone can spend them or yes, we're flooding the zone. China's doing the same thing with the yuan.
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B
Right.
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A
Like, I mean, what is Europe doing on the euro? They're bad risk here. It's actually shocking.
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B
Yeah, I think it's kind of sad.
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A
And they're doing all this taxation, wealth tax stuff that's going to also push money out of euros into other currencies.
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B
That's right.
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A
It's dangerous.
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B
Yes. I think it's, it's, it's very sort of unfortunately unfriendly for entrepreneurs. Right. And I think one of the other things, of course is if you look at Europe, I mean, I, I tell this to people in Europe as well. Say you've already been tech colonized.
- [18:23]
A
Yeah.
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B
Right. You know, the European technology companies don't really exist in the way that they could have. Right. And it has, it's not for want of ability or universities or skills. Europe has all the intellectual firepower to be able to build some of the most amazing things in the world. But, you know, it lacks basically the support. And frankly, now basically tech companies in America own Europe and they are not. And that's why I say, you know, national, from a, from a sovereignty standpoint, you need to have your own stablecoin and you need to hurry up with it.
- [18:50]
A
Yep. You guys also announced with Republic that you're tokenizing Animoca's shares on Solana.
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B
That just happened yesterday.
- [18:58]
A
Yes, I saw that.
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B
Exactly. Yes.
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A
What is the why?
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B
Well, okay, so first of all, Animoca wasn't actually involved. So because these are secondary shares from other people, basically Solana and Republic basically came Together, of course, we have to sort of, we're supportive in the sense that, hey, it's cool. I mean, we're all about tokenization. So if someone tokenizes us, be kind of hypocritical for us to say, what are you guys doing? Right. And you know, the team at Republic are great. Solana is great. But I think the wonderful thing is that it allows people more access basically to buy basically shares in Animoca if they wanted to in this tokenized form. I think they just launched it, they're doing some testing on it, but it's going to be exciting to see.
- [19:38]
A
So this is the third party issuer model as the SEC describes it, where what we did was enabled our existing shareholders to tokenize Galaxy stock as the issuer. That's what the SEC calls the issuer sponsored model. I think in the end the issuer sponsored makes a little is it's the purest. Right. Apple should be able to decide what form its stock takes. Right. But you also can't really stop, I don't know, Republic from buying some Animoca shares and putting them in a bucket.
- [20:08]
B
It's your property. If you own it, it's your property. We certainly respect that.
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A
How important do you think? Just generally. So you said access, but one of the pushbacks I get sometimes when I talk about tokenizing equities, which of course I love and I love the project of advancing capital markets with new technology. Right. But one of the pushbacks is. Well, I mean, what are you talking about? I can. Boop, boop, boop. I can buy stocks anywhere. I can buy them on Cash App. Right. I can buy.
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B
Can your agent buy that?
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A
Well, I don't know.
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B
That's a good. Yeah, yeah. Your agent can't buy that. Right. Can you put it on defi pools? Right. Can you? Can you? I mean there's so many things that can basically you can do today. And also can someone in Africa buy it? Can someone in Southeast Asia buy it?
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A
Probably not.
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B
I mean, you know, I think one of the challenges why so many people can't see the benefits of crypto, particularly in the west, is because they have privilege. Yeah, right. The privilege is I can do this so easily. Right. And they don't care about spending $1 or $2 for transaction fees because, you know, the income is high. But if you're in the Philippines where you're making $10 a day or something, or maybe even $10 a month, right. Hey, that extra dollar makes a difference. And the other thing I love about tokenization, is you can fractionalize that stuff. Right. So if I want to buy a fraction of a share in anything that I want, whether it's Animoca or SpaceX or whatever business I like, I have the ability to do so. Whereas otherwise, minimum $500, $1,000, even $100, that's $100 too much for most of the world.
- [21:26]
A
Yeah. My friend Alex Gladstein wrote a great book who works at the Human Rights foundation called Check your financial privilege. He was mostly talking about Bitcoin, like how the scarce nature and non debasing nature of bitcoin as a store of value. You know, it's a financial concept in the us but if you're in a country whose currency is collapsing, it's much more obvious. But I like that point a lot. You've, you've invested in 20 plus blockchains over the AMOC, has a huge venture
- [21:53]
B
portfolio, over 600 companies.
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A
Yeah, I mean my gosh, that is like one of the biggest. It probably is the biggest in terms of number. Maybe if I go on Pitchbook or Crunchbase, Animoca will have like the most deals in crypto or if they up there.
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B
Well, if they track us, I don't know. I mean they track some of it,
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A
but yeah, you definitely prolific. Yeah. There have been so many narratives to invest in and things that haven't, haven't worked. But blockchains themselves, by my count, it was 20 plus L1 blockchains.
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B
Yeah, quite possibly.
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A
A lot of the last couple years has been in sort of blockchain design debate land has been about modularity and like to what extent like we should be using Ethereum L2s and then criticism of them. Are they, they're still too centralized or do they, does their usage actually flow back to the holders of the underlying eth? How do you think about, I mean now we're. It seems pretty late in the game. Like if I was going to come to you and say I want to launch another new blockchain, but I saw Google's launching a permission chain. You got some new chains out here. Monad launched. What is the landscape you think? Like, are we going to settle on like two or three? I mean Republic is using Solana, Galaxy was using Solana, everyone's obviously using Ethereum for stuff. How many more do we need? And also like, you know, or do we still need more? I don't know. Where are we in that trade in your mind?
- [23:07]
B
I think from my perspective, I think we can look at the distinction between sort of L1, L2s and app chains. And I think a lot of the L2s actually reflect more app chains. Like take Ton, for instance. Right. I think Ton is more reflective of an app chain, even though it is an L1. Right. But what it really is, it's the interface layer for you to develop on the Telegram network. And that's where its power is. And so if Google was going to launch a chain permission or not, of course the point is that it makes sense for them because it's a way for you to operate within the Google ecosystem to basically tap into that network without having to sort of in a permissionless manner, quasi sort of where you can transact with money and you can transact essentially with value that you couldn't normally do through the normal API structure. Right. And it's actually sort of easier and composable to build on. And they've built those Rails, so I think a lot of them will go that way. So I think from that perspective, I think we're going to see thousands of them. Right. But nobody said they had to be very valuable and nobody said they have to have their own token. Right? That's true. I mean, that's the thing, right? There's an infrastructure layer where it's very valuable. I mean, BASE demonstrated that you can actually have a pretty powerful and scaling and useful blockchain without a token. There's a little bit of stories about when token, when token.
- [24:12]
A
Will there be a token?
- [24:13]
B
Yeah, will there be a token? But the point is they grew it to this point as, you know, one of frankly the more most influential L2s without a token. Right. So I think the technology needs to be given credit for that purpose. I think one of the reasons why we haven't seen the necessary growth is because on chain, users haven't grown. Right. And I think again, AI agents to the rescue.
- [24:34]
A
Yeah, they're going to buy our bags, the agents. There's a couple of fun questions to wrap yat. I love talking to you. You're one of the more deep thinkers intellectually that operates in our space. You've talked about money as a social system.
- [24:48]
B
Absolutely.
- [24:49]
A
Long decentralized ID and property rights, which we've talked about at length already in this conversation and in and even more so in other conversations that we've had. What's like who's a non crypto author or thinker philosopher that you is has been key to your worldview that the audience should look into?
- [25:10]
B
Oh, philosopher, wow.
- [25:11]
A
Or author or historian. Yeah, anything novelist. I mean, what should we read or listen To.
- [25:20]
B
I mean, you know, I think these days, you know, I. I love going on, like, philosophy podcasts, broadly speaking.
- [25:26]
A
Yeah.
- [25:27]
B
Because there's so many philosophers that I've never heard of as well. Right. You know, where you hear, like, new ideas and they give you sort of. Sort of new constructs, but generally, if you haven't started. Right. I love sort of the foundations of Locke. Right. Again, you know, many things are outdated. Right. Yeah. So don't just. Don't just, you know, property rights, you know, but the basic of property rights and that sort of principle, and then you grow from there.
- [25:49]
A
Yeah.
- [25:49]
B
I think it's difficult if you just basically start off with a philosophy without some of the foundations in mind. Right. I think it's hard.
- [25:55]
A
Very, like, canonical. You really do have to, like, study it all and like, you know, and start sort of in a way. Stuart Mill and libertarianism.
- [26:03]
B
Exactly. Understand and then also understand the context. And so. So I'm. I'm a. I'm a big lover of history. I love reading about history because it's not about human behavior.
- [26:10]
A
Only favorite times in history to read about.
- [26:12]
B
Oh. I mean, I'm a big fan of the. Of the. Of the basically French Revolution, that era. Right. And of course, American. American Revolution. I mean, I think that, to me, was that era where humans really started going and saying, hey, I have rights, you know, and that was a huge pivotal moment. And I think a lot of people underestimate just how important the French Revolution was to basically define the fact that we have human rights. I mean, it's pivotal.
- [26:39]
A
It's the instantiation of what we now think of as, like, Western liberalism.
- [26:42]
B
And it's normal to us. Right. And it was. And all literature, fiction, storytelling, you know, basically the hero archetype. Right. And individualism.
- [26:50]
A
Yes.
- [26:50]
B
That basically came from that era before that. That didn't exist, human history. Essentially, most of us were slaves of someone. We didn't even have a last name. Basically, everyone was a slave pretty much. Right. And so I think that era redefined everything. And to me, the fascinating thing is that when you even think about someone like Locke, who, you know, basically started talking about sort of, you know, the fruits of our labor and basically that, you know, we should have this property. Right. This was a concept at the time. This wasn't something that people had.
- [27:21]
A
You're right. It seems innate now, but it literally didn't exist.
- [27:23]
B
It didn't exist. And so this idea that we should have this property became viral, effectively. Right. So viral that. Hey, America. Right. You know, we're like, we should have our rights. Right. And so it just shows the power of ideas. And then it begs a different question, which is that, well, if an idea is so powerful in the mind that it becomes or is made to reality, then is that something that is already innate in us anyway, and is it something that we were born with to begin with? Another construct is this idea of creativity. We used to say you were trained to be creative. It turned out that based on many studies, they were actually born to be creative. And that maybe is the true function of humanity, that we're creative and divergent thinkers. And then we can have the AIA do all the machine stuff. The more we gain. Exactly. And while we can finally be, you know, going back to even more of the historical philosophers, like Aristotle, you know, he's basically said that the ultimate form of his, you know, human sort of, you know, what humans should be doing is polis. Yeah, right. We should be sitting there debating, doing this type of stuff.
- [28:24]
A
This is the top.
- [28:25]
B
This is the top.
- [28:26]
A
Yeah.
- [28:26]
B
We pontificate about life while essentially back then, slaves were doing the work. But okay, fine.
- [28:31]
A
Agents are the swarms of agents doing the work for us today.
- [28:34]
B
Exactly.
- [28:35]
A
What's one thing that you've changed your mind on in the last year? Year?
- [28:39]
B
Well, I think I've changed my mind on the fact that, you know, the metaverse is something that we go into and the metaverse is now coming to us.
- [28:47]
A
I think that makes a lot of sense. Yatsu, Chairman of Animoca Brands, thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brains.
- [28:53]
B
Thank you for having me. Always fun.
- [28:55]
A
Thank you for listening to Galaxy Brains, the weekly podcast from Galaxy Research. I'm Alex Thorne, head of Firmwide Research at Galaxy. Follow me on X TangibleCoins. Follow Galaxy Research on X at GLXY Research. Read our written reports@galaxy.com research and don't forget, if you like Galaxy Brains to like and subscribe on your favorite podcast platforms like YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and more. We'll see you next time.