YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Blania

lines on the record: 77
first: 2026-04-02
most recent: 2026-04-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And we use multi party computations, so you remain anonymous, and platforms can choose to use that as well, but no one really did. It's just somehow they have this like very negative stigma, which I think makes sense.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I do think just to set a disclaimer, I think with deep fakes and all this stuff, I think that will fundamentally break. So it's a It's a temporary solution that I think can get us to scale. That's kind of how I think about it. We also actually use government IDs similarly where we use just the ones that have an NNFC ID chip.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, we have that. So actually we. Generally, we just have You know, we have the principle of whatever could be useful for this problem, we just build it. And. And so we have something called face check that does that. So it uses face from the camera. It still uses multi-party computation, what we've built for the entire system. So you're still anonymous. And it, of course, reaches way less accuracy. So, you know, as a system, you will know something along the lines of, well, this is at least one person cannot create 100 accounts. Maybe it's just 10 or 20. So it's at least some measure of rate limiting.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did you ever think about? I don't know, this is probably a terrible idea, but having kind of different levels like we know you're a unique human or like, this guy may be a unique human because he's done it on his iPhone and it's not quite the same.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be urban demand. Send a band just because actually it's such a gnarly problem to To get an orb to truly everyone, you know, it's like. To get that, the CapEx is insane. So it's actually much cheaper and easier to just put an orb on a motorbike and drive it to you. It's crazy as it sounds. So in places like the Bay Area or New York, you will just be able to say like, yeah, I want to verify now. And 50 minutes later, there's”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clusterfuck off, you know, all these dependencies to come together. So I think that's like one of the biggest engineering focuses right now. But then second, you need to find places to deploy them at. And the way to think about it is there are large scale distribution partnerships that could be something like Walmart, you know, or if you're very ambitious, it could be something like Starbucks. Or it can just be you go to one of hip coffee shops and you just put it there or, you know, and then you could eventually even go to the D&B and just put it right there. So that's the problem we're currently trying to puzzle together. And it's going to be some of all of that. I think there's going to be some large-scale distribution partnerships, many one-off coffee shops. Oh, actually, one thing that we will launch soon, and the team is going to hit it, I'm saying this now, but it's going to”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that will just set expectations. I think it will be slow initially because it also should be just to get understand the product. It will be focused on certain geographies, like what we did with Tinder very starting Japan just to test the product and also to just normalize the concept. But that will happen. And then secondly, which is now becoming one of the main priorities for me, is just how do you get this orb distribution up, which is Which is broadly speaking, there's a couple different dimensions to that, but one is, first of all, the product needs to work at scale without supervision, which turns out to be much harder than you would think. Every engineering problem at scale turns out to be much more complicated than you would think because, you know, fighting for 1% of improvement in quality is this.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, a month ago, we entered a very different phase of the project where I do believe many of the platforms that we are integrating with will really bring a lot of users to our platform. And that changes how you think about it entirely. Like if you have a platform of a billion users sending users to you, then it's really just all about like, how do you meet that demand? It's like, you know, and that's what we're now entering. Yeah, so I think the response is first, I think you will see, and we're already working on it, but you will see a lot of really large platforms that you know integrate in the near term future.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Share more, you said, okay, next year go to market is focused on the US. Say more about how you're thinking about that is the incentive for people to do it because they get to use a set of services? Is there some other economic incentive? Or how do you envision it?”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI is going to make that problem so bad because the ability to file fraudulent claims and create fake bisocial, I mean, you can buy social security numbers on the black market. For those of you who don't know, that's an easy thing. That's a real thing. Like, that is everybody's social security number is for sale. And so, you know, like AI is just a way of making that kind of loose black market underground fraud thing just massive and extremely scalable. I agree, Sad. Yeah. So I think proof of human is a piece of a very important puzzle where we have to upgrade the entire infrastructure or we're not going to be a democracy anymore. I mean, that'd just be my guess.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, cryptographically strong infrastructure on who's who. And then, you know, similarly, I think we're going to have to be able to get people money much more efficiently than through this crazy apparatus of social programs that we have just because how lossy is and fraudulent is social security or Medicare or any of these things. I mean, like the Medicare is so frustrating for people that they shot the CEO of United Healthcare. Like, and people are happy about that, like really happy. So think about how bad a system that is, and the government spends a lot of money sending you money for your healthcare, but they do it in a like super inefficient way. But we have the technology to do that now. So I think that.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The whole mail in ballot thing is built for a whole very different world, right? So like, I don't think in an AI world where you can have very high scale impersonation that, and then with a broken social security system that you're going to have the will of the people anymore. Like, I think that's going to be gone pretty fast. So I think we're going to need some kind of”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's ins We're going to have to get to some kind of way to cryptographically strong way to identify who's the citizen of what country. Like that's going to be a really bad problem, I think Otherwise, there is some way to even have a democracy. I mean, you know, like the, it's pretty crude what they're trying to do with the SAVAC, but it's not completely insane, which is. How do you even know the people are voting or actual people or living people or anything? And we really don't know now like we genuinely don't know. And then if you go to, I mean.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you go back to COVID, the stimulus program, like I think $400 billion was stolen, that's pretty cool. You would have liked to know that you were sending the money to unique humans. I mean, even if not citizens, as long as they were unique humans, that would have been good.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What actually do you think about AI continues? What in your mind are the economic policies that we will need to implement or directionally?”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so ridiculous and it is so hard to get to in terms of building it. And then there's a Massive network effect, which like people are starting six years behind you on that. But yeah, I'm sure they'll come because it's just such an obvious problem now.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absurd. I think we will. My guess is over the next couple months. We will see things like these platforms trying to use things like face biometrics. On the phone, which you know, I know it will break, so it's fine, but I think we'll go through that cycle now. And yeah, so we just need to get to scale fast enough to meet the market to what comes after, which I think something like the Orb is the only solution. I think currently there's no real competition. I think we'll also see that.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think people are going to. By the way, take a lot more pride in being human, particularly online because I think that people are going to start getting accused of being bots. I mean, it's going to get really weird. And without clear delineation, it's Going to be a mess. Like, I don't understand how somebody can think they're going to have a social media platform that doesn't distinguish between humans and bots. That seems absurd to me”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're just not thinking about Rome's the right way. And so that was like the moment when many, many people started reaching out. And now it feels like much more of an executional problem. Not anymore. Like a market risk or like a thesis problem, or like just a Which is still a big fucking problem. It's like, how do you get 50,000 devices out there? How do you make it cheap enough? How do you make it economic? How do you meet all these three things at the same time? It's still a very hard question.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you had a couple CEOs that really believed it and were like willing to take the long term bet to give some credit. But I think the second big shift was actually cloud bots and moldbook recently. Yeah.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was actually really funny. It was like some of the open AI people that I met were like, man, Alex, this is going to be so dark. People will hate you for not giving personal AIs. And I was like, Jesus Let's call it proof of human then. That's funny. So that's how it changed. But that actually like last year, so post, then there was like a big shift post chat GPT. Like people were like, that was like the AI suddenly got real to people. And then actually, I think, and so that's when people started talking to us, but still we're not like, you know, like it's a future problem. It's probably a couple of years out. Like we don't really care about it. Let's stay in touch. Like it was like the common response.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because people were like, what does it even mean? What does proof of humanity even mean? We can just, you know. Did you have the links? When did you come up with the language proof of human? We had actually proof of personhood for the longest time. It's even here in this brief, yeah. But then. At some point, we're like, shit, well, at some point, AIs will have personal too. So, like, that's not going to fly.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And even as the platforms, as you get into the platforms, even as the platform's largest problem has been bots, I mean, you remember Elon and he backed out of buying Twitter because all the stats were based on bots. They still, even knowing that It was hard for them to get The way to the future, and they're thinking, and go, yeah, we need proof of human because.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're done. Right. And then actually, the second piece of it was this was the first thing is it's going to be that itself is going to be a big deal. But then second of all, when it's going to become a big deal, we will be able to build one of the most valuable networks as a result of that. Because in a world of AI, having a human network is going to be this incredibly important thing. And so actually, yeah, two things. One, you will need a proof of human, but then second, it will have very strong network effects.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was basically everybody's going to have to prove their, you're either going to have to have some proof that you're human in cyberspace or like it's going to be a very bad world. I mean, the robots are going to get us. We're done. Right. And then then then then then”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It seemed very inobbious for a long time. And how different was that pitch from what it ended up being? It was actually pretty much exactly the same question.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And AI just hadn't happened yet. And you could kind of see, but there's bots, but they were kind of very crude compared to what there are now. But it seemed inevitable, at least at the time, you know, the thing was it was so from the future that Know we always worry about okay, like what's the timing of this and this and that and the other and so forth. But you were impressive enough and it was. Going to happen eventually, and it was an exciting enough idea that I think all those things kind of got us to go, okay, but it was not, it wasn't obvious that it was going to work in that time frame.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, because you had the orb, like the orb was so Wild. You know, okay, we're going to scan people's retinas, and that's how we're going to know they're human and so forth. And this was, I mean, you pitched us six and a half years ago, six years ago? Yeah, it was before COVID because you were there with the orb.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then on the platform side, actually, we went through a It was a very interesting experience to go through personally because I think. Like a couple of years ago, universally people just made fun of us. Well, minus recent and a couple other people that believed in it.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. That would be really great. So to get clarity on that. Yeah. So the big focus that we know are going through right now is to kind of go all in on the US. So I think over the next year, 90% of the effort of the company is just going to go about the US. And how do you get, for example, device distribution app? How do you eventually have this in every Starbucks? So it becomes just super normal and people just use it every day. So that's kind of the.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How does all of that come together to something that a lot of people really want to use it? And that's a combination of, you know, the utility of all the subplatforms, essentially. But all of that layers on top, like maybe you can use it in your Reddit account, maybe you get a certain amount of chat GPT subscription for free. So I think it's going to be a combination of things, but you need to land all three at some point at the same time, which is hard to do. We are now at 18 million users that are verified 40 million in total in the app. But the biggest thing is because of the past administration, because we use crypto, we did not really invest in the US for a long time. And that's not the main shift that we're going through. For all of this, the main thing that matters is the US.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe talk about the evolution as well. Well, first of all, it's a multi-sided problem. And I think there's like roughly three that you have to consider. One is, well, you need platforms to use the technology. Then, you know, things like Reddit or X or things like that. Secondly, you need a distribution of these devices. And I think the right mental model to have for it is How many minutes does it take a person to reach such a device on average? And currently if you take the global average, it would be a terrible number. It would be like days or something because many people would need to fly. But how do we get that down to below 15 minutes across CUS? And so that's probably roughly around 50,000 devices that you need to deploy. That's like, it's not crazy, but it's also not nothing. It's hard to do. And then the last one is.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they were like super human in their ability to change it because they were going back to the profile of the people posting it. They were like understanding their political motivation Talk and like, and then it's just interacting in perfect, in the perfect way.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, it's a glimpse. It's a glimpse. Like, you know, Costa Vinja intelligence is dropping almost exponentially agent capabilities are increasing in like some superlinear forms. What we currently see is less than 1% of what it will look like in probably a year or two. And it's so, and then second, these things will be actually, they will be superhuman in many ways. They will be perfectly able to understand you and talk in the right way to you. For example, there's this one paper that I think you could delete it after. But it was the change my mind subred Where the University of Zurich did this thing where they had AIs actually interact with Change My Mind.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the thing that I think people don't really get is that it should be always, but I don't think people really understand the. Consequence of that. I think two things. One is that We currently experience is like a super, super tiny thing of what is about to happen. Just because.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The whole sort of the creator economy platforms of the last decade, you know, Substack, Spotify, and all the people who support artists. Patreon is that creators, YouTubers, they have a personal relationship with these people. It's not just they like the art. And so if they all of a sudden found out that they were bots, they might not want to support them in the same way.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And I actually saw that a video today of a YouTube farm. They had these like thousands of phones that just watch videos all day for a reason.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, there's reality and there's connection to human, right? That's right. You can create a pretty good pipe. Like you can take a scientific paper and give it to Gemini and say, make this into a podcast. And it'll be like a pretty entertaining podcast. And it will be. Reality and that it came from some real thing. But you would like to know that. You would like to know that. Yeah, I would like to know that. And then it continues.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, my thesis about this is like something along the lines of. I think there's categories of content that are clearly just fictional Like movies are that. You know, it's like you don't care that there's any connection to reality. It's just a fully fictional story. But no, if you think about something like TikTok or all these kinds of things, people actually really care about them mostly because there is some connection to reality.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And you lose money, you train multiple hours a day to get really good at this thing, and then suddenly you get destroyed by an AI that is just super human in every dimension. Funny enough, I was like, I wonder what do you think about this because I don't have a good mental model about it. But even the whole model for video platforms, I think, is about to break because there's a couple dimensions that are problem. But one, if the creation of content is becoming super scalable. For example, I heard about this one guy that... Created, I think it was like on the order of a hundred videos a day on YouTube and made tens of thousands of dollars a month. All of them are fully AI generated. And people just fell for it. So another question is is that actually something that YouTube wants to monetize that way?”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very close. And so I think In a year from now, it's just going to be a full commodity and it's going to be super photorealistic and absolutely real time. And you will just not know anything anymore on these vehicles. And so. I think that's another one. I think another one then will be, which I think is fun, but it's going to be gaming, you know, because.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like, you know, that's still slightly hypothetical because these things are not fully real time and you can somehow.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And actually, you You raced it to me first, and that's why we started building a product for it. Because it would actually start with very high value users. Like, for example, people, you know, like yourself that maybe manager fund. And, you know, sometimes calls actually could be very high value if it's about borrowing money.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he started in Japan And as a test market, and it's essentially exactly what we just discussed, it is if you verify it with an orb, you get a little badge that signals to other people that you are infected human, so it has a high level of verification. And then also, I don't think that's live yet, but what will come next is that you're actually the person you claim to be. So meaning you have a rolled ID that is associated to the kind of profile pictures that you use. So you just run a quick check that this is all correct. And so, you know, you then know you're not interacting with bot, but also you interact with a fully authentic profile. Another fun one because I think it's somewhat contritive, but I think it will be video conferencing. Because you already have deepfakes.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, actually, I think the simple model I have for it is every moment on the internet that is primarily about humans interacting with each other or even indirectly interacting with each other. You can start with. That really matters. What does the other side is, in fact, a person?”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, social media is one kind of vector of, you know, things that were annoying and are now becoming overwhelming in terms of just bots, you know, particularly with psyops propaganda, all these kinds of things. What are some of the other uses of bots that are going to be kind of impossible to live with if we don't get to proof of human in the future?”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Counterintuitive property there is like even though it uses biometrics you preserve anonymity and And extreme levels of privacy, which I think is super cool.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No one knows anything about you, but you can actually together make a statement about you. And so you send it to this multi party computation. And what comes back is yes, that individual is unique. And then the second thing we do is we separate all of this from you with a zero knowledge proof. So meaning you have that secret on your phone, but no one else has it. No server has it. We don't have it. And then you can later go back to this multi-party computation and say like, hey, I have a secret that is part of that computation and I am in fact unique. And you can prove that to a platform. You could go to the social network and prove that you're a unique user to the social platform without us knowing anything about you or the social network knowing anything about you. And so it's this like very.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So no one has to whole thing. And also during the competition, no one has to whole thing. But they do some clever interactions to come to the conclusion”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Information about you. And then you do some clever tricks of how these different parties need to come together to do a computation that still leaves the pieces apart.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source