Billionaire Investor Tim Draper: “Irresponsible” for Apple & Meta NOT to Hold BTC

Tim Draper (0:00)

SpaceX has always been a forward thing. Elon's really extraordinary. And I think that the ones who are not holding Bitcoin, the Apple, the Facebook, if I'm the head of a treasury, and I'm looking at the ridiculous amount of government spending that's been going on for the last 10 years, and the possibility of hyperinflation or crazy high interest rates, I would hold at least four weeks' worth of Bitcoin on my balance sheet.

Spencer Nichols (0:33)

Hello, and welcome back to the Bitcoin Magazine Podcast. I'm your host, Spencer Nichols. And today we are joined by the one and only Tim Draper, Bitcoin investor, first and foremost. However, he's also an esteemed venture capitalist with investments in firms like SpaceX, Tesla, Twitch, Skype, Baidu, as well as Bitcoin native firms, Arc Labs and Open Node. Tim, welcome to the show. How are you doing today?

Tim Draper (0:54)

Terrific. Great. Yeah, I think we made 50 Bitcoin investments in different companies, maybe four, because we have a Bitcoin PHY organization. It's an accelerator for Bitcoin companies.

So that's another thing we've been doing around your environment.

Spencer Nichols (1:14)

Amazing. Yeah, I look forward to getting into that. And I think a place that I think is really prescient to start with is kind of just talking about the innovation climate in the United States.

You've spoken towards the idea of decentralizing everything. In particular, I know you've written about decentralizing kind of the impetus of science in our society, talking about how centralization can lead to kind of a slow down and innovation. I think this is top of mind for people right now, as we see these frontier AI labs, kind of what some are calling kind of a regulatory capture type strategy. Others are calling a prudent means of slowing down the deployment of AI in society. But I think first and foremost, I want to understand how you are digesting everything that's happening right now just in the innovation climate broadly.

Tim Draper (1:56)

Yeah, I think things do innovate faster in a decentralized world. So when a leader decides to be socialist, they control everything.

And then we all have to sort of walk the walk and talk the talk.

But if you have a capitalist society, it's decentralized and innovation can happen from anywhere. And actually, it isn't just relevant for individual leaders of countries. It's also relevant for individual leaders of large companies, because in a large company, if you have centralized control and centralized decision making, you are really only reliant on the creativity of the person at the top, maybe with a few of their advisors. But there might be hundreds of thousands of people with interesting ideas for how to improve the organization, and they are muted in a centralized environment. So I recommend that every organization be decentralized, science in particular has become much more centralized around the biggest grants from government, the Nobel Prize winners, they all seem to know each other. So I actually think that there are some major changes that could happen out there in the world if we decentralized some of the monopolies and oligopolies that we have.

Spencer Nichols (3:40)

And do you find that the current trend of artificial intelligence is becoming a centralizing force or a decentralizing force, centralizing in that you have these frontier labs amassing tons of capital, getting their own brain trust together in their walled gardens, and then decentralizing in that we're now democratizing access to research and things like non-coders being able to code, people engaging in data science that couldn't before. What is that overarching trend looking like to you?

Tim Draper (4:06)

It's an interesting question, but I think it's still in decentralized mode because it's so new. And now there's a centralization of a lot of the capital that's going in. The biggest AI companies are grabbing most of the capital, but the innovations are happening throughout. We're seeing entrepreneurs in every single walk of life applying artificial intelligence to their own business. And we're doing it ourselves at Draper Associates. So I do think that it's great when there's a new technology because it does tend to challenge those icons that are too centralized. So I would say what AI is doing is challenging decentralization of control of search in one way. And it has become decentralized. There are more than one, Google really dominated all of search and maybe Baidu in China. But now there are lots of different choices. You can go to Grok, you can go to Perplexity, you can go to OpenAI, you can go to any number of different AI providers. And as a consumer, you got a lot of good choices. So I'm actually pretty excited about what AI is going to potentially do. And that's just around search. I also think that it's going to take many of these centralized control industries and challenge them and get them to start thinking in new ways. And so, you know, anything big, big pharma, big banks, big, well, big banks have been challenged by Bitcoin. Big, big accounting, big law, those have all become a little bit more monopoly and oligopoly. They've become centralized in their decision making. And by in government too. And now with AI, you can do more things. And so you can, like AI can do a better job of defending you from a lawsuit than any lawyer in the world. It can go out and find so many more things in the history. It can find all the different cases and everything else that you need, and it can do a better job. In accounting, same thing. A lot of accounting is now being done by AI. And in a bureaucracy, AI can solve a lot of what a bureaucrat's doing. And it's actually good timing because, I know, because they put so many regulations down that the bureaucrats are overwhelmed. And this is a big opportunity to decentralize that and open it up.