The Chopping Block: Erik Voorhees on AI Privacy, Agentic Payments, and Crypto x Memecoin Mayhem

**Erik Voorhees** (0:00)
It is the game theory of a state to surveil and control as much as possible. It's not something weird about the current government. It is the endemic nature of how just the game theory of organizations at that scale operate. It's not any particular individual that is the problem. It is the institution itself at that scale, which necessarily desires and will always spy to whatever degree permitted on its people.

**Tom Schmidt** (0:23)
Not a dividend.

**Tarun Chitra** (0:24)
It's a tale of two clans.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:25)
Now, your losses are on someone else's balance sheet.

**Tom Schmidt** (0:28)
Generally speaking, airdrops are kind of pointless anyways.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:31)
Unnamed trading firms who are very involved.

**Tom Schmidt** (0:34)
I like that eighth of the ultimate problem.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:36)
DeFi protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Chopping Block. Every couple of weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intro, first we got Tom, the DeFi maven and master of memes.

**Tom Schmidt** (0:49)
Hello, everyone.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:51)
Next we got Tarun, the Giga Brain and Grand Puba at Gauntlet.

**Tarun Chitra** (0:54)
Yo.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:56)
Joining us today, we've got special guest Erik Voorhees, Privacy Pioneer at Venice.

**Erik Voorhees** (1:02)
Hello. Hello. Thank you.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (1:04)
And I am the CEO, the head hype man at Dragonfly. We're just investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see ChoppingBlock.xyz for more disclosures. So Erik, excited to have you on the show. For those of you who don't know you, you have incredible crypto bona fides that I think probably a lot of the meme coin kids don't know. How do you contextualize like your crypto origin story? Because you're now effectively an AI entrepreneur, although you've got some kind of overlap with decentralized technologies, privacy preserving technologies. But tell us, what's your crypto origin story in a nutshell, like in two sentences?

**Erik Voorhees** (1:44)
Yeah, well, in the AI world, I'm a tourist, but in the crypto world, I'm a very authentic pioneer of the earliest days. I think that's a valid statement. I've been into Bitcoin since 2011, back when everyone thought it was stupid and most people never heard of it. I got interested because I thought it was the most important financial invention that I had ever seen, and that it had a good chance of changing the way the world worked and removing a decent amount of power out of the hands of the state, which is my adversary. It's been my passion, hobby, and career ever since.
I got into AI and started Venice because I wanted to bring a couple of the principles that were endemic to crypto into the AI world where they were completely absent.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (2:31)
What principles? Give us the background, the motivation behind it.

**Erik Voorhees** (2:37)
Venice was launched to be a private and uncensored version of ChatGBT.
Two principles, privacy and free speech, basically. First and fourth amendment, things that should be important to all Americans, at least, but are generally discarded by most people, unfortunately. Privacy, to the degree that everyone started using ChatGBT, all their prompts and conversations were going to OpenAI, which is dangerous, not just in the present, but in all future scenarios where that stuff is hanging around forever and more and more of your life is stored. That's obviously a problem. Then censorship was very present from the beginning of these chatbots where certain topics it wouldn't let you talk about, and others had more subtle forms of censorship where they would steer the conversation in a way that wasn't necessarily true or at least was debatable. To me, it seemed that these principles of user sovereignty, where you actually just trust adult humans by default, should be present within the AI space and that someone needed to do that and build that. And so, no one in AI was doing it and I figured I should try. So that's where we started.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (3:51)
Okay. So let's break down some of those pieces. One of the things that it's hard not to notice today is that, for the most part, there's all these subreddits about how to jailbreak chatbots, how to jailbreak opening eye, how to jailbreak anthropic. And it's like, okay, if something gets big enough, they will stop you. But for the most part, you can kind of just run on hog wild these days if you have the right, whatever. Obviously, they're going to cut off a lot of these jailbreaks over time. But even today, I've got cousins that are like, oh, do you know that you can do this and get it to role play as such and such character that normally it won't do.