21 in 21: Andi Pitt on Bitcoin Venture, AI, and Cognitive Sovereignty

Andy, welcome to the 21 and 21 show. Thanks for having me. Yes. For those of you that don't know Andy, Andy Pitt is a founding partner at EgoDeath Capital, which is a Bitcoin-only venture fund.

Prior to that, she spent almost eight years at Goldman Sachs working in trading. Now, in addition to working in venture capital, she spends time researching and writing about mind control and cognitive sovereignty. She's busy. It's been a lot.

She kindly made time to come on this show while she's in San Francisco. Lovely to be here. It's beautiful. It is nice.

You got good weather for your visit. Yes. Yes. Well, my first question for Tio is what brings you to Presidio Bitcoin this week?

I was here for the HRF, the Human Rights Foundation, hosted a kind of gathering focusing on AI for individual rights. So looking at how AI is used by autocratic regimes for oppression and how potentially, you know, what the potential solutions are. So brought together activists, funders, donors, as well as people who are building space and potential builders. What was like your main kind of learnings that you had from that?

I mean, it's pretty horrific, honestly, what's going on in some places like China where AI has just enabled an incredible amount of tracking, of facial recognition, of robotic policing, of what do they call preemptive policing, where they're being able to pick up tiny little changes in behavior from video cameras to basically arrest people. or in places like Xinjiang put them in re-education camps, you know, preemptively. It's pretty horrific. That said, you know, the HRF does such a good job at bringing, it's like the rebel alliance, I like to think of it, like in Star Wars and bringing together all of the people fighting back and that movement is just growing and growing.

And so it's great to be part of, there's a lot of ideas and ways to use AI sort of counteract that authoritarian influence. So, yeah, I'm positive, but, you know, it is a pretty difficult situation. And China is also exporting that technology around the world. So countries that previously couldn't, you know, enforce their authority so much now can, basically.

So it's like a really, really important topic that the world really needs to be talking about. It is. And yes, that event was really powerful. They do such a good job curating really good content, really good people.

hearing the activist stories is always very sad to hear yeah it can be really intense um but important to understand for sure so being on like the vc side and bitcoin like what kind of impact do you feel like your team has there it's a little tricky um i sometimes feel a little out of place at these and like I don't quite belong there. But no, I've always been passionate about understanding authoritarianism, you know, even in university. So for me, it is something that I care a lot about.

In terms of the VC impact, I think what we can do, I think what was interesting in this conference is a lot of people are coming up with these potential AI tools that counter authoritarian oppression, but may also have a business model. So maybe you can create, you know, sell a product to people. And so helping people building, think through what a business model might look like. You know, beyond the idea and the technology, how do you develop that into a business?

What's your go-to-market? How are you going to fund it? You know, VC might not be, there's sort of VC is the best way of funding a narrow type of company. And there are so many different ways of getting funding for products of a company's people want to build.

So I think we can be really helpful in doing that and figuring out ways to get some of these technology is built and in the market, basically. Yeah. And then EgoDeath is Bitcoin only. Yep.

Can you maybe tell our listeners a little bit more about how that works and what kind of people you're speaking with? Yeah. So we co-founded the fund in 2022 to focus just on the Bitcoin ecosystem. Our first fund invested at the seed stage.

Our current fund invests mostly at the Series A stage, but also sort of across the spectrum from Pre-Z to Series A. Anything that's founders who are building in the Bitcoin ecosystem, so using Bitcoin or building for Bitcoin in some way, are founders that we would invest in. We have 12 portfolio companies that are closing a couple of deals right now. So that's in process.

Companies, this might be familiar with like Breeze or Relay in Europe, Ellen Markets. So it's really cool to get to work with these founders who are actually the ones out building and just help them and support them how. I'm curious what you think being on the VC side, because I've been in the Bitcoin space for like four and a half years and like a lot has definitely changed. Over time, have you seen like more Bitcoin only startups emerge?

Do you think like this is maybe more the time where like the building is like starting to happening? yeah so we i mean we really founded the fund because we'd seen taproot and segwit get you know the changes happen and that allowed so much more flexibility and potentially scalability and what you could do with bitcoin so our thesis was that you would be able to that there would be a range you know basically an explosion of building happening and there was not really enough funding in the space at that point in time uh so we wanted to basically raise the fund to support those entrepreneurs.

That's played out kind of exactly, I mean, even more than we could have imagined, to be honest. And I mean, I think Bitcoin in general, you know, we would never have imagined, you know we had BlackRock on TV talking about Bitcoin let alone you know the president of the United States having a Bitcoin fund or a nation states or just where we at in terms of corporate adoption and corporate acceptance of it So and then the building space just continues to grow We raised the second fund which was focused on the Series A.

You know, at the time there weren't that many companies in Bitcoin at the Series A stage. So we were, it was, it was a bet on the deal flow and it's been actually stronger than we expected. We've been really, really busy this year, seeing some amazing entrepreneurs, building with really significant revenue, finding really interesting use cases. So yeah, it's great.

We're seeing just, it just continues to sort of escalate. And it's like this little log curve, I would say, in terms of the ecosystem. Well, that's awesome. So maybe like part of it was there just was not a lot of like funding opportunities before, which we see too on like the spiral side with like the open source grants we about that like quite frankly there is just more money in like crypto than bitcoin for people to get yeah but i do think that you know before you had like the lightning network opened up a lot for people to use lightning network for payments and five years ago it really wasn't mature enough to use um in a sort of a what's brain is not working um like in a proper real world use case So that has enabled building.

And then there's been, I think, because of all of the issues on other chains, you know, Ethereum's going through some challenges. And I guess there was a reinvigoration of excitement around Bitcoin in the past few years. So I think there's probably a combination of funding, of technological capabilities, like the stack becoming ready, as well as sort of a fun, like Bitcoin is this sort of sexy thing again. Well, becoming slowly, maybe.

Not quite, but. It's getting there. At least we have a cute mascot. I love your little, what's your itty bitty?

It's itty bitty. It's so cute. Oh, my grumpy, the grumpy Bitcoin. He's grumpy because of the credit card fees.

I get it. Yeah. So Bitcoin maybe just needed some funding, some cuteness. Yeah, definitely needed some cuteness.

So I'm kind of curious. So we have some Bitcoin startups that are working out of here. And something that we're kind of hearing is like a lot of these like kind of like more startups are also trying to like incorporate AI too. And I'm curious if that's something that you're both seeing and encouraging from startups that you're looking at as well.

Yeah, there's definitely an interesting intersection of Bitcoin and AI. we've seen I think what we're seeing is it's hard to it's sort of I think companies are either bitcoin or their ai I don't think we've seen one that's really oh there's like one that's at the intersection I would say ppq which is sort of bitcoin payments or ai so I think that there's a lot of ai like the open source ai where you can have full privacy by using bitcoin payments is a use case. But I guess the question is, what's the scalability?

And we haven't invested in any sort of AI-focused companies yet. I'm definitely open to it. And it's definitely a theme we're seeing more. And I think every company ultimately is going to be an AI company.

It's not more use AI in some way. I mean, they should really be. Yeah. I mean, from what I've noticed, there's a lot of overlap and ethos with people who work on Bitcoin and the people who work on AI but are thinking about it in a more like private way or more like it kind of seems like similar people to the types of people that would work on those technologies.

Right. That's such a good point. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And we've seen, you know, some, yeah, we're definitely seeing the same thing.

I guess it's sort of the same challenge that you face in Bitcoin of people building open source and decentralized and how that turns into a business model that's scalable. So that's always the big question. You know, or in Nostra, for instance, how like that's probably also very sort of the other aligned ecosystem. So the business models, I think you have to be quite innovative around business model where potentially you have your for profit, like revenue generating component of the business.

And then maybe there's a subcomponent of the business, which is contributing to the open source and like developing the open source technology. but that's definitely something that's kind of a continuing challenge in Bitcoin and one that people that want to build something open source really need to think a lot about like how you develop the protocol at the same time as developing the business. For sure. Yeah.

It's complicated. Extra challenge. Extra challenging. Okay.

So you've been going down another rabbit hole recently. Yes. Can you maybe tell me more about it? So I've been going, yeah, it's a fun rabbit hole.

Fascinating. I've been diving a lot into researching and writing about, just starting to write about now after a few years, about mind control and cognitive sovereignty. It's the term I'm using. So, yeah, tell me more about it.

so um i guess if i use you know just for a definition of mind control it's nothing science fiction it's just psychology it's the psychological process of the capture of identity belief behavior for external aims um so you know most people will be filming everyone knows what a cult is right like everyone and everyone's really watched a cult documentary and being like what the fuck excuse my language i don't know if i it's okay um and so when there's basically once you look at the cult indoctrination process or the way someone gets really stuck in that process there's a relatively clear psychological process that happens um it's multifaceted it's nuanced it's very um yeah it is very nuanced but um it's quite a clear process and if you sort of keep understanding the different sort of ways or groups you keep looking around you see the same sort of psychological process at play in terrorist radicalization like so how terrorist groups operate how you know ethno groups operate if you think about the tumult tigers or the FARC these types of movements have these very same sort of cult indoctrination processes to to bind the group and enable violence or holocaust like genocide and then you see it a lot even just within say a democracy of the the political radicalization we're seeing of religions of, um, so that's sort of this psychological process at play that, um, is really not talked about a lot.

And it's, so that was what was so surprising. And yet it seems to, you know, if you think about the major events in history and what's going on, it's driving a lot of civilizational shift and history. Um, and so, yeah, my goal is really just, I mean, it's, I'm still early in the research and it's ongoing, but, um, is to really start a conversation and start talking about it. I think, you know, if we want to build a world that's not as divided, that's more cohesive, that's more at peace, where you have individual flourishing and creativity, like we need to at least understand it to be able to kind of start shifting things.

Yeah, and then also this idea of cognitive sovereignty. So what does it mean to kind of have cognitive sovereignty, be able to sort of not get stuck into these thoughts and ideas or groups? and what anyway I'll stop there it's super interesting and like I'm curious with your thoughts around like AI if there's like maybe ways to kind of like point out these like you know red flags or something uh if that can be like built in somehow to different models or or how maybe AI unlocks certain capabilities with this yeah definitely I I mean I yeah I had on my to-do list and I will at some point soon create maybe like you can definitely create I think no the issue is no one has really articulated the process in detail so if you just ask Chuck GTV like how mind control works it won't give you good answers because the literature on it is just not there so and that's partly I think there was a lot of attention on it in the 1950s basically after the rise of Soviets in Russia and American prisoners of war coming back brainwashed from China and Korea.

And that was the first. And the Holocaust had just happened. But we just haven't seen that much development in the articulation of the psychological processes that are driving it. And so if you ask to actually see, that knowledge is just not available on the internet and so the models are not picking it up yet.

So my work is to actually, and this will be the work over the next couple of months that's coming out of my sub stack is really articulating that process in detail with a bunch of examples. And then that can definitely go into like a model that, you know, someone will be able to put in like so-and-so like social influencer on Twitter or like this language or this email even. And you'll be able to like literally pick up like, oh, that language is trying to make me feel guilty about myself.

Like this language is just trying to like play on my emotion of fear. This language is trying to like do this and to be able to really understand it. And then hopefully it takes away a lot of its power. Yeah, that's so interesting.

I was in a conversation yesterday with this guy who's like an AI ethics professor. And he was just kind of blowing my mind on like certain things they think about. And one of them is like around, you know, health care and like people like, is it the responsibility of the AI to like call out like you know based on all the data points the models like someone has or is at risk for a certain rare disease or maybe they have it or all these certain things I feel like this all feeds into like what you're thinking about too I'm just like so much that this there's gonna be like data overload yeah I haven't thought about that I haven't really dived into the AI ethics that's another very big important conversation to be having.

I have like a rabbit hole list of when I have more time, which maybe will be around Christmas. I don't know. It hasn't been recently. My hack is to do, is to have ChatGPT do like a deep research and then I like load it onto Speechify.

And so then I just like listen to a podcast of basically whatever I wanted to dive into. Oh, that's a good hack. Yeah. Do you have to listen to it like within the app or can you like download it?

I'm sure there's a more seamless way to do it. I've just like copy pasted it into a Google doc and then like, or I see, and then I have my speechify like link. Okay, that's super interesting. Well, it's a fun rabbit hole.

I am going to check out your sub stack. Is that something that's public that you want people to look at? Yeah, sure. I just put it up.

So I don't have many subscribers yet. I'll go subscribe after this. So it's called the Klyra passages. I'll link to it on my LinkedIn and my Twitter as well.

But it's on Substack, just launched. Very cool. I'm excited to look at that. I guess kind of maybe like coming back to Bitcoin and thinking about like even what you're working on and AI and everything.

Is there something that like makes you like really excited about the future or kind of like something that you would want to see in the future? Well, I don't have specific things I want to see. Well, none come to mind right now. I'm sure there's many.

But no, I think in general, I'm really excited. I think we're at a really interesting moment in human history where we have AI for the first time. I've been in San Francisco getting the Waymo cars, like the robot cars. And it's amazing.

It's such a great customer experience. It's such a great product. So I think that there is where it sort of this potential inflection point where so much of this technology and AI can be used for repression or manipulation but then it also is such a leveling the playing field. Like we now as an individual has so much power in our hands to kind of build and create and research and find out and connect.

So I think it's sort of a leveler, if anything. So I don't know. I think being in Bitcoin in general is just, it's such a great place to be because it's like, okay, there's a lot of issues in the world, but we're just getting together and kind of building towards a better future. And so I think always being in Bitcoin is just a positive place to be, I would say.

Definitely, yes. There's always lots going on, and it does feel like people are aligned on the same ethos and what they're building, at least a lot of people are. So that's definitely a fun space. Yeah, yeah, I agree.

I guess another thing, do you have like any kind of tips or like advice you'd maybe give to somebody who's either thinking about starting a startup or like what's your normal kind of like tips for them? Yes, definitely. So what I say to people is put together before you start a company. So starting a company is like a huge investment and commitment of your time, of your resources.

you know you might spend the next one three five ten years on this so you want to really think through it before you dive in is this the best way that you could spend your life and so before diving into starting a company I really recommend people put together an investor deck because effectively you're they're investing you're investing your time your life into this so you should be thinking about it the same way an investor would start it um and so you know you can look at like there's so much resources on Y Combinator.

We have a little notion that we can send people with resources and I have a whole list of like what an outline for an investor deck and recommendations for pitching, but that's sort of separate. And so it's thinking through not just what's the product, but okay, what's the problem I'm solving? Who am I solving it for? Is it a 10 times better solution than what's out there?

How much are the customers willing to pay? How many customers are willing to pay for it? How will I reach those customers? So in VC land, like that would be called, you know, what's your business model?

What's your market size? What's your go to market? All of these different things that go into how, like what's important in thinking through, if this is a business worth you spending your time and energy on, how will I fund it? So that's what I would, that's just like a, I think a lot of people miss when they, when they kind of get an idea and I did the same thing, like, and who's, and the, the team.

The team is super important. Like, are you the best people in the world to do this? And if not, can you bring together the best people in the world to tackle this problem? And the biggest piece of advice, which is certainly where I failed as a founder and was, how are you getting in your own way?

Like, what are your own internal limitations? What are you good at? What are you not good at? And how can you either overcome them and work or get a business partner or an employee that can complement you and for what you're not good at and being really, really self-aware and ruthless around your self-awareness and really striving to grow and then complement yourself with people that help.

Because I think ultimately a lot of founders get in their own way and that's tough to see because they have a fear or there's something going on or they're not good at doing something and that gets in their way. so yeah that's good advice it definitely seems like a hard but rewarding thing to do um i know we're going over time but i have one more question that i meant to ask you uh because i think you'd have a good answer for it so so one of our goals here at presidio bitcoin is try to bridge the gap between bitcoin and silicon valley um which i think like you know ecodeath does a good job of kind of like being a middle ground VC for Bitcoiners.

I guess kind of like, what would you maybe say to people in Silicon Valley or tech land that aren't in Bitcoin, either VC or just tech? I'm like, why should they care about it? That's an interesting question. I mean, I think fundamentally, if we look at Bitcoin, I just always come back to the fundamentals of like why Bitcoin matters.

And it's like fiat currencies are fundamentally corrupted and we all see that now even in the u.s but it's a massive issue in emerging markets um and anything that will be corrupted can be corrupted will be and it's inherently centralizing inherently promoting of inequality and bitcoin i think is really far and away ahead of potentially being this currency that's the new global reserve currency and a technology-based global reserve currency like that's kind of a pretty incredible thing to have and then if you think about all of the technology that's going to be built and is being built on top of that um i just see that as such an exciting interesting place uh for any technology anyone that's in technology to think that you know the currency of the future is technology based um so i love that that's a good one um yeah actually we had a bitcoin design week uh back in september and it was interesting we uh named it like designing future money like we didn't even have the word Bitcoin in it.

And it brought in like a ton of new people in the door. So I feel like there's focusing on the technology aspect is important. That's very cool. Yeah, I agree.

Well, thanks for coming on the show. If our listeners want to follow you or where should they go? So on Twitter, I'm at one Andy Pitt. So the number one and then Andy Pitt.

LinkedIn is, I think it might be Andrea Pitt. But if you search Andy Pitt, EgoDeath Capital will come up. And Substack is the CLIRA passages. Very cool.

Well, thanks again. And enjoy the rest of your time in San Francisco. Yeah.