About this episode
Alex Blania (CEO of Tools for Humanity, Co-Founder of World, and Co-Founder of Merge Labs) joins Sourcery to explain why the internet is heading toward a breaking point: bots, deepfakes, scams, and autonomous agents are scaling faster than trust.“99.9% of internet traffic will be AI driven.”“It’s not about combating the bots because that will be a lost cause.”World is trying to build a “real human network” a proof-of-human layer for the AI era, and the numbers are getting serious:• 38,374,194 World App users across 160 countries• 17,832,402 verified unique humans• 970,885,726 wallet transactionsWe talk about: how proof-of-human actually works, what happens when bots outnumber people online, why identity becomes the bottleneck for markets and platforms, and what a “verified human internet” could look like.Then we go deeper into Alex’s second frontier bet: Merge Labs, a brain–computer interface research lab that raised $252M seed round at an $850M valuation, backed by Bain Capital Ventures, with OpenAI as an investor and research collaborator, plus Gabe Newell. Merge Labs is pursuing less-invasive, higher-bandwidth BCIs, exploring ultrasound-based modalities and molecular approaches to interface with more of the brain without implants.The bot era is here. The question is: how do you prove you’re human online, and what happens when you can’t?Alex Blania: ?https://x.com/alexblania?Molly O’Shea: ??https://x.com/MollySOShea??Sourcery: ??https://x.com/sourceryvc???????? ?????YouTube: ?https://youtu.be/7PnaQzw_K8E?????????• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets,
