Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
How Solana’s Founder Sees Crypto Transforming Global Finance, AI Innovation, and American Opportunity | Anatoly Yakovenko Pt 2
23 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome back to part two of this incredible conversation. Without further ado, here we go. Okay, so you brought up the USSR. What do you think would happen to crypto if what I think is the Democratic Party fully embracing socialism, what happens to crypto in that scenario? Because that gives me a way to get outside of a system where they can snatch all my stuff.
I'm, again, an optimist. I think you start seeing the ebbs and flows. People call one side socialist, the other side fascist. But when you actually look into it, or if you're an immigrant with experience in either one of those, you're like, yeah, come on, give me a break.
Now, in my defense, they call themselves a New York socialist.
Chapter 2: How does crypto relate to the current political climate?
So you look at that and you think, this is a watered down American version that we don't have to worry about.
Um, you do worry about it and you, people should push back and like, um, be critical of bad proposals and like really actually like test people. Like you really, you know, the problem you're trying to solve is solved by building more houses or building more hospitals. And you haven't built any of those things in the last 10 years. So you're full of shit. Like give them, give them that feedback.
And I think the loop, the feedback loops in the U S are fast enough that the people that want to get elected want to get elected so badly that they will do the right thing if you push them on it. This is, I think, the best part. They want to get elected, right? That's their career. That's the career they chose.
So there is incentive for them to do the right thing if that's what will get them elected. So it's ultimately up to the people and the voters to kind of push them on meaningful, measurable results. Where a lot of problems come in is like, People will claim that they solved housing affordability with subsidies, but no new houses being built. So you gotta call them in that bullshit.
You haven't solved anything, because you have the same number of houses, no matter how you move the numbers around. Some more people, fewer houses, somebody's screwed. You haven't solved affordability unless you build stuff. But that requires kind of that's ultimately up to the people. I think there's enough smart people that kind of push back and stuff that I think ultimately things work out.
I think Neither side, like even the worst administration like Gensler and Warren and all this stuff during the last four years had no meaningful impact on crypto adoption slowing down. Like I think Stablecoin growth went like 5x or something like that during those four years. And this is because a lot of the adoption is happening outside of the U.S.
and because they don't have these trusted financial systems that can guarantee that when I send you money, you actually receive it, especially across border like Argentina to China. Who are you going to trust? Right. If you go through the traditional finance channels that are trusted, you're paying a lot and it takes 14 days, like 10 plus days to settle like that. It's just
business people that need to get products and services shipped immediately to sell them will use the rails that work and crypto actually works and it and it removes all all those intermediaries and removes a whole bunch of failure cases so you're not going to be able to stop that from United States no matter what the next administration tries to do so from my perspective I think kind of
It doesn't really matter, I think, who's in charge. It matters for founders.
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Chapter 3: What challenges exist in building trust in a digital world?
Founders will just move offshore where they don't have to deal with the hassle of paying the lawyers and figuring out all of the stuff. They'll just move to Singapore or some other place like they did during those four years. But I think in terms of products and real adoption, not much will change.
It'll continue growing no matter what. So I have a giant region of my brain dedicated to America needing to avoid becoming a has-been, which happens all throughout history. And so I am also optimistic, but my optimism is really about Humans are the ultimate adaptation machine. We can get very good at anything that we apply ourselves to.
But history tells me that countries can and do go wrong for very long periods of time and that people will suffer. And so I have a much higher degree of paranoia than you do. So I look at this and I'm like, ooh, who's in power matters a lot because it's cold comfort to somebody who's not going to leave America that America is moving in the wrong direction.
yeah for sure it does it matters to to people's lives um i mean like it's crazy that the palisades fire homes haven't been rebuilt yet but it's nothing to do with lack of bricks or mortar like short ussr level shortages where they just didn't have any of that stuff it is a self-induced shortage It's purely our own politics that's preventing those homes from being built, which is nuts, right?
But it's a different problem than literally factory says that they built all the bricks, but the bricks don't exist. So I think we have a lot of problems that are of our own choosing. And I think what's important is that people actually kind of look at why we have those problems and
take agency in action to go address them and push back on like, you know, like I think if you look at it, there's so many stocks that you cannot possibly track them all and invest all of them. There's so many layers of government like we have very decentralized government. You have city, county, state, federal and many layers of federal.
There's like 12 people you have to track of to do a good job. that affect your specific, whether you can build stuff locally. And it's just too much for any single person to do that. I think that's kind of part of the problem. Who do you actually push back onto and block building buildings in California is like a difficult question.
And a lot of it is very much local people that don't want the value of their house to go down because it's stuff like this. So a lot of it is of our own choosing. And we can fix all those problems. I just got to kind of actually just talk them out, go throw a block party and talk to your neighbors. make some hot dogs in your hot dog stand.
That's good, I like that.
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Chapter 4: How is AI transforming finance and healthcare?
That's it from like 50 bucks a person. That's a trajectory. that anyone can achieve here because you have access to the best schools in the world and you don't actually need to go to Harvard to succeed. Like UIC is an excellent engineering school, like best in the world, but it's a state school.
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Chapter 5: What role does Solana play in the future of finance?
And this is with traditional finance. They just flub a transfer and their processes are too slow. So as soon as something like that happens, you start, how do I fix this? That never happens. And you use cryptographic signing and double signing and all this stuff that you can do in crypto. And you start removing those processes. It's just a slow thing.
But AI is also basically rebuilding how technology's made. I think, I just can't imagine any company with engineering, any kind of engineering, chemical, whatever, biology software that's not using AI. How much do you use it? Every day. Basically, probably more than I tweet, I send commands into Cloud.
Wow. And I tweet like 20, 30 times a day. That's hilarious. Now, are you doing like a co-pilot thing where you're just constantly... Yeah, I have...
I pay for all of them. So I have Grok and ChatGPT and Cloud and Gemini. And I use Cloud for coding. So it's what generates the code. And I use the other three to basically build like a planning document that I can then give to Cloud.
So that you're essentially architecting the system and then you say, here's what this whole thing is going to be now.
But I'm not actually like, it's weird, but it's very much like I'm a manager now. of the AI. Interesting. Yeah, I don't need deep understanding of the details. I just kind of have a high level of the thing that I want to do, but I try to create an adversarial environment for the AIs between the agents to come up with a planning document that is precise and concise and unambiguous.
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Chapter 6: How is the American spirit of innovation reflected in crypto?
And then I'm like, Claude, here's the doc, go build it.
How close will they get you? Because I've done vibe coding and I find that it always terminates where it gets in a loop and it will fix one problem only to break another.
Yeah, this is where I think AI is a massive accelerator for experienced engineers because you kind of like step back and you're like, okay, I'm dealing with like college grad that knows everything, but is a college grad. So you have to kind of like smell what they're doing and course correct them.
And I think if you've been like an engineer 10 plus years and you've dealt with like teams that are new grads or whatever, you kind of can like start, kind of use your experience to guide them. So for me, it's a massive accelerator. Like, I don't know if I want to for the side projects I'm working on. I don't think I need to ever hire for them. Whoa. It's it's it is that weird.
Like I can build the product and ship it and maintain it myself and kind of like basically I would hire somebody to replace that one person. That's me because I can go be that person for another project. Yeah. But I don't think you need a team for for a lot of things now. Which is weird. Very weird. So that is like, I think you'll see actually like this probably benefit big companies the most.
Like the Googles of the world will be able to ship a lot more products and maintain a lot more products because one, they have the experienced engineers and you basically assign one product per engineer and that's 60,000 products at Google, 60 at Microsoft, you know, insane number of breadth that they can cover now.
When you reach into the future, three, five years, what do you see? How dramatic is the transformation?
For engineering and science, I think it's very dramatic. It'll just be an invaluable tool. I don't buy into this, your national output will be based on the amount of silicon and energy. Kind of the Elon science fiction thing is like, That's like planetary scale versus some alien civilization. Like how much sun energy you're converting into intelligence thing. I think that's too far out.
The bottleneck is ultimately like there's just... It's really hard to succeed. Like it's both easy and hard to succeed as a business in the United States because consumers already have everything. They already have effectively like perfect lives. This is why all our problems are self-induced.
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Chapter 7: How does the Solana network plan to scale and improve?
Nobody wants to build housing because they're all kind of have decent housing and they don't understand the like the opportunity, the cost that it creates for everyone else that's trying to rise up. Right. Like So it's just hard to convince somebody to download a new app or to use a new product or to change their behavior in any way because they're so comfortable already.
Yeah.
Yeah. Tell me about it.
Trying to get them to try a new video game, I imagine, is going to be a pretty brutal task.
Yeah. So that's, I think, is like... We're very blessed. And the vast majority of kind of lifting people out of poverty is happening outside of the United States because we are already so saturated with stuff that people need.
Now, do you think about... Go ahead.
Like, there's real big, huge improvements that can happen, I think, in healthcare and medicine where... You can probably get a better diagnosis right now out of AI for like a good number of cases and better prescriptions and all this stuff. So a lot of health care, like probably 99, 95% of it is non-emergency. Like you don't need like a human AR person to like stitch you up.
Vast majority of health care is call your doctor. They poke at you, run a test and give you a drug. A lot of that seems like AI could do that. Go to like a Bender Futurama machine pokes you that spits out a drug.
Yeah, it's interesting. So Elon was saying three years that at scale, surgeons will be AI and robotics. Even if he's off by three X, that's still only nine years. that at scale the best surgeons in the world are AI. So when I start trying to reach into the future about how much things are going to change, it feels to me like 10 years from now, the world is pretty unrecognizable.
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Chapter 8: What future developments can we expect from Solana?
20 megabyte blocks are fine. Just suck it up. Like, it's not a big deal. Like, we have a lot more bandwidth now than 10, 15 years ago. That's interesting. So it'll grow the ledger 10 times faster and people are going to complain. But like, I think it's fine. Like, I think that's basically just suck it up.
So block size World War II basically is what you're...
Yeah, I think SegWit actually kind of makes it, I think, easier because the witness is segregated. So your witness size blows up and you could just download the ledger, which is transactions without the signatures and see the proof of work proofs for those and then verify and discard the witnesses. But you still should keep a copy of them.
And you don't want a third party intermediary to control that. If you really, really want that, oh, shit, I got a superpower collapse. I need to be able to sell these bitcoins somewhere else. You need that guarantee that somebody else always can get a copy of the ledger and process transactions. And this is where I think that debate isn't bullshit. Like if you actually like
buy into this sovereign store like self-sovereign store wealth that can survive a superpower collapse you do need the most trust minimized system solana's not that we have a totally different problem that we're trying to solve like there's no point to solve the bitcoin problem twice right right so so knowing that you guys are the execution layer and i don't know if you feel like you need to explain that but um what is your guys's future what what are you pushing into
So out of that stack of broker dealer, transfer agents, exchanges, it's a big, deep stack of people that are all taking a spread. The one that I have nerded out on is the exchange part. And it's got this weird problem. So like imagine you're sitting in Singapore and there's a container ship full of iPhones and it just sinks right outside of your window. That's a market moving event for Apple.
that real value that the company Apple depends on and now has disappeared, the newswire for that event has to travel speed of light through fiber to New York to trade on it. So there's like a 60, 70 millisecond worth of latency before you can take action on it. So the New York Stock Exchange with its nanosecond trading or whatever is 80 milliseconds behind the real world in that scenario.
Regardless of how fast that centralized exchange goes, that signal exists everywhere in the world. and a decentralized distributed system like Solana, our ultimate goal is that as soon as you see that signal, you can actually submit a transaction and its ordering becomes immutable in that moment in Singapore.
So then by the time that speed of light through Fiber Newswire goes to New York and you look at the market for Apple token stock, tokenized Apple stock on Solana and one in the New York Stock Exchange, The one on Solana has already priced that information in and there's no arbitrage.
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