#215 Charles Hoskinson - Cardano Founder on the Secret DARPA AI Project That Became Siri

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Charles Hoskinson, welcome to the show.

It's good to be here, Sean.

How you been?

Amazing.

I had a great breakfast with you.

It was a lot of fun.

But,

well, I've been wanting to have you on the show for a super long time.

And so now to have you here, it's just, it's awesome.

You are a fascinating individual.

You sketch your hands and all kinds of different stuff.

And I want to dive into it as into all of it as much as we possibly can.

And then, and then we had breakfast, and I was like, oh, man, I could go for days with this guy.

There's a lot there.

So thank you for coming.

Well, I do appreciate it.

You're one of the OGs, and this is an amazing studio, by the way.

You got some artifacts here, man.

A lot of history.

A lot of history.

But yeah, a lot of the guests have sent in stuff.

And we probably only covered about half of it.

But

yeah,

a lot of good people have sat in here, and now you're one of them.

So thank you again.

But

everybody starts off with an introduction here.

So

here we go.

Charles Hoskinson, co-founder of Ethereum and the CEO and founder of Input Output, the company behind the Cardano blockchain.

Cardano is positioned to be included in the U.S.

Strategic Crypto Reserve alongside Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, and Solana.

He testified in front of U.S.

Congress regarding cryptocurrency regulation, operate an 11,000-acre bison ranch in Wyoming, owned both a construction company and state-of-the-art healthcare clinic focused on anti-aging in rural Wyoming.

Part of the group that de-extincted the direwolf, co-founder of a lab that is genetically engineering bioluminescent plants, funded and joined a maritime expedition near Papa, New Guinea, that recovered extra solar fragments from the ocean floor.

In 2021, founded the Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University, and most recently, decided to wear gloves filled with bullet ants in a ceremony in Brazil.

And there's a lot more, but

we'll get into it later on in the interview.

So

I want to do

a life story on you.

and starting from childhood, getting into the Cardano and Ethereum, and then all these different ventures that you're doing now.

It seems to me like you just do whatever the hell you're interested in and go in that direction.

Right.

You know, you get enough money, you just do whatever you want.

So I just did everything, and I don't know if I can keep this up because I'm getting pretty tired.

There's too many pots in the fire.

I don't know how you keep it all straight, but we're at like six companies now or something like that.

Man.

yeah man but uh a couple things uh to do before we get into it so i have a patreon account it's a subscription account uh we've turned it into quite the community they've been here with me since the beginning when i started this in the attic and um and they're the reason that i get to be here today with you and so one of the things i do is uh i offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question so this is from andre

what do you see is the bus What do you see as the biggest physiological failure in how cryptocurrencies have been implemented since their inception?

And how is Cardano attempting to correct that course?

So one of the biggest challenges with cryptocurrencies is that you'd like them, for them to be successful and adopted, to be a cooperative.

But the way tokenomics work, the way the actual underlying tokens connect into the infrastructure, they're intrinsically adversarial.

So it's like kind of a sum-zero market.

So for Bitcoin to win, Ethereum must fail.

For Ethereum to win, Bitcoin must fail.

And for crypto to win, well, the banking industry has to fail.

And everybody has to go over to crypto.

And that's not how the world works.

If you look at real modern business, geopolitics, religion, whatever it is, you have to find cooperative equilibria.

You have to find a way that if I win, you win.

If I make money, you make money.

So, you know,

they've been tremendously successful from a growth hacking perspective.

Cryptocurrency has gone from nothing to 550 million users within 15 years, from no value to a multi-trillion dollar ecosystem, but they have still stayed somewhat divorced from the Web 2 world and the legacy financial world.

They're not interconnected and interoperable.

So really, the next five to 10 years in the industry, it's about how do you build bridges and how do you reset the incentive layer of the system so that people make more money cooperating together.

And we're starting to see this with stablecoins, for example.

They're working their way into the cryptocurrency space, and they went from from nothing to $243 billion of stablecoins issued with Tether and Circle and the other major standards, about 180 million transactions per month.

So huge amount of volume.

And probably by 2030, we're going to have stable coins grow to about a trillion dollar to $2 trillion vertical and probably about 500 million to a billion transactions per month.

So massive growth.

Under the hood, they're just tokenized treasuries.

you know short-term treasuries you buy them you get a few points of interest and so they just took them they tokenized them they put them on a blockchain.

Well, why do people want them?

Well, the cryptocurrency space, we want them because it's too volatile.

Bitcoin goes way up, it goes way down.

I was in Bitcoin before it was a dollar, and I watched it go to $30, down to four.

I watched it go all the way up to $256, down to $80, then up to $1,200, then down to $250,000, then up to $20,000.

Woo, cocaine and hookers, yay.

And then down to $4,000, then up to 40, is there 68,000, then down to 25, and then all the way up to $100,000, right?

It's just crazy times.

You can't build an economy if you have that level of volatility.

So you need value stability and then you can create credit and then you can have an economy.

Well, the legacy world can do that.

There's constructions there, but crypto has to learn how to work with that world.

Why does the legacy world want to work with crypto?

Well, this allows you to dollarize places that normally can't be dollarized.

So you look at Argentina or you look at Venezuela or where all these places are, they would much rather have U.S.

dollars than pesos, you know, because the volatility is so high and you can't trust the banks in these places.

So Argentina, for example, the economy is $700 billion through GDP, but there's already $100 billion in cryptocurrency assets that are floating around.

So one out of every $7 of value is in crypto.

Why?

Because they don't trust the local currency.

So they went to stable coins.

So if you're a bank or an issuer, you say, wow, this is the best business in the world.

I embrace this crypto.

I tokenize treasuries.

I get the yield.

They get the stability.

And I get basically free money, which is why Tether is now, I think, the seventh or eighth largest holder of U.S.

treasuries in the world.

And they make, they're more profitable than Goldman Sachs, even though they only have 250 employees.

No kidding.

Yeah.

So

it's those cooperative economics where the legacy world can do something, the crypto world can do something.

And when you bring these two things together and both sides make money, both sides get value.

That's what we need to do.

Now, specifically for Cardano, Cardano was always designed to be a highly upgradable cryptocurrency.

And the way we constructed it is we constructed it where there's an angle for the regulated business to exist.

We have technology called midnight that's coming out, and it's going to allow rational privacy and selective disclosure and all these things that are required for how the legacy financial world exists.

But then also at the same time, it has the same ethos and values that Bitcoin does, which is the largest market.

So it's fully decentralized and it has all these amazing capabilities.

So we kind of straddle both those worlds and we take this slow and deliberate function.

But what's nice about it is because of that, the network has never gone down.

For eight years straight, Cardano's operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

It's been hammered and attacked, and everybody's tried to kill it.

And it's just Johnny Live a lot, keeps going, keeps doing things.

So it creates a resilience and a trust that's required for people to build that type of infrastructure.

So, you know, it's a challenging space.

It's highly adversarial.

It's highly competitive.

And

you think like politics is bad.

Like crypto Twitter is probably much worse than anything Trump's ever said or Biden's ever said or whatever.

It's a tough world to live in.

But in general, we just keep that durability and we always have one eye on the future.

Like what is going to be required to bring trillions of dollars of real world assets into the space?

What is required to bring Bitcoin into a space where it can participate in the DeFi world and these things?

And by doing that, the network has grown.

It's gone from nothing to about 4.3 million active wallets.

And we think we'll probably grow to more than 10 to 15 by the end of the decade.

So it's got a very nice growth rate for it.

And also, it now works with everything.

So Cardano can start talking to Solana and to Ethereum and to Bitcoin and to all these other standards.

And that's what it should be.

Their success should be our success and their user should be our user and vice versa.

That's what's required to win.

What do you mean they should be talking to each other?

So the chains are independent infrastructure.

So if you have an asset or an application that lives on Ethereum, it doesn't natively know how to speak the language of an asset or a application living on Solana or Bitcoin or Cardano.

So to talk to each other means that you actually create interoperability and now for the first time ever you can move users and assets value liquidity between the different systems.

So imagine like foreign banking systems.

So you can't really send a wire transfer to Iran easily or back because the systems have been chopped up and isolated because of sanctions.

So imagine Wi-Fi if your phone could only connect to an Apple router or to a Samsung router and it couldn't connect to any other router.

Well that'd be a crazy protocol, right?

Or Bluetooth, like my Bluetooth headset only connects to my iPhone, iPhone, but nothing else.

So a long time ago, we realized that interoperability is a super important feature.

And so when you look at Cardano, one of the things we realized was it's less about how do I lock you into the system?

And it's more about how do I get the system to talk to all the other systems?

You know, what is that Wi-Fi moment for the industry as a whole?

And just in solving interoperability, then you see a massive flow of transactions, a massive flow of users, and eventually that becomes your kind of your commercial engine.

So that's what I mean by talking to each other.

And then the other side of talking to each other is how do you, for the big stakeholders in those ecosystems, so the people that control billions of dollars of the asset or have built large applications with many users, how do you work with them to create value for them?

So a great example would be Brave.

It's a very popular browser.

It's got about 86 million users.

Joe Rogan's a user.

Tons of people use it.

And it was founded by the guy who created JavaScript, Brendan Ick.

And Brendan actually is a pioneer.

He started Netscape with a bunch of other guys.

And then he was the CEO of Mozilla, which was Firefox.

Now he has Brave.

Well, Brave built into it wants to be as decentralized as possible.

They have an ad model called BATS and they have a VPN model to keep your information secret and private.

Well, they don't want to be in a position where they're a data custodian and they know everything about you.

And trust me, bro, everything works great.

They want to be in a position where they help you get the level of privacy you want and they help you share your data when and how you want to do that in exchange you get paid to do that but they know nothing about you well cryptocurrency technologies enable this to happen really well for them which is why they launched their own token called bats and these other things so how do we make their ad model better how do we make their vpn model better how do we grow that and then that solves a problem for 88 million users and it helps them grow then to 100 million users or 150 million users well once those users are on our ecosystem well then they also will do other things they'll participate in nfts and d5 things and whatever the heck of the latest and greatest newfangled thing is in the space.

So their users are our users and our users are their users.

That's a cooperative equilibria that you look for.

And if you solve their ad problem, you find a better way to do ads that preserve their privacy and actually share the ad revenue with the people who provide the information, well, that's just as useful to Microsoft and Meta and to Google as it is to bats.

You know, because they don't want to be a data custodian and they just want the semantical value of the data.

They want to be able to micro-target people and sell things, but they don't want to be in the business of knowing every single detail about who you are.

And it's a liability because if they ever get hacked,

then they lose all that data.

So you can create economies for these types of things, and then you can start creating ecosystems around them, and then you revolutionize the offering.

And every time you do it, it gets more decentralized, and you push more value to the edges.

And then you can start cutting people in on things that they previously gave away for free.

Very interesting.

Does crypto overtake the current system eventually?

No, I think think it'll merge.

It's like new media and online media versus legacy media.

It just became media.

And so the really smart people like the New York Times and other people,

they were quick to realize that they had to get on the web and build a web footprint.

And then the dinosaurs like the Rocky Mountain News and others, they didn't get that right and they went out of business.

And so very similarly, when you look at finance, you have TradFi and DeFi.

It's going to merge and become PHY.

And both sides help each other out.

So in terms of the legacy world, the cost of compliance is too high.

It's $500 billion a year globally.

So you could buy Tokyo every three years if you want to comply with KYC, know your customer, anti-money laundering, anti-terrorist financing.

It's extraordinary when you look at the global cost of that.

And then also just settlement time is too slow.

It takes days or weeks to do certain things.

And liquidity is siloed.

And so the American liquidity is different from the Dubai liquidity, different from the German liquidity.

That doesn't make any sense, because what if a German person wants to to buy an American product or a person in Dubai wants to buy an American product?

Why do they have to go through all these hops and loops to get into the American market?

So the legacy world, they want automated compliance.

They want universal global liquidity and they want more transaction volume.

Okay, well, the Web3 side of the world wants all the money.

They want the capital that's currently locked up in BlackRock and the capital that's locked up in Goldman Sachs and all these other places to move over into crypto products.

So there's a marriage there if they can kind of put these pieces together and one creates innovation and

reforms the legacy world and the other provides the users and ultimately the raw economic value.

Well when those systems merge, it gets harder and harder to distinguish what's crypto versus what's not crypto.

Like here's an example.

Let's say the Genius Act passes, which is a piece of legislation that's almost through the Congress right now to regulate stablecoins.

Well, the minute that passes, Microsoft could wake up and say, you know what, we want to issue our own stablecoin and we want to create a cryptocurrency wallet into Windows and just have it right there.

So when you boot up your Windows 11, it's right in the system tray and you click a button for it.

Well, the consumer, when they see that, they'll probably say dollars.

Won't say cryptocurrency on cryptocurrency XYZ.

Just say dollars.

And you can use your credit card to like...

top it up and transfer money into it and it's seamless because they'll have great bank infrastructure on the back end because Microsoft is so big and so rich.

What did they just do?

They just onboarded 2 billion people into the cryptocurrency space.

Now, why would Microsoft want to do this?

Well,

they have customers in Sri Lanka, and they have customers in Bangladesh, and they have customers in Burundi, and all these other places.

And it's really expensive for them to move money in and out of those countries and sell products in and out of those countries.

And you don't want to take a $100 product and have $20 disappear because of Forex risk and intermediaries and all these things.

You would much rather that customer have a decentralized money and have a direct financial relationship with you.

And no matter where that dollar gets sent to you for that purchase, you you get 100% of the purchase value.

You'd much rather have that relationship.

So

if they issue stablecoin, then a la,

voila, they have that.

It's all there.

So the temptation for the Mag 7 to come in, the Magnificent 7, like the Apples and the Microsoft, the Metas, is extremely strong.

And in fact, Facebook tried to enter the cryptocurrency space a few years ago with a project called Libra, and it kind of got smashed down by the regulators.

But they were going in with MasterCart and all these other guys because they wanted to turn WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger into a payment system.

You're chatting with somebody and he said, hey, you know, Sean, can I borrow 20 bucks?

Sure.

You just tap your phone, you send 20 bucks, just like that.

No banks involved.

It's person to person, completely decentralized.

Because they said, well, hang on, we got billions of people in this platform.

We can be the world's largest payment processor through this whole setup.

So there's too much temptation for these guys to come in.

They were just waiting for the regulatory window to open and then they come in.

And once they come in, the consumer is not really thinking, I'm in the cryptocurrency space, I'm a cryptocurrency entrepreneur.

It just feels like a better PayPal, it feels like a better traditional bank interface.

You see, makes sense.

Wow, wow.

We're gonna get more into this before I forget.

Everybody gets a gift.

What you got for me?

Those are vigilance league gummy bears legal in all 50 states, made in the USA.

You could even pay for those in crypto.

But,

but yeah,

everybody gets a gift.

So there it is.

Thank you, sir.

My pleasure.

I'll put that right there.

But,

you know, I want to get into your life story, but I want to talk about these bioluminescence plants first.

We had, you showed me some pictures at breakfast.

Wow.

I mean,

it looks like something out of a movie and the light that these things are putting off.

I mean, it looks like it looks, we can't show these pictures yet.

It looks like

they're under a black light and they're just glowing in these magnificent neon colors.

And what, so let's get into that real,

not real quick.

Let's get into that and then we'll get into your life story.

Where did this come about from?

So, you know, for many years, I always wanted to do a synthetic biology company because when I was in college you know I didn't know if I wanted to be a doctor or mathematician so I took a ton of biology classes and chemistry classes and a lot of my friends who went deeper into that they started it was because they were right at the beginning of the CRISPR era and the whole gene therapies and all these things so they were doing all the time genetic engineering and they kept saying well there's all these cool things that will be possible in 10 or 20 years and like like what and they're like well you know you could take human skin cells and merge them with octopus DNA and then you know octopus can actually change its color so you can make a human skin cell be able to change its color and camouflage itself kind of like the predator or something like that it's like wow that's cool or you can take luciferase in this case and put it into any plant you want and you can make a plant glow in the dark and so for more than two decades you know I was aware that these capabilities would be evident at some point it just Really, I was looking for a partnership that would make sense.

And so it was a serendipity.

I met Ben Lamb.

And Ben is a genius.

He's a great guy, a wonderful guy.

And he's kind of like me where he likes doing a little bit of everything.

We both like the alien stuff and this thing.

And he started all these weird startups and he's made quite a bit of money from them.

And he was just getting started with a startup called Colossal, which I invested in.

And Colossal is kind of famous for bringing back the dire wolf.

And they're working on the Willie Mammoth right now.

And it's an amazing company.

So Ben and I were talking about, was there a way that we could do something with Colossal in the cryptocurrency space?

And this was back in 2021.

And as like a side conversation, I mentioned to him, hey, it'd be really cool if we could do glow-in-the-dark plants.

And, you know, let's think this out.

And he's like, I want to do that too.

And George Church, the guy that started Colossal with him, like, was an expert in this area.

He wrote all the books on synthetic biology, like Regenesis was one book and over a thousand papers and these things.

He's like a gigabrain out of Harvard.

He had all this technology to basically do this.

And it was one of those like, did we just become best friends

type of thing?

They were like, we got to start a company.

It's like, yeah, shit, we got to start a company.

So we ended up starting a company and we're still running mostly in Sileno.

And they hate it when I talk about this stuff.

But every now and then, I'll be like, hey, there's some cool stuff coming.

And really what we've been working on is more than just this concept of bioluminescent plants, which is super cool and interesting.

But also, we've been working on this idea of using synthetic biology to engineer plants to be better adapted for our goals in the environment that they're put in.

So let's say that you're in Saudi Arabia and you're building NEOM, you know, you're MBS, and you have this grand vision of like this trillion-dollar massive megacity in the middle of damn nowhere that, and you want to terraform the entire world.

Well, there's only so much you can do with steel and concrete and glass.

At some point, you have to use agriculture and what you'd like to do is reclaim the desert and turn it into a different biome because who wants to be in a desert?

You want to be somewhere interesting.

That's why we're out here in Tennessee and this morning we had breakfast.

That place was gorgeous.

All this beautiful, lush greenery, you know, everywhere you look.

Well, I'd love to see that if I was MBS.

And so what if you had a company that understood so well how to modify the ambient environment that it could conceive of plants to do such a thing?

Or what if your goal is carbon reduction?

You can make plants that sequester enormous amounts of carbon.

Or what if your goal is environmental reclamation?

Let's say you have a shooting range.

You know, what's your number one problem?

You're going to accumulate a lot of lead over time, right?

And so what if you had plants that seeped it right out of of the soil so it doesn't get into the water and sequesters inside the plant?

You can do these types of things.

So bioluminescence is a really magical thing because it's one of those like you can see it.

It's not a hypothetical.

Like if I make plants that sequester carbon, oh, that's cool.

They sequester carbon.

I can't see it.

You know, it doesn't really appear to be anything meaningful.

But here, it's like, it's just magic.

It's something that never existed before.

And you can imagine the art of the possible.

You know, glowing cities, glowing golf courses, organic lighting, all these magical, amazing things.

And the other thing is that once you've mastered that as a platform, then all those other use cases become tractable and useful and easy.

Because you now know how to pretty much do anything you want with the organism.

And what's cool is the bioluminescence can also be a guide, tell you whether those genes have been taken or not.

Because you can cross-link them.

And you can say, well, if it glows this color, it has this property.

If it glows this color, it has this property or these types of things.

So there's a method to the madness, and it gets people instantly interested.

And they always say, oh, that's AI, or that's a fantasy, or it's under a black light, or something.

And then they physically see it and they say, wow, this is incredible.

And so at some point soon, we'll go out of silent mode and actually have a big showing of these types of things to get people very excited about it.

But every now and then, when I meet an interesting person, I kind of share it because people say, wow, the world is moving in kind of a new place.

And then they always ask for something.

They're like, can you make this plant glow?

Or can you do this color?

Or wouldn't it be cool if we could decorate this way or do this thing?

And then we say, oh, that's a good idea.

And you kind of take it and you say, well, maybe we should work on that or something like that.

You know,

I don't know how far you want to dive into this, so I don't want to push, but you had mentioned some early detection.

systems that these plants could be used.

Yeah, Sentinel plants.

And so imagine you're a coal miner and you're in West Virginia or Pennsylvania or something.

Gillette is like one of the coal capitals of the world, but we have these big open-pit mines, which are a lot safer.

But let's say you're underground, you're a coal miner, what's your number one problem?

You're worried about methane, you know, because it naturally leaches off the walls and you don't smell it.

Most people, when they think of natural gas, oh, it smells terrible.

Well, it doesn't actually.

It's odorless.

It smells terrible because after they process it, they put a chemical in it so you can detect it and you can smell it.

So if you're a miner in a mine and natural gas is building up, it's a silent killer.

It explodes and so it's terrible.

So you have to always detectors and that's why they had the canary and coal mine, this type of thing.

So imagine a plant, a cave moss or something, and it doesn't glow unless there's methane and when it does, it glows red.

It's called a sentinel plant, right?

And you can use this for military applications, for industrial applications, for environmental applications, these types of things.

And that's the art of the possible.

And that's what gets people very excited about this technology.

Because then you say, okay, the plant is now an information transmitter about something in my environment.

And it does it naturally and organically, and it's just there.

And once you have that capability, then what that does for you is it puts you in a position where you are able to kind of ask the people you're working with, what do you want?

You know, what would improve safety?

What would improve the experience?

You know, what would improve the ambiance of where we're at?

And then you can design the plants.

You can design this biology around that desire.

So that's what gets me most excited about it.

And what's cool is it's the only time ever where like Hollywood is interested and restaurants are interested and casinos are interested and the Air Force is interested.

You know, it's like there's this huge spectrum of people.

It's a magical company.

And I love those magical companies.

They just make people want to be part of it.

They want to be invested in it.

They brag to their friends like, I am in this coolest company in the whole world.

And Colossal is much the same way.

Any Ben Lamb company is this way.

This is why he's a genius.

It's like you invest in Colossal, you're like, oh, yeah, yeah, I'm part of that whole Willie Mammoth thing and that whole dire wolf thing.

You're like, holy shit, that's awesome.

You know, like, tell me more.

It's like, I can't tell you anything.

I mean, you had mentioned,

we were talking about security and a little bit of prepping and all that kind of stuff as well.

And you had mentioned that you could modify

what sounded like a thorn bush and make a security wall with thorns that are.

Yeah.

You know, like I have a construction company and we have about 200 people in it.

We do dirt work and concrete work and I go every year to World of Concrete and all these things.

And if you own a construction company, at some point you're building walls, you know, whether they be concrete walls or wood walls, whatever.

And landscaping is a big part of a security element.

And so all the time you can plant things like the Japanese barberry.

It's a perfect bush for security.

It can grow about six to eight feet high, which is exactly about how high you want it.

And they got these really sharp, nasty thorns, and they're about that wide.

So if you create a hedge wall and then back it with like a concrete wall or you know a wood fence or something, you've already created something that's very hard for somebody to work their way through.

Well, why don't people do this?

They're horrendously expensive.

It takes a real long time to grow one.

You have to water it and maintain it and all these things.

Well, when you get into business synthetic biology, you can say, okay, well, I want something with the properties of a crown of thorn or a Japanese barberry or whatever the plant is, but I want it to grow like really fast.

And then you can just 3D print some lattice structure, you put it in, and then just grow out an entire wall.

Well, if it's bioluminescent, it also glows at night too.

So you have your organic lighting, and now you have a denial and all these things.

And then you'd also tune it for the environment.

So you'd like say, well, I don't want the deer to eat it, so make it bad for them, but it's fine for humans or something like that.

So you can really get granular with your design requirements.

And what's cool is then you can even blend it with your logo or branding.

So you could be like, okay, well, I want it to match the colors of the brand of my corporation or organization.

You know, because I use black and red for input-output.

So those are our colors.

So it would be really cool if we can do like black flowers or red flowers or things like that.

And it's all there.

And that technology is going to be available

horizonally when you look to the 2030s, especially as AI gets deeper into bioinformatics.

You basically have like a CAD for organisms.

You can sit down and kind of type in all your requirements and it tells you exactly what you need to do step by step.

And you go and design it for the client.

You can do that for bespoke large-scale commercial landscaping.

And it's cool because then you start blending the aesthetic with the functional.

You get a lot of wonderful properties that really help you out, but then you also get these aesthetic properties and it creates a uniqueness about what you have.

So you don't live in this world of

malls and Walmarts and, you know, ugly landscaping.

It's more like European cities where every place you go has a very unique architectural fingerprint and it's very distinct and memorable.

Man, that is fascinating.

How long have you guys been working on that?

Oh, for about two years now.

That's it?

Yeah, that's it.

The first step was just building the science team.

And you got to understand,

it's like cryptocurrencies.

We've been working on it for a while, but...

Cryptography has been around since the 70s, like as an academic discipline.

But it's been around for hundreds of years as like an endeavor that people do.

And Caesar encoded things.

It's called the Caesar cipher.

It's a substitution cipher.

So these ideas are there.

It's just you have to wait a little bit for the science to mature to a point where you can commercialize the science.

So quantum computing, for example, there's all these different incredibly difficult things that have to happen, but once they come together, then you can build a quantum computer.

So now that most of those things have happened, we're starting to get to the possibility of a quantum computer.

And it's very much the same when you look at synthetic biology.

You know, George Church and other people had to spend decades of their lives writing papers and books and articles and training people and conducting experiments and figuring out basically how to do all this stuff.

And now that they have all these things figured out, you're in a position where you actually can now commercialize the technology and roll it out.

Multi-touch and phones, they had these ideas in the 80s for multi-touch, but it took two decades of fundamental R ⁇ D and material sciences to get to a point where Steve Jobs could pretend he invented it, you know, and say, hey, here's the iPhone, and now we can do the pinch and all the other things.

So that's the cool part.

You know, good technologists, they always have one foot in the research side and they are very connected to the labs and the universities and they see what's on the horizon and they have one foot in the right on the bleeding edge of commercialization.

And if you bet too early, you don't really get a good experience out of it and then the imitators come in and kill you.

If you bet too late,

you're the idiot.

There's always the three I's in business.

There's the innovators, the imitators, and the idiots.

And they're very close together.

So you're MySpace.

You come out.

You're the innovator, right?

But you take a lot of arrows and you make a lot of mistakes.

And then the imitator comes in, the Facebook, and they take your lunch and eat everything.

And then people came after Facebook.

They were the idiots.

You know, they weren't able to build, like, was it Google Plus or Google Circles or whatever it was.

They failed miserably, even though they had the network effect of Google and these types of things.

So it's very much the same way you look at emerging technologies.

You're like, where are we at?

Are we the innovator?

Not really.

There's other people that do synthetic biology.

But, you know, we're just leaving that phase and now we're in that second generation.

And we think that there's a lot of there there.

And if we're successful, there'll be tons of idiots that come in and they try to do things, but we already have all the right business model.

And that's what keeps it fun.

You know, Steve Jobs did this with AI.

You know, there was a DARPA program called Kalo in 2003 to 2008.

It was cognitive assistant that learns and organizes.

And he literally got weekly reports on the things that were happening there because the guys who were running it were the guys who ended up creating Siri.

So they were basically like talking about this idea of like an intelligent agent.

And this is in 2003.

DARPA is always ahead of the game.

There's like this intelligent agent that would basically know everything about you and it'd be your companion.

You'd talk to it and it's like a personal assistant.

It'd say, hey, read all my emails.

Which ones should I review?

Which ones should I delete?

I'll do this.

Well, obviously it was fantasy.

They didn't have the technology there, but the guys learned enormous stuff and they spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer taxpayer dollars to de-risk all this technology.

So the minute that they finished, they went and created a small company called Siri, and then Steve instantly bought them and brought them into the guts of Apple.

So he was watching that and he knew roughly when to invest to bring an intelligent agent in.

And every great entrepreneur has developed that sense.

It's the same for when you look at Larry Page at Google or you look at Sasha Nadella at Microsoft Today.

And he just knows when to cut it, when to invest in it.

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It's a double standard.

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Wow.

When do you think that the, what's the name of the plant company?

I'm not going to say it yet.

When do you think that will come out?

We'll probably have something by the end of the year.

Who knows?

You know, I've already probably said too much.

I'm going to get an angry phone call.

It's like in Glorious Bastards.

They're going to chew me out.

We'll move on.

I do have a random question.

You brought up quantum computing, and I wanted to get to this in a little bit, but we'll do it now since you brought it up.

Does quantum computing,

would that make cryptocurrency irrelevant?

No, no.

So

basically, how a quantum computer works is

it's an augmentation of classical computing, not a replacement of it.

So the way I like to explain a quantum computer is imagine that you meet a really hot girl, and she wants to give you her number, but she's kind of a bitch.

So she's like, all right, I wrote my number in this library over there inside one of the books you walk in the library there's millions of books and you're like oh you so she's legit she wrote her number in there but like how do you find the number so a classical computer how that would work is that you would just start at one of the bookshelves you take each book off and you flip through all the pages and see if you find the number now if you want to speed it up there's two ways you can speed it up you can speed it up sequentially meaning that you speed up the rate at which you flip through the books or in parallel and in parallel you get your friends to go and help look through.

So maybe you have five guys come, so you and five other guys are flipping through books.

Now you have six cores running.

And if you want to sequentially, that's your clock rate.

You speed it up.

So for a long, long time, since the 30s, when we first started talking about these things to today,

That's been the paradigm of computing is either speed up the clock rate or make it more parallel and find algorithms that can do that.

Quantum computing is fundamentally different.

What it does is it says, okay, here's what we're going to do.

We have three things.

We're going to do superposition.

So we're instead of looking through the books we're gonna have this magical way of taking all the books off the shelves and put them in a superposition state and then we have interference and entanglement and these properties allow us to relatively speaking know the location the rough location of where that book is then we'll put them all back on the shelves but the area that has the number we're going to pull those books out slightly so you still have to do the classical thing you still have to go and open the book and read through the pages but now instead of blindly going through and looking at all the different possibilities, you know the rough area that you want to go to.

So you go over there and you pull that book off and lo and behold, the numbers there.

Getting laid.

Congratulations.

Life is good.

You know, so

that's quantum computing in a nutshell.

And if you look at a lot of things that we do,

you are trying in computing to stumble upon the right answer.

Like flight scheduling.

You're just like, well, how do I figure out this flight so that I can have a layover of this property in Atlanta and this, this, and this, but there's all these other things going on.

And it turns out it's like an NP problem.

It's super hard to actually schedule a flight.

But if you have a quantum computer, it can kind of look at all the art of the possible and at least give you a sense of where a probabilistic minimum is.

So the minimize the layover time or whatever your objective is.

Or in the case of large language models like ChatGPT or any of these AI things, what you'll do is you'll say, okay, well, there's outputs that come out of these models.

Well, which one of the outputs is the right output?

You'll ask it a question.

You'll be like,

you know, I need to know I'm going to be in DC for the weekend and here are all my parameters and I'm looking for a good restaurant

and which one's a good one.

And so they'll have maybe 50 recommendations that come through.

And some are obviously wrong, like one's in Virginia or one's in Maryland or something, and one's really in DC, but it's too expensive or something like that.

So ordinarily, what you'd have to do is you'd have to create some sort of system that's intelligent to look through all those different things.

And a human being has to write that or programme, or you personally have to look at the outputs and say, oh, no, that's wrong, that's wrong.

With a quantum computer, you basically get to look at all the outputs, just like all the books at the same time.

And then it can show you which one of those answers is right.

Remember, it could be millions of them.

It's the qubit range.

And so, you know, once you start getting up in qubits, you can do this arbitrarily many.

And so what this does is it gives you the ability to have a large language model that's exponentially better than a large language model that we we have today.

And it gets really crazy when you start stacking modalities.

Like Microsoft has a technology called MatterNet and it's a simulation framework.

It's almost like Reality Builder where you just tell it what properties you want.

Like I want a battery and I want these properties and it basically gives you a recipe for how to make that molecularly.

But the problem is that the simulation breaks down after you start modeling maybe 20, 30 electrons.

So with a quantum computer, it doesn't have that limitation.

You can look at many, many, many different bonding paths and things.

So it literally can print out how to make that material that's magical and so you could start talking about like let's say i want a black hawk helicopter and and i want the skin to have what's called a negative refractory index material so it can go invisible and and i want it to be light but super strong and i want it to be self-healing so if i run an electrical current the the the stress fractures heal themselves so i don't have to replace the airframe and then also i want it to be non-Newtonian so that it's soft, but when it gets hit by a bullet, it gets super hard like a football helmet or something like that and it'll tell you literally the recipe for how to make that strange exotic alloy you know with all these different properties you can't do that with a classical computer because there's there's too many possibilities and it's like a library with more books than the time in the universe to look at but with a quantum computer it can look at all of them at the same time so it'll tell you the path to get to that in this specific recipe because right now how we figured out is math and trial and error you go to a lab and you kind of do some stuff and you think, I think it's over here.

And then you do a bunch of experiments until you stumble across the material.

And everything works this way.

It's like this microphone, what would give it the best sound?

Or like a battery?

You know, I want it to have a high energy density and I want it to be very light and I want it to charge really fast and I want it to be recyclable and be made out of non-rare earth materials because China owns all those and they're screwing us.

Like I want to be able to make it domestically in America.

That's a very rare intersection point of trade-offs.

And so what material would you need to be able to do something like that?

So when you blend these two things together, it's just going to create a golden age.

We're going to be able to do things that are incredible.

How close are we to that, do you think?

Well, yeah, and it's sorry, I was on a tangent there, but you asked a specific question, like, will that kill the cryptocurrency industry?

So in addition to these magical things that quantum computers can do, the defense issue is that most of the cryptography, public key cryptography that we use has two parts to it, a public part and a private part.

And the public part you give to everybody and the private part you have.

So in cryptocurrencies, you have private key and a public key.

Public key is where I pay you and the private keys, you know, what I use to authorize a payment.

So the challenge is that all the math that's behind it in the classical sense,

it only works as long as you don't have a quantum computer.

If you have a quantum computer, you have things like Rover's algorithm and Shor's algorithm and these things, and these gigabrains at MIT, we're basically able to show how to use this librarian book trick to find your private key inside the system.

Because you can't find it normally.

It'd be like looking for that phone number and going through book after book after book.

So the question is, are we done?

No, because it turns out that there's algorithms that are not susceptible to this.

They're called post-quantum cryptography.

So the challenge in why the cryptocurrency industry has not adopted them is kind of twofold.

One is that they're new and highly inefficient.

So in many cases, to use a post-quantum algorithm, the key sizes are 10 to 100 times greater, and it's much more computationally intensive.

And also, because they're new, they have not been mathematically rigorously tested as well as they need to be.

RSA, which is the backbone of the security of the internet, was invented in the 70s, and we still use it today.

So there's like 50 years of ACID tests and hardcore analysis that's been done.

Elliptic curve cryptography came out in the 80s by a friend of mine, Neil Koblitz, and he wrote this lovely paper called The Serpentine Path of Elliott Curve Crypto, where even though he invented it in the 80s, it didn't take off into the 2000s because it took him more than 15 years to convince people that it was secure.

And he had to do all this work and all this lobbying and these types of things.

So cryptography, they tend to be professionally paranoid by design.

And so they very, very slowly roll out these things.

And the other side is standardization.

So even if you have a brilliant idea, you never want to implement a non-standard piece of cryptography because you'll get screwed by the hardware manufacturers.

So when you look at your phone or your computer, the chips inside of them actually have specialized circuitry for crypto that the Department of Commerce through NIST standardizes.

So AES and RSA and certain elliptic curves and these things, there's actual acceleration and in hardware it'll run 100 times faster.

So if you pick a non-standard thing and you're just running on software, you're 100 times slower than your competition that picks a standard thing.

So you have to wait for NIST to standardize something.

And the good news is they did.

We worked with them alongside dozens of other cryptographic groups because we have one of the largest research groups for cryptography.

We have 168 scientists we work with in labs at Stanford and CMU and

University of Edinburgh and so forth.

And they wrote FIPS 203, 204, 205, and 206, which are standards for post-quantum crypto, both on the hash and lattice side.

And now that we have them, the hardware manufacturers are going to create specialized circuits for those to accelerate them.

And now that they're there, we can upgrade crypto to have those capabilities.

And what's really exciting is in many cases, these are going to actually add not just security, but in many cases acceleration.

Because in particular the lattice stuff can be accelerated on graphics cards.

So everything that people are doing for AI, to make AI faster, can be used to make crypto faster.

So it's going to be a golden age, actually.

We'll be able to take a lot of these sequential algorithms and make them very parallel in the design.

But cryptography is always a game of cat and mouse.

If you ever go to England, you can go to Bletchley Park, and it's a lovely tour.

It's where the first computer was built, the bomb, by Alan Turing.

And the Nazis, they had this thing called the Enigma machine, and it was basically this little black box with a keypad on it, and they put a wheel in it, and they'd have a setting for the day, and they could use it to encrypt messages, and then they would transmit it, and then somebody would have that setting and an Enigma machine on the other side, and then they would decrypt the message.

Well, what the Allies did is they figured out how to use computers to basically break those codes.

And so if you go to Bletchley Park, you can actually see a reconstructed bomb, and they tell you the story of how, like, Alan Turing and these other guys figured it out.

Well, now that they had computers, people use computers to make better cryptography.

And then they use computers to break that cryptography.

And so it's always 10, 20 years.

There's like a thing, and then the next thing, and then a thing, and then the next thing.

And it's just like warfare in general.

You know, if you invent a plane, well, somebody creates a countermeasure to the plane.

And then they create a plane that avoids that countermeasure, you know, and you never stop.

You just keep getting more advanced with it.

How far out do you think we are from this?

Well, the problem with quantum computing is the paradigm is not set.

There are many different approaches you can take to build a quantum computer.

It's Ion, Trap, and

topological quantum computers.

That's Majorana, what Microsoft did, which is so fucking crazy.

My favorite is optical quantum computers, Xanadu, and these other guys work on it.

So there's a lot of great companies, but they're fundamentally different.

Like some use the photon as their unit of computation, some use the electron, and you know, some use subatomic particles called Majorana fermions.

All these different things, somebody's going to crack it.

And the hard part is not the compute side, it's the air correction.

The problem with quantum computing is that state of superposition and entanglement is extremely delicate and so delicate that any perturbation of it can create a cascading failure in the compute.

So most of these things have to run at close to absolute zero.

You have to cool them super, super, super cool.

And then you have to keep all the ambient environment as free of interference as possible.

And then even still, the computation falls apart.

So the biggest challenge in quantum computing is not scale, like getting more qubits, more

compute raw power, it's error correction.

So how do you avoid errors from exponentially increasing and destroying the calculation and basically disentangling?

So that's been the big focus.

And whether it be Google with Willow or what Microsoft just announced with Majorana, we're seeing very systematic progress in every respect.

There's a big national security issue, though, because while we can change cryptography, we and our adversaries do archive all the data.

So Bluffdale, Utah, the NSA has this gigantic facility and it's like yodabytes of storage and they just basically packet replicate the internet and they take all the encrypted traffic from China and Russia and other places and they just store it there.

Because if you develop a quantum computer, because that was encrypted with classical compute, you can decrypt it.

So security is also

how long do you need to keep the secret for?

So battle plans in World War II are probably great for historians, but they have no national security implication because it's so long ago.

But from something in GWAT, it's still probably relevant today because that's probably still being used today in the battlefield and those systems are still around.

So cryptography has to last a shelf life beyond just being broken today.

It has to be maybe 30 years or 40 years, and then it's no longer relevant.

So

the United States is getting more paranoid about this, which is why NIST has done this.

And the Suite A and Suite B protocol suites for both NSA and then the Open One Department of Commerce are now recommending post-quantum.

So there's already a transition that's occurring to post-quantum.

And we're seeing post-quantum algorithms in the commercial side with like WireGuard getting post-quantum support.

So if I had to guess, I'd say probably the 2030s is when we'll start seeing quantum-like devices work their way into compute.

And by the 2040s, I think there's a very strong possibility that we'll crack it.

Now, this is a controversial viewpoint.

There are some people who think quantum computers are still impossible and they can't work for a variety of deep theoretical reasons.

And there's other people who think they will crack it, but it's like 2050 or 2060 or 2070.

But it's the same in AI.

You know, you talk to AI researchers and some are like, oh, well, 2027, and we'll have AGI and the computers will kill us all and Terminators forever.

And there's other people like Ian Lacun who are like, oh, the fundamental model is wrong.

We need a world model.

We're still a long way off from that.

So maybe the 2030s or 2040s.

And there's other people who say it's never going to happen.

Like

Fauricio Fagan or any of these other guys who invented the microprocessor because he says cognition is fundamentally different than how we do von Neumann architecture computing.

So

it's just, it lives in a different world.

So any expert, you'll always find like 45 opinions on these things.

But I always look as an entrepreneur at who's investing, how much money are they putting in, how many alternative approaches are we following,

and ultimately, what's the payoff of success.

If your payoff of success is you have like a reality machine with MatterNet where you can just enter in what you want and it produces that thing, well, yeah, a lot of people are going to chase that.

And it's much the same with AI.

You know, you could say, oh, we need to slow down for alignment, but you're like, guys, the first person to solve this problem, it's probably going to be a trillionaire.

You're going to get every company in the world chasing that and investing in that.

And even if one of them voluntarily steps off the thing, there's too much competition.

There's an inevitability behind it.

Just like the Manhattan Project, they actually had not one, but two different designs from the nuclear bomb, you know, the little boy and fat man or whatever they were.

And one was an implosion sphere, another was like a gun where it shoot something and hit.

And they did this to de-risk the program because they didn't know which one was going to work.

And it turned out both of them did.

So the one in Nagasaki was the implosion device and the other was was hiroshima but when you really want something to happen you'll just throw lots of money lots of people and you have lots of approaches so quantum computing is exactly the same way there's a dozen or so different paradigms that you could follow and there's many billions of dollars and many many companies that are chasing this thing so the odds of at least one of them turning out to actually work the way we think it's going to work is pretty high and the payoff is so large that people will continue to do this until they crack it do you think the u.s will be the first ones to crack it we have a huge advantage in that we have a lot of the brains and people.

And even if we don't, we tend to buy them and bring them into the United States.

Like Xanadu, for example, is the world leader in photonic quantum computing, and they're based in Canada.

But if they actually solve this problem, they're probably going to end up as an American company.

Somebody's going to give them an offer they can't refuse.

The other thing is that all the technologies that go into quantum computing, they are

They're mostly areas where America excels.

We're like super good at the science stuff, cooling things and super good at the very subtle environments that quantum computers require.

So we have a lead and it's a very strong lead.

But by no means is China sitting back and by no means are the Europeans sitting back.

You know, everybody's chasing this in their own way.

And a lead means you have maybe six months to two years.

But look at the iPhone.

It comes out.

It's magical and amazing.

But does it really feel magical and amazing anymore?

Especially when you compare it to all the other competitors are there.

It's unbelievable how fast fast that that happened.

And, you know, this is something where the payoff is exponentially higher.

Well,

makes me a little more comfortable knowing that we're in the lead.

We don't get a lot of good news here, but

I love America.

You know, our national slogan is we know we're working on it.

But

so let's get into your personal story here.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Hawaii of all places.

Like it's an odd place to be so my dad grew up montana and my mom grew up in florida she was in winter haven and my dad was out miles city uh and big timber and my dad's father my grandfather uh he was he became a doctor and and uh he was kind of an outdoor guy and he just loved the outdoors but he hated the cold and so when he was in residency they said hey would you like to do a residency down in panama and says oh that sounds a lot of fun so he went down for a few years to the panama canal zone and did an obgyn residency down there and delivered tons of kids.

But he got addicted to the tropical living.

And so when he went back to Montana, he's like, God, this cold thing sucks.

I don't want to do this anymore.

So he said, you know what I'm going to do is I'm going to buy a practice in Hawaii.

That's what I'm going to do.

So in the 70s, a practice came up for sale and he picked it up, moved to Maui.

And my dad ended up going to high school in Maui.

And we have very strong roots then in Hawaii.

So my father then went to college in Montana and then went back to Hawaii for medical school at University of Hawaii.

So when he went to residency, he was in residency in Colorado at St.

Joe's.

And that's where he met my mom.

She was a respiratory therapist.

So he,

when he finished residency, decided to go start a private practice in Hawaii.

So my brother was born in Colorado, but then I ended up being born in Maui.

My grandfather ironically delivered me.

So, you know, kind of like,

I know, awkward redfellows.

But

wow.

But anyway, yeah, I grew grew up there until I was about eight years old.

And then my mother got tired of living in Hawaii.

And she told my dad, I'm going to move back to Colorado.

And you can stay in Hawaii and be a single doctor.

You can move to Colorado and be a married doctor.

So, you know, you take your choice.

My dad said, I like being married.

So I said, go move to Colorado.

And my mom's whole family is in Colorado.

My mother's father was in the cable business.

And he kind of followed the evolution of the cable business from the 50s.

He was a Marine and fought in the Korean War.

So he signed up in 48 and got out in 52.

And when he got out, he got a job as a lineman.

And right around that time period, the cable business was getting started.

So he just kept going from place to place as they were laying cable.

And Colorado became kind of like the nexus that linked the United States together.

So in the 70s, all the cable guys started coming out this way.

And so my grandfather lived in Denver.

So my mother grew up in all those different places, but then kind of settled in Colorado.

And that's where she met my dad.

So anyway, they moved out to Hawaii, and

then I moved back from Hawaii to Colorado, and then I grew up in Colorado, and then I became kind of a nomad and traveled the world.

What kind of stuff were you into as a kid?

What did you like doing?

Well, I was really isolated as a kid.

The problem with Hawaii is that,

especially at the time and place I grew up in Hawaii, it's not easy to be a non-tourist white guy in Hawaii.

You know, they call you howleys.

And, you know, and it is, and so my parents didn't want me to attend public education.

So I ended up being homeschooled, which was like a double-edged sword.

It was great because I could graduate high school much faster.

And

I was a voracious reader.

And I love knowledge and these things.

But also it meant I was a little half-baked on the socialization side.

Just my brother and I.

And that's it.

And so we didn't really socialize with very many people.

But what was nice is then instead of doing the school stuff, where you'd go through like traditional K through 12, we did the nature stuff.

So an enormous amount of my time was going to the beach beach and going to the jungles and Eau Valley and all these other places on Maui and seeing the sea life and so forth.

And it developed a strong love of the natural world.

And, you know, that's why I have a plant company now, right?

You know, it's like, or a ranch, you know, I loved animals and I love plants and I love that whole experience of seeing things.

You know, the other thing is it gave me a

slightly different age demographic, you know, because I didn't get exposed to the K through 12 stuff.

I kind of skipped the late 80s and 90s 90s and I inherited my mom and dad's generation.

So their early 80s, the 70s and the late 60s.

And so I listened to Boston and I listened to Journey and, you know, I listened to all these things like Bread and, you know,

what was his name?

did Operator and Time in a Bottle, Jim Croch, you know, all these guys.

And all the television was from that time too, you know, and so I watched Lost in Space and, you know, I watched Gunsmoke and all these shows.

And so I'm always like one generation behind actually my cohort.

So, you know, it's easier in some cases for me to talk to people in their 40s and 50s than it is to talk to people in their early 30s and 20s because I have that cultural frame of reference, which is quite strange.

The other nice thing about Hawaii is it's like frozen in time.

You know, outside of the fire in Lahaina,

nothing changes at all, ever.

So you go there, and it's like the same store that I went to when I was eight years old is still there.

And it's probably the same guy working at the same store.

He's just a lot fatter and older.

He's got the man boots now and the comb over, but he's still going to the beach like three times a week.

Right.

And you talk to this guy and you say, like, God, like,

do you have any ambition in life?

You know, do you want to do more?

No, no, no.

I am content.

And that's the problem with island fever.

That's why my mom got tired of it.

She's like, you know,

it's a paradise for a year.

You get island fever within three years.

If you have any ambition at all, there's no progress.

There's no growth.

You're just static.

You stay stuck in time.

And then the tourism thing, too, is like you live in a place where the population literally doubles or triples every year.

And so you go boom, bust, boom, bust.

So during tourist season, traffic jams everywhere, all these tourists running around causing chicanery and havoc.

And then off season, like everything's nice.

So that gets old after a while, you know, and

tough after a while.

So, you know, I didn't want to leave.

I was eight years old.

I liked Hawaii.

I walk around with like no shoes on or the flip-flops and these things, had the long blonde hair that turned black over time.

It was great.

But then as I got older, I realized it was a really good decision to kind of go to Colorado.

What do you mean you started traveling the world?

Well, you know, after, so, you know, kind of following into Colorado,

you know, I was homeschooled and I graduated from high school at 15.

And then I started at a community college because my parents said, it's probably too much to go to a four-year university.

Like, you never went to high school.

You're all homeschooled your whole life.

So I did front range and that was kind of my high school.

So you know between 15 and 18 I was there and I graduated.

So I was like 18 with a college degree which was cool.

And then I transferred then to Metro, Paulina State and then I transferred to Cue Boulder.

And originally I wanted to be a doctor, you know, because my dad's a doctor.

My brother ended up as a doctor.

My grandfather was a doctor.

My uncle's a doctor.

There's a lot of doctors in the family.

And I said, oh, I'm going to be a surgeon.

This is going to be great.

And I was very precocious and arrogant as hell.

And I thought I knew everything.

And I was the center of the universe and all these things.

God help me.

And the problem is I was pretty charismatic and pretty smart.

So I could get away with it, you know, for these things.

So

I did the medicine thing for a little while and took EMT training and became a certified pharmacy tech and took all the biology and all the chemistry classes you're supposed to do.

And it was never a challenge.

But then I started learning the dark side of medicine as I kind of went through that.

So you have this like view of medicine from ER and house or, you know, know, from watching my dad practice where you're like, you help people, you take care of people.

But if you talk to any doctor, the vast majority of their time is not helping people and curing people and solving diseases or things.

It's either managing chronic ailments or paperwork.

You know, and it's gotten so bad in primary care, you might see 20 to 30 patients per day and have less than 15 minutes of actual time with each person.

And then after you see the person, lots of paperwork.

And the IC Day 10 coding, right?

You have to put all your codes in, and they got to bill, and they got to chase your RVUs and all this other stuff.

So, as I started volunteering hospital to actually working in that infrastructure and talking to the physicians, every physician that I met said, you're too smart for medicine, don't go into it.

Don't go into it.

You know, they were burnt out.

And they said, and it's a bad thing when the people who are good at the field are telling you, don't go into the field.

You know, it's not your way.

So, the other thing I was really good at was mathematics.

And I really loved mathematics.

You know, math is

an infinite well.

No matter how brilliant you are, you reach a stopping point that you can't go any deeper, but yet the ocean is deeper.

So I loved that about the field.

It was like a personal challenge.

Like I solve something and then I get the next thing and I solve that thing and then I get to the next thing.

And even math itself is like unsolvable.

There's like these boundaries like Girdle's incompleteness theorem or other things that say like you can't win.

The game is unwinnable.

So I love studying mathematics and I got quite good at it.

And that's actually why I transferred from Metro to Seoul Boulder because they had this nice combined master's undergraduate program.

So you could take graduate classes and undergraduate classes.

And I just took a ton of math classes.

And I went through.

And it's a research university.

So I interact with true mathematicians.

And then what I discovered was it was such a dreary field to actually be a professional in because while it was super intellectually interesting, To get tenure and to actually climb that chain, you had to do a ton of really boring stuff and highly political stuff.

And then in your 40s or 50s, you get to the other side and then you just do whatever the fuck you want to do.

But then you make no money.

No one cares about what you do.

No one understands what you do.

And you end up becoming like turbo-autistic.

You're just in your office looking at a, you know, at a

whiteboard.

It's like, why doesn't this work?

And then you discover something like, oh man, I just discovered this new thing about cobordisms.

Like, oh, okay, that's cool.

So I got really lost in that.

But I was fortuitous that there were a lot of good cryptographers there and there were a lot of good computer scientists there.

So as I was studying math, I was also inadvertently learning all these really cool things about all the underpings which became cryptocurrencies.

Like if you're a mathematician, you study cryptography, it's quite easy then to understand like...

how does a cryptocurrency work under the hood?

You know how a public key system works.

It's like, oh, it's RSA.

Oh, it's Euler-Toshent and this thing.

Oh, okay, I get that.

Or the discrete logarithm problem.

Oh, yeah, I understand that.

I understand how that works.

That's great.

You can read the papers.

And so coming from that side, it was, I didn't know at the time, but it was one of the most valuable things for me.

But I just got so tired of it.

I said, I'm wasting time and I don't really have a path to a career.

So I dropped out.

And then I took some time off to just kind of go and travel and meet people and see the world a little bit.

And I did that.

And that was fun, you know, and I got to see a lot of different things.

And I also did some political stuff.

I worked on the Ron Paul campaign.

I saw that.

Yeah, that was a lot of fun.

How old were you when you you did that?

Well, I was 21 when the Ron Paul campaign was first, because he did twice.

It was 2007 and 2012.

And then also there was the intermediate campaign, which was Rand Paul in 2010.

So everybody contributed their own way.

And again, you don't know at the time that you're going to learn a skill, and then that skill becomes valuable.

But on the Ron Paul, we learned about like online fundraising.

We kind of invented it.

We had the money bombs.

You know, Howard Dean was very successful in 2004 with online fundraising, and Obama was pretty good too.

But on the Republican side, nobody had really really cracked that nut.

And we were the first to do that.

And the whole Republican Party is like, oh my God, you just do a money bomb and one day you get $5 million or $10 million.

Like, how do you do this?

And you get calls from the national guys, and it'd be like, can you teach us your secrets?

We're like, yeah, okay, okay.

It's real simple.

You have to vote the same way for 30 years.

You have to have message discipline for 30 years.

And

you have to have integrity.

They're like, ah,

yeah.

Can

what's integrity?

Yeah, I know.

You're like, can we like do it without those things?

We're like, no, no, it doesn't work that way.

You know, that's why, you know, people give money that way.

But distributed fundraising is like the ICO in the cryptocurrency space.

Now, of course, we didn't know that at the time.

We invented that later on in the industry, but that was a great thing.

Also, that message discipline.

People like rules of three.

Like Ron Paul, he said, you know, three things and three things only.

Like, just choose liberty.

So the follow the Constitution.

If it's in the Constitution, we follow it.

If it's not in the Constitution, we don't do it.

Pretty simple.

Humble foreign policy.

It's like, we just don't want to go to war with all these people.

I remember in 2007, he told us we were going to lose in Afghanistan.

He said that Afghanistan is going to go back to the Taliban.

He told us that.

He said it in his speeches.

He'd say it privately.

He'd say, like, you know, it's going to be, it's just like Vietnam, you know?

He was right.

And then he said sound money.

You know, if you don't have good money, you don't have liberty.

Because all the things you do, all the things you're promised disappear.

Imagine working hard your whole life, 40 years, you save up, you have a good retirement ready to go, and then inflation eats away at all that stuff.

And within 10, 15 years, all your savings are gone.

You have no choice but to become a socialist and become a ward of the state because your money's gone now.

They destroyed the quality of the money.

So you have to go to the government and say, please give me some bread because you're like 70.

You can't work.

You don't have the training or the economic output or anything like that.

So you have bad money, you have socialism.

You have bad money, you have a destroyed society.

You have sound money, you have agency, you have control over your life, these types of things.

And the other cool thing is that it could expose me to all these economics that I took economics, macro and microeconomics.

And I think Paul Krugman, for God's sakes, wrote the book in macroeconomics that I took.

And it was all like Keynesian shit.

And so I thought, well, that's economics.

But then I joined the Ron Paul movement, and they're like Ludwig von Mises in Austrian economics and all these things.

It's like, oh, my God, this is amazing.

There's like a completely parallel economic school of thought that's totally different than what the mainstream has.

Like the Austrian economists were saying deflationary money is the money you want.

When you do Keynesian economics, they're like, it has to be inflationary.

If it's deflationary, you have the deflationary spiral.

The whole economy will fall apart and die.

Well, what's Bitcoin?

It's a deflationary monetary policy.

So all the classical trained economists, when they looked at Bitcoin when it first came out, they said it's not possible for it to succeed.

It'll die.

There's going to be a deflationary spiral.

There's no way for this to work.

But if you're an Austrian economist, you say, well, that's the natural way of money.

So this will organically get more valuable over time.

So, you know, 2007, Bitcoin wasn't even out.

And so I'm reading these books and these papers and everything.

And it was preparing me for that cryptocurrency career.

You know, it was preparing me to kind of like when I read the white paper from Satoshi, it was like, this makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, of course this system is going to work.

It's like gravity.

It's just going to happen.

You know, and the other thing was this power of decentralized networking.

You know, the Ron Paul movement was like a terrorist cell.

You know, they have people everywhere, you know, and you didn't know where they're at.

And they're like a secret club.

And, you know,

we were so adept at rapidly coming together and talking to each other and figuring things out.

So it scaled from just a few hundred volunteers to a nationwide Tea Party movement very quickly.

But how quickly a movement can be co-opted?

You know, when we were doing the Ron Paul days in 2007, there was just as many Democrats as there were Republicans.

It was such weird bedfellows.

You know, you'd have have the blue-haired gal with the tongue ring who's kind of out there hanging out with like a 55-year-old guy who buys golden guns.

And they're in the same rally.

And we're like,

I don't know how this works.

But then a few years later, because Paul's not a very good organizer, the movement got co-opted.

And suddenly Breitbart came in and all these other guys came in.

And it stopped being like a unifying thing with those three core things of choose liberty, sound money, and humble foreign policy.

Because remember, the blue-haired girls were against the Iraq war, you know, and also sound money.

Like, who could be against that?

And choose liberty is like, well, that's liberty for everybody, not just you or me, but for everybody.

And it became like, we're now anti-abortion and now we're anti-gay and we're this and this and this.

And the Tea Party went in very strange directions.

And we lost that political momentum and that political movement.

So it was fortuitous because a lot of the people that were still true core libertarians who had been indoctrinated into digital money and were quite, into sound money, who were quite young, when the cryptocurrency movement came around, they're like, oh, that's our home.

Because blockchains are like a constitution at their core.

When you look at a blockchain, what's written in it can't be violated.

If it says this is the monetary policy, that's the monetary policy.

If this is your right as a user of the system, the operator of the system or some power like the United States or China can't come in and change it because reasons.

It is what it is.

So if you believe in sound money, so deflationary monetary policy, and you believe in choose liberty, meaning to follow the Constitution, it's directly compatible with the blockchain.

And the other thing is that it's non-aggression principle, non-violence, this humble foreign policy, everybody in the world is treated equally.

So it doesn't matter what language you speak.

It doesn't matter where you're born.

It doesn't matter where you come from.

You have the same rights as the founders of the system.

And that's just not the case in the legacy world.

If you're Bill Gates or me and you use a bank, they kiss your ass.

You know, your private client, they'll do anything.

You have numbers you can call and you say, I need this and this.

Oh, of course, you know, we'll drop off a pallet of cash in front of your house.

They'll do that.

You can't do that as a poor farmer in Senegal or things like that.

You don't even have a bank account.

But in a cryptocurrency, my use is identical to that farmer in Senegal's use.

So it was in many ways a spiritual successor to the concepts of that liberty movement and people wanting to have something that was divorced from the corruption and the nepotism and had some principles behind it that were almost like the laws of physics.

They're immutable.

They're invariable.

You can't change them.

That's kind of

why I was asking if you think crypto will overtake

the system.

So many people are drawn to the...

So many people are drawn to it because of government oversight and regulation and all of these different things.

and then there's all the skeptics that say it's not real.

You know, and so that

can you elaborate a little bit on

how it works and will we see the volatility

stop?

So, you know, first off, all social systems are imaginary.

You know, every economic, political, or social system, they're not real.

Like, where do you go to find the dollar?

It's like, I can print a dollar and I can hand you a dollar, but that's like a certificate that says this represents this concept of a dollar.

Or where does your vote live?

You can vote, but I guess you have a ballot, but the concept of voting, the concept of democratic legitimacy.

Same for corporations, like where does Microsoft live exactly?

Where does Google live?

It's like, why, there's a registration, there's shareholders, but it's this abstraction in the internet.

Crypto is just an abstraction.

It's a set of consensus rules, and it uses a blend of social processes and mathematics and distributed computing and cryptography to basically create something that then acts as this trust layer.

It has three core properties.

It's immutable, it's time-stamped, and it's irreversible.

Everything you put in, you can't change it.

You know when you put it in and everybody can see it.

It's auditable.

And it doesn't seem like that's valuable, but it actually it turns out it's one of the most valuable things in the world.

Trust is one of the most valuable things in the world, and you know it when you're missing it.

And the example I like giving people is, let's say you're a rancher and you want to buy some of your neighbor's land.

There's two ways that can go down.

One way, you're great friends with that neighbor, you're drinking buddies with them.

So you go out there and you say, hey, Bill, you know, that 50 acres over there, I want my cattle to graze on that place.

I'd like to buy it from you.

And Bill's like, well, you know, Charles, Gray, what price?

And you haggle over drinks and you come to a term, you shake hands.

Now, let's say that you discover a problem with the transaction a month into it.

You go back to him, you say, hey, Bill, we got this problem and it's an issue.

Can we solve it?

And you drink it out, you haggle it out, shake hands.

Deal closes, you get the land.

The other way it can go down, let's say you hate your neighbor, you don't trust each other, but you really need the land.

So you go to the neighbor and you say, I want to buy your land.

He says, well, all right, talk to my lawyer.

So your lawyer is talking to his lawyer.

Complex negotiation.

That issue comes up.

Now you're in litigation.

You're suing each other.

Two years passed, all this money.

You win, got the land.

The outcome is exactly the same in both cases.

A, you get the land, B, you get the land.

What's the difference?

The difference was you solved it over alcohol and handshakes and hanging out with your buddy versus you had to litigate and spend an enormous amount of money.

What was the difference between those two transactions?

One thing, just one thing, trust.

That's it.

In the first scenario, you like and trust each other.

In the second scenario, you don't.

So then everything else, it's like a butterfly effect, cascades from there.

And at the micro scale, that's it.

But at the macro scale, it's the same way.

Russia has every incentive to try to find a way to work with Europe and the United States because China's eating them alive.

But you just can't get there with the trust.

So unfortunately, despite the fact that they have an incentive to try to work with us to solve a major problem they have with China, they can't.

And corporations, corporations in many cases have incentives to work together because maybe for some product you're building, somebody else has a piece of technology that you need.

Like Apple was a great example with Samsung, where Samsung makes all these chips.

Apple needed the chips for its iPhone, but Samsung makes phones too.

So how does Apple figure out how to buy those chips and work with Samsung, but trust them enough not to steal the iPhone design to use in the Samsung Galaxy?

So cooperatively, if they can find a way to make that happen, Samsung makes a fuck ton of money because they get like 100 million iPhones worth of memory sales.

But then Apple also gets this state-of-the-art technology that's better for their consumers.

But if they can't find a way to work together, that's patent litigation and this and this and this.

So by creating a common space where business processes and government processes, any economic, political, or social process can live, and you have trust at the core of it, then all of a sudden you now have a new place for people who don't trust each other to be able to start working together as if they did.

And just that example of the lawsuit thing, it shows you the economic consequences of it.

Literally, it's creation of tens of trillions to hundreds of trillions of dollars of wealth.

Notice that none of this did I talk about a token or a particular cryptocurrency or any of these things.

I'm just talking about the abstraction, the concept of a blockchain, this idea of a trust layer for it.

Then there's a question of why do the tokens exist?

Well, that comes into what type of world do you want to live in?

Do you want your trust infrastructure to be owned and controlled by a federated unchanging oligarchy or do you want it to be decentralized?

If you don't have the token, it's going to be controlled by an oligarchy.

It has an operator.

It has an owner.

Somebody has to maintain the infrastructure.

People aren't going to volunteer to go hoist up trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure.

So if there's no token, there's no instrument to pay for all of those things to exist.

You see?

So once you have the token, it can pay for its own bills to create a resource that you can use.

So Bitcoin creates its own token.

Then suddenly we go from me mining on my laptop in 2010 and getting lots of Bitcoins to gigantic mining fields that the president's son, Eric Trump, has and all these other people have.

billions of dollars worth of miners.

Where was the central Bitcoin Bureau, you know, telling people to do that?

There was none.

It was just a token.

And people through their own self-interest, independent of any central coordination, came together and they built out that mesh.

And now Bitcoin is secured by the largest computer computer in the world, distributed computer in the world, but secured by the largest function there.

So the token creates the resource and it creates the decentralization to maintain and operate that system.

Now, if you don't care about that and you say, you know what, I just really trust Microsoft and Google and Amazon and I really trust the US government or China or whatever, well then you don't need it.

You can run in a federated sense, but here are the consequences.

The minute you trust them, they own what goes in that and what doesn't go in that ledger.

So if they're told, compelled, or decide themselves to exclude somebody, they can censor anyone from the global order.

So they have a monopoly on trust and they have a monopoly on truth and they have a monopoly on who gets to play in the pond and who doesn't get to play in the pond.

We saw this with social media.

If they own the platform, they get to decide what's legitimate on the platform, what's not legitimate on the platform.

So you say, hey, you know, I'm a doctor and this COVID thing is pretty bad And, you know, I think these vaccines have issues.

Oh, I'm sorry.

That's against our community standards.

You're blacklisted.

You can never speak again.

You're deplatformed.

Or, you know, Hunter Body Laptop or, you know, pick your favorite topic, whatever the heck it is.

You get blacklisted and banished from the world.

And you say, well, that's not fair.

Who do I appeal to?

There's got to be some, well, actually.

Yes, that five guys, they're not going to change.

They control the thing.

So unless Elon Musk buys them or some weird black swan event happens, you're stuck with that configuration.

When it's decentralized, no one has censorship capabilities.

Nobody can come in and say, well, I don't like Sean Ryan.

I don't like his content, so I'm going to kick him out.

No, everybody gets to play, the good, the bad, and the ugly inside that type of a system.

So in a world that's multipolar, in a world that's highly

tribal, and there's all these factions fighting each other, it makes a lot of sense to have something where we have something that we all agree on is a universal good thing and we all use despite our differences.

Because once we have that, then we at least have some anchor of trust.

You know, your agency guys, you probably remember all the Russian propaganda.

Russian propaganda didn't try to convince you things were true or not true.

They attacked the very concept of truth.

They would go out and erode it and get people so fatigued and exhausted that you just don't even care anymore if people are lying.

You don't even care anymore what's real and what's not real.

You're just exhausted with the whole thing.

And that's where we're at in America right now.

There's institutional exhaustion.

When I was a kid, if you're sitting at a bar and the guy next to you was from the CDC, you'd say, wow, that's really cool.

You know, you're the guys who wear

the suits and go in and deal with the Ebola and everything.

You're a very courageous person.

Now you're looking at him and says, you're the guy who just tried to kill my kids with vaccines and all these other things.

Like institutional loss of faith.

And the same for the FBI and the CIA and the same for, in many cases, the military, like a lot of soldiers who fought in GWAT, they watched their friends die in Afghanistan.

And then the U.S.

government says, you know, a good outcome for that war was to give it back to the people that we literally took it from.

It's like, oh, well,

what was the purpose of all of this then?

So you have this institutional anger that's formed, and everybody doesn't trust anything anymore.

And then any government report comes out, the first thing people do is they take a look at what their tribe's opinion is.

And they don't even care what it says.

They just basically say it's true or false based upon what the tribe says.

So we just lived through Biden.

And under that regime, you you know, if the CDC said something or NIH said something, it's 100% true 100% of the time.

Now that Robert Kennedy's in and Trump's in control, if the CDC says something and NIH says something, it's 100% false 100% of the time.

So much so when they're saying like, hey, these artificial food dyes are pretty bad for people.

You have all these people that traditionally, the yoga people and the, you know, living health and vegan people, they're like, no, no, I just, no, they're awesome.

We want some food dyes in our food now.

You know, they're great.

It's like, what are we we doing?

It's because you no longer have objectivity in the world.

The concept of truth has been damaged.

So that's what blockchain is basically selling.

It's selling this idea of objective reality in a truth, a synthetic objective reality.

Then you can build an economic system from it.

Then you can build a political system from it.

Then you can build a social system from it, a way of communicating with each other.

And if you have faith and belief in the underlying mathematics and the level of decentralization, then you start trusting the outputs of these systems.

When I send you a transaction, you say, well, how do I really know I have the money?

Well, if the system works in this way, you know, you have it because you can check it from the ledger.

Great.

If you don't trust the ledger, then you don't know if you have the money.

The voting is another thing.

Trump lost in 2020.

He said, oh, it was rigged.

And when Al Gore lost in 2000, oh, it's rigged.

And it's like every election of my lifetime since like night,

basically since 1988,

it's been rigged in some way, you know, and it's always a loser who complains.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a voting system where you could check your vote and know it was counted correctly, and you can check the integrity of the system as a whole?

It's the exact same problem as building a decentralized money system, and the exact same problem as building a decentralized social network, and the exact same problem as building a medical record system, because you can use blockchain to do all of that.

And as long as you trust that the underlying infrastructure is secure, you're good.

And my job, my life's goal is how do I make it secure?

How do I get the science right?

How do I make it decentralized?

How do I make it resilient to attacks?

And why the token prices are so awesome is it creates a reward to break the system.

You know, when I first started, Bitcoin was under a dollar.

No one cared.

You couldn't pay somebody to take it and attack it.

Now you have these multi-trillion dollar systems.

So every single day, the most vicious hackers and the most vicious attackers are trying to beat the crap out of the cryptocurrency space to steal money.

And they do.

North Korea does as a national policy.

They attack exchanges all the time and steal millions and millions of dollars worth of Ethereum and other tokens.

And so what that does is it creates this learning and the systems get stronger and more resilient over time.

And eventually they get to a point where they can run social scale infrastructure, like a nation state's elections or a nation state's money system or something like that.

So that's kind of crypto in a nutshell.

And the other thing is a smart cow effect.

And this is something that's so close.

If you're a rancher, you always have a lot of dumb cows, but then you have that one smart cow.

And there's the most frustrating fucking cow.

If you find it, you shoot it.

Because the smart cow figures out how to get out and they don't just get themselves out.

If they can open up the fence, if they can open up the gate, all the other cattle follow them.

So if you invent something in a global, open, decentralized sense, whatever idea you have is everybody else's idea.

So the minute I figure out a secure protocol, everybody knows the secure protocol.

The minute I figure out a secure voting system, everybody has a secure voting system.

And they're royalty-free, they're open source.

So, what we've seen is an exponential growth in the innovation in the industry.

So, a great example would be zero-knowledge proofs.

These are some of the wildest, coolest things.

They were invented by MIT back in the 80s.

It was Silvio Macaulay and all these other guys, and they were geniuses, and they got like the Nobel Prize in Computer Science for it.

But basically, the idea of a zero-knowledge proof is for me to prove something to you without me telling you what it is.

So, for example, let's let's say I want to prove to you my age and I'm over a threshold.

Like you go to a bar and you say, hey, are you at or over the age of 21?

Well, how do you normally do that?

I show you an identity document like a driver's license or a passport, but then the minute I do it, you know my exact age, you know my name, you know all this information.

Well, what if I had a way to just generate a proof and it's yes or no?

Are you at or over the age of 21, but you don't know my age?

That's your knowledge proof.

And so they invented a way to do this in the 80s and it was an academic toy.

No one cared about it.

It was like verified computing and mathematics stuff, and who cares?

But then the cryptocurrency space said, well, hang on a second, we could use this to have private money and private voting and all this other stuff.

So in just five, six years of the cryptocurrency space being interested in this topic, we went from a few papers being written a year, a few lines of code being written a year, to hundreds to thousands of papers, to millions of lines of code and hundreds of projects and billions of dollars inside these systems.

So it did probably in the last five years more that's been done in 40 years of academic research for that one thing.

And that's the magic of the SmartCow effect is that when people start catching on to a good thing, they just go crazy with it.

Voting innovation, too.

Like, why is it, you know, a giant turd sandwich versus a giant douche, you know, every freaking four years?

Why do we have horrible choices?

Because the ballot architecture is wrong.

It shouldn't be left or right.

It should be a preference order.

So instead of picking one guy, you pick your top five.

And then once you do something like that, you never throw your vote away because you'll pick your absolute most favorite candidate here and then your second most favorite and then your third most favorite.

So you can always vote for third parties and there's no consequence because you talk to people like more than 70% of people would like more than just two options.

So if you give that to them, just by changing ballot architecture, you would suddenly get coalitions and third parties get represented in the political mirror.

But what Democrats and Republicans did is they got together and there's only one truly bipartisan thing.

It's only Republicans and Democrats can be elected, no third parties.

So they built the ballot architecture in a way to prevent any diversity.

So with the cryptocurrency space, because they have to govern these decentralized things, there's no corporation that controls a cryptocurrency infrastructure.

You have to create unchained governance, which means you're in the business of building voting systems and political systems and all these other things.

So what do you do?

You go and you say, okay, well, God, I need to dust off these books on political science and voting theory and stuff from written in the 1950s and 60s and literally read them and then implement them.

So you have quadratic voting and linear preference.

You have board on contrasté counts.

You have anonymous ballots.

You have voting rounds and voting times and then maybe runoffs with plurality.

And liquid democracy is another example where you actually delegate power to somebody, but you can pull at any time.

So imagine a congressman that their voting power in the House is connected to how much delegation they have.

But if you don't like them, you can pull delegation and they get less voting power.

And if they fall below the threshold, they get kicked out.

It's called liquid feedback.

That sounds amazing.

Exactly, right?

And these things have existed in the political science world at universities and things, but no one ever adopts them and puts them into the governing systems because the cadence of change of a government is by years and decades or centuries.

Usually it takes a war and you get conquered and then you build a new political system or an economic collapse and then you build a new political system.

So maybe you get to to change your voting system two or three times a century.

But in the cryptocurrency space, you have 1.4 million cryptocurrencies that have been issued since 2010.

And a lot of them are starting to get on-chain governance, which means they're building their own voting systems, which means we, in real time, at a scale of millions to tens of millions to hundreds of millions of people, get to test an entire economic system, an entire social system, an entire political system.

And it's adversarial.

You get people trying to break it and destroy it.

And so if there's a bug or flaw in it, it it's exploited and the system collapses so the minute someone comes up with a good system everybody else steals that and then they use that as a standard and then you reset and the standard and reset use that as standard reset it's it's so extraordinary and it's so magical because you're literally rewriting the fabric of society you know as you do these things and then eventually the regular world is like boy there's a lot of value that these guys have created so they start adopting it and they start absorbing it but the problem is that the only way to get the systems to work truly together is for you to go from federated to decentralized.

So these big middlemen, they're going to start evaporating because there's no reason to use them.

And even if they want to hold on to the monopoly,

if there's a more efficient system that was a different configuration, some jurisdiction, maybe Abu Dhabi with the ADGM or Singapore with a monetary authority will adopt it.

And you can't compete against somebody that's 30% more efficient or 50% more efficient.

The capital naturally moves in that direction.

And then eventually you get to a point where the system as a whole becomes that new standard.

It's very much like the internet and media.

Old media, they had a monopoly.

They controlled what's real, what's not real.

There was fixed distribution points.

And then the internet comes out and you can just get information any way you want.

So papers had to learn how to adopt and adapt that paradigm.

And if they didn't, they died and disappeared.

And it's much the same with cryptocurrencies.

They have to blend the systems together.

That is the best explanation of cryptocurrency I've ever heard in my life.

Thank Thank you.

Let's take a quick break.

Sure.

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All right, Charles, we're back from the break.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the crypto thing.

Sure.

That was, like I said, the best explanation I've ever heard in my life.

But

when you're talking about voting and all these other things that we can use blockchain for, I don't understand

how that works.

And so

how would we vote on the blockchain?

Okay, so if you think about a vote, a vote is kind of like a token.

So how many votes you get is how many tokens you have, and where you send the token to is who you're voting for.

And if you're allowed to vote for just one person, it's an atomic transaction.

If you're allowed to vote for multiple people, you have a certain amount of power.

So that's how much tokens you have.

and then you split it amongst multiple addresses.

So now that you have that set up, you're like, wait a minute, that's exactly the same as like how Bitcoin works or any of these cryptocurrencies work.

You have tokens and addresses and you can push them around.

So when you do an election, there are a collection of things you have to concern yourself with.

First off, who gets the tokens?

So these are registered voters.

So the most important part of any election is what is your voter registration process and how secure is that?

So we have numerous people, countries, other people come and say, would you like to bid on an RFP for a blockchain-based voting system?

And the very first thing I ask is, well, what does your identity system look like?

How do you identify people in your nation state?

And if that's not a secure system, I have no desire to build a voting system because all you're doing is you're building a very secure way to count dead people and a very secure way to count fake people that don't exist.

Because I can always just register as someone in the ballot.

So the step one is,

what is your digital identity component and how do you get to know somebody is real and they're suitable for the election

then the next stage assuming that everybody is suitable then you have to decide well what are the election mechanics that go on so is everybody equal so everybody gets one vote or do certain people have stronger votes so like weighted votes and so like shareholder votes are like this and so if you own stock and microsoft or google or something well if you have a lot of shares you have more voting power than other people okay so you can have many different configurations and again it's just like tokens how many vote tokens do you have for that particular thing?

Then you ask, okay, is it an anonymous or is it a public and transparent vote?

So in a lot of elections for shareholder votes, you can see who voted where.

You know, this person voted against Elon Musk's pay package for Tesla.

This person voted yes.

Others are anonymous ballots, meaning that when you vote, the outside world can't see it.

Then you ask another question of auditability.

So just because the outside world can't see how you voted, can you see how your vote was recorded?

And some systems, they say no.

And the reason being is they don't want you to sell your vote because if you can prove how you voted, then Bob over there can give you $100 bill if you vote this way.

And other systems, they say, yes, you can do that because

you want to be able to check that.

Then there is the mechanism.

Is it atomic?

Maybe you can only vote for one thing.

Or does it allow you to split?

You can vote for many things.

And so that's ranked choice or linear preference.

And then also you can have mechanics where if you have a lot of voting power, the more you vote for any one thing, there's a dampening effect as you start voting more.

So if you try to put all your voting power in, it actually ends up being less.

It's called quadratic voting.

So you have all kinds of mechanism for that.

Those can be grafted on and built into a cryptocurrency as an application.

And you can use the blockchain because it's immutable, it's time stamped, and it's auditable to audit the system as a whole.

It's immutable, meaning that once the vote is counted, it can't be changed.

It's time-stamped, meaning that the vote only occurred in a legitimate time period when the election was occurring.

It wasn't in and out of the election period, right?

And then it's auditable, meaning that everybody can see those records.

They can actually verify that that is what it is.

So you actually get two properties that are really cool.

Not only can you

verify your own vote was counted correctly, you can verify the integrity of the system as a whole.

This is a property called inclusive accountability.

So, and we lack this in most infrastructure.

Everything is trust me, bro.

So why is the money in your bank the way it is?

Well, that's J.P.

Morgan Chase's ledger or Bank of America's ledger or something like that.

And there's our loose consensus amongst all the different banks that the ledgers are accurate.

But at the end of the day, there's no like...

mutable law of physics that says the number you see on the screen is actually an accurate number, right?

So with a system that's inclusively accountable, any user of the the system has enough information to reconstruct the entire history of the system and verify that that state is correct that they're looking at.

Bitcoin, every transaction that's happened since January 3rd, 2009, same for Cardano when it launched, is verifiable, meaning you could start at the very beginning and go through the entire history of the system.

And at the tip of the system, what's going on today here in June of 2025, you'll be able to see that that transaction is connected to a chain of events all the way back to the beginning.

So, inclusive accountability is super powerful, but super expensive to maintain.

It's very hard, and there's a lot of work you have to do to have it.

But if you have it, it means you can have self-integrity.

You personally can verify with your computer that the system that you're looking at, the history that you're looking at, is correct by its construction.

This is why it's so seductive to try to build a voting system on a blockchain system.

Then, there's the question you ask of the on-and-off ramp.

So, what does the user experience look like?

How do I personally do that?

Okay, well, you'd have your phone or your computer, and the same way you would send a cryptocurrency is the same way you would vote.

So you'd vote with your phone or an app.

Now, a lot of people say, well, I don't know.

My phone can get hacked or, you know, there can be a problem with it.

So a lot of people, what they want to do are what are called hybrid systems, where they have a paper component and they have a digital component.

So you vote with the blockchain on your phone, and then it generates a paper vote at the same time.

Or you vote with paper, and then it generates a blockchain record at the same time.

Then you have a dual audit.

The votes have to match.

So you count all the paper, you count all the digital votes.

There should be a one-to-one correspondence between those two sides.

And they're different modalities.

One is a digital modality and the other one's a paper modality.

So to hack them, you have to use fundamentally different social engineering for both of these types of things.

Every election has other properties too, like how frequently do you do an election?

What's the cost of running the election?

The ballot access is also very important.

In fact, fact, you know, Stalin used to say it doesn't matter

who gets the vote.

It matters who counts the votes and what do you vote on.

So if there's only one candidate on the ballot, you're always going to end up with Kim Jong-un.

You always end up with the guy.

So

who gets to be on that ballot?

And what are the inclusion-exclusion principles of this?

And this is how third parties are excluded in the United States, amongst other places.

And then

when and how is that counting and tallying done?

The blockchain system will take care of the tallying.

And also you you can program any ballot architecture that you want inside that type of system because there's no cost on a digital side to have a million candidates in the system.

The paper side, there is.

So that's one of the excuses they use to exclude people unless they sign hundreds of thousands of signatures and things like that, is that they'll say, well, you know, we can't print, you know, 5,000 people on the ballot.

It'd be prohibitively expensive to print like 40 pages times 5 million, you know, something like that.

It doesn't make sense.

So in your trade-off profile.

could you just write in a name?

You could.

And that's not have anybody on it.

But that's always available in all ballots, right?

There's the write-in slot that they have.

But that's disenfranchising because to vote for Bob, you just fill in a circle.

To vote for Bill, you have to remember his last name.

And what if he has like Scharzeneger as his last name?

Who's going to spell that right?

And all these things.

So it's the more.

That would be your job as the candidate to make sure that that is addressed.

Yeah, you give him a stamp, right?

Here's the Schwarzenegger stamp.

In fact, they used to do that.

You know, they called it down ticket.

So in the 19th century, when voter laws were a little looser, people would print out ballots with the entire stuff already pre-filled out and they would hand it to people as they were walking to the polling thing.

So they say a down ticket candidate meant that the whole party was on one ballot.

And so all the Republicans would be on it or all the Democrats running.

Here's your pre-filled ballot.

Just go and drop it in the box.

And they would stand outside the polling places and hand people that.

And they'd also bribe people too they'd be like hey you want a drink you know like you have to take this put in the box if i give you a beer okay it's like all kinds of dirty stuff happens in elections so you know it at the very least having the digital side to replace mail-in ballots makes a lot of sense to me because i hate mail-in ballots it's one of the worst ways of voting you don't have a chain of custody of the ballot you set it out over the open mail.

You have no idea who's actually filling in the bubbles.

And also you can sell your vote very easily because you just hand the ballot to the person who's who's buying the vote.

They can fill in all the bubbles and you sign it.

They're like, oh, that's fraud.

It's like, who's going to know?

And the other thing is compromised people, you can do bundling.

You can just go to an old folks' home and register hundreds or thousands of people in an area and they're all mentally compromised and then the ballots show up because they have a legal right to vote.

You can't exclude them.

And then you can just fill the ballots all in and then do a drop in the middle of the night for people.

So it's a horrifically insecure system when you really start thinking about all the things that could go wrong.

And they say, oh, they're going to do signature verification.

It's like, that never really works.

It's not a digital signature.

You just sign it.

Like, how many are actually rejected inside these types of things?

So building voting systems, I like the idea of

preserving inclusive accountability, allowing you to check your own vote, and also you have to have a strong digital ID system for it.

Then 95% of the integrity issues are probably gone.

And if it's on blockchain infrastructure, you have that inclusive accountability.

You know the system as a whole is properly constructed.

And again, that smart cow effect that we were talking about earlier.

Once somebody has designed a secure voting system, it's free.

Everybody has access to that design of that secure voting system.

So what's nice about the cryptocurrency space is to vote on changes to cryptocurrencies, like new monetary policy or upgrading the code or something like that.

You're testing a voting system.

And the hacker has an incentive to try to break that to steal the money or damage the cryptocurrency.

Because if you can damage a cryptocurrency, you can short sell it, right?

You can go and say, oh, I'm going to take all these short positions here and then I'll create grievous harm, and then the value goes down, and I make tons of money because I'm leveraged short-selling for it.

So everybody has a strong financial incentive to break your shit.

So if you have that, that means that any voting system will be under extreme scrutiny by some of the world's greatest hackers.

And if it stands the test of time, it has reliability.

And just like RSA does or Elliptic Crypto does, it's like the multi-decade reliability that you have.

And then you could say, okay, that's a good voting system, and we can plop it down.

Voting systems are also connected to demographics.

You know, the older people may want to use paper.

Younger people, because they're natives on phones, would want to use phones.

By having a hybrid system, you accommodate basically both sides of the system.

And then they're also connected to frequency, like how often are you having an election?

What's nice is by having a digital system, you can do digital only for preference polling.

So you can say things like, hey, the Broncos just won the Super Bowl.

And citizens of Denver, we want to know when to do the parade.

Do we do it on Tuesday or Thursday?

So you can send to verified Denver residents a poll and actually get a vote that's statistically significant and actually almost like you ran an election and it costs you almost nothing to do because you have direct democracy.

You can just push these things out.

And then you can start talking about more exotic forms like approval polls or things like that.

And you say, if the politician falls below a certain approval rating for a protracted period of time, there's automatically a recall election or they get suspended until they can get above that approval rating or something like that.

So you can start thinking about much more granular representative democracy than just term-based representative democracy.

This sounds amazing.

I mean, is anybody close to implementing something like this?

Any countries, any governments?

Well, like liquid feedback was used by the Pirate Party over in Sweden.

And a lot of countries do do ranked choice voting and other things like that.

And organizational design, people have come up with all kinds of cool and interesting voting systems.

But it's a field, when you look at the nation-state level, that evolves very slowly, years, decades, centuries, and typically it evolves as a consequence of an invasion, a collapse, a calamity, or a major scandal.

You tend not to change social infrastructure until social infrastructure becomes inconvenient for some reason.

And in many cases, social infrastructure is unchanged even when it's inconvenient because it benefits an oligarchy inside the country.

Like back to India and cryptocurrencies, like why did they have the 1% tax and why did they not open up for remittances, even though it would be wonderful for them?

because there are these large companies that make all this money by being middlemen to prevent those remittances for coming in.

So

we have a unique opportunity in the United States because Trump really does want to change the voting system and make it more secure.

And the U.S.

government is bracing blockchain and cryptocurrency technology.

But again, you can't just talk about voting.

You have to talk about the digital infrastructure.

And there's a whole different house of concepts there.

And there's a whole different house of actors you're going to piss off by changing this type of stuff.

Because you don't just talk about identity.

You talk about identity and the metadata behind the identity.

And you talk about reputation behind the identity.

Because identity has two major families of things.

One is facts and the other is opinions.

So facts are things like, I was born November 5th, 1987 in Maui, Hawaii.

That's a fact.

It happened.

It's either true or false.

Or, you know, I attended this school or, you know, you were a Navy SEAL and you were a certain bud's class and all these things.

Those are facts.

Either they happened or not.

Opinions are like, you were a good Navy SEAL versus a bad Navy SEAL, right?

And everybody has an opinion on these things.

I got a Team Six guy on my security detail and

he thinks that certain prominent SEALs are overrated.

Every SEAL's got these opinions, right?

And I won't say which ones, right?

But you get the idea.

So

opinions are always referential.

So it's not just the opinion.

opinion, but the opinion holder.

So when they say, well, that guy who thinks that person's overrated, well, well, who is he?

Oh, he was a team six guy.

I said, okay, that's pretty credible.

You know, like, at least he's like, he's in the club.

He's allowed to have that opinion.

Just a fat dude at the bar, you know, never, never done anything in his life.

It's like, ah, fuck you, man.

Get the hell out of here, right?

So, so it's always referential to the opinion holder.

Facts are not referential.

They're objective reality.

Well, identity is one of those few things that embed both of those things.

We are a composition of objective reality and subjective opinions.

Well, this is important because we have to make decisions about trust relationships.

So

do I give you a loan or not?

Do I admit you to this university or not?

Do I let you into special forces or not?

Do I let you go to the Q course or Ranger School or whatever?

Or, you know, do I trust you with my children?

And what's interesting is you can have this weird paradox where you could be both completely unreliable and hyper-reliable at the same time.

So I may may trust you to be a special warfare guy and go on life and death missions and be with the friends, but not trust you with my dog.

It's weird, right?

But there's probably some intersection point that somebody listening will say, yeah, I know that guy, right?

And so identity embeds both these things.

And so the first thing that we did as an industry is we said, is there a path where we can reimagine the representation of identity where both these things are first-class citizens?

So the W3C is a standards body and it standardizes things like HTML and CSS, so the presentation layer of the internet.

They actually had a working group that people worked on for more than 10 years and they created an open standard called the DID, the decentralized identifier.

And what the DID is, is it's basically like a web address for you.

And so it has the URL, the web address, and then the web page, which is the DID document, which is all that metadata, which embeds both the facts and also it can embed the opinions.

And it's built on the same technology as cryptocurrency concepts.

So it's public-private keys, these types of things.

So there's a part you show everybody, and then you can have cryptography in it so you can prove it belongs to you.

So it's a non-reputable identity.

Nobody can forge it.

Well, it's so general that it works in the legacy world, but it also works in the blockchain world.

It can be used for access control, like logging into a website without a password.

It can be used for a financial transaction.

And also with zero-knowledge cryptography, like that ID thing we were talking about earlier, where I can prove my age without revealing my age.

You know, I can prove I'm over a threshold.

It works with that as well.

So this is a new identity primitive.

And there's a broader concept called SSI, self-sovereign identity, meaning you own it.

So it doesn't belong to Microsoft and it doesn't belong to Google or the US government.

You can create this did and build a reputation around it and get third parties to verify facts about you, but it's your credential.

So it's censorship resistant.

Because here's the problem with an identity system.

What if your passport's revoked?

Or what if your identity documents are invalidated?

It's like everybody serves in the military.

Like, what if there's an inaccuracy on the DD214 or something like that?

It's like, well, I served here and I did this and this.

Well, it didn't say that on the document.

Sorry, bro.

It's like you were not an 18 Delta.

I was.

It's like, well, the document doesn't say it.

But what if you own that document and you can self-verify these types of things?

There's a path to do these things.

Well, then if there's a bureaucratic miff-up, it doesn't.

have any consequences because you actually have the underlying evidence and the signatures from the entities where and when it happened for these types of things.

So digital identity is very closely related to to all these different things, whether it be voting or money.

In the money case, ID and money come together and we call that compliance.

So I give you $100, no problem.

I give you $1 million.

Who is Charles?

Know your customer, anti-money lottery, anti-terrorism, these things.

There's this wonderful book from Ron Saurat called Treasury's War.

And it says, hey, the GWAT wasn't just fought on a battlefield.

It was fought by accountants.

There was all these guys at the banks and the financial institutions.

And they created this huge anti-terrorist layer, and they were monitoring transactions to try to understand how does ISIS get its money, and how does Al-Qaeda get its money.

And so they got a very pervasive and aggressive understanding of basically how money flows and who's sending the money and these types of things.

But inadvertently, in the process of doing that, they removed any notion of privacy from the system.

And it's very uncomfortable because now that a policymaker knows who's sending money where what, I also know like you buy guns, or I also know you voted, you know, you're giving money to this politician, or, you know, I also know that, you know, you have land in a certain area, or you have certain preferences.

Well, if I'm against that preference set, or I think that's politically inconvenient to me, I can now use that information to weaponize it and go against you and politically censor you or, you know, harm you with soft power.

So you really want to try to preserve some sense of anonymity inside the system if you can get away with it.

So the great part about reconstructing digital identity is that you can have safety, but anonymity.

I can prove that you're a U.S.

citizen or prove that you're a credit investor or prove that you're over an age or you meet the suitability guideline.

Like here's a great example.

You have all these guys running around who hold top secret clearances like SCIs to the fucking nines.

They know special access program, this, that, and the other.

So they're literally the most trusted people that you can imagine.

I mean, the government knows what their colon looks like at this point, and they do the aversarial polygraphs and all these other things.

But then when they go to the airport to stand in that security line, they get molested by the

TSA guy because there's no interoperability between those trust systems.

So on one hand, we trust you with the nation's highest levels and secrets, but on the other hand, we don't know if you're going to bring a nail file on the plane.

It's like, it doesn't make any sense.

But if you have a unified trust system with zero knowledge proofs, you can prove you're in the trusted category.

The TSA guy has no idea why you're in that category.

He doesn't know that you're a secret squirrel dude doing crazy stuff.

And he just knows that you're in the trusted category and he doesn't get to molest you inside the line.

And that's how it should work, is that you have these proofs.

And so you have a DID, you have a DID doc.

It has all these identifiers.

Some are public and some are private.

You can have different DIDs for different personas.

So you can have one DID for an alias.

Maybe you're doing tradecraft and you have that.

You have another DID for your military life.

You have another DID for your personal life and for your professional life, et cetera, et cetera, your LinkedIn profile, as the DID here.

And then there's various public fields and all these things, and there's provability with all these things.

And then you can at any time pick up that.

You own all of them, but they're unlinked.

So you don't necessarily have to combine them and say, well, this is also the same person as Sean Ryan.

It's an unlinkable identity.

And you're in control of all of that.

And then you have the ability to at any time prove properties at your discretion for these types of things.

So that's the other side that the cryptocurrency industry has been really thinking about because it's so pivotal to everything we do.

If it's an engine of trust, where does trust come from?

Well, some of it's objective by the structure of the system, but then some of it's subjective, like who are the members of the system?

And so if you have the minute you step into who are the people, you have to have a representation of identity.

And once you have that representation of identity, you can then use that to prove all kinds of things that you want.

And eventually you can reconstruct reality because you can say, okay, now we can build a credit system.

And instead of it being decided by, you know, these four credit agencies and they give you a number and who the fuck knows knows where this number comes from?

Like, for example, I'm a billionaire, but somehow my credit score is lower than some of my family members.

I just can't for the life of me understand that.

I'm just like, guys, it's just like, I'm like, guys, you understand this is

beyond your notion of credit, but yet somehow my credit score is lower than my secretary's.

It's like,

it just, it bothers me.

She makes fun of me for it.

And I just don't understand it.

So obviously that credit system doesn't seem to make sense.

And it's weaponized in many cases against a lot of people who got into some bad situations.

So we should probably have marketplaces for those things and more decentralization for those things.

Otherwise, those actors can basically decide who gets to win, who gets to lose in society.

So yeah, that's what crypto is really about at its core.

It's like it's that trust.

And then you start looking at fundamental objects like money.

voice and political opinion, social influence, identity.

And then you say, can I represent these things mathematically as something, as an object that lives out there in the cloud?

And then can I make them programmable?

And then can I build an economy around them?

And then can I have them compete in an all-you-can-eat buffet of different ideas and have those ideas run in parallel and introduce adversarial thinking so people come in and try to break them and destroy them.

And if they do, they get a reward.

They get millions of dollars or billions of dollars and run away, yay.

But if they can't break them, then the system becomes stronger and then it becomes the system and takes over.

There's a lot there.

Going back to the voting, so there are discussions about possibly implementing this within the U.S.

Yeah, and the first step is...

And I would imagine that pisses

the institution off to no end.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, the first step is standardization.

So, you know, just like that post-quantum discussion,

you don't want to run too far off the reservation.

You want to say, well, the government's not going to procure something unless they have standardization for that thing.

So NIST is highly involved in these types of things, but the Department of Commerce is highly involved.

And before the DOD thinks about it or some Secretary of State in some states thinks about it, you really need to reference something like, what is the statutory definition or the standard RFC for what is blockchain?

and for this and for that and this.

You have to build all those components up as a house of abstractions and codes and numbers.

Like if you want to secure something and use it in the military, maybe you need FIPS 190-2 or something.

There's some processor standard, they point to that, or mil spec is another, you point to it, you say, that's that thing.

Then once you have it, you say, okay, now we can have a conversation about writing an RFP and building something.

So what's happened is we've had kind of a lot of chaos because it's hard and it's complicated and the people making the decisions are pretty divorced from the realities of the technology.

So they want to do it and they understand philosophically there's a they're there, but they don't have the vocabulary vocabulary and they don't have the bureaucracy necessary to be able to get into this world.

And so the thing we've been working on is saying, don't pick winners and losers right now.

Don't even talk about winners and losers right now.

Focus on instead a taxonomy.

Get the words right.

Get the language right.

Get the standards right.

Have a notion of what is decentralization.

You hear it all the time, the crypto.

We're decentralized.

What the fuck does decentralization mean?

I asked this question.

We've written 240 papers, academic papers at my company, over 10,000 citations.

So we said, you know, we should write an academic paper.

And we thought, oh, you know, it'd be really easy.

We'll just like have a paper in two months.

And it took like six years.

And then we created a standards group at University of Edinburgh.

We created something called

the Edinburgh Decentralization Index.

And it turns out there's eight different lenses you could look at for decentralization, everything from the token distribution to the consensus algorithm to how the code is written, all this stuff.

And it's a trade-off matrix.

It's not like one number that you can get to and say, this is the only number that matters.

It's more like, what do you value?

Do you value operational resilience or do you value a large distribution of the money?

You can have a fully decentralized system, but one guy owns all the tokens.

It doesn't really make sense, right?

Okay, you can have a system where a lot of people own all the tokens, but only three people run that ledger and it's federated forever and you can't get rid of them.

Doesn't really make any sense.

So it seems like there's some combination of these things.

So we just started measuring these things a few years ago.

The next step is to take that model to NIST and and other standards bodies and say, how do you integrate this and then start creating some infrastructure so then the government can use this tool to measure this from a qualitative and quantitative way when they're assessing technology.

Because the military probably doesn't want to go and adopt a blockchain technology that has a back door in it or has an operator that that China can coerce and then suddenly the whole thing comes down.

And it's the same for a voting system.

You don't want to adopt a voting system that's fundamentally insecure or has some sort of hidden vector of attack inside of it.

So the standards get you to a point where you can have that conversation, then the RFP process then allows the government to start experimenting with it.

Now that said, there have been plenty of pilots that have been run and DARPA has done stuff and DOD has done stuff and various states are doing things.

Like the state of Wyoming has passed over 30 cryptocurrency related laws and created all kinds of cool and innovative structures.

So there's a lot of stuff that's happening at the state county level and some in the federal level.

And thanks to Trump embracing cryptocurrency, there's an all-of-government mandate now to say, hey, we should actually consider blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies as a first-class citizen.

And in solving future problems, we actually think that there's a there there for these types of things.

The challenge again, though, is that the bureaucracy runs at a different clock speed than we do as an industry.

So we think if it doesn't happen in like five days, it didn't happen.

The government, if it doesn't happen in like five months,

that's actually pretty good.

Come back in a few years.

Maybe we'll have something for you.

It's a different clock speed.

What do you think we've learned from countries that have implemented crypto

is their national currency?

Is it El Salvador, Honduras?

Did they do it too?

I think El Salvador, that was Bukele.

I actually went down there after he did it.

So

El Salvador was like living on a different planet.

I got some stories for you.

So this is back in 2021.

El Salvador, Bukele, if you ever meet him, he's like in his early 40s and he is a super charismatic guy.

He was like a nightclub manager for a bit and then a mayor of something.

Now he's the president of the country, right?

And

he's just got this style that's just magical.

El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as their national standard and then he said it, but they had really no plan for how they were actually going to adopt and bring Bitcoin into their country.

And so they had these guys that were local and they were just terrible.

And so Bukele's like, I need some help.

So we knew one of his guys.

There was this coked out CIA guy.

His name was Marty.

And he was friends with this other guy named Damien, who is like the political advisor to Bukele.

And so I was friends with Marty.

And Marty's like, you got to talk to Damien.

So I talked to Damien.

He's like, you should really meet Bukeley, meet the president.

like, okay, I guess I can go to El Salvador.

I've heard interesting things about that country.

So we first had a phone call with him.

And I was like, am I really talking to the president of El Salvador?

Like, can we verify this guy real?

So the next time we had a video call and it looked official, there's flags behind him and everything.

And he looked like Bukeley.

We're like, okay, I think we're talking to Bukeley.

So then eventually we planned a trip and we went down to San Salvador and it was the wildest week in my life.

We landed there and

we go and first we have dinner with Bukeley and we ended up spending like four hours at the presidential palace.

And it was like this long, non-circuitous conversation about various things.

He was like, like Latin American Gaddafi.

It was just, it was crazy.

And I was like, okay, well, how are you going to actually implement it?

She said, we're just going to do it.

We're just going to figure it out.

And we have six months.

Let's do it.

You know, okay.

So then we had a group of people we brought in and we started talking to all the different government agencies.

We talked to the central bank and we said, okay, well, like, what are the compliance guidelines for adopting cryptocurrency here?

It's like, well, we don't have any of any.

It's like, well, where are you getting your business requirements?

And they said, Facebook.

What?

it was like yeah the president does all of his speeches on facebook so we just listen to the president's speeches and then we'll adopt you know whatever he says over the speeches we're like okay that's uh that's great but the crippiest thing is they wanted to do like this bitcoin mine uh you know was using geothermal because i guess they got volcanoes there and so they had this harebrain scheme that they were going to build this big bitcoin valley with like big geothermal power and they'll have all the bitcoin miners come because now it's like bitcoin utopia so we were talking to the minister of energy there and it was like a Doctor Strange love scene.

It was so crazy that he looked like, you know, Dr.

Octopus from Spider-Man 2.

And he talked like this, hello, Charles.

The power of magma will be the destiny of El Salvador.

And we had these Guatemalan guys in the meeting for no particular reason, and they were smoking inside the ministry.

And they're just like,

yeah, fucking magma, man.

We're going to get this done.

And it was just one meeting after another meeting of all this stuff.

Then we're like, okay, okay, the U.S.

government's got to know what's going on.

So let's go talk to the State Department.

And of course, Biden, you know, he never found something he couldn't fuck up.

So the prior ambassador was this great guy that Bukale really liked.

They had a wonderful relationship together.

They'd hang out, like watch movies together into one o'clock in the morning.

So the first thing Biden did is fire that ambassador and put a new person in and say the policy of the U.S.

is now regime change.

So Bukale went from, hey, we like the U.S.

and we're friends.

And I get to hang out with the ambassador to the ambassador wants to kill me.

Okay.

For no particular reason.

It's like Forrest gunpowder for no particular reason they shot that man um so so anyway we meet the u.s ambassador there or the attache where the hell she was and uh we were just like okay well we've seen all this insane stuff going on like surely you guys must know what's going on it's like no we thought you knew so it was just chaos it was absolute chaos they had no real plan on how to adopt bitcoin they had no real plan for how to use it and they passed the legislation for optics and they wanted to attract a lot of direct foreign investment in but they didn't really understand our industry so what they ended up doing in El Salvador is they adopted a centralized solution.

So they said there's Bitcoin, but then they had this thing called the Shivo wallet.

And then people would deposit and they would get a representation of it and they could spend it amongst each other with the wallet there in El Salvador.

But there wasn't...

in our view, appropriate controls to audit and verify there was a one-to-one correspondence between actual Bitcoin and the currency that they were trading.

The other issue is we went to the Treasury Department, the State Department, and we met with all these guys in DC, and we tried to say, hey, you know, is is there any way we could work together on this?

Because there's millions of El Salvadorans and like 25% of the population is in the U.S., they're kind of under your jurisdiction.

And there's all like half their economy relies on remittances from the United States.

So whatever they do in El Salvador, the United States is going to have to have an opinion on that.

We have to get the regulation to work.

Like Bukay, for example, want to do an airdrop to everybody in El Salvador.

We're like, okay, but MS-13 is on an OFAC list.

And so if we give Bitcoin to all these people, we're facilitating a transfer of value to a terrorist organization.

That's no bueno.

You know, we can't make that work.

So Justice Department has to give a clearance and understand what the rules are and everything.

We just couldn't get there.

So we passed on the deal after a week, but it was just wild walking through all that because it was like the whole country was like a startup.

The other thing is they were running everything on WhatsApp.

So all the ministers were like in WhatsApp groups and just talking to each other.

And that was their official form of communication.

And

there's layers and layers of other things I can tell you off the record, especially with some of the interpersonal dynamics there.

But what it did do was because El Salvador is a real country, it actually made Bitcoin the official currency.

And it forced the IMF and it forced all the transnational bodies to actually start recognizing Bitcoin as a currency and start talking about cryptocurrencies from a different lens and perspective.

They looked at it as kind of a shadowy, speculative asset that weird autistic autistic nerds trade online and who knows?

To, well, if a nation state's using it, technically speaking, it is a currency and there's something there.

And so at that moment, it was a sea change and it created cracks in the foundation.

And when El Salvador didn't collapse, but rather they got a lot of direct foreign investment and all the Bitcoiners came there, Bukeley's gambit actually worked.

It said it's okay as a nation state to adopt cryptocurrencies.

You're not going to get retaliation.

You're not going to to get crushed by the IMF or these other people, these big transnational bodies that came in.

Because the IMF was always a boogeyman.

I remember meeting the Prime Minister of Georgia, it's a country in Eastern Europe.

And we talked about like the digital LARI as a stable coin.

And he said, well, we tried, but the IMF came in and said, we'll pull all your funding and all your loans and just burn your country to the ground if you go and do this.

So they were always the boogeyman.

And when El Salvador had the balls to say, fuck it, we'll just go and do it because Bukeley's Bukeley.

And they didn't get destroyed.

It was a very pivotal moment.

So what is the IMF?

The International Monetary Fund.

It's like a transnational body that basically oversees the loans to countries and the litany of other things.

So after World War II concluded, the United States won.

And we were in charge of everything.

And

there was two systems, the Soviet system and our system.

And so we set up the World Financial Order.

It's called the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944.

And that, plus the Marshall Plan, plus things that happened in the 50s and 60s, they created a world order.

And we established these big transnational bodies like the World Bank and the World Trade Organization and the IMF and SWIFT and so forth.

And basically what they did is they created a management layer for the entire financial system of the world.

Any place the dollar touched, any place America touched, you adopted not just America stuff or our blue jeans and music, but you got our banking system and you got wired into it.

So how America projects soft power is we don't have to invade you.

We can just blacklist you from the world financial system.

So like FATF is a great example of that.

It's a controlling body that does all the compliance and regulation.

Well, if you get on a FATF blacklist, it's like really hard for your regulated financial vehicles to have correspondent bank relationships with the rest of the world.

So effectively, you become a financial island and money can't get in, money can't get out, and all your rich people are no longer rich because their money doesn't do anything.

So we don't have to invade you.

We just put you on a blacklist and then you're done.

So these transnational bodies, they've grown so powerful that they literally can influence foreign policy and also domestic policy.

So you can go in and use them and say, hey, you know,

you got to treat this ethnic group a little better or this group of people should be allowed to vote or you need to change this law or something.

If you don't change that law, you know, you're just not going to get credit anymore.

You can't borrow money.

So sorry.

Or, you know, all your debt, we're just going to collapse it and nobody will buy that debt.

Or, you know, actually, you just can't travel anymore.

Just cut your passports off or these types of things.

And

especially for smaller countries, it's not a small concern.

You're literally told what to do as the president of the country for these types of things.

So

yeah, well, Brexit was a component of that because that was the European system in the UK.

And, you know, it's still a mixed bag.

We have a lab in Scotland for a long time.

And so we kind of hear both sides of the politics, the pro-Brexit and the anti-Brexit people But that populist uprising did have that same sentiment Why is it that I as a voter in the UK can say my opinion but then some European bureaucrat can override my opinion that I can't vote for and I have no control over is this a democracy or not?

And so when you look at transnational body that comes in and they have some say or control over your country No matter who you vote for the president, no matter what you do, they basically you're not in charge.

It's like Bane.

Like, do you feel in charge?

It's like, that's these transnational bodies.

They do these types of things.

Now, of course, in America, we don't mind because we run these bodies.

It's one of our batteries included on the American empire.

It gives us the ability to project force.

And for the most part, it does create stability inside the world because you get standardization and you know your money works everywhere and contract law.

And also if somebody gets kidnapped or ransomed or something, then maybe just maybe like we'll have international coordination on law enforcement and these other things.

It's a way to kind of solve problems without having to go to war all the time or having to send spies and kill people or these types of things.

But on the other hand, it's a system that's rife for abuse because if you can take over those anchors of power, you can use those to benefit the people that put you there.

You see?

So it creates a shadow system of transnational governance across the world as a whole.

And then also it creates very strong incentives for people to try to opt out, which is why you have competing systems like the BRICS system that Russia and China and these others are trying to push and propagate through.

So these guys will say, oh, well, the American system is terrible and look how bad it is.

And to a certain extent,

you can see the anger.

Like in Switzerland, after 2022, when the Russians invaded Ukraine, the US government went to Switzerland and said, the Russians are persona non grata.

Get rid of all those Russian accounts and all that Russian money.

So the Swiss complied.

And like 50 billion plus dollars left Switzerland.

Very expensive for a small country.

So then the Swiss government says, okay, we were good kids.

So what do we get?

And we're like, go fuck yourself.

They give nothing for that.

You know, and so then the Swiss remember that.

They can't do anything about it right now, but they remember it.

And then the next time China comes and says, you know, Is it really worth your time being like so friendly and nice with the United States?

And in some cases, the country doesn't comply.

Like I remember, I was in Abu Dhabi.

I'll never forget this.

I was in Abu Dhabi and I was sitting eating dinner.

And then suddenly I saw saw fighter jets fly overhead, and they were painting the Russian flag in the sky.

I said, what the hell is going on?

And it turned out Vladimir Putin was visiting Abu Dhabi that day, and they gave him a hero's triumph.

He comes in like a Roman general returning with the purple robes on, you know, for a triumph.

Because what happened was that just a few weeks before, the Treasury Secretary was there, the prior Treasury Secretary, and they were threatening Abu Dhabi with sanctions and all these things, a Fatist's blacklist over having Russian money in Abu Dhabi.

And the king was very offended.

And so he upgraded Putin's reception from, hey, you're a foreign head of state to welcome hero of the people just to fuck with the Americans.

Wow.

You know, you can still find it on Twitter.

You can see the, because it was all a big news item of Putin coming to Abu Dhabi and these types of things.

Because, you know, they did the calculation and they told the Treasury Secretary this.

They say, if I had up China, Russia, Middle East, and Africa, that's twice the size of Europe and the United States in terms of GDP.

And if you look at the GDP growth of that block versus the GDP growth of America and Europe, it's growing much faster.

So if we're going to pick a side, we're going to pick that side.

You understand that?

And then they realize they overplayed their hand.

So that's the other danger of these transnational bodies.

If you abuse them and overuse them, the resentment builds and you create a coalition of anger.

And then over time, that forms into another economic block.

And then eventually people opt out of the system.

And then you lose the whole system as a whole.

So that's another another reason why cryptocurrencies are so appealing because it's a reset.

How close are we to losing that system?

Well, it depends on a variety of factors.

If a world war happens, it's a reset and whoever wins gets the new system.

So China, U.S., if that breaks out, you know, Thucydides trap,

we'll figure it out.

If the dollar collapses, we lose the system.

We're at 37 trillion in national debt right now.

That's the stuff on the books.

But then when you look at the long-term liabilities, it's well over 50 trillion to 100 trillion, depending on how you count it.

And at some point, the interest on that's untenable.

In fact, at the current rate of interest, we spend more on the interest on the debt than the entire U.S.

military.

Just gives a sense of that.

And if we continue spending the way we do, within 10, 15 years, we'll spend more than the U.S.

military, Medicare, Social Security, and education combined on interest on the debt.

It's a very bad situation to be in.

And the thing is that we don't feel real interest rates on our junk debt because we're the World Reserve currency.

And so we project that into the other countries first.

They get first hit.

Then we we get second hit because of our status.

It creates a very strong incentive for them to de-dollarize and get off the dollar.

And it's a gradual thing, little by little.

And we see this belt road in China with the digital yuan.

They are slowly moving through.

they don't just give you money, they give you an economic system.

So you adopt social credit, you adopt the digital yuan, you adopt the Chinese companies, you adopt the Chinese infrastructure, and you de-dollarize in the process of doing that.

So they have a 50-year plan, and they just go country by country, and they've taken all of Central Asia.

They're taking big chunks of Africa like Zambia and other things like that.

So as long as that continues, there's an inevitability of a de-dollarization of the world and then we have to pay real interest rates on the debt.

The money collapses and then that provokes a huge issue for us.

So if left to the own devices, nothing else changes, then probably around the 2030s, you'd be looking at that collapse.

Now, that said, never bet against America.

Because every time people said we're going to be dead in the water, then shit changes.

Some new leader comes in, some new policy comes in, some new innovation comes in.

And really all it would take for us to get out of it is just five and five, 5% GDP growth rate and 5% reduction in the budget of the U.S.

government.

Run that for 10 to 15 years, cut the budget in half, you double the economy, and we can pay down all of our debt.

It's not really a long time if you think about it.

When Bill Clinton left office, we were only at $4.5 trillion in debt.

Now we're at $37 trillion in debt.

That wasn't a long time ago you know, when you think about that.

And so things can change very quickly in a very negative direction or in a very positive direction.

But you have to have an adult conversation about things.

And the reason why people aren't willing to have an adult conversation, it goes back to what blockchain is for, which is trust.

You can't have an adult conversation if you don't trust the person sitting across from you.

If you think that that person doesn't have your best interest at heart, if you think that person's intrinsically corrupt and whatever they're proposing is through a lens of something to steal something from you, even if they have the best idea in the world, you're not going to say yes to that idea because you just, you can't get there on the trust side of things.

So the real reset is the trust reset.

How do you get to social systems where whether you're a Democrat or Republican, left or right, you're one political persuasion or the other, you trust that system.

You say that system is okay.

That is the space you can negotiate.

And then you can bring problems into the debate.

And objectively speaking, is it sensible that we have 37 trillion in national debt?

No.

Is it sensible that when we fight wars, we lose them now?

Even though we spend more money than any country in the world on the military, and we have the best warriors in the history of the world?

No, it's not sensible.

Is it sensible that we spend two to four times as much money on health care as our peers, but we have a lower quality for that?

No.

Is it sensible that, you know, Social Security is basically a Ponzi scheme.

You're going to pay in it your whole life.

You're not going to get anywhere near what you paid into it back if you just invested it.

And there's a strong possibility when they means test it, a lot of people will just be dropped out.

So they never get anything, even though they paid into it.

Probably not.

No.

Okay, so we start getting some consensus that these are not sensible things.

Notice we didn't say universal health care or complete free market or this thing or that thing.

We just get an agreement that these are problems.

Then you can negotiate.

and start talking around that.

And because you have a negotiation for a position of trust, everybody's working in the same direction because they're trying to solve the same problem.

And it's just a matter of compromises.

So that's the only way to solve it.

And until that's done, there's an inevitability of collapse.

And typically what happens is the collapsing empire tries to provoke a conflict to restore itself.

And so that's what begins with a world war against emerging powers.

So we'll see what happens.

But it's a difficult time.

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The other thing that really causes some complication is that we have too many exponential technologies.

So the 20th century was the introduction of an exponential technology.

It's multiple ones.

The nuclear weapons were the first example of that.

Bombs were linear before that.

More explosive, bigger blast, linear scale.

With nukes, like a little bit, wow, it's big.

A little bit more, oh my God, it's exponentially larger.

And so

the first atomic bomb was in the kilotons, and within just a decade, we were in the megatons, thousands of times more destructive.

Look at Zarbamba.

It was 50 megatons.

Hiroshima was like 30 or 40 kilotons of destructive power.

So exponential growth meant that we had invented something for the first time in human history that could actually wipe out the entire species.

And we actually came ridiculously close once in 1962, and it was literally a first officer in a sub who decided not to turn his key.

And then again in the 80s, and it was a lieutenant colonel who was running a nuclear silo in Moscow, and it was a computer software bug, and it was telling him that we had launched weapons at Russia, and

he was instructed to launch nuclear weapons at us, and he wouldn't do it, because he didn't want to end the world.

So like literally, like two people were prevented the world from nuclear armor-kitten just by themselves.

And in both cases, they were harshly punished by the Soviet system, which is just ironic.

But anyway, exponential technologies are very dangerous.

And then when you look at it, now we have multiple exponential technologies sneaking their way through.

You have synthetic biology, we talked about a little earlier.

It can be used for many things.

We saw, like some people think COVID was made in a lab.

Well, whether you believe it or not, it's undeniably true that people are using gain of function research to build diseases that have a 50% mortality rate or 60% mortality rate.

And they just blithely pretend like that's a good idea.

You've made something that if it ever got loose would kill 3 billion people.

It's just, it's so foundationally unethical.

But it's exponential because it's not a billion people working on that.

It's 10 guys in a lab working on something that has a consequence at the scale of 3 billion.

And it's the same when you look at artificial intelligence.

Is it 500 million people working all together?

No, it's like OpenAI has a few thousand employees and Anthropic has a few thousand employees and Google's AI group has a few thousand people and Microsoft's AI group is a few thousand people.

There's 800 million users for OpenAI.

So a few thousand people translate to a scale of 800 million.

So our governance systems were not designed for this and the world order was not designed for for this.

This idea of such a profound asymmetry.

You can't have a few thousand people just do something, and then somehow now that impacts a billion people.

Nobody consented to that asymmetrical relationship, because it's always easy to go Jim Jones and have a few thousand crazy people, and then suddenly those few thousand crazy people get to inflict upon the world their whole philosophy and their ideas because of that consequence.

We have no governing system for exponential technology.

The blockchain is probably the only layer that can do it because it's born of that.

But you need a regulating system for these and it has to be global in nature and everybody has to get along for it to work.

Well, if they can't trust each other and they can't get along, how do they make a decision?

You want to solve climate change or whatever.

If you believe it, you don't believe it.

How do you sign a treaty if China is not going to be part of it, India is not going to be part of it, Russia is not going to be part of it.

It's one global commons.

And that's one problem.

But then there's another problem, like AI, that's another problem.

Then there's synthetic biology, that's another problem.

Quantum computing, that's another problem.

There's all these things you can use.

They're very dangerous if they're misused.

So global governance has to solve that as well.

And one way of doing it is create a transnational order, one world government, and they run everything and they just

control people in this dopey and clauschwab way.

Another way is to try to decentralize it and try to push these things into the commons and have them jointly controlled by as many people as possible.

Because you can even, for example, AI, you can build a decentralized AI with blockchain.

You can have the inference like Bitcoin is held up with a supercomputer, right?

Well, you could build a different kind of computer with graphics cards and create a distributed computer that's more powerful than Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services or any of these things, but that's not owned by a company.

It's a digital commons.

And then you can put those rules in for the alignment of the system and the inference of the system.

And it's the very same rules that would garner a money system or a supply chain system or a voting system or something like that.

So you could just have all that stuff in there.

And that's the magic of

what we do.

So it's fun because

just like when I was studying Ron Paul's stuff in the early days, I didn't know that that knowledge base would be relevant for cryptocurrencies.

I didn't realize that what we were learning in the blockchain cryptocurrency space is just as applicable for how would you regulate and control an exponential technology or create a global governance system or these types of things.

It turns out it's an emergent property.

It's something that you actually have to solve.

Aaron Powell,

how is El Salvador dealing with the volatility of Bitcoin?

Aaron Powell, well, that's a red herring.

Oh, it's so volatile.

It's like, yeah, but gold is volatile.

And we've had it as a money system or a value system for 5,000 years.

Volatility is not a problem.

What's a problem is the lack of financial markets to deal with the volatility.

You always, in volatility, you're going to have winners and losers.

And if your preference as a merchant or a holder is stability, what you want to do is have a market that allows you to trade your upside to protect you from the downside.

Okay, so I keep my buying power at this level, and then you will take the upside and accept the downside.

So, for example, for a stock, you can buy options on both sides.

You can buy a caller, you can have a put, and you can have a call option.

So, if it goes to the moon, you have an exit strategy.

And if it goes to false, you have an exit, and you stay within that bound.

So your losses and gains are basically bounded.

Now there has to be a counterparty who accepts that risk and there's counterparty risk for these types of things.

So really it's a question of how deep are the markets?

How do you insure things?

How do you manage counterparty risks?

Why cryptocurrencies had such a hard go of things is they were not born of Wall Street.

So Wall Street is the ninja master of trading these things.

If you have a racehorse and you give it to a Wall Street guy, he's going to take the dick, the testicles, the teeth, and turn them into structured financial products and sell it to some guy in Saudi Arabia.

Okay, this is just the thing Wall Street people do.

They're addicted to it.

They just securitize and quantify and qualify as much as you can imagine.

Because it wasn't born of Wall Street, there were no guys in the room who had the ability to do that or the regulatory remit to do that or markets to trade these types of things on.

This is why it's so important that the TradFi and DeFi sides come together because they do different things.

The DeFi side does the trust thing, like I was just talking about, but the TradFi thing does let's build markets, let's build liquidity, let's market make, let's trade risk, let's insure, let's move capital around, let's like build structure upon structure upon structure to deal with these things.

And the end consequences as an interface to that marketplace, you're in the driver's seat to basically make a decision of what to do.

And so you can say, okay, well, I'm not really comfortable with downside risk above this amount.

So if it falls this far, this other guy will take it from me.

And I'll make a deal with him that, you know, I pay him X amount of dollars for that downside risk.

And, you know, maybe he wins, maybe he loses, but that's not my fucking problem.

It's his problem.

And then if it goes way up, great, make good returns.

We do this all the time.

Like every time you step on a plane, it's insured.

And the aerospace, you know, the airline companies, they buy fuel with futures contracts so they can lock in the price because they need predictability.

They can't run run a business if the price of jet fuel goes way up.

Like, what if a war breaks out?

Like, then suddenly United and Delta and all these other guys they go from profitable companies to you know in the red all the time.

So, they need to lock in that price of fuel for as long as they can.

So, that's what a futures market does: it gives you the ability to lock things in and take delivery.

So, these are the things that you do, and you know, these are the mechanisms.

But, more broadly, it's

different boats for different floats.

For small businesses to mid-sized businesses, even the big businesses, what crypto is doing for them is it's giving them more markets, more liquidity, and more optionality on the value that they have.

So let's say you're a pharmaceutical company and you're doing drug development and you're doing some state-of-the-art amazing things, but they're not valuable yet.

You have the patents, you have all these other things.

So what's your option for liquidity?

Because you got payroll.

You got to pay your scientists.

You got to pay for the clinical trials.

You got to pay for all this stuff.

Now, if you get it right, you're now a multi-billion dollar company.

Pfizer buys you tomorrow.

Congratulations.

But you have to wait 10 years to get it right.

So you have to go to a venture capitalist and they're like, yeah, all right.

Well, I'll give you some money.

Yeah, give me 30% of your company and, you know, this and this and this and this.

And you see, you see, all of a sudden you just get like predatory userist rates.

And that's their lived experience.

Well, what if I could tokenize my intellectual property and I could sell it almost like a micro IPO?

Now, all of a sudden, a larger group of people can participate.

I get a better deal.

So maybe instead of selling 30% of my company, I sell 15% of the upside on the patent portfolio or something like that.

So larger market, more investors, more fair transactions.

Same for microfinance.

If you do like small-scale loans in Africa or other places, like we do loans in Kenya, Uganda, and some of these markets are so predatory.

They're like 85% interest for loans that are

85% interest for loans that are 90 days.

So you'll go and borrow like 100 bucks, have to pay in 30 days, you know, 185 back.

It's just, it's so userous.

Why?

Because they're very thin markets and there's tons of middlemen and there's forex risk because the local currency is always going up and down and all these other things.

Well, you make it decentralized, you bring a lot of people in, then suddenly it falls from 85% to 18%.

And your default rates go down.

You know, in those jurisdictions, the NPL rate can be, the non-performing loan rate can be as high as 40%.

So we did a product that we did out there.

The interest rate fell to 18% and the non-performing loan rate fell to 2%.

So it's still a great return, but it's life-changing for the people there.

And the delta was liquidity.

So basically a larger market, more eyeballs, more people that are involved in these types of things, syndication.

So that's really how you solve volatility, is that you create markets for it.

And then you say for the people on that side, it's all about, I want more markets, I want more liquidity, I want more connection points, more people.

And then once you have it, it's like the free market takes over.

Like people are going to figure it out.

You know, a certain music star that I'm associated with that shall remain nameless, he bought a record label that it was deeply personal to him because of his life history.

And he's thinking around

how does he tokenize the intellectual property there, all of the IP behind those records.

Because like it's really hard in practice to get liquidity on music IP.

You have like five or six big companies that control all the IP and they're like cartels and they set the market.

So they set the prices.

But what if you can just go like sell part of it to your fans?

They like you.

You have a direct relationship with them.

Maybe you get like a five or 10X over that.

It's like an IPO if you as a person.

And the minute you do that, that cartel breaks up.

Those middlemen get disintermediated.

And then every other artist can do that.

You know, Taylor Swift can do it or, you know, Country Star can do it.

You know, Garth Brooks can sell his IP or whatever.

You see, so the artist now can monetize the direct relationship that they have with that.

the exact same concept as running a smart contract on Cardano, or the exact same concept as running an election.

It's the same infrastructure.

That's why the tokens are so valuable because they're universal.

They're like a financial stem cell.

They can become a heart cell or a brain cell or a kidney cell, or they can become a commodity or a security or intellectual property or an NFT or a game token or something like that.

It's the exact same thing.

It's the exact same concept.

How was it co-founding Ethereum?

That one was tough.

You know,

people ask me all the time because I run a venture capital firm and I advise young entrepreneurs all the time.

And I say there's three rules that I got out of Ethereum.

First off,

you can't have eight founders.

There were eight founders with Ethereum, you know, all from different wakes of life.

We have a Romanian guy, an Israeli guy, a Canadian guy, a Wall Street guy who was also Canadian, but also lived in Jamaica.

Vitalik, obviously, is a Russian guy.

And there's me, the Colorado, Wyoming Hawaii boy, right?

And there's others.

And we all had radically different ideas and philosophies.

And we were unified on this idea that we wanted programmability with the blockchain.

It's kind of like when JavaScript came to the web browser.

Before that happened, you just had pretty pictures and pretty websites.

But when JavaScript came, you had programmability.

So then you have Facebook and Amazon and YouTube and these things.

You can build beautiful, rich experiences.

Well, Bitcoin has no programmability until recently.

So what does that mean?

It's like you just move Bitcoins around.

That's all you can do.

It's a very simple network.

But then when you have programmability, you have a programming language.

So you can just do anything you want.

You can create decentralized exchanges and voting systems and all these other things.

So we all said, this is a really good idea.

So that was the first level of agreement.

But then as we started it, as the months went on, we had radically different visions of what would make that idea safe, effective, governable, and scalable, and all these other characteristics.

And then naturally it drifted.

And so, you know, Vitalik was the primary founder.

He came up with the initial idea.

So ultimately, he had to make a decision.

Like, we call it the Crypto Google or Crypto Mozilla decision.

So the Crypto Google is like be a for-profit entity that builds not-for-profit

open source stuff, stuff that you give away.

Google does Dart and Go and all this other, but it's a for-profit company with equity and founders and these types of things.

Or Mozilla is like a not-for-profit.

It's like a foundation.

You know, there's no owners, there's no shareholders.

So Vitalik chose the not-for-profit route, and then all the people that wanted to go the for-profit route, they kind of got pushed out.

So Joe Lubin got pushed out and created consensus, and Amir Shatreet got pushed out, and Anthony DiOreo got pushed out and created his own company called Decentral.

I got pushed out and I created input-output.

And the technology people were all that were left.

But then he learned that it's...

even amongst technology people very hard to get them to agree.

So Gavin Wood, who was like the CTO of Ethereum, he left and created his own competing product called Polkadot and did his thing.

And so like there's only one founder left out of the eight.

It's Vitalik.

He's done a good job.

I mean, it's gone from nothing to a $300 billion ecosystem and, you know, millions and millions of users and a lot of good things.

And, you know, they really enjoy their first mover advantage and they solve hard problems.

And Gavin did a good job with Polkadot.

We did Cardano.

It's a $20 billion ecosystem, millions of people.

So you find that in business and in life.

But you can't get into a business relationship if there is not a philosophical agreement on where to go and what to do.

You can't get into a business relationship if there's too many decision makers.

You can't have eight commanding officers.

You have to have a chain of command and you have to have a clear way of sorting that out.

And third, you have to have good founders agreements because people have a shelf life in businesses.

And some people are exceptional as early founders and they're really good to do the first six months to a year, but then you outgrow them.

And other people are exceptional for when you're scaling and you're growing from 300 people to 300,000 people.

And some people are really good along the whole journey.

So a great example would be Larry Page.

He was in and out and in and out.

So Larry Page started Google with Sergey Brin.

And when they got to around 300 people, they're like, Larry needs adult supervision.

So they brought in Eric Schmidt.

And he grew Google from a 300-person company and took over the CEO role to a 28,000-person company.

It made Google the Google it is today.

Larry wasn't sitting on his thumbs.

You know, he was still around.

He was learning.

He was growing as a person.

And he took his company back.

He pushed out Eric Schmidt and came back in as the CEO and ran the company again.

And then eventually he's like you know I want to do big things so he restructured Google and created alphabet and alphabet's this portfolio of all these cool interesting things like anti-aging and genomic stuff with calico and it's got google in the portfolio and all this other stuff and they now have a professional ceo at google sonder pichai so that's the nature of things you have to know yourself and you have to know that and ethereum was very stressful because i don't we were all very young i think i was 25 or 26 at the time and we knew we had a winner.

You know, just you look at it and you say, this is going to be big.

It's going to be a massive thing.

This is going to make so much money and it's going to change everything and it's going to change the paradigm.

But we didn't know what to do with that.

It's like discovering alien technology or something.

He's like, it's a big deal, but like, what the fuck do those runes mean?

You know, what the hell does this thing look like?

You know, it's, it's crazy.

So we did our best to interpret the alien runes and the alien technology.

And I was kicked out early and for the best for for me and best for them and other people were able to ride a little longer on the bull but they got knocked off too and now there's a just one guy left and you know he's kind of doing his thing.

What is the concept of Ethereum?

Oh it's it's like JavaScript to the web browser.

So it's just like Bitcoin in that it's a blockchain and it has transactions and assets.

The difference is the transactions are programmable.

So you have a programming language so you can encode into the transactions any terms and conditions you want.

So you can turn them into a voting system or this thing or that thing.

So it really becomes that financial stem cell.

So it's the next generation.

I usually term cryptocurrencies in terms of generations.

And so the first generation was Bitcoin.

And usually that's the problem you're trying to solve.

So the Bitcoin, it was decentralization.

There were money systems online before Bitcoin, but they always relied on a central authority.

So there was some guy that had to vouch for the ledger and say, this is a ledger, like DigiCash, David Chalms' business in the 90s is an example of that.

Then Bitcoin comes around.

You don't don't need a single entity.

You have a decentralized ledger, but it's simple.

It just has Bitcoin.

You just push Bitcoins around.

You can't do pull payments.

You can't do programmable things with it.

You can't issue assets.

It's only Bitcoin.

It's just Bitcoin.

Then Ethereum comes around, the second generation, the problem you're trying to solve there is generality.

You want to go from just a single asset ledger that's fixed function to a multi-asset ledger.

So you can issue your own tokens, your own things in that same infrastructure, and they're programmable.

So you can do whatever you want with them.

And that was a huge revolution when it came out.

Oh my God, like cryptocurrencies aren't just a speculative asset.

They're not just like a value holder.

Like this is a social system.

I can do economics as a political system.

The challenge of that generation is that it doesn't scale.

It's not interoperable, that Wi-Fi moment.

It doesn't talk to other stuff.

And also, you can't govern it.

You know, how do you upgrade it?

It's very complicated.

So you have to always be tinkering and tuning and fucking with it.

And we as consumers, we're used to custodians behind things.

So like Apple to the iPhone or Microsoft to Windows.

So you always think, like, who's going to be accountable for the next version of Windows and all the features?

Well, Microsoft will do that.

Who's going to build the next iPhone?

Well, Apple will figure that out.

Who's going to build the next version of Ethereum?

Ethereum Foundation?

Well, that doesn't sound very decentralized.

Now, does it?

If one group of guys get to decide like how everything is going to go for this thing that's decentralized.

Okay, well, if not then, then who?

How do you build a decentralized product function?

How do you build a decentralized upgrade function?

So these problems became apparent around 2016, 2015, that timeframe.

And we're like, we need a new generation.

We need fundamentally different technology for upgradability, interoperability, and also scalability.

The scalability thing is very bad in cryptocurrencies.

It's one of those cake and eat it too things.

inclusive accountability we mentioned with voting earlier that is awesome but super fucking expensive.

If your requirement is that you have a full node, that you're able to self-verify every single thing in the system, that only works as long as the set of things that you have to go through to verify is capped.

Because like, could you imagine trying to verify the state of the Googleplex?

That's like millions of computers running Google's backend with billions of users and yodabytes of data in that system.

How could you personally do that on your home computer?

It's not possible.

So obviously that's not a system that seems to be amenable to inclusive accountability natively.

So the problem is that the way blockchains work with that property, they're replicated, they have like a limitation of how much they can scale to, how many people can use it concurrently, how much data can be inside the system, how many transactions the system can process.

You want it instead to be a system that as people join the system, they add resources to the system.

So you never run out of resources.

It's like a potluck.

You know, instead of a dinner where you show up and there's a fixed amount of food, if a potluck, everybody shows up with food.

So no matter how many guests you have, your set of food grows.

And so if it's a good potluck, it should grow with the guests.

So you never run out of food.

You always have enough food to feed everybody inside that situation.

So there are protocols that do this that are scalable by design.

Like BitTorrent is a great example of that.

So, you know, more people that are downloading a video, paradoxically, the faster the download happens because those people share and download at the same time.

So if it's an unpopular thing like I don't know, Peewee's Playhouse or some shit like that, nobody's watching it.

It takes a really long time to download.

If it's Game of Thrones or something, like especially the early seasons that were good, then you get that quickly, you know, and because a lot of people are downloading.

So you like your cryptocurrency protocol to be the same way.

If I have a million users, it's fast.

If I have 10 million users, it's blazingly fast.

If I have 100 million users, it's one of the fastest things on the planet because they produce more than they consume.

Ethereum doesn't do that.

And they're trying to figure out ways to do that, to upgrade to the next generation.

So the third generation does that.

Scalability, interoperability, and governance.

And they have those things.

And they're actually creating a fourth generation now.

Because, you know, where there's not enough work to do, right?

And the fourth generation is the regulated side of the world.

So how do you get identity back in?

And how do you get privacy?

And these things?

Because blockchains are public.

So everything in them, everybody can see.

That's great for land records.

And that's great for open financial systems, but maybe just maybe our search history and what we bought on Amazon and maybe like where we spend our money is probably not, should be public.

We should keep that private.

So how do you add privacy back in, but preserve those properties that it has, immutability and auditability and so forth?

And so that's where the zero knowledge proofs come in.

They have to come in.

So the third generation is nearly over.

We have scalable protocols, interoperability is getting sorted out and governance, that's all the voting stuff we were talking about.

And now we're in that fourth generation.

We're starting to flirt with that.

And that's the next wave of cryptocurrencies that have privacy and identity.

And that brings the banking industry in and Wall Street in and regulators in and governments.

And what's great is they always include the features of the prior generations.

So Ethereum has a blockchain like Bitcoin does.

And a third generation thing has everything Ethereum does.

It has smart contracts.

So if you have a fourth generation, it's a third, second, first generation as well.

It's like a telescope that comes through.

How long was it after you left Ethereum that you started input-output?

I had the game plan for Ethereum, and so I wanted to do it.

So I was like, fuck it, I'm just going to do it myself.

So I started input-output about six months after I got booted out.

And so I, because I had to figure out how to start something, you know.

And so there's these guys in Japan who are like, well, if we still like you and we still want you.

So once you come to Japan, so it's like you're a celebrity, you're not making life good in Hollywood.

You go become like a B-list celebrity in Japan and start the Japanese movies.

And I'd never been to Japan before and that was fucking wild, man.

I was in Osaka and Osaka is like the gangster mean area of Japan and everybody's a little rough in Osaka, you know, and

it's where all the movies are.

So I moved there for a while and

I had to basically learn how to do business in Japan, how to raise money in Japan.

We raised $72 million in Japan.

At the time, it was the largest ICO that was ever done.

Ethereum was 18 million.

And then I had to build a company.

I had to build an army of engineers and scientists and all this other stuff.

And I was still in my 20s and I had absolutely no experience in any of these things.

Wow.

So, so it was a pretty wild ride, you know, and

just this is crypto circa 2015.

So it was still a very colorful time.

There was a lot of like larger than life people like John McAfee had just come into the cryptocurrency space.

And my frame of reference for John McAfee was like, wasn't that that crazy guy who like shot his neighbor and then like escaped into Guatemala and was blogging real time while he was doing it.

And he's probably a drug addict.

Yeah, but he's really cool.

It's like, all right, let's go party with that guy.

That sounds fun.

And we did in Malta, which was awesome.

But anyway, there's like those amazing stories and just meet all these just super crazy people.

And then also there was all these adjacent industries to crypto that were kind of shady.

Like DMM, for example, is a big Japanese content producer, but also they probably control all the pornography in Japan.

And they're like, yeah, we really love crypto.

And I was like,

I don't really want the porn muddy, but yeah, there's a lot of it, you know?

So

there was all these conundrums of like, who do you partner with and how do you partner with them in a way that doesn't have horrific blowback at some arbitrary point in the future?

So those were fun days, though.

And I kind of like lived in Osaka and then I would ping pong to Hong Kong and back because there was a huge crypto movement that was in Hong Kong at that time.

And then when the Chinese government cracked down on it, they moved to Singapore.

So then he went from Japan to Singapore.

And then for a while it was in South Korea and they got super big there.

And then exchanges got hacked and the South Korean government said, oh, we got to shut this all down.

So then they all fled to Singapore.

Now they've all gone to the Middle East.

So everybody's in Dubai now and speaks Arabic instead of Chinese or Korean.

But it's just wild.

But what we were able to do is we were the first to market to actually introduce the concept of peer review and at scale as an entrepreneur.

You know, it exists in academia, but nobody thought it was a valid business strategy to go and like hire scientists and do rigorous research and write formal papers and go through the peer review process and all these things.

They're like, dude, that'll set you behind by years and years and years.

And I said, I have plenty of time.

They're like, why?

And it's like, well, here's what's going to happen.

These guys are like Icarus.

They're going to fly really, really close to the sun.

Their wings are going to melt off and then they're going to fall and die.

And we were right in many cases.

Like all these cryptocurrencies would launch with brilliant ideas and they worked until they didn't.

EOS worked until it didn't.

Luna worked until it didn't.

And the falls got worse and worse every time.

So fail and a few hundred million dollars would be lost.

And then fail and it's like $4 billion.

Luna, fail, $40 billion get lost.

So

that was the other side is that there was this perverse incentive in the economic structuring of running cryptocurrency companies where you were incentivized to launch as fast as possible.

and make it somebody else's problem when the system didn't work.

So what we did with Cardano is we just said, you know, we'll just ignore all of that.

We'll just pretend like the rest of the world doesn't exist.

We'll be on Cardano Island in Japan and we'll just go and build this thing that's designed to run forever and never fail.

And so when we launched Cardano in 2017, it's been running 24 hours a day, seven days a week for eight years and never been hacked and never gone.

Wow.

You know, and so I was really proud of that.

Now, we had to do a lot of crazy shit to make that happen.

Like we use these weird programming languages like Haskell that like maybe 50 guys and the whole fucking world actually use and care about.

And, you know, they're just thoroughly unpleasant people.

And we had to invent a lot of new technology.

And in many cases, it's like, okay, I guess we just have to like write our own programming language or write our own thing or write this thing.

So we ended up developing this reputation for this thing that everybody acknowledges exists, but nobody really knows how it works.

It's just over there.

It's like Cardano.

It's here.

Don't touch it.

Don't think about it.

And then what I've had to do in my second act in the cryptocurrency space as I've gotten a little bit older is kind of somehow move that strange thing and make it get into the real space and normalize it and everything.

So, I'm coming back from Japan, being a star, and going back to Hollywood and seeing if I can find a way to be an A-lister.

And it's been a journey, you know.

And what's crazy is over the last 10 years, I've gone to 75 countries.

I keep a board in my office, and you put the little pins of different places you've gone.

And I counted them, you know, the other day, and I says, I hit 75, so I'm almost at 100.

Wow.

And it just, the only continent I haven't been to is Antarctica,

And it's so wild.

Like in any given three-month period, I'm probably going to set foot on three to four continents.

You know, I'll be in Africa and Europe or Asia or South America or North America and just travel, travel, travel.

And what's so surreal about it is everywhere I go, I get recognized by people.

Like I was in Mongolia.

Okay.

And this, this one blew my mind.

I was in Mongolia.

I was out in the Gobi Desert.

And there's like this camel herder.

And

he comes up to me and talks to my translator.

And I said, what's the issue here?

He said, oh he wants to take your picture it's like why he's like oh he's an Ada holder

the fuck is selling Ada out here in goddamn Gobi desert I mean like we got some good marketing man this is this this is this is nuts you know so uh so there's you know that that's that's fun but it you know it's also a little weird because there's asymmetries now if you're recognized everywhere you go you don't start at zero you know they already have an impression either positive or negative and the markets are doing well it's very positive the markets aren't doing well it's very negative So you got to be a little careful with it.

A lot of stuff there.

Yeah.

A lot of stuff.

Let's switch it up a little bit.

Let's talk about the

what was it that you were

looking for solar.

All the alien stuff.

Yeah.

Let's talk about the alien stuff.

Oh, God.

People love aliens.

All right.

So I watched

Avi Loeb on Joe Rogan.

He was talking talking about Muaemua, which is like this cigar-shaped alien vessel thingy, thing of a bob that doesn't seem to be from our solar system and it doesn't seem to be natural.

And I was like, wow, this Avi guy is really cool.

And he had something called the Galileo program.

And so I reached out to Avi and I said, hey, you know, I'm a big fan.

And, you know, I heard that you guys are doing some interesting stuff.

Is there anything that I can help you with?

And Avi's like, well, we've been tracking this one heavenly body, this meteorite that hit Earth in 2014.

And we think it's from a different solar system because we did all the mathematical calculations and we figured out where it landed, roughly speaking, and we think there might be a chance that it's not natural.

I was like, oh, that's interesting.

I said, where is it?

And they said, well, you know, we got some data from the Air Force, but they won't give us the right resolution.

But we have enough resolution that we think it's like, roughly speaking, 50 miles off the coast of Papua New Guinea.

I'm like, okay, so what do you want to do?

And he's like, well, we want to set up a sea salvage operation and go, you know, find it.

And he's like, do you want to be part of it?

I was like, do I?

Fucking sea salvage operation off the coast of Papua New York.

This is going to be interesting.

All right.

So it was like a heist movie.

We had to like assemble this team of people and we had this weirdo Air Force guy that went with us.

And then we had this old sea captain who was like 87 years old named Art Wright, who is like the Navy's Find It guy.

You know, he found like Russian nuclear subs and all these other things.

And he fought in Vietnam as like a captain in Laos and all these other things.

So you know he's just seen some horrible shit his entire life.

It was crusty as hell.

And then we had

this guy from New Zealand, whose name will come to me in a second.

And he was like a famous submarine diver, and he was good friends with James Cameron.

And he'd gone to the Titanic a dozen times and all these things.

So it was a really eclectic crew of people.

And I put in the money, and a Netflix crew came down, and they actually shot a documentary while we were down there, and they're still working on it.

So we also had a documentary crew that was led by a really

unique director who's special.

And then obviously Avi himself and all the Harvard scientists.

And we got on this ship called the Silver Star.

So we planned out the whole expedition.

We flew out on my jet to Manus Island and

then we took off.

And what we had to do is we designed this sled

with magnets on it.

And basically we had it fall behind the ship and sink all the way to the sea floor 6,000 feet down.

And then we dragged it.

It's kind of like spaceballs when they're combing the desert.

They're out there.

So just drag the sled behind the ship for eight hours.

Then you bring the sled up in a very dramatic way.

And then you take the sled off.

And then we had to clean the magnets off to see if we can find fragments from the meteorite that was there.

And we did this for two weeks.

And it almost became like a horror movie because we were like tightly confined in the ship.

And because of the schedule, you had a polyphasic sleep schedule.

We were running 24 hours a day to save money.

And nobody was sleeping properly.

And it was a very high stress.

And things kept breaking and things kept going wrong.

and like the experienced sailors like Art

would be super stoic guy like every morning go down at 5 a.m.

talk morning captain morning and I was like I heard you were a rowing champion and you know at 87 like how do you do that and they all died

it's like he's a man of few words art

and but then you know Avi he decided to stop sleeping in his cabin and sleeping in instead in the common areas and then

oh god we nearly killed him because he kept turning off the air conditioner.

It was like 120 degrees with the humidity because we're right in the equator and it's the middle of fucking summer.

And for some reason, I don't know why, in the common area, it's just the only place we can hang out on the ship.

Anytime he was working on his laptop, he would turn off the AC.

And it would get just unbearably hot inside the area.

So we go and turn it back on, then he would turn it off, and turn it back on, then he would turn it off.

And like the first few days, haha ha ha, we're all fun.

After about two weeks on a ship, not sleeping properly, you know, that motion and everything, we're like, do you think the world would miss Avi Loeb if he fell off the ship, you know?

But anyway, he was a good man.

And what we ended up finding, because after we processed all the samples, we sent them over to Harvard and they analyzed them, that we found these furols that are from a different solar system.

So after analyzing them, they have about 5,000 times the concentration of beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium.

And so what we think happened was that there was a planet that smashed into something and it broke open and its core was violently ejected.

And then it traveled for a billion years into interstellar space and then it ended up hitting the Earth.

Wow.

Which is the chance of that is like so infinitesimally small.

And we wrote a paper about it and it got published.

And they want to do another expedition because now that they found those fragments,

They think they know where the big pieces are.

And if you find a big piece, you can use different types of analysis to be able to actually definitively know what solar system that it actually came from.

But because, you know, when these things fall, they kind of like the outer skin melts.

And as it melts, they drop down and they form spheres, and then they sink to the bottom of the sea, and they just sit in the abyssal terrain forever.

But I think it's the first exasolar thing ever recovered from the sea floor.

So I was really proud of that.

You know, we helped design this sled and did all these things.

And we actually designed two sleds.

And one of them that I designed, they didn't use.

And then the other one with the magnets they ended up using.

The one that I helped design was a sleuth box.

And because I used a gold pan, and I used to do the sleuthing for gold on riverbeds.

And what you do is you have these riffles in it, and it takes advantage of the density mismatch between the sediments and the gold.

And so you're saying, well, if it's alien technology or it's like a heavy iron or something like that from a meteorite, it's probably really heavy.

It's pretty dense.

So if that material is really strong and really dense, then it's going to be much easier to sort it out from sand that's on the seabed, right?

And so if you use a sleuth box, just like gold panning, you should be able to filter it out.

the problem is that we tested it off the west coast of the united states like right off washington state because that's where the the guys who designed everything was and that was a radically different seabed than papua new guinea so it kept getting clogged up and we couldn't end up using it we were worried actually that we were going to break our line because we had this giant spool in the back and you know it's it has to have enough rope to go down 6 000 feet and also then drag this thing behind the boat and we're like man that's probably going to break with some snapback and kill somebody somebody we should probably not do that so we we ended up just using the magnetic sled instead but we had a lot of fun with it like um yeah you know the the thing you know where they had that that that soundtrack from it you know dun dun dun dun so we made a little video you know on twitter of like the sled coming up in the middle of the night and like the thing song theme there you know because we say hey you know it could be alien shit you know and we never told obviously but my security detail and i we said look if we actually find something alien we we had a whole protocol for how we were going to secure that and take it off the ship and take it to an undisclosed location to decide what to do with it.

And only later did we tell Avi that we had it.

We called it the touchdown protocol.

And these are all like green berets that were with me.

And

I didn't have a seal at that time, but I really wish I had some Navy guys because the berets didn't do as well on the boat as

Billy would have done.

What do you think of all this alien stuff?

in the news, these anti-gravity propulsion systems.

What do you think?

Well, you know, it's hard to know what's true anymore because it could be a false flag thing where they're doing it to distract people or a propaganda thing.

Or it maybe is it's legit UAPs and they actually have these capabilities.

Certainly the tapes are compelling.

You know, if you study aerospace engineering, it's like it's not possible to do the maneuvers that you're seeing with conventional propulsion.

So there's some fundamental difference here with these things.

And if you're an alien race, you got to think about what would they do?

They would send robots, like just like we would.

We would send drones to a place.

And so if you have it, you would first hide them in the sea because no one will discover them there.

And 70% of the Earth is sea, so it's the obvious hiding spot to do it.

And then, you know, you would use them to observe things of significance.

So observe nuclear weapons, observe the great powers, observe events.

And then there would be some period that you would transmit information back.

So it's, you know, it makes sense, you know, from a common sense framework that, you know, if there was an extraterrestrial surveilling the United States, that would be the approach that they would take.

And then the other thing you'd like to understand is the capabilities of the species.

Like, can you turn their nuclear weapons on and off?

There's been some reports of issues like power outages at silos and things like that.

And you'd also like to take samples.

You know, you'd like to understand what those species are and

understand if they're a threat or friendly or how they operate and what they do.

So is it plausible?

Of course.

The challenge is, you know, why is it not disclosed at this point if they do exist?

You know, what is the reason the government won't tell us the whole truth if they're fully aware of that truth?

Either because the truth is horrifying and there's really bad things that are happening, or they don't know, in which case they're actually being honest and they're sharing what they do have.

You know, sans, what they think they can't determine is an enemy capability versus what we have,

or it doesn't exist and they're actually doing this as a false flag thing to try to mess with us for some reason, to distract us from some other thing that they're doing.

Why would they be doing that?

Who knows?

You know, it's like tradecraft, right?

You know, you pay attention to the left hand while the right hand's sliding in your back pocket.

You know, so

you always do things in a certain way and in a certain structure based upon what your goals are.

You know, they could have killed bin Laden with a J-DAM and they've just taken DNA samples.

Instead, they had a daring raid.

You know, operate was a Neptune spear, and they they sent special forces in and a very, very dangerous mission that happened to be timed to happen exactly when Obama was at the White House correspondence dinner, when all of the press happened to be in Washington, D.C.

And the end result was exactly the same.

It was a kill mission.

It was not a capture mission.

So why do it that way?

I don't know.

Maybe the president had other objectives other than just killing a target.

Politicians do things and governments do things all the time to distract people and say things.

And if one distraction is not working, then perhaps another distraction is going to work.

The other thing is that there's a lot of weird top-shelf physics that we're starting to discover in the academic world.

Like they froze light the other day.

Now, I guess light's a solid.

Who the fuck knew?

What do you mean they froze light?

It's crazy, right?

God knows how it works.

They're doing it for memory modules for optical quantum computers and using crystals like freeze light.

And then they have time crystals and they have all this other crazy shit that they're coming up with.

It's like the physics are so insane.

So we're discovering things that are kind of like bending our conception of reality, whether it be quantum teleportation or

any of these things.

What is quantum teleportation?

It's basically where you move without going through a medium information from one point to another point.

And it seems to be faster than the speed of light.

And some physicists listening to this will cringe and say, well, actually.

But basically, you can move a message from A to B and it doesn't go through a medium.

They're just

quantum entanglement.

Yeah, they entangle and a message comes through.

And so you have these capabilities.

You have these things here.

And they're beyond the realm of normal understanding, meaning that you have to have a PhD in physics.

And even in just discussing them, you kind of get your conception wrong.

Like my description of quantum computers with the library, it's kind of sort of right, but there's some nuances about how interference works and entanglement works.

But it's right enough that you're 90% of the way there.

We're not even 90 of the way there when you talk about these top shelf new physics things well what if there are secret research labs that have been very focused and thinking about these top shelf things for 20 30 40 50 years they're going to be far ahead of the mainstream in which case they'll have things that look like magic maybe they figured out anti-gravity which case propulsion works totally different maybe they figured out some new physics we're not aware of and they're testing these types of things so would you just admit that we have this a massive advantage advantage against our near powers?

Or would you then invent a narrative that aliens are stalking us?

It's a fog of war.

So, that could be a thing.

It's just kind of like all the drones running around the other day in New Jersey and all these other places right after Trump won.

Who the hell knows?

We still haven't really gotten a good explanation for all this, you know?

So, anyways, like, did somebody lose a nuke and they're flying him at night to look for background radiation?

I mean, like, there's like dirty bomb rumors and all this other stuff.

And everybody had an opinion about it, you know, and who the hell knows what the real story was so you see stuff like that where it's meaningful is

if something is actually recovered and we actually get to analyze it that's what I care about like if I see some high entropy alloy or some exotic material like metallic hydrogen or something like that that we can't make and we don't understand how to make at scale.

If we have that, then that's meaningful because now we can use that.

We can analyze that.

We can backward engineer it and perhaps then gain something of value.

We can't really do anything with these raw videos that we see.

We can't really do anything with base speculation.

And

this is why consciousness is so interesting too.

It's a parallel to aliens in many ways.

So consciousness is like this thing that everybody has an opinion on.

And there's all these things like integrated information theory and panpsychism and other concepts where you're like, well, is consciousness just an emergent property of your brain cells working and doing things and it's completely encapsulated with the brain?

Or is your mind more like an antenna and consciousness comes from some global commons?

And so you people take psychedelics, they're like, well, I'm seeing the same things on DMT as these guys over here, and we're both sharing an altered state of consciousness.

We're not imagining it because I never talked to him beforehand.

So why did he see the same thing I saw, the whole DMT Elf thing?

But if consciousness is kind of like a global thing and you're changing your state of consciousness, you're retuning your antenna to a different frequency, you're seeing something now, right?

Okay, so maybe consciousness works this way, or maybe it's just an emergent property of the brain, and it's completely encapsulated there, and that is what it is.

What do you think?

Well, you know, there's compelling evidence for consciousness being in the panpsychism side.

And if that's the case, it explains remote viewing, it explains telepathy, it explains all the things.

Like, there's this thing I saw on YouTube that a friend of mine, the Neural Meditation Institute, we did some work with him years ago, Dr.

Jeffrey Turant,

where he did these studies with nonverbal autistic kids.

And they basically had so bonded to their caregivers, they had basically a telepathic bond with their caregivers.

So they actually tested it.

So what they would do is the caregiver would look at a number and the kid would be in front of them and then the kid would have an iPad or something like that.

And as the caregiver looks at the number, the kid would type the number into the iPad.

And they did it round after round after round.

And it's just incredible to see these things.

And as soon as I saw it, I called Turant and I said, Jeff, what the hell is is going on?

And he's like, yeah, it just blew my mind.

So there's all these YouTube videos where you can actually see the kids doing this type of thing.

Well, that makes no sense if consciousness is an emergent property of just the brain.

But it makes a lot of sense if panpsychism has something to do with it, because then you have to have some sort of mechanism for the brain to communicate that we don't know.

And there's a wonderful physicist named Roger Penrose who came up with this

orch theory, this idea that these microtribules in the brain are like a quantum computer.

And if if that's the case, you could do quantum entanglement.

And so you can entangle with people and you can entangle with like a different consciousness.

So if you can figure out that code, well, then you could transmit information.

So then suddenly telepathy makes sense and remote viewing makes sense and all these mystical things that we've been talking about for years and psychedelic people talk about.

That all fits in there saying, well, we're just retuning your antenna, your microtubules, and tuning that computer to now have the ability to connect better to other things.

So you see different things and information can transfer these different things.

So maybe that's true, maybe it's not true.

It also explains why it's so hard to

prove it exists because if it's quantum entanglement, it doesn't travel through a medium.

So there's no electromagnetic radiation or anything.

So these like these James Randi professional skeptics guys, when they put you in a room and they say, well, there's no signals coming out.

So what's the mechanism of action of the telepathy?

Well, if it's quantum entanglement, you'll never see it because it's over an arbitrary distance.

And it's basically instant.

It's basically faster than light.

So there's a great book, like one is Irreducible from Federico Facken.

And he was the inventor of the microprocessor that talks about this.

And there's dozens of others that kind of float around where they're kind of exploring the art of the possible.

And it was a big scientific taboo.

Everybody was so damn mechanistic and scientism.

They're like, if I can't see it, it doesn't exist to me.

But now people are starting to reevaluate things and say, well, okay, let's imagine if this was possible, what would then have to be true?

and then how do we test it like here's something i'm going to do i invested in this company called immortal um and they built these amazing chambers that are multimodal they they're they're like it's like a almost like a tanning bed you lay in it and it's got pulsed electromagnetic fields and it's got red light and it's got vibro acoustic and it's got molecular hydrogen and it's got you know sonic all this cool stuff and uh the guys who started it are like really into some of these out there ideas including remote viewing and so i said you know it would be really cool is to partner with the Monroe Institute, because they did all the CIA stuff from like the 70s to the 90s with Project Stargate and all this other stuff.

And there's still some of those old CIA guys floating around.

They're actually teaching at the Monroe Institute.

And I got this big-ass ranch, you know, 11,000 acres.

So, why don't we do this?

Why don't I just go randomly bury caches of things and mark them and put them on the ranch and run the guys for the remote viewing training program and see if they actually can find those caches.

What's the probability of finding like a needle in a haystack in this whole thing?

So if remote viewing works, you know, there's at least a chance that they could find this type of thing.

So the reason I bring up Immortal is that they're actually even thinking, is there a path to use those modalities in that chamber?

Because it's flirting with altered states of consciousness.

If you vibrate a brain in just the right way and use magnets in just the right way, you could actually knock a person into a psychedelic state.

You can create endogenous DMT.

You can do all kinds of crazy things.

Interesting.

It's so out there.

What's the name of this company?

Immortal, A-M-M-O-R-T-L.

And it's, and it's a lifestyle device right now, but, you know, there's a lot of medical use cases for these things for recovery and things because you have red light therapy with vibroacoustics and all these other things.

So anyway, it's really cool to see what you can do with this technology because it's currently one lens, but you know, if we move over here, we might even be able to use it for remote viewing or use it for something else.

Who knows if it works?

Very interesting.

You know?

Maybe you could connect me with them.

Oh, of course.

Of course.

I would love to have a conversation.

Yeah, they're super cool dudes.

And

since they launched it, they're selling it to everybody.

Like professional sports teams are buying them.

I bought three of them just because I wanted one in my clinic.

I have one at my office.

And then I sent one to the president of one of my companies because she really liked it.

And I gave it to her for a Christmas gift.

I said, here you go.

Wow.

Let's take another break.

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All right, Charles, we're back from the break.

We're talking about consciousness, extraterrestrials, remote viewing, all kinds of stuff.

And so

you had mentioned psychedelics briefly.

Have you done any psychedelic type therapy?

So I took kenamine last year, and that was a wild trip.

You know, I'd always been fascinated with psychedelics.

And I have a lot because I went to school, Seal Boulder.

Come on, it's like a big party school.

Like everybody's done something somewhere at some point.

But, you know, I came from a medical family and came from a traditional medical family.

So there was always kind of a dreary view on psychedelics.

Oh, well, these psychedelics do bad things or things like that.

Or, you know, they're at the best case scenario, kind of like a party thing as opposed to like an enlightenment thing.

So I didn't take it very seriously in kind of the first part of my life.

But then as I got older,

One of the unfortunate consequences that anybody who's well-traveled is you pick up a lot of friends and acquaintances who get damaged by circumstances.

Maybe they have a traumatic event or they go to war and then they come back and they're all messed up.

So as you see people get damaged, they try to heal themselves in the conventional, traditional way and then it doesn't work.

So then they try other things.

And

almost always somebody tries a psychedelic.

You know, like they go on an ayahuasca journey or a boga or they take

DMT or they take

psilocybin or mescaline.

And then they come back.

And then if they have the right set and setting, it really changes them.

So after I started noticing that, I read Michael Pullen's book, you know, How to Change Your Mind, and he's a great guy.

And I said, wow, there's a there there.

There's something interesting.

So then I started going down the rabbit hole, and I love plants.

And so I said, well, mycology looks like a lot of fun.

So I read everything from Paul Stamets, and I started going through his stuff and learning how to cultivate mushrooms and these types of things.

And knowing the mycology community, you kind of get to know the psychedelics community really well.

Because as they say, oh, no, we do different things.

Well,

you guys do the psychedelics too.

Come on now.

So you get to talk to all those guys.

So I'd always had that intellectual curiosity, but I didn't really have a really effective way to engage with intellectual curiosity.

I was always busy and I didn't want to go and, you know, take ayahuasca or something because I said, well, I have this company.

I have all these people that rely upon me.

If I go off on this spiritual journey, what if I radically change as a human being and I come back and I say, I've sworn off all wealth and I'm just going to sell my property and these types of things.

So I said, no, you know, I should probably wait.

But then I'm friends with Dave Asprey and Dave told me, hey, you got to try out this 40 years of Zen and we've added ketamine to it.

And I said, all right, that sounds fun.

I'll go try it out.

So I went to Washington for five days and I did his program.

And I took the ketamine with it for four of the five days.

And it was a wild trip.

You know, you're like in this pod and you.

you know, you have your brain is hooked up to an EEG, so you can actually see your brain signals while you're on a ketamine trip.

And then you have your earphones on and they give you an injection and then you just kind of sit back.

And ketamine makes you disassociate.

So it's a disembodying drug.

And so you

kind of, it gets dark and then suddenly you lift off and then you're just kind of in a different place.

And you no longer feel the sensation of proprioception.

You're not in your own body.

You're basically in a different body.

And the first time I did it, it was kind of like a journey.

You know, just you're on a roller coaster and you're going to all these different experiences and places.

But then as I adapted and learned more about the ketamine trip, because we did it multiple times throughout the week, then I was able to get a little bit more agency, a little bit more control over that journey.

So it went from a totally automated thing to you have some sort of influence and control.

And they said, well, there's intentionality is a big deal with this.

If you kind of go into the trip with some intentions, you can change it a little bit.

And so the most surreal thing happened that Thursday, which was the third day I was taking it, where I just basically embodied a wolf.

I don't know why it happened, but I was like an actual wolf and like in a forest, running and chasing a rabbit.

And I had the smell of a wolf, like I could actually smell its scent and run through.

And it's like all the sensations, doing all the things.

And it was just so out there.

And I come back and I say, I don't know what the hell this means.

So it took a little while to discombobulate and, you know, figure out these types of things.

But what was really nice about it was that after coming out the other side,

I

had this tremendous release of stress and tension.

You know, I had built up 10 years of founderitis, all the betrayals and the boardroom brawls and like traveling and anger and like shit I had to deal with.

It had aged me prematurely.

And the person who was there is like, you look 10 years younger.

And I looked at photographs actually before and after and he was like, damn, I actually do look a lot younger and lighter.

And I regained a sense of joy and I regained a sense of lightness, for lack of a better term.

I felt young again.

Was that your intention to do that in the beginning?

No.

Was it straight adventure?

It was straight adventure.

Well, it was more like I just wanted to see what would happen with it because I had read about it and I was trying to understand like biochemically what happens in the brain and these types of things.

And, you know, I

meditate with EEG-assisted meditation.

So, you know, I have like a muse and other devices like neurosity and these things.

And so I'm able to actually see my brain waves and control them and these types of things and elevate alpha or gamma or these things.

But I never really

thought that that outcome would occur with that.

And I said, there's a there there.

This is very powerful.

And ketamine is kind of like the entry point.

It's a very easy drug to take.

It's very safe.

It's FDA approved.

It's a Schedule III drug, so it's legal.

And any doctor could prescribe it and use it.

A lot of nurse practitioners use it.

And it's used in battlefield medicine a lot.

If you're like an 18 Delta, you're going to have it in your kit when somebody's legs are blown off.

You give them some ketamine so that they disassociate and you can get them out and they don't feel in horrible pain.

You know, it was originally designed for kids as an anesthetic.

So it's one of those drugs that's a very good entry point into the whole conversation.

And so I got so fascinated with it, you know, I said, you know, I would like to somehow integrate this into our healthcare clinic and use it for depression treatment.

And we now have a team of people that are kind of calling people and trying to figure out like, how would we do that modality?

But more generally, there's...

What's really interesting is this whole concept of disassociation and time expansion.

There's another drug that I've never tried, but I've talked to some people that have done it and I've read a lot of first-hand accounts.

It's called salvia and it has one of the strangest properties where the high...

Salvia?

Salvia.

Yeah, it's a plant.

And it has this property of time expansion.

So you take it and the high only lasts like two minutes or three minutes or something like that, but you'll experience hours.

or in some cases days, some cases weeks, some cases months of some event.

So like one person like lived another person's life.

He was in Alaska, and then he just woke up as another person in Texas, like working at Walmart, had a family and all this.

And for months and months and months, this thing goes on.

Then he wakes back up, and his body in Alaska is like, Where's my wife and kids?

What the fuck?

This is crazy.

I've heard about this.

Yeah, I've heard about it.

I was talking with some friends of mine a couple months ago.

I think they said that there was 5MeO DMT.

Yeah.

That the

time expansion experience.

Time expansion.

And that this guy had had taken had smoked the five MeO DMT

had this

had experienced this whole other life with a different wife kids all these

different things and it lasted

yeah they said 10 15 minutes maybe right and he woke up and still to this day he misses

the life, the entire lifespan that he had experienced within you know a matter of minutes minutes.

Right.

Which is nuts.

It's like that Captain Picard thing with the inner light and Star Trek the next generation where the probe hits him and then he lives another person's life and over like a 17 minute period.

It's like that's fantasy.

It's fiction.

But then you have five DMT and the frog venom and then you have

salvia and there's other drugs that do this.

And somebody even wrote a book about it called Time Expansion Experiences.

I think it was Stephen Tyler Taylor or something.

I forget his name.

He's a psychologist because he was so fast and he got in a traffic accident and like life just slowed down dramatically.

And even though it was a very short period of time, it felt like a really, really long period of time.

And it was curious, like, why does that happen?

Why does your perception of time so radically change?

And what substances and techniques could you use to do such a thing, either to speed it up or to slow it down on demand?

And some of these substances are so powerful that they disassociate.

So you leave your body and become something else.

But then also they expand time.

So a short period becomes a very long period.

And you tend to wonder, okay, if that does happen, what's sticky about that?

So there's the concept of experiencing, but then there's the concept of memory formation.

So you experience it, but do you retain what happened during that time period?

And how much is possible to retain, you know, what happened during that time period?

So it's just wild.

And it makes me sad that these substances are mostly banned because that means they're lost to us from a research perspective.

Because when you hear this account, the first thing you think about if you're a scientist is, well, how do I study that?

I want to know why that happens.

I want to know the mechanism of action.

I want to understand, is it a dial we can play with?

Because there's so many use cases.

Think about the special operations community.

If you're in a, you know, in a, in a combat setting and you have the ability to slow down time and perceive time at an accelerated pace.

That's a gargantuan tactical advantage over everybody else because you're acting considered and deliberate.

I would have never thought of that.

Yeah, but just think about that.

You're like breaching something and you're walking in and your perception's 10 times faster or 100 times faster than somebody else.

That's the very same mechanism of action as that salvia making you live like a lifetime in two minutes.

You see, so there's real value to these types of things and all these different or first responders, like a police officer trying to make a snap decision to use lethal force or not.

You know, is this person a threat or not?

And almost all these wrongful death death things, it's never black and white.

It's, you know, the person's charging you, well, did I really need to shoot him?

Could I have done something else?

You think that the time actually does slow down?

Yeah, your perception of it.

And not time slows down, but your perception of it.

Because think of it like a computer processor.

It's got a clock speed.

It operates much faster than a human brain does in terms of the hertz.

So we both experience time objectively in our reference frame, roughly speaking the same.

But the difference is the amount of things it can do in that time, the amount of actions it can take, decisions it can make, is millions of times more.

So, is there a way with the human brain hardware to kind of speed it up so that you can actually do more in the same amount of time or perceive more in the same amount of time?

In fact, this is an indicative of aging.

When you look at so,

if we're sitting here,

and I mean, I go to a combat environment because that's my background, but if we're sitting here and I take salvia and you don't, then we're experiencing we're experiencing the same baseline

because it's also disassociative.

And so you lose your sense of self and you go somewhere else.

You need a substance that is time expanding but non-dissociative to do such a thing.

We're experiencing the same time.

So are you saying that

I don't know how to put this.

Are you saying that my perception of time

being on the substance is compared to you, who's not on the substance, I'm able to

use that time more efficiently to make more effective decisions faster, but it seems slower.

My perception of time actually seems much slower.

And a lot of people in professional sports or who have been in a crisis event record at least once in their life that something has happened where time seemed to slow down.

And a lot of things occurred and they perceived all those things like it was yesterday, even though it was only actually maybe one or two seconds.

So maybe you get shot and you remember that really distinctly, or maybe you get in a car accident or you're in a football player at the Super Bowl and you see the ball coming at you and you catch it in the end zone and it's like it's an eternity, but it only was like one and a half seconds or something like that.

But it was a big deal because your perception is so hyper focused and you're in such a flow state that your brain is operating on a different clock length for these types of things.

So those expansion experiences are tremendously valuable.

The problem is they're unpredictable.

Like, how do you knock yourself into that state?

You know, can you do it just through focused attention or does it require some pharmacological intervention or maybe electrical?

You know, like you shock the brain with transcranial direct electrical stimulation or magnetic stimulation and it can knock the brain into that state.

It's a really interesting thing.

And so psychedelics, they seem to present that it's possible because when you take these substances, people can live another lifetime or perceive time.

And then objectively speaking, only a small window thing, but they're like, dude, I experienced it.

I was there.

Every day I was getting up and driving to work at Walmart.

You know, I was going to my kids' graduation.

I was doing things.

Okay.

It's, it was a lot of time.

You know, I felt that time, but they're like, dude, you're gone for two minutes.

It's like, there's no way that could have happened.

So there's something there.

What do you think that the mind is just tapping into?

Well, I just think, because again, it's a clock speed.

Like if if you're running a simulation of a civilization, for example, on a computer, you can run thousands of years or millions of years of a simulation, and that doesn't take millions of years to run the simulation.

You can run that simulation in like an hour or something like that.

So if you can speed up the clock inside the brain, then the perception of that time is different, even though the absolute elapsed time is the same.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

And so I think that's probably part of it, is that there's some mechanism where you can speed up the circuitry.

And from an evolutionary viewpoint, it makes a lot of sense because all the time you're context shifting in the flight or flight.

So while you're hunting the woolly mammoth or, you know, hunting the predator, you need to be super in the zone and super focused.

And you need an evolutionary advantage to be able to perceive that thing faster.

Because even a split second difference can mean the difference between you killing it and it killing you.

So you need some circuitry that gives you the ability to zero in, but that's probably super energy intensive and super stressful on the body.

So if you ran in that state 24-7, it'd kill you.

It's just like an adrenaline rush.

You get adrenal failure and it burns you out, you know?

So you have to have a context-shifting thing.

And it's probably an evolutionary trigger that puts you in, which is why they tend to be, TEEs tend to be associated with stress events, major stress events, both positive and negative.

Just because it's an evolutionary thing doesn't mean it's not controllable.

So there's probably a mechanism of action to control something like that.

And so it's a really, it's a really fascinating thing to me.

And I wish I had more time to, you know, kind of dig into it and understand it better because I'm just kind of at the surface level.

But looking into psychedelics, it kind of inadvertently made me start thinking about those types of things.

And I said, yeah, you know, that does exist.

That does happen.

You know, and I've met tons of people and I've experienced a few myself where time just seemed to slow down.

My brother cut his finger when we were both kids.

And I remember it was in in the bathroom and you know I could see the blood droplets come out of his finger and like slowly travel and then drop to the ground and it was probably you know one and a half seconds or two seconds but it felt like a whole minute and I remember that you know I was like probably nine years old ten years old when when that occurred

so

so

there's a there there and it fascinates me whenever I stumble on these things.

What about the disassociation from self?

Well, that's interesting, too.

And I think it's valuable for a different reason.

So disassociation

is a delusion of ego.

You know, we think I am Charles Hoskins and you are Sean Ryan.

We are that.

Okay, well, if you get too caught up in who you are, then it becomes exceedingly difficult to have empathy.

for other people because you're you're just you and like i am supreme you know it's i'm here so like yes everybody else is there and they exist but you know i got to take care of myself first you know put my mask on before i put their mask on.

Well, when you disassociate, you, for the first time ever, give up on the idea of just exclusively you, and you start thinking of the we or the us, because you could technically be anybody.

Like imagine if, you know, hypothetical, that there was a random chance, maybe 1%, that every time you woke up, instead of waking up in this body, you would wake up in a different body in a different life.

Like imagine how different the world would be just for something like that.

So you're like, you're a billionaire, life is great, and then you wake up and you're in a jail cell, and you're in someone else's life.

You're like, what the fuck just happened?

And that just would occur.

And maybe you're in the jail cell and now you wake up in the billionaire's body, right?

You swap places.

So we would probably have radically different social systems and religions and radically different notions of self in this particular case.

Because we're starting to think, well, hang on a second here.

Self is now divorced from our body and it can go to other places.

So we would probably have a much stronger conception of the soul than we currently do as people.

So disassociation is kind of like a psychedelic shortcut in a certain way, because if you disassociate and you become something else, then you start entertaining a world where you are somewhere else, but your body is there.

And then is that really your body anymore?

Or is that just a meat suit that you were wearing?

And you can go and wear another meat suit, or maybe you don't even need the meat suit, or something like this.

So it's a very powerful concept.

And actually, in darkness retreats, this is one of the things that happens when people go for a long period of time.

They lose sense of self because they no longer see themselves.

They start making DMT in their brain.

They start disassociating.

And

they basically shed the skin and they start living kind of a more ephemeral world because the darkness, there's no sensory perception.

Your brain can no longer orient itself.

And you just go to a different place with that.

And all these people that do darkness retreats, they talk about it.

In fact, the Tibetans, they have this thing called the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and it was written by this like super Buddha dude and who meditated so hard, he kind of looked into the afterlife, according to him, and he wrote down what happens after you die.

And he said, there's like these three stages you go through after your body's shed and your soul is trying to decide whether to go and be enlightened or be reincarnated.

And they do, in Tibet, darkness retreats for more than 40 days.

They actually go into a dark cave and and they live in a dark cave, no light, no thing, to live their own death.

And so they go through every stage of that process.

It's brutal and horrible.

But then when they come out the other side, they get enlightened and they get out of the cave.

And they all report that it was like some concept of a disassociation and an adolution of oneself from it.

So it's a powerful concept and it's high shelf.

It's scary because there's no comfort in losing what you are.

It's all the things you've done, everything you've accomplished.

You know, we're proud of the things we do.

This room is filled with the things you've done and the people that you've met.

And this idea that it could all just disappear and it could all be gone.

But on the other hand, if you don't mind these things, then none of this around you controls you.

My advantage of being a cryptocurrency billionaire is I was broken a billionaire three times in a 10-year period.

So then it goes way up, it goes way down.

It goes way up, it goes way down.

So people ask me, like, what would you do if you like lost all your money and i said i'll just go back to living in the apartment with the little stuffed giraffes behind me when i was doing the amas when i first got started they think but how will you be happy and i said well i was pretty happy back then life was pretty good back then i mean i don't get to do as many cool things but i did the cool things and i'd find something else to fill the time so i didn't really need that conception of like mega wealth to perpetuate happiness or a specific lifestyle to perpetuate happiness because i know i just have this sense that no matter what happens, it'll be okay.

And I think that dissolution is one of those major steps to helping people get there and accepting that everything is impermeant and there's losses.

Another thing the Buddhists do, I love it when they do these things because they worship impermeans.

Do you know what a sand mandala is?

I'm going to, this bothers the hell out of me.

Like the mere existence of this bothers me.

I shouldn't, but it does.

So these monks will meticulously sit down for weeks and weeks and weeks and grain of sand by grain of sand, colored grains of sand, sit down and put together this beautiful sand tapestry.

It's called a sand mandala on a table.

And usually they build it as a group and it's just absolutely stunning.

It's like super artistic and nice because every single grain of sand has been set by hand by these guys.

It's so meticulous.

And as soon as they finish it, they destroy it.

It's just like you see it just like, oh, wow, that's so beautiful.

And then they just go sweep, sweet, sweet.

He's like, what are you doing?

Stop it.

It's a work of art.

God damn it.

And the whole purpose of Asen Mandala is to kind of like showcase the impermeance of all things.

You know, everything must die.

Everything must come to an end.

And the joy is in the act of doing, not in the act of preserving the act of doing.

And it's the experience of these types of things.

So I think there's a...

There's some wisdom there.

And we in the Western world, we're not terribly comfortable with that because everything we do is trying to like preserve and make immortality.

Ernest Becker wrote a lovely book called The Denial of Death, and he says, like the driving force of the modern world is this concept of immortality cults.

We do everything in power to deny death.

And if we can't physically do it, then we'll do it through a religion or we'll do it through monuments.

And like, yeah, there's some truth to that.

Like going to Egypt and seeing like the Great Pyramids and you see Khufu's pyramid, you're like, wow, okay, 4,400 years ago, this guy built this gigantic thing just to try to deny death, you know, his own death.

That's pretty wild when you think about it.

What do you think happens when we die?

That's a good question.

I think the more meaningful question is, does it really matter?

You know, it's one of those things you can't stop and

you're on that ride and you can't know until you get there.

So why should we let the next chapter influence the enjoyment of this chapter?

It's kind of like you're reading a book and you're like, you know, I can't really enjoy chapter one because of something in chapter two.

Like, but you're not at chapter two.

Like, you're in chapter one.

Read that chapter and enjoy that chapter.

That's there.

Chapter two is, it's somebody else's problem.

It's, it's, uh, it's, it's, you'll cross that bridge when you get to it.

Because if you get obsessed with the end, then you end up spending wasting all the moments that you have here.

You waste all the relationships, you waste all the interactions

to try to buy more time.

Even if you live perfectly, you sleep right and don't have sleep apnea and

you work out every day and you do a great job and you low stress environment and you healthy diet, you could just walk outside and be shot.

Some random stray bullet from a bank robbery or something.

You could be in a traffic accident.

I had a good friend and he was 28 years old.

He was driving his truck and he was getting a little tired and

as he was taking a left turn, a drunk driver came by and just hit him and he got horrifically mangled up and died on the road.

And this guy, he was

a marathon runner,

perfect body, perfect health, fucking vegan,

annoying vegan, too.

It's like, yeah, it's like everything had to be like perfect.

And he always bragged about how healthy he was.

Every lab was perfect.

And he's done, right?

So

it's like, should we worry so much about that?

Because we don't know how chapter one is going to end.

It should be much more more like, what do you do to enjoy reading the chapter?

And then the rest will become evident.

The other thing.

You get fascinated with things, though.

We're talking about bioluminescence plants, the dire wolf, cryptocurrency.

I mean,

we haven't even got to the clinic.

Psychedelics.

Consciousness, you have to have some thoughts on what happens.

Yeah, but

it's one of the things like, can you know?

So mathematics, if you study mathematics deep enough, when you first start, you're like, everything has a proof.

And if you're smart enough, you can find it.

And then when you get deep enough into the guts of math, there's like a hidden dark knowledge you're not supposed to know.

You know, like Scientology, they have the levels, right?

And eventually you find out about Xenu.

So in mathematics, eventually you find out about Gödel.

You know, it's like the dark secret.

And it's called Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

So back in the 19th century, math was kind of in a weird state.

So these guys got together, like Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell and David Hilbert, and said, you know what we're going to do is we're going to rebuild all of the foundations of math to be on this

beautiful axiomatic system where everything will be rigorous and formally provable and it'll almost be like a machine where you just turn the crank and you can prove everything.

So in any formal system, you have four properties to a formal system.

So you have your axioms, the base level of the system.

So these are the things that you assume to be true without proof because you have to have some rules, you know.

And then the next step you have in a in a formal system is independence so once you have axioms do the axioms contradict each other or are they self-standing then the third thing you have is completeness and the fourth thing is what's called decidability so completeness says that if I give you a statement in my formal system

you have enough machinery to be able to prove whether that statement is true or false.

And decidability is can you build a machine that if you turn the crank enough times, it will derive that truth value or false value.

So all these mathematicians in the 19th century, they absolutely believed that math had all four of these properties, that you could build some set of axioms, who knows what the hell they are, that will cover everything in mathematics.

And then those axioms will all be independent of each other.

So

they're not too many, not too little.

It's like Goldilocks.

They're just right.

And then it's complete.

So no matter what you tell me, I'll be able to build a machine and it'll turn the crank and it'll tell me it's true and false.

So then in the 30s, there's this paranoid schizophrenic graduate student named Kurt Girdle.

And he's like, yeah, actually, math can never be complete.

It was called Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

He just broke math.

And basically what he did is he said, he invented this thing using what are called Gödel encodings outside of math.

And he said, okay, this thing that you can't prove it within your system unless you introduce another axiom.

But the minute you introduce another axiom, I can use that to construct another thing that requires another axiom.

So there's always going to be be a statement outside of mathematics, inductively, that is unprovable with the current system that you have.

So effectively, mathematics is forever incomplete if you want to do interesting things.

So it's like the hidden secret of mathematicians, like there could exist things in math that you can state, but you can't prove.

So then they're like, well, can we at least build the machine that can tell us whether it's true or false or undecidable?

So then they said, well, let's at least try to do that.

And then there was another brilliant kid named Alan Turing who basically said, no, actually, math is fundamentally undecidable as well.

You can never build an abstract machine

to basically always show you what the answers are.

But at least there we got computer science because inadvertently, while Turing was trying to solve that, he invented the Turing machine, which was the basis of all of modern programming languages and computer science and these types of things.

So why is this related to death and consciousness and things like that?

What we have just shown in mathematics is that there exists things outside of a formal system of provability.

And no matter how smart you are or how capable you are, it's so far outside of the realm, there's no way to actually meaningfully talk about it.

Because I can't prove it.

I can't solve it.

And death in many ways is like this.

Our perceptions are bounded by these electrical meat sacks we walk around in.

And there are things we can see and perceive, like light and sound.

There's other things we can't perceive, like radiation, for example.

We don't sense it.

We just feel the consequences of it.

Death is like this thing that happens after,

and you can have an opinion, like, okay, well, there's a soul, and the soul will go somewhere, or there's reincarnation, and you become something else.

Or you can say it just all comes to an end, and you're just like the plant that dies and this other thing.

Or you can say there's like this collective panpsychist consciousness.

In fact, there's a variant of Christianity that believes this called Gnosticism.

It was a competitor

of Christianity after Jesus died, and it was like heretical.

They said that actually the God that the Christians worship is actually a fake God,

and there's actually another God in a different realm, and this fake God is here to actually deceive all the people, and only through Gnosis can you discover this other God.

The point is that

you can spend endless time and endless mental constructions, but all you're doing is you're just adding another axiom, which then I'm going to immediately take and put into the machine to make another notion of afterlife that's beyond your ability to prove.

And then you add another axiom, and then we repeat it.

So death is an inductive process.

No matter how smart you get, what senses you get, what understanding you get, you can't really get there.

There's even this shipathesius problem.

Your cells replenish and change themselves.

So what is death?

You are you today, but in seven years, all your cells have rotated out and changed out.

So are you still you then?

Or are you a different person then if all your cells are replacing themselves?

Just like, let's say you buy a classic car and you change the tires, then you change the transmission, then you change the engine, then you have to redo some of the body work, and then you have to change the panels, then you change the doors, then you change the headlights.

At what point is it no longer the original car?

So if your body is constantly changing and adapting, your brain is constantly changing and restructuring and readapting itself, at what point did the you of today die?

Because our view of death is that it happens after everything ceases to function, but maybe you die a little every day and you're a completely new person every single day.

It's the same for Star Trek, you know, where they have the teleporters, the transporters.

Are you really moving from point A to point B and you're being reassembled?

Or are you just being cloned and

you're being murdered on one side and replicated on the other side?

So the person who stepped on that pad now is dead and the person on this other pad is actually a completely different person.

He's just cloned, but he thinks he's that because he has the exact same memories, the exact same DNA, and the exact same perspective.

Death could be this way.

And then AI makes things even more challenging because what happens when you can create near-perfect simulacra of people?

So all this interaction with AI and all this data, at some point, a computer can probably create a pretty realistic copy of you, so much so that it's indistinguishable from other people.

And we'll be like, oh, that's not you.

Okay, but what makes you you?

If I know you as a person and I spend time with you as a person and every time I interact with you, the computer gives me the exact same experience.

For all intents and purposes, it's you from my perspective.

So is your you defined by you, or is your you defined by me and my interactions with you?

It's another interesting part of life and death, right?

You see?

So that's why I try to avoid the big question, because I think it's in the same class of problems as the incompleteness problem.

And you can, with a life philosophy, construct a system where you sidestep it.

That's what the Buddhists do.

They basically say there's this concept of reincarnation and the goal is to divorce yourself of the things that cause suffering and pain and attachments or that.

So you get rid of the attachments.

Or you can then say, no, no, no, this world is a test and you are a meat suit with the soul.

And based on what you do, piloting that meat suit will decide where your soul's final resting place is, either it's in hell or it's in heaven.

So that's kind of a more Judeo-Christian view of that.

Or you can be an atheist and say there's just the meat suit and that's it.

And it's random chance that you get to pilot a meat suit.

Who the hell knows how you pilot it, where it comes from, but your time's your time.

And when you're dead, you're dead.

And have some kids because that's the closest you'll get to immortality, right?

Well, in all three of those cases, the same result occurs.

You die.

We don't even know when, but you die.

So what does that mean to me?

What does that mean to society and everything else around?

Not a lot.

You know, it's the same outcome and the same thing.

And let's say you get lucky and there is an afterlife.

Well,

what impact do my beliefs have in this world on that world?

Whether I believed A or B or C, whether I thought it was the meat suit or this is a spiritual test or, you know, there's a reincarnation thing, I'm going to end up in the same line with St.

Peter.

You know, and we're going to have the same conversation.

He's just going to be like, ah, I see, you didn't believe.

And it's like, well, what kind of a just God would punish me?

for that forever, for all eternity.

This is where I disagree with Thomas Aquinas and St.

Augustine and these other theologians of the Catholic Church who are like, oh, well, you know, God is infinite, so disbelief in God as an infinite sin thus deserves infinite punishment.

It's like, oh, screw you, Thumma Theologica.

It's like mental masturbation to justify an antiquated doctrine of control.

A lot of these things are about controlling behavior and regulating behavior amongst people.

You know, no just God or just parent of a child would create an infinite punishment for a lack of faith in somebody.

And no matter what you do and you misstep, it's a finite crime.

So punishment is finite.

So let's say you get it wrong.

The maximum punishment is the duration of your life, perhaps a multiple of that.

But it's not internal.

So there's no downside when you think of these things one way or the other.

And so that's why I don't let it guide the life.

And instead, what I do is I say, I just want to live a life of curiosity.

And what I want to do is self-impose

a mechanism of leaving things behind for everyone else.

If I build great systems, those systems will be accessible to everyone in the world.

And whether my name is remembered or not is immaterial.

I get to know that it changed things for everybody.

You know, it's like serving in the agency and it's like no one really gets to know you.

You're supposed to be secret, but if you do something great, you may have saved a thousand lives or 10,000 lives or 100,000 lives.

You didn't sign up for the credit.

You signed up for the action and the outcome that you wanted to do.

And so immortality is the exact same way.

You know, if you live for eternity, you're only living for yourself.

If you live for the system and you live for changing other people's lives, well, the only time you get to do that is finite.

So the immortalities thing doesn't mean anything.

The afterlife doesn't mean anything.

So that's why I think of it that way.

Otherwise, I just go crazy.

I just sit down all day long with theologians and philosophers and other people, and we'd just be mentally masturbating.

It'd be just one big circle jerk all around, you know, and getting sprayed a little bit over here by Christianity and right here by Vishnu and these things.

And just one big bukkaki of philosophy.

It's just, it's impossible to get anywhere.

And then you just get so glum because you're just like, why does it matter?

There's no meaning.

There's no purpose.

One thing I know for certainty is humans need meaning.

If you take meaning from a man, he will collapse.

and there's nothing there.

If you have meaning in a person, they will endure any amount of hell to get to the other side.

So the much more meaningful question isn't what happens when you die.

It's how do you discover meaning in the moment and perpetuate that and preserve that and carry it with you?

And then how do you align your meaning so it's empathetic with society as a whole and it helps society as a whole?

Those are the things that are a much more meaningful question to focus on.

Everything else is just, it's a waste.

It's either weaponized to control people and convince them to do things they ordinarily wouldn't do, or you end up going to dark places that you really can't come back from

back to your psychedelic journey where you you turned into the wolf yes was that before the dire wolf yes do you think there's an association there you know now that i think about it it could be yeah i never connected that because i i found out about it in january you never connected that i didn't I just because I did the trip in November and in January I found out about the dire wolf.

But that.

But you never thought about that until this specific specific point until i brought it up no i never thought about it

holy shit charles seriously i never did what do you think now that i just brought that up well you know it could be but the other thing is you know i'm a quarter norwegian and a quarter italian and the norwegian side they were like viking raider dudes and you know maybe one of them was like an ulfhead not a you know barbarian you know like the wolf raiders so who knows it could be some connection to familial blood it could be uh a premonition of the dire wolf it could be just that i like dogs.

You know, who the hell knows?

I got five dogs, you know, and that, and I got wolves, you know, running around, probably on the ranch, never seen them.

They tell me they're there, you know, so who knows?

But two months later, you find out about this project.

Yeah, I find out about it.

Yeah, that's a good point.

But I never thought of it that way.

Maybe it is.

Perhaps ketamine gives you the ability to see the future.

Let's talk about the dire wolf.

Yes, sir.

How How did you get involved in that?

So as I mentioned before, in 2021,

I met Ben and we were talking about like a kind of a crypto colossal thing.

And I invested in Colossal quite early in the company's VA history.

So they were before they had done any of that major work.

And so, you know, every six months to a year, you know, Ben and I would talk and I'd go down to either Texas and things like that.

And I'd kind of follow the progress and get to know like, what are they working on?

And then after we founded a company together, then I started getting much more involved in these things.

But

we always knew that the woolly mammoth was kind of a horizonal goal.

And the reason being is it's ridiculously hard to genetically engineer elephants.

You know, they have specialized machinery that prevents cancer, and that specialized machinery keeps their genome very stable.

So it's good for them, but it's bad if you want to change their genes because it's really hard to edit things.

So they needed an animal that was easier to manipulate and work with, that that was from a very well understood genome.

And dogs are super well understood.

We understand everything about their DNA because we selectively breed them.

And that's why you have corgis versus like great Pyrenees and things like that.

So they said, well, it would be really cool since they had a full genome of a dire wolf to see if they could take a gray wolf and kind of create a chimera.

So you take DNA from the dire wolf and the DNA from the gray wolf and you move genes over one after another.

And then eventually you get to something that will look like, act like, bark like, talk like a dire wolf.

And then it's a dire wolf.

And really the teth is morphological.

So you say, okay, if

I let it go 10,000 years ago, would it go find a dire wolf pack?

And would they accept it as a dire wolf?

And if it bred with them, would they have children?

If that's the case, it's a dire wolf.

And you know, there's all these internet being like, actually,

it's, you know, a modified gray wolf.

Fuck you.

It's, dude, it's if we found its bones,

the archaeologist would be like, oh,

that's a dire wolf skeleton right there, right?

They wouldn't think for a moment that that's a genetic gray wolf or things because it's identical to the dire wolf.

But what it does is it shows that it's the art of the possible.

It's possible to take a modern animal and then adapt that animal to become an ancient animal.

You can clone an ancient animal, but the challenge with cloning an ancient animal is the DNA is almost always incomplete and you don't really know what you don't know.

So you never find a full genome.

It's not like when you find the direwolf, there's like a labeled vial in a freezer that says direwolf DNA.

You find a skull or you find a tooth or you find something in a tar pit with a little bit of like ancient bone marrow.

And when you extract it, you get an incomplete reference.

And then you'll find another one you extract, and it's like a puzzle.

and you're kind of putting the pieces together in just the right way.

And there's people that this is all they do.

They just study this stuff and they say, oh, okay,

maybe we put the piece this way and the piece this way and the piece this way.

And then over time, you kind of get a sense of what the genome actually looked like for that particular animal.

And then if you're really lucky, you can actually start identifying which genes did what, where.

Like with the woolly mammoth, this gene makes the fluffy fur that makes them immune to the cold.

And this gene makes them fat, which insulates them and they get higher brown fat.

And this one makes their tusks curved and so forth.

And then if you're really good at synthetic biology, you can actually test that type of stuff.

So they actually created the woolly mouse.

So if you Google it, you could see this super fucking cute mouse where they took the genes that make the woolly mammoth fur and they put them in a mouse.

And so, the mouse looks like a woolly mammoth.

It's got a little fur and it runs around, and it's super cute.

But it then says, Hey, we thought it made the fur, and the mouse has the fur, and we take the fur off the mouse, it looks a lot like the samples we have in the tar pit.

So, yeah, that's the gene that does that.

And then, what you would do is take the elephant genome, and just like the wolf, you move the genes over one after another, and over time you get to a point where you have a mammoth, and there you go.

So that's kind of like 1.0.

Then as you move further down the road, as AI gets more advanced and the bioinformatic models get more advanced, then you escape the bounds of chimeras and you say, okay, no longer are we going to go produce things that are just simulacra of old animals, you know, a representation of that.

Instead, why don't we make new organisms?

And this is really interesting because

you can then make an organism perfectly adapted for the current environment that we're running into.

So, for example, look at the Great Barrier Reef.

You know, if my great-grandfather went to Australia and scuba dived down, you know, and saw the Great Barrier Reef, it would be a lush, vibrant, beautiful area.

But now, if you go and see it, like a lot of the coral down there has been destroyed because of rising ocean temperatures, so it's bleached.

And you can see images before and after of the Great Barrier Reef.

Because coral doesn't have very good mechanisms to maintain homeostasis with environmental variation.

We as humans, these meat suits are well adapted.

So you can put a human in a very cold environment or a very hot environment and where body temperature will stay stable because we have all these regulating mechanisms.

Coral doesn't have that.

So if the ocean temperature changes too quickly or even just by a few degrees in some cases, it'll kill the coral.

So what if you genetically engineer the coral, create a new type of coral?

that has that regulating mechanism so it's better adapted for that type of thing.

Then suddenly you can repopulate the Great Barrier Reef and we get it back.

So some people are like, how dare you do that?

You know, probably Greta will be angry with us and like, you've taken my future.

But fuck her.

You know, it's like, I don't care.

You know, it's, it's, we, we broke it, we bought it.

And so we are, we are masters of the world and it's ours to do with as we please.

And we can kill everything or we can rebuild everything.

So you know what?

Why don't we just be good stewards of the thing?

And if we broke something, let's fix it.

And that's ultimately, in my view, as an investor in Colossal and as somebody who likes synthetic biology, that's the philosophy that I take with this technology, is it gives us a toolkit to deal with the consequences of modernity.

The world wasn't designed for 8 billion humans with roads everywhere and power lines everywhere and chemical plants everywhere and cars driving everywhere and planes driving everywhere.

It just wasn't built for that.

It was built for a different thing.

We decided to do that.

It has consequences.

We can complain about them or we can just fix them.

And fixing them means you're going to have to genetically engineer things to be more adapted to this new environment.

So some things have to be more tolerant of the heat.

Some things have to deal with new chemicals or compounds or other things we've introduced into the atmosphere.

Like look at the forever chemicals.

You know, you've got shoes that are waterproof.

They have PFAs and other things on them that make them the Gore-Tex and things, the waterproof.

Well, those forever chemicals stick around and they cause cancer.

Microplastics are another example of that.

10 out of 10 penises at this point have microplastics in them, you know, And that's why fertility is probably plummeting.

We're half as fertile today as we were in the 1970s.

Probably microplastics in the balls have a lot to do with that.

We can complain about it or we can fix that problem.

So why don't we make organisms that eat the microplastics?

So there's a recycling mechanism so nature can process that.

Nature will do that, but it does it on a scale of millions of years.

We can do that, and we can do it on a scale of months or

years to decades, which means that we have some hope of solving the problem before it destroys have we made an organism that eats microplastics yeah we've made organisms that do there's bacteria that now eat back eat plastics you know and uh and pretty much anything you want to do you can do in fact there they've even developed an STD for mosquitoes to to basically kill them so that they don't spread malaria so they're right now working on this fungal STD and they're this you know I don't know how they administer it to the mosquitoes but you know they're getting all these mosquitoes jacked up and then they go and breed breed with each other and it spreads like a parasite and it's eradicating big piles of mosquitoes.

Why?

Because they spread malaria.

They've killed hundreds of millions of people because they spread malaria.

Is it a good idea?

Is it a bad idea?

Who knows?

There's

people go around irradiating a special type of parasite fly in Central America and South America, and they take these radioactive parasite flies and they airdrop them down, and they've been doing it for decades because then when they breed with the other ones, they they actually don't propagate the species and it controls the population.

So geoengineering and genetic engineering and synthetic biology, it has its role in place.

And the problem isn't the technology.

The problem is we don't have the right mediums to have an adult conversation about the technology.

Whenever you look at these things, there has to be a way for humans to come together and say, what should we do with this?

And come together as a community and have an adult conversation.

It's like, okay, so should we eradicate the mosquitoes, which gene drives or not, in these areas?

Should we change the coral so it's better adapted for this?

Should we do this?

Should we do this?

And what are the consequences of the thing?

Is it irreversible, meaning if we do it, we can't fix it.

Procedural inevitability?

Is it reversible but expensive and costly?

And sadly, we don't have governance structures that do these types of things.

We don't, the Iroquois did, they called it the seventh generation concept, where they say the decision we're making today, what impact will it have on the seventh generation down the line?

So you kind of think to the future and you say that, maybe capitalism needs to be changed a little bit to do this.

Like imagine if you had a dual monetary system.

You had today money and future money.

You needed both of them to buy stuff.

And so you earn today money just like you do now.

You make your podcasts and these things and have sponsors and they pay you.

But then future money, you can only earn that by doing something good for the world 100 years from now.

And so that changes all the things in capitalism.

There's going to be whole companies focused on making future money.

So they're doing all this stuff that no one alive today

will now imagine it as a concept.

Well, then we wouldn't have a lot of these short-term problems, would we?

Global warming would be inconceivable or any of these

environmental concerns would be inconceivable because

you can't make future money if you're destroying the world of tomorrow.

You can only make future money by helping the world of tomorrow or building longer-term government systems.

So you get what you pay for in an incentives thing.

And

so I always ask, why can't I have a conversation about what we should do with these tools, like what Colossal is building or what we're doing with the plant company?

Well, because the incentive system is not set up for that.

It's set up for short-term gains.

How do we make money as fast as possible, you know, from as many people as possible to maximize our local short-term utility?

If the incentives problem was set up that you have to make both short and long-term decisions, then capitalism would be tuned differently and then people people would make different decisions based upon these things.

So what's cool about Colossal, though, is it does show the art of the possible.

And it's one of those few companies where it's so blatantly obvious that there does need to be a conversation.

There does need to be a different way of discussing this than how we've historically done these types of discussions.

There needs to be a different zeitgeist about these types of things because we're so far removed now from I'm making a cell phone application or, you know, I'm making a website or I'm making, you know,

Black Rifle Coffee or something like that.

It's so far removed from that standard thing.

You're literally talking about like, hey, you know, what type of animal should we make today?

Would you like a turducken?

You know, which would you like your jackalope?

You know, you could do it if you really wanted to, you know, and I even thought about like, if we made a unicorn, like, what would that be like a narwhal with the horn?

Or is it like more like a rhino?

You know, is it a horn?

Is it more like a fingernail that just got really big?

Like, like, how would you do that with them?

Like, what would a horse's skull look like to make it like a unicorn?

How would that work?

You could probably figure it out if you're really motivated to do that.

You can make them glow in the dark, too, if you wanted to.

You know, you can do all kinds of crazy stuff with these animals.

Should you do it?

Who gets to say no?

When do they get to snow?

No, what conditions do they get to stay no?

How do they say no?

It's an interesting thing.

Why don't we talk about that instead of taxes at this rate or who gets to use this bathroom or this thing or that thing it's so exhausting it's like the same 15 15 fucking conversations again and again meanwhile the world is moving at this breakneck blinding speed and we're gaining all these amazing new capabilities and technologies and we're just stuck in the same 15 conversations

it's amazing how bureaucracy can get in the way isn't it yeah also social structures they're due for an upgrade

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Thank you.

Let's get back to the show.

You know, you have some fears with this, though, as well.

We had talked about at breakfast how you have had some conversations with, I believe, senators on how to regulate this kind of thing.

And you had briefly brought up China's experimentation program where they're

They're trying to build a super soldier.

Yeah, well, we are too.

There's a DARPA program for it and these things.

So it's like it's everybody wants a super soldier, right?

And you make them learn faster.

You know, you find ways to make them run harder.

And it's no different than the Nazis when they were giving people meth.

They had a drug called Pervitin, which was meth.

And they just did, and during Blitzkrieg, like in the early days, it just gave everybody tons of meth.

So those guys that were rolling in Poland, they were so high.

And even Hitler was taking tons of it.

And then they learned only after the fact that, well, there's some really serious consequences to having like an entire army of people on meth for a protracted period of time.

So,

but militaries seldom, you know, seldom think of long-term consequences.

They just want to win battles.

And unfortunately, that's an incentives problem again.

If you tune a system and say your objective is to win at any cost or defeat this very scary adversary, you will take shortcuts to facilitate that.

is what it is.

We can invade Japan or we can drop some nukes on them.

You know, we invade Japan.

MacArthur will do it.

He knows how to do it.

He was pretty good at it.

It'll take a year and it'll kill a million people.

We drop some nukes.

Maybe it ends faster.

It also shows the Russians that we have the nukes.

So, you know what, maybe instead of having North Japan owned by the Soviets and South Japan owned by the Americans, it's one country and we have total control out of it.

That's what ended up happening.

But, you know, you drop nukes on people.

It's pretty horrible, right?

So that's the thing.

It's like

you know that if you leave incentives in a particular way, people will naturally abuse the technology.

Not because they're evil and not because they're horrible monsters and they're all Dr.

Mangalas and things.

It's because their incentive reference is fundamentally different than what's good for the commons.

And whenever you see a mismatch there between those two in any system, financial systems, education systems, weapons systems, you have to regulate it a little bit.

You have to put something in there that says, okay, I have to realign these and force people people to pay attention.

It's why in construction, you have the concept of a building inspector.

Because if my incentive as a builder is to get it done as cheap as possible, as fast as possible, and just get my guys out so I can go build something else, maybe just maybe I don't wire it up correctly.

And if the person buying that is not a skilled builder, they don't have the requisite knowledge to verify that I didn't do the electrical panel right.

So they're going to sit on a time bomb and it's going to burn down and kill them.

So that's why you have a third party, a building inspector that comes in and says, you didn't wire this right.

You got to go do it again.

That's regulation.

It's not always bad.

And synthetic biology is a great example of that.

Our local incentives are one way.

But who's looking out for the long term?

And who's looking out also for the society scale consequences, not just of the nation state, but the world as a whole and these types of things.

Who speaks for the jellyfish?

So

you have to have some framework for it.

The good news is that there's a lot of really smart people that have spent quite a bit of time trying to think about this.

You just need to give a voice to those people and bring them up a little bit.

And then you create a framework.

And once you have that framework in place, if it's a good framework, people adopt it organically and then it becomes a global regulatory framework.

We got this right with the internet and internet scale governance.

There was a time when the internet could have been radically different.

We had the NSF-AUP and the acceptable use policy there forbade e-commerce on the internet.

You could sell things on the internet.

Think about that.

Then we also had this window of time where the Department of Justice was trying to push so that SSL had a back door in it and the US government could decrypt any website, any web traffic.

Just everybody in the world would have to have a back door right there.

That's just horrible to really think about the consequences of that.

But luckily, we sidestepped it.

some court cases that were very seminal and some good policy that was very seminal, we were able to get to global scale and said, you know, the internet is a global concern, So it belongs to everybody and everybody gets to use it, even the bad guys, like the Russians and the Iranians and these people, they use the same internet as the United States does and as China does.

Pretty fair.

Is it perfect?

No.

And are there problems?

Of course.

And is it as rosy as I've pointed out?

No.

But it at least gives you a sense of global coordination and cooperation at scale.

And it's something that enabled you to do what you do, me to do what I do.

If the internet worked differently, these types of business models probably wouldn't have been possible.

I don't think cryptocurrencies would have been so loved if we had to go and ask for permission to launch a cryptocurrency or something, or podcasting would be so loved.

If there was a media agency you had to go to and say, hey, I want to do this podcast.

Well, is it approved by the Ministry of Information?

Well, no.

Do you have a broadcasting license?

Well, no, I don't know.

Well, I'm sorry.

You just can't do your podcast, right?

But instead, it's an open platform.

So we were just able to do whatever the fuck we wanted to do.

We just launched these things and it's there.

And yet, there are still rules in that open platform and there's still consequences if you do bad things on that open platform.

So I think there's some middle ground there when you look at these regulatory structures.

But the first step is to have a fact-based conversation and say, well, what could go wrong?

And you regulate systems based upon the

extreme consequences.

and likely consequences.

So the matrix of like high probability, you know, low impact, low probability, high impact, that matrix that you put together.

So in the case of nuclear weapons, we said, God, these things are so bad.

So they created the IAC and they created a huge regulatory regime for the entire world.

And we spent the last 70 plus years enforcing that regime viciously to the extent that we're willing to go to war with countries in some cases to prevent them from getting them.

And because you know, one rogue actor using these weapons can literally kill millions of people.

That was probably a success, as shitty as it is.

Somehow, though, we've lost the plot in the modern era.

And what we've missed with gain of function research in particular is that a small group of people can actually kill more people than nuclear weapons.

And there's almost no global regulatory regime at the moment or discussion about it.

The real tragedy of Wuhan wasn't a virus leaking from a lab if it did.

The real tragedy of Wuhan was it didn't start an international conversation of, well, let's play the hypothetical.

Let's say it was engineered in a lab.

All these people died.

The whole world shut down.

How many people work for Dr.

Xi?

10?

15?

20?

Can you imagine 20 people shutting down the Wendy's across the street from your fucking apartment?

20 people living in China.

That's the butterfly effect, man.

Butterfly flaps its wings here, causes a tsunami in Japan.

It's just an extraordinary thought.

So everybody should be like, yeah, that should never happen again.

We really need to talk about this because like

somebody's going to do that somewhere.

And there's a lot of crazy people out there that are deranged and they might like be really angry and just decide that they need to separate the wheat from the chaff and like eradicate all of humanity and they're the chosen survivors and things like that.

It doesn't take a lot to get that Jim Jonesy-ness inside, right?

So maybe we should talk about an international regulatory regime.

No, it didn't happen.

Completely forget about it.

Don't look over here.

Oh, and by the way, we're actually doing it in Boston University and all these other places.

We have these labs that we built and, you know, they're they're playing around with it.

And you'll see like a press relief.

Oh, yeah, we designed a new avian flu that's human transmissible and 50% fatal or something like that.

So when I talk about a regulatory structure, I'm like, well, let's start there as a fact-based conversation and say, what are the consequences?

And analogously, in the lens of history, when and where did we regulate these things and how did we regulate these things as a global commons?

And then what's really cool is these are the very few places where we actually can have a meaningful conversation with China and Russia and all these other countries.

Because you separate the languages and the geopolitics and all these other things, I'm pretty sure that a person living in China is just as scared dying from a nuclear weapon or a synthetic biology virus as an American would be or a Russian would be.

They may want that to happen to us, but not happen to them.

But what we learned with nuclear weapons is there's no if or other.

It was all.

Everybody suffers.

The whole concept of mutually assured destruction.

So, in all these mad category things, there's a path to basically to get cooperation.

And what's nice is then you at least have dialogue.

And once you're talking with people, then you can build rapport.

And once you build rapport, maybe, just maybe you can actually start agreeing on more things than just the things that kill everybody.

And you start getting to a world that's more peaceful.

Let's move into the bullet ants.

What was that?

Well, you know, everybody's got rites of passage, and the problem with America in the non-military traditions is we let them go.

You know, so you were a Navy SEAL, so you have buds.

It's a rite of passage.

You go through something.

It's shit.

It's horrible.

And, you know, it's really scary.

But rite of passage has three properties.

First, when you hear about it, you're like, nobody wants to do it.

It sounds like the worst thing in the world.

Two, it's really survivable.

If a rite of passage has a high probability of killing you, it's not a really good rite of passage.

The vast majority of people, whether they fail or succeed, they should be able to come out the other side unscathed.

And then three, it's a unifying thing.

So everybody goes through it, they have a bond now.

They're connected to that thing.

That's like, no matter if you're from a different country and speak a different language, you both go through that thing.

You just, you're like, he's my brother now.

We're together in this thing.

So I'm always fascinating where and when you find these things.

And the bullet ant ritual was like the perfect rite of passage.

First off, you have these ants, and they're not small.

They're like this fucking big.

I think you saw the video and they're like, they're huge.

And they're terrifying when you look at them.

You're like, holy God, their stingers are huge too.

And they have a neural toxin.

And so I, you know, I went to clinic and so I talked to my allergist and I even hired a marmacologist, like an entomologist that studies ants.

And I said, Tell me about this neural toxin.

And they're like, well,

it's really painful.

It's like,

no, really.

Like, no, it feels like you're on fire.

It's fucking terrible.

And I said, okay, well, will it kill me?

And they say, no, it's actually weird.

It's designed not to kill you.

It just makes it hurt like hell and it incapacitates you for a bit.

But then the next day, it's like nothing happened.

That's interesting.

So it's terrifying, and the pain is indescribably bad.

And the entire ritual, when we went and found the Satari-Mawe tribe, first we had to send an advance out there and we sent these two guys down.

And one guy was a JSOC guy and the other guy was a 75th guy.

And of course, the 75th guy, he hit on the chieftain's daughter and nearly created a hole probably.

Let's go, Ricky Ranger.

But anyway, that was great.

But anyway, they built rapport with the tribe and the tribe's like, okay, we kind of like you guys.

Yeah, all right.

All right, you can do the ritual.

So they said, come by and, you you know this time and you know we'll set it all up and we'll have you actually go through it so then we had to figure out like how to get to them so we had to sail up the amazon river we rented a boat and then we went to the tribe and they were incredibly hospitable but you could tell that it was a psychological game as much as it was a physical game so everything they did was just to fuck with you and just make you not want to do it they're like all right let's let's go collect the ants and so you first you go and collect the ants you see all these ants are crawling and actually the way you collect them it's not really safe you know you're trying to get them into that damn tube and while you're doing it, they sting you and things like that.

And you feel the insane pain, but it's only one sting.

Remember, you put your hands in the glove for like 10 fucking minutes and they're stinging you, stinging you, stinging you.

So you're thinking, God, if it hurts this much, this one sting, what will 1,000 stings feel like?

This is so bad.

So then you do that.

Then they're like, okay, well, we got to like make the bullet ant clubs.

So you have to go find these weird leaves and then you grind them up and you put them in water and it acts as a sedative.

So you pour the ant tube and all the ants go inside the water and the ants go to sleep.

And then you grab the ants and you one by one put them into the glove, you know, and getting them in there, you know, and it's a whole process.

And

the ants are not fully sedated.

So they wake up.

And as you're putting them in the glove, at least one of them is going to sting you.

So you feel that pain.

It's like, fuck them.

So then after you have all the ants in the gloves, you put them on.

They're like, hey, let's go to lunch.

You're like, what the fuck are you talking about?

I don't want to eat lunch.

Come on, man.

I just want to get this over with.

They're like, no, no, no, let's go eat lunch.

We've got some fish for you.

You guys are going to like this.

Like, all right, jungle parasites are great.

Let's do it.

So,

so we go, we go, and we get, uh, we eat the fish, and nobody really wants to eat.

And we're all looking at each other, like, what the hell have we gotten ourselves into?

And he's like, All right, all right, guys, it's meditation time.

You just go off for an hour, fuck off, and just like think about what you've decided to commit yourself to.

So, we're all just sitting there like, what is going on?

And we're, and our hands hurt like hell because the ants have already stung us a few times and things like that.

And we're just like, oh, this is horrible.

I just want to get this over with.

And they're like, well, you could leave it any time if you want.

Like, no,

I came to the Amazon.

God damn it.

We're going to, we're going to, we're going to do the fucking ants.

So it's called the Tukandera is the name of the ritual.

So anyway, then finally, you get in your underwear, you know, or your shorts, and they paint you.

So you go out there and the shaman comes over and she paints your hands black because Your hands get really messed up after they bite it.

So you don't really want to see how messed up they are.

So, you know, they paint it black.

Maybe that solves the problem and then uh they start dancing uh and then after you they dance they say all right you ready so you go up there and you

put your arms up and then they put the gloves on

and what it feels like is a

sewing machine with a hot needle just going

and there's ants all in the thing so their heads are out but their butts are woven in and they just sting you like this you know it's like a stinging machine both hands so two sewing machines going like multiple needles, you know, and you're just like, fuck.

So I knew the internet was going to watch because we recorded it.

So I was like, I got to be a stoic motherfucker for this kind of thing.

So I was, if you see the video, I'm all like, yeah, but that

Ranger guy that went with us, you could see his face.

He's just like,

it was just great.

But how I trained for it was that I bought these shot keyboards, these nail boards

in the office.

So they're like wooden boards and they have nails sticking out.

And I would step on the nails for 10 minutes and just stand on these these nail boards and they have like beginner medium hard juicy and so like you know and it's just how many nails are there so the beginner ones have lots of nails so there's a lot of surface area for the nails so it's it's like a bed of nails you can stand on it but then as you get to like the more aggressive ones there's fewer and fewer nails so they get deeper into your feet and it hurts like hell so I took all these auto hypnosis courses where you can use like hypnosis for pain management kind of hypnotize yourself not to feel pain so i said okay I'm going to do the auto hypnosis.

I'll stand on the nail boards.

I'll start in beginner and I'll keep going until I can deal with that.

Then I'll go to the medium.

Then I'll go to the heart.

Then I'll go to the juicy.

And I did for a whole year.

And like every day, you know, at lunchtime, I go and stand on the nailboards and do this whole thing.

And

man, this sucks.

Man, this sucks.

But then I got better at like dealing with that immediate pain to a point where like, You can stab me for 10 minutes straight.

It doesn't fucking matter anymore.

I'm good.

So when I had my hands in the gloves, I was like, this is not bad.

This is good.

This is good.

Here's the problem.

It's a neural toxin.

This is the stupid thing, you know, like the Robert Downey Jr.

yelling at me in Tropic Thunder.

It's like, okay,

the hard part is not being stung.

The hard part is when the neural toxin kicks in, it's like rolling fire.

It starts coming up your arm.

And it takes hours for it to take fully effect and goes all the way up your arm, goes into your chest, goes into your face, the tip of your dick, your toes, your head, everything,

everything.

And it's like a throb.

So on fire?

Not on fire.

On fire?

Not on fire.

So we're all back at the boat.

I'm sitting with these guys, like Rangers, 18 Deltas, all this stuff.

And I'm just looking at them.

They're looking at me.

They're like, boss, you got some fucked up ideas.

They were like, we getting drunk?

It's like, we're getting drunk.

So we just started drinking.

And

we were just in hell um the first six hours it just because the other that thing is it doesn't stop you know normally like you reach a peak and you're like okay okay now it's getting better first hour oh god this is bad and the next hour like oh it's even worse and like the next hour oh god it's so bad and it just keeps building and building and building and building and it took six hours for it to reach its peak damn and we had a pj with us and uh and he he was also a pa uh so after he got out of pj he became a pa and so he was kind of like our our guy to make sure we didn't die.

And so he'd check our vitals every hour.

And we kept an index on pain.

He's like, how you doing?

How you doing?

At a six.

How about now?

At a seven.

What about now?

It's getting there to eight.

Like, what about now?

It's a nine.

And it just got worse and worse and worse.

And eventually at six hours, it's like, okay, I think this is as bad as it's going to get.

Because I said, I think I'm going to die if it gets any worse than this.

But then, you know, it got better gradually, like a long tail.

It took 24 hours for the whole fucking thing to wear off.

But here's the craziest part.

The next day, woke up, no pain.

And I could move my hands and do the whole thing.

Like the only thing that was there for a while was the black ink that they used.

It was about two weeks on that.

No kidding.

Yeah, yeah.

So, so that's the perfect rite of passage right there.

If you could bottle that shit and do it to every high school student,

that's great.

And you're going to do it again?

Oh, yeah.

And they do it 20 times.

Are you really?

Yeah, yeah.

They do it 20 times.

20 times.

20 times.

It's their rate of passage.

So they have to do it again and again and again and again.

But

actually, when we did it, the chieftain's son did it with us and his friend.

But it's just a great rite of passage.

And what was cool is like, it was like this huge sense of accomplishment.

Cause like for a whole year, we really thought about it.

We trained for it.

And then I looked at all the guys.

I'm like, you know, we're Terry Mawe warriors now.

And it's like, yeah.

We're Terry Mawe warriors now.

It's like, yeah, we're part of the tribe now, right?

And of course, you never want to do this with soft guys because immediately we started talking like, how could we make this even more painful and more dangerous?

And we started going through all the variations.

We're like, you know, maybe if a cold plunge was involved in some way or a darkness component.

So instead of just like letting them sit around for an hour, what if we put them in a dark cave for like 12 hours?

And I said, you know, it would be really cool if you put some snakes in that dark cave.

Oh, shit.

You know, because you can't see the snakes, but you can feel them and hear them.

And that's really fucking with you.

And they're like, yeah, it needs a fire component too.

So we spent the next like five days in the Amazon just

talking about it.

You know, I was like, what if we did this?

Yeah, I think that's a good idea.

Let's do this.

And we're like, you can't modify the rest of screw you, man.

We're North Americans to Terry Mawe.

Those guys are South Americans.

We do things differently as North Americans to Terry Mawe guys.

Damn.

Damn.

When was that?

Oh, that was just recently.

That was, I think, like March or April.

Oh, shit.

This year.

Realize it was that.

Yeah.

And it was crazy because

I did the Amazon.

I was in the Amazon for nine days and I immediately had to go to a conference afterwards.

So I was at a conference and I'm like, hey, guys, I got to go.

I got to go to the Amazon and do a thing.

Then I went down to the Amazon.

Then as soon as I was done, I came back and I was like at another conference, like speaking.

And I was like, all right, I gotta do a thing.

I think I went to consenus after that.

And I was moderating a panel with Eric Trump.

It's like, so where were you at?

Oh, I was just in the Amazon doing a thing.

Don't worry about it.

Wow.

Yeah.

Let's

finally, let's talk about the clinics.

Yes, sir.

How did that start?

Well, you know, as I mentioned, I have the medicine tradition in the family and 70 years of medicine.

So I didn't become a doctor, but I always wanted to do a medical thing.

And why I didn't become a doctor was that

I hated that medicine had two big issues.

One, as a practitioner, it's a person-by-person game, and I like systems.

I like treating millions of people or tens of millions of people at the same time because I want to maximize impact.

The second thing I hated was that the system had become stuck in an economic state where it's basically

treatments and not cures.

So you go see your doctor, hey, I have this thing.

Well, here's this pill.

Is it going to cure me, doctor?

No, no, no, no.

But it'll like manage the decline.

It'll get a little worse every day, but slightly less worse every day.

But I'm coming to your doctor, like, fix me, fix me for God's sakes.

And like, I'm sorry, we don't do fixes here.

You know, we haven't cured things in a long time in medicine.

So just take that pill and best of luck.

So like a great example would be like, let's say you're like, you know,

an 11 Bravo or something, and you serve in Afghanistan, you have a really heavy rucksack, fucked up your back.

What are they going to do?

They're going to tell you to get back surgery.

They're going to tell you to take painkillers, or you can go and do yoga and Pilates and fix your back.

And a lot of people, after they do it, the pain completely goes away.

So you go to a doctor, they tell you to do the yoga and Pilates and the physical therapy and these other things.

No, they give you the pills.

And if that doesn't work, they give you the surgery.

And then that never works for these people.

So that's medicine in a nutshell in 2025.

It's really fucked up.

So what you'd want to do instead is say, let's build a medical institution that

is a bastion of good health care, integrated health care.

So, lifestyle medicine with allopathic, traditional medicine.

Put those two things together for a community.

In this case, Gillette, Wyoming.

So, there's 13,000 patients and a population of 35,000 people.

And we have 40 providers.

We have all the allergies.

You know, we have internal medicine, we have nephrology, and cardiology, and neurology, and soon to have pulmonology, and dermatology, and et cetera, et cetera.

So, we have really top-notch physicians.

But if you have that and you have a vertically integrated system, meaning you own the radiology and you own the lab and you own all the diagnostic equipment and you have your own pharmacy with a compounding pharmacy, you have a perfect vertical to do medical experiments.

So then you build a biotechnology company on the other side and you start looking at a lot of stuff that is regenerative in nature, not cure, not treatments, but cures.

So what you do is you say, what can I do to get the body to heal itself?

And what can I do to give you something that fixes your problem permanently?

So I'll give you some examples.

We're right now getting ready for an FDA trial because everything we do is rigorous.

So we do FDA trials.

And we're going to take fat from people, adipose-derived mesenchymal stem cells.

So your stem cells, your adult stem cells that are in your fat.

You have three primary sources of them as adults, blood, bone, and fat.

You can get them from other places, but those are the big ones to get them from.

And we take your fat fat with liposuction,

and then we culture expand it, we grow them, and then we re-inject them.

And we're going to run it for a year,

four injections, and we're going to pair it with hyperbarics.

Hyperbarics are these pressure chambers.

You go inside of them, pure oxygen, high pressure.

Why hyperbarics?

Because when you go into a hyperbaric environment, for some reason, epigenetically, over 900 genes are silenced or activated, and your body enters a hyper-regenerative state.

So it tells your body, dump all the stem cells into your blood and start fixing shit, programs all of them.

So Jay Leno is a big classic car guy.

He was working on his car, exploded in his face, and he turned into two-phase.

It burnt off half his face.

So they treated him.

He went to a hyperbaric chamber, and now he's almost fully healed.

So you can see those before and after pictures of Jay Leno.

So there's amazing regenerative capabilities with hyperbarics, but the mechanism of action is stem cells and programming those stem cells to be really regenerative for you.

So our hypothesis is if we pair hyperbarics with exogenous stem cells, it's like adding gasoline to a fire.

It dramatically accelerates the healing effect of these types of things.

But also inadvertently, what we're doing is we're creating a platform to learn and think about navigating this stem cell space.

And what's nice is autologous adult-derived mesenchymal stem cells, they're yours.

There's no chance of rejection.

They're ethically sourced.

There's no babies coming out of your belly.

I hope not.

You know, it's just

fat.

It's like, we got a lot of it.

I got a lot of it.

We're okay.

You know, we can sacrifice some of that.

And it's infinite.

Once you have them, you can culture expand them for the rest of the life of the patient.

So you have a platform to work with the patient, and then over time, you can do all kinds of things to hit them with a yellow light to accelerate their metabolism, or maybe use umbilical cord blood exosomes to help culture expand to make them become younger and actually more vibrant.

Mess with the electrome inside the cells, because every cell has an electrical signature, and there's some stuff you can do to make them differentiate to different tissue types, or co-administer them with peptides.

There's hundreds of things that you can do to these cells.

But once you have that baseline, then you can start growing from that baseline and you can start targeting organ systems.

For example, we can look at peripheral neuropathies.

Those are things that tend to come up after cancer.

You get cancer, you do chemotherapy, maybe the chemo cures you, but you're jacked up.

You know, you got the tingly toes and fingers, and you just, anything that's hot or cold now is just so unbearably painful.

And you go to your cancer doctor and they're like, oncologist, what do I do?

And I say, you're cancer-free.

He's like, yeah, but what about neuropathy?

You're cancer-free.

Get the hell out.

We don't want to talk to you anymore.

We solve your primary complaint.

Well, what if I can use stem cells in hyperbarics to actually regenerate those nerves and actually fix those problems?

Now you don't have the neuropathy anymore.

Or what about TBIs, which are just a persistent issue?

Well, one of the things we can do with these stem cells, because we have such a powerful MRI, we have a three-tesla MRI with AI upscaling, is we can use SPIO tagging.

And that means the superparamagnetic oxide.

So you put these tiny nanoparticles of iron inside the stem cells, and then you inject them.

And when you take an MRI, they they light up like a Christmas tree.

What does that tell you?

It tells you where they go.

So if I inject them here, do they end up here or do they end up here?

Or do they end up here?

You know, where they go?

Are they just in the lungs?

And what if, now that I can find out where they go, I can co-administer them with certain chemicals, and maybe by doing that, I can steer the direction of where the stem cells go.

Maybe I can get them to cross the blood-brain barrier and get into your brain.

because they'll light up like a Christmas tree there, or maybe your liver, because you have cirrhosis from, you know, something or whatever, or maybe your knees, who knows?

So that's kind of the next stage of the platform is programmability.

You know, can we program them chemically or electrically to go to certain areas and then we have the equipment to track them?

So yeah, it'll be years of research, but we have the patient population.

We have a ton of people that have cancer.

We have a ton of people that have COPD and their lungs are jacked up.

We have a ton of people that have TBIs.

Like look at the rodeo stars.

They go bull riding and they fall off their bull, you know, and get 40 concussions, you know, and they can't remember their own damn name at 50.

It's tragic when you see all these things.

There's an unlimited depth of people that are broken and they want to be fixed.

And this idea that I can take your stem cells and culture expand them and modify and do things to them and then use that as a basis to regenerate you and actually get you to a younger state or get you to a healthier state and expand your health span.

It's so cool to be able to pursue that and to be able to do that under FDA supervision, meaning that it's just not like mad scientist shit.

It's actually structured experiments and you go through phase one, two, and three and you take people along the entire journey.

That's why we built the clinic, you know, and it's very conservative.

There's a lot of people in anti-aging that are doing much more aggressive things like something like induced pluripotent stem cells using Yamanaka factors or Dave

Sinclair at Harvard, who's like literally reprogramming the epigenome and he's taking mice that are twins and making one old and one young and vice versa and these things.

It's crazy stuff, but that's really difficult stuff you know and the thing is it's like you are you because these cells made you that way

so they're already enough to do a lot for you and there's animals in nature that are actually biologically immortal a lot of people don't know that turtopsis dorney is this jellyfish if you google immortal jellyfish you see this lovely picture of it and when it gets old it says i don't want to be old anymore so it forms a cyst and regenerates itself and it's young again no yeah there's shit in nature there's even this crazy guy named shin kaboda who's over in kyoto kyoto Kyoto University, and they call him the jellyfish man.

And he spent his whole career, he's even gotten divorced over it, like studying jellyfish and dressing up as jellyfish because he's obsessed with this immortal jellyfish.

And he wants to understand, like, why is it immortal?

What is it doing to be immortal?

And he's chasing that immortality cult.

So to me,

it's so cool that these things exist.

And if there's something in nature that already does it, well, then human beings can discover this.

And there's plenty of super regenerative animals, like ex-wattles, for example.

They run around, you chop off their arm they grow another arm lizards chop off their tail they grow another tail you know they they're in nature it's not a hypothetical it's here it's there genetically they're not too different from us so get a stem cell figure out how to program that how to work with that as a platform and then bring the ai in and then bring the science in and then year by year by year you gain a better and more mechanistic understanding and then what you can do is a whole class of diseases can be corrected because you can now regenerate things that's That's stage one.

Then stage two is to get really good at the electrome and get really good at the stem cells and then you can do tissue engineering and you can actually start growing organs and other things like that.

So you can have a bioreactor and you can grow skin or a bioreactor and you can grow a gallbladder or grow a heart or grow a kidney or a liver or something like that.

You can just grow these things and then you can transplant them in.

So when you have a bad heart, you don't have to be on an organ replacement list and hope to God that you have a compatible donor.

You just grow a new one and put it in the person.

How long would it take to grow a new one?

Well, that's the hard part because the issue is DNA contains the information of what you are, but it doesn't have spatial information of like how to make it like your leg goes here and your hand goes here, these types of things.

So there are different processes.

And so you can't just take stem cells and make them differentiate into an organoid and say, okay, well, this is a heart cell or this is the brain.

You can do that, but it doesn't turn into a brain.

It doesn't turn into a heart.

So it's an open question right now now in organ growth of how do you grow an organ to replicate an adult organ with the same size and shape and function of that.

But it doesn't take a heck of a lot of time.

If you're doing the right growth factors, it's a matter of weeks to months to grow something like this in a bioreactor.

And that's one approach.

The other approach are called xenografts, where they take pigs and they genetically engineer them because they're very close to humans.

In fact, we used to use pigs for insulin before we genetically engineered E.

coli to do that.

And they actually

make pig have your kidneys or a pig have your heart or something.

And they can take the kidneys out of the pig and put it into a human because they've been genetically engineered to be not rejected by humans.

Called a xenotransplant.

So these things exist, but I like the bioreactor more because I don't think we should have kidney pigs.

I mean, I like pigs.

They're nice.

But anyway, so that's like stage two.

It's like, can you grow tissue?

And then once you have that, then I can fix your broken parts or regrow limbs or other things like that.

And then stage three is the gene engine, and gene engineering.

And there the the lowest floor is called a plasmid and there's a company called Mini Circle down in Roatan that does this a lot.

And you could actually use plasmids to make pretty much anything.

They're like little molecular factories.

So I suffer from gout.

344 million people do.

It's a genetic disorder and it means my body doesn't process uric acid properly.

And so what ends up happening is the uric acid over time, if I don't get it out of the system through some means like allopurinol, it'll accumulate in the joints and you have gout attacks and they flare up with crystals and it's super fucking painful.

They just stab you when you're walking around.

It's one of the most painful conditions you can have.

And if you don't treat it, it gets progressive.

So it starts from the big toe to the joint to the knee to the hip and then eventually your hands and the whole body.

So you got to solve it.

Well there's a chemical called, it's an enzyme called uricase, and humans don't make it, but it exists in nature, and it digests uric acid and converts it to a water kind of like vitamin C, where you just pee it out, alatonin.

So what if I made a plasmid that made uricase?

Then I can inject it to a person who has gout, and now you have a natural way of processing the uric acid, so you never have gout.

It's basically a cure.

It's pretty cool.

And so there's all classes of diseases where your genetics don't allow you to make something because you lost a lottery and they're slowly killing you.

And so gene therapies are coming online.

And what's really cool is like within five to 10 years, we'll actually start having those treatments available and they're there.

And then you can also use it for therapeutic interventions.

Like the Mini Circle is using it for folastatin 344, which is

this

chemical that basically allows you to build muscle.

It turns off muscle inhibition.

So if you see like pigs with it or cows with it, you can Google like muscle pig.

You see like this picture is just fucking jacked up pig.

It's just looks like a damn beast.

And so you, so they actually, that's their first product is the muscle pig plasmid.

So they inject the person with folastatin and they just start building muscle like crazy with it.

And what's cool is the plasmids only last like a year or two, and you can turn them off using antibiotics.

So they take it and kills the plasmid.

Wow.

Yeah, it's just crazy stuff.

Well, the next thing they're looking at is TRT, testosterone replacement, and they're looking at HGH, human growth hormone, as another option.

So maybe that's a better way than, you know, dosing or these types of things because the next step with the plasmid is can you create an internal regulation system?

So like insulin regulation with your pancreas, it makes it when you need it, and then it turns it off when you don't need it.

So you get a constant level instead of having to inject yourself with, you know, something with it.

So, but you know, once you have the platform, you kind of build your way up there and you get there.

But the foundation of the platform is lifestyle.

You have to eat right, you have to exercise, you have to sleep right, and you have to have good mental health.

If you don't, you're dead.

And then the next level up is saying, okay, regenerative intervention, so hyperbarics and stem cells.

And then as you move up, there's replacement parts and as you move up, gene therapies for these types of things.

But you can just kind of walk the stack.

Every step of the way, though, you get two health span.

Longer lifespan and more comfortable life throughout.

So it's not to make you immortal, but it's to say, hey, in your 80s, you're not a frail person, you know, scrunched over and you can't move.

In your 80s, you're walking around.

You're having fun.

This is how Peter Attia thinks about life.

You know,

he says, hey, you should think about the proximal decade of your life, the last 10 years.

And you should say, okay, what do you want to do in the last 10 years of your life?

Do you want to be be able to walk by yourself without a walker?

You want to be able to swim for half a mile?

You want to be able to, you know, feed yourself and clothe yourself.

You know, you want to be able to take showers unassisted.

You write those things down.

And there's a formula, and you have to crank up and say, okay, how much muscle do you have to enter your 50s and your 60s in?

Because it's really hard to build muscle after your 60s.

What type of foods do you need to eat?

What type of sleep do you need to have?

What type of other interventions do you need to do?

And then that'll tell you basically what you need to do every day to be able to get to that point in the proximal decade.

Well, I think of it that, but I say, well, you know, maybe I'll give you a little bit of help because not everybody's Ned Flanders and they're going to fucking do everything right, right?

You know, sometimes we like our hard whiskey and fast women and you know, bad, stressful situations.

The best ex-wife I never had, right?

Sometimes we like that stuff.

So the stem cell part is about correcting the problems that we had, and hyperbarics is about correcting the problems we have.

And what's really magical about it is the AI is helping tremendously.

You know,

we were able to do literature review, especially from the Chinese papers, because the Chinese have so many of these guys working on this, and they just trained more scientists than we did.

But you can't read the papers because they're in Chinese, or even when they're in English,

they're very inaccessible.

So we were able to take pretty much every paper ever written in China and every paper written in other jurisdictions and run it through AI models and say, well, who's working on this thing and who's working on this thing?

And what were their experimental results that they got?

And it gives you some indication of what's working and what's not working.

And it's already paid huge dividends in a lot of the research that we've done.

And I'd say just the last two years in particular, we've probably done five or 10 years worth of desk work for this.

And I have a lot of MD PhDs that work for me.

So they do the translational medicine.

So they're able to take the basic science and then translate it and say, this is what would be required for a human trial.

And here's how many patients you need.

And here's how the FDA is going to get happy.

And these types of things.

So it's super exciting to be able to start that.

And that's going to be probably my legacy company.

It's a very slow burner.

Crypto is fast and exciting and chaotic and crazy.

And the mathematics stuff, which we kind of talked about, like, but I didn't mention the Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics.

That's like a big passion of mine.

But the medicine thing is like the family business.

This is what my grandpa did.

It's what my dad does, what my brother does.

And I really want to see, you know, 100 years from now, 200 years from now, say this was the nexus of a new paradigm of medicine where we pulled a lot of different ideas together and we pivoted medicine back from treatments to cures.

We got people thinking, how do I fix your problem instead of how do I manage your problem and create an economic system where that's profitable.

Wow.

You have got a lot going on.

Yeah.

You got a lot going on.

How do you, I mean,

all these are amazing things.

How do you, I mean, how do you

How do you know what to put your energy into?

What's the balance?

Well, I'd say there's two parts to that.

You know, one is how do you make more energy and time?

You know, and how do you better manage and organize your life and your time so that you can do these things?

And then the other thing is

you have to have an ethos that guides you so everything organically kind of clicks together and fits together into one comprehensive framework.

So things are a natural extension of these.

Like when you look at Elon Musk, he seems like insane and chaotic from the outside.

But when you integrate things together, you start realizing there's a cohesive picture behind all of his startups.

Like, why does he have the boring company?

That doesn't make any sense.

He's drilling all these tunnels underground.

Like, why would he do that?

Well, if he wants to go to Mars, humans aren't going to live on the surface of Mars.

They're going to live underground.

So you're going to have to build massive tunnel complexes underground to be able to go through.

Well, why does he have a solar company?

Why does that make any sense?

Well, you know, he's going to have to be pretty good at building power plants, right?

So why don't you build large solar fields?

Because there's no real estate problems on Mars.

So you can build like a five-mile

solar field on Mars if you wanted to, right?

Why is he building a robotics company?

Why does he have all these Tesla bots and these types of things?

Well, he has all those Tesla bots because, you know, where it's your workforce if you're on Mars.

You're not going to have five million humans show up overnight, but you can ship millions of robots ahead of time and use them as your labor force to help build up everything and they don't need atmosphere or any of these other things.

Why does he have an AI company?

Well, you need some sort of intelligence to coordinate and run and terraform the planet and do all these things.

Why does he need a battery-powered car company?

Because you're not going to be running internal combustion engines.

There's no fossil fuels to consume on Mars.

So you need battery-powered cars to be able to drive them around.

So it's actually coherent when you see that entire framework.

He probably like wrote it all down while high and drunk or burning man or something like that.

And he's like, this makes so much sense.

I'm so smart.

And it's just got like this pure force of will.

So, you know, he's just doing it and just having fun doing it.

But if you look at it from the outside, like everything looks like chaotic and crazy.

Like, why are we doing all these things?

Then when you look at like the energy, where do you make energy and more time?

The single most valuable thing you can invest in if you're young is a second brain, a PKM, a personal knowledge management system.

You have to be very good at note-taking and making, and you have to be very good at organizing what you know and learning how to learn.

You have to be exceedingly good at saying, okay, there's software for this, like Obsidian or Notion or Evernote or OneNote.

It doesn't matter the particular note system.

You have to be really good at saying, oh, how do I put my knowledge somewhere, the things that that I know, and link them so that I can find them again with context.

It's not good enough to write something down because what if you find a handwritten note from 25 years ago?

You look at it, who the hell is Seth?

You know, what was he doing with that donkey?

What the fuck is this note about?

You know, I don't know.

You know, it's like,

it's not meaningful.

But if you have linked knowledge, then that name would have been linked to a person and that's linked to another thing and that donkey is linked to another thing and it's in this, oh, Tijuana.

okay now i know what was going on so you have your linked knowledge so knowledge linking is so powerful and it's how your brain thinks if you look at how memory formation works it's kind of a three-stage process and you know um first is the encoding when you read something you know, do you encode it properly?

And that's the linkage of that to other things that you know.

And then the next stage is getting proper sleep because while you sleep, memory formation is happening.

And then the third phase is recall.

So how do you pull it out of the system?

So your PKM has to mirror how your brain works as a human being.

And we do the exact opposite with note-taking and knowledge systems.

We put them in wikis and we put big deep hierarchies and things like that.

And just for a moment, if you smell something, do you go to your folder, like folder of smells, and go navigate down and work your way through a bunch of like characteristics of the smell?

Maybe if you're like a somalier or something, I don't fucking know.

But no,

that smell is linked to a place and a location and a time or things like that.

That's linked to knowledge.

So it has to be a bottom-up knowledge system.

It has to mirror how the human brain cognates and how memory formation works.

And then you have to have a metadata system around it, whether it's latch or something else, that allows you to find things with context.

Now, if you have that, what ends up happening is you've made time for yourself because you can deal with basically infinite complexity.

You just have rooms in your second brain.

So, you know, I'm in clinic mode.

So here's my clinic room.

I'm in synthetic biology mode.

mode, so here's my synthetic biology room.

I'm in cryptocurrency land, so here's my cryptocurrency thing.

And those rooms are linked to each other.

So maybe there's this thing in medicine that's linked to cryptocurrency, private medical records.

So fourth generation cryptocurrency, privacy and identity.

Okay, so well, how do I connect that to this?

And how do I use a blockchain to solve my medical record system thing here?

Well, now they're cross-linked.

They're there, right?

And if you, at the time of the note making, you link that, that it's there forever inside your second brain, and you never forget it.

You see, so you can come back 25 years later and recover knowledge.

So there's a whole systems for this called Zettel Kasten, which was Ludeman's system.

There's a lovely book, How to Take Smart Motes, that talks about it.

But there's thousands of prophets in this personal productivity world.

Nick Milo is one, and there's guy Zoltz, who's a weird Bulgarian guy.

But, you know, it's all the same roads to the same destination, which is you create a second brain and you think into that.

Then Then recharge and rejuvenate.

You can't just go, go, go, go, go.

You have to have hard and soft, hard and soft.

You have to get into a cadence in life where you're able to give yourself the space to recharge.

And in many cases, that means doing nothing.

You know, you just, you're literally just going to sit down and fucking veg out.

And the problem with a type A personality is you think that's like a mortal sin, like you're sitting orphans on fire or something like that, like a Viking raider, like boarding up the church.

And it's like, no, it's okay.

You know, you've done all these amazing things in life.

You didn't get there by just killing yourself every day.

You have to take a step back and let it drift and let yourself veg out and then rejuvenate and recharge.

And then there's a habitualization of rejuvenation.

That's why I have the ranch.

You know, I take the Blackhawk up to the ranch.

We land.

I'm there.

I veg out for the weekend.

And I'm just driving around in my ATV.

And I see my bison.

They're walking around.

I look at them.

They look at me.

And I say, you're going to kill me today?

And they say, no.

And I say, all right.

And I just keep driving around, you know?

Maybe I see a mountain lion.

Only did it once, you know, just hanging out on the road.

They look at me, I look at them.

I'm like, come on, guys, you're supposed to be ferocious.

And they slowly walk away.

I'm like, oh, fuck you too.

You know, and so, so, but that's recharge, right?

And

if I wrote down on a piece of paper, what did I accomplish today?

It's like nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

But that then enables me to get back into the other mode, which is the hyper, you know, ferocious.

And we're going, going, going.

And when paired with a second brain and you have that, you're good.

But none of that means anything if you don't have motivation.

And you only have motivation if you have an overarching threat of your life.

So Musk has one.

And that's why no matter what the hell he gets hit with, he just keeps going.

And that's why he keeps building rockets and all this other stuff because he set an impossible goal and he's trying to make it possible.

So I set a goal saying, I want to change the economic, political, and social systems of the world.

I think that I have a real shot of doing it using cryptocurrency technologies.

So if I build enough technology and I get enough people to drink the Kool-Aid and get into this paradigm, they'll say, yeah, actually, there's a there there.

We should go and do that.

So then every day I wake up, I'm always going back to that and I'm asking like,

how did I move the chains a little bit?

So the other most important thing, and I tell young people to do this all the time, journal is the most powerful thing.

You don't think it is, but God, it's so powerful.

It just, it's a dialogue with yourself.

And you just go out there.

You don't have to be gold directed.

Just write stuff down.

It could be a sentence.

It could could be a paragraph.

It could be a fucking novella.

Congratulations.

You're going to be a novelist.

Doesn't matter.

What matters is the dialogue on a daily basis because it's a check-in with you.

You're saying, how do I feel?

Where did I fail?

What am I doing well?

What am I not doing?

What am I afraid of?

What am I not afraid of?

And it's so therapeutic.

Every research study that's ever done by psychologists and psychiatrists show that when people journal, their mental health is measurably better than when they don't journal, especially over a protracted period of time, five years, 10 years, 15 years.

And it helps you start building that muscle up to help you understand an overarching narrative because you can read all your journals, especially with AI, and you can say, the last 10 years or 15 years, what's the theme?

Like, you know, the spaces in my life.

Oh, that's the cryptocurrency phase of your life or this phase or this phase.

Like if Reagan was a brilliant guy and he wrote tons of letters, but he also journaled a lot.

And he had phases in his life.

And you could clearly see it in his writings like he's the radio broadcaster phase and this is the actor phase and this is the screen actor guild phase and this is the GE spokesman phase and this is the political Reagan phase at the governor level and then the political Reagan phase at the president level and this is the Reagan phase post-presidency dealing with Alzheimer's and every step of the way you could see the transformation of the person and his cognition and you could see him grow as a human being along the way what he talked about his perceptions and these things and what's nice about that is

it shows how much you can accomplish as a human being in a decade.

You know, we overestimate what we can do in a year.

We vastly underestimate what we can do in a decade.

I was broke 10 years ago.

I'm a billionaire today.

And nobody knew who the hell I was 10 years ago.

And now I'm a pretty well-known guy, a million Twitter followers, and a lot of people listen to me for better or for worse.

But

there was no one moment where everything just magically changed and I instantly got famous.

You know, it was just a gradual thing.

And the resolution is too low for any one moment.

But if you look at the totality of all the writing, you can get there.

And that is how you derive meaning.

Once you look at these things, you can kind of take the time during those veg out states to just consider it.

But once you have the meaning, you're fanatic.

And then you have infinite energy because no matter how weak you get, you can go back to that.

You know, it's just like if you do something extreme, like how do you survive buds or an ultra marathon or whatever the hell it is?

It's not how strong physically you are.

You could have been an Olympic swimmer or an Olympic champion and you have all these amazing skills.

You're still going to ring the bell.

You have to have some why that's connecting there that burns within you that's transcendent of just pure ego, like I'm a badass.

Because they do everything in their power to destroy that image of you as a badass.

And if they think that you still have that image, they'll make you a sugar cookie.

They'll just break you.

And that's what they're supposed to do.

So even after the image of you as a badass is gone, there's got to be something that's left over that's a screaming, burning why within you.

And if you have meaning in your life, you have that.

So then you can do anything, you know, at that point.

And it's just a question of who are you doing it for?

Are you doing it for yourself?

Or are you doing it for the world as a whole?

That's the difference between a good person and a bad person.

You know, I talked to a philosopher once and he said, Charles, you know what is the ultimate question in reality?

I said, what is it?

Will mankind,

on average, return the shopping cart?

I was like, what the fuck are you talking about?

He said, well, think about it.

You know, you're at Walmart, you're going out to your car.

You can just leave that shopping cart in the parking space right next to your car.

And there's no consequences to it if you do.

It's kind of a shitty thing to do to the basket guy, but not really.

It's kind of his job.

If you return it, nobody thanks you.

You don't really get any brownie points for it.

A virtuous society is a society where all the baskets are returned.

And an evil, immoral society is a society where none of them are returned.

And one of of these days, I want to fund a study where we're just going to use drones and go to like Walmart after Walmart and go to like all the broken neighborhoods and all the like happy Pleasantville neighborhoods.

And I'm going to see the ratio of shopping carts, you know, that have been returned versus not returned, because it's an interesting thing.

But I think there's some truth, you know, to all of that.

It's like it's those daily personal grind that you come back to and those little victories like, did you go to the gym today?

Did you, like Jordan Peterson?

Did you make your bed today?

You know, did you come the lobster?

You know, those little wins that you do that accumulate over a lifetime and that excellence then permeates and it becomes part of it.

And then the directionality of the winds, the meaning is like, who are you doing those things for?

Well, Charles, this has been a fascinating conversation.

And I want to want to leave with one last question.

If you had three people to recommend for the podcast, who would they be?

Oh, that's a good question.

Well, you got to have Ben Lamb on.

Come on.

He's Mr.

dire wolf and i'll call him and be like

why are you you know you got got we got on sean ryan come on um have you ever interviewed avi loe i have okay i have about what we just talked about okay good so you know you know the whole avi loe experience he's a great guy i love that guy oh he's so good he's so good spend two weeks on a ship with him you'll know everything about him um shipmates are great um let's see here avi would be uh really really cool uh if you ever want to go deep science terry tau would be a lot of fun terry tau Yeah, he's the smartest mathematician in the world.

He's like probably the smartest human being alive right now.

You know, it's just, there's smart people and then there's people that just have infinite depth.

And

I always was, I'm always fascinated, like, how does he decide what problem to work on?

Imagine if you have this curse where you can solve anything, but not everything.

And you know the clock is ticking and you have finite time and you're going to lose your ability to do that.

So what would you do?

And Terry is one of those few human beings where he is legitimately in that position.

He's so insanely, he graduated from high school at 12.

He got his PhD at Prince at 21.

He won the Nobel Prize of Math, the Fields Medal at 28.

He's just so insanely brilliant.

Like literally any problem he can solve.

He can't solve them all.

So like, how does he spend his time?

And, you know, how does he make that decision?

And,

you know, what is elegant to him?

What's amazing to him?

I love looking at the extremes in people and saying, you know,

this person, you know, what's their Roger Penrose would be another and Federico Fagan.

Roger in particular, because he's at the twilight of his life and as one of the most brilliant physicists ever to live, he's chosen to spend his time on consciousness.

And he's chosen to spend his time on, in particular, quantum consciousness, like this entanglement thing that we talked about earlier.

He's a phenomenal speaker and

it's just there's a depth of thought and elegance of his thought that is tremendously refreshing for these things.

I tend to be enamored with the people who have clean thinking and are very original thinking,

and they're kind of classic in that they just don't give a shit at all about the social consequences of what they say or do.

They're totally divorced for it.

Like one mathematician I always want to meet was Gregory Perlman, and he did the thing that no one's ever dreamed to do.

So he sold Poincaré's conjecture, which was this very hard math problem, and he got the Nobel Prize in Math for it.

And normally you go and show up, get a million dollars, and you get this beautiful gold medal, and then you tell all your friends, like, how smart you are and special.

He turned it down.

And he left math.

He's just like, meh, I did what I wanted to do.

And now he's just in St.

Petersburg riding the subway and like chopping wood.

And yes, completely out of the field.

And it's just inconceivable to me that somebody like

at that level would do that.

And he doesn't take any interviews.

He doesn't talk to any journalists.

He's just on a different reality.

Matthew Ricard is another really cool guy.

There's a book written about him and they call him the happiest man in the world.

He's this Buddhist monk who was a scientist.

And then he decided to leave science and then he went into the monastery and he just meditated so much, he found a way to like put himself in a state of bliss.

And because he was a scientist, he agreed to go through brain scans and everything like that.

And his brain waves work totally different than any normal human being.

So, and he's just a joyful guy.

So the world's filled with these people.

So my recommendation to you is just

Find the people that are the extremes of things, whether it be, you know, mathematical brilliance or meditation or these things.

And just try to say, well, why did you spend the time?

You know, because all these people are products of a constant vigilance and doubt.

And why did you choose those problems to solve over any other problem?

You know, Roger Penrose could have worked on black holes or, you know, some other thing, quantum computers.

But instead, consciousness, that's not something normally a physicist spends a lot of time on, right?

But he chose that for some reason.

But why did you spend the time for that?

Very interesting.

Well, Charles, it was an honor to host you, and I hope to see you again.

And

I just want to say again that

this entire five hours or whatever it was

was never a dull moment.

You're just a fascinating human being.

And thank you for everything you're doing.

And thank you for being here.

Thank you so much.

It's a lot of fun.

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