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

24:24Or 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. 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 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.

24:55They 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. So, 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.

25:35If 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, you know, 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, you know, I kind of share it because people say, wow, the world is moving in, you know, kind of a new place.

26:04And 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, 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 for. Yeah, Sentinel plants. And so imagine you're a coal miner and you're in West Virginia or Pennsylvania or something like that.

26:39Gillette 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.

27:07It explodes and so it's terrible. So you have to always detect it. 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.

27:44And 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? What would improve safety? What would improve the experience? 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.

28:22It'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 it they 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 direwolf thing you're like holy shit that's awesome you know like tell me more it's oh 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 mentioned that you could modify what sounded like like a thorn bush and make a make a security wall with thorns that are yeah you know like i 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 they're 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 wood fence or something you've already created something that's very hard for somebody worked their way through.

29:48Well, why don't people do this? It's horrendously expensive. It takes a real long time to grow one. You have to water 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.

30:20And 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 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'd be really cool if we can do like black flowers or red flowers or things like that. And it's all there.

30:50And that technology is going to be available, you know, horizontally 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.

31:26So you don't live in this world of malls and Walmarts and 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 how long is how long have you guys been working on that oh for about two years now you know that's it yeah that's it and the first step was just building the science team and uh you know you gotta understand it's like it's like cryptocurrencies you know we've been working on it for a while but the 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.

32:08So 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. It's very much the same when you look at synthetic biology. 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.

32:45And 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.

33:19And they see what's on the horizon. And they have one foot 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.

33:51And 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 when 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 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.

34:25And that's what keeps it fun. Steve Jobs did this with AI. There was a DARPA program called Kalo in 2003 to 2008. It was cognitive of 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 that say, hey, read all my emails.

35:00Which 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 an enormous stuff and they spent hundreds of millions of 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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37:06Wow. 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? I've already probably said too much. I'm going to get an angry phone call. It's like Inglourious 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.

37:52So 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. You're like, oh, fuck 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.

38:21Now, 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.

38:52And 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 instead of looking for the books, we're going to 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.

39:25So 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 number's there. You're getting laid. Congratulations. Life is good. 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.

40:08And 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 to minimize the layover time or whatever your objective is. Or in the case of large language models, like chat GPT 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 hear all my parameters and I'm looking for a good restaurant and which one's a good one.

40:44And 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, a programmer, or you personally have to look at the outputs and say, oh, that's wrong, that's wrong. Well, the quantum computer, you basically get to look at all the outputs, just like all the books at the same time.

41:13And 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 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 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.

41:59You 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, let's say I want a Black Hawk helicopter, and I want the skin to have what's called a negative refractory index material so it can go invisible. 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 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.

42:34And it'll tell you literally the recipe for how to make that strange exotic alloy, you know, all these different properties. You can't do that with a classical computer because 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 just math and trial and error you go to lab and 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 wanted to be recyclable and be made out of non rare earth materials because China owns all those and they're screwing us.

43:24Like 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. 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.

44:02And the public part, you give it 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 key is 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 Grover'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.

44:36It'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.

45:13RSA, 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 Elliptic Curb 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.

45:50And 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 then hardware will run a hundred times faster. So if you pick a non-standard thing and you're just running on software, you're a hundred times slower than your competition that picks a standard thing.

46:25So 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 the 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.

46:58And what's really exciting is in many cases, these are going to actually add just 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.

47:30And 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 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.

48:03Well, 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. It's just like warfare in general. If you invent a plane, well, somebody creates a countermeasure to the plane and then they create a plane that avoids that countermeasure. And you never stop, you just keep getting more advanced with it.

48:34How 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 quantum, 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 some use subatomic particles called mageronofermions.

49:08All these different things, somebody's going to crack it, and the hard part is not the compute side, it's the error 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 rock power.

49:49It'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 Yoda bytes 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.

50:28Because if you develop 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.

51:06So 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, the 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.

51:40Now 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 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, you know, we'll have AGI and the computers will kill us all and Terminators forever. And there's other people like Jan LeCun 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.

52:09And there's other people say it's never going to happen. like, you know, Ferrizio 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.

52:50Well, yeah, a lot of people are going to chase that. As much as same with AI. You can say, well, 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 for the nuclear bomb, the little boy and fat man or whatever they were.

53:19And one was an implosion sphere, another was like a gun where it'd 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 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 can follow. And there's many billions of dollars and many, many companies that are chasing this thing.

53:48So 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.

54:17Somebody'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 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. 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. 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 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.

55:13We don't get a lot of good news here. I love America. You know, our national slogan is we know we're working on it.

55:24So 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 in Montana, and my mom grew up in Florida. She was in Winter Haven, and my dad was out in Mile City. and big timber. And my dad's father, my grandfather, he became a doctor and 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 so he said, 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.

56:04But he got addicted to the tropical living. And so when he went back to Montana he's like god this cold thing sucks I I don't want to do this anymore so he said you know what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna buy a practice in Hawaii that's that's what I'm gonna do so in the 70s a practice came up for sale and he he picked it up moved to Maui and my dad ended up going to high school in in Maui and we have very strong roots than 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.

56:38Joe's. And that's where he met my mom. She was a respiratory therapist. So 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 awkward. No kidding. I know, awkward bedfellows. But anyway, yeah, I 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 or you can move to Colorado and be a married doctor.

57:15So, you know, take your choice. My dad said, I like being married. So I said, go move to Colorado. And my mom's whole family's 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 uh 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 uh they moved out to hawaii and you know 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 uh what kind of stuff were into as a kid what'd you like doing?

58:14Well, 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. They call you haoles. 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 loved knowledge and these things. But also it meant I was a little like half-baked on the socialization side. You know, it's just my brother and I, and that's it. And so we didn't really socialize with very many people.

58:52But 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 and going to the jungles and the 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 that's why a plant company now, right? Or a ranch. I loved animals and I love plants and I love that whole experience of seeing things. The other thing is it gave me a slightly different age demographic because I didn't get exposed to the K through 12 stuff.

59:29I kind of skipped the late 80s and 90s and I inherited my mom and dad's generation. So the early 80s, the 70s, and the late 60s. And so I listened to Boston, and I listened to Journey, and I listened to all these things like Bread, and what was his name? Did Operator and Time in a Bottle, Jim Crosh, all these guys. And all the television was from that time too. So I watched Lost in Space, and 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.

1:00:13The other nice thing about Hawaii is it's like frozen in time. You know, outside of the fire in Lahaina, you know, nothing changes at all, ever. So you go there, 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 boobs now, 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, do you have any ambition in life? Do you want to do more? No, no, no. I am content. And that's the problem with island fever.

1:00:48That's why my mom got tired of it. She's like, 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 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?

1:01:47Well, you know, after, so, you know, kind of following into Colorado, you know, I was homeschooled. I graduated from high school at 15. And then I started at a community college because I, my parents said, yeah, 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 to 18, I was there and I graduated. So I was like 18 with a college degree, which was cool. And I transferred then to Metro Pollen State, and then I transferred to CU Boulder.

1:02:18And 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. I said, 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 helped 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, you know, took EMT training and became a certified pharmacy tech and took all the biology and all the chemistry classes you're supposed to do.

1:02:52And 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, 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. 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.

1:03:26And then after you see the person, lots of paperwork and the ICD-10 coding, right? You have to put all your codes in and they got a 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 physicians. Every physician that I met said, you're too smart for medicine. Don't go into it. Don't go into it. They were burnt out. And it's a bad thing when the people who are good at the field are telling you, don't go into the field. It's not your way. So the other thing I was really good at was mathematics.

1:03:56And I really loved mathematics. Math is, it's 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 Gerdel'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 CU Boulder, because they had this nice combined master's undergraduate program.

1:04:36So you could take graduate classes and undergraduate classes. I just took a ton of math classes. And I went through and it's a research university. So I interact with like true mathematicians. And then what I discovered was like 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.

1:05:07No 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 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.

1:05:43Like 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. Well, it's Euler-Totient 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.

1:06:13So 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, 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, you know. How old were you when you did that? Well, I was 21 when the Ron Paul campaign was first, and 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 just, you don't know at the time that you're going to learn a skill and then that skill becomes valuable.

1:06:49But 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 cracked that nut. And we were the first to do that. And the whole Republican party is like, oh my God, you just like 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.

1:07:18You 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. They're like, what's integrity? Yeah, I know. Can we do it without those things? We're like, no, no, it doesn't work that way. That's why 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 at 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 choose liberty.

1:07:57So 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 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 just like Vietnam. You know, it was right. And then he said, sound money. You know, if you don't have good money, you don't have liberty.

1:08:27Because 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.

1:08:56So 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 did it. I took economics, macro and microeconomics. And I think Paul Krugman, for God's sakes, wrote the book on macroeconomics that I took. And it was all like Keynesian shit. And so I said, oh, 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. Oh my God, this is amazing.

1:09:29There's 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 Kinsey in 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.

1:10:00There'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 2007, Bitcoin wasn't even out. So I'm reading these books and these papers and everything. And it was preparing me for that cryptocurrency career. 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 the centralized networking.

1:10:32You know, the Ron Paul movement was like a terrorist cell. They had people everywhere, you know, and you didn't know where they're at. And there's 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 it, the Ron Paul days in 07, there was just as many Democrats as there were Republicans. It was such weird bedfellows. You know, you'd 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 gold and guns.

1:11:08And they're in the same rally. And we're like, I don't know how this works, you know. 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.

1:11:42And 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 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 went to 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.

1:12:14If 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. If you believe in sound money, so deflationary monetary policy, and you believe in choose liberty, meaning 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.

1:12:47It 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're a private client. They'll do anything. You have numbers you can call and just say, I need this and this. Oh, of course, 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.

1:13:21So 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.

1:13:42That's kind of why I was asking if you think crypto will overtake the system. So many people are drawn to it because of government oversight and regulation and all of these different things. And so, and then there's all the skeptics that say it's not real, you know? And so that, can you, can you elaborate a little bit on, 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, 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.

1:14:35Or like, 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. So 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 timestamped, and it's irreversible.

1:15:16Everything 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 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.

1:15:50I'd like to buy it from you. And Bill's like, well, you know, Charles, great, 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? 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.

1:16:20He 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.

1:16:53In 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.

1:17:35Like 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 a hundred million iPhones worth of memory sales But then Apple also gets a 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 process, 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.

1:18:30And 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, well, 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?

1:19:07If 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.

1:19:46Where was the central Bitcoin bureau 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 in the world, distributed computer in the world, but it's 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.

1:20:23You 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, I'm a doctor and this COVID thing is pretty bad.

1:21:01And 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 a hundred body laptop or 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 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.

1:21:35Nobody 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. them. 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 since we have that, then we at least have some anchor of trust. Your agency guys, you probably remember all the Russian propaganda.

1:22:09And 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.

1:22:43You're a very courageous person. Now you're looking and saying, 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 US 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.

1:23:16And 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, 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.

1:23:50You have all these people that traditionally, the yoga people and the 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. They're great. It's like, what are 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, is 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.

1:24:23And 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. You know, Trump lost in 2020. He said, oh, it was rigged. And when Al Gore lost in 2000, oh, it's rigged, you know. And it's like every election of my lifetime, basically since 1988.

1:24:58It's been rigged in some way, 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?

1:25:30How 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. 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.

1:26:07And 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. That's crypto in a nutshell. The other thing is a smart cow effect. This is something that's so cool. If you're a rancher, you always have a lot of dumb cows, but then you have that one smart cow. There's the most frustrating fucking cow. If you find it, you shoot it because the smart cow figures out how to get out. They don't just get themselves out.

1:26:40If 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.

1:27:16They were invented by MIT back in the 80s. It was Sylvia McCauley and all these other guys, and they were geniuses, and they got 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 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.

1:27:49Well, 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? This is 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 verify 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.

1:28:30So it did probably in the last five years more that's been done in 40 years of academic research for that one thing. That's the magic of the smart cow effect is that when people start catching on to a good thing, they just go crazy with it. Voting innovation too. Why is it a giant turd sandwich versus a giant douche 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.

1:29:15So you can always vote for third parties, and there's no consequence. 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 a change in 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 Republican 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 on-chain governance, which means you're in the business of building voting systems and political systems and all these other things.

1:29:57So 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 contours say 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.

1:30:38It'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 change your voting system two or three times a century. But in a cryptocurrency space, you have 1.4 million cryptocurrencies that have been issued since 2010.

1:31:10And 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, will 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'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 in the standard and reset, use that as standard reset.

1:31:44It's so extraordinary and it's so magical because you're literally rewriting the fabric of society 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 onto the monopoly, if there's a more efficient system that was a different configuration, some jurisdiction, maybe Abu Dhabi with the ADGM, or a Singapore with a monetary authority will adopt it and you can't compete against somebody that's 30 % more efficient or 50 % more efficient.

1:32:28The 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.

1:33:01Thank you. Let's take a quick break. Sure.

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1:35:20All right, Charles, we're back from the break. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the crypto thing. 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 i don't understand how that works and so how would how would we vote on the blockchain okay so if you think about a vote a vote is kind of like a token you know so yeah 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.

1:36:00If 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 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?

1:36:33So 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 is 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, a very secure way to count fake people that don't exist because, you know, because I can always just register someone in the ballot. So the step one is how do you, what is your digital identity component and how do you get to know somebody is real and they're suitable for the election?

1:37:08Then 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 my shareholder votes are like this. And so if you own stock in 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?

1:37:43So in a lot of elections for shareholder votes, you can see who voted where. You know, this person voted against Elon Musk pay package for Tesla. This person voted yes. Okay. Others are anonymous ballots, meaning that when you vote, the outside world can't see it. But 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 a$100 bill if you vote this way.

1:38:18And 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? I mean, you can only vote for one thing, or does it allow you to split? You can vote for many things. And so that's rank 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. That's called quadratic voting. So you have all kinds of mechanism for that.

1:38:51So 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 timestamped, 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 timestamped, 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.

1:39:27Not 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. 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 JPMorgan 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?

1:40:01So with a system that's conclusively accountable, any user of 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.

1:40:37So 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.

1:41:11So 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.

1:41:44And there are 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. Now, 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, 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.

1:42:16You 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 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. 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, we can't print 5 ,000 people on the ballot.

1:42:56It'd be prohibitively expensive to print like 40 pages times 5 million, something like that. It doesn't make sense. So in your tradeoff profile - Could you just write in a name? You could. Not have anybody on a ballot. But that's always available in all ballots, right? There's the write-in spot 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 Schwarzenegger as his last name? Who's going to spell that right? And all these things. So it's more a person has to do - That would be your job as the candidate to make sure that that is addressed.

1:43:34Yeah, you give a stamp, right? Here's the Schwarzenegger stamp. In fact, they used to do that. 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 were on it. 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.

1:44:04And they'd also bribe people too. They'd be like, hey, you want a drink? You have to take this and put it in the box if I give you a beer. Okay. It's like all kinds of dirty stuff happens in elections. So 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 buying the vote.

1:44:36They 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.

1:45:02And 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.

1:45:38Everybody 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, 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.

1:46:11So 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 curve crypto does, it's like the multi-decade reliability that you have. And then you can 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.

1:46:41by 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.

1:47:14You 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?

1:47:45Well, like Liquid Feedback was used by the Pirate Party over in Sweden. And a lot of countries do do rank choice voting and other things like that. And organizational design, people have come up with all kinds of cool, 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.

1:48:28Like back to India and cryptocurrencies, like why do they have the 1 % tax and why did they not open up for remittances even though it would be wonderful for them? because of 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 US government is bracing blockchain and currency 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.

1:48:58And 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. You talk about reputation behind the identity because identity has two major families of things. One is facts and the other is opinions. Facts are things like, I was born November 5th, 1987 in Maui, Hawaii. That's a fact that happened. It's either true or false. Or I attended this school or you're a Navy SEAL and you had certain BUDS class and all these things. Those are facts. Either they happened or not.

1:49:34Opinions are like, you were a good Navy SEAL versus a bad Navy SEAL, right? Everybody has an opinion on these things. I got a Team 6 guy on my security detail, and he thinks that certain prominent SEALs are overrated. He's like, every SEAL's got these opinions, right? And I won't say which ones, right? But you get the idea. Yeah. So opinions are always referential. So it's not just the opinion, but the opinion holder. So when they say, well, that guy who thinks that person's overrated, well, who is he? Oh, he was team six guy. I'd say, oh, okay. That's pretty credible. At least he's in the club.

1:50:12He's allowed to have that opinion. Just a fat dude at the bar, never done anything in his life. It's 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?

1:50:53Or, you know, do I trust you with my children? And what's interesting is you can have this weird paradox where you can be both completely unreliable and hyper-reliable at the same time. So I may trust you to be a special warfare guy and go in life and death missions and, you know, 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?

1:51:32So 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 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.

1:52:07So there's a part you show everybody, and 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, I can prove I'm over a threshold. It works with that as well. So this is a new identity primitive.

1:52:38And 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 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 the military. Like what if there's an inaccuracy on the DD 214 or something like that? It's like, well, I served here and I did this and this.

1:53:08Well, it didn't say that on the documents. Sorry, bro. It's like you were not an 18 Delta. And it's like, 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 all these different things, whether it be voting or money.

1:53:38In the money case, ID and money come together and we call that compliance. So I give you$100, no problem. I give you a million dollars. Who is Charles? Know your customer, anti-money lottery, anti-terrorism, these things. There's this wonderful book from Ron Saurot 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.

1:54:12And 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're giving money to this politician or I also know that 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 harm you with soft power.

1:54:55So 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 US 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. You know, they know special access program, this, that, the other. So they're literally the most trusted people that you can imagine.

1:55:28I mean, the government knows what their colon looks like at this point and they do the aficerial 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.

1:55:58The 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, you know, 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, you know, tradecraft and you have that. You have another did for your military life.

1:56:28You have another did for your personal life and for your professional life, et cetera, et cetera, your LinkedIn profile, as they did here. And then there's various public fields and all these things. And there's probability 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.

1:56:58So 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 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.

1:57:30And instead of it being decided by these four credit agencies and they give you a number and who the fuck 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 like a 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.

1:58:05And 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, Otherwise those actors can basically decide who gets to win, who gets to lose in society. So 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?

1:58:41And 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 this system and takes over.

1:59:09There'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... 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, Like, what is the statutory definition or the standard RFC for what is blockchain?

1:59:57And 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 like that. There's some processor standard. They point to that. Or milspec 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.

2:00:30So they want to do it and they understand philosophically there's a there there, but they don't have the 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. 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 in my company, over 10 ,000 citations.

2:01:09We said, we should write an academic paper. We thought, oh, that'd be really easy. We'll just have paper in two months. It was 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?

2:01:39Do 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 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. It 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 other standards bodies and say, how do you integrate this?

2:02:08And 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 the blockchain technology that has a backdoor in it or has an operator 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.

2:02:42Now, that said, there've been plenty of pilots that have been run and DARPA's done stuff and DOD's done stuff and various states are doing things like the state of Wyoming's 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.

2:03:16The challenge again, though, is that the bureaucracy, it 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 as 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. El Salvador was living on a different planet.

2:03:57I 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. So, 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.

2:04:38So 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 Damian, who was like the political advisor to Bukele. And so I was friends with Marty and Marty's like, you got to talk to Damian. So I talked to Damian. He's like, you should really meet Bukele, meet the president. I'm 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.

2:05:15And he looked like Bukele. And we're like, okay, I think we're talking to Bukele. 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 Bukele and we ended up spending like four hours at the presidential palace. And it was like this long non-secretist conversation about various things. He was like Latin American Gaddafi. It was crazy. And I was like, okay, well, how are you going to actually implement it? We're just going to do it. We're just going to figure it out. And we have six months, let's do it.

2:05:48Okay. 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, you're like, what are the compliance guidelines for adopting cryptocurrency here? It's like, well, we don't have any of many. I said, 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 great.

2:06:15But the trippiest thing is they wanted to do like this Bitcoin mine, you know, was using geothermal because I guess they got volcanoes there. And so they had this harebrained 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 Dr. Strangelove scene. It was so crazy. He looked like Dr. Octopus from Spider-Man 2. And he talked like this, hello, Charles, the power of magma will be the destiny of El Salvador.

2:06:49And 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's just one meeting after another meeting of all this stuff. Then we're like, okay, okay, The US government's got to know what's going on. So let's go talk to the State Department. And of course, Biden, he never found something he couldn't fuck up. So the prior ambassador was this great guy that Bukele really liked. They had a wonderful relationship together. They'd hang out, watch movies together at 1 o 'clock in the morning.

2:07:20So the first thing Biden did is fire that ambassador and put a new person in and say, the policy of the US has now regime change. So Bukele went from, hey, we like the US 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 Gump, for no particular reason, they shot that man. So anyway, we meet the US ambassador there, the attache, or the hell she was. And 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.

2:07:50So 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 was 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.

2:08:19But 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. We tried to say, hey, is there any way we could work together on this? Because there's millions of El Salvadorans and 25 % of the populations in the US, they're kind of under your jurisdiction. Half their economy relies on remittances from the United States. Whatever they do in El Salvador, the United States is going to have to have an opinion on that.

2:08:52We have to get the regulation to work. Like Bukele, for example, wanted 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. 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.

2:09:28So 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 nerds trade online and who knows.

2:10:08to, 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, Buckele'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 get crushed by the IMF or these other people, these big transnational bodies that came in. Because the IMF was always a boogeyman.

2:10:42I remember meeting the Prime Minister of Georgia, it's a country in Eastern Europe. And we talked about the digital lorry as a stable coin. And he said, well, we tried, but the IMF came in and said, we'll pull all your funding, 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 Bukele is Bukele. 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 litany of other things.

2:11:18So 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.

2:11:55Any place the dollar touched, any place America touched, you adopted not just America stuff, 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 uh 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.

2:13:00You 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 so it's, 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 - This initiated Brexit. Yeah. Well, Brexit was a component of that because that was the European system in the UK and 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.

2:13:37But 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, basically you're not in charge. It's like Bain, 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.

2:14:13It'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 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.

2:14:45Because 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.

2:15:31So 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. Give them 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.

2:16:02I was in Abu Dhabi and I was sitting eating dinner. And then suddenly I 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 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, the fattest blacklist over having Russian money in Abu Dhabi.

2:16:34And 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 can still find it on Twitter. Twitter, you can see the, because it was all big news item of Putin coming to Abu Dhabi and these types of things. Because they did the calculation and they told the treasury secretary this. They say, if I add up China, Russia, Middle East, and Africa, that's twice the size of Europe and 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.

2:17:10So if we're going to pick a side, we're going to pick that side. You understand that? And then they realized 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 reason why cryptocurrencies are so appealing, because it's a reset. How close are we to lose in that system? Well, it depends on a variety of factors.

2:17:43is if a world war happens, it's a reset, and whoever wins gets the new system. So China, US, if that breaks out, 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 US 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 US military, Medicare, Social Security, and education combined on interest on the debt.

2:18:23It's a very bad situation to be in. And the thing is that we don't feel real interest rates in 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 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 and 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.

2:19:02So 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.

2:19:37Some 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 US 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 four and a half trillion in debt. Now we're at 37 trillion in debt. That wasn't a long time ago when you think about that. And so things can change very quickly in a very negative direction or in a very positive direction.

2:20:14But 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 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.

2:20:46So the real reset is the trust reset. How do you get the 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 domain, 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?

2:21:16No, it's not sensible. Is it sensible that we spend two to four times as much money on healthcare as our peers, but we have a lower quality for that? No. No. Is it sensible that, you know, Social Security is basically a Ponzi scheme? You're going to pay on 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.

2:21:47Notice we didn't say universal healthcare 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 It begins with a world war against emerging powers.

2:22:21So we'll see what happens. But, you know, it's a difficult time. Dave Portnoy here. The wait is over. Football is here and so is DraftKings. DraftKings is now live in all 50 states. One app, every sport nationwide. New DraftKings customers. Sign up with code SPOTIFY. Spend five bucks to get$200 in rewards within 21 days. Includes all markets. That's code SPOTIFY in partnership with DraftKings. DraftKings, the crown is yours. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER, 1-800-MY-RESET. Connecticut, call 888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org. On behalf of Boothill Casino in Kansas, FedTax pass-through may apply in Illinois.

2:23:0221 and over, void in Canada. Bet with DraftKings Sportsbook to get bonus bets that expire in seven days or trade with DraftKings Predictions to get predictions dollars that expire in one year. Event contract trading involves risk of loss. Predictions offer void in New York. Non-withdrawable rewards issued as$50 click to claim every seven days for 21 days. Terms at dkng.co slash offer. Limited time offer. Nationwide based on sportsbook predictions and free-to-play sports contest availability. Varies by state. The other thing that really causes some complication is that we have too many exponential technologies.

2:23:31So 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.

2:24:14And 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 prevented the world from nuclear Armageddon just by themselves. And in both cases, they were harshly punished by the Soviet system, which is just ironic.

2:24:49But 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.

2:25:20It'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 has a few thousand people. There's 800 million users for OpenAI. So a few thousand people translate to a scale of 800 million.

2:25:56So our governance systems were not designed for this and the world order was not designed 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.

2:26:34because 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.

2:27:03That'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 dystopian Klaus Schwab 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 You can build a decentralized AI with blockchain.

2:27:33You can have the inference, like Bitcoin is held up with a supercomputer, right? Well, you can 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 guard 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.

2:28:04And that's the magic of what we do. So it's fun because just like when I was studying Rob Paul 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. How is El Salvador dealing with the volatility of Bitcoin? Well, that's a red herring.

2:28:39Oh, 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.

2:29:21You 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 fall, so you have an exit, and you stay within that balance. 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 risk? 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.

2:29:55If 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. 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.

2:30:31The 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 And sure, let's move capital around. Let's 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 I pay him X amount of dollars for that downside risk.

2:31:08And, 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 a business if the price of jet fuel goes way up. Like, what if a war breaks out? Then suddenly United and Delta and all these other guys, they go from profitable companies to in the red all the time. So they need to lock in that price of fuel for as long as they can.

2:31:45So 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 these are the mechanisms. But more broadly, it's different boats for different floats. So it's 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, you're doing some state of art amazing things, but they're not valuable yet. You have the patents, you have all these other things.

2:32:25So 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've 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 this and this and this and this. And you see, all of a sudden you just get like predatory userist rates. And that's their lived experience.

2:32:53Well, 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.

2:33:28So you'll go and borrow like 100 bucks, have to pay 30 days, 185 back. It's just, it's so usurious. 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. 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%.

2:34:06So 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 was deeply personal to him because of his life history.

2:34:45And 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 the IP, and they're like cartels. And they set the market. So they set the prices. But what if you can just go sell part of it to your fans? They like you. You have a direct relationship with them. Maybe you get a 5 or 10x over that. It's like an IPO of you as a person. And the minute you do that, that cartel breaks up. Those middlemen get disintermediated.

2:35:19And then every other artist can do that. Taylor Swift can do it or Country Star can do it. Garth Brooks can sell his IP or whatever. So the artist now can monetize the direct relationship that they have with the exact same concept as running a smart contract on Cardano or an 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.

2:35:56It's the exact same thing. It's the exact same concept. How was it co-founding Ethereum? That one was tough. People ask me all the time because I run a venture capital firm and I advise young entrepreneurs all the time. 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, all from different weeks 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?

2:36:34And there's others. And we all had radically different ideas and philosophies. And we were unified on this idea that we want a programmability with a 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.

2:37:03But then when you have programmability, you have a programming language. 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 Vitalik was the primary founder. He came up with the initial idea. So ultimately he had to make a decision like to, we call it the crypto Google or crypto Mozilla decision.

2:37:39So the crypto Google is like be a for profit entity that builds not for profits, 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. 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 Shatrit got pushed out. And Anthony DiOrio got pushed out and created his own company called Decentral.

2:38:13I 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 eights, 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.

2:38:45systems. 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 it 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.

2:39:18And 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 and made Google the Google it is today.

2:39:50Larry wasn't sitting on his thumbs. 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, I want to do big things. So he restructured Google and created Alphabet. 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. They now have a professional CEO at Google, Sander Pichai. That's the nature of things. You have to know yourself, and you have to know that.

2:40:24Ethereum was very stressful because we were all very young. I think I was 25 or 26 at the time, and we knew we had a winner. You look at it and you say, this is going to be big. It's going to be a massive thing where 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. It'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 crazy. So we did our best to interpret the alien runes and the alien technology.

2:40:58And I was kicked out early and for the best 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 just one guy left and he's kind of doing his thing. What is the concept of Ethereum? Oh, 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. Okay. So you can turn them into a voting system or this thing or that thing.

2:41:32So 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 the ledger, like Digicash, David Chalm's business in the 90s is an example of that. Then Bitcoin comes around. You don't need a single entity. You have a decentralized ledger, but it's simple.

2:42:06It 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. There'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.

2:42:40They'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 wifi moment. It doesn't talk to other stuff. And also you can't govern it. 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?

2:43:13Well, 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 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.

2:43:49The scalability thing is very bad in cryptocurrencies. It's one of those cake and eat it too things. So 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 back end with billions of users and Yoda bytes of data in that system.

2:44:25How 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.

2:45:01You 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.

2:45:30So if it's an unpopular thing, like, I don't know, Pee Wee's Playhouse or some shit like that, nobody's watching it. It takes a really long time to download. But it's Game of or something, especially the early seasons that were good, then you get that quickly 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. They're trying to figure out ways to do that, to upgrade to the next generation.

2:46:02The third generation does that, scalability, interoperability, and governance, and they have those things. And they're actually creating a fourth generation now because 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 in 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 where we spend our money is probably not should be public.

2:46:34We 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 and governments in.

2:47:10And 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 had to figure out how to start something.

2:47:46And so there's these guys in Japan who were like, well, we still like you and we still want you. So why don't 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 started 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. 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.

2:48:21We raised $72 million in Japan. At the time, it was the largest ICO that was ever done. Theory 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 these things. Wow. So it was a pretty wild ride. And this is crypto circa 2015. So it was still a very colorful time. There were a lot of 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 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 um but uh but but but anyway like there's like those amazing stories and just just meet all these just super crazy people and then also there was all these adjacent industries to crypto that were kind of shady.

2:49:24Like 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 money, but yeah, there's a lot of it. So there was all these conundrums of 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.

2:49:58And then when the Chinese government cracked down on it, they moved to Singapore. So then you 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 at scale as an entrepreneur.

2:50:29It exists in academia, but nobody thought it was a valid business strategy to go and 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. And they're like, why? And I said, 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. All these cryptocurrencies would launch with brilliant ideas, and they worked until they didn't.

2:50:59EOS worked until it didn't. Luna worked until it didn't. And the falls got worse and worse every time. So, you know, fail, a few hundred million dollars would be lost. And they fail, and it's like$4 billion. Luna, fail,$40 billion get lost. you know so it was 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 that we'll just pretend like the rest of the world doesn't exist we'll be on the cardano island in japan and we'll just go and build this thing that's designed to run forever and never fail and so we 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 down.

2:51:48And so I was really proud of that. Now, we had to do a lot of crazy shit to make that happen. We use these weird programming languages like Haskell that maybe 50 guys in the whole fucking world actually use and care about. 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 and 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 is 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 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.

2:52:40And it's been a journey. 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 the other day, and I said, I hit 75. So I'm almost at 100. Wow. And 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.

2:53:19Like 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, and he comes up to me and talks to my translator. And I said, what's the issue? He said, 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 goddamn goby 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's that's fun but 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 talk let's switch it up a little bit let's talk about the what was it you were you were looking for solar all the alien stuff yeah let's talk about the alien stuff oh god people love aliens All right.

2:54:25So I watched Avi Loeb on Joe Rogan. He was talking about Muimua, which is like this cigar-shaped alien vessel thingy-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, I'm a big fan, and 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.

2:55:09And 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 find it. He's like, you want to be part of it? I'm like, do I? Fucking sea salvage operation off the coast of Papua New Guinea. This is going to be interesting.

2:55:37All right. So it was like a heist movie. We had 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. He found Russian nuclear subs and all these other things. And he fought in Vietnam as a captain in Laos and all these other things. So you know he's just seen some horrible shit his entire life. He 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 a famous submarine diver. And he was good friends with James Cameron.

2:56:14And he got into 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 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 and 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.

2:56:48And basically, we had it fall behind the ship and sink all the way to the seafloor 6 ,000 feet down. And then we dragged it. It's kind of like space balls when they're combing the desert. They're out there. So you just drag the sled behind the ship for eight hours. And 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 on the ship. And because of the schedule, you had a polyphasic sleep schedule.

2:57:22We were running 24 hours a day to save money. Nobody was sleeping properly. And it was very high stress. And things kept breaking. And things kept going wrong. And like the experienced sailors like Art, he would be a 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? 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 instead in the common areas. And then, oh God, we nearly killed him because he kept turning off the air conditioner.

2:58:03It 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, which is the only place we can hang out on the ship, anytime he was wearing his laptop, he would turn off the AC and it would get just unbearably hot inside the area. So we'd go and turn it back on, then he would turn it off, turn it back on, then he would turn it off. And like the first few days, ha 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?

2:58:37But 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 spherules 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.

2:59:16And 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 exosolar thing ever recovered from the seafloor.

2:59:47So I was really proud of that. You know, we helped design the 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 to gold pan and I used to do a 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.

3:00:17It'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 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 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 gonna break with some snapback and kill somebody we should probably not do that so 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 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 you know and we never told obvi this but my security detail and I always said, look, if we actually find something alien, 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.

3:01:36And only later did we tell Avi that we had it. We called it the touchdown protocol. And these were 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.

3:02:14Certainly the tapes are compelling. You know, 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've got to think about what would they do. They would send robots, 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 would use them to observe things of significance.

3:02:49So observe nuclear weapons, observe the great powers, observe events, and then there would be some period that you would transmit information back. So it makes sense from a common sense framework that 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. 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, you know, how they operate and what they do.

3:03:27So 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 as 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.

3:04:05Why would they be doing that? Who knows? It's like tradecraft, right? You pay attention to the left hand while the right hand is sliding in your back pocket. So you always do things in a certain way, in a certain structure based upon what your goals are. You know, they could have killed bin Laden with a JDAM and they'd just taken DNA samples. Instead, they had a daring raid. You know, it was a Neptune spear and they sent special forces in and a very, very dangerous mission that happened to be a time to happen exactly when Obama was at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, when all of the press happened to be in Washington, D.C.

3:04:43And 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, you know? And so 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?

3:05:16What 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.

3:05:48And 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 entangling. Talking 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 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 know, you're 90 % of the way there.

3:06:30We'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 in 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 figure out anti-gravity, which case propulsion works totally different. Maybe they figure 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 against our near powers?

3:07:02Or 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. So it was like, did somebody lose a nuke and they're flying him at night to look for background radiation? I mean, there's like dirty bomb rumors and all this other stuff. And everybody had an opinion about it. And who the hell knows what the real story was? So you see stuff like that.

3:07:35Where 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, we have that, then that's meaningful because now we can use that. We can analyze that. We can backward and 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.

3:08:16It'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 commas. And so if 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.

3:08:48We're not imagining it because I never talked to him beforehand, so why did he see the same thing I saw, the whole DMTL 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.

3:09:21Like, 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.

3:09:53And they did round after round after round, and it's just incredible to see these things. And as soon as I saw it, I called Trent, and I said, Jeff, what the hell's 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 word orch theory the this idea that these micro tribules in the brain are like a quantum computer and 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.

3:10:59You 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 James Randys get 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.

3:11:31It's basically faster than light. So there's a great books, like one is Irreducible from Federico Fagin. 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.

3:12:04I invested in this company called Immortal, and they built these amazing chambers that are multimodal. It's 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 vibroacoustic and it's got molecular hydrogen and it's got, you know, sonic, all this cool stuff. And 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 this, all this other stuff.

3:12:40And 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.

3:13:17If 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 could do all kinds of crazy things. It's so out there. What's the name of this company? Immortal, A-M-M-O-R-T-A-L. And it's a lifestyle device right now, but there's a lot of medical use cases for these things for recovery and things because you have red light therapy with with vibroacoustics and all these other things so anyway it just it's really cool to see what you can do with this technology because it's it's currently one lens but you know 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'd love to have a conversation yeah they're super cool dudes and uh and and it since they launched it they're selling it to everybody like professional sports teams are buying amazing i bought three of them just because I wanted one in my clinic.

3:14:10I 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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3:16:07All 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 Kenemy last year, and that was a wild trip. I'd always been fascinated with psychedelics, and I have a lot because I went to school C. Boulder. Come on, it's like a big party school. Everybody's done something somewhere at some point. But I came from a medical family and came from a traditional medical family. So there was always kind of a dreary view on psychedelics.

3:16:44Oh, well, these psychedelics do bad things or things like that. Or, you know, they're 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.

3:17:18So 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, you know, DMT, or they take, you know, psilocybin or mescaline, and then they come back. And if they have the right set and setting, it really changes them. So after I started noticing that. I read Michael Pullen's book, 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.

3:17:50So 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 take ayahuasca or something because I said, well, I have this company.

3:18:24I 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 within four of the five days.

3:18:53And it was a wild trip. You know, you're like in this pod. And, 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.

3:19:29You 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 the 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.

3:20:04I 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 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.

3:20:47It 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. It was just a straight adventure? It was a 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 biochemically what happens in the brain and these types of things.

3:21:23And I meditate with EEG-assisted meditation. So 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 3 drug, so it's legal. And any doctor could prescribe it and use it. A lot of nurse practitioners use it.

3:22:00And 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. I said, 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?

3:22:34But more generally, 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 firsthand 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.

3:23:10So 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 stuff. 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 that was 5-MeO-DMT. Yeah. That the time. Time expansion experience. Time expansion, and that this guy had smoked the 5-MeO DMT, had experienced this whole other life with a different wife, kids, all these different things.

3:23:58And it lasted, yeah, they said 10, 15 minutes maybe. Right. And he woke up and still to this day, he misses the entire lifespan that he had experienced within a matter of minutes. Right. Which is nuts. It's like that Captain Picard thing with the inner light in Star Trek The Next Generation where the probe hits him and then he lives another person's life in 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.

3:24:35I think it was Steven Tyler or Taylor or something. I forget his name. He's a psychologist because he was so fast, and he got in a traffic accident. And 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, 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.

3:25:09But then also they expand time. So a short period becomes a very long period. And you tend to wonder, OK, 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 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?

3:25:47I 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 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 is 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?

3:26:29So there's real value to these types of things and all these, or first responders, like a police officer trying to make a snap decision, do I use lethal force or not? You know, is this person a threat or not? And almost all these wrongful 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.

3:27:05So 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 adhesive 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 we're experiencing this we're experiencing the same baseline time because it's also disassociative and so you lose uh 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 and we're experiencing the same time so are you saying that I don't know how to put this.

3:28:11Are 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

3:28:23use 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 a one and a half seconds or something like that.

3:29:04But it was a big deal because your 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 that 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.

3:29:35It'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 perceived time and then objectively speaking, only a small window of things. But they're like, dude, I experienced it. I was there. Every day I was getting up and driving to work at Walmart. I was going to my kid's graduation. I was doing things. It was a lot of time. 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 tapping into?

3:30:10Well, I just think, because again, it's a clock speed. 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.

3:30:45And from an evolutionary view point, 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 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 seven, it'd kill you.

3:31:19It'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. But 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 fascinating thing to me. And I wish I had more time to 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.

3:31:58And I said, yeah, that does exist, that does happen. 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 the bathroom and 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, 10 years old when that occurred.

3:32:36So 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 different reasons. 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 just you and like, I am supreme. You know, 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.

3:33:13Well, 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'd 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.

3:33:46You'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.

3:34:22Because 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 was that just a meat suit that you were wearing? And you can go 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.

3:34:55And they basically shed the skin and they start living kind of a more ephemeral world because in 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.

3:35:38And they do in Tibet, darkness retreats for more than 40 days. They actually go into a dark cave 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 a dilution 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.

3:36:14We'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. you know? But on the other hand, if you don't mind these things, then none of this around you controls you. You know, if 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.

3:36:51But 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 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. There are other things that Buddhists do.

3:37:27I love it when they do these things because they worship impermeants. Do you know what a sand mandala is? This bothers the hell out of me. The mere existence of this bothers me. It 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.

3:38:02It'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, sweep, sweep. They're like, what are you doing? Stop it. It's a work of art, goddammit. And the whole purpose of Ascend 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 some wisdom there. And we in the Western world, we were not terribly comfortable with that because everything we do is trying to like preserve and make immortality.

3:38:46Ernest 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, his own death. That's pretty wild when you think about it. What do you think happens when we die?

3:39:21That's a good question. I think the more meaningful question is, does it really matter? 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. But you're not at chapter two. You're in chapter one. Read that chapter and enjoy that chapter. That's there. Chapter two, it's somebody else's problem. You'll cross that bridge when you get to it.

3:39:59Because 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 a 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.

3:40:37And 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 and he always bragged about like how healthy 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 like what do you do to enjoy reading the chapter you know and then the rest will become evident um the other thing you get fascinated with things though and we're talking about bioluminescence plants, the dire wolf, cryptocurrency.

3:41:30I 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 Gerdel.

3:42:05You know, it's like the dark secret. It's called Gerdel'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.

3:42:34So 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 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.

3:43:16So all these mathematicians in the 19th century, they absolutely believe 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 was this paranoid schizophrenic graduate student named Kurt Gödel.

3:43:46And 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, OK, 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 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.

3:44:25So 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.

3:45:02So why is this related to death and consciousness and things like that. What we have just shown in mathematics is that there exist things outside of a formal system of provability. And no matter how smart you are, 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.

3:45:39We don't sense it and 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 it. It's 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?

3:46:28The 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 us 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, that you can't really get there. There's even this ship of Theseus 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.

3:47:08So 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, and change the doors and 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.

3:47:44It's the same with Star Trek, where they have the teleporters, the transporters. Are you really moving from point A to point B and you're being reassembled or you're 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.

3:48:20So 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've been like, well, 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?

3:48:55You 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 are 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 a 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.

3:49:36So 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 the pilot to meet soon. 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.

3:50:11And 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 there's a reincarnation thing, I'm going to end up in the same line with St. Peter. 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.

3:50:48So disbelief in God is an infinite sin, thus deserves infinite punishment. It's like, oh, screw you, Thuma 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.

3:51:26So 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 as immaterial, I get to know that it changed things for everybody. It's like serving in the agency and it's like no one really gets to know you're supposed to be secret but if you do something great you may have saved a thousand lives or ten thousand lives or a hundred thousand 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 immortality thing doesn't mean anything the afterlife doesn't mean anything.

3:52:27So that's why I think of it that way. Otherwise, I just go crazy. You know, 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 bukkake of philosophy. It's just, it's impossible to get anywhere. And then you just get so glum because you're like, why does it matter? There's no meaning, there's no purpose and things. One thing I know for certainty is humans need meaning.

3:53:01If 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 would ordinarily wouldn't do, or you end up going to dark places that you really can't come back from.

3:53:46Back to your psychedelic journey where 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. I never connected that because 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 is - You never thought about that until this 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 old set not or you know barbarian you know like the wolf raiders so who knows it could be some connection to familial blood it could be a premonition of the dire wolf it could be just that i like dogs You know, who the hell knows?

3:54:46I got five dogs, you know, 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. Two months later, yeah, I found 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.

3:55:10Let's talk about the dire wolf. Yes, sir. 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 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, I would talk and I'd go down to either Texas and things like that. And I 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.

3:55:45But we always knew that the woolly mammoth was kind of a horizontal 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, it 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 was from a very well-understood genome. And dogs are super well-understood. We understand everything about their DNA because we selectively breed them.

3:56:22And 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 direwolf 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 direwolf. And then it's a direwolf. And really the teth is morphological. So you say, okay, if I let it go 10 ,000 years ago, would it go find a direwolf pack and would they accept it as a direwolf?

3:56:58And if it bred with them, would they have children? If that's the case, it's a direwolf. And, you know, there's all these internet, you know, actually, it's, you know, a modified gray wolf. Fuck you. Dude, 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 genetically engineered 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.

3:57:36You 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.

3:58:07And 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.

3:58:37And 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 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.

3:59:05And 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, 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, representation. 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.

3:59:45So, for example, look at the Great Barrier Reef. You know, 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.

4:00:24Coral 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, and 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, we broke it, we bought it. And so we are masters of the world and it's ours to do with as we please.

4:01:01And 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.

4:01:33It 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 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.

4:02:08Microplastics 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.

4:02:46If we made an organism that eats microplastics? Yeah, we've made organisms that do it. There's bacteria that now eat plastics, you know, and pretty much anything you want to do, you can do. In fact, they've even developed an STD for mosquitoes to basically kill them so that they don't spread malaria. So they're right now working on this fungal STD and they're just, 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 with each other and it spreads like a parasite and it's eradicating big piles of mosquitoes.

4:03:18Why? Because they spread malaria. They've killed hundreds of millions of people because they've 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 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.

4:03:56The 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 conversations like, okay, so should we eradicate the mosquitoes with 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 this thing? Is it irreversible? Meaning if we do it, we can't fix it. Procedural inevitability.

4:04:31Is it reversible but expensive and costly? And sadly, we don't have governance structures that do these types of things. We don't, the Uroquois 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.

4:05:04But 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. This is happening. Well, no, 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.

4:05:41So 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 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 would make different decisions based upon these things.

4:06:17What'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 I'm making a website or I'm making black rifle coffee or something like that. It's so far removed from that standard thing. You're literally talking about like, hey, what type of animal should we make today?

4:06:56Would you like a turducken? Would you like your jackalope? You could do it if you really wanted to. And I even thought about, if we made a unicorn, would that be like a narwhal with the horn? Or is it more like a rhino? Is it a horn? Is it more like a fingernail that just got really big? How would you do that? 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 could do all kinds of crazy stuff with these animals. Should you do it?

4:07:30Who gets to say no? When do they get to say no? What conditions do they get to say 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 fucking conversations again and again. Meanwhile, the world is moving at this breakneck blinding speed and we're getting 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. And also social structures.

4:08:08They're due for an upgrade.

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4:09:11Thank you. Let's get back to the show.

4:09:18You 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. You had briefly brought up China's experimentation program where they're trying to build a super soldier. Yeah. Well, we are, too. There's a DARPA program for it. these things so it's like it's everybody wants a super soldier right and you make them learn faster you 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 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 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.

4:10:17But militaries 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. It 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.

4:10:54So, you know, 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, 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. They're all Dr. Mengele's and things. It's because their incentive reference is fundamentally different than what's good for the commons.

4:11:28And whenever you see a mismatch there between those two in any system, financial systems, education systems, weapon 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 to pay attention. That'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 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.

4:12:09So 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's 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.

4:12:44The 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 NSFAUP and the acceptable use policy there forbade e-commerce on the internet, could sell things on the internet.

4:13:14Think about that. Then we also had this window of time where the Department of Justice was trying to push so that SSL had a backdoor in it and the US government could decrypt any website, any web traffic. Just everybody in the world would have to have a backdoor right there. That's just horrible to really think about the consequences of that. But luckily we sidestepped it. And 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.

4:13:46Even 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.

4:14:23if 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. 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.

4:14:53But 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, 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.

4:15:33And 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, Now though, we've lost the plot in 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.

4:16:10Let's say it was engineered in a lab. All these people died the whole world shut down. How many people work for dr. She 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 it swings here causes a tsunami and Japan It's 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 Like, somebody's going to do that somewhere. And there's a lot of crazy people out there that are deranged, and they might be really angry and just decide that they need to separate the wheat from the chaff and eradicate all of humanity, and they're the chosen survivors and things like that.

4:16:57It doesn't take a lot to get that Jim Jones-iness 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 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?

4:17:28And 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. 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.

4:18:07But 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.

4:18:42Let's move into the bullet ants. Ah. 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 your rite of passage has a high probability of killing you, it's not a really good rite of passage.

4:19:21The 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.

4:19:56They're like this fucking big. I think you saw the video and they're like, they're huge. And they're terrified 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 myrmecologist, like an entomologist that studies ants. And I said, like, tell me about this neural toxin. And they're like, well, it's really painful. It's like, like, 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.

4:20:29It'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 Sateri Mawe tribe, first we had to send an advance out there, and we sent these two guys down. 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 like, let's go Ricky Ranger. But anyway, that was great. But anyway, they built rapport with the tribe and the tribes like, okay, we kind of like you guys.

4:21:10Yeah, right. All right, you can do the ritual. So they said, come by and 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 go collect the ants. And so first you go and collect the ants, you see all these ants are climbing.

4:21:39And actually the way you collect them, it's not really safe. 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 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.

4:22:11So 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, and getting them in there. 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. So you feel that pain. It's like, fuck. 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.

4:22:42They're like, no, no, no, let's go eat lunch. We've got some fish for you. You guys are going to like this. I'm like, all right, jungle parasites are great. Let's do it. So we go, we go and we get, 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.

4:23:12And we're just like, oh, this is horrible. I just want to get this over with. And like, Like, well, you could leave at any time if you want. Like, no, I came to the Amazon, goddammit. We're going to do the fucking ads. So it's called the Tucundera 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 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.

4:23:44And then they start dancing. And then after they dance, they say, all right, you ready? 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. It's like a stinging machine. Both ants. So two sewing machines going like multiple needles. you know and it's just like fuck so i knew the internet was going to watch because we recorded it so i was like i gotta be a stoic motherfucker for this so so i was if you see the video i'm all like yeah but that uh that 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 shakti boards these nail boards uh 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 nail boards.

4:24:45And 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 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 was like, okay, I'm going to do the auto hypnosis. I'll stand on the nail boards.

4:25:16I'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 hard. Then I'll go to the juicy. And I did for a whole year, like every day, you know, at lunchtime, I go and stand on the nail boards 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, it's not bad. This is good. This is good. Here's the problem.

4:25:45It's a neural toxin. It's just 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 with these guys, like Rangers, 18 Deltas, all this stuff.

4:26:30I'm just looking at them. They're looking at me and 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. The first six hours, it just, because the other fucked up thing is it doesn't stop. 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. It just keeps building and building and building and building. And it took six hours for it to reach its peak.

4:27:05Damn. And we had a PJ with us. And he was also a PA. So after he got out of a PA, he became a PA. And so he was kind of like 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, I was 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.

4:27:40It took 24 hours for the whole fucking day. Jeez. We're off. But here's the craziest part. The next day I 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 the hand. No kidding. Yeah, yeah. 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. 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 like a rite of passage.

4:28:11So 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 it was this huge sense of accomplishment. Because 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 tearing my way at Warriors now. It's like, yeah, we're steering my way worse 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?

4:28:42And 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? 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?

4:29:11Yeah, I think that's a good idea. Let's do this. And we're like, you can't modify them. It's just 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 of this year. I realized it was that recent. Yeah. 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 had to go. I got to go to the Amazon and do a thing.

4:29:42Then I went down to the Amazon. Then as soon as I was done, I came back, and I was at another conference speaking. And I was like, all right, I got to do a thing. I think I went to Consensus 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 clinic. 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.

4:30:17And 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 manage the decline. It'll get a little worse every day, but slightly less worse every day.

4:30:56But 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, 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.

4:31:28So 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 healthcare, integrated healthcare, 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.

4:32:03And we have 40 providers. We have all the ologies. You know, you 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 treatments, but cures.

4:32:39So 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 know, from other places, but those are the big ones to get them from. And we take your fat with liposuction, and then we culture expand it, we grow them, and then we re-inject them.

4:33:20And 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 silence 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-Face and burned off half his face.

4:33:50So they treated him. They 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.

4:34:23And 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.

4:35:00Mess with the electron 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.

4:35:35And 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 solved your primary complaint. What if I can use stem cells and 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-tesal MRI with AI upscaling, is we can use speotagging.

4:36:05And that means the super paramagnetic oxide. So you put these tiny nanoparticles of iron inside the stem cells, then you inject them. And when you take an MRI, 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 do 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 it will light up like a Christmas tree there.

4:36:39Or maybe your liver, because you have cirrhosis from 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, you know, 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, get 40 concussions, you know, and they can't remember their own damn name at 50.

4:37:15It'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.

4:37:50That'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. 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.

4:38:26A lot of people don't know that. Turtopsis dhorny 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 shit. Yeah. There's shit in nature. There's even this crazy guy named Shin Kubota who's over in 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?

4:38:56What is it doing to be immortal? And he's chasing that immortality call. 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-waddles, 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'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.

4:39:32And 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 stage one. Then stage two is to get really good at the electron 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 liver or something like that. You can just grow these things and then you can transplant them in.

4:40:06So 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 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 a brain.

4:40:38You 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 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.

4:41:11coli to do that. And they actually make pig have your kidneys or 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, you know, 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, you know, other things like that.

4:41:41And then stage three is the gene engineering. And there, 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.

4:42:19They 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 soluble, kind of like vitamin C, where you just pee it out, allotonin. So what if I made a plasmid that made uricase? then I can inject it to a person who has gout.

4:42:51And 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've 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 circles using it for folistatin 344, which is this chemical that basically allows you to build muscle.

4:43:28It turns off muscle inhibition. So if you see like pigs with it or cows with it, you can Google like muscle pig. And you see like this picture is just fucking jacked up pig. It's just like a damn beast. And so they actually, that's their first product is the muscle pig plasmid. So you inject the person with folistatin and they just start building muscle. crazy with it. And what's cool is the plasmids only last like a year or two and you can turn them off. You're using antibiotics. So they take it, 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.

4:44:02So 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.

4:44:31You 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 atia thinks about life you know he he says hey you you should think about the proximal decade of your life, the last 10 years.

4:45:09And you should say, okay, what do you wanna do in the last 10 years of your life? You wanna be able to walk by yourself without a walker? You wanna be able to swim for half a mile? You wanna be able to feed yourself and close yourself? You wanna 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? 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?

4:45:39And 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, maybe I'll give you a little bit of help because not everybody's Ned Flanders and they're gonna fucking do everything right. Sometimes we like our hard whiskey and fast women and 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.

4:46:12You know, we're 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.

4:46:43And 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, you know, these types of things. So it's super exciting, you know, to be able to start that. And that's going to be probably my legacy company.

4:47:11It'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 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 you know 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.

4:47:50Wow. You have got a lot going on. Yeah. You got a lot going on. How do you, I mean,

4:48:02all 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 in time, 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 to 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.

4:48:39But 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 solar field on mars if you wanted to right Why is he building a robotics company?

4:49:16Why does he have all these Tesla bots and these types of things? Well, he has all those Tesla bots because where'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.

4:49:45There'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 at Burning Man or something like that. And he's like, this makes so much sense. I'm so smart. And he'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 more time?

4:50:16The single most valuable thing you can invest in if you're young is a second brain, you know, 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, how do I put my knowledge somewhere, the things that I know and link them so that I can find them again with context.

4:50:48It'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? What was he doing with that donkey? What the fuck is this note about? I don't know. 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's linked to another thing and it's in there's 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 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 and then the next stage is is getting proper sleep because while you sleep memory formation is happening.

4:51:39And 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 sommelier 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.

4:52:12That'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 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. So here's my synthetic biology room.

4:52:46I'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 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.

4:53:20So there's a whole system for this called Zettelkasten, which was Lutman's system. There's a lovely book, How to Take Smart Notes, that talks about it. But there's thousands of profits in this personal productivity world. Nick Milo is one, and there's Guy Zoltz, who's a weird Bulgarian guy. But it's all the same roads to the same destination, which is you create a second brain, and you think into that. 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.

4:53:57And in many cases, that means doing nothing. You know, you're literally just gonna sit down and fucking veg out. And the problem with the type A personality is you think that's like a mortal sin, like you're sending 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'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.

4:54:31You 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 and like, oh, fuck you two. But that's recharge, right? And if I wrote down on a piece of paper, what did I accomplish today?

4:55:03It's like nothing, absolutely nothing. But that then enables me to get back into the other mode, which is the hyper ferocious and we're gone, gone, gone. 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.

4:55:36I think that I have a real shot of doing it using cryptocurrency technology. 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, 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. And you don't think it is, but God, it's so powerful. It's just, it's a dialogue with yourself. And you just go out there, you don't have to be goal-directed, just write stuff down.

4:56:12It could be a sentence, it could be a paragraph, it could be a fucking novella. Congratulations, you're gonna 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.

4:56:45And 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 writing. He's 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.

4:57:31And 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 billionaire today. And I, nobody knew who the hell I was 10 years ago. 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.

4:58:04But there's got, 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?

4:58:41It'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 as God, there's got to be something that's left over that's a screaming, burning why within you.

4:59:14And if you have meaning in your life, you have that. So then you can do anything at that point. And that's just a question, 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. 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're at Walmart, you're going out to your car. You can just leave that shopping cart and that parking space right next to your car.

4:59:53There'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. So 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 these days I'm going to fund a study where we're just going to use drones and go to Walmart after Walmart and go to all the broken neighborhoods and all the happy Pleasantville neighborhoods. And I'm going to see the ratio of shopping carts that have been returned versus not returned because it's an interesting thing.

5:00:27But I think there's some truth to all of that. It's like, it's those daily personal grind, you know, 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 to 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 wins, the meaning is like, who are you doing those things for?

5:00:56Well, Charles, this has been a fascinating conversation. And I 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. Direwolf. And I'll call him and be like, why are you? We got on Shawn Ryan. Come on. Have you ever interviewed Avi Loeb? I have. Okay. I have about what we just talked about. Okay, good. So you know the whole Avi Loeb 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.

5:01:34Shipmates are great. Let's see here. Avi would be really, really cool. If you ever want to go deep science, Terry Tao would be a lot of fun. Terry Tao. 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 they're 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 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.

5:02:17He's so insanely, he graduated from high school at 12. He got his PhD at Princeton 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, what is elegant to him? What's amazing to him? I, I love looking at the extremes in people and saying, you know, this person, you know, what's there? 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.

5:02:55And 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 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 a very original thinking, and they're iconoclastic 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 wanted to meet was Gregory Perlman, and he did the thing that no one's ever dreamed to do.

5:03:33So he saw 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 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, man, 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, wow, at that level would do that. And he doesn't take any interviews. He doesn't talk to any journalists.

5:04:02He'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 were totally different than any normal human being so and he's just a joyful guy you know you see him. 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 and 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.

5:04:49And 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 it's a consciousness. That's not something normally a physicist spends a lot of time on, right? But then 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. Yeah. 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.

5:05:30And thank you for being here. Thank you so much. It's been a lot of fun. Cheers.