#168 – Silvio Micali: Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Algorand, Bitcoin, and Ethereum

[0] The following is a conversation with Sylvia McCauley, a computer scientist at MIT, winner of the Touring Award, and one of the leading minds in the fields of cryptography, information security, game theory, and most recently, cryptocurrency, and the theoretical foundations of a fully decentralized, secure, and scalable blockchain and algorand, a company of cryptographers, engineers, and mathematicians that he founded in 2017.

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[3] As a side note, let me say that I will be having many conversations this year on the topic of cryptocurrency.

[4] I'm reading and thinking a lot on this topic.

[5] I just recently finished reading the Bitcoin Standard.

[6] a book I highly recommend.

[7] As always, with this podcast, I'm approaching it with an open mind, with compassion, with as little ego as possible, and yes, with love.

[8] I hope you go along with me on this journey, and don't judge me too harshly on any likely missteps.

[9] As usual, I will play devil's advocate.

[10] I will, on purpose, sometimes ask simple, even dumb questions, all to try and explore the space of ideas here with as much grace as I can muster.

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[21] It's funny, I had a conversation with Jonathan from MIT, a friend of mine, who I just discovered was an ultramarathon runner.

[22] And he talked about one of the mistakes he made is he really didn't ramp up slowly enough.

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[87] And now here's my conversation with Silvio McCauley.

[88] Let's start with the big and the basic question.

[89] What is a blockchain and why is it interesting?

[90] why is it fascinating, why is it powerful?

[91] All right.

[92] So a blockchain, think of it, is really a common database distributed.

[93] Think about it, is a ledger in which everybody can write an entry in a page.

[94] You can write, I can write, and everybody can read, and you have a guarantee that everybody has the same copy of the ledger that is in front of you.

[95] So whatever you see on page seven, anyone else sees on page seven.

[96] So what is extraordinary about this is this a common knowledge thing that I think is a really a first for humanity.

[97] I mean, if you look at communication, like right now you can communicate very quickly images, of thoughts, or photos, but do you have the certainty that whatever you have received has been received by everybody else?

[98] Not really.

[99] And so this is a common knowledge and the certainty that everybody can write, nobody has been prevented for writing whatever they want, nobody can erase, nobody can tear a page of a ledger, nobody can swap page, nobody can change anything, and that is immutable, common record is extremely powerful.

[100] And there's something fundamental that is decentralized about it.

[101] So at least in spirit, some degree, or against maybe a, a resistant to centralization.

[102] Absolutely.

[103] If it is not decentralized, how can it be common knowledge?

[104] If only one person or a few people have a ledger, you don't have a ledger, you have to ask, you know, what is on page seven, and how do you know that whatever they tell you is on page seven, they tell the same thing to everybody else?

[105] And so that is, this commonality is extremely powerful, just to give you an example.

[106] assume that you do an auction, okay?

[107] You have worked very hard, you build a building, and now you want to auction off.

[108] Makes sense because you want to auction worldwide, better yet, you want to tokenize the building and sell it in all in parcels.

[109] Now, everybody sees the bids, and you know that everybody sees the bids.

[110] You and I see the same bids, and so there's everybody else.

[111] So you know that a fair price has reached, And, you know, who owns what and who has paid how much?

[112] And if you do it instead of a wise, you know, in a centralized system, I put a bit, say, oh, congratulations, Alex, you won, and your price is $12 ,570.

[113] I do you know.

[114] So if instead of this common knowledge is a very powerful tool for humanity.

[115] So we return to it from a bunch of different perspectives, including like a technical perspective, but you often talk about blockchain and some of these concepts of decentralization, scalability, security, all those kinds of things, but one of the most maybe impactful, exciting things that leverage the blockchain, this kind of led your idea of common knowledge is cryptocurrency, in the financial space.

[116] So is there, can you, you say in the same kind of basic way, what is cryptocurrency in the context of this common knowledge in the context of the blockchain?

[117] Great.

[118] Cryptocurrency, right, is a currency that he is on such a ledger.

[119] So, imagine that on the ledger, right, initially, you know that somehow, say, you and I are the only owner, each one, let's give it ourselves a billion each or whatever this unit.

[120] Then I start writing on the ledger.

[121] I give 100 of these units to my sister.

[122] I give this much to my end.

[123] And then now, because it's written on the ledger and everybody can see, my sister can give 57 of these units that should receive from me to somebody else.

[124] And so, and that is money.

[125] And that is money because you can see that somebody who tenders your payment as really the money there, right?

[126] You don't have any more of the doubt when you want to sell an item.

[127] If I write your check, is the check covered?

[128] If I, right, or do I have the money at the moment of the transaction?

[129] You really see because the ledger is always updated.

[130] What you see is what I see, the merchant sees.

[131] You know that the money.

[132] So it's the most powerful money system there is because it is totally transparent.

[133] And so you know that you have been paid.

[134] and you know that the money is there, you have not to second -guess anything else.

[135] So the common knowledge applied there is you're basically mimicking the same kind of thing you would get in the physical space, which is if you give $100 or $100 of that thing, whatever of that cryptocurrency to your sister, the actual transfer is as real as you giving like a basket of apples to your sister because so in the case in the physical space the common knowledge is in the physics of the atoms and in its digital space the common knowledge is in this ledger and so that transfer holds the same kind of power but now it's operating in the digital space go ahead I apologize for a set of ridiculous questions but you mentioned cryptocurrencies of money, what is money?

[136] Why do we have money?

[137] Do you think about this kind of from this high philosophical level at times of this tool, this idea that we humans have all kind of came up with and seem to be using effectively to do stuff?

[138] Money is a social construct, okay, in my opinion.

[139] And this has been somehow, Now, people always felt that somehow money is a way to allow us to transact, even though we want different things.

[140] So I have two sheep, and then you have one cow.

[141] And I want the cow, but you are looking for blankets instead.

[142] So to have money, it really simplifies this.

[143] But at the end of, and that's why a bit was invented, and you start with gold, you start with cornage, when you start with check.

[144] But at the end of the day, money is essentially a social construct because you know that what you receive, you can actually spend with somebody else.

[145] And so there is a kind of a social pact and social belief that you have.

[146] At the end of the day, even barter requires this beliefs that other people are going to accept the quote -unquote currency you offer them.

[147] Because if I'm a Mason and you ask me to build a wall in your field, and I did, and you, in exchange, you give me a thousand ship, what am I going to do?

[148] Eat them all?

[149] No, I have to feed them.

[150] And if I don't feed them, they die and my value is zero.

[151] So in receiving this livestock, I must believe that somebody else will accept them in return for something else.

[152] So money is with a social belief, social shared belief system that makes people transact.

[153] That's fascinating.

[154] I didn't even think about that.

[155] That you're actually, you have a deep, like, network of beliefs about how society operates.

[156] So the value is assigned, even to sheep, based on that everyone will continue operating how they were previously operating.

[157] Somebody will feed the sheep.

[158] I didn't even think about that.

[159] That's fascinating.

[160] So that directly transfers to the space of money and then to the space of digital money, cryptocurrency.

[161] Okay.

[162] Does it bother you sort of intellectually when this money that is a social construct is not directly tied to physical goods, like gold, for example?

[163] Not at all, because after all, gold has some industrial value nobody delies it it's a metal it doesn't oxidate it has some good things about it but does this industrial value really represent the value to which now is traded no so gold is another way to express our belief I give you an ounce of gold you treat it like oh somebody else will want to this for doing something else so it is really this notion of this money is a mental construct, is really and is shared is a social construct, I really believe.

[164] And so some people feel that it's physical, so therefore gold exists.

[165] Then, as you know now, we countries, most sophisticated country right now they print their own money and you believe that they are not going to exaggerate with inflation.

[166] Not everybody believes it, but I'm saying, there is at least they are not going to exaggerated blatantly and therefore you receive it because you know that somebody else will accept it, we'll have faith in the currency and so on and so forth.

[167] But the weather is gold, whether is livestock, whatever it is, money is really a shared belief.

[168] So there is something, you know, and I've been reading more and more about different cryptocurrencies, there is a kind of belief that the scarcity of a particular resource like Bitcoin has a limited amount and it's tied to physical, you know, to proof of work, so it's tied to physical reality in terms of how much you can mine effectively and so on, that that's an important feature of money.

[169] Do you think that's an important feature to be a part of whatever the money is?

[170] That is certainly a very useful part.

[171] So at some point in time, you know, assume that money is something that all of a sudden we say daisies are money, are the currency.

[172] Then, you know, I offer you 10 days in payment of whatever goods and services you want to provide.

[173] But at the end of the day, if you know that you can cultivate it and generate them at will, then perhaps, you know, you should not accept my payment.

[174] Here is a bouquet of days.

[175] So you need some kind of a scarcity, the inability to create suddenly out of nothing is an important.

[176] And it's not an intrinsic necessity, but it's much easier to accept once you know that there is a fixed number of units of whatever currency there is, and therefore you can mentally understand I'm getting this much of this piece of a pie, and therefore I consider myself paid.

[177] I understand what I'm receiving.

[178] You described the goals of a blockchain.

[179] You have a nice presentation on this as scalability, security, and decentralization.

[180] And you challenged the blockchain trilemma that claims you can only have two of the three.

[181] So let's talk about each.

[182] What is scalability in the context of blockchain and cryptocurrency?

[183] What does scalability mean?

[184] So remember, if we said, that the blockchain is a ledger and each page receives that gets transaction and everybody can write in these pages of a ledger, nobody can be stopped for writing and everybody can read them.

[185] Okay, scalability means how fast can you write?

[186] Just imagine that you can write an entry in this spatial shared ledger once every hour.

[187] Well, you know, what are you going to do?

[188] If you have one transaction per hour, the world that doesn't go around.

[189] So you need to have scalability means here that you can somehow write a lot of transaction and then you can read them and everybody can validate them and that is the speed and the number of transactions per second and the fact that they are shared so you want to have this the speed not only in writing but in sharing and an inspection for validity this is scalability The world is big.

[190] The world wants to interact with, the people want to interact with each other, and you better be prepared to have a ledger in which you can write lots and lots and lots of transactions in this special way very, very, very quickly.

[191] So maybe from a more mathematical perspective, or can we say something about how much scalability is needed for a world that is big?

[192] Well, it really depends how many transactions you want, but remember that, I think, right now yet to go into at least thousands of transactions per second.

[193] Even if you look at credit cards, right, we are going to go from an average of $1 ,600 to peaks of $20 ,000, $40 ,000, something like this.

[194] But remember, it's not only a question of the transaction per se, but the value is that the transaction is actually been shared than visible to everybody, and the certainty that that is the case.

[195] I can print on my own printer way more transactions that nobody has the time to see or to inspect.

[196] That doesn't count, right?

[197] So you want scalability at this common knowledge level.

[198] That is the challenge.

[199] I also meant from a perspective of like a complexity analysis.

[200] So when you get more and more people involved, doesn't need to scale in some kind of way, that, do you like to see certain kind of properties in order to say something is scalable?

[201] Oh, absolutely.

[202] I took a little bit implicitly that the people transacting are actually very different.

[203] So if there is two people who can do thousands or thousands per second with each other, this is not so interesting.

[204] What we really need is to say there are billions of people at any point in time, thousands and thousands of them want to transact with each other, and you want to support that.

[205] So Al -Grand, it solves, so that's the company, the team of cryptographers, mathematicians, engineers, so on, that challenged the blockchain trilemma.

[206] So let's break it down.

[207] In terms of achieving scalability, how do we achieve scalability in the space of blockchain in the space of cryptocurrency?

[208] Okay, so scalability, security, remember, and that decentralization, right?

[209] So that's what you want.

[210] What's the best way to approach?

[211] Can we break it down?

[212] Let's start with scalability and think about how do we achieve it?

[213] Well, to achieve it at one at a time is perhaps it easy, even security.

[214] If nobody transacts, nobody loses money.

[215] So that is secure, but it's not scalable.

[216] So let me tell you, I'm a cryptographer.

[217] So I try to fight the bad guys.

[218] And what you want is that a Veselager that we discussed before, or cannot be tampered with.

[219] So you must think of it that it's a special ink that nobody can erase.

[220] Then it has to be, everybody should be able to read and not to alter the pages or the content of the pages.

[221] That's okay.

[222] But you know what?

[223] That is actually easy cryptographically.

[224] Easy cryptographically means you can use tools invented 50 years ago, which in cryptographic time, is prehistory, okay?

[225] We are cavemen working around and solve their problem in cryptography land.

[226] But there is really a fundamental problem which is really almost a social, seems a political problem, is to say, who the hell chooses or publishes the next page on the ledger?

[227] I mean, that is really the challenge.

[228] This ledger, you can always add a page because more and more transaction to be written on there.

[229] and somebody has to assemble this transaction, put them on a page, and add the next page.

[230] Who is the somebody who chooses the page and adds it on?

[231] Who can be trusted to do it?

[232] Exactly.

[233] Assume it is me for what I'm being, not that I won't volunteer for the job, but then I would have more power than any absolute monarch in history because I would have a tremendous power to say, these are the transactions that the entire world should see and whatever I don't write, this transaction will never see the light of day.

[234] I mean, no one had any such a power in history.

[235] So it's very important to do that.

[236] And that is the quintessential problem in a blockchain and people have thought about it to say, it's not me, it's not you, but for instance, in proof of work, what people say is to say, okay, it's not me, it's not you, you know what it is?

[237] We make a very difficult, we invent a cryptographic, puzzle very hard to solve.

[238] The first one who solves it has the right to add one page to the ledger on behalf of everybody else.

[239] That's now seems okay because, you know, sometimes I solve a puzzle before you do, sometimes you solve before I do or before somebody else, somebody else solves it.

[240] It's okay.

[241] And presumably the effort you put in is somehow correlated with how much trust you should be given to add to the ledger.

[242] Yeah, so somehow you want to make sure that, you know, you need to work because you want to prevent, you want to make sure that, you know, you get one solution every 10 minutes, say, like in particular example, of Bitcoin, so that it is very rare that two pages are added at the same time.

[243] Because if I solve a puzzle at the same time you do, you could happen that if you it happens once or twice, we can survive this.

[244] But if it happens, you know, every other page is a double page, then which of the two is the real page, it becomes a problem.

[245] So that's why in Bitcoin, it is important to have a substantial amount of work so that no many how many people try on Earth to solve a puzzle.

[246] You have one solution out of how many people are trying every 10 minutes.

[247] So that you have, you disdantiate these pages and you have the time.

[248] to propagate through the network of a solution and the page attached to it and therefore there is one page at a time that is added.

[249] And they say, well, why don't we do that?

[250] We have a solution.

[251] Well, first of all, a page every 10 minutes is not fast enough.

[252] So it's a question of scalability.

[253] And second of all, to ensure that no matter how many people try, you get one page and every 10 minutes, one solution to the riddle, every 10 minutes, this means that the real world becomes very, very hard.

[254] And to have a chance to solve it within 10 minutes, you must have such an expensive apparatus in terms of specialized computers, not one, not two, but thousand and thousands of them.

[255] And they produce tons of heat, okay?

[256] These, they dissipate heat like a maniac.

[257] And you need to refrigerate them too.

[258] And so then now you have air conditioning galore to add to the thing.

[259] It becomes so expensive that fewer and fewer and fewer people can actually compete in order to add to the page.

[260] And the problem becomes so crucial that in Bitcoin, depending on which day of the week or look at it, you are going to have that two or three mining pools are really the ones are capable of controlling the chain.

[261] So you're saying that's almost like leads to centralization?

[262] Right.

[263] It started being decentralized, but the expenses became higher and higher and higher.

[264] When the cost becomes higher and higher, fewer and fewer people can afford them, and then it becomes de facto centralized, right?

[265] And a different type of approach is instead, for instance, a delegated proof of stake, which is also very easy to explain essentially boils down to say well look at these 21 people say okay don't they look honest yes they do in fact I believe that they're going to remain honest for the foreseeable future so why don't we do ourselves a favor let's entrust them to add the page on behalf of all of us to the ledger okay okay but now we're are going to say, is this centralized or decentralized?

[266] Well, 21 is better than one.

[267] But I have to say, it's very little.

[268] So if you look at when people rebel to centralized power, I don't know, the French revolutions, okay?

[269] There was a monarch and the nobles.

[270] Yes.

[271] Were there 21 nobles?

[272] No, there were thousands of them, but were millions and millions of disempowered citizens.

[273] So one is centralized, 21 is also centralized, right?

[274] So that's delegated proof of stake.

[275] Delegate.

[276] It's kind of like a representative of democracy, I guess.

[277] Yes, which is good.

[278] It's working great, right?

[279] It's working great.

[280] Well, it's better than a single monarch, right?

[281] There's problems.

[282] There are problems.

[283] And so we were looking for a different, when I'm thinking about Algon for a different approach.

[284] And so we have an approach.

[285] approaching that is really, really decentralized because essentially it works as follows.

[286] You have a bunch of tokens, right?

[287] These are the tokens that have equal power, and you have, say, 10 billions of tokens distributed to the entire world.

[288] And the owners, each token, has a chance to add the ledger, equal probability than everybody else.

[289] in fact actually if you want here is how it works so think about by some magic photographic process which is not magic it's mathematics but think of it the magic assume that you select a thousand tokens and so sometimes a random okay and you have a guarantee that they're random selected and then the owners of these 1 ,000 tokens somehow agree on the next page they all sign it and that's the next page.

[290] Okay?

[291] So it is clear that, you know, nobody has the power, but, you know, once in a while, one of your tokens is selected and you are in charge of this committee to select the next page.

[292] But this goes around very quickly.

[293] So, and if you look at this, the equation really is that is not really centralized and because for agreeing on the same page, it is important that the 1 ,000 tokens that you're randomly selected are in honest ends, the majority of them.

[294] So which, if the majority of the tokens are in honest ends, that is essentially true because if the majority of the tokens are in honest ends, if you select, say, 90 % of the people are, 90 % of the tokens are in honest ends.

[295] So can you randomly select a thousand?

[296] In this thousand, you find the, 101 tokens in bad ends, very, very improbable.

[297] So basically, when a large fraction of people are honest, then you can use randomness as a powerful tool to get decentralization.

[298] So what does honesty mean?

[299] And now we're into the social side of things, which is how do we know that a large fraction of people or participating parties are honest.

[300] That is an excellent question.

[301] By the way, first of all, we should realize that the same thing is for every other system.

[302] When you look at proof of work, you rely that the majority of the mining power is in honest hands.

[303] When you look at a delegated proof of stake, you rely that the majority of these 21 people are honest.

[304] What is the difference?

[305] The difference is that in this, other systems, you should say the whole economy is secure if the majority of this small piece of the economy are honest.

[306] And that is a big question.

[307] But instead, in Algrant, in our approach we say, the all economy is secure if the majority of the economy is honest.

[308] In other words, who can subvert Algrant?

[309] It's not a majority of a small group, but it is a majority of the token holders.

[310] I have to conspire with each other in order to sink the very economy for which they own the majority of.

[311] That I think it is a bit harder to.

[312] Like a self -destructive majority, essentially.

[313] And you're also making me realize that basically every system that we have in the world today assumes that the majority of participants is honest.

[314] Yes, the only difference is the majority of whom.

[315] And in some cases, the majority of a club.

[316] and in our case is the majority of the whole system.

[317] The whole system.

[318] Okay, so that's that's fat.

[319] So through that kind of random sampling, you can achieve decentralization.

[320] You can achieve, so the scalability, I understand.

[321] And then the security that you're referring to, basically the security comes from the fact that the sample selected would likely include honest people.

[322] so it's very difficult to so by the way the security as you mentioned that you're referring to is basically security against dishonesty right or manipulation or whatever yes yes so essentially when what you're going to do is to the following and say you say well Sylvia understood what you're saying but somebody has to randomly selected with tokens then I believe you so then who does this random selection that's a good point and in an algorithm we do something a little bit unorthodox, essentially is the token choose themselves at random.

[323] And you say, if you think about it, that seems to be a terrible idea.

[324] Because if you want to say, choose yourself at random, and whoever chooses themselves is a thousand people committee, you choose the page for the rest of us.

[325] And because if I'm a bad person, I'm going to select myself over and over again because I want to be part of the committee every single time.

[326] but not so fast.

[327] So what do we do in Algorithm?

[328] What does it mean that I select myself?

[329] That each one of us, in the privacy of our own computer, actually a laptop, what you do is that you execute your own individual lottery.

[330] And think about that you pull a lever of a slot machine.

[331] You can only pull the lever once, not until you win, not enough times until you win.

[332] And when you pull the lever, case one, either you win in such a case you have a winning ticket or you lose you don't get any winning ticket.

[333] So if you don't have a winning ticket, you can say anything you want about the next page in the ledger, nobody pays attention.

[334] But if you have a winning ticket, people say, oh wow this is one of the 1 ,000 winning tickets, we better pay attention to what he or she says.

[335] And that's how it works.

[336] And the lottery is a cryptographic lottery, which means that even if I am an entire nation, extremely powerful with incredible computing powers, I don't have the ability to improve even minimally my probability of one of my token winning the lottery.

[337] And that's how it happens.

[338] So, everybody pulls the lever.

[339] The 1 ,000 random winners say, oh, here is my winning ticket and here is my opinion up or down about the block.

[340] These are the ones that count.

[341] And if you think about it, while this is distributed, because there is, in the case of Algon, there is 10 billion tokens, and you select a thousand of them more distributed than this, you cannot get.

[342] And then why is this, you know, scalable?

[343] Because what do you have to do?

[344] Okay, you have to do the lottery.

[345] How long the lottery takes?

[346] It takes actually one microsecond.

[347] Whether you have one token or two tokens or a billion tokens is always one microsecond or computation.

[348] which is very fast.

[349] We don't hit the planet with a microsecond or computation.

[350] And finally, why is this secure?

[351] Because even if I were a very evil and very, very powerful individual, I'm so powerful that I can corrupt anybody I want instantaneously in the world.

[352] Who would I want to corrupt?

[353] The people in the committee so that I can choose the page of the later.

[354] But I do have a problem.

[355] I do not know whom I should corrupt should I corrupt this lady in Shanghai, this other guy in Paris because I don't know the winners are random so I don't know whom I should corrupt but once the winner come forward and say here is my winning ticket and you propagate your winning ticket across the network together with your opinion about the bloc now I know who they are for sure I can corrupt all thousand of them given to my incredible powers, but so what?

[356] Whatever they said, they already said, and their winning tickets and their opinions are vallily propagated across the network, and I do not have the power, no more than the U .S. government or any government has the power, to put back in the bottle a message virally propagated by WikiLeaks.

[357] So everything you've just described is kind of, it's fascinating, a set of ideas.

[358] And, you know, online I've been reading quite a bit and people are really excited about those set of ideas.

[359] Nevertheless, it is not the dominating technology today.

[360] So, Bitcoin in terms of cryptocurrency, is the most popular cryptocurrency and then Ethereum and so on.

[361] So it's useful to kind of comment.

[362] We already talked about proof of work a little bit, but what in your sense does Bitcoin get right?

[363] and where is it lacking?

[364] Okay, so the first thing that Bitcoin got right is to understand that there was the need of a cryptocurrency.

[365] And that, in my opinion, Trump, they deserve all the success because they said the time is ripe for this idea.

[366] Because very often it's not enough to be right yet to be right at the right time.

[367] And somebody got it right there.

[368] So hot off to Bitcoin for that.

[369] And so what do they go to write?

[370] is the way that is make it is hard to subvert and change the ledger to cancel a transaction it's not impossible that is very hard what they did not get right is somehow that is a great store of value currency wise but money is not only a question that you store it and you put under the mattress money wants to be transacted and the transaction in bitcoins are very little.

[371] So if you want to store value, everybody needs a store value, might as well use Bitcoin.

[372] I mean, it's the plant, but if you are don't look at that for a moment, at least is a great store of value.

[373] And everybody needs a store of value.

[374] But most of the time, we want to transact, we want to interact.

[375] We don't put the money under the mattress, right?

[376] So we want to try and that, they didn't get it right.

[377] That is too slow to transact.

[378] Too few transactions.

[379] Just scalability.

[380] Is it possible to build stuff on top of Bitcoin that sort of fixes the scalability?

[381] I mean, this is the thing, you look at, there's a bunch of technologies that kind of hit the right need at the right time, and they have flaws, but we kind of build infrastructures on top of them over time to fix it, as opposed to getting it right from the beginning.

[382] or is it difficult to do?

[383] Well, that is difficult to do.

[384] So you're talking to somebody that when I decided to throw my hat in the arena and I decided, first of all, as I said before, I much admire my predecessors.

[385] I mean, they got right a lot of things and I really admire for that.

[386] But, you know, I had a choice to make.

[387] Either I patch something that has holes all over the place or I start from scratch.

[388] I decided to start from scratch.

[389] because sometimes it's a bit of way.

[390] So what about Ethereum, which looks at proof of stake and a lot of different innovative ideas that kind of improve or seek to improve on some of the flaws of Bitcoin?

[391] Ethereum made another great idea.

[392] So they figured out that it was that money and payments are important as they are.

[393] They are only the first level, the first stepping stone.

[394] The next level are smart controls.

[395] And they were at the vision to say, the people will need smart contract, which allow me and you to somehow to transact securely without being shop around by a trusted third party, by a mediator.

[396] By the way, because mediators are hard to find, and in fact, maybe even impossible to find, if you live in Thailand and I live in New Zealand, maybe we don't have a common person that we know and trust.

[397] And even if we find them, guess what?

[398] They want to be paid, right that six percent of the world GDP goes into financial friction, which is essentially third party.

[399] So the headed right to the world needed that.

[400] But again, the scalability is not there.

[401] And the system is of smart contracts in the theorem is slow and expensive.

[402] And I believe it is not enough to satisfy the appetite and the need we have for our smart contracts.

[403] Well, what do you make of just as a small sort of aside in human history?

[404] Perhaps it's a big one, is the NFT, the non -fungible tokens.

[405] Do you find those interesting technically, or is it more interesting on the social side of things?

[406] Well, both.

[407] I think, you know, I think it's, NFTs are actually great, right?

[408] So you have an artist to create a song, or you could be a, a piece of art. He has many unique representation, right, of a unique piece where there is an artifact of something dreamed up by you and as a unique representation that now you can trade.

[409] And allow, and the important part is that now you have this, not only the NFTs themselves, but the ability to trade them quickly, fast, securely, knowing that who owns which rights.

[410] And that gives a totally new opportunity for content creators to be remunerated for what do.

[411] But ultimately, you still have to have that scalability, security, and decentralization to make it, you know, to make it work for bigger and bigger applications.

[412] Correct.

[413] Yeah.

[414] Yeah.

[415] I still wonder what kind of applications are yet to be like in, by it because so much the interesting thing about NFTs you know if you look outside of art is just like money you can start playing with different social constructs is you can start playing with the ideas you can start playing with um with uh even like investing somebody was talking about almost creating an economy out of uh like creative people or influencers, like if you start a YouTube channel or something like that, you can invest in that person and you can start trading their creations and then almost like create a market out of people's ideas, out of people's creations, out of the people themselves that generate those creations.

[416] And there's a lot of interesting possibilities of what you can do with that.

[417] I mean, it seems ridiculous, but you're basically creating a hierarchy of value, maybe artificial, in the digital world, and they're trading that.

[418] But in so doing, are inspiring people to create.

[419] So maybe as a sort of our economy gets better and better and better where actual work in the physical space becomes less and less in terms of its importance, maybe we'll completely be operating in the digital space where these kinds of economies have more and more power.

[420] And then you have to have this kind of blockchain to the scalability, security, and decentralization.

[421] And decentralization is, of course, the tricky one because people in power start to get nervous.

[422] Absolutely.

[423] Once in power, you're always nervous that would be supplanted by somebody else.

[424] That's your job.

[425] Congratulations, you're on the job, the top job, and now everybody wants it.

[426] Well, what is your sense about our time and the future hope about the decentralization of power?

[427] Do you think that's something that we can actually achieve, given that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and it's so wonderful to be absolutely powerful?

[428] Well, good question.

[429] So first of all, I believe, by the way, there is a complex question.

[430] Lex, and like all the rest of your questions.

[431] I'm so very sorry.

[432] It's okay.

[433] I am enjoying it.

[434] So there are two things.

[435] First of all, power has been centralized for a variety of reasons.

[436] When you want to get it, it's easier for somebody, even a single person, to grab power.

[437] But there is also some kind of a technology.

[438] lack thereof that justified a vegan power because in a way in a society in which even communication never mind blockchain which is common knowledge but even simple unilateral communication is hard it is much easier to say you do as I say because the alternative is so there is a little bit of a technology barrier but I think that and now to get to this common knowledge that is a totally different story now we have finally the technology for doing this.

[439] So that is one part.

[440] But I really believe that by having a distributor system, not only you have to actually much more stable and durable system because not only for corruption, but even for things that go astray, and you give it a long enough time by strange version of Murphy's law, whatever goes wrong goes wrong.

[441] And so if the power is different, fused, you actually are much more stable.

[442] If you look at up any any living, complex living being is distributed.

[443] I mean, I don't have somebody say, okay, tell Sylvia now it's time to eat.

[444] You have millions of cells in your body.

[445] You have billions of bacteria.

[446] Exactly.

[447] Help me in the guts.

[448] I think, you know, we are in a soup that somehow keeps us alive.

[449] It's a, it's strange enough, However, when we design systems, we design them centralized.

[450] We ourselves are distributed beings, and when we plan to say, okay, I want to create an architecture, how about I make a pyramid, I put this on the top, and the power flows down.

[451] And so, again, it's a little bit perhaps of a technology problem, but now the technology is there.

[452] So that is a big challenge to rethink how we want to organize power.

[453] in very large system.

[454] And distributed system, in my opinion, I'm much more resilient.

[455] Let's put this way.

[456] There was my of my Italian compatriots, right, and on Machiavelli, who looked at the time, there was a big, there was a bunch of a small state, Democratic Republic of Florence, of Venice, and the other thing.

[457] And there was the Ottoman Empire, but at that time was an empire, and an assault and was very centralized.

[458] And he made a political, observation that goes roughly to say whenever you have such a centralized thing, it's very hard to overtake that former government is centralized.

[459] But if you get it, it's so easy to keep the population.

[460] Well, instead, with other things, are much more resilient.

[461] When the power is distributed, it's going to be lasting for much longer time.

[462] And ultimately, maybe the human spirit wants that, kind of resilience, wants that kind of distribute.

[463] It's just that we didn't have technology throughout history.

[464] Mackey Valley didn't have the computer, the internet, and...

[465] That is certainly part of a reason, yes.

[466] You've written an interesting blog post if we take a step out of the realm of bits and into the realm of governance.

[467] You wrote a blog post about making algorithm as decentralized.

[468] Can you explain what that means, the philosophy behind that?

[469] you know, how you decentralize basically all aspects of this kind of system?

[470] Well, the philosophy and how, let's start with the philosophy.

[471] So I really believe that nothing fixed lasts very long.

[472] And so I really believe that life is about intelligent adaptation.

[473] Things change and we have to be nimble and adjust to change.

[474] And when I see a lot of a crypto project, actually very proud to say it's fixed in stone, right, you know, code is low, law is code, I verify the code will never change.

[475] You go, wow, when I'm saying this is a recipe to me of disaster, not immediately, but soon, just imagine you take an ocean liner and you want to go, I don't know, from, Lisbon to New York and you set a course iceberg, no iceberg, tempest, no tempest, and all, it doesn't matter.

[476] That is not the way.

[477] You need a till, you need to correct, you need to adjust.

[478] And so, by the way, we would design an algorithm with the idea that the code was evolving as the needs.

[479] And of course, a way there is a system in which every time there is an adjustment, you must have essentially a vote that right now is orchestrated 90 % of the stake.

[480] They say, okay, we are ready, we agree on the next version, and we pick up this version.

[481] So we are able to evolve without losing too many components left and right.

[482] But I think without evolving, any system essentially become asphatic and is going to shrivel and die sooner or later.

[483] And so that is needed.

[484] And what you want to do on the blockchain, you have a perfect platform in which you can log your wishes, your votes, your things, so that you have a guarantee that whatever vote you express is actually seen by everybody else.

[485] So everybody sees really the outcome, call it of a referendum, of a change, and that is, in my opinion, a system that wants to live long as to adapt.

[486] There's an interesting question about leaders.

[487] I've talked to Vitalik Buteran.

[488] I'll probably talk to him again soon.

[489] He's one of the leaders, maybe one of the faces of the Ethereum project.

[490] And it's interesting.

[491] You have Satoshi Nakamato, who's the face of Bitcoin, I guess, but he's faceless.

[492] He, she, they.

[493] It does seem like in our, whatever it is, maybe it's 20th century, maybe it's Machiavellian thinking, but We seek leaders.

[494] Leaders have value.

[495] Linus Torvald, the leader of Linux, the open source development a lot.

[496] I mean, there's no, it's not, it's not that the leadership is sort of dogmatic, but it's inspiring.

[497] And it's also powerful in that through leaders, we propagate the vision.

[498] Like the vision of the project is more stable.

[499] Maybe not the details, but the vision.

[500] And so do you think there's value to – because there's a tension between decentralization and leadership, like, and visionaries.

[501] What do you make of that tension?

[502] Okay, so I really believe that – that's another great question.

[503] I think of it, you know, I really believe in the power of emotions.

[504] I think the emotion are the creative impulse of everybody else.

[505] And therefore, it's very easy for a leader to be a physical person, a real being.

[506] and that interprets our emotions.

[507] By the way, this emotion has to resonate, and what is good is that the more intimate our emotions are, the more universal they are, paradoxically.

[508] The more personal, the more everybody else somehow magically agrees and feels a bit of the same.

[509] And it's very important to have a leader in the initial phase that generates out of nothing something.

[510] That is important leadership.

[511] But then the true test of leadership is to disappear after you led the community.

[512] So, in my opinion, the quintessential leader, according to my vision, is George Washington.

[513] It served for one term.

[514] It's for another term.

[515] And then, although a son, he retired, became a private citizen.

[516] And 200 and changed years later, we still are with some defects, but we had done a lot of things right.

[517] and we have been able to evolve.

[518] That to me is success in leadership.

[519] Well, instead, you contrast our experiment with a lot of our experiment.

[520] I've done so much, so well that I want another four years.

[521] And why shouldn't I be only a four and I have another eight?

[522] And why should be another eight?

[523] Give me 16 and we'll fix all your problem.

[524] And then is the type in my opinion of failed leadership.

[525] Leadership ought to be really lead, ignite and disappear.

[526] And if you don't disappear, the system is going to die with you.

[527] And it's not a good idea for everybody else.

[528] So we've been talking a little bit about cryptocurrency, but is there spaces where this kind of blockchain ideas that you're describing, which I find fascinating, do you think they can revolutionize some other aspects of our world?

[529] That's not just money?

[530] A lot of things are going to be revolutionized.

[531] is independent of finance.

[532] By the way, I really believe that finance is an incredible form of freedom.

[533] I mean, if I agree to do everything I want, but I don't have a means to do anything.

[534] That's a bad idea.

[535] So I really think financial freedom is very, very important.

[536] But, you know, just again say that, you know, against censorship, you write something of a chain and now nobody can take it out, can take it out.

[537] That is a very important way to express, you know, our view.

[538] And then the transparency that you give, because everybody can see what's happening on the blockchain.

[539] So transparency is not money, but I believe that transparency actually is a very important ingredient also of finance.

[540] Let's put this way.

[541] As much as I'm enthusiastic about blockchain and decentralized finance, and we have actually, our expression, we're creating this future five.

[542] As much as we want to do, we must agree that the first guarantee of financial growth and prosperity are really the legal system, the courts, because we may not think about them and say, oh, the courts are a kind of a bunch of boring lawyers, but without them, I'm saying there is no certainty, there is no notion of equality.

[543] There is no notion that you can resolve your disputes.

[544] Think that's what thrives commerce and things.

[545] And so what I really believe that the blockchain actually makes a lot of this trust essentially automatic by making it impossible to cheat in a very way.

[546] You don't even need to go to court if nobody can change the ledger.

[547] So essentially is a way of So you cannot solve an legal system reduces to a blockchain, but what I'm saying, a big chunk of it can actually be guaranteed, and there is no reason why technology should be antagonistic to legal scholarship.

[548] It could be actually co -existing, and one should start to doing the interest things that the technology alone cannot do, and then you go from there.

[549] But I think that essentially blockchain can affect all kinds of our behavior.

[550] Yes, in some sense, the transparency, the required transparency ensures honesty, prevents corruption.

[551] So there's a lot of systems that could use that, and the legal system is one of them.

[552] There's a little bit of attention that I wonder if you can speak to where this kind of transparency, there's a tension.

[553] with privacy, is it possible to achieve privacy, if wanted, on a blockchain?

[554] Do you have ideas about different technologies that can do that?

[555] People have been playing with different ideas.

[556] So absolutely.

[557] The answer is yes, and by way, I'm a cryptographer.

[558] Right.

[559] So I really believe in privacy, and I believe in, and I have devoted, you know, a big chunk of my life to guarantee privacy, even when it seems almost impossible to have it.

[560] And it is possible to have it and also in the blockchain too.

[561] And however, I believe in timing as well.

[562] And I believe that the people have the right to understand their system they live in.

[563] And right now, people can understand the blockchain to be something that is, cannot be altered and is transparent.

[564] And that is good enough.

[565] And right now, any way to add, and there is a pseudo -privacy for the fact that, who knows if this keys belong, public key belongs to me or to you, right?

[566] And I can, when I want to change my money from one public key, I split it to other public keys, going to figure out which one is Silvio, all of them of Silvio, or only one of Silvio.

[567] Who knows?

[568] So you get some vanilla privacy, you know, not the one I can talk.

[569] And I think it's good enough because, and it's important for now, that we absorb this stage.

[570] Because the next stage, we must understand the privacy tool rather than taking on faith.

[571] When the public starts to say, I believe in the scientist, and whatever they say, I swear by them.

[572] And therefore, if they tell me it is private, it's private, and nobody understands it very well.

[573] We need much more educated about the tools we are using.

[574] And so I look forward to deploying more and more privacy on the blockchain.

[575] But we are not, I will not rush to it until the people understand and are behind whatever we have right now.

[576] So you build privacy on top of the power of the blockchain.

[577] You have to first understand the power of the blockchain.

[578] Yes.

[579] Yes.

[580] So Algarand is like one of the most exciting, technically at least, from my perspective, of technologies, ideas in this whole space.

[581] What's the future of Algonne look like?

[582] Is it possible for it to dominate the world?

[583] Let's put this way.

[584] I certainly working very hard with a great team to give the best blockchain that one can demand and enjoy.

[585] And they said, I really believe that there is going to be, it's not a winner -tax them all, So it's going to be a few blockchains and each one is going to have its own brand and it's going to be great at something.

[586] And sometimes it's a scalability, sometimes it's your views, sometimes it's a thing.

[587] And it's important to have a dialogue between these things.

[588] And I'm sure, and I'm working very hard to make sure that this is one of them.

[589] But I don't believe that it is even desirable to have, you know, a winner takes all.

[590] Because we need to express different things, but the important thing is going to have enough interoperability with various systems so that you can transfer your assets where you have the best tool to service them, whatever your needs are at the time.

[591] So there's an idea, I don't know, they call themselves Bitcoin maximalists, which is essentially the bet that the philosophy that Bitcoin will eat the world.

[592] So you're talking about it's good to have variety.

[593] Their claim is it's good to have the best technology dominate, the medium of exchange, the medium of store of value, the money, the digital currency space.

[594] What's your sense of the positives and the negatives of that?

[595] So I think people, are smart and it's going to be very hard for anybody and to win a twin and because people want more and more things and there is an italian saying that it goes as translates well i think it goes of the appetite grows while eating okay i think you understand what he means yes so i'm not hungry okay food oh let me try this so we want more and more and more and when you find something like Bitcoin, which are already had very good things to say, but it does something very well, but it's static.

[596] I mean, store value, yes, I think it's a great, like, the rest, you know, it would be a sad world, if the world in which we are so anchoring down, so on the defensive, that we want to store value and hide it under the matters.

[597] I long for a world in which is open, people want to transact, interact with this way, and therefore, Or when you want to store value, perhaps one chain, you want to have to transact, maybe is another.

[598] I'm not saying that, you know, one chain cannot be store of value or the other thing, but I really believe that I believe in the ingenuity of people and in the innovation that is intrinsic to the human nature.

[599] We want always different things.

[600] So how can it be something invented, whatever it is decades ago, is going to fulfill the needs of our future generations?

[601] I'm not going to fulfill my needs, let alone one of my kids, or their kids.

[602] We are going to have a different world, and things will evolve.

[603] So you believe that life, intelligent life, is ultimately about adaptability and evolving.

[604] So static is, static loses in the end.

[605] Yes.

[606] let me ask the well first the ridiculous question do you have any clue who Satoshi Nakamoto is is that even an interesting question well is it you?

[607] Your questions are very interesting so and I think I would say first of all it's not me and I can prove it because if I were Satoshi Nagamoto I would have not found an algorithm which was a totally different principle to approach to the system.

[608] But the other thing, with Satoshi Nagamoto, you know what the right answer is?

[609] It's not him or she, her or them.

[610] Satoshi Nagamoto is Bitcoin.

[611] Because to me, it's such a coherent proof of work that at the end, the creator and the creation identify themselves.

[612] So he says, okay, I understand Michelangelo.

[613] Okay, he did the assistant chapel, fine.

[614] Indeed, the St. Peter's Dome, fine.

[615] Indeed, the Mosas of the Pietra statue, fine.

[616] But besides this, who was Michelangelo?

[617] That's the wrong question.

[618] Is his own work?

[619] That is Michelangelo.

[620] So I think that when you look at the Bitcoin is a piece of work that, as it defects, yes, like anything human.

[621] But it was captivated the imaginations of millions of people as a subverted the status quo and I'm saying whoever this person or people are he's living in this piece of work I mean it is Bitcoin that's my idea of the work is bigger we forget that sometimes it's something about our biology wants likes to see a face and attach a face to the idea when really the idea is the thing we love the idea is the thing that impact the idea is the thing that Ultimately, Steve Jobs or somebody like that, we associate with the Mac, with the iPhone, with just everything he did at Apple.

[622] Apple, actually, the company is Steve Jobs.

[623] Steve Jobs, the man, is appails in comparison to the creations of the man. And the sense of aesthetics that has brought to the daily lives.

[624] And very often, aesthetic wins in the long end.

[625] And these are very elegant design product.

[626] And when you say, oh, elegance, a very few people care about it, apparently millions and millions and millions and millions of people do, because we are attracted by beauty.

[627] And these are beautifully designed products.

[628] And, you know, in addition to ever the technological aspect of the other thing, and I think, yes, that is.

[629] Yeah, as the Steyevsky said, beauty will save the world.

[630] So I'm with you on that one.

[631] Great.

[632] It currently seems like cryptocurrency, all these different technologies, are gathering a lot of excitement, not just in our discourse, but in their scale financial impact.

[633] A lot of companies are starting to invest in Bitcoin.

[634] Do you think that the main method of store value and exchange of value, basically money, will.

[635] soon or at some point in the century will become cryptocurrency?

[636] Yes.

[637] So, mind you, as I said, that the notion of cryptocurrency, like any other fundamentally one notion has to evolve, but yes.

[638] So I think that he has a lot of momentum behind it, is not only static as this programmable money, as I think, smart contracts, it allows.

[639] So peer -to -peer interaction, among people who don't even know each other, right, and they don't even, therefore, cannot even trust each other just because they never saw each other.

[640] So I think it's so powerful that it's going to do.

[641] They said, again, a particular cryptocurrency should develop, and cryptocurrency they will all develop, but the answer is, yes, we are going towards a much more.

[642] Unless we have a society, a sudden crisis for different reasons, which nobody hopes.

[643] There's always an asteroid, there's always a nuclear war and all the existential crisis that we kind of think about, including artificial intelligence.

[644] Okay, it's funny you mentioned that Michelangelo and Steve Jobs, you know, a set of ideas represents the person's work.

[645] So we talked about Algram, which is a super interesting set of.

[646] technologies but you know you did also win the touring award you have a bunch of you have a bunch of ideas that are you know seminal ideas so can we talk about cryptography for a little bit what is the most beautiful idea in cryptography or computer science or mathematics in general asking somebody who has explored the depths of all well very well very a few contenders.

[647] And either your work or other work.

[648] Let's leave my work aside.

[649] But one powerful idea and is both an old idea in some sense and a very, very modern one.

[650] And in my opinion, it's the best idea of a one -way function.

[651] so a function that easy to evaluate so given x you can compute f of x easily but given f of x is very hard to go back to x okay think like breaking a glass easy reconstruct the glass harder frying an egg easy from the fried egg to go back to the original egg harder if you want to be extreme killings a living being, unfortunately easy, the other way around, very hard.

[652] And so the fact that a notion of a function, which you have a recipe that is in front of your eyes to transform an X into F of X, and then from F of X, even though you see the recipe to transform it, you cannot go back to X, that, in my opinion, is one of the most elegant and momentous notions that there are.

[653] and is a computational notion because of the difficulties in a computational sense and it's a mathematical notion because we're talking about function and it's so fruitful because that is actually the foundation of all a cryptography and let me tell you is an old notion because very often in any mythology that we think of the most powerful gods or goddesses are the ones of X and the opposite of X, the gods of love and death.

[654] And when you take opposite, they don't just erase one another.

[655] You create something way more powerful.

[656] And this one way function is extremely powerful because essentially becomes something that is easy for the good guys and bad for the hard for the bad guys.

[657] So for instance, in pseudo random number generation, the easy part of the function corresponds, you want to generate bits very quickly, and art is predicting what the next bit is.

[658] It doesn't look the same.

[659] One is X -F -F -X, going from X -F -X to X -R, what does to do predicting bits?

[660] By a magic of reductions in mathematical apparatus, this simple function morphs itself into sort of random generation.

[661] This simple function morphs itself in digital signature scheme, in which digital designing should be easy and forging should be hard.

[662] Again, a digital signature is not going from X to F of X, but the magic and the richness of this notion is that it is so powerful that it morphs in all kinds of incredible constructs.

[663] And in both these two opposites coexist, the easy and the hard, and in my opinion, it's a very, very elegant notion.

[664] That simple notion ties together cryptography, like you said, pseudorandum number generation.

[665] You have work on pseudo -random functions.

[666] What are those?

[667] What's the difference in those and the generators, pseudo -random number generators?

[668] How do they work?

[669] Let's go back to pseudo -random number generation.

[670] Yes.

[671] First of all, people think that a pseudo -randomal generation generates random number.

[672] Not true, because I don't believe that from nothing you can get something.

[673] So nothing from nothing.

[674] But randomness, you cannot create out on nothing, but what you can do is that you can be expanded.

[675] So in other words, if you give me somehow 300 random bits, truly random bits, then I can give you 300 ,000, 300 million, 300 trillions, 300 quadrillions, as many as you want, random bits.

[676] so that even though I tell you the recipe by which I produce these bits but I don't tell you the initial 300 random numbers I keep them secret and you see all the bits I produce so far if you were to bet given all the bits produced so far what is the next bit in my sequence better than 50 -50 of course 50 -50 anybody can guess right but to be inferring something you have to be a bit better then the effort to do this extra bit is so enormous that is de facto random.

[677] So that is a pseudo -random generator are these expanders of secret randomness which goes extremely fast.

[678] Okay, this said, what is...

[679] Expanders of secret randomness, beautifully put.

[680] Okay, so every time somebody who, if you're a programmer, is using a function that's not called pseudorandum, It's called random, usually, you know, these programming languages and it's generating different.

[681] That's essentially expanding the secret randomness.

[682] But they should.

[683] In the past, actually, most of the library, they used something pre -modern cryptography, unfortunately.

[684] They would be better served to take 300 real seed random number and then expand them properly, as we know now.

[685] But that has been a very old idea.

[686] In fact, one of the best philosophers have debated whether the world was deterministic or probabilistic.

[687] Very big questions, right?

[688] Does God play dice?

[689] Exactly.

[690] Einstein says it does, he doesn't.

[691] But in fact, now we have a language that even at Albert time was not around, but it was this complexity theory and modern complexity -based cryptography.

[692] And now we know that in the universe has 300 random bits, whether where is random or probabilistic or deterministic, it doesn't matter.

[693] Because you can expand this initial seed of randomness forever in which all the experiments you can do, all the inferences you could do, all the things you can do there you will not be able to distinguish them from truly random.

[694] So if you are not able to distinguish truly random from this super -duper pseudo -randomness are the really different things?

[695] So I'm not saying.

[696] To become really philosophical.

[697] So for things to be different, but I don't have in my lifetime, in the lifetime of the universe, any method to set them aside, well, I should be intellectually honest, say, well, pseudo -random in this special faction is as good as random.

[698] Do you think true randomness is possible?

[699] and what does that mean?

[700] So practically speaking, exactly as you said, if you're being honest, the pseudo -randomous approaches true randomness pretty quickly.

[701] But is it, maybe is this a philosophical question?

[702] Is there such a thing as true randomness?

[703] Well, the answer is actually maybe, but if there exists, most probably is expensive to get.

[704] And in any case, if I give you one on mine, random string, you will never tell them apart.

[705] By any other shape, no matter how much you work on it.

[706] So in some sense, if it exists or not, it really is a quote philosophical sense in the colloquial way to say that we cannot somehow pin it down.

[707] Do you ever, again, just to stay unphilosophical for a bit, for a brief moment, do you ever think about free will and whether that exists because ultimately free will sort of is this experience that we have like we're making choices even though it appears that the world is deterministic at the core I mean that's against the debate but if it is in fact deterministic at the lowest possible level at the physics level how do you make if it is deterministic how do you make how do you make sense of the difference between the experience of us feeling like we're making a choice and the whole thing being deterministic so first of all let me give a gut reaction to the equation and the gut reaction is that it is important that we believe that there exists free will and second of all almost by weird logic, if we believe it exists, then it does exist, okay?

[708] So it's very important for our social apparatus, for our sense of the air of ourselves, that it exists.

[709] And the moment in which we so want, we almost, we conjure it up in existence.

[710] But again, I really feel that if you look at some point, the space of free will seems to shrink, we realize how more and more, how much of our, say, genetic apparatus dictates who we are, why we prefer certain things than others, right?

[711] And why we react to noises of music.

[712] We prefer poetry and everything.

[713] We may explain even always.

[714] But at the end of the day, whether it exists in a philosophical sense or not, it's like randomness.

[715] If you can, if pseudo -random is as good as random, random vis -a -vis lifetime of the universe, our experience, when it doesn't really matter.

[716] Yeah.

[717] So, you know, we're talking about randomness.

[718] I wonder if I can weave in quantum mechanics for a brief moment.

[719] There's, you know, a lot of advancements on the quantum computing side.

[720] So leveraging quantum mechanics to perform a new kind of computation, and there's concern of that being a threat to, a lot of the basic assumptions that underlie cryptography.

[721] What do you think?

[722] Do you think quantum computing will challenge a lot of cryptography, will cryptography be able to defend, all those kinds of things?

[723] Okay, great.

[724] So first of all, for the record, because I think it matters, but it's important to say the rigor, there are people who continue to contend that quantum mechanics exist, but there's nothing to do with computing is not going to accelerate it, at least very basic other computation.

[725] That is a belief that you cannot take it out.

[726] I'm a little bit more agnostic about it, but I really believe going back to whatever I said about the one -way function.

[727] So one -way function, what is it?

[728] That is a cryptography.

[729] So does quantum computing challenge?

[730] The one -way function.

[731] Essentially, you can boil it.

[732] down to, does quantum computing find a one -way function?

[733] What is one -way function?

[734] Easy in one direction, hard than the other.

[735] Okay, but if quantum computing exists, when you define what it is easy, it's not easy by a classical computer and hard by a classical computer, but easy for a quantum computer, that's a bad idea.

[736] But once easy means it should be easy for a quantum and hard for also quantum.

[737] Then you can see that you are, yes, it's a challenge, but you have hope because you can absorb if one computing really realizes and becomes available and according to the promises then you can use them also for the easy part and once you use it from the easy part the choices that you have a one -way function they multiply so okay so the particular candidates of one -way function they not be one -way anymore but quantum one -way function may contain to exist and so I really believe that for life to be meaningful with one -way function had to exist because just imagine that anything that is it becomes easy to to do I mean what kind of life is it I mean so you need that and if something is hard but it's so hard to generate you'll never find something which is hard for you.

[738] You want that there is abundance, there is easy to produce heart problem.

[739] That's my opinion is why life is interesting because heart problem pop up and not really relatively speed.

[740] So in some sense, I almost think that I do hope they exist.

[741] If they don't exist, somehow life is way less interesting than it actually is.

[742] Yeah, it does, that's funny.

[743] It does seem like the one -way function is fundamental to all of life, which is the emergence of the complexity that we see around us seem to require the one -way function.

[744] I don't know if you play with cellular automata.

[745] That's just another formulation of...

[746] I know, but it's very simple...

[747] It's almost a very simple illustration of starting out with simple rules and one way being able to generate incredible amounts of complexity, but then you ask the question, can I reverse that?

[748] And it's just surprising how difficult it is to reverse that.

[749] It's surprising, even in constrained situations, it's very difficult to prove anything.

[750] It almost, I mean, the sad thing about it, I don't know if it's sad, but it seems like we don't even have the mathematical tools to reverse engineer stuff.

[751] I don't know if they exist or not.

[752] But in the space of cellular automata, But when you start with something simple and you create something incredibly complex, can you take a small picture of that complex and reverse engineer?

[753] That's kind of what we're doing as scientists here.

[754] You're seeing the result of the complexity and you're trying to come up with some universal law that generate all of this.

[755] What is the theory of everything?

[756] What are the basic physics laws that generated this whole thing?

[757] And there's a hope that you should be able to do that, but it gets, it's difficult.

[758] But there is also some poetry of the fact that it's difficult because he gives us a mystery to life without which, I mean, it's not so fun, right?

[759] Life will be less fun.

[760] Can we talk about interactive proofs a little bit and zero knowledge proofs?

[761] What are those?

[762] Okay.

[763] How do they work?

[764] So interactive proof actually is a modern realization and conceptualization of something that we knew was true.

[765] That is easy to go to lecture.

[766] In fact, that's my motivation.

[767] We invented schools to go to lecture.

[768] We don't say, oh, I have the Minister of Education.

[769] I published this book.

[770] You read it.

[771] This is a book for this year.

[772] This book for this year.

[773] We spend a lot.

[774] of our treasury in educating our kids and in person educating, go to class, interact with a teacher, on the blackboard and chalk on my time, now we can have a whiteboard and presumably you're going to have actually this magic pens and a display instead.

[775] But the idea is that interactively you can convey truth much more efficiently.

[776] And we knew this psychologically.

[777] It's better to hear a explanation than just to to belabor some paper, right?

[778] Same thing.

[779] So interactive proofs is a way to do the following.

[780] Rather than doing in some complicated, very long papers and possibly infinitely long proofs, exponentially long proofs, you say the following.

[781] If this theorem is true, there is a game that is associated to the theorem.

[782] And if the theorem is true, this game, I have a winning strategy that I can win half of the time.

[783] no matter what you do.

[784] Okay, so then you say, well, is the theorem true?

[785] You believe me. Why should I believe you?

[786] So, okay, let's play.

[787] So, and if I prove that I have a strategy, and I win the first time, and I win the second time, then I lose a third time, but I win, say, more than half of the time, or I win, say, all the time if the theorem is true, and at least at most half of the time, if the theorem is false, you statistically get convinced.

[788] you can verify this quickly and therefore is much when the game typically is extremely fast so you generate a miniature game in which if the theorem is true I win all the time in the theorem is false I can win at most a half of the time and if I win win win win win win win you can deduce either the theorem is true which most probably is the case so to speak or I've been very very unlucky because it's like if I had a hundred coin tosses and I got a hundred heads.

[789] Very improbable.

[790] So that is a way.

[791] And so this transformation from the formal statement of a proof into a game that can be quickly played and you can draw statistics or many times you win and is one of a big conquest of a modern complexity theory and in fact actually has a highlight the notion of a proof as really give us a new insight of what to be true means and what truth is and what proofs are.

[792] So these are legitimately proofs.

[793] So what kind of mysteries can it allow us to unlock and prove?

[794] You said truth, so what does it allow us, what kind of truth does that allow us to arrive at?

[795] So it enlarges the real mob of what is provable because in some sense, the classical way of proving things was extremely inefficient from the verifier point of view.

[796] Yes.

[797] So, and so therefore, there is so much proof that you can take, but in this way, you can actually very quickly, in minutes, verify something that is the correctness of an assertion, that otherwise would have taken a lifetime to belabor and check all the passages of a very, very, very long proof.

[798] And you better check all of them because if you don't check one line, an error can be in that line.

[799] And so you have to go linearly through all the stuff rather than bypass this.

[800] So you enlarge tremendous amount what the proof is.

[801] And in addition, once you have the idea that essentially a proof system is something, that allows me to convince you of a true statement but does not allow me to convince you of a false statement and that at the essence of proof proof can be beautiful should be elegant but at the essence is true or false if you want to be able to differentiate it is possible to prove the truth and it should be impossible or statistically extremely hard to prove something false.

[802] And if you do this, you can prove way, way more once you understand this.

[803] And on top of it, we got some insight, like in Visit Zero Knowledge Approves, that is something which you took for granted were the same.

[804] Knowledge and verification are actually separate concepts.

[805] So you can verify that an assertion is correct without having any idea of why this is so.

[806] And so, People felt to say, if you want to verify something yet to have the proof.

[807] Once you have the proof, you know why is true.

[808] You have the proof itself.

[809] So somehow you can totally differentiate knowledge and verification, validity.

[810] So totally, you can decide if something is true and still have no idea.

[811] Is there a good example in your mind?

[812] Oh, actually, you know, at the beginning, we labored to find the first knowledge.

[813] zero knowledge proof.

[814] Then we found a second.

[815] Then we found a third.

[816] And then a few years later, actually we proved a theorem, which essentially says every theorem, no matter what about, can be explained in a zero knowledge way.

[817] So it's not a class of theorem, but old theorems.

[818] And it's a very powerful thing.

[819] So we were really, for thousands of years, both this identity between not, and verification had to be hand in and together and for no reason at all.

[820] I mean, we had to develop a way of technology.

[821] As you know, I'm very big in technology because it makes us more human and make us understand more things than before.

[822] And I think that's a good thing.

[823] So this interactive proof process, there's power in games.

[824] Yes.

[825] And you've recently gotten into recently, I'm not sure you can correct me, mechanism design.

[826] Yeah.

[827] So, I mean, first of all, maybe you can explain what mechanism design is and the fascinating space of playing with games and designing games.

[828] Mechanism design is that you want to, you want a certain behavior to arise, right?

[829] If you want to organize a societal structure or something, you want to have some orderly behavior to arise.

[830] It's right because it is important for your goals.

[831] But you know that people, they don't care what my goals are.

[832] They cares about maximizing their utility.

[833] So putting crassly making money.

[834] The more money, the better, so to speak.

[835] I'm exaggerating.

[836] Self interest in whatever.

[837] Self interest.

[838] In whatever way then.

[839] So what you want to do is, ideally, what you want to do is to, design a game so that while people played sought to maximize their self -interest they achieve the social goal and behavior that I want.

[840] That is really the best type of thing.

[841] And it is a very hard science and art to design these games.

[842] And it challenges us to actually come up with a solution concept for way to analyzing the games that need to be broader.

[843] And I think the game theory has developed a bunch of very compelling way to analyze the game, that if the game has a best property, you can have a pretty good guarantee that is going to be played in a given way.

[844] But as it turns out, and not surprisingly, these tools have a range of action like anything else, all these so -called the technical resolution concept, the way to analyze the game, like dominant strategy equilibrium with something comes to mind to be very meaningful, but as a limited power.

[845] In some sense, the games that can be, admit such a way to be analyzed.

[846] There's a very specific kind of games, and the rules are set, the constraints are set, the utilities are all set, and you can say something strong.

[847] If you want to reason, if there is a way, say, that you can analyze a restricted class of games this way.

[848] But most games, you know, don't fall into this restricted class.

[849] Then what do I do?

[850] When you need to enlarge away what a rational player can do.

[851] So, for instance, in my opinion, at least in some of my, I played with this for a few years and I was doing some exoteric things, I'm sure in the space that were not exactly mainstream and then I changed my interest and now I do blockchain.

[852] But what I'm saying, for a while I was doing...

[853] So, for instance, to me, is a way in which I design the game and you don't have the best move for you.

[854] The best move is the move that is best for you no matter what the other players are doing.

[855] Sometimes a game doesn't have that.

[856] Okay, it's too much to ask.

[857] But I can design the game such of it, given the option in front of you say, oh, these are really stupid for me. Take them aside.

[858] But these are not stupid.

[859] So if you design the game so that in any combination on non -stupid things that the player can do, I achieve what I want, I'm done.

[860] I don't care to find the unique equilibrium.

[861] I don't give a damn.

[862] I want to say, well, as long as you don't do stupid things and nobody else does stupid things, good social things outcome arise, I should be equally happy.

[863] And so I really believe that this type of analysis is possible and as a bigger radius, so it reaches more games, more classes of games.

[864] And after that, we have to enlarge it again.

[865] And it's going to be, we are going to have fun because human behavior can be conceptualized.

[866] in many ways, and it's a long game.

[867] It's a long game.

[868] Do you have favorite games that you're looking at now?

[869] I mean, I suppose your work with blockchain and Algorand is a kind of game that you're basically this mechanism design, design the game such that it's scalable, secure, and decentralized, right?

[870] Yes, yes.

[871] And very often you're to say, and you must also design so that the incentives are, are and tend to the truth for whatever little I learned for my venture in mechanism of design is that incentives are very hard to design because people are very complex creatures and so somehow the way with design algorithm is a totally different way essentially with no incentives essentially but technically speaking there is a notion that is actually believable, right?

[872] So that to say people want to maximize their utility, yes, up to a point.

[873] Let me tell you.

[874] Assume that if you are honest, you make 100 bucks.

[875] But if you are dishonest, no matter how dishonest you are, you can only make 100 bucks and one cent.

[876] What are you going to be?

[877] I'm saying, you know what?

[878] technically speaking even that one cent nobody bothers and say how much am I going to make by honest hundred if I am devious and if I'm a criminal 100 bucks and one cent you know I'm others will be honest okay so that essentially is called you know epsilon utility equilibrium but I think it's good and that's what we design essentially means that you know there is having no incentives is actually a good thing because to prevent people from reasoning how else I'm going to game the system.

[879] But why can we achieve in Aragon to have no incentives and in Bitcoin instead you have to pay the miners because they do tremendous amount of work.

[880] Because if you have to do a lot of work, then you demand to be paid accordingly.

[881] But if I're going to say you have to add two and two equal to four, how much you want to me pay for this?

[882] If you don't give me vice, I don't add two and two.

[883] I would say you can add two and two in your sleep.

[884] You don't need to be paid to add two and two.

[885] So the idea is that if we make the system so efficient, so that generating the next block is so damn simple, it doesn't hit the universe, let alone my computer, let alone take some micro -second or computation, I might as well not being received incentives for doing that and try to incentivize some other part of the system, but not the main consensus, which is a mechanism for generating and adding block to the chain.

[886] Since you're Italian, Sicilian, I also heard rumors that you are a connoisseur of food.

[887] What, you know, if I said today is the last day, you get to be alive.

[888] I'm Russia.

[889] You shouldn't have trusted me. You never know the Russian whether you're going to make it out or not.

[890] If you had one last meal, you can travel somewhere in the world.

[891] Either you make it or somebody else, makes it, what's that going to look like?

[892] All right.

[893] This is one last meal, I must say, you know, in this era of COVID, I've not been able to see my mom.

[894] And my mom was a fantastic chef, okay?

[895] And had this very traditional food.

[896] As you know, the very traditional food are great for a reason, because they survived hundreds of years of culinary innovation.

[897] So, and there is one very laborious thing, which is, you heard the name, which is this parmigiana, but to do it is a piece of art, like why so many hours, that only my mom could do it.

[898] If we have one last meal, I want a parmigiana, okay.

[899] What is, what's the laborious process?

[900] Is it the ingredients?

[901] Is it the actual process?

[902] Is it the atmosphere and the humans involved?

[903] The other.

[904] The ingredient like in any other, in Italian cuisine believes in very few ingredients.

[905] If you take, say quintessential Italian recipe very boninoos, spaghetti pesto, Pesto is olive oil, very good, extra virgin oil, basil, pine nuts, pepper, A clove of garlic, not too much.

[906] Otherwise, you do...

[907] Overpower everything.

[908] And then yet to do either two schools of thought, a parmesan or pecorino or a mix of the two.

[909] I mentioned six ingredients.

[910] That is typical Italian.

[911] I understand that there are other cuisines, for instance, a French cuisine, which is extremely sophisticated, and extremely combinatorial, or some Chinese cuisine, which has a lot of minimal ingredients than this.

[912] And yet the art is to put them together a lot of things.

[913] In Italy is really the striving for simplicity, yet to find few ingredients, but the right ingredients is to create something.

[914] So in Parmigiana, the ingredients are eggplants, they are tomatoes, they are basil, but how to put them together and the process is an act of love, okay, labor and love.

[915] is that you can spend the entire day when I'm exaggerating, but the entire morning for sure, to do it properly.

[916] Yeah, as the Japanese cuisine, too, there's a mastery to the simplicity with the sushi.

[917] I don't know if you've seen Joachers of sushi, but there's a mastery to that that's propagated through the generations.

[918] It's fascinating.

[919] You know, people love it when I ask about books.

[920] I don't know if books, whether fiction, nonfiction, technical or completely non -technical had an impact in your life throughout if there's anything you would recommend or even just mention as something they gave you an insight or moved you in some way.

[921] So, okay, so I don't know if I recommend because in some sense you almost had to be Italian or have to be such a scholar, but being Italian, one thing that really impressed me tremendously is the divine comedy.

[922] It is a medieval, poem, a very long poem, divided in three parts, hell, purgatory, and paradise, okay?

[923] And that is the non -trivial story of a middleman man gets into a crisis, personal crisis.

[924] And then out of this crisis, he purifies, when it's a catastrophe, he purifies himself more and more and more until he's become capable of actually meeting God.

[925] God.

[926] Okay.

[927] And that is actually a complex story.

[928] So you have to get some very sophisticated language, maybe Latin at that point that we were talking about 1200s, Italy, right, in Florence.

[929] And this guy instead, he chose his own dialect, not spoken outside his own immediate circle, right, a Florentine dialect.

[930] Actually, Dante really made Italian Italian.

[931] He was, and so I'd say, how can you express such a sophisticated thing and so this?

[932] And then the point is that these words that nobody actually knew because they were essentially dialect and plus a bunch of very intricate rhymes in which they had to rhyme the things and turns out that by getting meaning from the things that you rhyme, you essentially guess what the world means and you invent Italian and you.

[933] you communicate by almost osmosis what you want is a miracle communication in a dialect a very poor language very unsophisticated to express a very sophisticated situation i love it people who love it and italians and not italian but but what i got of it is that you know very often limitations are our strength because if you limit yourself at a very poor language somehow you get out of it and you achieve even better form of communication into using a hyper -sophisticated literary language of lots of resonance from the prior books so that you can actually instantaneously quote.

[934] He couldn't quote anything because nothing was written in Italian before him.

[935] So I really felt that limitations are our strength.

[936] And I think that rather than complaining about the limitations, we should embrace them because if we embrace our limitation, limited as we are, we find very creative solutions that people with less limitation we have, we would not even think about it.

[937] So limitation is a kind of superpower if you choose to see it that way.

[938] Is there, since you speak both languages, is there something that's lost in translation to you?

[939] Is there something you can express in Italian that you can't in English and vice versa maybe?

[940] Is there something you could say to the musicality of the language?

[941] I mean, I've been to Italy a few times, and I'm not sure if it's the actual words, but the people are certainly very, there's body language, too.

[942] There's just their whole being is language.

[943] So I don't know if you miss some of that when you're speaking English in this country.

[944] Yes.

[945] In fact, actually, I certainly, I miss it and somehow it was a sacrifice that I made consciously by the time I arrived I knew that this I was not going to express myself at that level and it was actual sacrifice because given to you have also your mother tongue is Russian so you know that you can be very expressive in your mother tongue and not very expressive in a new tongue in a new language And then what people think of you in the new language, because when the precise of expression of things, it generates, you know, he shows elegance or he shows, you know, knowledge, or he shows as a census, or he shows as a caste or education, whatever it is.

[946] So all of a sudden, I found myself on the bottom.

[947] So I had to fight all my way up, back up.

[948] But what I'm saying, I go back to that.

[949] Yeah, that's a bad saying, right?

[950] Their limitations are actually our strength.

[951] In fact, is a trick to limit yourself to exceed, right?

[952] And, you know, there are examples in history.

[953] If you think about, you know, Hernan Cortez, right, goes to invade Mexico, he has, what, a few hundred people with him, and he has 100 ,000 people in arms on the other side.

[954] First thing he does, he limits himself.

[955] He sinks his own ship.

[956] There is no return.

[957] Okay.

[958] And I've met Bonty, actually, manager.

[959] That's really profound.

[960] I actually, first of all, that's inspiring to me. I feel like I have quite a few limitations, but more practically on the Russian side, I'm going to try to do a couple of really big and really tough interviews in Russian.

[961] Once COVID lifts a little bit, I'm traveling to Russia.

[962] And I'll keep your advice in mind that the limitations is a kind of, a superpower we should use it to our advantage because you do feel less like you're not able to convey your wisdom in the russian language because i i moved here on us 13 so you don't you know the parts of life you live under a certain language are the parts of life you're able to communicate you know i became i became a thoughtful deeply thoughtful human in english the pain from World War II, the music of the people, that was instilled with me in Russian.

[963] So I can carry both of those, and there's limitations in both.

[964] I can't say philosophically profound stuff in Russian, but I can't in English express that melancholy feeling of the people.

[965] And so combining those two all somehow.

[966] Oh, beautifully said.

[967] Thanks for sharing.

[968] This is great.

[969] Yes, I totally understand you.

[970] Yes.

[971] You've accomplished some incredible.

[972] incredible things in the space of science, in the space of technology, a space of theory and engineering.

[973] Do you have advice for somebody young, an undergraduate student, somebody in high school, or anyone who just feels young?

[974] About life or about career, about making their way in this world?

[975] So I was thinking before that I believe in emotion, and my thing is to be true to you, your own emotion.

[976] And that I think that if you do that, you're doing well because it's a life well spent and you are going, never tired because you want to solve all these emotional notes that I always intrigued you from the beginning.

[977] And I really believe that, you know, to live meaningfully, creatively and yet to live your emotional life.

[978] So I really believe that whether you're a scientist, or an artist even more, but as a scientist, I think of them as artists as well.

[979] If you are a human being, so you are really to live fully your emotions, and to the extent possible, sometimes emotions can be overbearing, and my advice is try to express them, with more and more confident.

[980] Sometimes it's hard, but you are going to be much more fulfilled than by suppressing them.

[981] What about love?

[982] One of the big ones.

[983] What role does that play?

[984] that's the bigger part of emotions that is a scary thing right is a lot of vulnerability that comes with a love but there is also so much energy and power and love in all senses and in the traditional sense but also in the sense of a broader sense for for humanity with feeling this compassion with makes us one with other people and the suffering of other people.

[985] I mean, all of this is a very scary stuff, but it's really the fabric of life.

[986] Well, the sad thing is it really hurts to lose it.

[987] Yes.

[988] That's why the vulnerability comes with it.

[989] That's the thing about emotion is up and the down, and the down seems to come always with up.

[990] but the output only comes with a down so yeah let me ask you about the ultimate down which is unfortunately we humans are mortal or appear to be for the most part do you think about your immortality do you do you fear death I hope so and I do because I mean without death there is no life so at least there is no meaningful life And death is actually, in some sense, our ultimate motivator to live a beautiful and meaningful life.

[991] I myself felt as a young man that unless I got something that I wanted to do, I don't know why I got the idea of I said something to say.

[992] If I'm not able to say, I would suicide.

[993] So maybe it was a way to motivate myself.

[994] But you don't need to motivate it because, in some sense, fortunately, death is there.

[995] So you better get up and do your thing because that is the best motivation to live fully.

[996] Well, what do you think, what do you hope your legacy is?

[997] You know, my...

[998] You mentioned you have two kids.

[999] Yes.

[1000] And so I really feel that, you know, there is, on one side is my biological, legacy and that is my two kids, right, and their kids, hopefully.

[1001] And that is one fine.

[1002] And the other thing is this common enterprise, which is society.

[1003] And I really feel that my legacy would be better by providing security and privacy.

[1004] Actually, for me, are metaphorical to say, I want to give you the ability to interact more and take more risks and reach out more for more people as difficult and dangerous as amazing.

[1005] But my all scientific work is about to guarantee privacy and give you the security of interaction.

[1006] And not only not transaction, like it would be a blockchain transaction, but that is really one of the hardcore of my emotional problems.

[1007] and I think that these are the problems I want to tackle.

[1008] Yeah, and ultimately, privacy and security is freedom.

[1009] Freedom is at the core of this.

[1010] It's dangerous, just it's like the emotion thing.

[1011] But ultimately, that's how we create all the beautiful things around us.

[1012] Do you think there's meaning to it all, this life, except the urgency that death provides, and us anxious beings create?

[1013] cool stuff along the way?

[1014] Is there a deeper meaning?

[1015] And if it is, what is it?

[1016] Well, meaning of life.

[1017] Actually, there are three meanings of life.

[1018] Great.

[1019] That's great.

[1020] One, to seek.

[1021] Two, to seek.

[1022] And three, to seek.

[1023] To seek what?

[1024] Or is there no answer to that?

[1025] There's no answer to that.

[1026] I really think that the journey is more and more important than the destination, whatever that be.

[1027] and I think that is a journey and is in my opinion at the end of the day I must admit meaningful in itself and we must admit that maybe whatever your destination might be at the hang you know we never didn't get there but hell was a great right it was a great right well I don't think that's a better way to end as Sylvia thank you for thank you for wasting your extremely valuable time with me today, joining on this journey of seeking something together.

[1028] We found nothing, but it was very fun.

[1029] I really enjoyed it.

[1030] Thank you so much for talking to.

[1031] Thank you, Alex.

[1032] It wasn't been really special for me to be interviewed by you.

[1033] Thank you for listening to this conversation with Sylvia McCauley, and thank you to our sponsors, Athletic Greens, Nutrition Drink, the information in -depth tech journalism website, Four -Sigmatic mushroom coffee, and Better Help Online Therapy.

[1034] Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast.

[1035] And now, let me leave you with some words from Henry David Thoreau.

[1036] Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

[1037] Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.