Surprise AMA August 30th, 2021

hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado today is august 30th 2021 and it is the lovely ama not much to talk about not much to report pre-ama outside of the fact that i still do get fan mail from time to time and i got this lovely bison for my bison ranch from shane patrick he sent me a great letter he says charles greeting from warm sunny southwest florida first off thank you so much for signing copies of the code book for my students in miami you're welcome they really appreciate it i'm sorry the thank you took so long i've been traveling most of the summer and am now clearing out the time to do many of the things i should have gotten to months ago and he goes on to talk about my pool and various other things but i just wanted to make a quick shout out to him before we get started vma and thank him for the bison it is now permanently part of the collection we might even put this in the crypto bison game that we're building so thank you shane so much for that okay a few other housekeeping items conferences on the 25th 26th i think it's summit.cardano.org that they settled on who knows somebody else takes care of that i and of course the 12th is going to be a big day got my whiskey right here we're ready to go and so far things are all happy happy octopus there's no satipus in sight and i i'm just still amazed and humbled by how amazing the community is and how everybody's working together it's been a long hard six years it really has it's been a slog we had to do enormous amounts of research a lot of code writing a lot of engineering a lot of community building and there's still tons of stuff to do and there's still tons of rough edges to stand out and integrations to build and that's gonna break at some point somewhere somehow cause reasons and that's that's what keeps us all busy but i really do appreciate the fact that you've been along this journey with us and cardano is no longer cardano is it's cardinal r cardano is a nation it's filled with millions of people all around the world some young some old some are from great places some are from places that are a little hard some people have had trouble in their lives other people have had everything work out for them just the perfect way we got people broke we got people are billionaires and everything in between and what's consistently amazing to me is just the innovative capacity of the cardano ecosystem and what makes gogan so special as a release is this is really one of those releases that opens up the creativity and passion of all of you who are part of this movement we keep seeing these ecosystem maps and what they're real because there's real people behind them but the big but is they got to deliver their logo on an ecosystem map is a commitment it's a promise to all of you in the ecosystem that they're going to do their finest their hardest they're going to commit they're going to put the work in just we did when we built the underlying protocols and a lot of people are going to earn it and some won't measure up and that's the truth of life you see a lot of people they tell stories they talk and they tell you how great they are they have all this reputation one of the reasons why i in my older years and now i'm 33 almost 34 as i've gone through life and god i've gone through so much life the last 13 years you wouldn't believe it i've met so many people that talk big and the thing that has always been a a moment for me like mathematics or in agriculture those are fields where who no matter how big someone talks there is a burden of proof that is universal in mathematics it's the proof you can claim to be a great mathematician but you got to prove something got to do something which is why i'm not a great mathematician because i never proved anything big in mathematics now doing the hoskins center this upcoming month and rewrite the foundations of mathematics it'll take 25 years to do it and after i've done all of that i'll pay back that debt of having the audacity to say that i'm a mathematician but there's proof in that and that's actually proving it to the harshest of all critics the computer because computers can't accept what i'm saying or you get this or without loss of generality they can't get statements like that you actually have to be very pedantic to them so they're the harshest of all critics far more than any referee of any journal so it's going to be fun spending a big chunk of my adult life working in those circles funding those circles hopefully contributing when i have the time to those circles and agriculture is the much same way it is all about planting seeds it's all about watering it's all about feeding you can be a billionaire and have an incredible reputation and have changed the world do you think the cow standing outside understands that has any conception of that they're a passive moral agent they life happens to them they don't have the consciousness their capability to comprehend and make provisions they just know they're hungry and it doesn't matter if it's cold outside it doesn't matter if the wind is blowing it doesn't matter what the circumstances and facts are if you just got divorced or you lost your sister or you're recovering from an addiction that matters at the end of the day that cow's hungry and if you don't feed them too many times you'll see it on them and eventually they die they rely completely on you it's the same for the plants it does not matter what's going on where you're at how that works either you water it or you don't that's the key and i got plants right there on my desk and no matter what's going on i'm accountable to them and i feel bad when they don't get watered and it's my job it's no one else's job that list that ecosystem map that we see ahead of us those have to be watered they have to be tended they have to be taken care of by people and if they're not they'll die they won't get adoption they won't launch they won't get there that's the ultimate truth and that's why i really enjoy this stage of the project we've given people a foundation however imperfect to realize their dreams in the community you're in charge of that you get to see that you get to decide what you support what you don't support it's not my place or purpose it's yours you get to decide what you vote to fund and what you don't vote to fund you get to decide which state pool you delegate to because there's actually the ideo the initial delegation offering now these people are delegating to pools to support the development of some software it's a novel distribution it's a novel concept for funding and in the coming months these things are going to be your choices i think what 13 days 14 days hfc event happens and a lot to do a lot of things are going to take some time to turn on but it'll go so quickly and you're going to wake up in hundreds of applications and thousands of applications the community is there people are passionate they're excited but the hard days will come as the enthusiasm starts waning a little bit and we get into the reality of actual software life cycles and support deaths in version 2 and version 3 and version 4. that is what separates the people who have integrity from the people who don't if we've built good foundations and a good ecosystem then i believe you will all as a community collectively be better judges than most and we'll have a lot less problems there is no greater example of this than in the certification and verification ecosystem that's going to be built around cardano it's unique to cardano in this respect so cardano has the capacity built within the languages to leverage years if not decades of formal methods ideas because of the functional programming nature and we have a lot of partners like cubic runtime verification and twig and others who are throwing their hat into the ring to provide services or infrastructure to allow adapt developer to show proof to the community that their dap follows a standard higher quality code better assurance of semantical correctness and potentially even better security you the community have to demand that you have to use dapps that follow that rigor and don't use the ones that don't it falls upon your lap questions you asked how you think now we'll be here we're always here can't leave got lobsters to feed and i'll give of course my two cents from time to time but of course i can't endorse applications one way or the other if i see something interesting of course talk to them but it's not my place to pick winners and losers it's yours collectively as a community and it's not my place to say who's real who's not real it's for the builders of these things to show that they're real to you the community that is the reality that we're working our way into over the next few months and it's going to be fun to see i think we've laid good soil and i think you guys have good seeds and as long as they're watered i do believe we're going to have a great forest okay let's get to your questions huh all right charles do you believe that cryptocurrency could lead to a ubuntu society and allow truly allow mankind to expand further into deep space i believe so i'd like to hear your thoughts on the sci-fi future i think that might be a carrot emoji okay hal 9000xl who's i think that's the little girl from the addams family this concept of societal evolution is a tremendously important component of what we do in the cryptocurrency space people often ask what type of company is input output and i say we're not a cryptocurrency company we're not even a blockchain company these are tools in a toolbox we're a systems company the systems of the world the voting system the property system the voting the governance systems the payment settlement systems all of these things that you take for granted you're born into when you are swiss there's a different set of rules about what it means to be swiss than if you're born in zambia or argentina all of those systems they're going to be upgraded changed and what we're trying to do is we're trying to figure out how do we build things that doesn't require a king or a leader or a ceo or a prime minister or a small group of special people in the united states of america it's one plus nine plus five thirty five the vast majority of my life the things that happen in my life are controlled by a president nine supreme court justices and 535 lawmakers huge impact whether we're in war or not or a piece my property rights my basic human rights the tax rates how land works all these things controlled by that and if not them plus 50 50 governors and their associated state legislators less than 10 000 people in the united states have control over over 300 million domestically and because we have an empire billions of people there's got to be a better way than that honestly it's not hard to corrupt 10 000 people it's not hard to find 10 000 idiots and put them in positions of power there's got to be a different way where we have a lot more control over our lives what we do as a systems company is we ask that fundamental question we try to build tools techniques economic systems and pressures to push people in that particular direction but at the end of the day you can lead a horse to water you can't make them drink and so ultimately people have to adopt the new way of doing things and have faith and confidence that that social fiction is better than the ones that came before it will you integrate solana at charles hoskinson it's not my call i mean you guys are going to do it as much as me solana can do it it's an open ecosystem now it's probably in reference to my tweet i noticed a lot has been getting a lot of adoption and it's been getting a lot of buzz and talk and it's certainly performing well in the markets and whenever that occurs i always take a step back and i say okay well who are these guys and i'm genuinely curious it's gotten to the point where we really should sit down and read the protocol and see what's novel and interesting so i commissioned this morning a business intelligence report to be written i reached out to some people in the salon community and they were very helpful they sent me over a twitter private message several links and places to look and i'll read through it and i'll probably have a stronger opinion and a lot more to say a little bit later down the road but i mean i i think everybody should have that mentality once certain thresholds are accomplished and milestones are accomplished we should ask who are you where you come from what do you believe in where do you want to go all of these basic things and solana's gotten to that particular point now partnership at the input output level if there was such a thing it would have to break down to either an area of economic collaboration or area of engineering collaboration or an area of scientific collaboration and there are some cryptocurrency ecosystems we work with in in and more than one of those categories so obviously we'd have to see what they do they have to see what we do and if there's something that seems to make sense we're both trying to solve the same problem then of course we would we'd pursue something but as it stands right now there's no relationship as it stands right now it was just a genuine question tell me more i'd like to learn more and i i hope they return the favor and they learn a lot more about cardano and the two communities can get to know each other nothing is accomplished by hate and division and maximalism everything is accomplished by trade and cooperation why is ergo not the top 10 a because there's not enough in circulation and b it's not on enough exchanges yet but for in terms of technology and utility i think ergo is definitely an amazing ecosystem got great people and i really like what alex has done regarding smart contract integration are you still on track dude september 12th yes sir when is the third cohort probably at the end of the conference that'll be announced because pab will be solidified and also the prism pioneer program is going to begin as well charles i'd love to hear your elaborated arguments for dismantling the fair points mentioned in the cryptocolonialism article in coindesk against cardano thanks there are no fair points in that article it's a completely unfair inhuman thing done by one of these social justice warriors it has very limited experience in the jurisdiction crypto can't build roads that's true but people build roads and people have to be paid and have the resources and expertise and knowledge and ability to build roads where do they get those things from from systems if you have bad systems you don't get roads you got good systems you get them what crypto does is it gives you a new system and once it's installed the system has properties about it which are better universally for each and every person in that economy doubt me ask yourself this would you like to live in a country with free and fair elections simple yes no questions would you like to live in a country with sound stable money would you like to live in a country where it's easy to get money in and out of the country would you like to live in a country where you're treated equally to everyone else and there aren't people who have special considerations or favors because they won the genetic lottery or the geographic lottery born to the right family right name right political connections yes or no would you like to live in a country where the property that you live on you earned and you think you own can't be stolen from you by a nepotistic corrupt company or entity would you like to live in a country where the things you have a right to know are guaranteed and the accomplishments you make are recorded properly so you can prove them to other people yes or no and we can go down the list all of these things are contingent upon the operating system of that country and the belief that those things are credible don't believe me okay you have two candidates you're an hr director one of them graduated from massachusetts institute of technology the other one graduated from a university in kigali they both have phds and computer science which one of them would you hire knowing only that all things being equal let's say the curriculum is identical you'd probably hire the mit graduate why because you think it's a more reputable organization why because the brand and reputation and the faith in that institution is higher than the other and that's the problem so how do you get ahead if that's your only access to education now let's change it up a little bit let's say that the person who graduated in mit was last in their class the person who graduated kigali's is sovent you still are judged by the brand and reputation of the institution how does that person get ahead is it colonialism for saying that we can improve the systems and how exactly would we do so by coming in and changing them or by creating a self-serve system the point of cryptocurrencies is there's not central coordination or central permission keeping for the system to be integrated and installed don't believe me who did bitcoin then the campbell herder in mongolia who has his bitcoin tell me was there some committee that woke up and said boy we really need batuza to buy bitcoin those goby camel herders they have to do it yup we need a guy out there it's good story good pr let's go find him convince him he made the decision himself so let me get this straight coin desk it's colonialism to give people open source tools no one controls to put the freedom of globalization and self-determination in their own hands and improve their system so that they're on par with the rest of the world if not better and they can fairly compete with the rest of the world that's colonialism just because that can't build roads i don't think you understand anything if you view it that way and unfortunately see a lot of this the cynical 25 30 35 year olds they got their liberal arts degree and they think they know everything and they've been all around the world how everything works the evils of the world are all about dealing with scarcity at the end of the day the fear of it or the reality of it and the whole field of economics is the study of human behavior under scarcity if resources are unlimited no one really cares doesn't matter but when resources are finite who gets to decide how they get to decide who gets to allocate who has access who doesn't have access these types of things that's where governments come in corrupt governments are ones that keep the pie small good well-constructed governments grow the pie for everybody and everybody prospers from it systems make good governments not the other way around bad governments make bad systems good systems make good governments and i think that was totally lost and that's totally beyond the point and they say oh they have all these connectivity problems and infrastructure problems oh you they're going to solve that too themselves because there's a lot of money in the developing world there's a lot of value in the developing world african entrepreneurs are going to solve the african connectivity issues and in many cases better faster and cheaper than we do they're not going to have four monopolies beating each other up that our state is sponsored no there's going to be thousands of isps thousands of different ways to connect oh they don't have the right computing infrastructure africans will figure that out for africans not us okay and they're gonna do it better than we do they'll get more better faster cheaper and that infrastructure alone is all that's required for new systems that are better than our systems give them access to the systems they know what to do they'll get it done and when they do collectively the wealth will build to an extent that it's comparable to ours and then suddenly those roads get built and they're not just roads they're hyperloops they're not just roads they're hypersonic aircraft they're not just roads they're the matternet a lot of new things will come that we can't get here because we have blinders on and bad systems [Music] how do we stop political corruption well it's a combination of systems that force transparency and punish those who are corrupt and it's also a reality that those who are corrupt tend to make money off of the system as it is if the system is more prosperous they make a lot more money in a new system and even if they're already wealthy and powerful look to the story of jack ma is a great warning of what happens when you don't live in a rule of law free society you can be the wealthiest man in your country who every day has a rolodex filled with heads of state regularly meeting with the most powerful people in the world and you pissed off one person and because you pissed off that one person now you're filling your calendar with golf and learning how to paint and reading taoist poetry and staying out of the spotlight and flying to beijing to apologize for the indiscretions to the state while the communist party slowly but surely tears your companies apart and hands them to their friends and at some point you end up good locked when no one's looking political corruption is not a monolithic entity and a fact of life it's a consequence of a system and a set of beliefs and economic realities change the system the beliefs and the economic realities the corruption changes and the corrupted actors change and either they do or their own people will hang them charles can you please tell us more about your biotech company you're setting up with your brother all right well it's called hoskinson biotechnologies and my brother and i are really interested in regenerative medicine and anti-aging also did it with my dad so my brother dad and i are all co-owners my dad and brother are both doctors they're internists and my dad's been practicing medicine for well over 30 years my brother's been practicing just for a few years he graduated in colorado and he moved up to wyoming and anyway we're looking into treatments and we're looking into the science of anti-aging so we're in silent mode and we're going to do is the same thing we did with aisle global i o global what i did was hire the best and brightest scientist in the field and we wrote 111 papers and we kind of learned how this entire industry works and then we built cardano as an example product of these things and now we're building out a digital transformation portfolio to go and change nation states and companies and build other infrastructure products and services okay well similarly when you look at biotechnology we're right at the edge of a renaissance in medicine and biology where all these really geeky scientists they've been sitting in labs for a long time thick glasses and they're studying oxwattle or a jellyfish that lives forever or a newt or salamander and they say wow they have this tremendous regenerative capacity they get old they form a cyst they come out young again they live they're biologically immortal wow they they have ways of regrowing limbs and healing wounds that would be mortal for humans but somehow they survive these things and we're not so much different those creatures in us so they've been studying these things for a long time and learning all the secrets of that stuff and little by little those secrets will slow drip their way into medicine there's a lot of cynicism and skepticism in medicine there's a lot of belief that innovation doesn't happen and rightfully so because the system is broken there's plenty of brilliant biologists and brilliant doctors and brilliant scientists who really want to do a lot of good and they get very cynical because they spend a career and they realize first it takes 10 years 20 years to bring a drug to market a billion dollars and the innovation investments are seldom for revolutionary things therefore treatments and evolutionary things therefore slightly better a new chemo drug and it gives you an extra month doesn't actually cure the cancer it just gives you an extra month but it's on patent we charge fifty thousand dollars for a treatment or maybe give you a slightly better treatment for your heart disease your high blood pressure your blood sugar problems okay so you just take that meanwhile all these people are running around saying gosh we're learning so much so quickly we really want to try some new things so i think there's an opportunity to speed things up i think there's an opportunity to innovate differently and there's certainly a lot of great books written about it from audrey to gray to david sinclair ben bickman why we get sick lifespan and and so forth and these books really lay out great blueprints of how to think about slowing down the aging process or at least trying to play around with it and there's already some great innovations some new like exosome therapies and some old the foreman for example and some supplements like nad plus that have actually been shown to have a really interesting signals there's great researchers like elysium does this up in mit and dozens of others floating around but we really live in a golden age these bio chips are being invented that you can test all kinds of things on you have these amazing computer models that can simulate things that we never thought possible before you can sequence the entire human genome you see billions of dollars now it's hundreds of dollars there's a company called nebula that does that there's actually a blockchain company they work with called oasis labs that actually makes you own the data and secure it like 23andme and these other guys so it's a golden age that we're heading to especially with ai assisted research and it's my belief that if we get in early we put a brain trust together and we look at everything we look at the orthodoxy the metformins that are starting to show real interesting clinical signals that are already fda approved to the unusual almost pseudoscience like photobiomodulation and pulsed electromagnetic stuff and so forth so pemf and photobiomodulation hyperbaric treatments have been shown to do some really interesting things there's an israeli research group that's been studying that so we'll look at all of these things and we'll have a really strong opinion just i do with cryptocurrencies after we do the science which means there's no substitute for meta-analysis and reading papers and writing papers and getting really qualified people together and at some point somewhere somehow we'll learn enough to be able to build a product and i don't know what that product is going to be yet all kinds of different things we could do it'd be really cool for example to use autologous stem cells and do something there for wound treatment okay but saying that it's one thing actually doing it is a completely different thing and turning it into an entire product is a completely different thing be really cool to go after antibiotic resistance using bacteriophages that very act could actually teach you a lot about synthetic biology because you have to type the phage to the bacteria and that means you have created some sort of machine that can do that stuff okay but it's early early days so it'll be about 24 36 months in silent mode where i imagine we're not going to be announcing too much but we'll certainly be hiring just like elon musk did with his bci venture neurolink and little by little we'll start slow dripping stuff out and we're going to do as much as we can in wyoming so we'll create some local jobs there get some people to relocate and live out those winters and then just right out of the blue come up to you guys and say oh by the way we got this thing take a look and it'll be a lot of fun yeah this is a common one from andrew yang he says charles can i get your take on the progressive automation of our jobs through artificial intelligence and the implementation of some form of ubi universal basic income so the paraphrasing the the argument is that we're just about to head into the fourth industrial revolution and this revolution is not an information but it's an automation revolution where you have two pieces of technology that are evolving at a very rapid pace one are robotics so instead of these wonky little robots that go danger danger rule robinson and clearly are toys you now have robots that you watch the general dynamics videos or the boston all these videos that are coming out of the military and you see robots running obstacle courses and doing somersaults and lifting heavy things and so forth and they're clearly able to understand how to navigate and interact with an ambient environment in ways that were just science fiction 10 years ago so if you chart that rate of evolution and you look at the advancement of the brains of these things gpt-3 and gpt-4 the people working on these things and how they're actually evolving at a massive pace they're going to intersect at some point where you're going to have an agent that has the dexterity agility and strengthen capabilities of a human and the brain of at the very least a manual laborer and what's going to happen is that plus some judgment probably first with a human controlling a collection and eventually artificial judgment means that that entity can now replace fast food workers truckers road workers all kinds of people or augment those people so for example construction you have your general contractor and instead of having a carpenter an electrician foundation people dry wallers floor people tile people you now have robots that occupy those particular roles supervised by that general contractor 15 20 people build a home one person to build a home plus an automated crew that never gets tired if they get broken they don't sue you and they don't get injured and basically always does their best work and software updates mean they make better and better and better work and then when you want to know how to build new materials new patterns all of those things can be downloaded into them like for example you want to go from stick to icf suddenly they just download the icf program and now they know how to work with insulated concrete forms okay ready to go even if the gcs doesn't have any experience the robots in the ground will and then they also can do multi-purpose roles they can drive the trucks and they don't need a cdl necessarily they can work at night because they have night vision they can work in the rain or incredibly cold and windy conditions and most workers can't work in those they can work in hostile conditions like highly radioactive environments oxygen-poor environments dangerous environments like environments that have a lot of natural gas floating around like mines and things like that okay so there's this push towards this reality and the question is when that happens are we going to see an exacerbation of the things we saw in the last 35 years in particular where the billionaire class gets richer and richer and richer and richer and richer richer but the poor in middle classes they don't grow in wealth now there's a big political economic divide in why that's been occurring the last 35 years if you talk to an austrian economist you talk to a libertarian you talk to a conservative their answer is it's the fiscal and monetary policy that caused that reality so those middle class and those poor people they haven't gotten richer because the money in their pocket is losing value too quickly because of bad monetary policy since 71 we've been off the gold standard and you can actually plot from 1971 to today the value of the dollar and you notice the buying power goes down the wealthy get first access to the money and have all kinds of magic investments that are hedges against inflation so the wealthy basically are in a position where no matter what the economic conditions are they win but the poor people only win when monetary policy is looking good okay so you talk to the liberal economist and they say well no no no no no the problem we have here is we don't have redistributionist tax policy and the rich who have been getting richer and richer and richer they should have a large chunk of their newfound wealth redistributed to society so no one gets left behind and that is where ubi basically lives it it's nestled in that redistribution concept and the basic idea is that all this new wealth that automation and ai is going to create for a small group of billionaires we should take a meaningful percentage of it and then give it to all the people who will be displaced the question is will they really be displaced we don't know we actually don't have an answer so far the other three industrial revolutions that we've had they actually were not displaced many new jobs were created for example we have new industries like professional gamer vr stuff we have nfts we have gig economy we have a lot of creative outputs all these types of things where those people have been displaced maybe they go and do other things there's plenty of people make money selling world of warcraft gold maybe that's large enough to handle that displaced economy assuming that people can self retrain or the resources are available for that maybe they can't there were people who were left behind in the last few industrial revolutions and so far the state was able to take care of them maybe they will maybe they won't hear it's an interesting question so where i believe ubi makes sense is not redistribution where i believe ubi makes sense is sovereign wealth fund and a a government invests billions of dollars every year into innovation and all these other things for the good of its people and the education for the good of its people a government shouldn't be spending more than it makes unless of time of crisis i don't like deficit economies and a government with its surpluses should be investing that money and getting a return on that money like norway did with its sovereign wealth fund which is now 1.4 trillion dollars then it's not ubi it's what andrew tried to do a freedom dividend it's a dividend that you pay out from the sovereign wealth fund of the people that makes sense to me and i like ideas like that because it's not redistribution it's not taking property from one person and giving it to another person because you've arbitrarily decided well this person has too much well i think the us military has too much 750 billion dollars a year and by the way they just gave 85 billion dollars worth of military hardware to the taliban i'm not so happy about that can we please redistribute some of that budget and give it to oh no we can't do that but go take some of mine because you obviously will do better with it like go fight endless wars go have a spy state go take all my liberties and freedoms away and so forth do a really poor job of fighting a pandemic yeah you guys know what you're doing on the spending of my money redistribution to me is i'm a bit cynical about it because i see in practice how the money is spent and it's never enough once you get comfortable with this idea that you're entitled to a thousand dollars a month why shouldn't you be twelve hundred why shouldn't you be fifteen hundred why the arguments are all the same in that respect now the only practical way of doing ubi is with cryptocurrencies because you need digital money you need digital wallets you need the ability to push value to every single registered account we saw with the bailouts and the stimulus checks with covid united states how difficult was just to distribute money to people in the legacy way so ubi is definitely interconnected to cbdc's it's definitely interconnected to digital wallets and digital id and so forth and our industry is this is not the the last we're going to hear of it charles what's the most unique thing about cardano that no one will have or has at the moment it's the hard four combinator that's a very unique bespoke piece of technology and it gives us the ability to do upgrades easily in the system and every chain that's lacking it they're suffering right now and we're doing good a question from fada how to use db sync with the database different from postgresql like mongodb there's an impedance mismatch when you go to a nosql system but it's open infrastructure and what will likely happen next year as the things change up is that open infrastructure will become more diverse and it will be entirely possible that it's going to live in any no sql world i like mongodb i think it's great to store things as json i i love javascript as a language it's one of my dirty secrets so it'd be really cool to see that that work with dpsync but postgres is a an enterprise grade database and sql is the standard in the industry and those schemas make a lot of sense to us and so it seemed a very good target but it would be nice to get some diversity not just with but also graph databases like neo4j and other nosql databases like redis and so forth awesome charab charles what are your thoughts on sunichi mochizuki purported proof of the abc conjecture there's certainly a war between field specialists about that it's an old number theory conjecture from i think the 1970s 1980s what it is is not important what what's important about it is the fact that it's too hard to verify it's actually one of the reasons why we're sitting at the hoskins center over at carnegie mellon the reality is that you have these overly abstract very technical proofs that come out and it takes enormous amounts of brain power for people to actually verify them and there's literally no incentive in the mathematical community for the verification of some of this work so think of it this way you're a young recently graduated phd in mathematics now the way math works is that if you're in your 20s and early 30s you're super productive then you have a radical decline in your productivity as you get into your 40s and 50s and eventually your 60s you're not solving big things so you have a finite career and a clock ticking mercilessly that if you don't do things in that finite career you can't get tenure you can't get into a good university for teaching so if you're a graduate student a postdoc or a young professor you look at something as daunting as the abc conjecture it's a fields metal class problem so to get there and solve that without the luxury of tenure you're probably not going to make much progress on it just like fermat's last theorem for example it was one of those problems you don't work on it it's bad for your career or the hailstone conjecture sequences the syracuse problem the collapse conjecture these types of things they're too hard okay so that group of people on their own devices aren't going to take the time to open up 250 300 pages of mathematical pros read super technical proofs many cases are ahead of their time because what sunich did is he didn't just prove something in his mind he actually created new math new tools new things to actually prove it okay so it's it's not a simple thing and literally you're gonna have to spend six months to a year of extremely focused deep work to get yourself to a point where you can have a strong opinion unless you just so happen to be in that field just so happen to be familiar with that research group now sinichi didn't make it easy for anybody normally when you have the audacity to report that you've solved a big problem the abc conjecture or the arts conjecture or any of these things that are floating around the number theory world you would go lecture you'd go on tour you'd spend some time with people like after fermat's last theorem was proven silverman had a lot to say about it they got together brown they had working groups forum graduate students came in they had seminars and they were the first thing they did is they simplified the proof it went from hundreds of pages to like 30 to 50 pages and they said okay i can understand it now okay that's never been done he just stayed in kyoto and he published in his own journal for this thing and he said i have solved it the job is done it's the mathematical community's job to figure out what i've done okay that's that's not good form in the mathematical community and it's something that mathematicians don't look so kindly on and that's one of the reasons why the other group of mathematician the professor who has tenure and access to graduate students at post-docs and can kind of guide them hasn't spent the time to really dig seriously into the abc conjecture and as a consequence that means it just sits in paper and there's a few guys in germany that are certainly who are very credible who are spending some time claiming that perhaps the proof isn't right and there's a few other adherents in kyoto who say it is and it's a big debate most professional mathematicians have no opinion on it kind of the continuum hypothesis it's beyond us in that respect beyond the industry in that respect it's like go go worry about that stuff and the rest of the guys okay so the point of constructive mathematics the point of systems like lean or dependently typed languages is sinichi can self-serve a big chunk of the verification of the proof we see this with the four color theorem we see this with other things that have been mechanized the difference is the tools here are on steroids they're much better than the older tools like auto math and mizar and things that came with the qed manifesto it is my belief that if these tools are heavily invested in it which is why i put 20 million dollars into the center it was not a small investment it's a permanent endowment that i'll continue adding money to throughout my life and career it's my belief that over the arc as people learn to use these tools they become collaborative community tools that what sinichi's successors can do is they're not going to just dump a 250 page tome on the mathematical community and say good luck everybody have fun everybody goodbye everybody what they'll do is they'll decompose it into interesting things improve a lot of those technical very refined things with these proof assistants and if it compiles there's a high probability that it's right then because you've had the discipline to construct it in a way that's machine understandable and a computer is the harshest of all critics because it can't take things for granted you can't assume it knows something i mean you have to back the piano arithmetic and teach it what a natural number is it's not simple stuff for a computer you have to really work at it what you can do then is you can show that certain things that would be of concern for a proof are resolved okay and as a consequence then you can really lecture on and talk about how all these pieces fit together how the agenda fits together andrew wiles was very considerate in this respect if you actually look at the anatomy of fermat's last theorem his proof for it with these residues and these other things what he did is he actually had these modules and they kind of plugged together in a kind of an overall giant proof agenda and because each of those modules had kind of nice connections between them it was easy to decompose the proof into understandable blocks that domain experts in those blocks could look at and dissect and say well now there's a problem here in fact the proof in 1994 the original proof had a flaw it was only discovered because of the care and consideration that was in the design of this of that proof that was not done in the proof of the abc conjecture like new math was invented at the same time as the application of extremely specialized tools and a very incomprehensible paper was constructed and if you use something like lean you're forced to do that in the process of writing approve so you have self-serving you have a platform for collaboration you have a higher burden of proof than most mathematicians are used for and you have a separation of concerns just you would in any software architecture and so the key is just to get to the tools to a level of maturity that they can be applied properly for the writing of mathematical proofs as a collective game and every day mathematicians around the world from imperial to max planck and out here at cmu and other places they work together and they think about these things and they have all kinds of interesting debates and the other thing is that you can switch your logics so you can say things like yeah i don't like cfc set theory let's let's go do something else let's live in a system where the continual hypothesis is false the system that wouldn't construct it in these types of things and let's get rid of the axiom of choice let's see what happens that's really cool that you can just pull things out and switch your logics and so forth it's true under this set but it's not out of this set and so forth you do that as a set theorist or a logician you don't commonly do that as an algebraic or topologist so you don't get to the basement you look at the basement dwellers and you say live in the basement and they're the radiologists of mathematics they live in dark rooms and i'll accept them so anyway those are my thoughts i think it's a lack of consideration and i i think it's the output of an insanely brilliant person let me be very clear sinichi's probably the top ten in terms of most brilliant mathematicians alive right now i'd say number one is terry tau and she's certainly in the top ten and i think he's gotten to a point where he knows who he is and he has a high degree of confidence in his brilliance so he just doesn't really care to go and take the time that somebody in their 20s would do if they they solve something really huge and it's going to be really fun seeing what people do from that it's the other thing that sometimes is missed is if you look at the fermat's last theorem for example because this is one of those problems people really talked about so it's a great example it's just a gift that keeps on giving there was a brilliant woman named sophie jermaine who attempted to prove it in the 19th century and ultimately her agenda failed however sophie's work actually inspired a lot of people to do a lot of other things in mathematics in the 19th and 20th century and so sometimes the failure in attempting to prove something is actually a a great opener to other conjectures and other ideas riemann spent quite a bit of time thinking about things the goldbach conjecture and prime number theorem and these things and then we have the riemann hypothesis so there's a lot of magic there that happens and mathematicians often remember their failures more than their successes and their failed proofs and their failed attempts their failed thoughts at least unlocked something somewhere if we can get that thinking that computing that right now lives in the wet brain the meat space that dies with the mathematician in part or whole into a computing system a digital mind if we can extract that and put that into that that system then when a mathematician dies we don't quite lose them instead a crude simulacrum of that mathematician a shadow of that mathematician remains behind we haven't lost growth in d we haven't lost hilbert we haven't lost emmy nother they're still there their papers are there their proofs are there but the way they think is lost because the papers can't tell you enough when you start using ai with lean mathematicians interact with artificial intelligence they talk to it it learns from them they conjecture together they work together part of who they are gets permanently imprinted in that system and over 100 years of that usage you'll have a gallery of specters of the great people from the past and they're on display for all the new mathematicians and that's the only way a field can get to the next level the other fields they have the advantages of tangible physical things the ghosts of the past leave behind physical things they constructed airplanes and trains and computers and all these things outputs of the brilliance that you then can be inspired and build on so you don't need to remember the names like how many of you remember who created the cathode ray tube for the television we don't even use that type of tv anymore it was professor farnsworth you might remember futurama professor farnsworth from futurama that he was actually named after philo farnsworth but you don't even remember farnsworth and by the way he created that because he was interested in fusion and he failed fusion but created the television and instead with the crt and but you see that it's there and the successors of that technology is what you're looking at on your screen right now we don't have that in mathematics we don't we just have the papers and the proofs and we're only one generation away from all of that being lost everything the paper can be there but it'll be a dead tongue a dead language if no one bothers to teach it that's the other important thing one of the reasons mechanization of math is so powerful and so interesting above all the other things is that idea that we now get to leave something behind that's kind of the cathode ray tube in the structure and the other things so to me it is one of the most exciting and vibrant and sexy things any human can be involved in and i hope that the center can figure out a way to grow to that and inspire many young mathematicians to use lean as a tool is one of the friendliest nicest most amazing communities if you're interested and actually jeremy avagod the director of the center is writing a textbook called lean for mathematicians which will be released under creative commons license that's the other point every output of this is open source there's no intellectual property no patents no ipe none of that stuff math it should be for everybody there's no notion of credentialing a mathematician any more so than credentialing euclid or archimedes or diophantus of these people it's it's a structured way of thinking like critical thinking it's a way of looking at the world in reality that's not owned by academia it's been preserved because no one else wanted to and we couldn't find a way to work it into society we have poetry and fiction and all these other things that we have and we take for granted but hopefully we can find a way to liberate it a little bit and open it up a little bit anyone springer vale won't have monopolies or these things that's at least the vision and it'll be really fun seeing where it goes and more books will come after lean for mathematicians will be lean for algebras it's like topology for turtles lean for topologists lean for combinatoris lean for probability theorists and so forth we'll just keep adding and adding and adding and hopefully the center will one day be able to get most mainstream mathematicians thinking this way and if they interact with that plus ai they're permanently part of the year of math mm-hmm good question right here how did you meet ben gertzell what are your opinions on grace and sophia thanks charles big fan of european and alex cherpinoy so i met ben through i think it was it was mihail it was dr m she she introduced ben to tom flynn our commercial director and tom talked to him and then i had a chance to meet him and i met him in person in wyoming he came to laramie and we spent some time together and talked to each other and had the hat on and we drank some beer and went to chili's ate some chips and had an incredibly deep conversation i think we spoke for about six hours straight it was a lex friedman level conversation i and i interviewed him and we broadcasted that i and what i left from ben was really a sense of what a true academic is is a person who has no ego who's extremely humble who's just surrounded by this permanent curiosity everything is interesting he wants to know how everything works how does everything fit together you could pour a puzzle in front of him he'd get lost in it for an hour or two because he has to solve it has to see it and also someone who always is inspired by the science fiction of the future the world we could live in the things we could have if only we humans could get out of our own way and we could find better ways of doing things now i contribute in that respect with systems and what we do with cardano blockchain technology and my company input output he contributes by trying to build an artificial intelligence that's real an agi not in a narrow ai that can do alphago or it has slightly better computer vision than the last computer vision or you got good speech to text okay it actually recognizes my weird accent okay no an agi where you can just throw a problem at it say okay ag i go tell me the cure for this disease you got it boss comes back with all this thought and says have you tried that it's making contributions as if it's here okay he wants to build that and when you look at grace and sophia the other hanson products his partner really these are just cases to carry that journey that he's been on 300 plus papers he got his phd in math at 21.

he's a super bright guy in that respect and he's attracted an or around his orbit people are equally brilliant or trained people and those are just cases to hold those ideas and those things now they happen to be very valuable cases if they happen to solve real problems in case of grace this is an area that is near and dear to my heart because two of my grandparents actually all three of my grandparents died recently last 36 months i lost my two grandmothers and a grandfather my dad's mother and father and i lost my mom's mother they all died of neural degenerative disorders on my dad's side my grandfather had parkinson's and my grandmother had dementia and on my mom's side my grandmother died of parkinson's excuse me alzheimer's from my grandfather on my my dad's side so i remembered them in their prime i remembered them when they were doing brilliant things and talking brilliant thoughts and i watched them decline and decay and it was a slow horrible process really dehumanizing grace is all about interacting with people who are in that state of affairs they still have from time to time lucid thoughts they still have from time to time things that are remnants of who they were when they were like us and the problem is the conditions the disorders are so caustic and corrosive to all of those around these people that people stop paying attention and they lose those lucid moments any single person who cares for people who have memory problems or neural gender problems or have a family member that's this way they can tell you they felt it it's horrible and it it takes the patience of a saint to be able to see through all of that and try to connect to those last vistages of lucid moments grace has unlimited patience that's the nature of the game grace has no ego grace has all the time in the world grace can sit and listen to the wildest confabulation the wildest craziest ideas and grace will somehow be able to sort all that out and find something hidden gem within all of it that's there grace also can hear things that humans can't hear like for example when your parkinson's is getting worse very subtle changes to your vocal cords occur subtle changes your eyesight occur you have this dementia stare every care provider who deals with those who are neurodegenerative they notice that stare they that glaze over vacant look that people develop grace can see that internalize that measure the state take the vitals every time and can sit by the bedside of these people eight hours 12 hours 16 hours it's just a limitation of how many graces you have and it can watch all these things and what grace can do is sort the fact from fiction and put those last lucid moments together and give those last lucid moments to the family in a way that is appropriate that alone is i think worth the entire endeavor if we solve nothing else with ben's work that one thing i would have given anything for for my parent my grandparents i would have given anything for that in my 20s and in my 30s i have traveled so much and unfortunately because of that i missed the last lucid years of my grandparents i just hear about it from afar and i didn't even get to go to most of the funerals just my grandmother's funeral on my mom's side the other two i missed and that's sad that's really sad so i think that these are great accomplishments i love people who dream big try big because even if they don't succeed even if they don't get there the attempt to get there the attempt to succeed that's what really matters that's what you should be teaching your children if your parents if you're an educator and you're in a position of mentoring someone sculpting someone if you are someone in a position of authority over someone turn off the news media turn off the cynicism stop paying attention to those who say you can't stop paying attention those who say that's just not the way the world works and start listening and working with and interacting with the people crazy enough to believe they actually can change something because what if enough of us get together and believe that it happens it's just that simple i believe in 10 years time there will be a grace for someone else's grandfather and grandmother that actually does that job and i believe in 10 years time as robotics gets more advanced that grace is going to do a whole lot of things and i guarantee a lot of burnt out nurses out there that really could use that because they're goddamn tired and they work too hard already and they make a lot of mistakes because they're so tired and worn down and they deal with the same stuff and bureaucracy again and again and again and in many cases they're treated like robots themselves before my brother was a doctor he was a nurse and he dealt with the brunt of all of it that's why the nurses like him because he's one of the doctors that actually was one of them and knows knows that he has some kinship there and having a grace around was a is a lifesaver stops you from making mistakes it helps you do your job better and it gives a lot more grace and dignity to the treatment of those who need help for all of us this is great twitter never lets us down nothing you are talking about is important today welcome wise here's what's important today the people around you for you that's the only thing that's important today not this and sure as hell not anything else you want to get rich why because there's something around you today that you don't and you think money is going to solve that for you think about it greetings charles cardinal's fees might be too high if it is price keeps rising have you considered changing them before voltaire the community will be in charge of that that's one of the handovers to get voltaire done you guys are gonna have to decide reasonable and prudent structures for the future fees are not the best mechanism for congestion control and they're certainly going to be alternative transaction vehicles like hydra to mitigate these things they're just to moderate a scarce resource and that is a difficult economic question now what you guys can do in the meantime is you can go and hire the rent is too damn high guy through voltaire and make him the official spokesman of the cardano fees why not that's the magic of voltaire that's the magic of catalyst somebody do a proposal find that guy see how much he works for i'm sure he'll do it think about it the fees are too damn high klaus's klaus's notorious statement you'll own nothing and you'll be happy any thoughts on davos's vision for our future it's a dystopian vision if i've ever heard one we don't have a resource problem we have a systems and technology problem there are asteroids in the asteroid belt that have more iron that has ever been found on earth sitting there or gold or other materials we have the capacity as a species to harness geothermal energy enough of it to power all of society for millennia we can live in the sea in seastead we can live underground we can go vertical do all kinds of things if desire we even become a multi-planetary species there's a group of people in davos this elite circle who think they speak for the world and they have this thing called the great reset and they believe capitalism has failed and we now need to replace it with some version of democratic socialism which effectively means property rights have to be thrown away it effectively means because of global existential problems like global warming we cannot as individuals be trusted with liberty and freedom our betters the royals the dictators the presidents the political systems the political class they have to solve our problems this is neo-communism it's what it is it's all rolled up they changed the vocabulary they changed all these other things and they promised a utopia but not a single damn one of them can take a step back and clearly articulate and explain to me how they overcame the problem that the minute that you install a government so powerful that it's in control of all the property rights that that government won't become co-opted corrupt and totalitarian because it's never not happened every time they've tried it now we have systems with cryptocurrencies that don't have leaders if cardano can update itself without leadership that is a good indication you can do that for governments and companies great in the next 10 20 years we're going to take those things for a spin and if they work we should push for nation states to go down that road because you can preserve and protect liberty and freedom and property rights but you can encode in the system parameterizations that respect environmentalism parameterizations that respect long-term thinking here's a great thought experiment if you don't believe me capitalism can solve all your problems here's how you create another currency that's all you got to do okay so you got today money the u.s dollar rar go to work make dollars an hour twenty dollars an hour thirty dollars an hour forty dollars an hour pick your number four hundred an hour you're a great lawyer thousand dollars an hour you're a partner raw all right you're making the money okay you are short-term focused get as much of this currency as possible any means necessary let's say your wealth is now two currencies today money future money future money you can only earn by doing something good for future you you who lives in the year 2200 today money you earn the same way you earn it today you need both to buy suddenly capitalism's working differently utility and value of you recycling planting a tree taking care of people volunteering educating your neighbor building a system that is preservable for hundreds of years is equivalent in some cases more valuable than the short-term stuff that is the key that's what is missed in this whole davos you'll own nothing and be happy great reset they're thinking too narrowly what they have to do to win the game is change the game they have to change the way economics work you have to create new currencies for example global warming right now if i was go to ever and try to build a geothermal power plant like 40 million dollars to build a 3.5 megawatt plant it's too expensive on the capex even though it lasts 100 years and the operational expense is like 300 000 per year it's so cheap to run those damn things but it's too expensive to build today but what if instead of just selling power it also produces some sort of carbon credit that i can sell and you sum the two together and now i make more money than the coal guys and all the other guys it's the most profitable power plant around having a second currency means that is the most profitable infrastructure to build and everybody's in a rush to build it and it displaces all the bad power it's just that simple capitalism is an optimization engine however you parameterized it it is going to optimize and look for those local and absolute maximum minima and optimize accordingly minimize cost maximize return so by parameterization it tells you where you can minimize to that's the point of regulation and by parameterization where you're maximizing to you're maximizing future money and today money then the only way that works the only way you can be rich in a system like that is by doing a lot of good for people in the year 2200 people you'll never meet because you'll be dead change the game to win the game the davos people don't do that they like writing books and charging a hundred thousand dollars for a seat at the table for companies and they talk a lot about global warming but can't land your private jet there because the airport is full and you can't let a helicopter there every 15 minutes a helicopter is landing because it's full you i don't know and you can fly on a private jet if that's your whole shtick but okay and they tell us how we should live our lives while they're most of them born into positions of wealth and privilege they got rockefeller or rothschild or these other things their last names or they're part of those families and they've never worked a real day in their lives when they graduate from their private school they get to go to a very prestigious university that's been around for hundreds of years that their family members attended and they get their requisite degree and then they get to go run one of the family businesses and then they think in their head because they've always been rich and powerful that they know the secrets to life all they know are the secrets to life in a monarchy secrets to life where they're in charge and we americans we're a little different we were born with the whole idea that we don't like kings and queens royalty we kind of fought a little bit of a revolutionary war over that thing and we were pretty scrappy and we didn't give in we didn't give up it's built into our dna we don't like control we don't like these hierarchies that tell us how to think what to do you can't even get people in america to wear a damn mask okay you could tell them aliens are invading half in america and say so what i don't care get off my land that's just how we look at the world so i think we're uniquely well positioned to think about things a little differently and i hope that that mentality and that thought process can be used to implement these new types of economic systems and ultimately i think that's the way of solving the problems not this davos dystopian neocommunism that they want to inflict on that but i'm a libertarian so one man's communism is another man's democratic socialism and if you're lactose millionaires and billionaires as bernie sanders would say you're well more than welcome to drink from that cup it's a free country at least the royals aren't shooting missiles at people yeah howard i think you need to read some books [Laughter] get outside a little bit you might you might be surprised to learn how the world really works charles what do you think of paul stamens did you meet him i've never met paul i've always wanted to and we keep missing each other i go to these mushroom conferences and he misses it or i can't go to one that he's at i've met bill yule and what's his name the rockefeller kid who's who does a lot of mushroom stuff and william and the rest of the gang there's some real cool people in the mushroom community and i just haven't met paul yet and i really do he's a hero of mine i read his books i got both of them the blue color and black color i one of gourmet mushrooms in the mushroom bible so charles we know you like rock do you listen to any electronic music chicago house detroit techno yeah i like synth wave and psychedelic trance rock and space rock and all those things i mean just depends on the mood if you're on a road trip that's the way to go 2 30 in the morning driving around used to have a ford fusion take that thing all around drive from colorado virginia and back go through west virginia with all the fog on the roads at three o'clock in the morning you either got playboy radio on xm that used to be real popular howard stern or that or then you got your synth wave that that'll get you through or your edm now rock i do like rock and this has actually been an area of criticism for some of the books out there it's a little side note i was homeschooled so my mom taught me and i raised me i didn't go to middle school or high school i i did the whole school all the way through k through 12 and i graduated early because of that i listened to all my mom's rock and she saw pink floyd in concert and all those other guys and so i grew up listening to journey in boston and motley crue and yellow and all these guys it was just second nature to me i love steve miller for that reason and ccr and later in life i had the privilege of meeting steve miller in ccr and that was a dream come true i had a conference in miami and i could invite anybody i wanted so i said let's bring steve miller in he made me pay for all the guitars he flew in flew 14 guitars and including all these old gibsons that were very expensive to ensure and then we had ccr come obviously and god that was amazing to see like right there in the front row five feet away from the listen to them play fortunate son but i have a very eclectic music taste i also used to play the piano a long time ago and so i know all the classical things like chopin's etudes and the preludes and all of beethoven's work and box work brahms's work and to be saying maurice revell godowski and so forth so it's always there's always a mood for these things now that i'm doing game development we got crypto bisons and we're doing algorithmically generated music i i really am starting to look into like rama jawadi's work and max richter's work and so forth because i'm thinking a lot about how do you do soundtracks for games and that's some blend of composer and some blend of stochasticism you have to put them together or else you have a stale soundtrack and there's a lot of inspiration for this great music is also storytelling and that's where they connect to us the plight of the worker or lost love for these types of things and so video games are great because you have the story and then you're trying to say okay well how does the music add a dimension to that and amplify that and reflect the emotional reality that you go into that's that's incredibly fun and there's an art to that that i don't fully understand but we're so fortunate we live in a world where there are people who do and you can hire them and interact with them and when it works together it's it's just magical it really is how far is this statement from the truth america is the best country in the world i don't believe america is the best country in the world i can't run for office now oh no i believe that the american people are the best people in the world because they come collectively from the entire world we are one of the very few countries in the world where the american people are composed of every single country i honestly don't believe there's one country missing even north korea there's north koreans in america there's iranians in america there's israelis in america there are flags from every nation in our culture we're in a country of immigrants and that's what makes us great that's what makes the country great all the ideas the languages the cultures the traditions come together they blend together and it's this great melting pot that finds a way to make it work now our government was built for a different time it was built for the 18th century it was built for the 19th century was built for the 20th century it wasn't built for instantaneous communication and a fourth branch of government a grand bureaucracy and civil service with millions of people in it who are politically immune to consequences of their actions our government has let the world down in the american people down we deserve better and we try to vote our way out of it we really do but look at our democratic institutions we only have two political parties we're allowed to vote for no political diversity other than those two and our candidates for the most part are chosen for us by powerful people and then we're told we're only allowed to vote for one or the other and then somehow that's going to solve the problem and every election most important election of our lifetime most important election that's that's why less and less people vote every year because they're disenfranchised from the process and we leave behind the greatness of all those people all those people who are truly amazing their collective intelligence and capability and brilliance is recused from our system so i believe very firmly the american people collectively as a whole never bet against them we will win 10 out of 10 times when we are properly unified want us to go to the moon we'll make it happen want us to go to mars we'll make it happen i don't believe the american government is the best government i firmly believe it's ossified corrupt chaotic and it needs to be upgraded and it is the duty of the american people to do that and what's going to happen is we're going to get so sick and tired and frustrated of the lies nepotism corruption and frankly that's being inflicted upon us children being taken away from their parents because their parents don't want to give an 11 year old a vaccine you can't do that forever i'm telling you it's gonna it's gonna break and when it does we're gonna rewrite the constitution through a convention and then suddenly we won't have this old horrible broken government that thinks it's okay to go fight in afghanistan for 20 years and come back with nothing to show for it outside of lost blood and treasure and national disgrace you'll have a government for the people accountable to the people harnessing the brilliance of the american people and then people like america again because every day actually everybody kind of likes the american people who are they by the way white guy sitting in colorado or is it the taxi driver from senegal arrives in new york city or is it sasha nadella the ceo of microsoft from india or is it a brilliant doctor from namibia who started as a mercenary and she worked her way here there are literally thousands of stories that are unique and amazing struggle all along the north korean gal who's just i forget her name was just on the joe rogan podcast and also the lex friedman podcast interviewed her right before he interviewed me and she tells this horrible story of having a claw and scratch your way from north korea to china and eventually get here her story is our story it's the american story we carry it with us and the unifying theme of all these things is this meritocratic idea of it can be better who can argue against that there are certainly cynical philosophies like this woke cult of post-modernism and power hierarchies and it says oh no one can be better it's all an illusion and everything's about power and the point of the government's to get redistribution so that it's fair the american dream was always that you can earn your way no matter where you start from it might take several generations but you'll get there your granddad may have started with just the clothes on his back as a refugee and then he died he had a house and your dad may have actually been able to start a great company and the son can actually end up taking that company making a fortune 500 or the daughter that's the american dream it's multi-generation in that respect too it's just this idea generation after generation effort after effort meritocratic work roll up your sleeves do what you need to do i'm a product of my father and my mom and they're a product of their father and their mother my grandfather on my mom's side he right out of high school signed up for the marine corps marine demolitions fought in the korean war and then came back home rolled up his sleeves came alignment worked his way all the way up retired an executive i think he had 19 patents before he retired and he just had a high school education and he was a product of the fact that his father left when i think he was 12 years old 13 years old my great-grandfather was a drunk on my mom's side didn't take care of his family and skipped out town one of those leaving for cigarettes never came back typical grandfather didn't complain had to be the man of the house and had to find a way to survive the great depression and the korean war and everything that came in between and get it done raised seven children and only because he made those choices and my grandmother made the choices she made the sacrifices she made did my mom have a chance to live the life she did and i had the chance to live a life i did that's america and the american people in a nutshell we're given the freedom to fail and that means we're given the freedom to succeed and we're held accountable for our failures it's okay to never be great i've certainly made so many mistakes in my life god if i could get a do-over i could write you all a 800-page book are the things i do differently the meetings i do differently the interactions i do differently the thoughts i have differently but what despite all of that i found a way to succeed and get to the top and you can too at least each and every person has a quality of opportunity in that respect so i firmly believe that we're the best country in the world because of that because we welcome the challenge we welcome the game we welcome the integration and so forth and we have a debt to the world to replace our government with a better one and we will get it done one way or another even if we have dragon kicking and screaming through a constitutional convention it'll happen one day in my lifetime because it can't keep going downhill but then again i'm an american so we're kind of programmed to think that way [Music] from costa greetings from the most beautiful place in the world switzerland we love you charles i do love switzerland as well and i gotta tell you it is one of the prettiest places colorado looks a lot like switzerland you go out to telluride or a or any of those places and actually they'll give the alps a run for their money but switzerland is certainly a place that's near and dear in my heart i used to go there every quarter and covet came so i haven't had a chance to go there but i'll return and i love the community out there and it's home with the cardano foundation based right in zug what's the greatest virtue i think that's a good way to end it huh i i as i've gotten older i think self-integrity is probably the greatest virtue we live in a society collectively in the developed world at the very least where you are allowed to accumulate enormous amounts of self-fictions small or large i and when people accumulate too many of them you see these people like jeremy dewitt or others and you say wow that guy's really up well the problem is that most of us are closer to that than we'd like to believe in small little instances and they accumulate and what these things do these misintegrities is they hold you back from getting to your greater self as a human being and so the reason why psychedelics have become such a prominent area of study if you read michael pollan's book is not because they take you to some astral projection and you get to meet dmt aliens and go on crazy adventures or things like that has nothing to do with any of that psychedelics are not so useful to teenagers for the most part they're club drugs when they're used there but yet they're tremendously useful for people in their 50s and 60s or people who have post-traumatic distress disorder or depression or other conditions why because you have this default mode complex and you have these misintegrities these self-fictions you these issues these accumulations of stories and then you go and take this substance and what it does is it removes the sense of self and you extract your consciousness from who you are and you stand and observe yourself as others see you for the first time ever there's ego destruction there and then suddenly you say holy oh no no no no no that's no good we got to make some changes we got to do some house cleaning now being a public figure i get that for free for the most part every comment tweet reddit post 4chan post there's a kernel there's a little bit of truth there not a lot but there's something and if you're really clever how to filter these things in a way to improve yourself if you're not so clever you let it bother you away at you and really crush you jordan peterson for example is a self-help guru brilliant psychologist goes on these long circuited stories maps and meaning is one of the hardest books i've ever read in my life after he got big i said i'll take a look at it oh wow this is big but then he ended up becoming a drug addict why because he wasn't able to get the benefit but filter out the toxicity of notoriety and publicity and fame so those things plus personal issues in his life combined together and they created a state of affairs where he had to use substances to try to bridge the gap and deal with the pain i could go on a diet i could lose weight i have been i've actually been working out every day not all super hardcore only twice a week for the hard stuff and then i get on a treadmill i already lost five pounds i put that off for too long i used the excuse of the fact that i'm successful and powerful to justify not taking care of my health but all i'm doing is i'm hurting myself there's no integrity in that lifestyle and 4chan says look at this fat soy boy these other things i get angry about it or i can accept that there is a point that a person in my position with my responsibilities and obligations that kind of a person needs to be better i need to get up earlier i need to get up at 5am i need to find the time to be healthy i need to eat right if anything because i inspire others to do so and a person in my position should do that every day it's leadership is all about so that the integrity component i think is the single most important component in all the things you do all the business dealings you do all the interactions you do even if you don't have positive or good interactions finding a way to dig through it and find at least something there that you can latch on to and say we tried our best to have a good outcome there you go and then when you start thinking this way you start losing a lot of negative things a lot of vices hate for example anger vengeance resentment envy those vices just they just fade away they melt away like ethereum for example i do have objectively legitimate grievances when you look at what's happened and what's been said and just the craziness behind some of the things that continues to be recycled again and again and again in the noise in the garbage and so forth and i can just spend the rest of my life angry about that but at the end of the day if you think about it you say to yourself well their existence does a lot of good for the world a lot of good research they've decentralized a lot of things there's a lot of beta testing that they're doing and every now and then there might be an area of collaboration that makes sense might be narrow might be broad might take 10 years might take 15 years why hate those people if they want to live in a real world where they hate if they entertain fictions and they hate a person who doesn't exist that's their disadvantage i'm going to live in a world of integrity i'm going to live in a world where we actually can see through the smoke and mirrors and we can actually see each other as human beings get to that point and then suddenly you don't have a lot of problems anymore and you can really focus in on the things that matter you really think long term you can really think about where would you like to be in 10 years people always overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 why because humans are really bad at exponential growth and if you get one percent per month you don't really think it's too big but actually it's huge over a period of 10 years the returns that you can get there you don't see it though in the short term so having that virtue of self-awareness and self-integrity and being able to perceive yourself objectively good bad and ugly and be intellectually honest about who you are and what you can and can't do and how quickly you can move and being able then to put yourself on a path not where you do the great things that's what we all aspire to do put yourself on a path where you do the simple things the small things that are easy to do but are also easy to not do that is what makes greatness if you look at any of these people that are great people that objectively have done great things or have been able to push themselves to the boundaries of human limits all those people had that mindset a little bit better a little bit better a little bit harder and they didn't let the failures bother them because it's only a problem if you're out of the game forever if you can play tomorrow and get back into the game try a little bit harder push a little bit harder then you're still there you're still relevant you're still breathing you give up when you're dead we've lost a little bit of that in society social media has constructed a world where we have become obsessed with the outcome the end goal it's hard i mean you want to learn how to play the piano go and start playing the piano you feel you're pretty good then you go to youtube and you see some seven-year-old who's a concert pianist you want to get in shape and lose some weight you start losing a few pounds you feel good and you go to instagram you see the models [Applause] anything you want to do there is some outcome some end goal that that person is elite and amazing and incredible and if you live in a reference where that's what you want you'll never get what you want because what you're seeing is a snapshot of a deeper truth and story and those people in their own way had to follow a path quite similar to the one that you have to be doing yourself and having the integrity to admit that and saying it's okay keep that as a north star but put in the work every little day is such a powerful thing and there's a lot of tools that can help people get there and psychedelics happen to be one for the old but there's all kinds of tools like flow research and these types of things stephen kotlin is is a big researcher there there's high chickasee high dozens of these human performance psychologists that think about this mindset but it always stems from the same common source which is the integrity to understand reality as it is not as how you'd it to be the ability to admit that and then work a little harder every single day and then once you're in that mindset the vices melt away even even if they don't you have a mechanism upon which to conquer them and having said that it is now time to end the ama and for those of you who are frequent guests of our ama you'll know how we do that we do that on kiva so org and by the way when i go to africa on the africa tour i'm going to be going to kenya it's one of the many nations and there's a partner we have there that does microfinance we're starting 150 million 150 000 pilot with that partner and we will be with that partner doing a microfinance blockchain pilot next year so kiva as i mentioned is just a proof of concept of stepping stone to talk about microfinance but i'm very excited to actually begin doing that right out of daedalus right out of your wallet okay so let's go here let's look at lend and let's find a borrower do and given that we are going to africa soon let's go to africa and given that we're going to kenya soon and there's a lot of great microfinance in kenya let's pick somebody all right how about mercy all right mercy she's looking for a loan of six hundred and fifty dollars to help a single mom to purchase farm inputs such as fertilizer and seeds to help improve her farm so she's 32 years old she's a rural smallholder farmer from the ceo and jiro area of kenya butchered that pronunciation didn't i her family's main income source is milk from their dairy farm however they're also involved in other agricultural activities such as growing maize and beans the biggest problem that farmers in this region face is the huge deficit in terms of access to agricultural inputs meaning that the farmers yields and incomes are far below what they could be colimo has partnered with kiva to provide financial services to smallholders around kenya through these financial services farmers from the region like mercy can now buy productive assets and important agricultural inputs for use on their farms mercy seeking alone to buy the input farm inputs such as seeds fertilizer herbicides and pesticides your loan will enable her to improve her production use through the through the use of quality farm inputs this intervention will help her fill the increasing demand for food in the market and in the process generate more income to repay the loan debt improve the quality of life for her family she also hopes to improve the condition of her house please help this mother to accomplish all her dreams with just a loan all right well let's help her out and let's give her the full amount and now there's a problem adding oh i gotta sign in okay so i'm gonna stop sharing there we go okay make sure that there take off my glasses what i need to do is sign in [Music] loading continue to check out 550. there we go can't wait to do this with cortana it's going to be great guys okay okay boom all right all right let's share screen again everything looks good there i share a screen so we had a bit of mercy for mercy go to my portfolio let's take a look how it's doing so far almost 6 000 in loans and we have a faf from palestine albania el salvador senegal togo philippines haiti cambodia mexico peru and kenya and now we have mercy there and you paid out her entire loan so it's 550.