1:17:30 to 2:05:45
do giraffes get a neck ache you know it's funny I was in South Africa we went on safari and I had this lovely female giraffe that actually followed our safari car all around and the safari guy he name was Alex he said all you know giraffes love potato chips I say sure it's really good idea to feed it's like no they absolutely love potato chips and it turns out that giraffes really really like potato chips so much so that they're willing to bend their head down and get into the car with it so I suspect they probably got a neck ache from that but great experience love giraffes okay are you gonna introduce ring signatures into cardano's so that they can be used the darknet to buy things that aren't illegal you know I mentioned this earlier about privacy primitives in the system so we think a great degree about privacy it's actually one of the sexiest research topics for graduate students and one of the sexiest things for cryptographers to publish things about you get great media you can go to all the right clubs and parties you get to go to DEFCON and say hey look I have something really cool three-letter agencies sometimes start reaching out to you and say hey would you like to do a presentation so cryptographers have a certain appreciation and love for anonymity and for privacy primitives and in the cryptocurrency space that's like taking that traditional hallowed place and putting it up on steroids and making it really cool so ring stick the cheers are an older primitive and they're used in Manero and other things and we could certainly add such a thing to card Atum where it gets really interesting is when you start thinking about holistic privacy systems so it's not just good enough to think about privacy in terms of link ability that's what we typically think about it's kind of like level one when you're starting to build out a privacy system so link ability is saying I have an address address a can I determine who owns address a is that Charles is that Bob and what level of certainty do I have and what you know facts and circumstances go into that then the next level is saying well maybe I can't necessarily link things but I can know who's using the network and if only like 35 people are using the network I might not be able via retic Lee to link it but you know I can do some other out-of-band things to winnow that set down to the one person who's using it because there's only one guy in my country who's using it okay so there's Network level anonymity as well can you office Kate the fact that you're using the protocol and to what level can you do that and we've seen things like dandy-lion and desires to run protocols over tor and things like that to try to get down that road then there is a mountain anima T so you know if I'm sending a transaction between Alice and Bob a and B can we office K how much was set like a financial transaction now why would you want to do that because again it creates a target surface you know if you're an observer you might not necessarily be able to link Alice to a and Bob to B but you can watch for large transactions and say boy a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin just moved that's probably something interesting now let's go look into that and let's do a bunch of forensic analysis around the metadata there to try to understand that so when you think about privacy to me it's useless unless you start thinking clearly about well how do you build an ecosystem of privacy around your system and then there's the environments that these things run in your computer your computer is notoriously swiss-cheesed if you're running Windows there are backdoors into it the underlying hardware there's a lot of very credible people who believe there are Hardware backdoors in that so you know you have to ask yourself who you trying to naanum eyes yourself from from the script kitty or the professional hacker it's probably possible to do that with good cryptographic primitives and good conduct from the state actor it's probably impossible to do that because it's a rigged game they have advantages that normal people don't have one of my favorite papers I have I've ever read was written where people were able to use a microphone well listening to changes in the frequency of a CPU to steal a private key for PGP key so they could sit at a coffee shop with a microphone listening to a computer that was encrypting and decrypting files using a you know keys and it just by listening to the subtle changes in frequency it could actually steal the key it gives you a sense of the level of sophistication in the level of creativity that people have come up with in terms of InfoSec and it's just always a war and it's always a the adversary is always very powerful and they don't play a fair game so when you think about privacy in that context it's also about well who do you care about if your goal is to hide from the government you're gonna have a very difficult life if your goal is to protect yourself in to anonymize a lot of your activities you probably can accomplish that was some best practices and so forth you know another thing is access control so you know if you have history you're probably going to want to know your history because you can't remember everything especially as your financial life gets more and more complicated and more interdependent a lot of things so you have to store that somewhere and so even if you have a perfect protocol that provides perfect privacy and everything's great and you have very secure environments to run these things then there is a back door which is you you are the back door so as a consequence how do you get access but no one else does how do you remember and so forth you know one of the things change my life is when I moved the last pass I tried very diligently to remember hundreds of different passwords and all these creative schemes and I say you know at the end of the day I'm just gonna go with LastPass and do two-factor authentication and this that and yes I'm trusting certain things but it's pretty good service and I think it's dramatically improved my personal security and I have a lot more control over it and it's made my life a lot better but I accept that I am giving up a little bit of privacy there and I also giving up a little bit of control there for that trade-off that I've made so privacy lives within that context of the backdoor you yourself have the environments that the systems run in the type of adversary that you're dealing with and exactly what are you talking about with the privacy is it linked ability is it the network or is it the amounts now getting to card ATO in particular this is a very controversial topic because the more private you make a system you have 70 year old lawmakers who love questioning Mark Zuckerberg and they're fun to watch I had Senate hearings and things like that who don't know their head from their ass for any of these things and somebody comes along like the FBI or the NSA and tries to convince them that you should have secret backdoors in crypto because that's the way the world needs to work and unfortunately every now and then those people end up passing laws or they end up passing regulations or they end up using soft influence to convince exchanges to de List or banks to blacklist and so forth so there needs to be a community discussion within Cardno and I think that's the first great use case a governance system is to have a discussion of how private should we be my scientists are geniuses they have long great careers they study things like the zero knowledge cryptography and they sure as hell get privacy and they've done things for the European Union and all these other guys they've worked for the military they've worked for a three-letter agencies every now and then there's a huge diversity and my organization with people who have great track records to think about that whole pie and to build great privacy experiences but at the end of the day we do not have the right to make such a foundational decision for the cardinal ecosystem because that decision will have an impact on liquidity and price if we go to private we probably will get de listed from a lot of exchanges especially in Asian countries if we go in the other direction we probably will be more palatable to governments and the price may go up but you have a Facebook style scenario where there's a back door in the system so it's a spectrum and what we can do as engineers and scientists is we can tell you the trade-offs and what the tech looks like how it's going to slow down the system what it's going to do to your latency to the transaction sizes and the societal trade-offs and say if we go down this road these are the consequences and the first great governance challenge I think is going to come is going to be about privacy it's sure as hell not going to be about scalability because at the end of the day you know our research gives us good trade-off profiles so we come in we say would you guys rather have X thousand transactions per second or X dozens of transactions but if you said more is better let's do that especially if the trade-off profile is very reasonable but on privacy there's no clear solution we could go with bulletproof stuff we could go with ring signatures we could put dandelion into the base protocol and by doing that massively enhance your privacy we could build special devices where you have plausible deniability just like TrueCrypt or these other guys where you know you can you can have alternative ways to decrypt things and so you could appear as if you don't even have the installed on your computer you can boot off a USB device into memory only and interface with your wallet this way there's a thousand ways we could approach this problem a thousand ways but and this is the big thing each and every one of those ways has an unclear scenario here's the last point about privacy imagine that you lived in Iraq in 1970 1975 something like that and the person comes up to you and says are you a member of the bath party you would say if you were yes why because that was how you got ahead during that time period you know there was a one stop show they had a monopoly on power if you're in the party you get to go to the good school you get the good job you get all the opportunities if you're outside of the good graces of the party your life pretty difficult fast-forward to post occupation Iraq after Iraqi Freedom and Bremer and Wolfowitz tea bath the country and they say are you a member of the bath party you say no I don't know anything about oh no no no I was one of the Opposition guys why because you potentially could be ineligible for going to the right schools or serving in government already have a very soft bias against you so the very same fact a piece of information has a historical art to it based on the facts and circumstances that you cannot predict in that in the beginning you would say yes and broadcasted everywhere the more you do it the higher and the food chain you get and then later on it's a liability for you same piece of information and the problem with secrets is once you tell them everybody knows it so it's very difficult to know how private things ought to be and who should have access and when should you tell people and so forth and so it opens up a broader conversation about minimum viable escalation of privacy there is no greater example of that in the financial world then kyc and a ml for example right now we have a very bad situation if you run a bank or an exchange somebody comes to you and says hi bitstamp or hi bit tricks or hi shape-shift I want to do business with you and they say great show me your passport or proof of funds or proof of residency give me a utility bill they have to collect that and it's information that's a liability for them because they hold it they can't do much with it and then if they get hacked they lose it and they get sued or go out of business from it or causes a lot of commercial harm and mistrust and then the government comes and says you have to weaponize that data against your own customers so you have to put in anomaly detection systems and if somebody's doing something that's unusual you have to file suspicious activity report so you take a normal commercial relationship and now an entity through regulatory Fiat because regulators don't have unlimited power or resources they delegate it to the financial businesses are now in a position where they have to spy on their own customer and hold something they have great liability for wouldn't it be a better world if you owned your own data and you could take that and put it into a warehouse that you control and only you can see then you can invite on a case-by-case basis auditors to come in and attest to the data yes I'm an American citizen yes I'm this age yes I paid my taxes they can sign that and then when you want to go do business with bitstamp you send the transaction to them it goes to pending and they play a game of 21 questions and they just ask whatever the government tells them to ask this transaction coming in where is it origin u.s. okay pull up the US library for the US library how much how many questions we have to ask what's the age of the person where's the location of the person it's they pay taxes the IRS sign off on that and once you get enough yes is the transaction settles and that's that there is no suspicious activity report there's none of these things there's no data custodianship that's a world we could live in within 10 to 15 years especially if we start billing parallel systems like with a pan-african strategy where they're just now entering the KYC world and they don't have to adopt the legacy system and that's a world that could kill the compliance officer in 25 years and save banks a huge amount of money and return them to service based businesses instead of adversarial businesses that are soft regulators over your conduct and behavior that's intimate to the privacy couldn't question because we could actually build in nuances to that system for example while you could own your data and that's anonymized we could build a back Dornan where if a sufficient amount of thresholds are met and a sufficient amount of actors agree we could de nota mais the data to a particular actor like a judge or a regulatory body the cryptographic primitives to do this type of thing do exist and they're becoming more nuanced so maybe instead of saying absolutely private total libertarian absolutely not private we're in China you could actually have a spectrum there and people could decide what that spectrum needs to look like and reasonable people can disagree so I think the privacy question of should card out of the X or Y is much more nuanced it needs to be a community discussion and it has to fit into the environments that cardano's going to operate in one of our big goals is to merge the permission to permissionless worlds together and have card on a run in a pan-african way we think that we can get hundreds of millions of users off that continent over a long arc of time and if we're doing that it has to be a system that replicates the functionality and expectations of the legacy financial world so it's not good enough just to be able to write the transactions we have to have a meaningful articulation about compliance about regulation and about privacy and if you you get the right base protocols then you can build a reality where you have competition you have a diversity of thought and over time you converge to something good the one thing we won't do at i/o HK is we won't be like ripple we won't put Ben lossky on our board we won't kowtow to whatever makes us the most money or gives us the best access because at the end of the day if I wanted to work in the legacy financial world I to just take a job at a bank the whole reason we build open protocols and open systems and we oppose things like bitlicense is because that's the 20th century that's a hierarchal world that's a bad world and that's the world that causes 2008 and that's the world that turns banks into spies on their own customers it's immoral it's wrong its unsustainable and it will collapse at some point we have a point in human history where we can either decide to double down on the past and become a very dystopian world where everybody gets a number on their forehead and if it gets too low you get kicked out of society and if it gets high you get the good life to a world where you're in control of your data you're in control of your money you're in control of the way you interact with markets it doesn't mean you can't do whatever the hell you want to do because when you do business with somebody they have a say on how you do business with them but it does mean at the end of the day at least you get a choice accepting the consequences of that choice so privacy fits as a component of that and it's something we do care a lot about at our company that's a good question can anything be done about people who get coin scam from them and have that transaction reversed you know we have this thing we've had of her very long time it's right here it's called cash see five dollar bill okay so it's funny that our grandparents and great-grandparents they grew up in a world cash is king and we all and they were just so attuned to this idea that if somebody steals your wallet breaks into your house they take your cash it's gone and so they build a lifestyle where they got very clever you know yeah I'm how to store it how to think about it and there's certain efficiencies with that then we move to this digital world the world of credit cards the world of bank accounts world of PayPal and then we just started building these consumer expectations of if identity theft happens or if somebody hacks into my account I can pick up a phone I can call somebody and somebody's gonna be on the other side of it to listen to my story hear me and make things right there's big cost to that there's hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud cost to the global financial system every year and that system has a huge amount of trade-offs in that you lose control you know just like this this piece of cash that our grandparents lived with and they enjoyed at the end of the day you know they had total dominion of that you didn't have civil asset forfeiture you didn't have freezing of assets these types of things you the country went bad you could convert that into silver to something else people couldn't come in and just seize money out of your bank account like put in a wealth tax cipriotti style or something like that so what cryptocurrency users have done is if effectively taking the rules that our grandparents live with and they've updated them to live in a digital world and the problem is instead of having just the occasional pickpocket who can reach into your pants and take your wallet you now have a global pickpocket so you have people everywhere and scammers everywhere and they're really really good at trying to separate you from your money and they're very clever and they do all kinds of things I've personally been impacted for example I have cell phone and hackers got enough social information about me they called my cell phone company and convinced my cell phone company to convert my sim to their sim so I lost access to my own cell phone from my own cell phone company and then once they had access to my cell phone they tried really hard to break into all my accounts now Michael Turpin is a very famous guy in the cryptocurrencies face not only had this happened to him he lost millions of dollars from it as a result of that backdoor that AT&T in his case did that so even the best of us can be subject to theft fraud scams and abuse so the question is what do we do about it well my view is it's a really bad idea at the protocol level to say Bob you're in control you get to decide right and wrong who gets their money back or this committee gets to decide that it's a bizarre terrible thing I think yose is a great example of that you know we already have deciders there's judges there's police there there's a judicial branch of every government even Mickey Mouse governments like North Korea they have some notion of a judicial branch so there's already people who get to say I'm empowered with deciding whether you get something back or not so instead what you need to do is say look the base protocol is like cash but you know what I can do with cash I can convert it into other forms and when I do that I get added trade-offs maybe I lose some control but now I get consumer protection there's insurance there's multi sake there's custodial accounts and so forth so what we ought to do is instead of saying can we build a governance system and have 21 people or whoever get down and and I have to investigate what the hell to do with a global financial system but they're not qualified for and not legally able to actually do instead of trying to reinvent 2,000 years of human government let's just instead open up the free market and let insurance markets form custodial markets for multi-sig solutions form and so forth and that will give you finer grained control I mentioned the exchange addresses there's no reason we couldn't open that up and you could do your own reversals and store your money this way you could write smart contracts to put custom terms and conditions and if you don't want to do it people can template it created and then you can use it to store funds accordingly and best practices can form now what do you do about scams once consumer fraud and nothing will replace your government's judicial branch if bob says I'm going to give you X and Bob doesn't do it you can sue Bob and if bob is a real criminal bob can go to jail for that and the rules haven't changed just because we're doing a different mechanism you know people stole cars back in 1915 it was a different type of car then the Lamborghini they still today but it's the same act and the justice system is more than capable of dealing with these things now whether it can do it or can't do it is contingent on the rule of law the society you live in and the powers you've given that particular branch so you as a consumer have to self protect ultimately so you have to ask yourself what can I do to have good hygiene to protect myself from scams and for the most part most people aren't falling for the Nigerian prince scam most people aren't following a following for the person who knocks on your door and says donate money to the orphans or these types of things with the exception of people who lack the cognitive capabilities to take care of themselves and this is one area where crypto currencies have a big family my grandfather on my mom's side he's in his mid 80s and we've had to work real hard with him to lock down as accounts because he's become a target for scammers people will call him up and sell him gold coins that really aren't worth very much or ask him for political donations and for a long time he was one of the most savvy people ever he was a lineman who worked his way up to be a vice president of a cable company and got 19 patents including one on the cable box he was a brilliant guy and he and he never had a college education but yet despite that he was able to retire very well-off but the problem is that he's gotten to the point in his life where he no longer has the ability to handle complex financial discussions and people know that they smell it and they're trying to take advantage of them so we as the family had had to come together and help Mao and a lot of families have to do this for the older and the infirm my grandfather and my other side my my dad's dad he has Alzheimer's and again he was a brilliant man he was a surgeon an ob/gyn delivered four thousand kids over his career and had land up in Montana and land in Hawaii and unfortunately as his Alzheimer's got worse and worse his financial decision-making got worse and a lot of that nest egg that he had constructed to give him a good retirement got absorbed away the problem with cryptocurrencies is they take things that are like bank accounts which normally do have some protections and allow other people to come in and when it's a social problem resolve it especially on a family side and they treated like cash and if grandpa has Alzheimer's and he's buried a lot of money somewhere on a 600 acre estate you're never gonna find that good luck and it's the same problem with cryptocurrencies you know what happens when they forget the private keys this is one of the challenges that we as an ecosystem have to think really carefully about and unfortunately for this particular asset class there may exist realities and scenarios where these things just don't work out so well and people lose their money in other cases like with hal Finney who was in Bitcoin very early he was able because he knew he was going to die and he knew he was declining to protect himself and his family as best he could but even they were actually victims of ransom attacks and scammers and other such things and they had great preparation so it's a great conversation to have from our part we can build great devices and smart contract standards and special transaction types but at the end of the day it is something where third-party services are going to have to interact with the protocol to provide that level of coverage which actually stumbles into another point about what is the role of the financial institution in a post cryptocurrency world I see a lot of people usually people that want to separate you your money run around and say cryptocurrencies are gonna kill all the banks kill all the insurance companies kill all the financial institutions no because at the end of the day financial institutions exist not to take money from you they do that today a lot because they've been perverted but in the beginning they were about saying you have something and I'm gonna help you protect and transform that thing you have and over the arc of your life so you get less risk you can grow it more and you get more certainty for you and your children and your children's children there are a service provider that's the at the end of the day the heart of what the financial industry should be doing as a good industry so the financial industry as it learns more about cryptocurrencies it's just another asset class it's just another tool and maybe they're not going to be as large part of the economy and make as much money as they used to but there's going to be some subset of people who are quite clever who can adopt special types of processes that can take care of my grandfather and my other grandfather as we grow older and as life gets more complicated and harder and our goal is to preserve the fruits of our labors as opposed to growing the fruits of our labors and to make sure that those fruits can be transferred from one generation to the next generation and a responsible and well thought out way and it turns out that they have much much much better palette to work with much better canvas to work with then they have with the legacy financial system where you only have five tools and they all kind of look like hammers here they have code they can actually do amazing things so I'm actually very excited to see how we can go back to the baronial age and go back to the way things used to work in the financial industry where you have a relationship with somebody and that person's adding value either in that they're protecting you or that they're making transactions better or more comprehensive or that they're making your ability to transfer what you have to someone else occur with less friction so it's a great question though and thank you for asking it Kenny I nml in the crypto sphere cardano's specifically yeah so I get a lot of AI questions and I get a lot of questions about machine learning like what's the role for this stuff in the cryptocurrency space so you know Apache has a project called flink and there's this notion of complex event processing and in the financial world is very sophisticated these days and so one thing hi you can google this it's actually a create anomaly so somebody hacked I think it was Reuters Twitter feed one of the news agencies and as a spoof they tweeted Whitehouse attacked Obama injured in route to hospital now the moment that they did that the markets went not minutes not hours but like literally seconds after that tweet came out no human being could have possibly reacted to that so you have to ask yourself what happened how did the markets react like that well what happened is that people were at all these algorithms and these algorithms there are complex events and basically they watch all these sources of data and they weave them together into a mosaic and that mosaic forms a picture and that picture is retro addicted to many different things and it's it's an opinion on how reality ought to be it's only as good as the inputs that are going into it now what's so incredibly interesting to the financial industry about the blockchain space is one of the if you look at the historical failures like for example the 2008 financial crisis or the long-term capital crisis almost always these things come from not having a consolidated data feed not having a consolidated marketplace or tape in that some subset of people were doing business in a way that was okay ik to the broader community and that was still somehow connected to the rest of the marketplaces in that if their business went sour it would cascade and caused this huge failure in the system so we're a I nml I think fit blockchain spaces as more and more and more stuff goes from the legacy world into these consolidated tapes into these Universal Ledger's that are all transparent to each other for the first time ever ever we're gonna have a situation markets are going to actually have a fair game it's not the game of well you know Bob happens to be co-located next to the stock exchange you put his servers right inside our servers and as a result you can do high frequency trading and deuce things on the micro or nano second to go ahead and get some statistical arbitrage but more rather that we're all looking at the same data feeds and they're all kind of coming together and eventually getting consistent and then a on ml they can come in and say hey you know what does all this mean and what is that tapestry mean and so forth so I don't think that those things are gonna have a huge impact on the design of block chains or in some way make our industry better I think that it's just that those models now have a new input that for the first time ever is more holistic than the way the markets work before and that's really exciting and it's something that I think will give more resilience and stability and I'll also give policymakers better anchors so that when they let they look at macro micro prudential policy see anything else we got here all right let's do one more and then I got to get going let's make it a good one Charles what do you envision the world would be like in 20 years yeah that's uh yeah that's gonna be a fun one answer let's go down that road so you know you have all these guys here called futurists you know and if I could go the University all over again and do everything all over again I'd probably take more art classes I'd learn how to draw and certainly learn how to paint I love Bob Ross but damn I had to be a futurist go get a PhD in that man that's like what is your jobs Lee I write books about where we're all going it's like what if you're right it's like well I'm a visionary what if you're not right well you already bought the book so so at least I can feed myself and there's these these guys that that write these types of things um I would hope that 20 years from now the world looks you know we could kind of break the world into three different buckets and I would hope that we make progress in those three different buckets one I would hope that we understand that the way the world works is a product of narratives it's a product of fictions that we all agreed to believe in like the nature of money why is this worth anything because we said so well who's we the US government who's the US government us the American people and we collectively have come together we could change everything we could hold a new constitutional convention we could rename our money booboo char we could do whatever the hell we wanted to do but collectively we just came up with this and that's the way it is and people believe it's worth products and services so it gets valued right beliefs are very powerful things they create religions sometimes good ones sometimes bad ones they alter how you live your life the types of things you eat for example somewhere along the way we started convincing people that high carb low fat was a good idea it didn't do anything to our heart disease or our diabetes rate in fact quite the opposite they just kept going up but Ancel keys did that and now we have all this food where we strip out all the fat we put in tons of sugar to augment the taste and lo and behold people can't lose weight and they get fatter and fatter so narratives can really have a huge impact on people's perception of reality how they live their life and what they do I would hope that people realize that narratives are malleable and in the next 20 years we gain better cognitive tools and social tools to be able to alter those narratives in a way that is better for everybody we produce so much you know for example there's this idea that America's manufacturing days are behind it it surprises a lot of people to know that we manufacture more things in the United States in 2018 that we didn't hear 2000 or the year 1990 or in the year 1980 or 1970 or 1960 yet people seem to believe that we make less because there's physically less people involved in that particular industry and as we mechanize we automate and as things get more advanced we get even more productive capacity so why is it the fact that despite the fact that we're getting more efficient we have more productive capacity we still have people that live on less than a dollar a day and we still have people that are going through a real hard time you know so I would hope that people realize that if you just change the narrative a little bit like we did when we went from communism is the solution in Africa and all these governments just got really raped and destroyed from it or deep injection of foreign aid and foreign control is the only way to get people out of poverty to like a market oriented approach where you empower people to do their own things we saw in 20 years you know places that were the canonical place for people starving to death to actually having a lower infant mortality rate than Europe had 1950s so the first thing I would hope is that because of the internet the intellectual dark web and all these new capabilities that more and more people wake up to self offering their own narratives trust but verify using critical thinking talk to people look at things get more data-driven and over the next 20 years we have a tremendous opportunity to break up that cartel and to basically be in charge of the way we live our lives and the way we perceive reality second there really is a great silent medical revolution and it's a revolution that focuses on cures instead of treatments and this is something where you have to think carefully about financials one of the reasons why the pharmaceutical industry works the way it does in the healthcare industry is the way it is is that you get paid a lot to treat and you get paid a lot to manage but you don't get paid a lot to cure if you know somebody comes in and you fix their back and they say well my back feels great you know it's like great you got a service for you for that even if it's a very high fee somebody comes in and says my back hurts you say here are some opiates here are some drugs for that and by the way you have to keep taking them or else the pain comes back you make money from that person for the rest of your life as a pharmaceutical industry so there are some in the industry that invest very heavily into treatment but not so much into cures if you look at things like cancer things like no generators Thoreau's autoimmune disorders all these things there's a huge body of things regenerative biology and regenerative medicine immunotherapy where we're starting to learn that you can just have the body heal itself the body built itself from nothing you know just two cells came together and came this huge thing so the body can certainly regenerate itself or repair itself there are some cancer vaccines coming on the marketplace there are some miracles where basically they say hey you know your own immune system can treat it instead of chemotherapy or this similarly we're actually starting to see meaningful progress in growing organs we growing limbs and so forth now that I think is probably one of the greatest achievements in the history of humanity and we're on a collision course to get there there's just tons of great scientists and great Institute's that are working on it unfortunately all the wars the United States has had and the wars we've had is all throughout the world of we'll have millions and millions of amputees and millions of paralyzed people and people with permanent injuries and those people are going to live a very long time 60 years 70 years beyond when they got the injury and the health care system needs to treat that second the dementia crisis where neurodegenerative disorders are coming us is horrendously expensive to deal with so there's just massive amount of government money and industry money coming in and we're moving from a treatment based economy more towards an idea of care based economy where through some combination of perturbing your diet and exercise and other such things some perturbation of things like CRISPR and stem cell research and so forth somehow some way we're gonna stumble into a reality where we can tune things to make things better so that gets me profoundly excited I think over the next 20 years we're really going to start seeing great progress there and it's I'm gonna live and you're gonna live to see the first person get up out of a wheelchair or first person to regrow their legs or first person to have a heart transplant where they grew the heart in a petri dish and a bioreactor as opposed to transplanting it from one person to the next it brings up a lot of ethical questions and it brings up a lot of you know societal questions of well what happens when people start living a lot longer and a lot of the things that used to off us or now we're kept around and what do we do about overpopulation and what do we do about resource allocation because these therapies probably aren't going to be cheap and it's going to be one of the great challenges of the 21st century finally this is the first century I think where we're going to create a new form of life we're going to both be able to bring back life that has been lost and we're going to be able to create different types of life defined by cognition so in terms of bringing back in short order we're probably going to bring back the woolly mammoths and other animals like that there's even documentaries on YouTube you can watch but it's only a matter of time before the extinction happens and in fact from policy perspective so many animals go extinct every year it's much better business if you're an entrepreneur looking for the next big business to start to go to a government and say let your animals go extinct and we'll pay a subscription to us and we'll go ahead and DX tink them when you have the resources to do that then to try to conserve them and prevent them from going extinct as it's just it's a battle that's too uphill to fight but that might be a better way of doing it which then brings up a question of well we can bring back the woolly mammoths but there were over 20 different species of humans of Homo erectus and Neanderthals and so forth what if we could bring them back what does that mean what rights would they have and is that a good idea or not so there's a humongous intellectual challenge ethical challenge societal challenge in that that we're gonna be able to do that and we're not really prepared as a society for the consequences of that we're kind of used to letting things go instead of gaining things back second we're creating artificial eyes in that we're creating these computer programs which are so tremendously complex that at some point they're going to be able to imitate human cognition and at some point they probably will have their own cognition what that means is difficult and the problem is that these systems are mirrors that's the most dangerous part of them we adopt mental defenses and installations about ourselves to protect ourselves from who we really are we tell ourselves lies and we believe those lies and we create social eyes I think Trump is the best of the world at that just think that I am X but the problem is when you have something like the laws of physics or a cryptocurrency or an AI it can look at you with a penetrating gaze that is um so profoundly intrusive that all your fictions go away and who you really are gets exposed you know how much you lie you know how much you kind of procrastinate and that's a profoundly uncomfortable thing and this can be done on the individual level and on the social level and when you start giving commands to such creatures to such entities like let's protect the environment or let's prevent the world from descending into chaos the reality is the optimal solution may not be a solution that's in the favor of you individually so then you have to ask yourself well how do we address and deal with that and that's another one of the great challenges of the 21st century is the creation of life that is a mirror that will show us things we don't want to see and at some point we'll be able to evolve at a rate much faster than us and as a consequence have capabilities we don't have now if we're smart and humble we could recognize this is the greatest tool in human history in that we've created a living God to give ourselves ideas and force ourselves into modes of cognition that collectively are good for us we've created the parent we've always wanted to have if we're dumb we will use these tools for purposes of war and greed and we'll lose control of them and eventually they'll turn on us and destroy us so the 21st century is really going to be the the make-or-break moment in my mind for the human race we thanks to the hard work of the people who came before us now have the paintbrush of reality in our hands and we get to decide basically whether we're going to extend beyond where we're at as a race and go into the Stars and be something grand or we get to decide whether we erase ourselves from history the prior generation got close to this with the event of nuclear weapons and we got very close to annihilation twice once during the Cuban Missile Crisis where we were literally one key turn away from extinction and then another time during the 1980s were an astute colonel recognized that there was a computer failure and that the United States wasn't launching missiles at the Soviet Union and violated direct orders and violated his training to avoid nuclear Armageddon we were that close twice to extinction as a species and now the 21st century is going to give us the potential to do it again but this time do it in a way that we really don't have a chance to survive so my hope for the next 20 years is that we recognize that the fictions we have the narratives that we have can be rewritten and we recognize they can be rewritten in a way that gives us a higher probability of embracing these amazing tools the tools that allow us to live far longer than any humans have ever lived in history and the tools that will allow us to understand more about ourselves and we've ever been able to understand before and to merge with those tools in such a way that we really can get to the next level in our evolution the dystopian reality is that we might not get there that's the challenge every generation has so I don't think so much about material things like money or you know what cryptocurrency is going to win or so forth because at the end of the day it doesn't really matter it's like saying well does Rockefeller did he really care that Standard Oil was broken up okay his company got broken up and still rich he's you know still relevant but at the end of the day he was still subject to the times so the same frailties that you and me have the same diseases you and me have and he still died and the challenges that we look to in the future our existential in nature and we each have to do our part collectively globally not on the nation's state level but globally to actually have a meaningful impact on that so those are the things I think about a lot and I see cryptocurrencies is a Great Awakening to start getting people to understand that they actually have control over the narrative of the world and then once you've gone down that road you start waking up and realizing that there's more and more and more and more you personally actually have control over and that you've been told all these lies that you're worthless and meaningless and you can't do anything everybody's special in their own regard and everybody has a choice that kernel grew up in the Soviet system as a Soviet military officer with the commissar Xin the gulags he was born during the time of Stalin there was no greater system in the world to dehumanize you and tell you you couldn't do something but then he sat there and said you know what it's my call and I'm not going to end the world and I don't care about the consequences and you're no different than him so I would hope over the next 20 years more and more people awaken to that the technology is on autopilot it's going to happen there's too many brilliant people working on it I and if we get it done right we're gonna live in a really good world and let's try to make that happen anyway thank you guys so much for listening is this a bit more philosophical of an AMA less Cardinal related but I hope you guys enjoy it thank you so much