Zooko Wilcox, CEO of Zcash: The Evolution of Legitimately Private Crypto

Zooko Wilcox is the CEO of Zcash, and one of the most experienced people in crypto. In this conversation, Zooko and Anthony Pompliano discuss all things privacy, freedom, decentralization, the original battle between governments and technologists for encryption, and how the current privacy technology for crypto is likely to evolve moving forward. ----- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

• 0:01Speaker 00

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Zooko Wilcox is the CEO of Zcash and one of the most experienced people in crypto. In this conversation, we discuss privacy, freedom, decentralization, the original battle between governments and technologists for encryption, and how the current privacy technology for crypto is likely to evolve moving forward. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions

• 0:46Speaker 00

  of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Alright guys, bang bang, I'm here with Zuko himself. Thank you so much for coming in and doing this.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Thank you, Pomp.

• 1:13Speaker 00

  We've got a lot to get through. You've been working on encryption, cryptography, privacy, scalability, etc. for a really, really long time. And I don't think people quite know your background, so maybe let's just start there and kind of set your perspective before we dig into some of the stuff we want to talk about.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  My background is I dropped out of college when I was 21 because I got an opportunity to work on a privacy cryptocurrency. That was in 1996.

• 1:46Speaker 00

  That is literally 20 years before the madness of 2016, 2017. Alright, so what exactly were you working on?

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Back then, in 1996, I was in love with this cryptocurrency protocol called DigiCash.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  DigiCash, okay.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  And...

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Instead of paying attention to class and doing my homework, I would hack on like these cryptography projects in my spare time and um they had a uh they had like a test net for DigiCash uh with um some play money called Cyberbucks and they said they were gonna have a competition for who would make the website like the store, the online store that would sell the most Cyberbucks. In nineteen ninety-six, there wasn't really um well, this may have been ninety-five, but there wasn't really a lot of e-commerce happening. And um I made a store where there was two pictures of quarters and if you clicked on the quarters, it would uh

• 2:49Speaker 01

  uh send a CGI request to have you pay half a Cyber buck. Okay. And then if you paid, it would send you a copy of this uh program I had written to make it easier for my mom to use PGP. PGP was a cryptography program. Anyway, so uh after a while, the company that was making uh this DigiCash project, they called me and told me that I had the most successful Cyberbucks store on the internet. Okay. After they excluded all the porn and gambling.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  So I wasn't sure how many competitors there were in my category. Um so then they offered me the job of like junior coder. Okay. At their company. Uh and I said, well, I guess I have to finish my undergrad degree first. And they were like, oh, okay, too bad. Good luck. And then as soon as I hung up on them, uh I called my best friend excitedly. And I said, you'll never guess what happened. DigiCash offered me a job and because he knew that I would never talk about anything but this digital currency stuff. He said, what did you tell them? And I said, I said, I had to finish my undergrad degree first. And he said, I just have one question for you. Is this exactly the kind of opportunity you've been waiting for?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  And that's all he said. I was like, you're right. I'll I'll call you back. So I hung up on him and I called DigiCash back and I said, I I I don't have to finish my undergrad degree right now. And so I uh I dropped out of school and uh.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  You know, sold all my belongings and moved to Amsterdam, Holland, which was their headquarters. Uh, which is a pretty great move. One of the best decisions of my life was dropping out of school and going to work for these crazy cryptographers in Amsterdam.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  When I was 21.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  Well, well, Digicash, if I remember correctly, is one of about five previous attempts at what eventually became Bitcoin, right? Whether, um, you know, kind of encryption, uh, some sort of scalable decentralized, uh, digital currency.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  Um, and was probably one of the better known ones.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  Uh, there's about five of them. When you were working on it, what's the kind of culture or the, the energy around this, right? What I mean by that is like, is there this belief in like the late nineties? Hey, we're going to go build a new like global reserve currency, kind of what you see with some of the Bitcoin stuff today? Or was it more of just like, we're working on a encryption and a like scalability type problem? And it's more about the problem and then like, we'll see what the solution ends up being.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Well, it wasn't a currency. It was a payment system. So the idea was it would be US dollars or Deutsche Marx or something as the underlying currency. And at the time, it was widely believed that you couldn't do commerce on the internet using credit cards. Credit cards worked in person.

• 5:58Speaker 00

  Why?

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Because they were insecure. If you transmitted them over the internet, hackers would get copies or the hackers would hack into the merchants and steal all your credit cards.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  Because of a lack of encryption.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  That was the belief at the time was that credit cards were too like not, they weren't internet native.

• 6:19Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  And that an internet native technology would turn on the possibility for e-commerce.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  And a big lesson I learned from my stint as the junior coder at Digicash was that.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Faith in your product's specialness can be really crippling. Because everyone at the company believed that we had the only solution to e-commerce.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  And so it was inevitable that eventually everyone on the whole internet would want e-commerce. And when they did, they would have to use our product.

• 6:57Speaker 00

  It's almost like this balance an entrepreneur has to have between.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  We're going to change the world. We are special. The detachment with reality to some degree.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  But also being realistic enough to understand that may not be the best solution, right? And may not actually have the highest probability of being accurate.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, you've got to be realistic about the fact that having the best technology or the best feature or the best product isn't sufficient to change the world. It isn't sufficient to help people. You've got to reach the people and you've got to give them what they need, when they need it. And they've got to know they want it and all those other steps.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  What do you think is the reason why Digit Cash ended up not being successful? What would you attribute that to?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  That's a really good question. It's hard to attribute failure.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  There were some missteps by management, but I think even if they had done everything right, it could have only reached a certain level, like PayPal, right? It could have been as good as PayPal, but it couldn't have been as good as Bitcoin. Because it was centralized, so everyone knows it could go away or it could like institute a policy that excludes you, you know, terms of service or whatever. And that puts a limit, that puts an upper limit on how big something can be.

• 8:26Speaker 00

  And so you work on this for a while. You end up leaving. Were you hooked on the problem of like a digital?

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Even while I was there, I was always trying to figure out how to make the decentralized version of it.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 8:43Speaker 01

  I would stop the other cryptographers, like the real cryptographers. I learned so much. I said it was a great move to drop out of school, but I really started learning a lot because that company was stocked with all of the smartest cryptographers in the world, probably.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  And they like took me under their wing and so I started learning a lot. But anyway, I would, I would stop them in the hallways and say, oh, I have another idea for how to make it decentralized. And I would start sketching out this crazy thing and they'd be like, that is never gonna work. Um, and then after I left, I kept thinking about it. For literally 12 years, I was struggling to figure out how to make a decentralized currency. And, you know, dead end after dead end, nothing would work. And so that's why when I realized that Bitcoin was, had a chance of working.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  That was the like, the, the, the light breaking through, you know, that's what, that's what I've been looking for, for all those years.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  So a lot of people don't know, uh, you didn't show up in 2016, right? So, um, kind of late 90s, you're working on DigiCash. Then, like, January 2009, you knew about Bitcoin. You not only knew about it, you wrote about it. And, uh, you, I think you said were one of three people or, or pieces that were linked to on the original Bitcoin website.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  When did you first hear about, see Bitcoin? What, what, you know, just kind of describe that discovery process?

• 10:21Speaker 01

  I'm pretty sure the first I saw of it was when Satoshi posted his white paper to the, uh, cryptography mailing list.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  And you were on the mailing list?

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a mailing list I'd been active on for a long time. It was one of the successors to the Cypherpunks mailing list.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Um, which was the early 90s forerunner of the whole culture. And, uh,

• 10:43Speaker 00

  And what, what, what else is getting posted on these mailing lists? Like whether it's the Cypherpunk one or, uh, or the cryptography one. Everyone hears like, oh, the Bitcoin thing got sent out. Well, it's not the only thing that got sent out, right?

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  What, what is the other type of content?

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, um.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  It was a lot of...

• 11:07Speaker 01

  So cryptography is a very

• 11:10Speaker 01

  deep science with a lot of really sophisticated, complex ideas that only a few mathematicians fully understand. And the cryptography mailing list was a lot about the connection between that and practical software deployment in both directions. Does that answer the question? So the Bitcoin white paper was a pretty good example

• 11:32Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  of a novel idea that you that relied on cryptography. But no academic scientist cryptographer would have even understood it or considered it to be a valid concept.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  So yeah, I'm glad the cryptography mailing list existed so Satoshi had somewhere to go to find people who could appreciate it.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  So you get it, you read the white paper, you're intrigued?

• 11:57Speaker 01

  You know, I didn't really, I didn't really get it when I first saw the white paper, or I didn't really believe that it would work. Because like I said, I'd been banging my head against the wall forever. And so people like me who were experts, I've talked to many of them, and many of them had the same experience of seeing it and saying, oh yeah, another thing that can't possibly work, you know, a noble attempt. Thanks for trying, for adding to our catalog of failed ideas. And then what happened for me, well, then I did blog about it, even though I thought it wasn't technically going to fly. But I blogged about how it was a good idea and it was a sort of a stab in the right direction. And at the time, like, nobody, well, my blog post says

• 12:40Speaker 01

  there's a thing that could exist, which is decentralized money, and it's not PayPal, it's not a payment system, and it's not centralized money like World of Warcraft gold. It's a, it's a, it's a possibility that I don't know how to make. And by the way, see this new Bitcoin thing by this new Satoshi Nakamoto person who is the most recent attempt at making it.

• 13:02Speaker 00

  Got it. So you, so you really took a kind of a stab at... Here is an idea around decentralized money. I think that here's components or criteria that it could have. By the way, here's kind of the closest or newest thing I've seen that that generally hits in that direction. But you didn't think it was going to work, which is really interesting.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Well, what changed my mind was I saw people playing with it in practice.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  Why did you not think it was going to work?

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Um, for technical reasons, like it kind of seemed like it would rely on global clock synchronization.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Um, because that's kind of the way it was described in the early parts of the white paper, uh, is that it relies on some sort of shared clock. Um, and I thought, oh, but I don't know how to make global clock synchronization work. So that will be the fun, the fatal flaw in this.

• 13:58Speaker 00

  That's hilarious. Like, like, like, sitting here today, 10 years later, right? And kind of seeing how it all played out, that it wasn't, uh, what I would say, like the hotly debated, you know, block size or like, like nothing that today is a problem. Like the things that you thought were, uh, not even actually the failure points, but just like the risky things were things about like global clock synchronization.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  You know, we still don't know that Bitcoin works.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  That's very true. And, and, and it still could not only quote unquote not work, but, uh, you know, I tell people all the time, the downside is that it could be worth zero.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  Right? Like, like, there's actually a pretty high percentage chance that's still possible.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Co- complex software often completely fails so completely that there is no value left in the complex software.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So, all right, you, so you write this blog post, you get linked, uh, do you continue to participate in like the Bitcoin talk forums and cryptography stuff? Like just, what are those early days like, uh, as those things, people are kind of playing with it?

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Um, like the early Bitcoin community came out of the CypherPunks and the open source, uh, communities. And, um, I was already pals with some of those folks on IRC. You know, we used IRC, that's a, like a chat thing.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  For those listening, it's like Instant Messenger of AOL, but for smart people.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  It's like Slack, but without graphics.

• 15:25Speaker 00

  It's like Slack.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  I love it. Alright, so as you're doing all of this, you actually communicate with the, the, we can't even say infamous, the famous Satoshi Nakamoto, and he, she, they link to this blog post you wrote. They, Satoshi just say, "Thanks," right, for, for writing it.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that was on the Bitcoin Talk forum, because I was on there talking about like various Bitcoin things. And in particular, I was working on a decentralized encrypted file system.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  Which still exists, which is called Tahoe LAFS.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  And that, I was talking about how it would be great to integrate decentralized encrypted storage with Bitcoin, which is sort of a forerunner of IPFS-style concept today. Anyway, so I was hanging out on the Bitcoin Talk forum, talking about many different topics. And Satoshi said, like, "Oh, hey, Zuko, I wanted to thank you for blogging about my white paper," something like that.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  The irony of Satoshi thanking you for blogging is not lost on me, right? Of like, this person who, every word is scrutinized now as, you know, "Who is it? Why did they use this word? Why does that phrase in there?" And the idea that, you know, they're literally just thankful that somebody took notice.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  Right, is pretty cool.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:47Speaker 00

  Alright, any, I gotta ask, any idea or guess as to who it is?

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Uh, no. Yeah, A, I don't care, B, I don't know, C, if I knew, I wouldn't say.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's actually exactly where I am. Like, I don't think it matters at all, and there's probably a lot of benefit to not knowing, right? Just because it's one less thing to attack Bitcoin on, right? Of like, you can go after the person.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  My C, I wouldn't say, isn't like for the good of Bitcoin or to protect Bitcoin. It's out of like, respect for Satoshi.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  I love Satoshi. Satoshi was such a wonderful, like, hero, and like, achieved the things I wanted to achieve, and for the reasons that I cared about them, and he was a nice guy.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  So. Out of general respect for anybody who wants to maintain their own privacy, I wouldn't like speculate or share any information that I had.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  Got it. And so as you you see this, it starts to gain some traction, you're like, oh, this may actually work. Uh, why eventually started Zcash? What was the thought process?

• 17:57Speaker 01

  It was many years later.

• 17:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, because this is in like 2009, 2010 with Bitcoin.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Well, the thought process was it's it really started right then, actually, because even in like 2009,

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Satoshi and Hal Finney and others were talking about the privacy problem in Bitcoin.

• 18:16Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  And um, there may be some revisionist history eventually. If Bitcoin's successful enough, there will be revisionist history eventually.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  But the original true history is that Satoshi and Hal and everyone, like 100% of everyone involved for the first several years, considered privacy to be not only a necessary goal, but almost the overriding purpose of Bitcoin was privacy. Like privacy and decentralization, which are probably not extricable from one another. And they talked from the beginning about how to achieve it, about how there was a sort of a gaping problem with the original design of Bitcoin and that it exposes people's transactions to unauthorized others.

• 19:02Speaker 00

  It it's interesting, right? Because I think when many people who are uneducated when it comes to Bitcoin specifically, uh, they look at it, they say, oh, this is, you know, it it's private, it's anonymous, it's all these things, right? And and again, it's not anonymous, it's pseudonymous, right? It's not that it is uh, private in terms of the transactions, it's just that you don't know who's doing them, but it's actually very transparent.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  It kind of reminds me of the early days of the internet because IPv4 addresses are just four numbers with dots between them and it doesn't have your name in it. And so therefore people thought on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. And it's all anonymous. Uh, and it turns out that that's it's it's much more complicated than that to prevent someone from scraping and using.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  AI or whatever or spying on people like it's really hard to protect information.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  For sure. And so as they're talking about all this privacy stuff, uh, what was the general consensus or sense of like how that would get solved?

• 20:03Speaker 01

  At the time, there wasn't a good answer. So they talked about, so Hal was a great cryptographer. Uh, Satoshi was not a great cryptographer, but he used cryptography effectively. And so what they talked about was cryptographic approaches to the problem. Well, they also talked about other approaches. Um, but I think those are all doomed, like Band-Aid measures that aren't even going to help. Um, but they did talk also about cryptographic approaches to the problem. But at that time in 2009, the necessary cryptography didn't exist.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  And that's what they concluded. They were like, well, it would be great if we could, um, fix this with cryptography, but nothing will work. Uh, and they were right at the time because Hal knew all the cryptography. Uh, he's another hero of mine.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  And I miss him because he's, uh, frozen in carbonite like Han Solo.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  We can get to his decisions there because it's pretty, it's pretty incredible. Um, but so, so as they're talking about this, obviously, you know, you're kind of in and around the community. Uh, many people don't know that the cryptographic work that's been going on, you know, literally for decades, uh, eventually intersects with cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin, right?

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  Um, the invention of zero knowledge proofs, uh, by a bunch of folks at MIT happened in the eighties.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 21:30Speaker 00

  Right? I mean, even before the DigiCash, like all of this stuff. Uh, and then eventually, um, it's almost like two parallel worlds are being built, right? The kind of the electronic money or, or, um, digital currencies. And then you've got this cryptography work that's happening. And at some point, right? It sounds like probably 2014 or so.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:49Speaker 00

  There's an intersection of let's take these cryptographic techniques and technology and apply it to digital money.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  So that's what Hal and Satoshi were talking about was the use of zero knowledge proofs. And in 2009, when they were talking about it, it was impossible. They wouldn't fit. And in about, I think 2013 or so, um, some scientists came up with improved zero knowledge proofs, which they now call snarks, uh, which were.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Good enough, but no one realized yet because nobody had put two and two together. And then, at the same time, some different scientists came up with the zero coin cryptography protocol. And then, at the San Jose Bitcoin Conference in 2013, these two teams of scientists met each other. And it was like, your chocolate goes well with my peanut butter. They were like, oh, we have this improved zero knowledge proofs, which can do all sorts of things, if only we had a problem where the efficiency of the zero knowledge proofs was the limiting factor. And on the other side, we have this protocol to have a, to have privacy in a public blockchain,

• 22:58Speaker 01

  which is a novel, interesting breakthrough, but its limiting factor is performance. And in fact, the ones who came up with that, Ian Myers and Matt Green and Christina Garman, presented it at the 2013 San Jose Bitcoin Conference. That was kind of the first big Bitcoin conference. It was probably the second or third Bitcoin conference ever. And it was the first one where there was that like thrill in the air and there were all these VCs walking around. And all of us geeks were like, whoa, this is weird. This is like when you're having a party and your dad comes in. The Winkelfossers were there and like there were journalists who were covering it. And we were like, how did the journalists find out about Bitcoin?

• 23:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, before we go to the conference, I just want people to understand who are listening. Explain what a zero knowledge proof is and explain what ZK Snarks actually is. And then let's talk about zero coin and what the idea there was, just so they understand those three concepts.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 23:55Speaker 00

  And then we can talk about how they got come up.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, good catch. Yeah, I just threw out a bunch of different ideas.

• 23:59Speaker 00

  I've done too many of these to know when, when we got to clarify things.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  So is zero knowledge proof is this really mind-boggling cryptography idea that, like you say, was invented in the 1980s. And the people who came up with it won the Turing Award, which is like the Nobel Prize for computer science, for the most important advance in computer science. And the idea of a zero knowledge proof is I can, there's an interactive protocol where I can convince you of the truth of some fact about some data without revealing the data to you. So like, if I know how to solve a pseudocoup puzzle, or... Uh, you know, I, I know the, the answer to a crossword, or I know my secret key that can unlock, can decrypt uh some data or anything I know.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  One way I can prove to you that I know, I say, I say, hey, I, I know this, I know how to do this. I know this puzzle, I know the secret key. And you say, no, you don't prove it. Like, I challenge you to show me you're not bluffing. Well, one way I can do is I can give you all the stuff like, okay, here's, you know, here's my password. You can use it to decrypt the data. Here's the solution to the pseudocopies. I can tell you everything and that convinces you, oh, I must have known it because I just told you. But that also gives you all the data.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  Not, not very private or secure.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Right, so that means there's a lot of limitations to that. Now, I can't.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  This puts all my data at risk, like now you know my password. It also means I can't prove it to a second person after I've proved it to you by giving you my password. Now, if I go to prove it to a second person, he'll, he won't know if it's you or me or someone else who got the password. So it's, it's a really weird conceptual breakthrough to say, which these scientists did in the 1980s, to say, actually, there's a way I can prove to you that I can solve the puzzle, while giving you zero information about how to solve the puzzle.

• 25:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's basically, I want to tell you that I have a piece of information. And I want you to know that when I say I have it, you have confidence that I have it.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:01Speaker 00

  But I can't tell you what the information is.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I, I have to not be able to bluff. So it's got to be a proof that really proves to you that I know it. And I'm not uh trying to like bluff my way through, you know? Uh, but it has to give you zero information.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  It's funny how zero knowledge proof is the name for something that involves giving zero knowledge, but proving how it actually works.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's a weird word, but it actually has a lot of meaning.

• 26:29Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Baked into the name of it.

• 26:30Speaker 00

  And so how does it actually work?

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Well, I can give you a really simple, do you have a couple of like, three minutes? Oh, watch this, yeah, hold on.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  All right, and first time ever on the podcast, Zuko has gotten out of his seat. He's grabbed a bag. I'm gonna, I'm gonna narrate. He, he, he, he's back.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  He is furiously digging through and he's whipped out some index cards.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  All right, I'm gonna, so this is, this is a database.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  All right.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  With a bunch of data in it.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  All right.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  And um.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  I'm gonna write some bits of data on it. So databases are full of information. All information is being coded into bits. Alright. But you can't see what I'm doing here. I'm gonna write a zero or a one on each card, okay? Alright. He's writing a zero or a one on each index card? And, and, and this is my secret. This is my database. This is my like, health history or whatever. It's not, not for you to know, right? And then I say, hey, I wanna prove to you some, something about myself. I'm over 21, I'm a citizen of the United States, I have license to drive, my credit record has zero unpaid debts in it, or whatever. And you say, oh, okay, you wanna prove to me something.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Fine, give me all of the information about you. Give me the database and your name and social security number. And that's the way the world works today. And that's why there's these increasing crisis of data breaches, cuz the data is more and more valuable, it's more important to more people's lives, cuz databases drive everything we do. And we need to use it more and more, but the more we use it, the more vulnerable to exploitation it gets by bad actors, right? So here is a zero knowledge proof. I say, oh, I've got this data here. It shows that, you know, I'm, I'm over 21, or whatever. So it's, it's a couple of bits in a database.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  And these bits are either zero or one, that I drew on this card, and I'm gonna prove to you that the two bits are different. Okay? So, so either this is a zero and this is a one, or this is a one and this is a zero. Yep. But I'm, I'm claiming they're not both zero, or they're not both one. Okay. And, and this is just an example of like, something you could prove about data in a database. Yep. But zero knowledge proofs can apply to any data, in principle. Mm-hmm. This is just a minimal example. Okay. So I say, it's not the case that they're both the same. They're different. So therefore, I've proven, like, whatever it is that you're gonna let me do. And you say, I think you're bluffing. I think actually, you do have unpaid debts in your credit record. They're actually both zero.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Yep. And, and so I'm not gonna let you, you know, let you in, whatever it is. And so now we're gonna do a zero knowledge proof. I'm gonna prove to you that they're different, but I'm never gonna let you look at the database. Okay. Ready? Here's how it works. Okay, don't, don't look at the, don't, don't look, you can't look at the camera. Cause you're, you're the one who doesn't know.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  He's made me turn my face.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  No one else, so, so, we know what's in the database, you don't. We're gonna prove to you that they're different, so here's how it works. You get to hold them, but don't look.

• 29:48Speaker 00

  Alright, I'm now holding both index cards.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Show them to the camera, but don't look at the camera.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  But I ha- but I haven't looked yet.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Alright, now.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  I feel like, I feel like Zuko's a magician right now.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  So, when, in a minute, you're gonna hold the cards behind your back. And either swap them, or don't swap them. And bring them back out. And if they're actually different, I should be able to tell you whether you swapped them or not. If they're actually both zero, or they're actually both one, I won't be able to tell. Make sense?

• 30:21Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Can you see those cards again? Okay, put them behind your back, so I can't see.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  I am now doing a magic trick. I've taken the cards, I've put them behind my back, I still haven't looked.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Alright, hold them up.

• 30:33Speaker 00

  I now have showed Zuko.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Show them to the camera. You didn't swap them.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  He claims I didn't swap them?

• 30:41Speaker 01

  So, and I'm right, right? You didn't swap them.

• 30:44Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  So either they're different, and I've just proven that to you, or I'm bluffing. Right, maybe they both have zero on them, and I'm, I just guessed, and I got lucky.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  So how can you make sure that I'm not just bluffing?

• 30:57Speaker 00

  Do it again. Do it a bunch of times.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  Yep, and so keep doing it.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, do it a hundred times in a row. And eventually you'll say, these two bits must be different from each other, cause he can't have guessed, bluffed successfully a hundred times straight. Right? But here's the zero knowledge property. You have no information about whether this is a zero or a one. You have zero added information. If you were forced to guess, you have fifty fifty odds, right?

• 31:22Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  You got zero added information, isn't that amazing? I've proven something to you, that they're different, while giving you zero added information beyond the fact that they're different.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  And so the whole idea here really is that the...

• 31:36Speaker 00

  Individual or the organization that's asking the question, right? So, you know, the birthday is a great example. I don't, I want to ask you, are you over 21?

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  You don't want to tell me what your birthday is, right?

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  And so what I need to be able to do is confirm that you are over 21. I actually don't need to know what your birthday is.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  I just need the information of yes, no, on are you over 21?

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  In this scenario, I basically can do a set of tests without actually ever looking at the data and then receive additional information from you to confirm whether the information

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:09Speaker 00

  says you're over 21 or not.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Right, and zero knowledge proofs are very general. You can configure them to prove any fact. You're over 21, you're over 22, any combination of facts, whatever it is.

• 32:19Speaker 00

  They're customizable.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they never reveal information beyond the minimal information necessary. And that's why they're more scalable for society than the current way of doing things. If you think about it, the current way of doing things is almost the opposite, which is, I want to prove something kind of minimal, like this is really me who's covered by this health insurance, right? I go into the doctor's office, they're like, let's make sure that you've got the right health insurance, like linked in our database or whatever. So all I want to do is prove that I'm the right person for the health insurance. How do I prove it? I prove it by giving you more sensitive information, which is more dangerous to me. Like I give you my social security number and everything you would need to do identity theft. We write it down on a piece of paper and you like fax it somewhere.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  It's a pretty dumb system.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  So the more we use it, the more vulnerable everyone gets to being exploited by like criminals or foreign actors or advertisers or whatever.

• 33:15Speaker 00

  For sure. So as zero knowledge proofs gets created, it's come a long way in the last, you know, almost 40 years now. Where do we get from the zero knowledge proofs that intersection with zero coin, right? So this idea that there can actually be a payment network or a transaction settlement network.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  That has privacy baked in.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:39Speaker 00

  What was the original kind of way that worked without having the zero knowledge proofs incorporated?

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Um, the answer is, that was kind of the idea that Hal and Satoshi talked about, and they decided correctly that it wouldn't work in 2009. And then Matt Green and Ian Myers and Christina Garman came up with a way to do it, using zero knowledge proofs, but they were not snarks. Snarks are like... The S in Snarks is for succinct, which means like small, efficient zero knowledge proofs. But the zero coin protocol by, um, by those scientists from Johns Hopkins

• 34:18Speaker 01

  required like about forty kilobytes of data for each proof. So you'd have to put all of that into each transaction in a Bitcoin like blockchain. So with the two thousand thirteen San Jose Bitcoin conference, uh, Ian, I think it was presented that scientific result as like a, you know, a talk at the conference. And there was a lot of buzz about it because remember back then, okay, now we do have the Winklevosses and the journalists and the VCs have shown up for the first time.

• 34:49Speaker 00

  The suits are here.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, but still like ninety percent of everyone in the community considers privacy to be not only necessary, but almost the whole point of the whole product, the whole experiment.

• 35:01Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  So everyone's really excited about the zero coin proposal. And there was so much buzz about it that the, uh, the, the Bitcoin core devs who were also presenting on other stuff at the same conference, they took some of their time on stage to say, okay, by the way, we, you know, we've been hearing a lot about this zero coin presentation. That's also that happened here. And we just want to make it clear to stave off any, like anybody jumping to assumptions. We're not going to put zero coin into the next upgrade of Bitcoin.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  They had to say that because everyone was talking about it like that, like, oh, we figured out how to solve this problem with this upgrade. And so

• 35:44Speaker 00

  Why did they take that position?

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Uh, they said for really good reasons, they said, A, we totally don't know if forty kilobytes per transaction would even work, or if that would just be a killer. Uh, B, Bitcoin is too important for experiments. Uh, we're not going to try something out in Bitcoin. So what you should do is try this out in an altcoin first. And if it flies, then we could consider adding it into a future Bitcoin.

• 36:08Speaker 00

  This is like one of the most important parts about. Bitcoin that I think is misunderstood by especially the non crypto community like the financial community, the institutional investors, etc. It's this idea that there's a very important trade off between security and what I like to call speed and innovation.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:30Speaker 00

  Right? So the shiny things are the experimental things that we don't know yet if they work or not.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:38Speaker 00

  Bitcoin optimizes for security in the sense of it is slow, it is methodical, it is intentional in the way that it operates and also in the way that it is built in terms of the actual engineering process.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  Right?

• 36:53Speaker 01

  And let me interrupt you. It's really neat to see historically how that didn't arise from like market forces or startups or whatever. That arose from the culture of the Bitcoin cordages back in 2013. What they said was Bitcoin's too important, but you know what? It wasn't very important back then. Different people with a different culture or a different attitude might have said, sure, this isn't important. Let's, I mean, it's

• 37:16Speaker 00

  Try everything.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Let's try something. And they didn't and that set the culture.

• 37:21Speaker 00

  It is, it's almost like they knew the potential.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. They were saying, they were saying it's so important and I think they were right, but what, what they were really thinking is it's going to be so important if we stay the course.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. The, the discipline is, is pretty impressive.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  Um, one of the things that is really interesting to me is this idea that privacy, right? The knock against it today, especially around financial transactions is why do you need to hide your transactions if you're not doing anything wrong? Right? And, uh, you know, at one point you and I had been talking about this a while ago and you said something to me that stuck with me and, and I told you before, I don't even know if you remember saying this to me, but you said, this is the exact battle that encryption had in the nineties. Right? And so maybe for those that don't know, just give a quick overview of this idea that, you know, when encryption was created and it became popularized, there was enormous blowback. Right?

• 38:19Speaker 00

  And people were just, why do you need to encrypt your data if you have nothing to hide? And kind of how we got

• 38:23Speaker 01

  Different parts of the government tried to ban it.

• 38:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  In lots of different ways, like they tried to ban it in certain ways and they failed. This is probably also happening with Bitcoin and Zcash too. And then they tried to ban it in the next way and that failed as well. And then, uh, but eventually after, so what happened like? Cryptography went from being a military and diplomatic tool for like top secret messages between generals or whatever um to being a mainstream part of public infrastructure that allows the internet to happen.

• 38:54Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  And that was with the creation of Netscape in nineteen ninety four. Netscape added cryptography.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  And of course Netscape was the first time that people could use the internet without being a computer programmer. Um, and that was the historical moment that cryptography became part of public infrastructure instead of part of military secrets.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  And the military, like the NSA, literally in the United States, uh, which is part of the Department of Defense. Had was attempting to sort of retain control of that science.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  And uh, so for for maybe a decade or so, there was this policy and technical struggle in which these entrepreneurs like Netscape and these hacker activists like Adam Back.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  On the Cypherpunks mailing list um on the one side and then like Al Gore, the Vice President of the United States and the NSA and the FBI on the other side were trying to control the future technology um.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  And basically what the what this faction inside the US government was trying to do was either prevent encryption entirely or make it weak encryption so that it would be crackable by sufficiently big players.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  So the whole idea was basically.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Or backdoor it.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, the the the idea really a- at the core was uh, the belief our generals have things to hide, right, in the military, and so they're using encryption, so that makes sense. Uh, there is other communications that we know needs to be secure and hidden. They're using encryption. Why do you, you know, Zuko as a user of the internet need to have encrypted?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  Transfer of information if you have nothing to hide.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there was this. What I always thought at the time was like myopic perspective that A encryption is going to hide things from the government, whereas actually it's going to hide things from criminals and hackers a lot more than it's going to hide things from the government, right?

• 41:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  From your government. It hides things from foreign governments, but it doesn't necessarily hide things from your government.

• 41:16Speaker 00

  And my understanding, right, and don't slap me in the back of the head if I get this wrong, is while this is all going on, there's eventually like a congressional hearing, right, where I forget the gentleman's name, but he has to defend encryption, right, and basically say, look, this is why this is important. This is why we need this. And we go from, you know, literally...

• 41:42Speaker 01

  That may have been Whit Diffy, one of the inventors of public key cryptography, who testified before Congress.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so we go from that scenario where literally it's, should we ban this? Should we prevent people from doing it? If we can't ban it, should we enforce rules where it has to be weak, right?

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  To today, it is the industry standard.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Right. After about, after about 10 years, the, the people in favor of openness and a stronger economy and safer national infrastructure got the upper hand over the people in favor of espionage and law enforcement. Like basically, the majority of United States government sided with strong public infrastructure. It protects individual citizens. It protects businesses, because how else are we going to have an economy on the internet without this kind of strong safety? And it protects national infrastructure. You don't want your citizens' activities being visible to enemies.

• 42:39Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Right? So eventually, the faction that was trying to control cryptography and keep it a military secret succumbed.

• 42:46Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  And it became, like today, HTTPS is the standard. So it's about 20 years on since, literally 25 years on since HTTPS was originally invented, and now it's...

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Like it's almost unheard of that you would use unencrypted internet for anything.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Well, imagine using your credit card and sending it over unencrypted.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  Anything.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Or anything. You wouldn't, you wouldn't browse your social network.

• 43:12Speaker 00

  So, so as this happens, the reason why I bring it up is when we were talking, you know, I was asking you about the privacy technology and cryptocurrencies, right? And, and Zcash, Monero, et cetera. Today, there's a lot of folks, usually law enforcement, government, yes, same players, saying, why do you need privacy technology if you have nothing to hide?

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Right?

• 43:33Speaker 00

  And your response to me was really targeting this idea that like, no, this isn't about privacy coins. It's that privacy technology is likely to be baked into all cryptocurrencies, all of these digital assets. And it follows similar to encryption, right? And that's where kind of that, that came from.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Just think of it for business requirements. If, if you're running a business, you're paying employees, you're making purchases or investments or transactions. You can't be leaking that to like foreign militaries.

• 44:02Speaker 00

  Well, let's use a real life example, right?

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Competitors.

• 44:05Speaker 00

  Look today at the exchanges.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 44:08Speaker 00

  Right? And once their wallets are identified, people can watch the flow of money in and out. Now, you may know that it goes to a certain address and you may not know who that address is, right? Is it an employee? Is it a, you know, somebody else, whatever? Or you may know it. And if you know it, then you can transparently see all of the movement of money.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that same, so there's this tracing and like metadata visualization tools like Chainalysis and many others. And their primary customers are probably exchanges and law enforcement. But you can think how that exact same tracing would allow you to front run traders who are using exchanges.

• 44:51Speaker 00

  It's pretty crazy.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Or it would allow like a foreign military to analyze the activities of Americans by using that exact same tracing technology.

• 45:01Speaker 00

  So let's talk about this idea of why privacy is so important, right? This this kind of, you know, real, it's not even an idea as much as it is a debate right now around privacy as a financial right, right? Like your financial privacy is a right. There's plenty of people who say, you know, look, this is how we track terrorism. This is how we track, you know, people doing bad things is we follow the money. And and there's a lot of truth to, yes, we do catch people like that. But following your transactions or my transactions or our businesses' transactions, who are law abiding citizens is different, right? And so maybe just kind of opine a little bit on like how you think about privacy as,

• 45:46Speaker 00

  you know, like financial privacy as a right compared to maybe the way other people think about it.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Well, I would say things have sure changed in the public discourse. So before Bitcoin, there were these, I told you, there was like 12 years after I left Digicash and before I discovered Bitcoin where Silicon Valley at that time during the dot com boom or whatever, pretty much threw out the notion of decentralization or privacy as having any value in the pursuit of their new business models. And it wasn't until Bitcoin and then moreover, in the past like two years, maybe, that all

• 46:31Speaker 01

  of a sudden, everyone around the world is shocked to find out that they are personally and their their institutions and their societies are threatened by the massive experiment in eradicating privacy and making people vulnerable to one or two or a few specific companies or governments in some regions. It's really heartening to me that it's like almost every headline now, right? It's really well understood as the problem or as a problem.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  And I have to, personally, my experience, I don't think this is why it has affected the rest of the world, but in my little tiny circle, it was Bitcoin that made people start caring again, perhaps because it demonstrated that some kind of decentralization is actually possible.

• 47:37Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  Whereas before then, there was kind of a nihilism or fatalism.

• 47:41Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Like, there's this famous quote from some Silicon Valley captain of industry in late 90s, probably, he said, "Privacy is dead, get over it."

• 47:50Speaker 00

  (laughing)

• 47:51Speaker 01

  And I'm really glad to see that sort of give-up sentiment is currently on the wane.

• 47:58Speaker 00

  Yep. Well, and part of it too is, I think as Bitcoin has become popular, and, you know, again, this belief in 2013 of the Bitcoin developers, you know, "This is too important", right? Matt Green, who you mentioned earlier, is a professor at Johns Hopkins, and he said that in a Fortune article about Zcash, that Bitcoin is the least private financial system ever created.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kind of ironic.

• 48:22Speaker 00

  And there's pros and cons to that, right? That the level of transparency and the openness of Bitcoin is highly celebrated in many cases, and because, you know, rightfully so, because it brings a lot of advantages. I think that there is another group, and many of them are actually Bitcoiners, who say, "Look, there is privacy components that are not there, even Satoshi and hal, etc." Walk me through kind of what you guys have built to date with Zcash, why that technology hasn't been incorporated into Bitcoin, and like, kind of, you know, is there an intersection point in the future where eventually it does get, you know, just kind of, like, what is Zcash? How does it work today? And then, like, how do you see that interacting with the?

• 49:06Speaker 01

  All right. So let's pick up the story back at the 2013 San Jose Bitcoin Conference. The ZeroCoin was presented.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  Took like forty kilobytes, thirty or forty kilobytes per transaction. The Bitcoin cordives rejected the idea of bundling it into the next upgrade of Bitcoin. And at that same conference, the Johns Hopkins team met up face to face. They ran into this other team of scientists who had invented these really efficient zero knowledge proofs called SNARKs. And from that collaboration, they realized that using the SNARKs instead of the older, bigger zero knowledge proofs would make it really sort of practical. And then, and I was at that conference, but it wasn't until maybe a year later that those

• 49:58Speaker 01

  scientists had come up with the science protocol that made the practical version.

• 50:04Speaker 00

  Got it. So they had the components, but they hadn't put them together yet. They spent a year, they put them together, and now we've got kind of a working prototype to some degree.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Yep, like, yep. And then they asked me to productize it, to make it real world scalable and all that. And then, so that was the origin of Zcash. So we spent, starting in like 2015 or so, and we launched Zcash at the end of 2016. And it worked, so it was a huge experiment, right? But now, after more than two years, we've seen that it has sustained like live fire exercises in the wild, and it protects people's privacy effectively.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  And so this was the demonstration that proved the maturity of the modern zero knowledge proof technology. And I believe it's because of Zcash that there's been a renaissance in zero knowledge proof science and in a whole bunch of startups and major companies like JP Morgan and Mastercard and every. Every major industry trying to apply zero knowledge proof technology to all of these massive problems we have.

• 51:27Speaker 00

  Yep. And as you guys are building this, you know, you know, many of the Bitcoin developers, right? They know what you're building. Their thought again is just this is experimentation. We can't risk Bitcoin with the experimentation, kind of go prove that it works or?

• 51:43Speaker 01

  There's no.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  There's no easy way, there's no way I can see to upgrade Bitcoin to have this zero knowledge proof privacy built into it without a very divisive, complex change to the protocol. And that's where that, the advantages that you eloquently sketched out earlier of maximal security. And also I would put it as maximal predictability, right? Those are tremendous advantages and the way Bitcoin is widely trusted probably in large part stems from this longstanding like Lindy effect of maximum, not only survival,

• 52:33Speaker 01

  but also predictability and recognizability. And I don't really see how you could add something so radical as built in encryption without throwing all that out.

• 52:47Speaker 00

  And really, when you describe it that way, it's almost as if, if it's, that technology is incorporated in the early days before you get adoption at any degree. You can move forward with it. Once you start to get adoption and you don't have that encryption incorporated, it's nearly impossible to put in, right, in the future without, just, I mean, like really major obstacles and changes.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:17Speaker 00

  Does that leave you thinking that it is unlikely snarks or similar type of encrypted technology ends up ever getting incorporated into Bitcoin? Or is there some other like organic way that they can?

• 53:27Speaker 01

  I mean, ever is a long time. What's your investment thesis horizon here, Pom? Hundred years, twenty five?

• 53:34Speaker 00

  Well, you're gonna, after you're done solving this problem, you're gonna go solve, uh, life expectancies, so.

• 53:41Speaker 00

  We'll be around forever.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  You'll live longer if you'd only meet, Pom.

• 53:44Speaker 00

  Oh, we, we'll, we'll get into that in a second there.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  Um, I'm not gonna say anything about forever. I, I find it hard to imagine getting this kind of radical strong privacy baked into an upgrade to Bitcoin at layer one, uh, within like ten years.

• 54:02Speaker 00

  Got it. Okay. And, and so as, uh, you continue to build Zcash, right? It, it has this, uh, privacy focused component to it. Um, that really is privacy by design, right? If, if you think about, um, you know, people hear that terminology all the time, but Zcash is a great example of a, of a product and a protocol that was built for privacy from day one, uh, but not only for privacy. It was built to have transactions, et cetera. Um, one of the things that, uh, you know, I know you guys are running into now is this whole scalability, right? Many, many different protocols and blockchains are running into this, uh, challenge of, you know, how do you make a currency, right?

• 54:43Speaker 00

  An actual transaction settlement network work if it isn't scalable? It has to be scalable.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  When you have the privacy components, that doesn't relieve you of the scalability challenges, right? And so Bitcoin is taking, uh, you know, I think most people in Bitcoin are very excited about the kind of layer two, the Lightning Network, et cetera. I think you guys are looking at it more as like layer one scalability. Maybe just talk about, you know, one, the difference between the layer one approach versus layer two and the why, why you're excited about and focused on the layer one scalability.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  The, the why is that our mission is to provide economic freedom and opportunity to all people. Um, and, you know, with the current architectures, we can't reach all people. We're lucky if we could do like 10,000 people simultaneously. Right? So we have to have a radical improvement, like unprecedented improvement in scalability in order to satisfy that mission. Now, about layer one versus layer two, I've been studying it closely for a while, for like years. My current thought is sort of half baked, even though I study it closely, this stuff is really complicated. And as, as has been demonstrated by my thinking Bitcoin would never work, I'm often wrong, right?

• 55:57Speaker 01

  So, but my current belief is that layer two can add features or like functionality, like non custodial exchange, which I think is a very cool, much needed feature. So that like when an exchange gets hacked, you don't lose your funds. That's, everyone would want that.

• 56:18Speaker 00

  Well, just on this note, a lot of people who don't understand or have never been exposed to the traditional financial system, they don't realize that custody and exchange are not vertically integrated in like any other major financial market in the world. Right? Like in crypto, most people coming from like a Wall Street or a banking background, when they see that the exchange is also the custodian, their heads explode.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  Right?

• 56:44Speaker 00

  And it leads to problems that we've seen, right? When the exchange gets hacked, they're actually hacking a custodian at the same time.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  Right?

• 56:51Speaker 00

  And so I think to people coming at it from the finance background, they're like, of course you have to break those two apart. I think people in crypto have just always seen the custodial exchanges and so they think that's normal.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  That's really interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing that with me. I hadn't thought it through.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  So layer two, like Lightning Network, and there's this thing called Bolt, which is like Lightning, but more private. I think those are really promising for lots of reasons. One is new features like non-custodial exchange. And the other is, I think it's a massive improvement in the latency and the fee, like making the fees really low. But I don't think it's an improvement in scalability in terms of number of users who can onboard. Unless, like, they come up with better and better fixes and improvements to the layer two where they could reach that. But currently, I think of it as, layer one is what I think

• 57:52Speaker 01

  of as horizontal scalability, which is how many simultaneous users who are active you can sustain, you can onboard and sustain. And then layer two is improving latency and fees and additional features. Okay. And on layer one, how do you improve the scalability there? Well, that is an unsolved problem. And it's really fun. Why did you tell us all the secrets right here? So, you know, we, here's the thing, our team is both science innovators and pragmatic engineers. So many of the people involved in Zcash invented some of the fundamental breakthroughs in

• 58:34Speaker 01

  cryptography that other scientists will be citing for like 100 years probably. But, that's the easy part. Hopefully, they won't hear me say that. But that's not the hard part. The hard part is making a thing which satisfies real-world use cases well enough that people can use it, and it runs in practice and it keeps running despite errors and bugs and hacks and everything, right? And our team has done both of those things. Now, we're in this, with, with privacy, like deploying...

• 59:10Speaker 01

  Practical, secure, zero-knowledge-proof-based privacy to large numbers of people was never done before, even though the science had existed in various degrees all along.

• 59:21Speaker 00

  Is it fair to say that all of these challenges, the scalability, the transaction fees, you know, all the things that people know are actively being worked on, they become exponentially harder when you have to do it from a privacy standpoint? As like, like it's a privacy by design? And then also you're trying to deal with scalability?

• 59:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, some of them really do become harder if you also add a need for privacy. And, and again, like we went over earlier, I don't really believe that you can have mass adoption be used by all businesses and all citizens of all different countries if doing so exposes your private data to like foreign enemies. It's just a non-starter. So anybody who's making a scalable system without privacy, I question if they could find product-market fit with that. And it is, it does make it technically harder in some cases, but it can also help. And in particular, there may be a breakthrough possible, which is that zero-knowledge proofs can help with the scalability problem.

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  Because the, the reason that Bitcoin and Ethereum and Zcash today are non-scalable is that every node on the network has to verify the correctness of what every other node on the network has done. Right? So that means it doesn't scale because the more participants there are, the more work it is for every participant. Right? Now, it could be that zero-knowledge proofs can allow a succinct, efficient proof that a whole swath of operations that were done outside of your view were all correct. And you can verify that cryptographically, so then you can sign off on it without having to transmit and inspect everything else that's happened everywhere around the network. Does that make sense?

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  It does.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  And there's, there's a lot of people, what I was getting at was, there's a lot of people, there's a few, at least a few people working on this.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  Various notions of scalability. And a couple of people who are also working on the same idea we are of using efficiency or knowledge proofs as a key piece of the solution to scalability. But what is fun and exciting and encouraging to me is we're the only people I know of that have both the fundamental science, the baked in privacy, and we know how to bring these things all the way to mass adoption.

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  Actually building the product, yeah. Why, um, as we talk about some of the additional challenges, right, on the technical side, privacy can lead to a lot of advantages, right? And one of the things is regulators, right? And so when you think of Wall Street coming into-

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  You mean privacy can lead to disadvantages? Is that what you were gonna say?

• 1:02:05Speaker 00

  No, no, I, I, I think that there are plenty who would, who would claim that, right? There's plenty of regulators who think, again, going back to the encryption, right, debate, et cetera, of, you know, why do you need to hide stuff? Why should regulators or, or, you know, these large banks on Wall Street, et cetera, like, why should they be excited about privacy? Or what is the thing that, you know, if you were talking to those regulators saying like, no, no, no, this is actually an advantage or a positive? What's your answer to that?

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it, it actually, I think it's actually pretty easy in practice to get people to start thinking about it from a different point of view, which is everybody wants insight into other people's information, but everybody also has information of their own that they need to protect from other people inspecting it, from getting, like, spying on your stuff. And that's true of regulators too. Like, a regulator-

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  There's lots of regulations in the United States, also in other countries, but especially in the United States. Some of these regulations are about anti-terrorism, the drug war, organized crime, but then there's other regulations. There's regulations about healthcare information protections, regulations about children accessing the internet, there's Graham Leach Bliley, which is just a general purpose, a very general rule that financial institutions are not allowed to disclose private information about their clients to unauthorized third parties. That's just, that's just the law in the United States, you're not allowed to do that. And so, regulation has lots of goals to satisfy.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  There's consumer protection, you know, anti-fraud, and, and there's national security. And it's only a very sort of first knee-jerk reaction, like with HTTP in 1994, there's only a first knee-jerk reaction, "Oh, we don't want secrets, we don't want like, crime to flourish." Sure, nobody wants crime to flourish, but a more considered study of the technology tells you, you also don't want like, foreign governments surveilling the behavior of your businesses.

• 1:04:31Speaker 00

  Well, there's a balance, right, between you want to protect the right information, but you also don't want people to abuse the system, and, and I think that's where the debate lies.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  Okay, that's a really good point. Now, in the, the way we've gotten into doing it in the West, especially led by the United States, in the last like 30 years, with financial regulation, is that the balance is mediated by financial intermediaries, right? So in the United States, what you do with the cash in your pocket and who you buy from or give money to is your business, and there's no, it would be...

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  Rejected by the mainstream of the United States government and the United States society if we said, oh, let's start requiring you to report everything you do every time you send or receive cash or whatever. But the balance is that banks and money services businesses and financial intermediaries are required to do a whole bunch of surveillance and reporting and anti-crime operations. Right? Now, for the time being at least, that same balance works for cryptocurrencies. The financial intermediaries are exchanges instead of banks currently, although they might be banks themselves in a few years.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  And you can treat people holding cryptocurrency on their wallet. This has got a Zcash wallet on it, but it's locked. That's okay. You can treat people holding cryptocurrency on their...

• 1:06:15Speaker 00

  I'm talking to a guy who likes privacy and I think I know his password. So, we're gonna see if I can do it here. Look at that, I got right in to his wallet. Only because I heard him say the password earlier.

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  It's the second demo of the day. For the time being, a reasonable balance that fits with all the current laws and the current stances of the United States regulators is we treat people having cryptocurrency on their phone like we treat people having cash in their pocket. It's probably unconstitutional and it's definitely against the ethos of the United States to have the government sort of heavy-handedly mandating what people are allowed to do in their pockets. But at the same time, it's normal and accepted for there to be heavy-handed rules about what all the financial intermediaries do.

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

  So, for those who are just listening and can't see the video, what we're showing is a, there's a wallet. This is a prototype or a demo. It's a Zcash wallet.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  It's a working prototype. It totally works. It's not, no smoke and mirrors.

• 1:07:23Speaker 00

  Explain what this wallet does that other wallets don't do and why it's important.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  This is the first wallet on a mobile phone where... All of it's like a fully decentralized cryptocurrency, right? And all of the encryption is done on the mobile phone. So nobody outside of this phone can spy on what this phone is doing by looking at the blockchain.

• 1:07:49Speaker 00

  Got it. So it is it is fully encrypted on the device and it provides a layer of privacy that just isn't being done anywhere else in wallets.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  Yep. So as far as the blockchain is concerned, it has a similar effect as cash. If I zap some Zcash to your wallet, to your phone from this phone, there's not any record of that happening that's visible on the blockchain.

• 1:08:13Speaker 00

  Got it. All right. You're you're building all kinds of stuff. I could literally could talk to you for like three days, not even hours. But before I let you go, we're going to talk about this carnivore diet. I know that you are incredibly excited about it.

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:08:29Speaker 00

  Describe what this is and just like the whole thing. So let me let me caveat.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  How many hours do we have?

• 1:08:37Speaker 00

  Hold on, hold on, because I know that he's gonna he'll talk for three hours on this for sure. We don't have that much time. But one of the most fascinating things about you to me is you are very well known in the cryptocurrency community. You've spent decades of your life working on encryption, privacy, digital currencies, etc. And if you go to Zuko's Twitter account, the first thing on his profile is katonic.com.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  Katonic.org.

• 1:09:04Speaker 00

  Right, dot org, okay. Which has nothing to do with crypto, has nothing to do with privacy, has nothing to do with.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  Medical research blog.

• 1:09:11Speaker 00

  Literally, his life's work is not the first thing that's listed. So obviously, this is important to you.

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  Maybe I should update my Twitter bio.

• 1:09:18Speaker 00

  Well, it just it was cracking me up when I saw this. So talk a little bit about why is this medical research blog the first thing that you link to? What is the purpose behind all this and why are you excited about it?

• 1:09:32Speaker 00

  Just what is it, right? It's just you just eat meat all the time?

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  Right, so.

• 1:09:36Speaker 00

  You don't eat anything else?

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  I try not to, like, uh, about one day out of four, I give into temptation and eat ice cream. So I'm really a bad, uh, role model, but I'm a good thinker. Uh, so you should do as I say, not as I do, and eat only meat.

• 1:09:50Speaker 00

  I'm gonna start using that. I'm a bad role model, but I'm a great thinker. That applies like a lot of things in life. Alright, so you eat just meat and we're talking, uh?

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  On a good day, I eat only meat.

• 1:09:58Speaker 00

  Okay, and that is red meat, chicken, any?

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  Mostly red meat. Red meat's better for you than chicken, because it's fattier and has, uh, more micronutrients.

• 1:10:07Speaker 00

  Alright, and, uh, what time do you wake up?

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  What time do I wake up?

• 1:10:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know, seven-ish.

• 1:10:14Speaker 00

  Okay, so set like seven AM you wake up. Do you eat meat? Like, are you just eating steaks at seven thirty? Or are you?

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  Um, I usually have bacon and eggs if I eat breakfast. Um, it's typical for people who eat the carnivore diet that there's a rule among the carnivore clan, which is that you should eat according to hunger, not according to like a schedule or a

• 1:10:34Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  a plan or a calculus.

• 1:10:37Speaker 00

  That that seems pretty reasonable.

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  It's kind of like the, like, the theory is humans are animals. Like lions don't have wristwatches, they don't have a, um, a plan written down. Uh, they just presumably, we assume that lions eat when they're hungry and then they don't eat when they're not hungry. That seems like a reasonable assumption. And so the theory is a similar thing would be good for humans. Which actually totally makes sense if you start thinking of humans as being animals. Uh, anyway, the point is, I'm not always hungry in the morning, but if I am hungry, I'm gonna eat bacon and eggs or ground beef or steak, usually.

• 1:11:11Speaker 00

  Okay, and then how many meals do you think you eat in a day on average?

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  Hmm, two on average.

• 1:11:17Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  For me.

• 1:11:18Speaker 00

  And like, each meat, each one has steak? Or do you also eat like vegetables or?

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  Well, I try not to eat vegetables. I think vegetables are bad for you. I know that you know that that's a ridiculous statement, but explain why you say that. Um, I know, I, I am fascinated and this might have some connection to cryptocurrency and Bitcoin. I remember being so thrilled and having so much fun. You can find my old tweets from like 2012 or whatever. When, I remember one of my tweets is something like, "Oh, boy, another Nobel Prize winner is saying that Bitcoin is a stupid idea that can never work." I love this, right? Um, it really, really excites me when I see

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  authoritative or

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  consensus being wrong. And I'm sure they're wrong. That's interesting. That's like an opportunity for us all to learn and benefit. So vegetables being good for you as a consensus. Yeah, everyone believes that. You laughed. You literally, you made the funniest facial expression. For those who don't have the video and you're just listening, he made the funniest facial expression when I said, "Oh, no, vegetables are bad for you." Zuko is gonna be the podcast host by the end of this. He's already got it down. You described the facial reactions. Everyone knows vegetables, plants and fruits and vegetables are good for you. It's like so well-known and with such high confidence. And if you dig into the science, the very first thing that you find out is this has never been tested by experiment.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  Wait, what? No one's ever like taken a bunch of humans or even like mice or whatever. And said, "We're gonna give these ones more like five fruits and vegetables a day. We're gonna give these ones no fruits and vegetables a day and we're gonna follow them for six months or six years or something and find out if it affects their health. And if it does affect their health, how it affects their health." Okay. It's never, that experiment's never been done. Now, there's a couple of close calls where they made experiments like that accidentally, like they were trying to test different kinds of vegetables, like do apples help versus cucumbers or whatever? And they accidentally had some people taking more vegetables and fruits than the other people. And the results of those close calls, just like maybe two, I think, experiments

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  where the additional fruits and vegetables made no detectable difference to anyone's health. The fruits and vegetables hurt you, it's that they just don't make a difference. They hurt some people. Okay, in what way? Um, there are a lot of toxins and anti-nutrients and um, things that people are sensitive to or allergic to. Um, if you think about it, uh, animals, they either hide, fight back, or run away. Plants don't do any of that, right? What do they do? They have chemical warfare to make it hard on things that would eat them. Right? So every plant is packed full of pesticides. And not the additional pesticides added, well, also the additional pesticides or the breeding to increase the pesticide

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  levels in plants or to reduce the spoilage or the loss to pests, but just natural pesticides from evolution. How, how long have you been eating this carnivore diet? About ten years with a whole lot of ice cream along the way. Uh, and what do you think the benefits have been? Uh, oh, for me personally? Yeah, is it like more energy, clear mind? All kinds of benefits. I was really fat when I started. Okay. I had like forty pounds of excess belly flab hanging over my belt and I was really ashamed of it and hated it. Um, and that all went away, like within probably nine months after I started, it was gone. And um, it cleared up a bunch of like weird

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  medical conditions, like my toes used to turn purple and like tingle and hurt all the time, like they were too hot or too cold and nobody could tell me why, and that stopped happening. Um, and it gave me better energy and alertness and uh, gave me a much better mood, like I stopped being so impatient with my kids, you know? And my then-wife, uh, who is my partner in this research, if you go to ketotic.org, that was actually mostly her science ideas and I was mostly like the editor or promoter.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  But it really helped my mood. But that's just my personal experience. I'm much more, I don't find personal anecdotes very compelling, right? Because you can only, there's a billion personal anecdotes pointing in a billion directions.

• 1:15:49Speaker 00

  What's the guy who only ate Subway and lost all the weight? And then?

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  Haven't heard of that one. I've heard of the Twinkie guy.

• 1:15:55Speaker 00

  So, well, the guy who was all the Subway ads? This is, I believe this to be true, but somebody on the internet will correct me if I'm wrong. I believe that now the FDA categorizes deli meat, like salami, pepperoni, etc. As a carcinogenic.

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  Ah, yeah.

• 1:16:13Speaker 00

  Which also cigarettes are. And so it's this idea that it isn't just eat only meat. I think it is also what type of meat you eat. Has a big impact.

• 1:16:23Speaker 01

  I think it's the World Health Organization you're thinking of, not the FDA. And I think they're totally wrong.

• 1:16:29Speaker 00

  Wait for the internet.

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  The World Health Organization thing about processed meat is total baloney.

• 1:16:33Speaker 00

  Oh, you disagree with them?

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's based on completely nonsensical pseudoscience. Like, the World Health Organization should be ashamed of themselves for that. It's, it's based on...

• 1:16:45Speaker 00

  For those at home, I'm just laughing.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  Go ahead. Are we out of time yet?

• 1:16:51Speaker 00

  No, no, go ahead.

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  The World Health, so there's this horrible, horrible publication from the World Health Organization that says that red meat and processed meats, like cured meats and things like that, are carcinogenic. And it's absolutely implausible. It's based on a whole bunch of correlational evidence, like as a, as a...

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  I don't know about this. I was gonna say, you should recognize this as a financial expert. Have you ever seen people looking at like graphs? Or whatever, numbers or facts? And correlating two different things from the past and saying, aha, I figured out what causes the other thing. It's this one that correlates with that one. And you're like, okay, maybe, maybe not, right?

• 1:17:34Speaker 00

  My favorite is when you take the 2017 cryptocurrency bubble and you overlay it on the internet bubble. And people say, look, this is what's gonna happen. And I say, you could overlay every bubble on top. And that's what it looks like.

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  Right. So if you have enough data sets and you overlay enough things on top of enough other things until you find the one you want, and then you show everyone, look what I found. Look at these two line up. That's the World Health Organization report on processed meats and carcinogens. That's what they wanted to find. If you look at the actual... Corpus of all the different data sets they could have looked at, half of them line up the other way, where eating more meat correlates with having less cancer in women. And there's no scientifically plausible reason why it would affect men and not women. So it just doesn't make any sense. And plus which, there are a few actual experiments. So the solution to this correlation stupidity, I don't know how to apply this to financial

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  markets, but in human nutrition, the solution is you do an experiment. Like, almost every-

• 1:18:35Speaker 00

  You should win a Nobel Peace Prize for that. That's a really novel idea.

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  Well, you know, and almost every other science people know this. I don't know why human nutrition is such a pseudoscience, where they think it's okay to publish these non-experimental correlational stuff, and then claim they found a causal explanation. Because, we can backtest this. We can go look at the record of the last 30 years' worth of announcements about these correlational results. And then we can say, out of all of those, how many were subjected later to an experiment? Right? There are, like, at least 40 of the most important, most widely-reported results, like this World Health Organization result, that have subsequently, years later, someone has done an experiment,

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  where you're not just correlating, but you're actually, you know, doing one thing to some people, doing a different thing to someone else, and then measuring the results. Out of those, like, 40 or so, zero of them stood up-

• 1:19:35Speaker 00

  Stood up.

• 1:19:36Speaker 01

  -to experiment. Thus correlational stuff is actually less likely to be true than if you flipped a coin.

• 1:19:42Speaker 00

  All right. So here's what I'm gonna do. I think we agree on two things. One-

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  You should eat more steak.

• 1:19:49Speaker 00

  No, no, one-

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  And buy more Bitcoin.

• 1:19:51Speaker 00

  Sugar is bad, for everybody, right?

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  And fiat currency is bad.

• 1:19:56Speaker 00

  Fiat currency and sugar are basically the same. So that's one. Two is that all of the health and dietary-

• 1:20:05Speaker 00

  Quote-unquote studies, information, etc. is definitely driven by big money. Right? And it's very capitalistic in terms of the sugar industry was behind a lot of stuff, etc. So I think we both agree on that.

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  True.

• 1:20:17Speaker 00

  I will promise you, at some point, I'll decide when, I will do thirty days.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  Good.

• 1:20:24Speaker 00

  Of it, and then we'll come back and we'll talk about it.

• 1:20:28Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:20:28Speaker 00

  But the caveat is, if it sucks, I'm gonna tell people it sucks.

• 1:20:32Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:20:33Speaker 00

  If it doesn't work, I'm gonna tell them it doesn't work.

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:20:35Speaker 00

  And if I like it, I'm gonna be quiet and not, and not admit that you were right.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  Heads I win tells you lose.

• 1:20:45Speaker 00

  But we, but we will come back and we will talk about this more.

• 1:20:48Speaker 01

  My, my, my ex-wife and I, my now ex-wife and I wrote a, a, a manual, a little webpage that says how to do it for thirty days.

• 1:20:55Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  It's called Eat Meat, Not Too Little, Mostly Fat.

• 1:21:01Speaker 00

  That's easy.

• 1:21:01Speaker 01

  That's the, go, go Google that for your thirty day instructions.

• 1:21:04Speaker 00

  Alright, I, I, I will do this and we'll come back and we'll talk about it. Before we wrap up, uh, two things, most important book you've ever read?

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  Hmm, most important book, uh, I never answer the most questions, I just answer the first thing that pops into my mind. The first thing that pops into my mind is Catch Twenty Two, which I'm halfway through. And I'm so confused, I'm just gonna have to go back to the beginning and start again.

• 1:21:29Speaker 00

  You're one of the smartest people that I know, and the recency bias is just like smacking us in the head.

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I'm, I'm not even finished with that one.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  Oh, you know, a really, so my second thing, I get to have three answers.

• 1:21:44Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:21:45Speaker 01

  I've decided. The second one that pops into my head is about diet, it's about the history of nutrition theory. It's called Good Calories, Bad Calories.

• 1:21:53Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  It's like a, a history book, but it's fascinating if you're into like philosophy of science or history of science.

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  But don't read it unless you have a high tolerance for facts and dates.

• 1:22:06Speaker 01

  And then the last one that pops into my head was a philosophy book that I read when I was probably about nineteen called Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

• 1:22:15Speaker 00

  Okay, what's that about?

• 1:22:16Speaker 01

  It's a philosophy book about evolution and about emergent qualities and emergent order that weren't designed or chosen by any individual. Highly, highly relevant to our interests.

• 1:22:30Speaker 00

  I actually will read all three of them because I feel like you'll, uh, you'll give good recommendations. Aliens, real or not?

• 1:22:39Speaker 01

  There probably are aliens somewhere, don't you think?

• 1:22:44Speaker 00

  Well, I'm asking you. I'm asking the questions. You're supposed to answer them.

• 1:22:49Speaker 01

  I'm pretty sure all the aliens that anyone has ever reported are not real.

• 1:22:54Speaker 00

  So the aliens that have previously been reported are not real?

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:57Speaker 00

  We definitely haven't run experiments, so we can discount all the studies, uh, but do you think that they exist?

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  It's a fun, interesting, unknown, unknown question because there's, I'm aware of zero evidence of aliens, but there should be a whole lot of universe that I've never gotten any information from, so it's entirely possible there are aliens there, right?

• 1:23:19Speaker 00

  What would you put the probability at?

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  I don't think you can ascribe probabilities to this situation because there's the anthropic principle, which is that since I'm wondering, that changes all the priors about what I'm wondering about, you know that? Um, and I don't, I don't think I can quantify how much of the universe we don't know anything about. So I don't think I can put a probability.

• 1:23:47Speaker 00

  That's fair. Just so you know, uh, people are gonna listen to this and somebody's gonna write an article and the title is gonna be,

• 1:23:53Speaker 01

  Zuko believes in aliens.

• 1:23:54Speaker 00

  No, no, they're gonna say, Zuko didn't believe in Bitcoin, now does. He thinks vegetables are bad. Now, listen, man, this has been awesome. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this. Uh, we will definitely do it again, uh, at some point, but, uh, I think people will, uh, enjoy hearing from you. So thanks so much.

• 1:24:10Speaker 01

  Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

• 1:24:12Speaker 00

  Hey everyone, Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.