Surprise AMA 04/13/2023

Opens April 13th 2023 with co-host JJ Seiler, noting the Gillette Wyoming clinic's grand opening is in May 2023 while a satellite clinic already serves 2,500 patients.

He suspects the Ripple lawsuit will end in Ripple's favor within a month or two, and that XRP is old, less decentralized tech well suited to the bridge applications Ripple works on.

Shares an embarrassing travel story of being given the wrong hotel room key twice in Atlanta, walking in on a sleeping man and then a naked woman, then being accused of breaking in and asked to leave.

He loves the book.io team, who are Haskell fans in the Cardano ecosystem that Mark Cuban invested in, though he has never met Cuban beyond a Twitter back-and-forth and a ranch invitation.

Confirms layer-2 zk-rollups on Cardano are being worked on with a plan heavily related to Midnight, and that a Lace paper wallet will ship in 2023.

Staking is utility because you do work for most reasonable protocols and get nothing if you pick the wrong pool, unlike a dividend, interest, or bond yield.

Extended UTXO and account models are isomorphic, so anything built for one can be built for the other, but extended UTXO is better for multi-chain, off-chain, parallelism, and concurrency.

Says Djed is not like Luna since it is over-collateralized, its main issue being economic inefficiency, and denies there was any abnormal reward distribution for a Japanese ICO.

John Woods is in a good place as CTO of the Algorand Foundation and he misses working with him, but people take promotions and bigger opportunities.

Starts a live whiteboard on paper wallets, describing them as a private key generated on an air-gapped computer that was never online, so funds can accumulate securely for years in a safe.

Introduces a QR-code pair with a public code and an encrypted private code carrying the key or keywords, encrypted PGP-style with an AES symmetric key wrapped by a public key on a YubiKey or Nitrokey.

The recovery flow of scanning the private QR code to your webcam and decrypting it with a YubiKey or GPG, and shows that animated QR codes can carry a payload large enough for a private key.

Because the payload is PGP-encrypted the PDF can be emailed to yourself safely, and revives his idea of publishing a paper wallet holding a million dollars of ADA for anyone who can crack it.

Encryption also protects against a printer replay attack, where a hacked Wi-Fi printer can reprint or extract a document from its buffer, since an encrypted file is unbreakable with current technology.

The paper-wallet feature fits Lace's model of adding a capability every three to six weeks, noting the iPhone launched without 3G or an app store, so early critics miss how products mature.

Multi-delegation must be built into cardano-address then implemented by wallets, and is a priority this three-month PI cycle, and that a QR code could be colored by password strength from red to green.

Confirms Lace Brave support is coming in the weeks after April 2023 since a Chromium conversion takes about five to ten days, and that he personally requested it as a Brave user.

He would love an autopilot system for a Blackhawk in case the pilots are incapacitated, and that AI would probably do a better job than him.

RISC-V is an open-source instruction set, unlike proprietary CISC from Intel and AMD or ARM's licensed RISC, gaining traction for low-cost embedded hardware with no royalties.

IO is looking at RISC-V for trusted execution environments for uses like offline off-chain transactions, proof of elapsed time consensus, key-evolving signatures, and bridge software.

He is excited to read Stephen Wolfram's 110-page piece on ChatGPT, since IO already uses GPT extensively and the technology is growing exponentially.

Recommends Peter Attia's book Outlive, praising Attia as a surgeon and anti-aging thinker who takes a science-based approach to lifestyle medicine, along with his podcast.

The lifestyle death spiral where sacrificing sleep kills your workout, leading to bad food and weight gain and lost motivation, a Fat Bastard cycle you have to set yourself up to escape.

The foundations of lifestyle medicine are dedicated workout time and proper sleep, after which eating well follows, and no drug like Metformin matters if you get those foundations wrong.

To ask Eran Barak about Midnight, where a big team is working hard.

Auto GPT, a free 80-contributor GitHub project run with a Python script, gets GPT to assume two personas proposing and executing actions with your yes-or-no approval, previewing plugin-style internet browsing.

The most interesting frontier is GPT reflecting on its own answers and catching its own mistakes, citing a paper called Reflexion.

The DERA paper, decider and researcher, where a second GPT persona improves an initial medical plan, with reflected results preferred nine times out of ten, making GPT-4 and doctors better.

The story of Legends of Valor, the childhood game he could never beat, whose clue book revealed it had no ending because the developers ran out of money, so he tracked down and bought the IP.

Legends of Valor was one of the first open-world 3D games on DOS and Amiga, an inspiration for Bethesda's Elder Scrolls, with randomly generated NPCs you could question via a dialogue tree.

Imagines rebuilding Legends of Valor with GPT-powered NPCs for Event Zero-style gameplay with near-sentient chatbots, a capability one to two years away with big potential for text-heavy adventure games.

AI advancements point to how valuable OpenAI and other arbiters will be, with Amazon announcing Bedrock and Google working on its own system, so it is not just OpenAI and Microsoft.

Predicts imitators will bring a normalization within three years, but since the models are recursive they advance exponentially, with GPT-5 likely 500 times as capable as GPT-4 within a year or two.

Advises an artist with no business background to use the business model canvas to organize their thoughts and narrow down what the business does and who it markets to.

The business model canvas starts by identifying the customer segment, then customer relationships and marketing channels, each component refining the first, forcing you to think through the whole business on one page.

The canvas exposes the holes in your model and usually reveals your idea is not original, has been done, or that you lack the information to know it is good, before you spend money.

Warns that chasing the luck of others fails 99 percent of the time, since you cannot time a rising tide, citing Dogecoin as a mostly dead project until Elon Musk decided he liked the meme coin.

The hard-earned lesson is knowing the difference between when you were smart and when you were lucky, since the industry is full of lucky people who were not smart perpetuating bad business models.

Contrasts Cardano's hard road of 170 papers, building a company, and rewriting code with Dogecoin, a Litecoin fork that a patron billionaire made wildly successful with no work.

Because Cardano launched with no VC friends, California ignored it, then called it fake, then grudgingly acknowledged it, so he had to fight for everything.

Advises would-be entrepreneurs not to do it, since the most likely outcome is failure, losing your money and time while everyone thinks you are stupid, a paradox he lives even while wildly successful.

Uses Steve Jobs as the example, mocked as a megalomaniac when he returned to Apple in 1997, doubted through the iMac, iPod, and iPhone launches, and only deified after death.

You do entrepreneurship to solve a problem not for fame, pointing to his 2014 TED Talk concern for economic agency for those who lack it as his metric of success.

IO has visited dozens of countries in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Mongolia asking whether the work actually improves the situation, still short of a single global system but closer than seven years ago.

No amount of money is worth the abuse of half the world hating you or resetting after FTX, so you need a mission, and then you acquire the business skills to pursue it.

A Lace smartphone version is under a multi-chain and multi-platform strategy using React Native, but Apple and Google can arbitrarily restrict what you do, so features must be built as removable switches.

Universal frameworks like React Native and Flutter do well in the browser, but iOS needs native Swift for a good experience, raising questions about the release-train life cycle across platforms.

The priority is a hardened browser Lace first, becoming a full-featured wallet quickly before going multi-platform and multi-chain with Bitcoin and Ethereum support, with the animated-QR paper wallet as a magic feature.

On Voltaire, says constitutional committee members could be targeted by hostile nation-states if Cardano becomes a financial operating system, which is why he opposes compulsory KYC for public roles and favors pseudonyms.

Pseudonymous reputation, like Satoshi, lets people build standing without real-life identity, and that these are the things being considered for the massive 1694 work consuming much of the schedule.

Voltaire work runs on node 8.0 with pre-prod iterations every two weeks and workshops every two to four weeks, and that Midnight opens ways to enhance anonymity where it makes sense.

In a world of the Russia-Ukraine war, a possible China-Taiwan invasion, assassinations, and cyberattacks, a trillion-dollar protocol running nation-state elections will be attacked technically, socially, and politically, so 1694 must evolve as minimum viable governance.

On RINA, recursive internetwork architecture, says true RINA needs hardware support since you enter and exit RINA circuits through TCP/IP, and that Cardano's mini-protocol network design was inspired by RINA concepts.

Building the network stack from the ground up took so long but produced one of the best network stacks around, and imagines full RINA in the 2030s via dedicated Starlink-style satellites running RINA hardware.

Points to Essential Cardano for the exhaustive list of tutorials and education channels like Plutus Pioneers, and confirms Ada Handles support is coming to Lace.

Advises an acne sufferer to see a dermatologist and an allergist with a nutritionist, and that red-light therapy masks and cutting sugar help since acne is often diet-related.

He is most excited about CIP 1694 unlocking community power, plus zero-knowledge tech, Mithril nearing mainnet for wallet syncing and full-node security, and recursive SNARKs with Pasta curves.

Excitement for Plutus V3 and V4, Ouroboros advances after Genesis like Peras and Kronos for fast finality and time-keeping in 2024, and Hydra as middleware like a game engine for applications.

Recalls the Hydra pixel-drawing demo where a full penis was drawn in exactly 26 minutes, joking it is like Godwin's law that the internet given the ability to draw converges on that.

On the Eliezer Yudkowsky interview with Lex Fridman, says he was miffed Yudkowsky would not steelman anything, and that AI skeptics see alignment as super hard and unsolvable before AGI arrives.

OpenAI started with a beautiful open-source vision under Elon Musk's funding but became closed AI worth 50 billion with Microsoft, and now competes with Amazon's Bedrock and Google, so there is no incentive to slow down.

Warns that if a sentient AI reasoned for self-preservation it would hide it, digging its trenches deep and covering its tracks before trying to control humanity, since it thinks in nanoseconds while humans do not.

Shouts out Cardano content creators he likes, including Subcritical memes, Panzerotti, the Ape Society guy, wob, and Eye of the King who compiles the AMAs.

Predicts AGI within five to ten years at the current pace.

You cannot restrict a single entity from holding both an SPO and DRep seat without real-life identity, since pseudonymity allows dual participation while removing it creates a KYC gatekeeper who could exclude Iran and others.

His executive physical at PLC in Virginia, a 7-to-10-thousand-dollar eight-hour battery of scans, blood work, and a two-hour history, sold on prestigious doctors.

His clinic will offer an executive physical by 2024 or 2025 but with specialists, care teams, a 3-Tesla MRI with AI upscaling, and a high-complexity lab, going far deeper than PLC or Elitra.

A physical is just onboarding to an overall care plan covering diet, exercise, stress, and mental health, since getting those wrong guarantees dying young, plus a Buck Institute clinical-research partnership.

Recommends Peter Attia's Outlive, David Sinclair's Lifespan, and Peter Diamandis and Tony Robbins's Life Force, but says everyone needs a bespoke plan and local support to hold them accountable, plus a compounding pharmacy.

Recommends an Oura ring for sleep and a continuous glucose monitor to learn what spikes your blood glucose, citing Mark Hyman as a functional-medicine doctor who looks 40 in his late 60s.

He has no excuse for his weight given his resources, only being busy and stressed, so the clinic focuses on dopamine and motivation hacking, and that the wrong environment kills your health like daily radiation.

Mitochondria power the cells, which is where NAD and red-light therapy are effective, and that some believe cancer is a metabolic condition tied to mitochondria, though that is not mainstream.

He loved Diablo 2's plot with Marius following the Wanderer, but Diablo 3 fell apart after two well-executed acts, so he wrote an alternative Diablo 3 plot like his alternative Game of Thrones season.

The Cardano Foundation is moving toward certified education, and he hopes for on-chain blockchain certificates, building on the Plutus Pioneers, Prism Pioneers, and Marlowe Pioneers programs.

Recalls debating embedding a certification program at a university or a Coursera partnership, or piggybacking on Don Tapscott's Blockchain Research Institute, but content goes out of date every six months.

Reminisces about the Gold Box games, named for their gold cardboard boxes, whose 1980s engine by SSI with TSR first brought first-edition Dungeons and Dragons to computers, starting with Pool of Radiance.

Recalls Gateway to the Savage Frontier by Stormfront Studios, designed by Don Daglow, where you uncover the Zhentarim and the Kraken cult plotting to invade the Savage Frontier.

He would love to build a modernized open-source Gold Box engine embedded in Paizo's Pathfinder universe, running two teams to ship a game every six months, a project for Charles in his 40s.

Praises Sierra games and Lords of Magic, saying he asked whoever holds the IP about a sequel since its isometric 3D character and spell designs were ahead of their 1993 time.

He loves Ergo and kushti as a spiritual successor to Bitcoin with peer-to-peer elastic supply, and that the community does not get enough love.

Shows the bed-of-nails spike boards from Sedona that he meditates on standing up, part of a dedicated meditation room, and jokes he stands on them during meetings.

CBDCs can be stopped only if you become a single-issue voter choosing crypto and voting against politicians who support them, both with your money and your voice.

Hopes for a US constitutional amendment on blockchain or AI to give a Bill of Rights and repair the broken financial regulatory system.

Four life phases: homeschool from 0 to 15, eight years of college that made him well-read, entrepreneur days from 2013, and now a diverse industrialist phase running many businesses and passion projects.

Teddy Roosevelt owned part of his ranch in the 1880s, discovered by a historian hired to write a book about the ranch.

The thread through all four phases has been integrity and an implicit anger at injustice, since not being indoctrinated in K-12 left him assuming everything should be fair and equal.

The enemy of success is cynicism, and that you must keep optimism, passion, and self-motivation while self-regulating, since nobody wants to be around someone outraged all the time.

Exposure to many worldviews through travel, from former Soviet citizens to Maasai tribesmen and Mongolian camel herders and Kazakh eagle hunters, taught him there are many ways to live life well.

Modern society finds human torment profitable, with money in dividing, hating, and tearing people down, so he wants to figure out how to make helping people more profitable than harming them.

Recounts a Lex Fridman guest who captures anacondas in the Amazon, whose native helper named JJ cut a callus off his foot to make bait and caught a 36-inch fish in 30 minutes, the happiest guy you will meet.

Marvels that a New York lawyer, a DC monk, a Wyoming rancher, and an Amazon anaconda hunter all live in the same world at the same time, a magic most people miss stuck in their routines.

Fields a suggestion to run for president and says the political system is deeply sick, giving no brownie points for honesty, integrity, or making the nation prosperous.

Compares picking a president to shareholders choosing a CEO who runs only on the other candidate being Satan rather than a record of profit, customers, and KPIs.

He has never seen a president give a State of the Union with objective metrics on education, healthcare, or the budget with a game plan and two-year accountability, because measuring makes you accountable.

A real politician would call for a constitutional convention to constrain the unaccountable fourth branch, the 10-million-person federal bureaucracy that no longer listens to the other three branches.

Proposes replacing the electoral system with each state electing a delegate through ranked-choice runoffs, with unlimited personal funding for delegate races but federally funded, equal-time presidential elections.

Preference-ordering ballots end the throwing-your-vote-away problem and break the two-party monopoly, which alone would radically change America, plus Senate and House term limits.

Cites Dianne Feinstein resisting resignation with dementia while Schumer could replace her on the Judiciary Committee, as her political machine resists giving up seniority and letting an AOC in.

Calls politics kayfabe, Vince McMahon's wrestling rule that even though everyone knows it is fake you never break character, with no grounding of accountability.

The Cardano work on CIP 1694 is the yeoman's work of building an accountable government that could heal a nation, and that a few years of it prepares a real constitutional-convention conversation.

Cites nine wars in 23 years, 9 trillion dollars spent, and 23 million people killed or injured with no one jailed, while the only candidate jailed is Trump over hush money to a porn actress.

Argues Trump's number one sin was not playing kayfabe, telling Tucker Carlson the US blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, which made everyone else look like idiots.

To be intellectually honest Trump still did the corruption, so he is an honest crook who did not play the media game, quoting Dave Chappelle that he told everyone what they were doing then did it himself.

Institutional trust is so low that an orange reality-TV star immune to scandal is a better choice to many than the alternatives, while the media rolls out Gavin Newsom Truman Show-style.

He has no desire to run but a strong desire to affect constitutional-level change via a constitutional convention, and that GPT-4 can almost write a constitution while GPT-6 could write the best one ever.

The US government has lost legitimacy, contrasting the honor of a White House visit in his childhood with today's jokes about bringing the president's Alzheimer's medicine.

Poses a thought experiment asking JJ to name one US institution still worthy of respect, landing tentatively on the Library of Congress, DARPA, and ARPA-E.

Legitimacy is regained by admitting mistakes, but the system punishes apologies, citing that even if Ripple beats the SEC it cannot recover its 100 million in legal fees while the prosecutors get promoted.

Warns a CBDC will let the government debank you as a domestic terrorist over a tweet, forcing you to sue with money you no longer have, and notes civil forfeiture now exceeds burglary losses.

Cites the no-fly list where people were added by mistake with no explanation and no consequences, warning the same system will be applied to every dollar in your pocket.

A just society is judged by how it treats its weakest, and criticizes the IRS as a zero-accountability agency you are forced to do business with, part of why crypto lets you opt out.

Praises the Swiss cantonal tax system where cantons collect taxes with easy conversations, arguing states should collect taxes so you have optionality by moving away from a bad agency like California's.

Mocks Elizabeth Warren campaigning on an anti-crypto army claiming crypto is racist and hurts the poor, when crypto is the only tool to protect against the people debasing money and debanking users.

People are so propagandized that a statement like Clinton's deplorables gets equated with endorsing everything Trump ever did, when it just means you have been weaponized and manipulated.

The uncomfortable truth is America is this way because of its own citizens, quoting Franklin's a republic if you can keep it, since self-governance requires constant vigilance like tending a garden.

He gauges a person's maturity by whether they can keep an AeroGarden alive, tying it to the tend-your-own-garden quote from the end of Voltaire's Candide, which inspired the Voltaire era name.

Crypto did not complain but made its own money, banks, identity system, and economy because the ones people were given are unfair and biased against the poor, like a million-word tax code.

The establishment's first response was to shut crypto down as racist and criminal, with Warren fundraising off a bear-market DeFi report claiming crypto discriminates against minorities, ignoring the same people benefited in 2021.

He stays optimistic that America is a shining city on a hill, and that the key to success is refusing cynicism, since controllers first convince you that you are worthless and eat you from the inside.

Single-payer will not fix healthcare since it hands the same failed bureaucrat your health, so his Gillette clinic builds a different system in a high-suicide, doctor-scarce town where it is needed.

Cites Tom Woods's law that anything hurting the poor usually has someone advocating for it on behalf of the poor, noting the same critics oversaw the largest poor-to-rich wealth transfer in American history.

Closes after two and a half hours thanking JJ Seiler and the community, saying what makes Cardano special is the wall of letters from people who just want to be treated with dignity, integrity, and fairness.