Good to be Back

Opens June 30th 2023 back from Papua New Guinea and family affairs, thanking everyone for condolences on the death of his grandfather Austin, the last of his four grandparents.

Remembers Austin as a Marine demolitions man who became a cable lineman in 1952 and worked up to researcher and executive with many patents, including one on the cable box, over a 50-year career.

Austin's generation picked up ailments like silicosis and asbestosis from asbestos exposure, and that he was on oxygen in his 90s, never smoked or drank, raised seven kids, and died at 93 a practicing Catholic given last rites.

Reflects that if you still have parents or grandparents you should call them, recalling an IO friend who only talked about the weather with his dad and would now give anything to do it again.

Shares fond memories of mowing his grandfather's lawn and talking politics, describing the don't-complain-get-it-done generation with the strongest work ethic, always building with a slide rule and graph paper.

Austin kept a vacuum cleaner's repair schematics because his generation never bought anything they could not fix, and kept World War II ration coupons from a Great Depression childhood in Michigan.

Austin retired a millionaire on a blue-collar salary by saving 20 percent of every paycheck through Dean Witter at Sears, a single breadwinner with seven kids in a very different America now gone.

Pivots to his two weeks in Papua New Guinea, explaining he had followed Avi Loeb's Harvard work on Oumuamua and called him to fund the recovery expedition.

The recovered object IM1, being verified at Berkeley and Harvard, is probably interstellar and older than the solar system, the first such object recovered, and that Jason Cohn filmed a 90-minute Netflix documentary of the quest.

Avi Loeb was on the Joe Rogan Experience with tens of millions of viewers, and that documenting it is great marketing showing a human element of curiosity and a commitment to good science.

Criticizes a paper by a Mr Brown in Canada claiming the object must be stony and the government data wrong, published without contacting the team despite their recovered iron spherules.

Calls it the believe-the-model-not-the-eyes groupthink of science, comparing it to Paul Krugman insisting cryptocurrencies are deflationary-spiral scams 14 years into a working experiment.

Shows a psychedelic-scientist hat from John Vandergriff who attended the MAPS conference, and marvels at papers showing mushrooms, MDMA, and ayahuasca are transformative and curative for PTSD in rape, torture, and war victims.

Modern psychiatry still stigmatizes psychedelics as it-can't-be-true, like astrophysics, and that he lives in the science of the edges, the pioneering you-can-be-wrong work rather than the safety of the shore.

He funded the expedition precisely because they might find nothing, arguing that is the point of the NSF and scientific endowments, to take risks and be willing to be wrong.

Predicts coming revolutions in large language models, synthetic biology, psychedelics, robotics, aerospace, and material science will transform everything, driven by a small number of risk-takers.

Imagines that definitive proof humanity is not alone would unify the species by making its differences seem small, a theme he explored in the documentary.

The expedition team, including 87-year-old captain Art Wright who found Russian subs with side-scan sonar and hunts Amelia Earhart's plane, a jiu-jitsu geologist, and Ryan Weed, an Air Force test pilot with a nuclear physics PhD in antimatter propulsion.

He knew everyone on the OceanGate sub was dead before the news because the small submarine community knew the Navy had picked up the implosion signal.

Deep-sea subs float up if they lose power, so there was no stuck scenario, but the Navy could not admit it because the SOSUS system is classified, and the media turned it into a spectacle with an air-countdown.

Reveals he had corresponded with OceanGate months earlier about the quarter-million-dollar Titanic tour, found red flags and moved on, and praises Triton as a great company by contrast.

Deep-sea exploration is harder than landing on the moon, and that at 380 atmospheres an implosion crushes you faster than the 10 to 15 milliseconds of human perception, so death is instant and no rescue was ever possible.

Pivots to Cardano, noting the Voltaire page is out on Essential Cardano with an animation of the worldwide CIP 1694 workshops, and thanks participants despite the cynicism on Twitter.

Walks the map of worldwide 1694 workshops: California, TAM Cardano across six Latin American countries, Wada Global with Mercy in Ghana, Kenya, Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, Johannesburg, Japan, and the Cardano Foundation near Zurich.

Lays out the next steps: aggregate feedback at a closing European workshop into a draft final 1694 spec, stand up a functional testnet, then a community vote and fork, after which Cardano has an official government and anyone can become a DRep.

Jabs the US government for calling everything a security, joking Gary Gensler would call alien artifacts securities, cites Coinbase's 177-page filing, and notes Cardano's TVL is up 148 percent in 2023 with Djed, COTI, and World Mobile.

Cardano is maturing with node 8.1.1, Plutus gaining BLS support, side chains, and Hydra, a giant open-source collective that needs resources and good governance, the point of the MBO and 1694.

Highlights 43 workshops held worldwide in just two months, from Ghana and Vietnam to Japan, Zug, Latin America, and Philadelphia where the US Constitution was written, completely bottom-up, with organizers likely becoming the DReps.

Defends being away in Papua New Guinea while all this progress happened as a jab at the crowd that tells him how to run Cardano, and admits some growing sympathy for the XRP free-pass argument.

Shares an optimistic philosophy that crypto only works if you believe in the goodness of people coming together, urging people to choose positive energy over toxicity, with the best days ahead via Hydra, roll-ups, side chains, and Africa.

Rebuts a CoinDesk story that the Ethiopia project was cancelled, saying they are onboarding a million people in 2023 and five million in 2024, upgrading Prism 1.4 to 2.0, and want ground partners so graduates get crypto wallets and use their digital IDs.

Addresses layoff stories by saying they cut divisions strategically while the org grows, splitting into multiple companies like Midnight, RealFi, and the wallet with hungry equity-holding CEOs, like Flagship spinning out biotech companies, so he can focus on core innovation.

Closes saying IO is a specialized infrastructure company always pushing to deliver faster, that it is good to be back and he will restart the AMAs, while awaiting Berkeley and Harvard results dating the spherules via electron microscopes and laser-ablation isotope analysis.