AMA 12/31/2020

Broadcasts live from Colorado on December 30th, the last stream of the year, fresh off a steak dinner trip to Laramie, Wyoming.

Plans to ring in the New Year with fireworks, a tradition carried over from growing up in Hawaii, likely setting them off with family in Gillette, Wyoming.

Reflects on how brutal 2020 was, citing over a million COVID-19 deaths worldwide including 330,000 in the US, plus widespread job and business losses.

Hopes 2021 becomes a collective opportunity to do better, start new businesses, and treat each other with more kindness and less cynicism.

Calls out the lack of civility that social media has bred into society, letting people treat strangers cruelly since they never meet face to face, and hopes everyone emerges from lockdown more empathetic and friendly.

Shares personal New Year's resolutions: lose weight, meditate more, eat healthier, treat family better, and keep the dogs stocked with treats.

Expects a strong 2021 for Cardano as more software ships and the ecosystem keeps growing after roughly quadrupling in size in 2020, with stake pool operators now successfully running the five billion dollar network.

Looks forward to smart contracts and a wave of new dApps arriving on Cardano in 2021 alongside continued growth of the governance system.

Spend significant time with colleagues studying global solutions networks and multi-stakeholder governance, reading historical papers on how the internet governed itself as a model for Cardano.

Believe winning the governance fight is what lets Cardano outlast competitors since it has a model to sustain itself while scaling to billions of users without ossifying, calling the social and governance side the real challenge of 2021, not the technology.

Announces plans to write a practical book on blockchain governance with a co-author, documenting lessons learned by the organization and demonstrating governance approaches already implemented in Cardano.

Plans a trilogy of foundational books, following the governance book with one on identity in 2022 and one on the nature of money and monetary policy in 2023, reflecting the company's focus on value, identity, and governance.

Plans to eventually create an original JavaScript course, but only once it can add something genuinely novel beyond existing material.

Keep the beard since no longer having to shave for a job, though still trim the hair occasionally.

Know little about Holochain after its Reddit community treated him poorly, and move on rather than dig deeper since there are 3,000 competing cryptocurrencies and limited time.

Plans to update the cryptocurrency security tutorial video after taking Udemy infosec courses and consulting security experts to fix usability issues, and highlights building a secure skeleton key as the best way to close backdoors like a compromised email account.

Recommends kids start with Python for its versatility across data science, machine learning, and hardware programming as a gateway to other languages, pairing it with a Raspberry Pi and the free Nand to Tetris curriculum.

Confirms the distinction between Cardano's computation layer and settlement layer remains relevant, with upcoming side chains acting as permanent computation layers alongside the stable settlement layer run by stake pool operators.

Recommends building a web scraper to escape tutorial hell, since debugging real problems teaches headless browsers, REST APIs, and text parsing skills that transfer to bots and other projects.

Jokes that if there is money to be made, the internet will eventually produce another Justin Sun, calling it an organic, self replicating phenomenon.

He still has his round glasses as a backup pair, currently bent out of shape and unfixed, so he is wearing a different pair tonight.

Doubts that running quantum computers on satellites in space is a good idea, since cold temperature alone does not protect qubits from cosmic rays and radiation that cause decoherence.

Confirms he owns a video game company and plans to travel to Singapore and Malaysia once the world reopens after the pandemic.

Reveals the purple mask on his wall was inspired by designs from an Irish mask maker, though the caller's guess was not quite exact.

Admits he does not eat enough vegetables and resolves to improve his diet in 2021.

Confirms simulations exist on how raising the k parameter to 1000 would affect small stake pool operators, run by Colin Edwards, with results to be discussed before k is raised.

Credits Aggelos Kiayias, Juan Garay and Nikos Leonardos, not himself, for the GKL model that formally defined blockchain security and underlies all of Ouroboros's security proofs, rather than crediting Satoshi Nakamoto or himself.

Will reveal details on the first African smart contract going live and its user numbers during a dedicated Africa special episode.

Explores algorithmically generated, dynamic music for his video game Legends of Valor so the soundtrack never feels repetitive across long play sessions.

Wishes he could get composers Max Richter and A.R. Rahman Jawadi, known for Game of Thrones and Westworld, to create the core soundtrack for Legends of Valor.

Names Euterpea, a Haskell School of Music project out of Yale, as his favorite framework for programmatic and algorithmically generated music.

Weighs design choices for Legends of Valor's combat system, comparing real time versus turn based mechanics inspired by games like Shadow of War, Warhammer and Pathfinder.

As RPG characters grow too powerful, games often introduce a quick combat option to skip tedious random battles, citing Heroes of Might and Magic 3.

Argues every game mechanic must serve the story and the emotions you want players to feel, criticizing EA's approach and praising Red Dead Redemption 2's tuberculosis storyline for building real empathy.

Legends of Valor's setting, the quarantined underground city of Middle Dwarf, constrains the game to tight urban spaces unlike open world games like Skyrim.

Contrasts Warhammer 40k's brutal, disposable soldiers with God of War's singular protagonist Kratos to show how narrative tone should dictate combat system design.

Recalls Oregon Trail as one of the first popular computer games from the late 80s or early 90s, notoriously frustrating because it was nearly impossible to win.

Plans to build the next game project in house and rename it Hilbert, drawing on experience working on one of the God of War games.

Runs a video game company because storytelling and narrative are a core part of who he is, and invites questions about video games.

Does not consider Ethereum Classic his child and has no expectations for it, leaving the ETC community to independently decide in Q1 whether to pursue the proposed path forward together.

Rules out ever partnering with Blizzard again, still bitter about how badly Diablo 3 squandered Diablo 2's setup, and considers StarCraft II the last genuinely good game the studio made before Bill Roper and Blizzard North departed and it became a soulless corporate entity.

Traces how Diablo's original three heroes, the warrior, sorcerer and rogue, each became corrupted into the villains of the sequel, and laments that Diablo III completely ignored that continuity by dropping all five Diablo II heroes from its story.

Once got so angry at the ending of Game of Thrones that rewrote both season seven and season eight as a form of therapy after the showrunners ruined a series loved for nearly a decade.

Decide to rewrite Diablo III's plot from scratch, keeping act one's Tyrael setup but deepening the paladin's redemption arc and having the paladin die at the act's end.

Rebuild act two as a murder mystery set in Caldeum where Belial, god of lies, hides disguised as the emperor's child.

Criticizes Diablo III for wasting the villain Zoltun Kulle, creator of the black soul stone, arguing he should have stayed alive as a suspicious, useful ally instead of betraying the player and vanishing.

Rework act three around Azmodan's siege on hell's volcano by bringing back the barbarian and necromancer from Diablo II as the reason humanity's armies have held the line.

Rebuild act four in heaven around Imperius, criticizing how the game keeps humiliating its own most powerful character just as The Last Jedi did to Luke Skywalker.

Resolve the rewritten story by sending the black soul stone to hell where Zoltun Kulle sacrifices himself to destroy his own creation, completing his redemption and proving to Tyrael that humanity deserves to survive.

Sees game and movie studios as custodians with a sacred duty to honor the lore fans have grown to love, since beloved worlds like Star Wars, Star Trek and Diablo grow far beyond any single creator.

On the duty to honor a franchise's source material before adding to it, with Star Trek Deep Space Nine as a masterful example of nuanced characters like Garak, Odo, and Sisko expanding the lore in productive ways.

Cites Deep Space Nine's Section 31 bioweapon plot and the tacit Federation cover-up of the Obsidian Order's genocide attempt as proof the show gave a far more realistic, morally grey depiction of government than earlier Star Trek.

Slams J.J. Abrams' 2009 Star Trek reboot for throwing away 40 years of continuity for a flashy clean-slate time travel story.

Criticizes Star Trek Picard and Discovery for betraying Jean-Luc Picard's established character and inventing an unearned relationship with Data instead of understanding the source material.

Contrasts that with Jon Favreau's Luke Skywalker cameo in The Mandalorian, which he says was more emotional in two and a half minutes than the entire Star Wars sequel trilogy because it honored what fans expected while still surprising them.

Argues great fiction and games must stay true to their lore, points to the YouTube channel Wisecrack for its deep philosophical analysis of stories, and laments that most modern content is too shallow to reward that kind of repeat analysis.

Ties the storytelling lesson back to Cardano marketing, arguing Apple beat HP and Dell not on engineering but on the emotionally compelling story its charismatic founder told.

Credits Steve Jobs with marrying the humanities to computing, turning a fungible beige box into a tool for creativity and self-expression, which is what built a trillion dollar company.

Lays out the vision of a billion people saying the word Cardano and it becoming the world's financial operating system, warning the road there will be littered with regulatory battles, setbacks, and even assassination attempts.

Draws the Bitcoin parallel, recalling how early believers were called crazy for a decade before critical mass hit, and says Cardano's dreams are even bigger so the community must master telling its own story.

Jokes he might just be talking to the wind but it's his show, then brings up The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror killer advertisements segment as one of the show's greatest bits.

On Cardano and insurance, says it is not IOG's core competency right now even though Emurgo CTO Nico is excited about it, with priority instead on critical infrastructure like stablecoins, DEXs, and oracles, while peer-to-peer insurance and lending will emerge from regulated and unregulated actors building on the financial operating system.

Shares his theory that Jeffrey Epstein worked as a compromised intelligence agency asset who blackmailed powerful people using recordings of them with underage girls until he became inconvenient and was killed.

Epstein's videotapes and recordings disappeared from his compound before police arrived after his arrest, which he takes as further evidence of intelligence agency involvement.

Polkadot is not a copy of Cardano, Gavin Wood read IOHK's research papers and built his own original design closer to Ethereum's account model versus Cardano's extended UTXO, much like Tolkien inspired George R R Martin to write Game of Thrones with his own darker viewpoint.

Litecoin, unlike Polkadot, is a genuine clear copy of Bitcoin with only minor tweaks to monetary policy and consensus, which is why it effectively functions as a Bitcoin testnet.

Tone Vays is not a dumbass, he is an entertainer who profits from clicks and manufactured controversy, the same playbook used by Max Keiser, Rush Limbaugh, and Howard Stern to keep audiences and sponsorships growing.

Yes, the crypto space is full of massive egos, politics, and backstabbing behind the scenes because it made many social outsiders extremely rich overnight, and money and power amplify the worst parts of people, echoing Abraham Lincoln's warning about giving someone power.

Expects fusion, nuclear, tidal, fracked geothermal, wind, and solar power to get so cheap that fossil fuels become unnecessary, with battery powered and hydrogen cars carrying a carbon neutral backbone.

On reversing climate change, expect large scale carbon capture companies like Carbon Engineering to suck carbon dioxide out of the air using fusion and nuclear power, undoing 200 years of emissions without requiring any change in global economic behavior.

Not afraid of Sophia the robot, know her creator Ben Goertzel of SingularityNET well as a good friend and brilliant person, feeling optimistic rather than afraid about the future.

Climate change may not be entirely bad since higher carbon dioxide has driven a great global greening with more plant growth and biomass, a reminder that the earth is a dynamic system science does not yet fully understand.

Skeptical of climate change being used to justify a one world government, since having the power to control how much carbon every company produces effectively means controlling every business on earth.

Quantum computing is the boogeyman of crypto that comes up in every AMA, but it is not a threat to cryptography today, the real reason governments like China, America, and Russia take it seriously now is that they archive encrypted traffic today to decrypt later once quantum computers mature.

Nation states keep sensitive communications relevant for decades, just like it takes decades to bring the F-22 or F-35 to market and the CIA only declassifies documents after 50 years, so NIST is racing to change cryptographic algorithms before quantum archiving attacks become viable.

Plenty of post quantum algorithms already exist and Cardano's 2025 roadmap will include a quantum agenda to fully inoculate the protocol once the speed and signature size trade offs become reasonable enough to ship.

Jokes that a Vitalik versus Charles boxing match would be as lopsided as Mike Tyson versus Floyd Mayweather.

The US government has been central to nearly every major advance in modern cryptography over the past 40 years, training and funding the scientists and pushing codebreaking forward simply by being a determined adversary.

A brilliant Israeli research group led by Mordechai Guri specializes in exfiltrating data from air gapped systems, turning RAM into a wifi transmitter or reading PGP keys from CPU electromagnetic emissions.

The US government's dual role as both standard setter and adversary, from the Clipper Chip to targeting cryptographers like Bruce Schneier, massively enriched the field, much like DARPA created the internet.

Admits total confusion about what a time crystal actually is, beyond knowing it matters for quantum computing.

Lab grown meat still needs harvested biomaterials from real animals, but paired with vertical farming from companies like Plenty using 99 percent less water for huge yields, it could reshape urban food in the 2050s and 2060s.

Holds up a book on Fourier analysis that happens to be sitting on the desk, joking about the coincidence.

Confirms there is no contractual obligation to keep doing AMAs but promise to keep talking to the community anyway, even working on Cardano for free after the contract ends to finish the job.

Picks Helm's Deep from The Two Towers as the best battle in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, praising Fellowship for its world building and noting Return of the King needed its many endings.

Have sold a Rubik's cube before and joke about wanting a mantis shrimp to solve one for him someday.

Recommends computer science as the best college major and music or art as the best minor, joking it helps you get a date.

Declines to reveal a deepest secret, joking that saying it would defeat the purpose.

A new personal contract isn't the point, instead the plan is to propose a Cardano 2025 governing structure to the community through a vote, since only a decentralized government of the ecosystem can legitimately commission future development work.

Muses that Jeff Bezos building a giant clock inside a mountain is just a horology obsession funded by extreme wealth, sharing his own love of clocks and watches like the Atmos and automatons by Jaquet Droz.

Criticizes Brad Garlinghouse for the fakeness of Ripple's positioning as alternately a cryptocurrency and an equity financed banker coin, and for paying himself 150 million dollars while hiring Ben Lawsky.

Recalls being alarmed when Ripple unveiled Codius smart contracts in 2015, before Ripple management killed the project rather than let DeFi or asset issuance form on their platform.

Credits David Schwartz, Ripple's chief scientist and a former NSA engineer, as a genuinely smart and capable technologist, while questioning why Ripple leadership wouldn't just face the community transparently like a good CEO should.

Recalls calling then Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas about Codius and realizing that letting stateful operators run distributed smart contract nodes with configurable trust thresholds like seven of nine agreement would have been a beautiful fit for Cardano's computation layer.

A long term goal of offline, off chain transactions using trusted hardware enclaves in a phone that can transfer an encrypted private key to another enclave the way a YubiKey locks in a PGP key, with the sending device proving it erased its copy.

A proven unique, tamper proof private key transfer effectively creates anonymous, infinitely scalable digital cash you move by tapping phones together, the goal behind the University of Wyoming research partnership aimed at giving Africa cell phone based stablecoin cash within about five years.

Sync two phones over USB with a simple app using trusted hardware enclaves like Samsung Knox or Apple's secure element, and note that traded-in phones typically end up in the developing world within 24 to 36 months, with encrypted payloads keeping Bluetooth transfers safe.

If someone steals your phone you lose the digital cash on it just like a stolen wallet, though a recovery mode or hardware subnet of trusted devices could allow key rotation at the cost of added complexity.

Favorite sports car is a 2017 Lamborghini Huracan LP610 Spider, loves it but it is expensive as hell to fix.

A backup phone will not work for the offline cash system because the private key is unique and can only live on one device at a time, just like cash in a wallet.

Trusted hardware enclaves are cheap, around 50 cents to a dollar for a dedicated chip, and are already built into most modern phones and computers via ARM TrustZone, Intel SGX, and AMD's equivalent.

Starlink is a promising idea but ubiquitous internet will not reach much of the developing world for 20 to 30 years, so offline peer-to-peer digital cash complements rather than competes with bank accounts and connectivity.

Astrological sign is Scorpio, joking that Neuralink could let you check it just by thinking.

You can absolutely still catch COVID after a vaccine since 96 percent efficacy still means 4 percent get sick, though illness after vaccination tends to be much milder, as with a nurse who caught it eight days after her shot before full immunity had kicked in.

Ivermectin is a great drug, uses it for parasites in his horses, and thinks there is a lot of evidence it works even though it is strangely not talked about.

Double spending on the offline peer-to-peer system is prevented through proof of secure erasure, where an enclave destroys its private key copy before a transfer completes and the receiving enclave will not accept the key until it gets proof of that erasure, destroying the money rather than risking duplicate keys.

MRNA is a great platform, Moderna designed its vaccine in two days after getting the genetic sequence, though the polyethylene glycol adjuvant in the lipid layer is causing allergic reactions about 20 times more often than normal vaccines.

Designing vaccines in software is an extraordinary miracle because it lets you keep pace with viral evolution, tailoring mRNA to new variants like the more infectious UK strain or the seemingly more lethal South Africa strain in just two or three days.

What he likes most about mRNA vaccines is that they do not interact with your DNA, unlike the AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson viral vector vaccines, which use genetically engineered adenoviruses carrying DNA that interfaces with your nucleus to produce the same spike protein response.

More can go wrong with a genetically engineered viral vector interfacing with your DNA than with an mRNA instruction that at worst just makes a useless protein, but viral vectors are chosen because they are far more stable and storable, needing only normal refrigeration versus Pfizer's negative 95 degree cold chain.

Expects huge improvements ahead in adjuvants, lipid layer design, and mRNA software, including freeze drying for room temperature storage and possibly a universal flu vaccine.

The most exciting part of mRNA is the idea of a micro vaccine manufacturer, a hospital device that can be sent software to produce a vaccine against a newly discovered pathogen on site, something companies like CureVac are already pursuing, with mRNA also opening the door to bespoke cancer vaccines.

Moderna's cancer immunotherapy research could eventually help cure pancreatic cancer, though it will take time to reach market.

Herpes is a tricky virus that hides in the body, including behind the brain, and the overlap between HIV and herpes research means a herpes vaccine breakthrough would be a strong signal that an HIV vaccine is achievable too.

Category theory is a broad field useful in Haskell since monads make sense from a category theoretical viewpoint, while homotopy type theory combines homotopy theory with type theory to build new mathematical foundations that could underpin the Hilbert project's effort to replace tools like Coq and Agda, and recommends free online courses on category theory before diving into Haskell.

An HIV vaccine question leads into the story of the CCR5 delta 32 mutation, where a gene variant tied to surviving the Black Death in medieval Europe also confers natural resistance to HIV, a historical curiosity that HIV vaccine researchers explored without success in the 1990s and 2000s.

Admits he is not doing keto enough right now but plans to restart it in 2021 as part of a healthy lifestyle alongside regular exercise.

Clarifies he is not a medical researcher, he studied a lot of biology and nearly became a doctor before choosing math and then entrepreneurship instead, though his family is full of physicians including his grandfather, brother, uncle, and father, and he himself worked as an EMT.

Jokes that physicists, mathematicians, and biologists answer what two plus two equals in totally different ways, illustrating how medicine used to be textbook memorization but is now driven by hands-on genetic experimentation and bioinformatics.

Plans to eventually start a biotechnology company, using his current mushroom growing hobby as a stepping stone into agricultural genetic engineering, CRISPR work, and creating sterile bioluminescent plants for decoration.

Recalls his old interest in phage therapy, where bacteriophage viruses that kill bacteria were popular alternative antibiotic treatments in 1960s and 1970s Soviet medicine, and could see a resurgence today against drug resistant bacteria like MRSA if someone funded an open source phage library, though weak intellectual property incentives currently keep it under-researched.

Confirms he grows lion's mane mushrooms and jokes about applying mRNA vaccine and adenovirus vector delivery techniques to phage-style treatments.

Clarifies that in a past video he never said bacteriophages create superbugs, only that they can be used to combat superbugs since they are a different vector that co-evolves with bacteria.

On why Cardano still is not listed on Coinbase for Q1 2021, notes IOG delivered the Rosetta integration but has zero control over listing decisions since Coinbase is an independent company busy with its own issues like the XRP SEC lawsuit fallout, its IPO, and a recent social justice controversy.

Pushes back on the belief that a Coinbase listing would send Cardano's price to the moon, arguing Cardano already has deep liquidity so a listing likely would not move the market much, though it could help people in certain jurisdictions like New York gain access.

The real relationship with exchanges is purely technical, not a business negotiation, exchanges reach out about wallet or UTXO issues and IOG gives them a heads up on hard forks and node upgrades, while listing fees and financial products are mainly things small cap coins pay for, so people should drop the Coinbase obsession since a listing will not be some historic turning point for the ecosystem.

Notes that whether Coinbase lists ADA matters far less than shipping Project Catalyst and a timely Goguen launch, even though the Coinbase question is the one he gets asked most.

Confirms he still works closely with Alexander Chepurnoy on Ergo and Scorex, and is trying to get Scorex accepted into the Hyperledger group as an R&D chain.

Pushes back on the idea that the SEC is crypto's enemy, comparing regulators to vampires who only enter an industry once invited in, and noting mathematics needs no regulator because self-correction inside the field is enough.

Pharma gets regulated because bad products can physically harm people and the profit incentive doesn't naturally align with safety, tracing the pattern back to 19th century snake oil charlatans like William Avery Rockefeller.

Lists how crypto invited SEC scrutiny on itself through the ICO boom's scams, rampant insider trading, wash trading on exchanges, exchange collapses, and software built on purpose to steal funds.

Points to Ripple as the textbook case, since its principals sold roughly 600 million dollars of XRP to retail investors and paid themselves, exactly the kind of behavior that draws a consumer protection agency's attention.

Contrasts that with Cardano's own restraint, recalling how IOHK held its roughly 2.4 billion ADA presale allocation, worth nearly 3 billion dollars when ADA hit a dollar thirty, without selling any of it because it felt irresponsible.

Block.one sold four billion dollars worth of EOS and only got fined 24 million dollars by the SEC while keeping the rest, which frustrated him at the time compared to how Cardano handled its own holdings.

Argues the SEC exists precisely because not everyone self-regulates, tracing its 1933 creation back to the 1929 crash and Great Depression when speculation, boiler rooms, and insider trading turned unchecked markets into a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.

Flags it as troubling that Chinese companies can list on US exchanges without the same transparency required of Microsoft or Apple, but put the real blame on Congress for letting cryptocurrency regulation stagnate for a decade instead of updating outdated laws.

Credits the SEC with a relatively light touch overall, having brought only a few dozen enforcement actions out of over a thousand ICOs, mostly against clear frauds or geopolitically sensitive cases like Telegram.

Questions why Ripple is acting blindsided by the SEC when it already had a tolling agreement in place, suggesting negotiations broke down after Ripple threatened to move the company to the UK.

Dismisses commentators like Max Keiser and Tone Vays as bitcoin maximalist idiots who don't understand securities law, and lays out his own rule as an entrepreneur working across 52 countries: since perfect compliance everywhere is impossible, he grounds decisions in whether something is ethical, moral, and good for the consumer.

Uses Facebook as an example of a company that isn't technically breaking written laws yet still faces antitrust suits from 48 states because it angered half the country over Libra and perceived censorship.

Observes that politics is about appeasing public anger, pointing to Trump facing prosecution threats after leaving office and Martin Shkreli becoming a press villain regardless of whether he actually committed a crime.

Sums up his personal filter as always asking whether something is ethical, moral, and fair to people, noting IOG has a general counsel for securities law and stays out of trading, market making, and ICOs as a pure software and protocol company.

Securities law is inherently ambiguous, lawyers always hedge with a 'more likely than not' opinion, even on Bitcoin back in 2012, so what really matters is how you actually treat people, not the legal memo you got.

With Ethereum there was zero regulatory guidance in the early days, so the team got a more likely than not opinion from a law firm, then worked with another prominent firm to set up a foundation and run token distribution as transparently as possible on chain.

The real problem is when people game the system with clever structures that guarantee themselves a payout no matter what, even if the project fails, and that moral hazard corrodes your soul over time even if regulation never catches up to hold you accountable.

Donald Trump is a case study in bad business character, notorious for stiffing contractors and forcing them to sue for payment they were owed, and that reputation follows you even if you never go to jail for it.

Regulatory agencies need to be powerful enough to stand up to private industry, but that creates its own moral hazard: officials like Ben Lawsky, who effectively destroyed New York's crypto industry with the BitLicense, cash in afterward with lucrative industry jobs, including his current board seat at Ripple.

Predicts Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin will go straight back into banking after leaving office for an eight or nine figure payday, which is exactly why people distrust regulators instead of seeing them as protectors like firefighters.

His relationship with YouTubers like BitBoy and CryptoCrow is simple: they invite him on, he answers their questions, and he moves on to the next interview.

The Daedalus wallet's symbol is not a bull's head but a minotaur head, referencing the mythological creature trapped in the labyrinth that Daedalus built because nothing else could contain it.

Asked about Edward Snowden as a case study in who not to recruit as a spy, since being a charismatic, trust building people person who was recruited into the NSA and CIA is only half of what makes a good intelligence operative.

Spy recruitment follows the MICE framework, compromising targets through money, ideology such as using religion against Soviet atheism in Afghanistan, blackmail over a secret like being gay or something like what Epstein did, or a wounded ego from being passed over for promotion.

Snowden's fatal recruitment flaw was ego, he needed to be seen as the hero who alone knew what was best for the country, when a real intelligence operative has to accept the mission and stay silent forever, even from their own spouse.

Snowden's betrayal so traumatized the intelligence community that DARPA researchers built a predictive AI program called Prodigal, using graph theory and machine learning to flag anomalous behavior in cleared personnel before they could defect.

Points to the Nashville RV bomber as an example of the kind of pattern Prodigal style predictive analytics could catch, since there were early warning signs, including a 2019 girlfriend's tip that police dismissed, before he acted on 5G and lizard people conspiracy theories.

Counterintelligence failures like Snowden are deeply traumatizing to an agency's internal culture because every employee feels the betrayal and gets looked at with suspicion afterward.

Intelligence agencies can only confirm a surveillance capability exists but can never reveal how it was actually used, so they absorb allegations they are legally barred from defending against.

There is deep seated hatred of Snowden inside intelligence circles even among people who privately agree his underlying arguments about mass surveillance were right.

Argues that pardoning Snowden is not the intelligence agencies call but a political decision for the american people, complicated by unanswered questions about his ties to Russia and why he fled to Hong Kong first.

Seven years after the Snowden leaks there is now far more scrutiny and caution around security clearances and the handling of classified information.

Reflects that spies lie, kill, and manipulate for a living, citing china funded anti vaccine propaganda designed to prolong US lockdowns as an example of that kind of psyops warfare.

Pose a hypothetical asking whether a foreign leader would take a deal to fund a bot and psyops campaign that costs half a million american lives if it cripples the US economy.

Argues that once someone enters the spy class they have crossed a moral threshold and should never be fully trusted by society again, since the ends do not justify the means.

Calls the Snowden affair a fascinating case study in organizational psychology, recruitment failure, and the political problem of forgiving someone without demoralizing the institutions society relies on.

Trump has not been vaccinated because he received a monoclonal antibody treatment, likely regeneron, which blocks the vaccine from working for about 90 days, contrary to dishonest media claims he is being irresponsible.

Roger Stone deserves clemency or a pardon and that Snowden should first negotiate his return by sitting down with the justice department and intelligence agencies in a neutral country.

Speculates that Snowden's freedom of movement inside Russia implies some reciprocity with Putin's regime, since nothing is free there.

Dismisses Snowden's excuse that he cannot return to the US for a fair trial, urging him to stop playing the martyr and negotiate a plea deal.

Argues PRISM is mild compared to China's social credit system, great firewall, and concentration camps in western China, so America is not the world's worst surveillance offender.

Compares isolated US overreach, like Obama era spying on the Trump campaign which is worse than Watergate, to the truly systematic political oppression of the KGB or the Stasi, insisting there is no moral equivalency.

Criticizes Snowden for becoming a propaganda figurehead exploited by authoritarian regimes since he exposes american surveillance without acknowledging worse abuses elsewhere.

Predicts Snowden would become a wealthy celebrity with bestselling books and speaking fees if he returned home, giving him a strong financial incentive to make a deal.

Laments that post Church Committee reforms reining in the CIA have faded, especially around FISA courts, and that the Trump administration had the best chance in 50 years to fix it but was too incompetent to follow through.

Jokes about not being as tough as a rebel shock trooper as a new rapid fire question shifts to Star Wars.

Runs through the different COVID vaccines, Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca, and predict that Novavax, a protein and adjuvant based vaccine still in phase three trials, will end up the safest option.

MRNA vaccines are effective and safe enough that he will get one, but their side effect profile is too rough for normal commercial approval outside emergency use, so dosage will likely need to be adjusted down.

Argues a day or two of vaccine discomfort is a fair trade against the risk of death or permanent disability from COVID, citing his brother, an ICU doctor in Wyoming, treating patients in their 20s and 30s left with chronic fatigue and lung damage.

Pushes back on a skeptic in chat by framing the choice as nature's vaccine versus man's vaccine, then recall being quarantined in an African country during an Ebola outbreak with a sixty percent mortality rate and watching entire families die.

Argues the media wrongly equated coronavirus with Ebola and lost credibility like a parent who exaggerates the dangers of drugs, riffing that daily marijuana use still saps motivation even if it will not kill you.

Argues the media should have honestly explained that COVID risk varies sharply by group instead of claiming a 12 year old faces the same danger as a 78 year old with heart failure, and note schools closed to protect teachers, not because kids were dying.

Insists there is no equivalence between vaccine side effects and coronavirus itself, citing roughly 330,000 dead and several times more left with permanent disabilities, a toll he compares to US war casualties, and rejects claims that the whole thing is a hoax.

Concede government can exploit a crisis for power and that mask policy is nuanced, but maintain that does not make the vaccine worse than what the disease itself is doing to people.

Praises Taiwan's pandemic response, only seven deaths in a densely packed country of 20 million on mass transit, as proof that blanket lockdowns were the wrong tool.

Calls for burning down the institutions that failed the public, blasting Operation Warp Speed for having nine months to plan vaccine distribution yet still managing barely 200,000 doses a day, with unclear rules on which companies got funding.

Questions why none of the phase three clinical trials tested for sterilizing immunity, since proving the vaccines block transmission could have ended quarantines, distancing, and mask mandates much sooner.

Confirms he intends to get vaccinated himself and notes his brother and father have already been vaccinated with no problems.

Calls for holding every responsible politician accountable, demanding economic analysis of the lockdowns, restitution for destroyed businesses, and a full investigation into contact tracing, supply chains, and PPE procurement.

Proposes funding private industry with about 20 billion dollars to pre-develop vaccines to phase two trial readiness for every disease that could cause a future pandemic, arguing it would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives this time.

Voice suspicion of insider trading behind Novavax, a 375 employee company near bankruptcy that had never brought a product to market, landing a contract for 1.6 billion doses, and note the US vaccine czar's prior board seat at Moderna raises the same conflict of interest concerns.

Asks why the Defense Production Act was not used to take over and nationalize vaccine production at small, inexperienced companies like Moderna and open source the results.

Predicts multiple COVID vaccines above 90 percent effective will be available by may 2021, effectively ending the US pandemic by june, and call for holding officials accountable afterward for the deaths caused by a mishandled response.

Calls ripple's codius dead: they had a window to launch smart contracts before ethereum and could have owned defi and the ico boom, but they blew it and there's no path back now.

Names bob dylan as a favorite musician besides pink floyd and recounts a red rocks concert in colorado where dylan skipped his classics and played odd new material to a disappointed, thinning crowd.

Pay tribute to jim croce and john denver, both killed in plane crashes, and to johnny cash, recalling a favorite youtube clip of denver and cash singing rocky mountain high and cash's late cover of nine inch nails' hurt.

Lists boston and journey among favorite bands, then describes personally hiring steve miller and creedence clearwater revival to play a private concert at the 2019 IOHK summit in miami.

Praises pink floyd tribute acts the pink floyd experience and brit floyd, and joke about wanting roger waters or david gilmour to guest at a future IOHK summit despite disliking waters' opera project.

Reminisces about seeing charlie daniels play cheap, high-energy shows in vegas and wyoming every year and mourn his death in 2020, calling the devil went down to georgia a classic.

Dismisses most modern auto-tuned pop stars as manufactured and interchangeable, while singling out lady gaga as genuinely talented and a spiritual successor to cher and madonna.

Highlights ukrainian pianist valentina lisitsa as probably the best classical pianist alive and describes the joy of catching the berlin philharmonic, vienna orchestra, or zurich opera while traveling in europe.

Recalls an after-party in kigali following the africa transform summit and meeting president paul kagame, praising the vibrant blend of techno, rap, classical, and traditional artists in rwanda's music scene.

Reflects on a life spent visiting 52 countries and meeting heads of state, fortune 500 ceos, and musicians, hinting he might write a book about it someday.

Recalls meeting elon musk before he was famous at CU boulder, where musk's brother ran a local restaurant and top aerospace engineers took huge pay cuts just to work at spacex.

Notes that elon musk wasn't easily recognizable to most people before he became a global celebrity, and joke that having only briefly met musk, who probably doesn't remember him, puts him next in line for a jobs to musk to hoskinson torch pass.

Recounts sneaking into a sold out berlin philharmonic performance of beethoven's ninth symphony at the brandenburg gate by finding a hole in the fence.

Looks forward to closing out a horrible 2020 and expects 2021 to be amazing, joking that elon musk, born in south africa, is technically the richest african american in the world.

Defer a deep dive on nick bostrom's simulation hypothesis to a future ama, promising a full monologue on it in 2021.

Confirms buying a hyperbaric chamber for the garage, which will also house an ice bath, flotation tank, and shower, following the jerusalem protocol of ninety minute sessions several times a week.

Plans to do daily reading inside the hyperbaric chamber and, working with dr lesser, test biological age and telomere length before and after to see if the protocol has regenerative effects.

Leaving ethereum in mid 2014 as a mutual, amicable split over philosophy and strategy, having feared the project would run out of funding and face lawsuits over how the ico proceeds were spent.

Points to nearly six years of tireless work on cardano, twelve times longer than the ethereum stint, as proof of genuine passion and resolve rather than an empty promise not to leave.

Cardano exists to bring economic identity to billions of unbanked people, especially in africa, in contrast to ethereum's later pivot toward jp morgan and fortune 500 enterprise deals.

Praises michael saylor as a sharp rocket scientist turned bitcoin investor who built saylor academy, comparing him to a smarter tim draper.

Estimates hyperbaric chambers cost ten to fifty thousand dollars depending on features, and stresses wanting to operate it safely himself given past new age entrepreneurs who died experimenting with theirs.

Buying a mendi biofeedback headset to try out, alongside using isolation tanks and ice baths regularly since covid closed the facilities he used to visit.

Jokes about not needing a bathroom break, claiming years of lecturing gave him an iron bladder.

Recalls meeting peter schiff, nicknamed doctor doom, several times, arguing schiff dismisses bitcoin as a scam because crypto is siphoning investors from his gold based euro pacific capital business, while praising austrian economist tom woods as a good guy.

The story of former colleague carlo vicari insisting dolphins have rape coves, coining dolphin rape cove as a great death metal band name.

Picks chess as his favorite board game, refusing to name something hipster like settlers of catan.

Clarifies he never actually confirmed the dolphin rape cove claim and doesn't want to unfairly malign dolphins, who save people from sharks and reportedly helped the navy.

Recalls watching the animated avatar the last airbender show and immediately trying to forget m night shyamalan's live action movie adaptation.

Reveals the longest fast he's done is a two week water only fast.

Admires mycologist Paul Stamets, owning two of his books, and credits him with raising awareness of mushrooms.

Names There Will Be Blood the most complete film, Blade Runner 2049 a personal favorite, and agrees Pulp Fiction is great too.

Confirms deleting a wallet does not stop staking since delegation lives on chain and only changes via a new transaction.

Calls The Big Lebowski amazing and reveals Jeff Bridges was his first choice to emcee the IOHK Summit before scheduling issues ruled out William Shatner and hip surgery ruled out Steve Wozniak.

Denis Villeneuve calls Dune the best movie he has made and joke it better be world changing after twenty years of wanting to make it.

Like the idea of blockchain verified charity donations and want someone to propose it through the Catalyst fund, especially for faith based organizations.

Picks Rachmaninoff's third piano concerto as a favorite classical piece and mention having played some of his preludes himself.

Jokes that any DMT stories have to be saved for a future Joe Rogan appearance.

Jokes he is too young to have a favorite Spice Girl and reveal he was homeschooled and graduated at fifteen.

Names Janet Yellen the most powerful person in crypto since her policy decisions could push bitcoin toward two hundred fifty thousand dollars or crush it.

Talk supercars, eyeing a McLaren 720S and marveling at battery powered hypercars now hitting twelve hundred horsepower with zero to sixty under two seconds.

Janet Yellen's power comes from setting US crypto policy, which determines whether hundreds of billions in institutional money enters the space.

Warns that McLarens break down easily and share that his Lamborghini's oil pump failure cost eight thousand dollars to fix at twelve thousand miles.

He bought the Lamborghini as his one indulgent expense using tokens paid for Polymath and Polymesh consulting work, having otherwise only ever driven Cadillacs and trucks.

Calls Predator the most complete standalone Schwarzenegger film, though Terminator 2 and Total Recall are also great.

Recalls his first car was a beat up Ford Taurus followed by an Alfa Romeo Spider.

Calls out a persistent online critic who falsely claims IOG holds five billion dollars in ADA when a public disclosure showed two point four billion received as compensation for the five year Cardano development contract, valued at six million dollars at the time.

Rejects being called a bad guy for being successful, pointing to Bitshares, Ethereum, and Cardano together holding over eighty billion dollars in market value plus his early Bitcoin history.

Wraps up the year's longest AMA by reflecting on empathy, judging people by their actions rather than their words, and following mathematician Paul Halmos's inductive writing method of announcing, doing, and then revising.

Apply the Halmos method to Cardano itself: announce the plan to build it, deliver it with contributors across Japan, Korea, and Asia plus three core entities, release it in September 2017, and keep shipping hundreds of updates over four years.

Recaps cardano's 2020 stats: over 1200 stake pool operators, a million lines of code, 91 academic papers, hundreds of thousands of community members, and listings on 30+ exchanges, with a roadmap to match or exceed every other cryptocurrency.

Looks back on the uncertainty and setbacks along the way, including friction with the Cardano Foundation and Michael Parsons, and project managers who didn't work out, plus the risky choice to build in Haskell.

Celebrates that Shelley shipped in 2020, calling it the hardest single launch in crypto industry history, moving Cardano from a static federated system to a dynamic decentralized one.

2021 needs to focus on telling people what Cardano actually is, since there's a gap between what's shipped and what the market perceives.

Reflects that the last five years building Cardano were the hardest of his life, a choice he made despite already having enough success to take it easy, because he believed it could make a difference in the world.

Explains that doing meaningful work makes you a target for people who go out of their way to attack you, and admit it used to genuinely get to him.

He now feels pity rather than anger toward critics, comparing them to flat earthers who can't be convinced no matter how much evidence or success you show them.

Closes out reflecting on 2020 as a hard year for everyone, recalling his fdr quoted only thing we have to fear is fear itself video during the market crash, and the lesson that people need to be more empathetic toward each other.

He tries to understand critics like Max Keiser, Tone Vays, and Chico Crypto since attacking Cardano is simply their business model for getting clicks, and he doesn't take it personally.

Notes what actually saddens him is critics who sincerely believe he's a con man running a worthless project, since no amount of progress or partnerships will ever change their mind.

Warns that the empathy gap and inability to have conversations across political, religious, and crypto tribal lines is the biggest challenge of the coming years, and it's getting worse.

Trump lost the election and Biden becoming president is simply reality, yet some people refuse to accept it no matter the evidence, which is a symptom of that same empathy gap.

Uses the Catholic Church's fundamentalist reaction to Pope Benedict's resignation, insisting Francis is illegitimate, as an analogy for the cognitive dissonance people will face when denial meets reality.

Shares that his cousin's partner, a gender studies PhD, has cut his cousin off from seeing his own family because she says she doesn't feel safe around them, calling it a real example of how division destroys families.

Clarifies that despite strong disagreements with EOS, Tezos, and Vitalik Buterin, he doesn't delight in their struggles and congratulated Vitalik when Ethereum 2.0 launched, hoping 2021 brings more of that spirit.

Wraps up the longest AMA he's ever done, nearly four hours straight from 8am to midnight, and wishes everyone a happy new year and a better 2021.