AMA 06/09/2020

Kick off the live AMA broadcasting from home in Colorado, riffing on the ever changing local weather.

Marvels that more CEOs and project founders do not talk directly with their communities the way he does.

Open the floor to any question, Cardano related or not, promising to answer or decline as he sees fit.

Refuses to give ADA price predictions or say whether it will make anyone a millionaire, calling that not his job.

Lays out the Shelley launch dates: mainnet ships June 30 or July 7 depending on hard fork testing, the hard fork lands July 29, ITN migration completes August 3, and staking begins August 18.

There is no logout in Daedalus, only turning the wallet off and securing it with a spending password, with hardware based login under consideration.

Ergo as Alex Chepurnoy's experimental blockchain testing concepts like Sigma protocols, non outsourceable puzzles, and UTXO decay, a low risk sandbox that could feed ideas back into Cardano.

Ergo has been invited to present alongside Meria at the Cardano Virtual Summit on July 2 and 3.

Rotating three and two day fasts in place of a formal workout routine.

Shrugs off a hideous new CoinMarketCap logo, noting Binance now owns the site.

Riffs on the when moon question with a joke about asking why moon instead.

Jokes that the quarantine beard is not a wizard look timed for the Shelley release.

Frames CEO stress management around three core duties: sustainable revenue, managing existential risk, and ensuring a succession plan.

Stresses that the second CEO duty is protecting and growing company culture, since every organization shapes how its people think and act.

Recommends mindfulness meditation stripped of metaphysical baggage, comparing it to weightlifting for the brain that undoes the mental wear of leadership.

Prioritizing breaks with friends and family, ranch chores, and watching sunrises and sunsets over pushing through every task.

Argues no coping technique lets you survive a job you do not love, illustrated by a friend who quit surgery right after finishing residency.

Advises CEOs to fix a toxic culture even at the cost of short term profit or key employees, since a healthier team pays it back many times over.

Recounts dreading walking into his own office because of toxic people, and how life improved once they finally left the company.

Points to the Calm app as an easy starting point for learning meditation.

Confirms a Treasury system will fund Cardano development once the IOG contract ends in 2020, with more details coming.

Addresses former community members splintering into their own small subreddit, framing it as a lesson that governance is hard because people resist admitting their own faults.

Denies any Harvard partnership, noting Cornell once rejected IOG funding, so the money went instead to build the world's most productive crypto research center at the University of Edinburgh.

Highlights cross institutional research like game theory work spanning Oxford and Edinburgh, giving graduate students high impact, widely cited publishing opportunities.

Praises Nathan Kaiser's fellowship at the more independent Berkman Klein Center, distinct from Harvard's core bureaucracy.

Preferring frontier partners like Wyoming, where a half million dollar IOG contribution was matched up to 1.3 million, over elite schools with poor return on donations.

Gives a hardware timeline: the University of Wyoming hardware wallet is years out, but Ledger support for Daedalus is expected within the month.

Explains that if stake pools mass failed the chain would halt gracefully rather than lose funds, though such simultaneous failure is unrealistic given decentralization.

Previews multi asset support and Goguen as the next releases after Shelley, with native token equivalents to ERC-20 and ERC-721 detailed at the Virtual Summit.

Chats about family in medicine, including a brother who became an ICU nurse and then a doctor, and reminisces about Metro State University.

Explains why he tips restaurant workers 100 percent anonymously, pointing to how hard the pandemic hit hourly service workers.

Recalls being scolded in Japan for tipping, since it can be seen as insulting there.

Weighs in on the Rick and Morty season finale mystery of which Beth is the clone.

Doubts a unified field theory will be discovered any time soon.

Pushes back on complaints that Shelley was delayed, arguing critics will never be satisfied no matter the outcome.

Compares the no win criticism cycle to Tom Brady being called washed up right after a Super Bowl win, arguing true worth is not tied to fleeting achievement.

Uses the iPhone as an example of consumerism, marveling at incredible engineering that gets discarded the moment a new model ships.

Reminisces that the best childhood gift was a pen and notepad, the same kind he used to plan out Cardano in 2015 and still keeps as mementos.

Exchange held ADA generally cannot vote in governance because exchanges must keep funds on demand for regulatory reasons, unlike locked staking commitments.

Clarifies Duncan Coutts is not an employee but runs Well-Typed as a long term consulting partner advancing Haskell tooling alongside Cardano.

Questions the legitimacy of the Forrest Fenn treasure hunt since the anonymous winner was never publicly verified.

Update on New Balance: the Kawhi Leonard shoe pilot shipped, but scaling up further depends on New Balance amid pandemic hit consumer spending.

Confirms an NFC chip was packaged with the New Balance shoes for pairing.

Rejects the framing of Africa as Cardano's primary focus, describing the real focus as underserved people worldwide who lack economic identity.

Getting emotional watching the Cardano Virtual Summit teaser video ahead of its release.

Names Wish You Were Here as his favorite Pink Floyd album.

Denies any personal ancestral tie to Africa, criticizing people who culturally appropriate African dress as performative solidarity without actually building anything there.

Argues real solidarity means going and building businesses and solving problems directly rather than just talking about supporting a cause.

Lays out a win win investment philosophy: build wealth in a way that also enriches the people and communities he works with.

Himself as a cultural nomad shaped by growing up in Hawaii and living all over the world, with no single fixed identity to claim.

Argues journalists lack incentive to write honest, in depth stories because outlets from Fox to MSNBC and CNN are locked into predefined narrative agendas.

Compares modern news coverage to pro wrestling kayfabe, entertainment dressed up as real conflict.

Points to Joe Rogan's move to Spotify as proof of soft censorship pushing the most popular long form voice in media off open platforms.

Criticizes Twitter for policing world leaders' speech, arguing private platforms have become de facto utilities that should not act as political arbiters.

Proposes decentralized, protocol based social media as the fix, just as cryptocurrency built independent payment rails to route around banks freezing accounts.

Predicts micro tipping will become crypto's killer app within a decade, letting audiences directly fund the creators and content they want.

Argues mainstream media is suspiciously incurious about whether COVID-19 originated from the Wuhan lab, deferring instead to Chinese Communist Party claims.

Speculates that political and financial incentives, from election timing to Chinese business ties, explain the reluctance to investigate COVID's origins honestly.

Warns that centralized control of information lets someone else decide what is true, false, and appropriate for you to see, calling it antithetical to American founding values.

Calls out over 1200 medical professionals who deemed BLM protests an acceptable COVID risk while opposing other protests, calling it propaganda rather than science.

Warns that unchecked control over information distribution risks a real 1984 style scenario, citing a Star Trek interrogation scene as a metaphor for manufactured consensus.

Predicts a crypto powered replacement for Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube within 10 years, citing Brave and BAT as early progress.

Suggests building a new content distribution platform is a legitimate path to becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg.

Best practice wallet security guidelines are still coming as a university course, delayed by the Shelley launch and awaiting hardware wallet availability.

Recalls winning a contest to title Dan Bilzerian's book, quipping Dances With Herpes.

Criticizes the manufactured alpha male image, arguing people who buy that lifestyle end up loved only for their money and deeply lonely.

Points to Jocko Willink as a real role model, a lethal Navy SEAL commander who is also humble and gentle.

Argues the world is not empty or shallow, since every person alive carries the same potential depth as history's great figures and wisdom can be mined from that history.

The story of visiting Rwanda's genocide museum and meeting two employees, a survivor and a perpetrator's associate, who chose to work side by side.

Reveals the two coworkers were tied to the same 1994 killing and chose forgiveness over vengeance for the sake of their country's future.

Contrasts Rwanda's collective choice to move on with ongoing American struggles to reconcile over slavery and racial history.

IOG will consider a rebranding at some point tied to moving the company toward Wyoming.

Clarifies his academic background is primarily mathematics, not computer science, which shapes a more theoretical, functional programming leaning approach to building systems.

Confirms the full ADA supply distribution schedule will be republished with new documentation by month end.

Names analytic number theory as his specific field of study, joking he was never particularly good at it.

Previews an upcoming paper generalizing solutions to the spikes of dishonest majority problem across proof of stake protocols.

Confirms he still lives in Colorado, just an hour's drive from Wyoming.

Muses on whether mathematical objects are real or useful fictions, comparing numbers to fictional characters that become culturally real through belief.

Walks through how formal systems build up from axioms and logical operators to sets, classes, and questions of consistency and decidability.

Cites Godel's incompleteness theorem as proof no sufficiently powerful mathematical system can prove everything within itself.

Some mathematicians question whether infinity is even a necessary concept, since calculus can be done without it via non-standard analysis.

Argues video games are the last medium for truly immersive storytelling, since players stay absorbed unlike distracted, phone checking moviegoers.

Cites the tuberculosis storyline in Red Dead Redemption 2 as proof games can create real emotional grief in players.

Hand writing game design notes for his Legends of Valor project in the same notebooks he once used to plan Cardano.

Cites The Last of Us as another game with powerful emotional storytelling.

Gives a mild, mostly neutral take on Monero, admitting he has not studied privacy coins deeply enough to have a strong opinion.

Confirms future Cardano development phases will be funded through the on chain Treasury rather than fresh fundraising.

Choose Babylon.js for a fast, open source Legends of Valor remake, and a AAA engine like Unreal 5 for a bigger budget flagship version.

Praises Telltale's Walking Dead and the character Clementine for its writing.

Argues blockchains and web browsers do not naturally combine, though blockchain can add value via decentralized DNS and content addressable networks instead of location based addressing.

Compares content addressable retrieval to BitTorrent, where you fetch verified data by hash instead of remembering a website location.

Calls Brave the most sophisticated browser currently bridging blockchain and web technology.

Promises to name a Legends of Valor doctor character after a viewer as a reward.

Dismisses The Colbert Report and Rush Limbaugh alike as partisan outrage media that teaches nothing but hatred of the other side.

Argues outrage media exists to make audiences hate an out group for profit, whatever label that group is given.

Recommends turning off the television for a week and reading a biography together with a partner instead, citing Ron Chernow's writing.

Shares how Chernow's George Washington biography revealed a flawed, relatable man defined by failure rather than the sanitized textbook version.

Recounts how nearly being denied a British Army commission pushed Washington toward the Revolutionary side, turning a slight into the making of a nation.

Praises Ulysses S. Grant's rise from a disgraced, alcoholism driven army discharge to general and president as an inspiring redemption story.

Questions whether Joe Biden will remain coherent through a term citing visible signs of decline, while crediting Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard for fresh ideas in the primary.

Calls Andrew Johnson the worst president in U.S. history, arguing Grant had to rebuild after both a civil war and disastrous post Lincoln leadership.

Hydra as a layer 2 state channel approach rather than ledger sharding, letting stake pool operators reuse their existing trust and infrastructure.

Argues ledger sharding is far more complex and fragile under Byzantine conditions, citing GHOST and Phantom DAG protocols as cautionary examples against Hydra's lower risk path.

Emphasize gradual, low risk scaling through Hydra over ledger sharding's research uncertainty, citing competing teams building interoperable state channel clients.

Confirms his videos are released under Creative Commons, free to clip and repost with attribution.

Corrects a claim that Grant owned slaves, noting he freed the one he inherited through marriage, and warns against judging historical figures purely by modern standards.

Warns that deepfake technology could be weaponized by controlled media to fabricate quotes and statements, deepening the crisis of trust in what is real.

Insists objective truth still exists and that dismantling that concept is the first step of authoritarian control, pointing to inconsistent public health standards applied to different protests.

Confirms R.A. Salvatore wrote the Drizzt Do'Urden novels.

The story of accidentally ordering a 600 dollar Wagyu steak in Tokyo after misreading a yen to dollar conversion.

Declines to judge Eric Weinstein's geometric unity theory of everything, deferring to physicists on a topic outside his own expertise.

Endorse Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life argument that society only functions when people agree to treat truth as objective.

Russian information warfare as seeding distrust in everything, comparing it to digital landmines that erode society's ability to agree on facts.

Dismisses conspiracy theories claiming the officer arrested for George Floyd's death was not the real culprit, tying it to eroded public trust.

Recommends Dan Dennett's books and James Randi's skepticism work for building critical thinking tools, warning that schools and media purposely dull those skills.

Contrasts Cardano's years of unsatisfying but honest trade off talk with competitors' unrealistic claims of solved scalability and centralization.

Defends Shelley shipping exactly when ready after five years of hard, underappreciated work despite constant accusations of being scammers.

Frames Cardano's blunt honesty like a doctor delivering hard truths, preferable to comforting lies that leave you exactly where you started.

Jokes agreement that Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself.

Thanks ZuriHac 2020 for sponsoring the Haskell hackathon.

Civilization 5 as a favorite over 6 and admit no time lately for a Command and Conquer remake.

Speak warmly of Ron Paul and call his son Rand a fitting successor.

Declines to comment on his hair after a viewer's perm joke.

Threaten to stop doing live AMAs if price questions keep dominating, insisting he has no insight into and no interest in short term ADA price moves.

Argues getting rich off crypto misses the point of the work, calling anyone chasing only profit a slave to the system he is trying to free people from.

Identify a background painting as a 1910 era John William Waterhouse work.

He is unlikely to collaborate with Vitalik Buterin again given how differently they prioritize and think, likening it to McCartney and Lennon going separate ways.

Calls the Rick and Morty pickle episode a comedy peak.

Confirms the wall masks are genuine, sourced from African, Nordic, Venetian, Celtic, and Nepali traditions.

Picks CU Boulder, his alma mater, over CSU, joking about the rough Hawkins era of the football program.

Names black as his favorite color.

Wraps the stream, thanking the community for another fun two hour AMA covering a wide range of topics.

Reflects that the best days are the ones spent building something new and helping people take control of their own lives, closing the AMA on that note.