AMA 02/22/2021

Opens the AMA live from Colorado, working through webcam and lighting glitches before diving into questions.

Reveals a cold call email from Lex Fridman requesting a podcast interview, comparing it to his chat with Elon Musk.

Recaps a busy week and teases fun HFC event announcements landing at the end of the month or early next.

Tinkering with his own stake pool, joking he will register it in Daedalus like everyone else.

Gives his take on David Chaum, praising the DigiCash pioneer's brilliance while admitting he does not fully follow his new Elixxir project.

Riffs on psychedelics and innovation, noting Silicon Valley's history with microdosing.

Shuts down a token burn suggestion, telling the questioner to touch grass and rethink their priorities instead.

Reacts with surprise to Gene Simmons buying ADA and calling it a great investment, hoping to get him on the podcast.

Confirms a new Haskell course is coming up in Ghana.

Promises Cardano will solve the gas fee problems plaguing Ethereum.

Confirms every IOG project is open source, usually under Apache 2 or MIT and never GPL.

His Bermuda TEDx talk six years ago came about simply because organizers invited him to speak.

Brushes off Janet Yellen's comments on Bitcoin with a joke about her looking familiar from decades ago.

Admits to playing piano badly and owning a shakuhachi flute, then jokes about adding llamas and alpacas to his property.

Points an Ethiopian fan wanting to help Cardano toward John O'Connor at the IOG office.

Expects developers will eventually figure out Python tooling for Cardano, and sees no reason a Flutter or Dart plugin couldn't be built.

Cardano isn't talking directly to the Indian government but leans on foundation council member Manmeet Singh's local expertise, with Catalyst funding local entrepreneurs in closed markets.

Reacts to the United Airlines engine failure that dropped debris near his hometown of Broomfield, Colorado.

Lays out the path to becoming a cryptographer: strong math and computer science fundamentals, starting with John Katz's Introduction to Modern Cryptography.

Confirms he has both met and spoken with Elon Musk.

Recommends the Zettelkasten note taking system as his top study and learning advice.

Explains why ADA's supply is fixed at 45 billion, joking that any other number was either too little or too much.

Confirms he gives out a Kiva microloan during every AMA.

Argues government seizure of private property, as in Zimbabwe under Mugabe, destroys an economy within a decade without exception.

Downplays Polkadot's parachains as a competitive threat, noting it shares Cardano's consensus lineage through Gavin Wood.

Recommends The Annotated Turing by Charles Petzold as essential reading for understanding Alan Turing's foundational work.

Deflects a P versus NP security question about Cardano with jokes rather than a technical answer.

Calls Warren Buffett the living incarnation of Benjamin Graham's value investing philosophy.

Jokes that Jeff Bezos stepping down as Amazon CEO is really just completing his transformation into a supervillain.

Explores whether machines need consciousness for general intelligence, citing Stuart Russell's The Problem of Control and arguing goal driven AI doesn't require it.

Hardware wallet support for Catalyst voting is in progress via a Vacuumlabs firmware update, likely landing in Q2.

Names Bertrand Russell his favorite philosopher.

Recounts a seminar with Leslie Lamport on writing formal proofs, recalling how Principia Mathematica needed a thousand pages to prove 1 plus 1 equals 2.

Insists cryptography demands real math skills, but suggests a sales role in applied cryptography for those without them.

Suggests President Biden shows signs of cognitive decline.

Names Wish You Were Here his favorite Pink Floyd album.

Reflects on mortality through Ernest Becker's Denial of Death, arguing that accepting death, not denying it, brings peace.

Confirms he golfs but declines to reveal his handicap.

Dismisses the Flare Network as no threat to Cardano's proof of stake model.

Jokes that he doesn't drive a Lamborghini, at least not yet.

Picks Radiohead's Kid A over OK Computer and In Rainbows.

Names 2001: A Space Odyssey his favorite Kubrick film, with Full Metal Jacket a close second.

Urges fans chasing a Lamborghini to instead set a goal of living well.

Jokes about IOG's many Greek team members, including a Greek chief scientist and an office at the University of Athens.

Mocks Bill Gates' climate book for pushing top down global government regulation instead of technology like carbon scrubbers.

Names Gary Larson's The Far Side his favorite cartoon, ahead of Garfield.

Names Chopin's Nocturnes his favorite pieces to play on piano.

Recalls visiting Gilgit, Pakistan years ago and calling it a beautiful place.

Reveals the Lex Fridman podcast interview is expected around June 11th.

Reveals Goguen was named after a famous computer scientist.

Refuses to engage with Hashgraph questions, dismissing its patented tech as no different from a database until it opens source.

Admits to only listening to Daft Punk's Tron soundtrack albums.

Recites pi from memory well past twenty digits as a party trick.

Calls Baldur's Gate one of the best games ever made.

Jokingly picks Colorado State and CU Boulder over MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford, saying pedigree doesn't matter to him.

He doesn't pay much attention to feeless DLTs like IOTA and Nano since fees have to be paid somewhere.

Jokes that hosting AMAs themselves are his favorite stress relief.

Confirms he uses the Brave browser and has been drinking a lot of matcha lately.

Picks Mars Attacks over Coneheads and jokes about buying his beard from Russell Crowe.

The story of Eddie, a Ghanaian bar owner he befriended in Osaka, who inspired him to eventually build something in Ghana.

Announces a rigorous pan African course in Accra covering Haskell, Elixir, and TLA plus, honoring his old friend Eddie.

Admits he hasn't used the Ergo brain sleep device as much as he should.

Shares his best life advice: the slow way is the fast way, live in the moment, work hard, and never go to bed angry.

Jokes about tricking visitors to Colorado into eating Rocky Mountain oysters.

Announces plans to launch an anti-aging and regenerative medicine company with his physician brother, researching therapies like hyperbaric and photobiomodulation treatment.

Names Scala his favorite programming language.

Admits he hasn't had time to record the promised security lecture update video.

Names World War II the most iconic battle of good versus evil while stressing that no war deserves to be celebrated.

Picks operational semantics over denotational semantics for formal methods work.

Riffs on Ludwig von Mises with a nod to subjective value theory in Austrian economics.

He made his first million at 26 and became a billionaire at 30.

Picks Euler over Gauss as his favorite mathematician, citing Euler's identity and the totient function.

Reveals Boston as his favorite rock band.

Declines to comment on Noam Chomsky until his obituary, to avoid political backlash from the community.

He'd welcome a meeting with Argentina's president and points fans toward the ATIX office in Buenos Aires to help make it happen.

Rates Gavin Wood a far better programmer than Vitalik Buterin.

Calls helping create Ethereum his biggest mistake.

Argues math is invented rather than discovered, walking through the Banach-Tarski paradox and the axiom of choice.

Sides with The Princess Bride over Three Amigos.

Picks Super Mario Bros 3 as the best NES game ever, over Zelda and Dragon Warrior.

Confirms he will get the COVID vaccine.

Plans to return to mathematics by endowing a Hoskinson Institute for Formal Mathematics, modeled on James Simons' example and built around the Lean proof assistant.

Lays out three goals for the institute: free open access math pedagogy, one click proof assistant tooling, and machine understandable mathematics.

Confirms he never visits the unofficial Cardano Discord, warning that impersonators can't sign messages with his PGP key.

Names the lack of reciprocated empathy as the hardest part of being CEO.

He dislikes MATLAB but loves Mathematica and counts Stephen Wolfram as a friend.

Names The Big Lebowski his favorite Coen Brothers movie.

Uses a hypothetical Apple takeover poll to warn that decentralization has to be protected by system design, not majority sentiment, since crowds are fickle.

Funds a 500 dollar Kiva loan for Antonio in Mexico to pay for his aunt's cataract surgery, the AMA's traditional charity moment.

Envisions Cardano eventually powering peer to peer microfinance directly on chain, backed by IOG treasury guarantees.