Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Silvio McCauley, a computer scientist at MIT,
00:00:04 winner of the Turing Award, and one of the leading minds in the fields of cryptography,
00:00:10 information security, game theory, and most recently, cryptocurrency and the theoretical
00:00:16 foundations of a fully decentralized, secure, and scalable blockchain at Algorand, a company
00:00:23 of cryptographers, engineers, and mathematicians that he founded in 2017.
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00:00:42 links to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I will
00:00:47 be having many conversations this year on the topic of cryptocurrency. I’m reading and thinking
00:00:53 and thinking a lot on this topic. I just recently finished reading The Bitcoin Standard, a book I
00:00:59 highly recommend. As always, with this podcast, I’m approaching it with an open mind, with
00:01:04 compassion, with as little ego as possible, and yes, with love. I hope you go along with me on
00:01:12 this journey and don’t judge me too harshly on any likely missteps. As usual, I will play devil’s
00:01:20 advocate. I will, on purpose, sometimes ask simple, even dumb questions, all to try and explore the
00:01:27 space of ideas here with as much grace as I can muster. I have no financial interests here. I
00:01:33 only have a simple curiosity and a love for knowledge, especially about a set of technologies
00:01:39 that may very well transform the fabric of human civilization. If you enjoy this thing,
00:01:45 subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or
00:01:51 connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now here’s my conversation with Silvio McCauley.
00:01:59 Let’s start with the big and the basic question. What is a blockchain? And why is it interesting?
00:02:05 Why is it fascinating? Why is it powerful? All right. So a blockchain, think of it, is really
00:02:11 a common database distributed. Think about it as a ledger in which everybody can write an entry
00:02:19 in a page. You can write, I can write, and everybody can read, and you have a guarantee
00:02:26 that everybody has the same copy of the ledger that is in front of you. So whatever you see on
00:02:32 page seven, anyone else sees on page seven. So what is extraordinary about this is this common
00:02:40 knowledge thing that I think is really a first for humanity. I mean, if you look at communication,
00:02:48 like right now, you can communicate very quickly images, photos, but do you have a certainty that
00:02:57 whatever you have received has been received by everybody else? Not really. And so there’s a
00:03:02 commonality of knowledge and the certainty that everybody can write, nobody has been prevented
00:03:09 from writing whatever they want. Nobody can erase. Nobody can tear a page of a ledger.
00:03:14 Nobody can swap page. Nobody can change anything. And that is immutable common record is
00:03:21 extremely powerful. And there’s something fundamental that is decentralized about it.
00:03:27 So at least in spirit, some degree against maybe a resistance to centralization.
00:03:33 Absolutely. If it is not decentralized, how can it be common knowledge? If only one person or a
00:03:41 few people have a ledger, you don’t have a ledger, you have to ask, you know, what is on page seven?
00:03:47 And how do you know that whatever they tell you is on page seven, they tell the same thing to
00:03:52 everybody else. And so this commonality is extremely powerful. Just to give you an example,
00:04:02 assume that you do an auction, okay? You have worked very hard, you build a building,
00:04:08 and now you want to auction it off. Makes sense because you want to auction worldwide,
00:04:14 better yet, you want to tokenize the building and sell it in all in parcels.
00:04:20 Now, everybody sees the bids. And you know that everybody sees the bids. You and I see the same
00:04:26 bids, and so does everybody else. So you know that a fair price has reached, and you know who owns
00:04:32 what and who has spent how much. And if you do it instead of, otherwise, in a centralized system,
00:04:39 I put a bid saying, oh, congratulations, Alex, you won, and your price is $12,570. How do you know?
00:04:47 So if instead of this common knowledge is a very powerful tool for humanity.
00:04:56 So we return to it from a bunch of different perspectives, including like a technical
00:05:00 perspective. But you often talk about blockchain and some of these concepts of decentralization,
00:05:09 scalability, security, all those kinds of things. But one of the most maybe impactful, exciting
00:05:17 things that leverage the blockchain, this kind of ledger idea of common knowledge is cryptocurrency.
00:05:25 So in the financial space. So is there, can you say in the same kind of basic way,
00:05:31 what is cryptocurrency in the context of this common knowledge and in the context of the blockchain?
00:05:37 Great. Cryptocurrency is a currency that is on such a ledger. So imagine that on the ledger,
00:05:45 initially, you know that somehow, say you and I are the only owner, each one, let’s give it
00:05:52 ourselves a billion each of whatever this unit. Then I start writing on the ledger,
00:06:01 I give 100 of these units to my sister, I give this much to my aunt. And then now,
00:06:08 because it’s written on the ledger and everybody can see, my sister can give 57 of these units
00:06:13 that she received from me to somebody else. And that is money. And that is money because
00:06:19 you can see that somebody who tenders your payment has really the money there. You don’t
00:06:26 have any more of a doubt when you want to sell an item. If I write you a check, is the check covered?
00:06:33 Or do I have the money at the moment of a transaction? You really see because the ledger
00:06:38 is always updated. What you see is what I see, what the merchant sees. You know that the money,
00:06:44 the money is the most powerful money system there is because it is totally transparent. And so you
00:06:52 know that you have been paid, and you know that the money is there, you have not to second guess
00:06:58 anything else. So the common knowledge applied there is you’re basically mimicking the same kind
00:07:04 of thing you would get in the physical space, which is if you give 100 bucks or 100 of that
00:07:10 thing, whatever of that cryptocurrency to your sister, the actual transfer is as real as you
00:07:18 giving like a basket of apples to your sister. So in the case in the physical space, the common
00:07:28 knowledge is in the physics of the atoms. And then it’s digital space, the common knowledge
00:07:35 is in this ledger. And so that transfer holds the same kind of power, but now it’s operating
00:07:43 in the digital space. Again, I apologize for a set of ridiculous questions, but you mentioned
00:07:52 cryptocurrencies and money. What is money? Why do we have money? Do you think about this
00:08:00 kind of from this high philosophical level at times of this tool, this idea that we humans
00:08:08 have all kind of came up with and seem to be using effectively to do stuff?
00:08:15 Money is a social construct, okay, in my opinion. And this has been somehow people always felt
00:08:22 that somehow money is a way to allow us to transact, even though we want different things. So
00:08:30 I have two sheep, and then you have one cow, and I want the cow, but you are looking for
00:08:39 blankets instead, you know, so to have money is really simplifies this. But at the end of
00:08:44 it, that’s why a bit was invented. And you started with gold, you started with
00:08:49 the coinage, then you started with the check. But at the end of the day, money is essentially
00:08:56 a social construct because you know that what you receive, you can actually spend with somebody
00:09:01 else. And so there is a kind of a social pact and social belief that you have. At the end of the day,
00:09:09 even barter requires these beliefs that other people are going to accept
00:09:17 the quote unquote currency you offer them. Because if I’m a mason, and you ask me to build a wall
00:09:25 in your field, and I did, and you, in exchange, you give me a thousand sheep,
00:09:32 what am I going to do? Eat them all? No, I have to feed them. And if I don’t feed them, they die,
00:09:37 and my value is zero. So in receiving this livestock, I must believe that somebody else
00:09:45 will accept them in return for something else. So money is a social belief, social shared belief
00:09:53 system that makes people transact. That’s fascinating. I didn’t even think about that,
00:09:58 that you’re actually, you have a deep like network of beliefs about how society operates.
00:10:06 So the value is assigned even to sheep, based on that everyone will continue operating how they
00:10:12 were previously operating. Somebody will feed the sheep. I didn’t even think about that. That’s
00:10:19 fascinating. So that directly transfers to the space of money and then to the space of digital
00:10:26 money, cryptocurrency. Okay. Does it bother you sort of intellectually when this money that is
00:10:33 a social construct is not directly tied to physical goods like gold, for example?
00:10:40 Not at all, because after all, gold has some industrial value. Nobody delights it. It’s a
00:10:49 metal. It doesn’t oxidate. It has some good things about it. But does this industrial value
00:10:55 really represent the value to which it now is traded? No. So gold is another way to express
00:11:01 our belief. I give you an ounce of gold, you treat it like, oh, somebody else will want this
00:11:07 for doing something else. So it is really this notion of this. Money is a mental construct,
00:11:14 is really, and is shared, is a social construct, I really believe. And so some people feel that
00:11:21 it’s physical, so therefore gold exists. Then, as you know now, countries, most sophisticated
00:11:30 country right now, they print their own money and you believe that they are not going to
00:11:35 exaggerate it with inflation. Not everybody believes it, but at least they are not going
00:11:42 to exaggerate it blatantly. And therefore you receive it because you know that somebody else
00:11:49 will accept it, will have faith in the currency and so on and so forth. But whether it’s gold,
00:11:54 whether it’s livestock, whatever it is, money is really a shared belief.
00:11:59 So there is something, you know, and I’ve been reading more and more about different cryptocurrencies.
00:12:07 There is a kind of belief that the scarcity of a particular resource like Bitcoin has a
00:12:14 limited amount and it’s tied to physical, you know, to proof of work. So it’s tied to physical
00:12:23 reality in terms of how much you can mine effectively and so on. That that’s an
00:12:28 important feature of money. Do you think that’s an important feature to be a part of whatever
00:12:34 the money is? That is certainly a very useful part. So at some point in time, you know,
00:12:40 assume that money is something that all of a sudden we say, daisies are money, are the currency.
00:12:46 Then, you know, I offer you 10 daisies in payment of whatever goods and services you want to
00:12:52 provide. But at the end of the day, if you know that you can cultivate it and generate them at
00:12:59 will, then perhaps, you know, you should not accept my payment. Here is a bouquet of daisies.
00:13:08 So you need some kind of a scarcity. The inability to create it suddenly out of nothing
00:13:14 is unimportant. And it’s not an intrinsic necessity, but it’s much easier to accept
00:13:24 once you know that there is a fixed number of units of whatever currency there is and therefore
00:13:30 you can mentally understand I’m getting, you know, this much of this piece of a pie and therefore
00:13:37 I consider myself paid. I understand what I’m receiving. You described the goals of a blockchain.
00:13:43 You have a nice presentation on this as scalability, security, and decentralization.
00:13:49 And you challenged the blockchain trilemma that claims you can only have two of the three.
00:13:55 So let’s talk about each. What is scalability in the context of blockchain and cryptocurrency?
00:14:02 What does scalability mean? So remember, we said that the blockchain is a ledger and each page
00:14:09 receives a, gets some transaction and everybody can write in these pages of the ledger. Nobody
00:14:16 can be stopped from writing and everybody can read them. Okay. Scalability means how fast can
00:14:21 you write? Just imagine that you can write an entry in this special shared ledger once every
00:14:28 hour. Well, you know, what are you going to do if you have no one transaction of an hour,
00:14:33 the world doesn’t go around. So you need to have scalability means here that you can
00:14:38 then somehow write a lot of transaction and then you can read them and everybody can validate them.
00:14:47 And that is the speed and the number of transactions per second and the fact that
00:14:54 they are shared. So you want to have this speed not only in writing, but in sharing and
00:15:01 in inspection for validity. This is scalability. The world is big. The world wants to interact,
00:15:09 the people want to interact with each other and you better be prepared to have a ledger
00:15:13 in which you can write lots and lots and lots of transactions in this special way very,
00:15:17 very, very quickly. So maybe from a more mathematical perspective or can we say
00:15:22 something about how much scalability is needed for a world that is big?
00:15:27 Well, it really depends how many transactions you want, but remember that I think right now
00:15:36 yet to go into at least 1000s of transactions per second, even if you look at credit cards,
00:15:46 we are going to go from an average of 1600 to peaks of 20,000 or 40,000, something like this.
00:15:54 But remember, it’s not only a question of a transaction per se, but the value is that the
00:16:01 transaction is actually being shared and visible to everybody and the certainty that that is the
00:16:08 case. I can print on my own printer way more transactions, but nobody has the time to see
00:16:15 or to inspect. That doesn’t count. So you want scalability at this common knowledge level.
00:16:22 That is the challenge. I also meant from a perspective of like a complexity analysis.
00:16:28 So when you get more and more people involved, doesn’t need to scale in some kind of way that
00:16:38 do you like to see certain kind of properties in order to say something is scalable?
00:16:42 Oh, absolutely. I took a little bit implicitly that the people transacting are actually very
00:16:48 different. So if there is a two people who can do thousands of transactions per second with each
00:16:54 other, this is not so interesting. What do we really need is to say there are billions of
00:16:58 people at any point in time, you know, thousands and thousands of them want to transact with each
00:17:03 other and you want to support to that. So Algorand, it solves, so that’s the company,
00:17:12 the team of cryptographers and mathematicians, engineers, so on, that challenged the blockchain
00:17:17 trilemma. So let’s break it down in terms of achieving scalability. How do we achieve scalability
00:17:25 in the space of blockchain, in the space of cryptocurrency? Okay. So scalability, security,
00:17:31 remember, and decentralization, right? So that’s what they want. What’s the best way to approach?
00:17:36 Can we break it down? Let’s start with scalability and think about how do we achieve it? Well,
00:17:41 to achieve it one at a time is perhaps easy, even security. If nobody transacts,
00:17:48 nobody loses money. So that is secure, but it’s not scalable. So let me tell you, I’m a cryptographer,
00:17:56 so I try to fight the bad guys. And what you want is that the vesselager that we discussed before
00:18:04 cannot be tampered with. So you must think of it as a special link that nobody can erase. Then
00:18:12 it has to be, everybody should be able to read and not to alter the pages or the content of the pages.
00:18:22 That’s okay. But you know what? That is actually easy cryptographically. Easy cryptographically
00:18:28 means you can use tools invented 50 years ago, which in cryptographic time is prehistory, okay?
00:18:35 We cavemen working around and solve the problem in cryptography land. But there is really a
00:18:42 fundamental problem, which is really almost a social, seems a political problem, is to say,
00:18:48 who the hell chooses or publishes the next page of the ledger? I mean, that is really the challenge.
00:18:58 This ledger, you can always add a page because more and more transaction had to be written on
00:19:03 there. And somebody has to assemble this transaction, put them on a page and add the
00:19:08 next page. Who is the somebody who chooses the page and adds it on? Who can be trusted to do it?
00:19:14 Exactly. Assume it is me for what I’m being, not that I want to volunteer for the job, but
00:19:20 then I would have more power than any absolute monarch in history, because I would have a
00:19:25 tremendous power to say, these are the transactions that the entire world should see. And whatever I
00:19:32 don’t write, this transaction will never see the light of day. I mean, no one had any such a power
00:19:38 in history. So it’s very important to do that. And that is the quintessential problem in a blockchain.
00:19:47 And people have thought about it to say, it’s not me, it’s not you. But for instance,
00:19:52 in proof of work, what people say is, okay, it’s not me, it’s not you, you know what it is?
00:19:58 We make a very difficult, we invented a cryptographic puzzle, very hard to solve.
00:20:04 The first one to solve it has the right to add one page to the ledger on behalf of everybody else.
00:20:12 That now seems okay, because sometimes I solve a puzzle before you do, sometimes you solve
00:20:19 before I do, or before somebody else solves it, it’s okay.
00:20:22 And presumably, the effort you put in is somehow correlated with how much trust
00:20:29 you should be given to add to the ledger.
00:20:33 Yeah, so somehow you want to make sure that you need to work because you want to prevent,
00:20:39 you want to make sure that you get one solution every 10 minutes, say, like in a particular
00:20:46 example of Bitcoin, so that it is very rare that two pages are added at the same time.
00:20:51 Because if I solve a puzzle at the same time you do, it could happen that if it happens once or
00:20:58 twice, we can survive it. But if it happens every other page is a double page, then which of the two
00:21:06 is the real page, it becomes a problem. So that’s why in Bitcoin, it is important to have a substantial
00:21:13 amount of work so that no matter how many people try on Earth to solve a puzzle, you have one
00:21:19 solution out of how many people are trying every 10 minutes. So that you have, you distance these
00:21:26 pages, and you have the time to propagate through the network a solution and the page attached to
00:21:31 it. And therefore, there is one page at a time that is added. And you say, well, why don’t we
00:21:38 do it? We have a solution. Well, first of all, a page every 10 minutes is not fast enough. It’s a
00:21:46 question of scalability. And second of all, to ensure that no matter how many people try, you
00:21:53 get one page every 10 minutes, one solution to the riddle every 10 minutes. This means that the riddle
00:22:00 becomes very, very hard. And to have a chance to solve it within 10 minutes, you must have such an
00:22:09 expensive apparatus in terms of specialized computers, not one, not two, but thousands and
00:22:15 thousands of them. And they produce tons of heat, okay? They dissipate heat like maniac. And then
00:22:20 you have to refrigerate them too. And so then now you have air conditioning galore to add to the
00:22:26 thing. It becomes so expensive that fewer and fewer and fewer people can actually compete in
00:22:33 order to add to the page. And the problem becomes so crucial that in Bitcoin, depending on which
00:22:46 day of the week you look at it, you are going to have two or three mining pools that are really
00:22:51 the ones that are capable of controlling the chain. So you’re saying that’s almost like
00:22:58 at least a centralization. Right. It started being decentralized, but the expenses became
00:23:07 higher and higher and higher. When the cost becomes higher and higher, fewer and fewer
00:23:11 people can afford them. And then it becomes de facto centralized, right? Yeah. And a different
00:23:19 type of approach is instead, for instance, a delegated proof of stake, which is also
00:23:26 very easy to explain, essentially boils down to say, well, look at these 21 people, say, okay?
00:23:35 Don’t they look honest? Yes, they do. In fact, I believe that they’re going to remain honest
00:23:40 for the foreseeable future. So why don’t we do ourselves a favor? Let’s entrust them
00:23:46 to add the page on behalf of all of us to the ledger. Okay. Okay. But now we are going to say,
00:23:54 is this centralized or decentralized? Well, 21 is better than one, but to say is very little.
00:23:59 So if you look at when people rebelled to centralize power, I don’t know, the French
00:24:04 revolutions, okay? There was a monarch and the nobles. Were there 21 nobles? No, there were
00:24:11 thousands of them, but there were millions and millions of disempowered citizens. So one is
00:24:18 centralized, 21 is also centralized, right? So that’s delegated proof of stake. Delegated. It’s
00:24:23 kind of like representative democracy, I guess. Yes, which is good. It’s working great, right?
00:24:29 It’s working great. Well, it’s better than the single monarch, right? There’s problems.
00:24:39 There are problems. And so we were looking for a different, when thinking about Algorand,
00:24:49 for a different approach. And so we have an approach that is really, really decentralized
00:24:56 because essentially it works as follows. You have a bunch of tokens, right? These are the tokens
00:25:04 that have equal power. And you have say 10 billions of tokens distributed to the entire
00:25:12 world. And the owners, each token has a chance to add the ledger, equal probability to everybody
00:25:21 else. In fact, actually, if you want, here is how it works. So think about by some magic
00:25:29 cryptographic process, which is not magic, it’s mathematics, but think of it as magic. Assume that
00:25:36 you select a thousand tokens and so sometimes a random, okay? And you have a guarantee that the
00:25:43 random selected. And then the owners of these 1000 tokens somehow agree on the next page,
00:25:51 they all sign it, and that is the next page. Okay? So it is clear that nobody has the power
00:25:59 but in a while, one of your tokens is selected and you are in charge of this committee to select
00:26:09 the next page. But this goes around very quickly. So, and if you look at this, the equation really
00:26:16 is that it’s not really centralized. And because for agreeing on the same page, it is important
00:26:23 that the 1000 tokens that you randomly selected are in honest ends, the majority of them.
00:26:32 So which, if the majority of the tokens are in honest ends, that is essentially true because
00:26:37 if the majority of the tokens are in honest ends, if you select, say 90% of the people are,
00:26:46 90% of the tokens are in honest ends. So can you randomly select a thousand,
00:26:51 in this thousand you find the 501 tokens in bad ends. Very, very improbable.
00:26:58 So basically, when a large fraction of people are honest, then you can use randomness as a powerful
00:27:05 tool to get decentralization. So what does honesty mean? And now we’re into the social
00:27:13 side of things, which is how do we know that like the fraction, a large fraction of people
00:27:23 or participating parties are honest? That is an excellent question. So by the way,
00:27:28 first of all, we should realize that the same thing is for every other system. When you look
00:27:33 at proof of work, you rely that the majority of the mining power is in honest ends. When you look
00:27:41 at delegated proof of stake, you rely that the majority of these 21 people are honest. What is
00:27:47 the difference? The difference is that in these other systems, you should say the whole economy
00:27:54 is secure if the majority of this small piece of economy are honest. And that is a big question.
00:28:04 But instead, in Algorand, in our approach, we say the whole economy is secure if the majority
00:28:12 of the economy is honest. In other words, who can subvert Algorand is not a majority of a small
00:28:18 group, but is a majority of the token holders had to conspire with each other in order to sink the
00:28:24 very economy for which they own the majority of. That I think it is a bit harder to…
00:28:29 Like a self destructive majority, essentially. And you’re also making me realize that basically
00:28:36 every system that we have in the world today assumes that the majority of participants is
00:28:43 honest. Yes. The only difference is the majority of whom. And in some cases, the majority of a club
00:28:51 and in our case is the majority of the whole system.
00:28:53 The whole system. Okay. So that’s… So through that kind of random sampling,
00:29:02 you can achieve decentralization. You can achieve… So the scalability, I understand.
00:29:10 And then the security that you’re referring to, basically the security comes from the fact that
00:29:16 the sample selected would likely include honest people. So it’s very difficult to… So by the way,
00:29:23 the security, as you mentioned, you’re referring to is basically security against dishonesty,
00:29:31 right? Or manipulation or whatever. Yes. Yes. So essentially when what you’re going to do is to
00:29:37 the following and say, well, Silvio, I understood what you’re saying, but somebody has to randomly
00:29:42 randomly selected these tokens, then I believe you. So then who does this random selection?
00:29:46 That’s a good point. And in Algorand, we do something a little bit unorthodox.
00:29:52 Essentially is the token choose themselves at random. And you say, if you think about it,
00:30:00 that seems to be a terrible idea. Because if you want to say, choose yourself at random,
00:30:05 and whoever chooses himself is a thousand people committee, you choose the page for the rest of us.
00:30:11 Mm hmm. And because if I’m a bad person, I’m going to select myself over and over again,
00:30:16 because I want to be part of the committee every single time. But not so fast. So what do we do
00:30:22 in Algorand? What does it mean that I select myself? That each one of us,
00:30:26 in the privacy of our own computer, actually a laptop, what you do is that you execute your own
00:30:34 individual lottery. And think about that you pull a lever of a slot machine, you can only pull the
00:30:42 lever once, not until you win, not enough times until you win. And when you pull the lever, case
00:30:48 one, either you win, in such a case, you have a winning ticket. Or you lose, you don’t get any
00:30:54 winning ticket. So if you don’t have a winning ticket, you can say anything you want about the
00:31:00 next page in the ledger, nobody pays attention. But if you ever win a ticket, people say, Oh,
00:31:07 wow, this is one of the 1000 winning tickets, we better pay attention to what he or she says.
00:31:13 And that’s how it works. And the lottery is a cryptographic lottery, which means that even if I
00:31:20 am an entire nation, extremely powerful, with incredible computing powers, I don’t have the
00:31:27 ability to improve even minimally my probability of one of my token winning the lottery. And
00:31:33 that’s how it happens. So everybody pulls the lever, the 1000 random winners say, Oh, here is
00:31:41 my winning ticket. And here is my opinion up or down about the block. These are the ones that
00:31:46 count. And if you think about it, while this is distributed, because there is, in the case of
00:31:53 Algon, there is 10 billion tokens and you selected 1000 of them more distributed than this, you
00:31:59 cannot get. And then why is this scalable? Because what do you have to do? Okay, you have to do the
00:32:06 lottery. How long the lottery takes? It takes actually one microsecond. Whether you have one
00:32:13 token or two tokens or a billion tokens is always one microsecond of computation, which is very
00:32:19 fast. We don’t hit the planet with a microsecond of computation. And finally, why is this secure?
00:32:27 Because even if I were a very evil and very, very powerful individual, I’m so powerful that I can
00:32:35 corrupt anybody I want instantaneously in the world, whom would I want to corrupt? The people
00:32:42 in the committee so that I can choose the page of the ledger. But I do have a problem. I do not
00:32:49 know whom I should corrupt. Should I corrupt this lady in Shanghai, this other guy in Paris?
00:32:56 Because I don’t know. The winners are random, so I don’t know whom I should corrupt.
00:33:01 But once the winner comes forward and says, here is my winning ticket, and you propagate
00:33:06 your winning ticket across the network, together with your opinion about the block,
00:33:11 now I know who they are. For sure, I can corrupt all 1000 of them given to my incredible powers.
00:33:18 But so what? Whatever they said, they already said, and their winning tickets and their opinions
00:33:25 are virally propagated across the network. And I do not have the power, no more than the US
00:33:31 government or any government has the power, to put back in the bottle a message virally
00:33:37 propagated by WikiLeaks. So everything you just described is kind of is fascinating,
00:33:44 a set of ideas. And, you know, online I’ve been reading quite a bit, and people are really excited
00:33:50 about the set of ideas. Nevertheless, it is not the dominating technology today. So Bitcoin,
00:33:58 in terms of cryptocurrency, is the most popular cryptocurrency, and then Ethereum, and so on.
00:34:05 So it’s useful to kind of comment. We already talked about proof of work a little bit.
00:34:09 But what, in your sense, does Bitcoin get right? And where is it lacking?
00:34:16 Okay, so the first thing that Bitcoin got right is to understand that there was the need
00:34:22 of a cryptocurrency. And that, in my opinion, they deserve all the success because they said
00:34:29 the time is right for this idea. Because very often, it’s not enough to be right here to be
00:34:34 right at the right time. And somebody got it right there. So hat off to Bitcoin for that.
00:34:42 And so what they got right is that it is hard to subvert and change the ledger, to cancel a
00:34:52 transaction. It’s not impossible. That is very hard. What they did not get right is somehow that
00:35:00 it is a great store of value, currency wise. But money is not only a question that you store it
00:35:07 and you put under the mattress. Money wants to be transacted. And the transaction bitcoins are very
00:35:13 little. So if you want to store value, everybody needs a store of value. Might as well use Bitcoin.
00:35:19 I mean, it’s the plan. But if you don’t look at that for a moment, at least it’s a great store
00:35:27 of value. And everybody needs a store of value. But most of the time, we want to transact. We
00:35:32 want to interact. We don’t put the money under the mattress. So we wanted to embed. They didn’t get
00:35:38 it right. That is too slow to transact. Too few transactions. There’s a scalability issue.
00:35:45 Is it possible to build stuff on top of Bitcoin that sort of fixes the scalability? I mean,
00:35:52 this is the thing you look at. There’s a bunch of technologies that kind of hit the right
00:36:00 need at the right time and they have flaws, but we kind of build infrastructures on top of them
00:36:07 over time to fix it as opposed to getting it right from the beginning. Or is it difficult to do?
00:36:14 Well, that is difficult to do. So you’re talking to somebody that when I decided to throw my heart
00:36:21 in the arena and I decided, first of all, as I said before, I much admire my predecessors. I
00:36:27 mean, they got it right, a lot of things. And I really admire for that. But I had a choice to
00:36:36 make. Either I patch something that has holes all over the place or I start from scratch. I decided
00:36:41 to start from scratch because sometimes it’s a better way. So what about Ethereum, which looks
00:36:46 like proof of stake and a lot of different innovative ideas that kind of improve or seek
00:36:52 to improve on some of the flaws of Bitcoin. Ethereum made another great idea. So they
00:36:57 figured out that money and payments are important as they are. They are only the first level, the
00:37:05 first stepping stone. The next level are smart contracts. And they were at the vision to say
00:37:12 the people will need smart contract, which allow me and you to somehow to transact securely without
00:37:20 being shopped around by a trusted third party, by a mediator. By the way, because mediators are hard
00:37:26 to find. And in fact, maybe even impossible to find if you live in Thailand and I live in New
00:37:32 Zealand, maybe we don’t have a common person that we know and trust. And even if we find them,
00:37:39 guess what? They want to be paid. So much so that 6% of the world GDP goes into financial friction,
00:37:48 which is essentially third party. So the head of right of the world needed that.
00:37:53 But again, the scalability is not there. And the system of smart contracts in Ethereum is slow
00:38:04 and expensive. And I believe that is not enough to satisfy the appetite and the need that we have
00:38:12 for smart contracts. Well, what do you make of just as a small sort of aside in human history,
00:38:19 perhaps it’s a big one is NFT, the non fungible tokens. Do you find those interesting technically,
00:38:24 or is it more interesting on the social side of things? Well, both. I think NFTs are actually
00:38:32 great. So you are an artist to create a song or it could be a piece of art. He has many unique
00:38:46 representations of a unique piece where there is an artifact of something dreamed up by you and
00:38:55 has unique representations that now you can trade. And the important part is that now you have this
00:39:01 is not only the NFTs themselves, but the ability to trade them quickly, fast, securely, knowing
00:39:11 who owns which rights. And that gives a totally new opportunity for content creators to be
00:39:18 remunerated for what they do. But ultimately, you still have to have that scalability, security
00:39:25 and decentralization to make it, you know, to make it work for bigger and bigger applications.
00:39:33 Correct. Yeah. Yeah. I still wonder what kind of applications are yet to be
00:39:38 like enabled by it because so much. The interesting thing about NFTs, you know,
00:39:44 if you look outside of art is just like money, you can start playing with different social
00:39:51 constructs, is you can start playing with the ideas. You can start playing with even like
00:40:01 investing. Somebody was talking about almost creating an economy out of like creative people
00:40:10 or influencers. Like if you start a YouTube channel or something like that, you can invest
00:40:15 in that person and you can start trading their creations. And then almost like create a market
00:40:22 out of people’s ideas, out of people’s creations, out of the people themselves that generate those
00:40:29 creations. And there’s a lot of interesting possibilities of what you can do with that.
00:40:33 I mean, it seems ridiculous, but you’re basically creating a hierarchy of value, maybe artificial
00:40:40 in the digital world and are trading that. But in so doing are inspiring people to create.
00:40:48 So maybe as a sort of our economy gets better and better and better where actual work in the
00:40:55 physical space becomes less and less in terms of its importance, maybe we’ll completely be operating
00:41:01 in the digital space where these kinds of economies have more and more power. And then
00:41:09 you have to have this kind of blockchains to the scalability, security, and decentralization.
00:41:15 And then decentralization is of course the tricky one because people in power start to get nervous.
00:41:23 Absolutely. Once in power, you’re always nervous that you’ll be supplanted by somebody else.
00:41:29 But this is your job. Congratulations, you got the job, the top job, and now everybody wants it.
00:41:34 Well, what is your sense about our time and the future hope about the decentralization
00:41:42 of power? Do you think that’s something that we can actually achieve given that power corrupts
00:41:50 and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and it’s so wonderful to be absolutely powerful?
00:41:57 Well, good question. So first of all, I believe that by the way, there is a
00:42:02 complex question, Lex, and like all the rest of your questions.
00:42:10 I’m so very sorry.
00:42:13 It’s okay. I am enjoying it. So there are two things. First of all,
00:42:19 power has been centralized for a variety of reasons. When you want to get it, it’s easier
00:42:24 for somebody, even a single person, to grab power. But there is also some kind of a technology,
00:42:33 lack thereof, that justified having power. Because in a society in which even communication,
00:42:40 never mind blockchain, which is common knowledge, but even simple unilateral communication is hard,
00:42:46 it is much easier to say, you do as I say. So there is a little bit of a technology barrier.
00:42:59 But I think that now to get to this common knowledge, it is a totally different story.
00:43:04 Now we have finally the technology for doing this. So that is one part. But I really believe
00:43:09 that by having a distributed system, you have actually a much more stable and durable system.
00:43:19 Because not only for corruption, but even for things that go astray, and given a long enough
00:43:24 time by a strange version of Murphy’s law, whatever goes wrong, goes wrong. And if the
00:43:33 power is diffused, you actually are much more stable. If you look at any complex living being,
00:43:43 it’s distributed. I mean, I don’t have somebody who says, okay, tell Silvio now it’s time to eat.
00:43:50 You have millions of cells in your body. You have billions of bacteria.
00:43:54 Exactly. Help me in the guts. We are in a soup that somehow keeps us alive.
00:43:59 So strange enough, however, when we design systems, we design them centralized. We ourselves
00:44:09 are distributed beings. And when we plan to say, okay, I want to create an architecture,
00:44:15 how about I make a pyramid, I put this on the top and the power flows down. And so again,
00:44:24 it’s a little bit perhaps of a technology problem. But now the technology is there.
00:44:29 So that is a big challenge to rethink how we want to organize power in a very large system and
00:44:37 distribute a system, in my opinion, much more resilient. Let’s put it this way. There was
00:44:45 Italian compatriots, Machiavelli, who looked at the time, there was a bunch of small state
00:44:53 democratic Republic of Florence and Venice and the other thing. And there was the Ottoman Empire
00:44:58 that at the time was an empire and the Sultan was very centralized. And he made a political
00:45:04 observation that goes roughly to say, whenever you have such a centralized thing, it’s very hard
00:45:09 to overtake that former government is centralized. But if you get it, it’s so easy to keep
00:45:17 the population. While instead these other things are much more resilient. When the power is
00:45:26 distributed, it’s going to be lasting for a much longer time. And ultimately maybe the human spirit
00:45:33 wants that kind of resilience, wants that kind of distribution. It’s just that we didn’t have
00:45:36 technology throughout history. Machiavelli didn’t have the computer, the internet.
00:45:43 That is certainly part of a reason. Yes. You’ve written an interesting blog post. If we
00:45:48 just take a step out of the realm of bits and into the realm of governance, you wrote a blog
00:45:56 post about making Algorand governance decentralized. Can you explain what that means, the philosophy
00:46:03 behind that? How you decentralized basically all aspects of this kind of system?
00:46:09 Let’s start with the philosophy. I really believe that nothing fixed lasts very long.
00:46:21 So I really believe that life is about intelligent adaptation. Things change, and we have to be
00:46:30 nimble and adjust to change. When I see a lot of a crypto project, I’m actually very proud to say
00:46:42 it’s fixed in stone. Code is law. Law is code. I verify the code. It will never change. You go,
00:46:50 wow. When I’m saying this is a recipe to me of disaster, not immediately, but soon. Just imagine
00:46:56 you take an ocean liner, and you want to go, I don’t know, from Lisbon to New York, and you set
00:47:04 a course, iceberg, no iceberg, tempest, no tempest. It doesn’t matter. You need a teal. You need to
00:47:15 correct. You need to adjust. By the way, you would design Algorand with the idea that the code was
00:47:25 evolving as the needs. Of course, there is a system in which every time there is an adjustment,
00:47:32 you must have essentially a vote that right now is orchestrated at 90% of the stake. They say,
00:47:39 okay, we are ready. We agree on the next version, and we pick up this version. So we are able to
00:47:45 evolve without losing too many components left and right. But I think without evolving, any system
00:47:51 essentially becomes aesthetic and is going to shrivel and die sooner or later. That is needed.
00:48:01 What you want to do on the blockchain, you have a perfect platform in which you can log
00:48:08 your wishes, your votes, your things, so that you have a guarantee that whatever vote you express
00:48:14 is actually seen by everybody else. Everybody sees really the outcome, call it a referendum,
00:48:20 of a change. And Vete is, in my opinion, a system that wants to live long as to adapt.
00:48:28 There is an interesting question about leaders. I’ve talked to Vitalik Buterin. I’ll probably
00:48:33 talk to him again soon. He’s one of the leaders, maybe one of the faces of the Ethereum project.
00:48:40 And it’s interesting. You have Satoshi Nakamoto, who’s the face of Bitcoin, I guess. But he’s
00:48:47 faceless. He, she, they. It does seem like in our whatever it is, maybe it’s 20th century,
00:48:57 maybe it’s Machiavellian thinking, but we seek leaders. Leaders have value. Linus Torvalds,
00:49:04 the leader of Linux, the open source development a lot. It’s not that the leadership is sort of
00:49:14 dogmatic, but it’s inspiring. And it’s also powerful in that through leaders, we propagate
00:49:24 the vision. Like the vision of the project is more stable. Maybe not the details, but the vision.
00:49:30 And so do you think there’s value to, because there’s a tension between decentralization
00:49:36 and leadership, like in visionaries. What do you make of that tension?
00:49:41 SL. Okay. So I really believe that, that’s another great question. I think of it,
00:49:47 I really believe in the power of emotions. I think the emotion are of a creative impulse
00:49:52 of everybody else. And therefore it’s very easy for a leader to be a physical person, a real
00:49:59 being, and that interprets our emotions. And by the way, these emotions have to resonate.
00:50:07 And what is good is that the more intimate our emotions are, the more universal they are,
00:50:13 paradoxically. The more personal, the more everybody else somehow magically agrees and
00:50:19 feels a bit of the same. And it’s very important to have a leader in the initial phase that
00:50:26 generates out of nothing something. That is important leadership. But then the true tested
00:50:31 leadership is to disappear after you lead the community. So in my opinion, the quintessential
00:50:37 leader according to my vision is George Washington. He served for one term, he served for another
00:50:48 term, and then all of a sudden he retired and became a private citizen. And two hundred and
00:50:54 change years later, we still are, with some defects, but we have done a lot of things right.
00:51:00 And we have been able to evolve. That to me is success in leadership.
00:51:05 While instead you contrast our experiment with a lot of our experiment. I’ve done so much so well
00:51:10 that I want another four years. And why shouldn’t I be only a four and I have another eight?
00:51:16 Why should it be another eight? Give me 16 and I will fix all your problems. And then is the type,
00:51:21 in my opinion, of failed leadership. Leadership ought to be really lead, ignite, and disappear.
00:51:29 And if you don’t disappear, the system is going to die with you. It is not a good idea for everybody
00:51:34 else. So we’ve been talking a little bit about cryptocurrency, but is there spaces where
00:51:40 this kind of blockchain ideas that you’re describing, which I find fascinating,
00:51:47 do you think they can revolutionize some other aspects of our world that’s not just money?
00:51:52 A lot of things are going to be revolutionized is independent of finance. By the way,
00:51:59 I really believe that finance is an incredible form of freedom. I mean,
00:52:07 if I’m free to do everything I want, but I don’t have the means to do anything, that’s a bad idea.
00:52:11 So I really think financial freedom is very, very important. But you just can say that against
00:52:18 you know, censorship, you write something on the chain and now nobody can take it out.
00:52:24 That is a very important way to express our view. And then the transparency that you give,
00:52:35 because everybody can see what’s happening on the blockchain. So transparency is not money.
00:52:41 But I believe that transparency actually is a very important ingredient also of finance. Let’s put
00:52:49 this way, as much as I’m enthusiastic about blockchain and decentralized finance, and we have
00:52:57 actually our expression, we’re creating this future five, because as much as we want to do,
00:53:03 we must agree that the first guarantee of financial growth and prosperity are really
00:53:11 the legal system, the courts. Because we may not think about them and say, oh, the courts
00:53:16 are a bunch of boring lawyers. But without them, I’m saying there is no certainty. There is no
00:53:24 notion of equality. There is no notion that you can resolve your disputes thing. That’s
00:53:29 what thrives commerce and things. And so what I really believe that the blockchain actually
00:53:35 makes a lot of this trust essentially automatic, but make it impossible to cheat in very way. You
00:53:41 don’t even need to go to court if nobody can change the ledger. So essentially it’s a way of
00:53:50 you cannot solve an illegal system that reduces to a blockchain. But what I’m saying, a big chunk
00:53:55 of it can actually be guaranteed. And there is no reason why technology should be antagonistic
00:54:03 to legal scholarship. It could be actually coexisting and one should start to doing the
00:54:09 interest things that the technology alone cannot do. And then you go from there. But I think that
00:54:16 essentially blockchain can affect all kinds of our behavior.
00:54:23 Yeah. So in some sense, the transparency, the required transparency ensures honesty,
00:54:30 prevents corruption. So there’s a lot of systems that could use that. And the legal system is one
00:54:34 of them. There’s a little bit of attention that I wonder if you can speak to where this kind of
00:54:40 transparency, there’s a tension with privacy. Is it possible to achieve privacy if wanted
00:54:49 on a blockchain? Do you have ideas about different technologies that can do that? People have been
00:54:55 playing with different ideas. So absolutely. The answer is yes. And by the way, I’m a cryptographer.
00:55:04 Right. Okay. So I really believe in privacy and I believe in and I’ve devoted a big chunk of my
00:55:13 life to guarantee privacy, even when it seems almost impossible to have it. And it is possible
00:55:20 to have it also in the blockchain too. However, I believe in timing as well. And I believe that
00:55:28 the people have the right to understand their system they live in. And right now people can
00:55:41 understand the blockchain to be something that cannot be altered and is transparent. And that
00:55:50 is good enough. And there is a pseudo privacy for the fact that who knows if this public key belongs
00:55:59 to me or to you. And I can, when I want to change my money from one public key, I split it to other
00:56:05 public keys, going to figure out which one is Silvio or all of them are Silvio or only one of
00:56:09 Silvio. Who knows? So you get some vanilla privacy, not the one I could talk. And I think it’s good
00:56:15 enough because, and it’s important for now that we absorb this stage. Because in the next stage,
00:56:21 we must understand the privacy tool rather than taking on faith. When the public starts saying,
00:56:27 I believe in the scientists and whatever they say, I swear by them. And therefore,
00:56:31 the term is private is private and nobody understands it very well. We need a much more
00:56:35 educated about the tools we are using. And so I look forward to deploying more and more privacy
00:56:44 on the blockchain, but we are not, I will not rush to it until the people understand and are behind
00:56:53 whatever we have right now. So you build privacy on top of the power of the blockchain. You have
00:56:59 to first understand the power of the blockchain. Yes. So Algorand is like one of the most exciting,
00:57:06 technically at least from my perspective, technologies, ideas in this whole space.
00:57:12 What’s the future of Algorand look like? Is it possible for it to dominate the world?
00:57:17 Let’s put it this way. I certainly working very hard with a great team to give the best blockchain
00:57:26 that one can demand and enjoy. And they said, I really believe that there is going to be,
00:57:35 it’s not a winner takes them all. So it’s going to be a few blockchains and each one is going to
00:57:42 have its own brand and it’s going to be great at something. And sometimes it’s scalability,
00:57:49 sometimes it’s your views, sometimes it’s a thing. And it’s important to have a dialogue between
00:57:56 these things. And I’m sure, and I’m working very hard to make sure that Algorand is one of them,
00:58:01 but I don’t believe that it’s even desirable to have a winner takes all because we need to express
00:58:11 different things. But the important thing is going to have enough interoperability with
00:58:16 various systems so that you can transfer your assets where you have the best tool to service
00:58:23 them, whatever your needs are at the time. So there’s an idea, I don’t know, they call
00:58:28 themselves Bitcoin maximalists, which is essentially the bet that the philosophy that
00:58:36 Bitcoin will eat the world. So you’re talking about, it’s good to have variety.
00:58:42 Their claim is it’s good to have the best technology dominate the medium of exchange,
00:58:50 the medium of store of value, the money, the digital currency space.
00:58:58 What’s your sense of the positives and the negatives of that?
00:59:03 So I feel people are smart and it’s going to be very hard for anybody to win. And because
00:59:12 people want more and more things. There is an Italian saying that translates well, I think.
00:59:20 It goes, the appetite grows while eating. I think you understand what he means. So I say,
00:59:27 I’m not hungry. Okay, food. Let me try this. So we want more and more and more. And when you find
00:59:33 something like Bitcoin, which are already very good things to say, but it does something very
00:59:39 well, but it’s a static, I mean, store of value. Yes, I think it’s a great way for the rest. You
00:59:47 know, it would be a sad world if the world in which we are so anchoring down, so defensive
00:59:53 that we want to store value and hide it under the mattress. I long for a world in which is open.
00:59:59 People want to transact, interact with each other. And therefore, when you want to store value,
01:00:05 one, perhaps one chain, where you want to have to transact, maybe is another. I’m not saying that,
01:00:12 you know, one chain cannot be store of value or another thing, but I really believe,
01:00:19 I believe in the ingenuity of people and in the innovation that is intrinsic to the human nature.
01:00:25 We want always different things. So how can it be something invented,
01:00:28 whatever it is decades ago, is going to fulfill the needs of our future generations.
01:00:33 I’m not going to fulfill my needs, let alone my kids or their kids. We are going to have a
01:00:43 different world and things will evolve. So you believe that life, intelligent life,
01:00:50 is ultimately about adaptability and evolving. So static loses in the end.
01:00:58 Yes. Let me ask the, well, first the ridiculous question. Do you have any
01:01:05 clue who Satoshi Nakamoto is? Is that even an interesting question?
01:01:12 Well, your questions are very interesting. So, and I think, so I would say, first of all,
01:01:19 it’s not me. Okay. And I can prove it because, you know, if I were Satoshi Nakamoto, I would
01:01:25 have not found an algorithm. It takes a totally different principle to approach to the system.
01:01:31 But the other thing, who is Satoshi Nakamoto? You know what the right answer is? It’s not him
01:01:36 or her or them. Satoshi Nakamoto is Bitcoin. Because to me, it’s such a coherent proof of
01:01:46 work that at the end, the creator and the creation identify themselves. So you say,
01:01:52 okay, I understand Michelangelo. Okay. He did the Sistine Chapel. Fine. He did the
01:01:57 St. Peter’s Dome. Fine. He did the Moses of the Pieta statue. Fine. But besides this,
01:02:04 who was Michelangelo? That’s the wrong question. It’s his own work. That is Michelangelo.
01:02:10 So I think that when you look at the Bitcoin is a piece of work that as it defects, yes,
01:02:18 like anything human, but it was captivated the imaginations of millions of people as subverted
01:02:26 the status quo. And I’m saying, you know, whoever this person of people are, he’s living in this
01:02:34 piece of work. I mean, it is Bitcoin. The idea of the work is bigger. We forget that sometimes.
01:02:43 It’s something about our biology likes to see a face and attach a face to the idea when really
01:02:49 the idea is the thing we love. The idea is the thing that impact the idea is the thing that
01:02:54 ultimately we, you know, Steve Jobs or somebody like that, we associate with the Mac or the iPhone
01:03:00 with just everything he did at Apple. Apple, actually the company is Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs,
01:03:05 the man is a pales in comparison to the creation. Correct. And the sense of aesthetics that has
01:03:13 brought to the daily lives and very often aesthetic wins in the long, in the long,
01:03:19 in the long game. And these are very elegant design product. And when you say, Oh,
01:03:25 elegance, very few people care about it. Apparently millions and millions and millions
01:03:31 and millions of people do because we are attacked by beauty and these are beautifully designed
01:03:36 products. And, and, and, you know, and they’ve in addition to ever the technological aspect
01:03:44 of the other thing. And I think, yes, that is, yeah, as the Stajewski said, beauty will save
01:03:50 the world. So I’m, I’m with you on that one. Right. It currently seems like cryptocurrency,
01:03:57 all these different technologies are gathering a lot of excitement, not just in our discourse,
01:04:07 but in their like scale of financial impact. A lot of companies are starting to invest in Bitcoin.
01:04:14 Do you think that the main method of store value and exchange of value, basically money will soon
01:04:25 or at some point in the century will become cryptocurrency?
01:04:29 Yes. So mind you, as I said, that the notion of cryptocurrency, like any other fundamental human
01:04:36 notion has to evolve, but yes. So I think of it, uh, he has a lot of momentum behind it.
01:04:45 Um, it’s not only static as a visa programmable money as a smart contract. It allows a peer to
01:04:55 peer interaction among people who don’t even know each other. Right. Uh, and they don’t even,
01:05:01 therefore I cannot even trust each other just because they never saw each other.
01:05:06 So I think it’s so powerful that, uh, uh, is going to do this said again,
01:05:13 a particular cryptocurrency should develop and cryptocurrency will all develop. But the answer
01:05:20 is yes, we are going towards a much more, uh, unless we have a society, a sudden crisis for
01:05:28 different reasons, which nobody hopes there’s always an asteroid. There’s always something,
01:05:34 uh, nuclear war and all the existential crisis that we kind of think about,
01:05:38 including artificial intelligence. Uh, okay. It’s funny. You mentioned that, um,
01:05:44 um, Michelangelo and Steve jobs, you know, set of ideas represents the person’s work.
01:05:50 So we talked about Algorand, which is a super interesting set of technologies, but,
01:05:56 you know, he did also win the touring award. You have a bunch of, you have a bunch of ideas that
01:06:05 are, you know, seminal ideas. So can we talk about cryptography for a little bit? What is the most
01:06:12 beautiful idea in cryptography or computer science or mathematics in general asking somebody who has
01:06:19 explored the depths of all? Well, there are a few contenders
01:06:29 and, uh, either your work or, uh, or other words, uh, let’s leave my work aside and, uh, and, uh,
01:06:38 so, but one powerful idea and is, uh, both an old idea in some sense and a very, very modern one.
01:06:49 And, uh, in my opinion is this idea of a one way function. So a function that easy to evaluate.
01:06:57 So given X, you can compute F of X easily, but given F of X is very hard to go back to X. Okay.
01:07:06 Think like breaking a glass, easy. Reconstruct the glass harder. Frying an egg, easy. From the
01:07:17 fried egg to go back to the original egg, harder. If you want to be extreme, killing a living being,
01:07:24 unfortunately, easy. The other way around, very hard. And so the fact that the notion of a function,
01:07:31 whichever a recipe that is in front of your eyes to transform an X into F of X,
01:07:37 and then from F of X, even though you see the recipe to transform it, you cannot go back to X.
01:07:43 That in my opinion is one of the most elegant and momentous notions that there are. And it is a
01:07:53 computational notion because of the difficulties in a computational sense. And it’s a mathematical
01:07:58 notion because we were talking about function. And it’s so fruitful because that is actually
01:08:05 the foundation of all cryptography. And let me tell you, it’s an old notion
01:08:11 because very often in any mythology that we think of, the most powerful gods or goddesses are the
01:08:19 ones of X and the opposite of X, the gods of love and death. And when you take opposites,
01:08:27 they don’t just erase one another, you create something way more powerful. And this one,
01:08:32 the function is extremely powerful because essentially becomes something that is easy
01:08:40 for the good guys and hard for the bad guys. So for instance, in pseudo random number generation,
01:08:49 the easy part of the function corresponds, you want to generate bits very quickly. And hard is
01:08:54 predicting what the next bit is. It doesn’t look the same. One is X f of X going from X f of X to
01:09:02 X. What does it do? Predicting bits. By a magic of reductions in mathematical apparatus, this simple
01:09:12 function morphs itself into pseudo random generation. This simple function morphs itself in
01:09:18 digital signature scheme in which digitally signing should be easy and forging should be
01:09:23 and forging should be hard. Again, a digital signature is not going from X to f of X,
01:09:29 but the magic and the richness of this notion is that it is so powerful that it morphs in all
01:09:37 kinds of incredible constructs. And in both these two opposites coexist, the easy and the hard,
01:09:44 and in my opinion is a very, very elegant notion. That simple notion ties together cryptography,
01:09:52 and like you said, pseudo random number generation. You have work on pseudo random functions.
01:10:00 What are those? What’s the difference in those and the generators, the pseudo random number
01:10:08 generators? How do they work? Let’s go back to pseudo random number generation. First of all,
01:10:16 people think that the pseudo random number generation generates a random number. Not true,
01:10:19 because I don’t believe that from nothing you can get something. So nothing from nothing.
01:10:29 But randomness, you cannot create it out of nothing, but what you could do
01:10:35 is that it can be expanded. In other words, if you give me somehow 300 random bits,
01:10:41 truly random bits, then I can give you 300,000, 300 million, 300 trillions, 300 quadrillions,
01:10:48 as many as you want random bits, so that even though I tell you the recipe by which I produce
01:10:55 these bits, but I don’t tell you the initial 300 random numbers, I keep them secret, and you see
01:11:02 all the bits I produced so far, if you were to bet, given all the bits produced so far,
01:11:09 what is the next bit in my sequence? Better than 50, 50. Of course, 50, 50, anybody can guess.
01:11:15 But to be inferring something, you have to be a bit better. Then the effort to do this extra bit
01:11:23 is so enormous that is de facto random. So that is a pseudo random generator, are these
01:11:29 expanders of secret randomness, which goes extremely fast. Okay, that said, what is that?
01:11:37 Expanders of secret randomness, beautifully put. Okay, so every time somebody, if you’re a
01:11:43 programmer, is using a function that’s not called pseudo random, it’s called random usually,
01:11:49 you know, these programming languages, and it’s generating different, that’s essentially
01:11:54 expanding the secret randomness. But they should. In the past, actually, most of the library,
01:12:00 they used something pre modern cryptography, unfortunately. They would be better served
01:12:07 with 300 real seed random number, and then expand them properly, as we know now.
01:12:18 But that has been a very old idea. In fact, one of the best philosophers have debated
01:12:27 whether the world was deterministic or probabilistic. Very big questions, right?
01:12:32 Does God play dice?
01:12:33 Exactly. Einstein says it does, it doesn’t. But in fact, now we have a language that even
01:12:40 at the Albert time was not around, but it was this complex theory of modern
01:12:45 complexity based cryptography. And now we know that if the universe has 300 random bits,
01:12:53 whether where is random or probabilistic or deterministic, it doesn’t matter,
01:12:58 because you can expand this initial seed of randomness forever in which all the experiments
01:13:04 you could do, all the inferences you could do, all the things you could do, they are,
01:13:08 you are not be able to distinguish them from truly random. So if you are not able to distinguish
01:13:14 truly random from this super duper pseudo randomness, are they really different things?
01:13:22 So many to become really philosophical. So for things to be different, but I don’t have
01:13:27 in my lifetime, in the lifetime of the universe, any method to set them aside,
01:13:32 well, I should be intellectually honest, say, well, pseudo random in this special
01:13:38 fraction is as good as random.
01:13:41 Do you think true randomness is possible? And what does that mean?
01:13:48 So practically speaking, exactly as you said, if you’re being honest,
01:13:52 that the pseudo randomness approaches true randomness pretty quickly.
01:13:58 But is it, maybe this is a philosophical question. Is there such a thing as true randomness?
01:14:05 Well, the answer is actually maybe, but if it exists, most probably it’s expensive to get.
01:14:14 And in any case, if I give you one of mine,
01:14:19 you will never tell them apart by any other shape, no matter how much you work on it.
01:14:26 So in some sense, if it exists or not, it really is a quote philosophical sense in the
01:14:33 colloquial way to say that we cannot somehow pin it down.
01:14:38 Do you ever, again, just to stay unphilosophical for a bit, for a brief moment,
01:14:43 do you ever think about free will and whether that exists because ultimately free will sort of
01:14:52 is this experience that we have, like we’re making choices, even though it appears that,
01:15:00 you know, the world is deterministic at the core. I mean, that’s against the debate,
01:15:05 but if it is in fact deterministic at the lowest possible level, at the physics level,
01:15:14 how do you make, if it is deterministic, how do you make sense of the difference between the
01:15:20 experience of us feeling like we’re making a choice and the whole thing being deterministic?
01:15:25 So first of all, let me give you a gut reaction to the question. And the gut reaction is that
01:15:30 it is important that we believe that there exists free will. And second of all, almost
01:15:41 by weird logic, if we believe it exists, then it does exist. Okay. So it’s very important for our
01:15:48 social apparatus, for our sense of ourselves that it exists. And the moment in which, you know,
01:15:55 we so want to, we almost conjure it up in existence. But again, I really feel that if
01:16:02 you look at some point, the space of free will seems to shrink. We realize how more and more,
01:16:11 how much of our, say, genetic apparatus dictates who we are, why we prefer certain things than
01:16:17 others, right, and why we react to noises of music. We really prefer poetry and everything
01:16:23 else. We may explain even all this. But at the end of the day, whether it exists in a
01:16:31 philosophical sense or not, it’s like randomness. If pseudo random is as good as random vis a vis
01:16:38 lifetime of the universe, our experience, then it doesn’t really matter.
01:16:42 Yeah. So, you know, we’re talking about randomness. I wonder if I can weave in
01:16:48 quantum mechanics for a brief moment. There’s a, you know, a lot of advancements on the quantum
01:16:55 computing side. So leveraging quantum mechanics to perform a new kind of computation, and there’s
01:17:02 concern of that being a threat to a lot of the basic assumptions that underlie cryptography.
01:17:10 What do you think? Do you think quantum computing will challenge a lot of cryptography? Will
01:17:16 cryptography be able to defend all those kinds of things?
01:17:20 Okay, great. So first of all, for the record, and not because I think it matters, but it’s
01:17:25 important to set the record, there are people who continue to contend that quantum mechanics exist,
01:17:32 but that’s nothing to do with computing. It’s not going to accelerate it, at least, you know,
01:17:37 very basic, you know, hard computation. That is a belief that you cannot take it out. I’m a little
01:17:45 bit more agnostic about it, but I really believe, going back to whatever I said about the one way
01:17:52 function. So one way function, what is it? That is a cryptography. So does quantum computing
01:17:58 challenge the one way function? Essentially, you can boil it down to does quantum computing
01:18:04 challenge the one way function. What is one way function? Easy in one direction, hard in the other.
01:18:09 Okay, but if quantum computing exists, when you define what it is easy, it’s not easy by a classical
01:18:16 computer and hard by a classical computer, but easy for a quantum computer, that’s a bad idea.
01:18:22 But once easy means it should be easy for a quantum and hard for also quantum. Then you can
01:18:30 see that you are, yes, it’s a challenge, but you have hope because you can absorb if one computing
01:18:36 really realizes and becomes available according to the promises, then you can use them also for the
01:18:44 easy part. And once you use it from the easy part, the choices that you have a one way function,
01:18:50 they multiply. So, okay, so they particularly candidates of one way function, they not only
01:18:57 candidates of one way function, they not be one way anymore, but quantum one way function may
01:19:06 continue to exist. And so I really believe that for life to be meaningful, this one way function
01:19:18 had to exist. Because just imagine that anything that is becomes easy to do. I mean, what kind of
01:19:28 life is it? I mean, so you need that. And if something is hard, but it’s so hard to generate,
01:19:35 you’ll never find something which is hard for you. You want to that there is abundance,
01:19:39 that is easy to produce hard problem. That’s my opinion is why life is interesting,
01:19:44 because pop up really, really speed. So in some sense, I almost think that I do hope they exist
01:19:54 if they don’t exist, somehow life is way less interesting than it actually is.
01:19:59 Yeah, it does. That’s funny. It does seem like the one way function is fundamental to all of life,
01:20:05 which is the emergence of the complexity that we see around us seem to require the one way function.
01:20:12 I don’t know if you play with cellular automata. That’s just another formulation of.
01:20:18 I know, but it’s very simple.
01:20:22 It’s almost a very simple illustration of starting out with simple rules in one way,
01:20:29 being able to generate incredible amounts of complexity. But then you ask the question,
01:20:34 can I reverse that? And it’s just surprising how difficult it is to reverse that. It’s surprising,
01:20:44 even in constrained situations, it’s very difficult to prove anything that it almost,
01:20:52 I mean, the sad thing about it. Well, I don’t know if it’s sad, but it seems like we don’t
01:20:58 even have the mathematical tools to reverse engineer stuff. I don’t know if they exist or not,
01:21:04 but in the space of cellular automata, where you start with something simple and you create
01:21:08 something incredibly complex, can you take something, a small picture of that complex
01:21:14 and reverse engineer? That’s kind of what we’re doing as scientists here. You’re seeing the result
01:21:19 of the complexity and you’re trying to come up with some universal law that generate all of this.
01:21:24 What is the theory of everything? What are the basic physics laws that generated this whole
01:21:29 thing? And there’s a hope that you should be able to do that, but it gets, it’s difficult.
01:21:35 Yeah. But there is also some poetry on the fact that it’s difficult because it gives us some
01:21:40 mystery to life, without which, I mean, it’s not so fun. Life is no business fun.
01:21:48 Can we talk about interactive proofs a little bit and zero knowledge proofs? What are those?
01:21:52 What are those? How do they work?
01:21:55 So interactive proof actually is a modern realization and conceptualization of something
01:22:06 that we knew was true, that is easy to go to lecture. In fact, that’s my motivation.
01:22:12 We invented schools to go to lecture. We don’t say, oh, I’m the minister of education. I published
01:22:17 this book. You read it. This is book for this year, this book for this year. We spend a lot
01:22:24 of our treasury in educating our kids and in person, educating, go to class, interact with
01:22:31 teacher, on the blackboard and chalk on my time. Now we can have a whiteboard and presumably you’re
01:22:37 going to have actually this magic pens and a display instead. But the idea is that interactively
01:22:46 you can convey truth much more efficiently. We knew this psychologically. It’s better to
01:22:53 hear an explanation than just to belabor some paper. Same thing. So interactive proofs is a
01:23:00 way to do the following. Rather than doing some complicated, very long papers and possibly
01:23:06 infinitely long proofs, exponentially long proofs, you say the following. If this theorem is true,
01:23:12 there is a game that is associated to the theorem. If the theorem is true, this game,
01:23:19 I have a winning strategy that I can win half of the time, no matter what you do.
01:23:26 So then you say, well, is the theorem true? You believe me. Why should I believe you? Okay,
01:23:30 let’s play. If I prove that I have a strategy and I win the first time and I win the second time,
01:23:38 then I lose a third time. But I win more than half of the time, or I win, say, all the time
01:23:45 if the theorem is true, and at least at most half of the time if the theorem is false, you
01:23:50 statistically get convinced. You can verify this quickly. And therefore, when the game typically
01:23:59 is extremely fast, so you generate a miniature game in which if the theorem is true, I win all
01:24:06 the time, and if the theorem is false, I can win at most half of the time. And if I win, win, win,
01:24:12 win, win, win, win, win, you can deduce either the theorem is true, which most probably is my
01:24:16 case of the week, or I’ve been very, very unlucky because it’s like if I had 100 coin tosses and I
01:24:25 got 100 heads. Very improbable. So that is a way. And so this transformation from the formal
01:24:33 statement of a proof into a game that can be quickly played, and you can draw statistics
01:24:41 how many times you win, is one of a big conquest of modern complexity theory. And in fact,
01:24:50 actually has highlighted the notion of a proof as it really gives us a new insight of what to
01:24:57 be true means and what truth is and what proofs are. So these are legitimately proofs. So what
01:25:05 kind of mysteries can it allow us to unlock and prove? You said truth. So what does it allow us?
01:25:17 What kind of truth does that allow us to arrive at? So it enlarges the realm of what is provable
01:25:24 because in some sense of the classical way of proving things was extremely
01:25:31 inefficient from the verifier point of view. Yes.
01:25:34 Right. And so therefore, there is so much proof that you can take. But in this way,
01:25:41 you can actually very quickly, in minutes, verify something that is the correctness of an assertion
01:25:49 that otherwise would have taken a lifetime to belabor and check all the passages of a very,
01:25:56 very, very long proof. And you better check all of them because if you don’t check one line,
01:26:02 an error can be in that line. And so you have to go linearly through all the stuff rather than
01:26:08 bypass this. So you enlarge a tremendous amount what the proof is. And in addition,
01:26:13 once you have the idea that essentially a proof system is something that
01:26:22 allows me to convince you of a true statement, but does not allow me to convince you of a false
01:26:28 statement, and that at the end is proof. Proof can be beautiful, should be elegant,
01:26:35 but at the end is true or false. It is possible to prove the truth and it should be impossible
01:26:43 or statistically extremely hard to prove something false. And if you do this, you can prove way,
01:26:49 way more once you understand this. And on top of it, we got some insight like in this zero
01:26:56 knowledge proofs that is in something which you took for granted where the same knowledge
01:27:04 and verification are actually separate concepts. So you can verify that an assertion is correct
01:27:11 without having any idea why this is so. And so people failed to say, if you want to verify
01:27:18 something, you have to have the proof. Once you have the proof, you know why it’s true,
01:27:22 you have the proof itself. So somehow you can totally differentiate knowledge and verification
01:27:33 validity. So totally, you can decide if something is true and still have no idea.
01:27:37 Is there a good example in your mind?
01:27:38 Oh, actually, you know, at the beginning, we labored to find the first zero knowledge proof.
01:27:47 Then we found a second, then we found a third. And then a few years later, actually, we proved
01:27:53 a theorem which essentially says every theorem, no matter what about, can be explained in a zero
01:28:01 knowledge way. So it’s not a class of theorem, but all theorems. And it’s a very powerful thing. So
01:28:10 we were really, for thousands of years, bought this identity between knowledge and verification
01:28:18 had to be hand in hand together, and for no reason at all. I mean, we had to develop a
01:28:23 way of technology. As you know, I’m very big on technology because it makes us more human
01:28:28 and make us understand more things than before. And I think that’s a good thing.
01:28:37 So this interactive proof process, there’s power in games.
01:28:43 Yes.
01:28:43 And you’ve recently gotten into, recently, I’m not sure you can correct me, mechanism design.
01:28:50 Yeah.
01:28:50 So first of all, maybe you can explain what mechanism design is and the fascinating
01:28:58 space of playing with games and designing games.
01:29:03 Mechanism design is that you want a certain behavior to arise. If you want to organize
01:29:11 a societal structure or something, you want to have some orderly behavior to arise because
01:29:17 it is important for your goals. But you know that people, they don’t care what my goals are.
01:29:26 They care about maximizing their utility. So put it crassly, making money. The more money,
01:29:32 the better, so to speak. I’m exaggerating.
01:29:36 Self interest in whatever way then.
01:29:39 So what you want to do is, ideally, what you want to do is to design a game so that
01:29:48 while people play it, so to maximize their self interest, they achieve the social goal
01:29:56 and behavior that I want. That is really the best type of thing. And it is a very
01:30:03 hard science and art to design these games. And it challenges us to actually come up with
01:30:18 solution concepts for a way to analyzing the games that need to be broader. And I think
01:30:25 game theory has developed a bunch of very compelling ways to analyze the game,
01:30:32 that if the game has the best property, you can have a pretty good guarantee that it’s going to
01:30:37 be played in a given way. But as it turns out, and not surprisingly, these tools have a range
01:30:45 of action like anything else. All these so called the technical resolution concept,
01:30:50 the way to analyze the game, like dominant strategy equilibrium, if something comes to mind,
01:30:54 would be very meaningful. But as a limited power, in some sense, the games that can be
01:31:03 admit to such a way to be analyzed.
01:31:05 There’s a very specific kind of games and the rules are set, the constraints are set,
01:31:09 the utilities are all set.
01:31:11 Yes. So if you want to reason, if there is a way, say, that you can analyze a restricted
01:31:19 class of games this way, but most games don’t fall into this restricted class, then what do I do?
01:31:26 When you need to enlarge a way what a rational player can do. So for instance, in my opinion,
01:31:35 at least in some of my, I played with this for a few years, and I was doing some exoteric things,
01:31:44 I’m sure, in the space that was not exactly mainstream. And then I changed my interest in
01:31:51 blockchain. But what I’m saying for a while I was doing. So for instance, to me, is a way in which
01:31:58 I design the game, and you don’t have the best move for you. The best move is the move that is
01:32:04 best for you, no matter what the other players are doing. Sometimes a game doesn’t have that,
01:32:08 okay, it’s too much to ask. But I can design the game such that given the option in front of you
01:32:15 say, oh, these are really stupid for me, take them aside. But these, these are not stupid.
01:32:21 So if you design the game so that in any combination of non stupid things that the player
01:32:27 can do, I achieve what I want, I’m done. I don’t care to find the very unique equilibrium. I don’t
01:32:36 give a damn. I want to say, well, as long as you don’t do stupid things, and nobody else does
01:32:41 stupid things, good social things outcome arise, I should be equally happy. And so I really believe
01:32:48 that this type of analysis is possible and has a bigger radius. So it reaches more games, more
01:33:01 classes or games. And after that, we have to enlarge it again. And it’s going to be, we’re
01:33:07 going to have fun because human behavior can be conceptualized in many ways. And it’s a long game.
01:33:16 It’s a long game. Do you have favorite games that you’re looking at now? I mean, I suppose
01:33:20 your work with blockchain and Algorand is a kind of game that you’re basically this mechanism
01:33:26 design, design the game such that it’s scalable, secure and decentralized, right? Yes. And very
01:33:34 often you have to say, and you must also design so that the incentives are, and tell you the truth,
01:33:43 whatever little I learned from my venture in mechanism design is that incentives are very
01:33:51 hard to design because people are very complex creatures. And so somehow the way we design
01:33:59 Algorand is a totally different way, essentially with no incentives, essentially. But technically
01:34:08 speaking, there is a notion that is actually believable, right? So that to say people want
01:34:16 to maximize their utility. Yes. Up to a point. Let me tell you. Assume that if you are honest,
01:34:25 you make a hundred bucks. But if you are dishonest, no matter how dishonest you are,
01:34:30 you can only make a hundred bucks and one cent. What are you going to be? I’m saying,
01:34:35 you know what? Technically speaking, even that one cent, nobody bothers and say,
01:34:42 how much am I going to make by honest? A hundred. If I’m devious and if I’m a criminal,
01:34:46 100 bucks and one cent, you know, I might as well be honest. Okay. So that essentially is called,
01:34:51 you know, Epsilon utility equilibrium, but I think it’s good. And that’s what we design
01:35:00 essentially means that, you know, having no incentives is actually a good thing because
01:35:07 prevent people from reasoning, how else are you going to gain the system? But why can we achieve
01:35:13 an algorithm to have no incentives and in Bitcoin instead, you have to pay the miners because they
01:35:18 do a tremendous amount of work. Because if you have to do a lot of work, then you demand to be
01:35:26 paid accordingly. Because you, right? But if I’m going to say you have to add two and two equal
01:35:31 to four, how much you want me to pay for this? If you don’t give me this, I don’t add the two
01:35:35 and two. I would say you can add two and two in your sleep. You don’t need to be paid to add the
01:35:40 two and two. So the idea is that if we make the system so efficient, so that generating the next
01:35:46 block is so damn simple, it doesn’t hit the universe, let alone my computer, let alone
01:35:52 take some microsecond of computation, I might as well not being received incentives for doing that
01:35:59 and try to incentivize some other part of the system, but not to the main consensus,
01:36:03 which is a mechanism for generating and adding block to the chain.
01:36:08 Since you’re Italian, Sicilian, I also heard rumors that you are a connoisseur of food.
01:36:19 If I said today’s the last day you get to be alive, you shouldn’t have trusted me.
01:36:26 You never know with a Russian whether you’re going to make it out or not. Well, if you had
01:36:29 one last meal, you can travel somewhere in the world. Either you make it or somebody else makes
01:36:36 it. What’s that going to look like? All right. If it’s one last meal, I must say in this era of
01:36:44 COVID, I have not been able to see my mom. My mom was a fantastic chef and had this very
01:36:56 traditional food. As you know, the very traditional food are great for a reason,
01:37:00 because they survived hundreds of years of culinary innovation. There is one very laborious
01:37:08 thing, which is, you heard the name, which is parmigiana, but to do it is a piece of
01:37:16 art. So many hours that only my mom could do it. If we have one last meal, I want a parmigiana.
01:37:22 Okay. What’s the laborious process? Is it the ingredients? Is it the actual process?
01:37:31 Is it the atmosphere and the humans involved?
01:37:36 The latter. The ingredient like in any other, in the Italian cuisine, believes in very few
01:37:45 ingredients. If you take say quintessential Italian recipe, spaghetti pesto. Pesto is olive oil,
01:37:56 very good extra virgin olive oil, basil, pine nuts, pepper, clove of garlic, not too much,
01:38:06 otherwise you overpower everything. And then to do either two schools of thought, parmesan or pecorino
01:38:15 or a mix of the two. I mentioned six ingredients. That is typical Italian. I understand that there
01:38:22 are other cuisines, for instance, a French cuisine, which is extremely sophisticated
01:38:26 and extremely combinatorial, or some Chinese cuisine, which has a lot of many more ingredients
01:38:33 than this. And yet the art is to put them together a lot of things. In Italy is really the striving
01:38:40 for simplicity, yet to find few ingredients, but the right ingredients to create something.
01:38:45 So in parmigiana, the ingredients are eggplants, tomatoes, basil, but how to put them together
01:38:54 and the process is an act of love, labor and love. You can spend the entire day,
01:39:04 I’m not exaggerating, but the entire morning for sure to do it properly.
01:39:09 Yeah, as a Japanese cuisine too, there’s a mastery to the simplicity with the sushi. I don’t know
01:39:14 if you’ve seen Giorgio’s of sushi, but there’s a mastery to that that’s propagated through the
01:39:19 generations. It’s fascinating. You know, people love it when I ask about books. I don’t know
01:39:26 if books, whether fiction, nonfiction, technical or completely non technical had an impact on your
01:39:32 life throughout. If there’s anything you would recommend or even just mention as something that
01:39:37 gave you an insight or moved you in some way. So, okay. So I don’t know if I can comment because
01:39:45 in some sense you almost had to be Italian or to be such a scholar, but being Italian,
01:39:51 one thing that really impressed me tremendously is the Divine Comedy. It is a medieval poem,
01:39:59 a very long poem divided in three parts, hell, purgatory and paradise. Okay. And that is the
01:40:07 non trivial story of a middle man gets into a crisis, personal crisis. And then out of this
01:40:19 crisis he purifies, makes a catastrophe, purifies himself more and more and more until he’s become
01:40:28 capable of actually meeting God. Okay. And that is actually a complex story. So you have to get
01:40:35 some very sophisticated language, maybe Latin at that point. We are talking about 1200s Italy,
01:40:45 in Florence. And this guy instead, he chose his own dialect, not spoken outside his own immediate
01:40:52 circle, a Florentine dialect. Actually, Dante really made Italian, Italian. How can you express
01:41:01 such a sophisticated thing? And then the point is that these words that nobody actually knew
01:41:10 because they were essentially dialect and plus a bunch of very intricate rhymes in which they had
01:41:16 to rhyme with things. And it turns out that by getting meaning from the things that rhyme,
01:41:23 you essentially guess what the word means and you invent Italian and you communicate
01:41:29 it by almost osmosis what you want. It’s a miracle of communication. In a dialect,
01:41:35 a very poor language, very unsophisticated to express very sophisticated situation.
01:41:41 I love it. People love it, Italians and not Italian. But what I got of it is that very often
01:41:52 limitations are our strength. Because if you limit yourself at a very poor language,
01:41:58 somehow you get out of it and you achieve even better form of communication using a hyper
01:42:04 sophisticated literary language with lots of resonance from the prior books so that you can
01:42:08 actually instantaneously quote. He couldn’t quote anything because nothing was written in Italian
01:42:13 before him. So I really felt that limitations are our strength. And I think that rather than
01:42:21 complaining about the limitations, we should embrace them because if we embrace our limitation,
01:42:29 limited as we are, we find very creative solutions that people with less limitation we have,
01:42:36 we would not even think about it. So limitations are kind of superpower if you choose to see it
01:42:41 that way. Since you speak both languages, is there something that’s lost in translation to you? Is
01:42:49 there something you can express in Italian that you can’t in English and vice versa maybe? Is
01:42:55 there something you could say to the musicality of the language? I mean, I’ve been to Italy a few
01:43:00 times and I’m not sure if it’s the actual words, but the people are certainly very, there’s body
01:43:09 language too. There’s just the whole being is language. So I don’t know if you miss some of that
01:43:16 when you’re speaking English in this country. Yes. In fact, actually, certainly I miss it.
01:43:25 And somehow it was a sacrifice that I made consciously by the time I arrived. I knew that
01:43:33 this, I was not going to express myself at that level. And it was actually a sacrifice because
01:43:40 given to you also your mother tongue is Russian. So you know that you can be very expressive in
01:43:47 your mother tongue and not very expressive in a new tongue, a new language. And then what people
01:43:53 think of you in the new language, because when the precise of expression of things, it generates,
01:43:59 it shows elegance or it shows knowledge or it shows as a census or it shows as a caste or
01:44:08 education, whatever it is. So all of a sudden I found myself on the bottom.
01:44:14 So I had to fight all my way up, back up. But what I’m saying, their limitations are actually
01:44:22 our strength. In fact, it’s a trick to limit yourself to exceed. And there are examples in
01:44:30 history. If you think about Hernan Cortes, he goes to invade Mexico. He has what, a few hundred
01:44:38 people with him and he has a hundred thousand people in arms on the other side. First thing he
01:44:44 does, he limits himself. He sinks his own ship. There is no return. And at that point he actually
01:44:53 manages. That’s really profound. I actually, first of all, this inspiring to me, I feel like I have
01:45:01 quite a few limitations, but more practically on the Russian side, I’m going to try to do a couple
01:45:07 of really big and really tough interviews in Russian. Once COVID lifts a little bit, I’m
01:45:13 traveling to Russia and I’ll keep your advice in mind that the limitations is a kind of superpower.
01:45:21 We should use it to our advantage because you do feel less, like you’re not able to convey
01:45:28 your wisdom in the Russian language. Cause I moved here when I was 13. So you don’t,
01:45:35 the parts of life you live under a certain language are the parts of life you’re able
01:45:40 to communicate. I became a thoughtful, deeply thoughtful human in English.
01:45:48 But the pain from World War II, the music of the people that was instilled with me in Russian.
01:45:56 So I can carry both of those and there’s limitations in both. I can’t say philosophically
01:46:01 profound stuff in Russian, but I can’t in English express like that melancholy feeling
01:46:08 of like the people. And so combining those two, I’ll somehow.
01:46:11 Oh, beautifully said. Thanks for sharing. This is great. Yes. I totally understand you. Yes.
01:46:18 You’ve accomplished some incredible things in the space of science, in the space of
01:46:26 technology, in the space of theory and engineering. Do you have advice for somebody young,
01:46:33 an undergraduate student, somebody in high school or anyone who just feels young
01:46:37 about life or about career, about making their way in this world?
01:46:43 So I was telling before that I believe in emotion and my thing is to be true to your
01:46:51 own emotion. And that I think that if you do that, you’re doing well because it’s a life well spent
01:46:59 and you are going never tire because you want to solve all these emotional knots that
01:47:05 always intrigued you from the beginning. And I really believe that to live meaningfully,
01:47:13 creatively, and yet to live your emotional life. So I really believe that whether you’re a scientist
01:47:20 or an artist even more, but a scientist, I think of them as artists as well. If you are a human
01:47:25 being, so you are really to live fully your emotions and to the extent possible, sometimes
01:47:31 emotions can be overbearing and my advice is try to express them with more and more confident.
01:47:39 Sometimes it’s hard, but you are going to be much more fulfilled than by suppressing them.
01:47:45 What about love? One of the big ones. What role does that play?
01:47:50 That’s the bigger part of emotions. It’s a scary thing. It’s a lot of vulnerability that comes
01:47:58 with love, but there is also so much energy and power and love in all senses and in the traditional
01:48:10 sense, but also in the sense of a broader sense for humanity, this feeling, this compassion that
01:48:20 makes us one with other people and the suffering of other people. All of this is very scary stuff,
01:48:28 but it’s really the fabric of life. Well, the sad thing is it really hurts to lose it.
01:48:38 Yes, that’s why the vulnerability comes with it. That’s the thing about emotion is
01:48:43 the up and the down and the down seems to come always with up, but the up only comes with the
01:48:51 down. Let me ask you about the ultimate down, which is unfortunately we humans are mortal
01:49:02 or appear to be for the most part. Do you think about your own mortality? Do you fear death?
01:49:11 I hope so. Without death, there is no life. At least there is no meaningful life. Death is
01:49:19 actually in some sense our ultimate motivator to live a beautiful and meaningful life. I myself
01:49:26 felt as a young man that unless I got something that I wanted to do, I don’t know why I got this
01:49:33 idea of something to say. If I’m not able to say, I would suicide. Maybe it was a way to motivate
01:49:39 myself, but you don’t need to motivate it because in some sense, unfortunately, death is there.
01:49:44 So you better get up and do your thing because that is the best motivation to live fully.
01:49:56 Well, what do you hope your legacy is?
01:50:05 You mentioned you have two kids.
01:50:06 Yes. I really feel that on one side is my biological legacy and that is my two kids
01:50:21 and their kids, hopefully. That is one side. The other thing is this common enterprise,
01:50:31 which is society. I really feel that my legacy would be better by providing security and privacy.
01:50:42 Actually, for me, it’s metaphorical to say I want to give you the ability to interact more and take
01:50:48 more risks and reach out more for more people as difficult and dangerous as it may seem.
01:50:55 But my whole scientific work is about to guarantee privacy and give you the security
01:51:02 of interaction. Not only in a transaction, like it would be a blockchain transaction, but
01:51:09 that is really one of the hardcore of my emotional problems. I think that these are
01:51:17 the problems I want to tackle. Ultimately, privacy and security is freedom.
01:51:22 Freedom is at the core of this. It’s dangerous. It’s like the emotion thing,
01:51:30 but ultimately, that’s how we create all the beautiful things around us. Do you think there’s
01:51:34 meaning to it all, this life, except the urgency that death provides and us anxious
01:51:43 beings create cool stuff along the way? Is there a deeper meaning? If it is, what is it?
01:51:48 Well, meaning of life. Actually, there are three meanings of life.
01:51:53 Great.
01:51:54 That’s great. One, to seek. Two, to seek. And three, to seek.
01:52:01 To seek what? Or is there no answer to that?
01:52:04 There’s no answer to that. I really think that the journey is more important than the destination,
01:52:10 whatever that be. I think that is a journey and is, in my opinion, at the end of the day,
01:52:19 I must admit, meaningful in itself. We must admit that maybe whatever your destination might be,
01:52:30 at the end, we may never get there, but hell was a great ride towards it.
01:52:37 Well, I don’t think there’s a better way to end this, Silvio. Thank you for wasting your extremely
01:52:43 valuable time with me today, joining on this journey of seeking something together. We found
01:52:50 nothing, but it was very fun. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for talking to us.
01:52:54 Thank you, Alex. It’s been really special for me to be interviewed by you.
01:53:00 Thank you for listening to this conversation with Silvio McCauley,
01:53:03 and thank you to our sponsors, Athletic Greens Nutrition Drink, the Information In Depth
01:53:09 Tech Journalism website, Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee, and BetterHelp Online Therapy. Click the
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01:53:22 some words from Henry David Thoreau. Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.
01:53:28 Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.