Something You Should Know - How Old Will You Get To Be? & Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Explained Simply

Episode Date: December 9, 2021

Have you heard of “touch starvation”? It’s a real thing that happens when you don’t have the skin-to-skin physical contact with others that you need or that you are used to. This episode begins with a brief discussion about how the pandemic has deprived people of touch and why we need to be aware of it. https://www.webmd.com/balance/touch-starvation What can you do to live as long a life as possible? That is what biologist and science writer Andrew Steele set out to discover. And what he found is amazing. Andrew is author of the book Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old (https://amzn.to/3pAtIxx) and he joins me to explain the very latest on what we can all do to improve our chances of living much longer and staying healthier in those later years. He also describes some of the fascinating research that may result in treatments in our lifetime so we can all live even longer. If you haven’t checked your tire pressure in a while, now is the time to do it since the weather has gotten colder. Listen as I explain why the weather makes a difference. https://www.familyhandyman.com/article/ideal-tire-pressure-cold-weather/ You have heard of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, but do you understand what they are or what they are worth or who uses them and why? David Sacco is a Practitioner in Residence in the Finance program and serves as a full-time instructor in the Finance, Economics, Management and Entrepreneurship programs at the University of New Haven and he is here to help us all understand cryptocurrencies and what they mean to you.  PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! We really like The Jordan Harbinger Show! Check out https://jordanharbinger.com/start OR search for it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen!  Discover matches all the cash back you’ve earned at the end of your first year! Learn more at https://discover.com/match Find out how Justworks can help your business by going to https://justworks.com Visit https://ferguson.com for the best in all of your plumping supply needs! https://www.geico.com Bundle your policies and save! It's Geico easy! Download Best Fiends FREE today on the App Store or Google Play.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit betterhelp.com to learn more. That's BetterHelp.com. Today on Something You Should Know, are you getting touched enough? I'll reveal why that's so important. Then, the fascinating and unusual strategies that can really increase how long you live. I think my favorite of these is to brush your teeth.

What we've discovered is that people who have worse oral health actually have a higher risk of heart disease. There's maybe even a link with dementia because the bacteria that cause gum disease have been found in the brains of people who've got dementia. Also, why you need to check your tire pressure now that the weather is colder. And Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. What are they?

Who uses them? And where did they come from? If you think about why people started using these cryptocurrencies, right, go back 15, 20 years ago, and basically it was so that people could transact on the dark web doing illicit and illegal transactions and avoid government scrutiny. All this today on Something You Should Know. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey.

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Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Something that I've noticed that I haven't really heard a lot of people talk about is the fact that one of the consequences of living

through this pandemic has been that we touch each other a lot less. We don't shake hands, we don't hug each other, and it can lead to something called touch starvation. It's a condition that happens when you don't get as much physical contact as you're used to, or you don't get any at all. Human touch is a huge part of how humans interact with others. We shake hands, we high-five, we hug, we bond through physical touch. Your skin is the largest organ in the body, and it sends good and bad touch sensations to your brain. When you engage in pleasant touch like a hug,

your brain releases a hormone called oxytocin. This makes you feel good, and it firms up emotional and social bonds while lowering anxiety and fear. So for all these reasons, and probably a lot more, we need to find more ways to touch again. And that is something you should know. I bet there have been times when you have been alone with your thoughts and you have wondered to yourself,

I wonder how long I'll live. This happens often, I think, when someone close to you dies, especially a family member. I know some people believe that, hey, when your number's up, your number's up. And I guess to some extent that's true. But since, as the saying goes, all we really have is time, what can we do to prolong our time and live a happy and healthy life in the process? Well, as it turns out, there is a lot of really interesting research going on that I really think you want to hear about, because it goes way beyond the, you know, exercise, eat right, see your doctor, and that's about the best you can do.

Andrew Steele is a biologist, he is a science writer, he has his PhD in physics from Oxford, and he is author of a book called Ageless, in which he looks into the latest cutting-edge research on longevity. And he has found some really interesting stuff that could actually affect how long you live, because this new research could lead to treatments in our lifetime to extend our lifetime, which is pretty cool. Hey, Andrew, welcome. Hello, thanks for having me. So define what you mean by aging. And first of all, I've always had trouble with that term because it implies that you can stop time almost and that, you know, people get old. I mean,

that's what people do. My car gets old, the trees get old, everything gets old. So what are we talking about in your view when we talk about aging? I mean, that's exactly right. And I think one of the big challenges that I've overcome is to explode people's conventional wisdom about what aging is. But what I mean by aging as a biologist, actually the simplest definition isn't a biological definition at all, it's a statistical one. And it's simply how fast your risk of death increases with time. As a human, our rate of aging as a species is that our risk of death doubles about every eight years. So let's try and put that into some kind of context. I'm 36, and that means my

odds of death this year are about one in a thousand. And actually, you know, I quite like those odds. If that were to continue for the rest of my life, I'd live into my thousand and thirties on average. But of course, that isn't what happens. My risk of death will carry on doubling every eight years. And so that means if there are no advances in medical science between now and me, you know, fingers crossed, making it into my nineties, my odds of death by then will be one in six per year, life and death at the roll of a dice. And so, you know, as a biologist, you look at this and there's this exponentially increasing risk of death with time. that is the problem that we call aging. I was surprised when you said that your chance of death at age 36 is one in a thousand. That actually seems high to me. So one out of every thousand 36-year-olds will die this year?

Yeah, I guess you've got to look at that as 0.1%. And actually most of that, when you're my age, is still down to external things. We call them extrinsic forms of mortality biologically. So that's things like car accidents and unfortunately suicide is a really big cause of death for men at my age as well. So it's not generally the sort of cancers and the heart disease and that sort of stuff that you associate with older age. It's the external causes of death. And then obviously as you get older, the risk of diseases increases and starts to swamp those external causes. And as you get older, as you say, your risk of death goes up exponentially. But at the end of the day, I mean, everything gets older.

My car gets older. You know, the trees outside get older. And eventually my car breaks down. One day the trees will die. One day I will die. Everything gets older and goes away. Well, this is the fascinating thing, because obviously that happens to cars. It happens to machines. It happens to our pets. It happens to our farm animals. You can easily imagine that aging is a universal process. But actually, this just isn't the case, because we've got a huge

advantage as biological organisms. We can repair ourselves. If we didn't have these incredibly intricate mechanisms of repair that are buzzing away inside of ourselves every single hour of every single day, all the time, you know, correcting mistakes, disposing of rubbish, that kind of thing, we would die an awful lot sooner than we actually do. And in fact, there are some animals that have got so good at repairing themselves that their risk of death doesn't change with time. That's a phenomenon that in biology we call negligible senescence so negligible just meaning you know not much and senescence is just the biological term for growing old so the reason there's a tortoise on the cover of my book is because

that is a negligibly senescent animal it's an animal whose risk of death stays constant when it becomes an adult and that means that they can live an incredibly long time but most importantly it's not just their risk of death that stays constant. They also don't have any increase in frailty as they get older. They stay reproductively active no matter how old they are. That means that they grow older, but without growing old in the way that we humans do. And so I hope that by understanding the biology of aging, we can try and transfer some of that wisdom and some of those sort of biological techniques to keep us sprightly into our old age too. And the goal is what? Because one day your day will come. I mean, you can't put off death forever. So is the goal just to put it off as long as possible, put it off as long as

possible and be healthy? What is it that we're trying to accomplish with all of this? The goal is definitely health. And I think that you've got to think about what actually kills you. Although decades ago, it was permissible for doctors to write death by old age on an older person's death certificate. Now we understand that you can't just die of old age. You die of heart disease. You die of cancer.

You die of dementia. One of these diseases that are much more likely as you get older, and these diseases too get exponentially more likely as you increase in age, that's something that eventually becomes severe enough to take your life. And so, you know, it's very much the pain, the suffering, all of these things together that we want to try and get rid of. And actually, it's a really good way of thinking about it, is to think about a lot of modern medicine seeks to treat individual diseases. But even if we had, hypothetically, a complete success treating an individual disease and let's take the example imagine that you know we cured cancer tomorrow that would only add about three years to human life expectancy and that's because you know if

you avoid getting cancer you've probably already got a bit of heart disease or diabetes or you know dementia starting you know waiting in the wings to kill you as you get older and so that means that it doesn't make you healthier for much longer whereas by treating treating the aging process, the thing that causes all of these diseases, we can potentially defer those diseases, maybe even prevent them entirely, and create a lot more healthy years for people. And isn't the prescription for doing that just lead what we've been taught is a healthy lifestyle to eat well, sleep well? Isn't that the prescription? These are all good ideas, and they're definitely something

that I would encourage people to do. But the fact is we can go beyond this with medicine. And I think the best way to explain this is with an example. One of the biological processes behind aging is the accumulation of aged senescent, there's that word again, senescent cells. And they build up in our bodies as we get older.

And we know that they're responsible for a whole range of age-related diseases. And we've also got drugs that can kill those senescent cells while leaving the rest of the cells in the body intact so we've done experiments using these drugs on mice and we wait wait till the mice get to about 24 months old now mice obviously have a much shorter lifespan than humans so that's something equivalent to about 70 in human years so that means we give these old mice the drugs it clears out those aged cells and we find is that the mice basically get biologically younger. They live a bit longer, which is a good thing, but they're not just sort of stumbling along

in ill health, unable to muster the energy even to die. They're healthier, they get less cancer, they get less heart disease, they get fewer cataracts. They're less frail, so they can run further and faster on the little mousy treadmills that they use in these experiments. They're more curious, so if you put a young mouse in a maze it's often very exploratory. It wants to sort of look around its new environment. An older mouse might be a bit more anxious, maybe just a bit lazier because it's a bit more frail. And by giving mice these senolytic drugs that kill the senescent cells, you restore some of that youthful curiosity. And finally, these animals, they just look great. I was a computational

biologist, so I never dealt with mice in the lab. And yet, if you look at a picture of one of these mice that's had these drugs, they've got better fur, they've got thicker, plumper skin, they just look fantastic. And so the point is, you know, you can't diet and exercise and live a good life to a healthy, you know, guaranteed healthy hundred years old. Whereas by using some of these drugs that could potentially slow down, maybe even reverse the aging process, we can allow ourselves to live longer and healthier than any current lifestyle intervention would allow. And so that would mean what to me? What would I be doing? Where do I go get these drugs? Well, we're going to have to wait for some of the clinical

trials to happen. So I'm very excited that these things are going to be here in time for all of us because they're already in human clinical trials. But at the moment, you know, mostly we're looking at results in mice and we've got the first tentative results starting to come out in humans. So hopefully in the next five or so years, we're going to have some of those answers. Do these drugs work in humans as well as they do in mice? And we can start thinking about taking them. What is the connection between how you look, how young you look, how healthy you look, and how you age internally? Is there any connection or those are two separate topics?

It actually is, yeah. There's a fascinating study that was done a few years ago where people were asked to rate the photographs of other people to guess how old they thought they were. And what they found was that people who looked older tended to have a greater risk of dying in the near future and a greater risk of contracting certain diseases. And actually what this really tells us

is that there is a sort of fundamental collection of underlying processes that are responsible not just for your internal aging, but for your external aging as well. And so someone who is wrinklier, someone whose hair is a bit grayer, they probably have older insides. The same processes are giving them an increased risk of cancer, an increased risk of heart disease. And so actually, although I very much hope we don't initially go after these cosmetic things, they're obviously less important. One researcher I spoke to said, you know, I'd far rather have improved, you know, strength and resilience in my arteries than in my skin. So, you know, they're not so worried about wrinkly skin, but wrinkly arteries effectively. I actually think we're going to solve quite a few of these cosmetic problems almost by accident,

because we'll go after the causes of these particular diseases. And then what will happen is those same processes are responsible for the wrinkles, the gray hair, all the external stuff. And so we might find that those things improve at the same time. What do we know about the things that people do in their life that are the worst? Whether it's drinking or stress or what are the things that are killing us slowly? The absolute top of my list, and this isn't going to come as a surprise to anybody listening, is smoking. It's so, so bad for your health. But what you actually find when you dig into health advice is something that's really, really encouraged me actually to, you know, make sure I am doing every single thing I possibly can to be that little bit healthier. And that's

because all these different things that were advised about, you know, trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle, most of them actually slow down the aging process itself. And I think a really good example of this is exercise. Because, you know, when you're sweating away, you know, on a run or something, it's really obvious your lungs are going, you can feel your heart beating in your chest, you know, your muscles are obviously doing an awful lot of exercise. You can see how that exercise is benefiting your muscles, it's strengthening them, it's benefiting your cardiovascular system. But actually, this process seems to slow down the aging process as a whole. So it's not just the heart disease that you're deferring by doing exercise. It also defers

quite a lot of kinds of cancer. There's even quite good evidence that can reduce the risk of getting dementia and neurodegeneration. And you just wouldn't necessarily think that working out on the treadmill or going for a bike ride or lifting weights is going to improve your cognitive health as you get older. But because these processes are all so interconnected, it just means that doing all of these bits of health advice can improve your health in so, so many different ways, not just the obvious ones. We're talking about longevity, what we can all do to live longer and healthier. And my guest is Andrew Steele, author of the book Ageless.

At Wealthsimple, we're built for whatever you're building. Built for Jane, who wants to break into the housing market. We're built for Ted, who's obsessed with what's happening in the global markets. And built for Celine, who just wants to retire and explore the world's flea markets. So take a moment and think about what you're building for. We've got the financial tools to help make it happen. Wealthsimple. Built for possibilities. Visit wealthsimple.com slash possibilities. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful

as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert, as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks, and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. So, Andrew, besides smoking being the obvious bad thing for your longevity and exercise being good for your longevity, what else is there? So some of the things are surprisingly obvious, you know, making sure you don't eat too much, smoking, exercise, that kind of thing, not drinking too much, getting enough sleep. But actually, the other thing that can happen is that by understanding the aging biology, you can uncover some slightly less conventional bits of health advice that are nonetheless really important. I think my favorite of these is to brush your teeth.

So we've begun to understand that a lot of the aging process is driven by a process called chronic inflammation. So let's unpack what that means. Inflammation is the process by which your immune system goes and fights off various threats. So it can fight off you know an infection or it could rush to the site of an injury to try and start the healing process. And when you're youthful, that process is often acute, i.e. it turns on very rapidly when it's needed and it turns off again once the immune system's done its job. But as we get older, this process can become sort of chronic. It can just be turned on a little tiny bit all the time, kind of a paranoia in your immune system. What's going on if you have poor oral health? Well, you've got bacteria in your mouth, they're infecting your gums, they might be decaying your teeth. And the reason that the

dentist has such a sort of comparatively primitive set of tools, they can yank out teeth, they can drill holes in them, is because your immune system never quite wins this battle. So there's this constant process of inflammation going on in your mouth. And what we've discovered is that people who have worse oral health actually have a higher risk of heart disease. There's maybe even a link with dementia because the bacteria that cause gum disease have been found in the brains of people who've got dementia. So again, it just seems like the whole body is this incredibly interconnected thing and keeping one part of it healthy can have huge effects on the whole aging process of every single part of it. I think people believe, and probably because we see evidence of it, that there is a bit of dice rolling in all of

this. That, you know, people get cancer very early for no apparent reason, or then there are other people who lead a rather unhealthy life and live to 105, and that perhaps genetics plays a big part in this. And actually, the genetic contribution to longevity is surprisingly small for people who live a normal length of time. So if your parents live to 70 or 80, you really shouldn't see that as a ceiling on your own lifespan. We think that genetics only contributes maybe somewhere between 5 and 20% of how long you can go on to live. But the one exception to this is the people who do live in exceptionally long times. So people who make it into their hundreds, centenarians. There seems to be a huge genetic component to this. In fact, if your parents are centenarians, or if you have a

centenarian parent, or if you have a sibling who makes it into their hundreds, you've got a 10 times greater chance of doing so yourself. And it really seems that the way in which these centenarians make it to these advanced ages is they just got protection from age-related disease. They really do just age slower than the rest of us. So if you look at studies of centenarians, they don't tend to be much healthier than the general population. They're still a little bit overweight. They often smoke. They often drink just as much as regular people do. But the fact is that they've got the genetics that keeps them effectively impervious to these bad lifestyle habits and allows them to live long enough anyway. So for most of us, the best advice is to carry on with this stuff because unfortunately we haven't got those

centenarian genes that are going to allow us to power through anyway. So for most of us, the best advice is to carry on with this stuff because unfortunately we haven't got those, you know, centenarian genes that are going to allow us to power through anyway. There is a ceiling though, as I've understood it when I've read about this is, you know, people are getting older on average, but the oldest of the oldest don't get a lot older. It's a really fascinating subject. And so the record for longevity is a hundred and twenty two years held by a French woman called Jeanne Carmont and she set that record in 1997 I think so what that means is that you know the current oldest person I think is a hundred and eighteen so even if they're going to go on to break that record it's not going to be for another few years which means she'll have she'll held on to that record for decades which is really quite incredible I think the fact

is that people who make it to these exceptionally old ages they're just just so rare that it's very, very hard for that record to be pushed back and back. But also I think you are right that, you know, with the current state of, you know, no matter how well you live, no matter what medical care you have access to, it's very, very unlikely with the current state of medicine that you're going to be able to live longer than that. The only way that you can stop your body falling apart on that schedule is to intervene in the aging process itself. Because as I sort of alluded to earlier, say you're 110 and you get cancer and we cure that cancer, there are still loads of other things wrong with your body that are going to probably take you out in the next few years.

Whereas if we could actually slow down aging, that would mean you could make it to 110 in a much healthier state, and that would completely change the game in terms of the limit on human longevity. But no matter how hard you try, I mean, the parts of the human body can't last forever. Eventually, they're just going to wear out. I mean, I think the best counter to that is just to look at these

negligibly senescent animals. I already mentioned tortoises have this property, but it's not just tortoises. There are actually loads of animals out there. So there are various kinds of fish are negligibly senescent. There's a salamander.

There's a tiny little water creature called a hydra. there's a bit closer to us on the evolutionary tree something called a naked mole rat which is a rodent a bit like a rat or a mouse but whereas mice live you know maybe two or three years in the lab naked mole rats live to 30 they seem to be almost immune to cancer they're almost immune to neurodegeneration but most importantly their risk of death is basically constant throughout their adult lives and And then they suddenly basically fall off a cliff when they get ill toward the very end of their lives. And so this isn't a biological impossibility. The fact is that we aren't cars. We've got these incredible self-repairing capacities inside ourselves. And if we can just learn how to augment those with medicine, there's no reason why we couldn't keep ourselves

going healthier for longer. But do you think that there's a lot of dice rolling going on here and that, well, you know the saying, when your number's up, your number's up. And that, so that people kind of throw caution to the wind and say, I'm just going to live my life because, you know, I could go to the gym, but then, you know, how many years am I spending at the gym to add, you know, how many years to my life. And that, so what I guess what I'm wondering is, are people doing themselves a disservice by believing in this when your number's up, your number's up? I think there is like a frustrating degree of randomness to this, because the fact is that, you know, in order to get cancer, you have to get something like an average of 10 mutations, and those mutations have to be in one particular cell. So say you've got

nine mutations in one of your cells right now, then, you know, it could just basically be luck whether you get that 10th one and whether that becomes a cancer. And then whether that cancer is spotted by your immune system is partly down to luck and whether that cancer then goes on to accumulate further mutations that allow it to spread throughout the body and cause serious disease that might go on to kill you. Again, all of these things are, you know, you can do things with diet and lifestyle, but at the end of the day, some people do die of cancer in their 30s. The most important thing to think about is, like you said earlier, it's like we were discussing earlier, the odds of death for someone in their 30s

are about one in a thousand a year, which is incredibly low. So if we can just get a little bit closer to that, then people could live much longer, healthier lives. And the reason that I'm particularly excited about trying to follow all this lifestyle advice now is because it means that if I can live a little bit longer, that gives scientists longer to perfect some of these treatments. And then by living longer with those treatments, that gives scientists longer still. So, you know, say, for example, I can keep myself good and healthy, you know, into my 60s, 70s, 80s. I'll be healthy enough to benefit from that first generation of

senolytic drugs that can remove those aged cells and increase my lifespan. I'll be able to benefit from other new treatments that are developed over the next few decades. And if that gives me more years of healthy life still, I can develop, sorry, I can benefit from whatever treatments are developed after that as well. So I think we're just living at this pivotal time where the longer you live, the more medical technology is going to be available.

So I think, yeah, to sort of neglect your own health at a time like this is doing yourself a huge disservice. Anything else about the way we're living or the things we're doing, anything else that really affects our longevity that maybe people don't realize? I think something that's been illustrated perhaps a bit more to us over the last year, but still hasn't necessarily entered the consciousness, is the importance of the prevention of infectious disease. And there's actually some quite good evidence that children who grew up in environments of lower infection, and obviously this really

started to transform in the first part of the 20th century with vaccines and antibiotics and improvements in hygiene, kids started to be able to grow up without this huge spectrum of childhood diseases. And what they found is that by looking back at this, they seem to age better as well. So it seems as though, you know, having less of that inflammation caused by disease throughout your life can improve your health in the longer term. And we also know there are certain cancers that are specifically caused by particular viruses, particular bacteria. So I think avoiding infectious disease, quite apart from avoiding the immediate misery of being ill, is a really good thing to do to try and, you know, extend your lifespan overall. One of the criticism, or not

criticism, but one of the complaints people have about this whole idea of longevity and increasing is, you know, you get the extra years, but you get them in your nineties and in your hundreds, it would have been so much better to get them in my thirties or my twenties when I was young and could enjoy them more. And that's exactly what really excites me about this actual anti-aging medicine, real anti-aging medicine. Because the fact is that if we did cure cancer, unfortunately, we tend to treat these diseases in silos. So you find a lump, you might go to your general practitioner, your general practitioner refers you to an oncologist,

that oncologist will give you chemotherapy, maybe operate on your tumour, etc, etc. All of this is really focused on getting rid of that cancer that single problem but actually you know you might have a host of other problems by the age that you're traditionally diagnosed with cancer you might have a bit of diabetes you might have a heart condition that's sort of nascent and not necessarily quite as advanced as the cancer yet you've got all these other problems brewing but the point is that by treating the aging process because we know that it's your risk of disease goes up exponentially with age if we can sort of flatten that curve we can reduce that

exponential increase of disease that can hit all of those diseases at the same time. It can reduce our risk of cancer, reduce our risk of heart disease, reduce our risk of dementia. And it's also really important to say that it's not just the diseases, it's the frailty, it's the cognitive decline, it's the incontinence, all of these things aren't necessarily going to actually take your life, but dramatically reduce the quality of it. All of these things are caused by the same biological processes. And so by intervening in these biological processes, we effectively will give you extra years, perhaps not in your 30s, depending on when you start taking the drugs. But if we can stretch out your 60s so they last 15 years and comparatively good health,

then that's going to be a massive improvement over the situation we have today. Yeah. Well, but in the situation we have today is a whole lot better than it was 100 to 300 years ago. We're living longer and living healthier. So it just keeps getting better. Andrew Steele has been my guest. And the name of his book is Ageless, the new science of getting older without getting old. And you will find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks for coming on, Andrew.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Cheers. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Andrew, thank you. great Gulf Coast weather. Visit FlyPorter.com and actually enjoy economy. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives,

and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for.

Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. I'm sure you've heard of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. I've heard them mentioned and talked about for a while now. And I'll be the first to admit, I don't really get it. I pay for things and people pay me in dollars. So why is there this other currency? And I don't understand where it is or how you mine for it. There's a lot about cryptocurrency I don't get.

And I think one of the reasons I don't get it and a lot of people don't get it is it's hard to grasp. So I have someone who can explain it so that I can understand it and also explain why it's important for all of us to understand it. David Sacco is a finance guy. He is a finance guy. He is a teacher at the University of New Haven College of Business Finance Department in New Haven, Connecticut. And as you start to listen to this conversation,

stick with it because it's going to take a few minutes for it to start to crystallize in your head as to what he's talking about and what cryptocurrency is and isn't. But at the end of this discussion, you will come away with a pretty decent understanding of what it's all about. Hi, David. Welcome. Michael, thanks for having me. So what's the best way to start to understand this whole idea of cryptocurrency? So I would say the best way to look at Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in

general for a novice, and again, the idea that they were experts on cryptocurrency is kind of interesting because it's so new, is to think of it as a form of digital gold. I teach economics here at the University of New Haven. And one of the things that we teach in macroeconomics is the definition of a currency. And a currency is basically, it has to meet three definitions. One, it has to be a store of wealth. It has to be a measure of accounting. And it also has to be something that people are comfortable transacting in. As far as I can tell, cryptocurrencies right now really only hold one of those definitions. They are a store of wealth, right? Their value isn't stable enough

that people are willing to transact in them. And what I mean by that is if I ask you how much something is worth or tell you what the cost of something is in dollars, that's something that you can easily visualize, right? If I tell you that a car costs a Bitcoin, that doesn't necessarily mean anything to you. So it's not quite yet, you know, a unit of commerce that we can use to transact where people easily know what the value is. But it has proven that it can store financial value, albeit in a very volatile way. And so whose currency is it? Because every currency that I can think of is backed by some governments, you know, the US.S. government prints dollars,

the English government prints pound notes. Who's behind Bitcoin and who's behind other cryptocurrencies? So good question. And the answer is nobody is. Now, I'd rephrase that. And you mentioned the U.S. dollar and the British pound, which at one point were actually backed by a certain amount of gold that you could buy. But in today's world, the reason we call them fiat currencies is that there really is no intrinsic value to the currency. Yes, you believe that the dollar has value, but that has less to do with who's backing it and more to do with the fact that you know that people are willing to accept dollars in exchange for the goods that you want to purchase. So even with national currencies and some of the big

currencies that you mentioned earlier, what really gives them value is not so much who's backing them, but the fact that we believe that people will accept them. And I think crypto is not obviously as widely accepted, obviously, as dollars and sterling, but it's starting to gain that acceptance. And the difference about crypto, as we've seen lately with inflation, national currencies, the value of national currencies can erode through inflation. And the reason that they typically erode is usually because of bad economic policies, either monetary policy or fiscal policies.

What intrigues me about crypto, and again, I'm not saying that this is going to happen, but it's possible that it could happen, is that because cryptos are not tethered to government, fiscal or monetary policies, they may provide some attractiveness for exactly that reason, that people don't have to worry about governments enacting poor economic policies that could devalue those currencies. But how did they start? They had to have started somewhere by somebody. You know, there's some I mean, some of the cryptocurrencies, for instance, Dogecoin literally started as a joke. Bitcoin was started out by someone who is still anonymous, who came up with the idea of using this blockchain technology, which basically allows you to create a digital identifier that essentially is unhackable, at least for now. And remember, the keys to

cryptocurrencies are the security that comes from the fact that they are basically unhackable and the fact that there's a dwindling or finite amount of them. So the person who created the Bitcoin algorithm, and again, at a very basic level, the way you mine Bitcoin is there's an algorithm where you set up a computer to solve mathematical problems. And the more work the computer does to solve those problems, you can generate Bitcoins doing that. Now, the way the algorithm was set up... Okay, so wait, hang on. So here's where you're losing me, because I don't know what you mean by it's not hackable.

And then when you talk about mining Bitcoin, I have no idea what that means and that's where i i that's really where i get lost on this okay so again at its simplest level the way you mine bitcoins is you have you you but i don't but i don't mine dollars so i don't know what you mean by mine bitcoins okay that's good good point and let me clarify that mining is what creates the bitcoins? Okay, that's a good point. And let me clarify that. Mining is what creates the bitcoins. Okay. So the US government controls the supply of currency by not actually printing money, but creating more dollars in the banking system. In the crypto world, the way these currencies, and again, they don't have to be mined, right? Someone could just create a cryptocurrency

with a certain fixed number of tokens is what they're called. And it would just depend on how much people thought those tokens were worth. In the case of Bitcoin, the idea was to create something that users could create using computing power. So it was a totally organic ecosystem, basically. So you set up your computer to calculate math problems and your reward for calculating those is getting Bitcoin. I'm not sure if you're familiar with anybody who plays like any of these online computer games, but a lot of these computer games essentially create tokens that you can earn based on your performance in the game. So in some ways, the mining of Bitcoin is a little

bit similar to that. Once these tokens are created, they exist in the Ether world forever. They're all identified by a very specific code, or you can keep them in a crypto vault, which basically only you have the access code to. And what I mean by it's unhackable is that, yes, if someone gets your access code to your crypto vault, they can go in and take them. But as long as you hold that information and don't share with anybody, there's no way for someone to hack into it. Now, think about how people can hack into accounts. They can try to attempt different passwords. The way crypto vaults work is after, I think it's 10 attempts, the crypto vault basically goes away. And as a result

of that, in fact, right now there's speculation that there's between $200 and $400 billion worth of Bitcoin alone that is lost forever. Now, the reason I say it's unhackable is think about this. If there was a way to hack into those cryptos vaults, there is a very large financial incentive for someone to be able to do that, right? There's essentially $200 to $400 billion worth of currency out there that someone could hack. Now, that doesn't mean that they're going to be unhackable forever, right? That's to me, the biggest risk of cryptocurrencies is a technological one. If somehow technology changes over the next few years, where it does become possible to hack them.

That would create a risk in terms of the value of Bitcoin. If the enthusiasm that people have right now for cryptocurrencies wanes, and we see it go up and down, right? I'm looking at a chart right now of Bitcoin throughout 2021. And right now, you know, Bitcoin is at about $58,000 or so of Bitcoin. You know, it started out the year in the high 20s. It went up to 60. It went back down to 25. And now it's back up at 60 again. So it's a very volatile asset. So I wouldn't recommend that people put their life savings in Bitcoin because it is a very volatile asset class. Why should anybody care about this? I don't know anybody that uses Bitcoin. I've never bought anything with Bitcoin. I never see prices expressed in Bitcoin. Who's using it for what and why should I care? So all true. And

in a country like the United States, where we have a well-developed economy and a very safe and secure currency, you're absolutely right. I think the only people in this country that should be concerned about it are people who are interested in speculating and risky assets. However, there are plenty of countries around the world that don't have very stable currencies. And if you live in a country that doesn't have a stable currency, you can get a lot of pain inflicted upon you when your currency gets devalued and inflation. And I don't mean the kind of inflation that we're seeing now. I'm talking about hyperinflation where the price of food goes up by so much that it impacts people's ability to feed their families. And if you think about places like Venezuela, certain places in South and Central America and other parts of the world that have very

unstable currencies, there could be some appeal to people in those nations in the sense that if the cryptocurrencies can establish over time that they are in fact more stable than that nation's home currency, that could create a lot of incentive. So I actually personally believe that a lot of demand for cryptocurrencies is going to come from places like that and less from big developed economic countries. So when you say that to mine cryptocurrency, to mine Bitcoin, your computer has to solve these mathematical problems, is this just a game that somebody's playing? Or does solving these mathematical problems do anything other than mine Bitcoin? No, I mean, the computer game analogy is a good one. They do

nothing but create these Bitcoins, which then you then own. And again, mining now has become, again, because the computing power and electricity needed to mine Bitcoins goes up exponentially, right? So, you know, 10 years ago, I could mine, I could have probably mined what's now worth millions of dollars of Bitcoin on my home computer. Now to do it, people have to create these basically mining farms where they have dozens of high powered computers that consume a tremendous amount of electricity. So, you know, I think the mining aspect of Bitcoin is kind of over and done with because it just, you know, it's hard to justify the value and the electricity usage so now it's become more it's this asset that's out there we know there's going to be only a finite amount of it and now people are just trading it based on that what they perceive the value to be

and again it's let me make it clear everything you're saying is entirely true and that there's nothing intrinsic behind any of these cryptocurrencies. It literally is your belief that someone else is going to be willing to pay something for it that gives it its value, which that's a hard concept for people to wrap their arms around. I'll be honest with you. A year ago, I was very much in that camp. And what's changed my mind is that now Bitcoin seems to be behaving a little bit like some other assets in the financial markets, like some of these stocks that don't really have a lot of intrinsic value in terms of the companies that are behind them, but for some reason are generating a lot of

investor interest. So I think people have heard of Bitcoin. That seems to be kind of the, you know, the acme of cryptocurrency. But what's the difference between these different cryptocurrencies? And could I start one? Could you start one? There's a few hundred cryptocurrencies, right? And again, if you think about why people started using these cryptocurrencies, right, go back 15, 20 years ago. And basically, it was so that people could transact on the dark web, doing illicit and illegal transactions and avoid government scrutiny. So that's sort of the genesis of this, which was we need to come up with something that will allow people to avoid government oversight and essentially transact in illegal activities. Now, it's more from that. governments are much better now at tracking that illegal activity, as we saw in the case of some

of these ransomware attacks, where the government was actually able to get back the Bitcoin that was paid as ransom in some of those cases. So if cryptocurrency was originally used for illicit things, and now it really isn't, and as you say, a lot of governments like the United States and Europe and England and all that have very, very stable currencies. What's the growth potential? Who needs it except those countries where currency is unstable? Well, those countries and then, you know, look, remember, we are now experiencing inflation in the U.S. I mean, you you sound like you're relatively young. You know, most people in this country don't even remember what inflation was. Right. Now we're starting to feel it again. And, you know, does that mean that, you know,

it maybe gives people a little more pause to think about the value of even currencies like the dollar and the potential for storing wealth in something other than dollars or other than dollar-based investments. And the same goes true for Europe and Japan and those other places. But what I suspect is going to happen over time is that cryptocurrency will just become another alternative investment class. And that people that have wealth that they are now storing in financial assets will start keeping, you know, at first a small amount in these crypto assets, and then maybe a slightly bigger amount as time goes by. Again, no one should invest all of their

savings in cryptocurrency, but it's something that certainly has the potential to become a little more well respected and well used around the world, which if that happens, it will lead to an increase in value. I mean, I bought some Bitcoin at the beginning of this year, simply because if it goes up the way some people are projecting it to, I want to make sure I participate in that. Now, the amount of Bitcoin that I bought, I am perfectly willing and will accept the fact that it could go to zero. So if you ask me what I thought Bitcoin was going to be 10 years from now, I would tell you, it's as likely to be at a million dollars of Bitcoin as it is to be worthless. And my investment, which I would consider more to be speculation, simply reflects that view. If it

goes up by a million bucks, great. I'll pay for my grandkids' college education. And if it goes down to zero, the amount I've invested is not going to materially impact me financially for the rest of my life. And that's the risk profile of it. You have to have that mindset. Investing in cryptocurrencies in some ways is like going into a casino. So when you say you bought cryptocurrency earlier this year, from who? Where'd you get it? I bought my cryptocurrency on a platform called Coinbase. So there are several cryptocurrencies out there now that essentially act like a bank or a brokerage firm, right? And what they do is they match up buyers and sellers. So if you go on to Coinbase, I have an account at Coinbase. I deposit dollars into that account. And then they basically

are a market maker. They have people who want to buy Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and they have people who want to sell crypto or other currencies. So I simply go in and say, okay, I want to buy Bitcoin at whatever the prevailing market price is, i.e. where someone else is willing to sell it right now. And from what I've seen, the liquidity, the ability to buy and sell things like Bitcoin is pretty good. I mean, you can go in right now and pretty much buy or sell a decent amount of Bitcoin at the current market clearing price, which makes it very similar to the stock market. So again, it's just an exchange where buyers and sellers meet up, but it's pretty liquid. That in of itself tells me that there's something going on here where it might have legs to it. So now I hold the Bitcoin in my Coinbase account.

I don't own my own crypto vault because I'm afraid of losing that key. And what about other risks, other schemes or scams going on in cryptocurrency? Every week now, there's another cryptocurrency that comes out and you hear about some social media influencer or Elon Musk or Dave Portnoy, and they go online and they tell people how great it is and people jump into it. I'm not sure if you heard about this, you know, the stock trading craze with AMC last year, and these meme stocks were essentially companies that have very little value, the prices were going up based on people on the internet running around telling people to buy them. That there's a lot of potential for that with cryptocurrencies, because remember,

it literally it takes nothing to create a cryptocurrency other than a little bit of computing skill. And, you know, anybody can create one. And then if people start buying it and there are some standards that some of these exchanges have. But remember, you can transact somebody on social media told them to do it. So there's definitely the potential for some. And I guarantee you, we're going to see some really bad stories over the next couple of years about people who jump into some of these cryptos and wind up losing a lot of money based on that. And you just, you know, there's no easy answer. I mean, I can't tell you.

I mean, you know, Bitcoin's the leader in the clubhouse, but who knows what's going to happen two, three, four, five years from now. What's your sense, I know it's putting you on the spot, but what's your sense of how much money's involved right now? Is this a big deal or is this a lot of talk about a little bit of money? The market value of all the Bitcoin

that exists is over a trillion dollars right now. So, you know, a trillion dollars is a lot of money, right? I mean, a trillion dollars is about, according to the New York Fed, now this is not totally meaningful. There's about a trillion two of US currency in circulation. That means physical printed dollars. There's more than that in the banking system just because of the way the banking system works. But the amount of Bitcoin out there is comparable to the amount of dollars. Now, again, dollars are the underpinning of the biggest economy of the world and also the safest of the global currencies, right? People literally are willing to invest in dollars

over and above anything else in the world right now. So I don't mean to equate that because there's a trillion dollars worth of Bitcoin out there, that it's, you know, half as meaningful as the amount of dollars because it's not, and it's nowhere near that. So Bitcoin is the big one. That's the big cryptocurrency. But you said there's a whole bunch of other ones. But why would anyone invest in one of the littler ones when Bitcoin knew about them, right? And they're now trading at a million times what they were trading at back then. The beauty of crypto is every time someone invents a new cryptocurrency, people are like, well, okay, I can buy it for a penny. And five years from now, it'll be at $50,000 like Bitcoin is. And it's literally that simple. I mean, which again, that scares me, right? Because it's such a speculative way of thinking that, you know, that it's going to end in tragedy at some level. Now, the other analogy is I would look at startup companies. Right.

We all know about Apple and Facebook and Netflix and all the companies that have made their founders billionaires. Right. But we've never heard about the hundreds or thousands of other companies that started out the same time and went bankrupt. Right. Right. So, you know, with any sort of risky financial enterprise, of course, the ones who win wind up showing extraordinary gains. But there are hundreds, if not thousands of losers for everyone that wins, because that's just the nature of that type of financial market. And again, cryptocurrencies are that kind of financial market. They're very much like the venture capital and startup business where, you know, for every one that succeeds dramatically, there's going to be 100 that fail. So based on what you've been saying, it seems that cryptocurrency, Bitcoin,

isn't really a currency so much. I mean, I don't know people that really buy and sell with cryptocurrency. It's really an investment, a very speculative investment, much more than it is a currency. I was just about to say it's mismonitored as a currency. Well, you've explained it pretty well, I think, at least in the sense that I have a better understanding, a general idea of how this all works and why it exists and what it does that I certainly didn't understand before.

And now that I understand that, it'll be interesting to watch it and see what happens. David Sacco has been my guest. He teaches at the University of New Haven College of Business Finance Department. Thanks for being here, David, and thank you for explaining something I never understood. Now that cooler weather is here, more and more of us are actually driving around on under-inflated tires. That's because when the temperature drops outside, the air pressure goes down. So it's really worth stopping into the gas station for a quick air refill. Driving on under-inflated tires is less fuel efficient and it can even be dangerous.

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