TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #92: Bryan Bishop & Joseph Jackson

Episode Date: August 21, 2019

Join Marty as he sits down with Bitcoin Core contributor Bryan Bishop and his friend Joseph Jackson to discuss: - Bitcoin Vaults - Bitcoin security - Transcription - Transhumanism Check out Joe's website: biotechnbeyond.com Follow Bryan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kanzure Follow Marty on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MartyBent Shoutout to our sponsors: Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $5 and contribute $5 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app.

Well, hey there, freaks. It's your boy, Marty, here to introduce this week's episode of Tales from the Crypt. An incredibly interesting conversation I had with Brian Bishop about Bitcoin vaults and many other Bitcoin-related topics in the first quarter to half of the episode. But then about halfway through, we were joined by Brian's friend, Joe Jackson from the biotech and beyond.com it's uh it's a life science incubator in north san diego and the conversation shifted from bitcoin to transhumanism i have never really approached the subject of transhumanism uh and it seems that that brian and joe uh have been enthusiasts for years uh so they so they uh educated me about what's going on in the transhumanism world what

it could potentially do and and their thoughts on that subject so definitely stick to the end of the episode because it is very interesting uh and i guess you'll learn a little bit more than than just bitcoin but before we get started have to give a shout out to the cash app you freaks already know all about them they're helping us stack sats they're helping us save money at their at merchants out there with their boost program for those of you don't know about the boost program It's the coolest thing since sliced bread. You get a personalized card. You put a little signature on it.

It's a black card. It looks hot when you're out spending it at merchants. People take a second look at you like, whoa, what kind of card is this? And then you initiate a boost depending on where you want to go, whether that's Chick-fil-A, Whole Foods, DoorDash, coffee shops. I know we're sad about the coffee shop boost being less effective than it was a few weeks ago. But, hey, it's still there. Still able to use it after five tries. You'll begin saving dollars at your local coffee shops.

Excuse me, saving $1 at a time at local coffee shops. And then on top of that, of course, they have the Bitcoin capabilities. You can buy and sell Bitcoin on the Cash App. You can send it off the app, and you can send Bitcoin to the app as well. Sending off the app is BEC32. Compatible at this point, and they have a beautiful UI that makes it very easy to buy Bitcoin. There's only one Bitcoin to buy. They're not confusing with many options of different forks.

it's the one and only the true bitcoin uh use the code stacking sats that's one word stacking sats s-t-a-c-i-n-g-s-a-t-s when you first download you're going to get five dollars and then five dollars is going to get owls lacrosse which is charity near and dear to our heart here at tftc i hope you guys enjoy this episode i know i did we we uh recorded in the the lobby of a hotel so there's some background noise too bad i think the background ambience is it's pretty nice actually um i haven't listened to the audio before recording this podcast or excuse me this ad but i'm hoping it's okay i don't think it should be too bad um but learn about bitcoin and Transhumanism. Enjoy.

What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy Marty Bent here in a hotel lobby, 45 minutes late for this interview. I booked this on Google Calendar on the East Coast, thinking the time would stay steady across time zones, but that's not the case. Time zones are really an archaic concept. They're completely broken. We need to get down to block time.

That's right. And you freaks have just been introduced to this week's guest. It's Brian Bishop. Brian, welcome to the podcast. Hey, thanks. Thanks for having me here. A.K.A. Conjure on Twitter. Prolific transcriber.

Has worked at LedgerX. recently um released a proposal for bitcoin vaults which is something i'm insanely interested in and fascinated by um but before we get into all the nitty-gritty of the details we're going to talk about brian the way this podcast works out is we usually uh get the tail how did you find bitcoin what drew you towards bitcoin and how did you find it basically so i actually found out about bitcoin very early on i found out on january 2009 january 10th 2009 holy shit yeah well i was subscribed to the one of the mailing lists that satoshi nakamoto sent his original emails to uh he had sent a few earlier in like 2008 or something to um perry metzger's uh

cryptography mailing list but i was actually on mitchell bowen's uh peer-to-peer foundation mailing list and um at the time though i i actually made a public comment about bitcoin when i looked at it and i said uh quote this is yet another piece of crap boss and and the reason why i said that was because at the time bitcoin only ran on microsoft windows and as a programmer i i basically felt that you can't be serious about a financial revolution if you're only running on windows that just didn't seem legitimate to me what were the responses to that comment like Oh, I had some agreement, I guess. Yeah, and what...

So anyway, it wasn't until a few years later that I got very deeply involved in Bitcoin development and things like that. Yeah, but you were a young buck coming on that. Yeah, at the time I was 19, yeah. What's it like being on this mailing list at a young age? Oh, I mean, first of all, on the internet, no one knows you're a dog, so it totally doesn't matter. And everyone just wants you to do great work, and if you don't, they yell at you. does that take getting used to the yelling at oh it's sort of a personality detail i mean like i mean it's not really yelling some people interpret it as yelling i personally don't but

i i can use i can easily see how some people might yeah and it's um we were doing a little pre-interview talk here the way you got into programming is actually something uh that resonates well with me pokemon red and poke or was the fire and water or red and blue just red It was red and blue and it was back when I was in middle school and I was using something called the GameShark device and this was a cheating device that allowed you to access the RAM of the game in progress and actually beyond the RAM you could also modify the source code or the code as well. and essentially my interest in programming evolved out of that in fact in around 2012 i started working with a few people online on a project that has since become the in my opinion the second largest video game reverse engineering project in the world and it's the source code to pokemon games really yeah you are the one who put that online uh well i mean there was a few like

two other primary people with me but yeah what's the community like that like now oh it's it's actually really interesting i mean there's still like a large fan base that is interested in like modifying these games and just seeing what they can do and learning about programming and things like that and you know in 2012 i went back to that and to to look at that and get the source code because i was i was just curious to see you know now that i know a lot more about programming you know i'm not in middle school anymore and i actually know what a pointer is or something you know what can i do now that i wasn't able to do then and uh you know being able to get source code out of this and being able to comment it and and get um good variable names and function names

uh was really interesting i mean there was all sorts of things in there like like one of the myths on the school playground is that like if you pressed one of the buttons fast enough it would like cause your catch rate to go up or something so you yeah yeah you had more damage while you're in a fight or something yeah exactly um it turns out that's that's not true it's i checked i was one of those kids kids are so gullible yeah there's there's a beauty to that gullibility also but so what what is like the most fascinating thing you've seen somebody build with this open source oh um so the most fascinating is a um something called the rom hack it's a completely custom game made by a pseudonymous individual named cool boy man and um this game took him i

i think it was over somewhere between four and seven years to make and um it it was finally released and upon release where he you know gave it away for free to the world nintendo of course sent him a cease and desist letter uh as as they as they do and did he have to shut it down or was like open source oh yeah he took that offline yeah oh yeah but anyway it was it was one of the it was just amazing what what basically one guy and then eventually a few other people joined him but one what one guy you know could get done on his own it was just really impressive so what were the types of things that he's doing is he like making the game it was it was essentially an entirely new game but with the same style of graphics in the same game engine okay so what's

that 8-bit graphics or no yeah so all right back to bitcoin you made this comment on the mailing list and you said it took you a few more years to get back into it what sort of dragged you back in so what dragged me into bitcoin actually was the developers or more accurately it was programming in general i i was quite skeptical about like banking and money like if money didn't exist And there was a startup that came around, and they started to say, hey, here's little green pieces of paper. It's called money. Everyone would laugh them out of the room because the concept's completely ridiculous. And I saw in Bitcoin, I was like, whoa, wait, this is like code.

There's like real code here. It actually does something. And this is something I can understand and contribute to. And that's how I just got sucked into it. Where was the first place you started contributing? i i remember that i was primarily like it started with i i was talking with like bitcoin core developers on irc and i was complaining about like like uh there was these um uh altcoin projects or not even altcoins like a few were like file storage services or something and they were

making all these preposterous claims on the internet and i was going to like i remember i was going to like greg maxwell and saying this is wrong isn't it how can these people just say wrong things on the internet and he just laughed and said welcome to the welcome to bitcoin so how how's your understanding of bitcoin chain since you first got into it and sort of what well i suppose what's interesting about bitcoin um in terms of my journey is that I was not originally exposed to any of the monetary economic theories, actually. I was completely greenfield when it came to that subject. So that was certainly something interesting to learn.

And one of the other interesting things to observe is that early on in Bitcoin, a lot of people were claiming that Bitcoin was completely anonymous. But the truth is that it isn't. And what happened was that people who adopted Bitcoin early on, some people were not developers and did not read the source code, just simply didn't know. what what this thing actually does and so as a result we had like for quite a while very significant just falsities floating around and honestly that's really harmful if for someone to use bitcoin and think it's completely private and it's not that's that's actively dangerous and harmful yeah no it's probably probably the biggest cause if there is impediment of bitcoin's progress which is debatable like it has made a lot of progress over the last decade but

But narrative-wise, the fast and free transactions that are made anonymously was a trope that was treaded out for years. Yeah, that's another one, free transactions. I mean, they're not free. There's actually a transaction fee. There is literally something in the protocol called the transaction fee. And why is that necessary in your mind? Well, the transaction fee is necessary for paying miners for their work. And the idea is that eventually the Bitcoin system will be completely powered by the fee market instead of the Bitcoin subsidy, which is rapidly decreasing over time. Are you confident in Bitcoin's ability to survive on a fee market?

Well, yes, I am. And in particular, the reason why I'm confident about this is that I actually believe that in the future, when Bitcoin is even more successful than it already is, that people will be willing to pay obscene amounts of money to pay for a Bitcoin transaction fee. why is this well because what bitcoin provides is just so valuable and what is what is the value in your mind i mean the value is that bitcoin uh these transaction fees are securing your access and ability to move bitcoin and bitcoin is one of the few asset classes that you have that is just uh completely alien and unique in in the financial world i would i tend to agree that's uh that's one of my favorite pieces of fun to come back Because, for one, everybody's saying that we need to add a tail emission already.

A tail emission, like more supply to the end. I find the whole argument that people try to make that we should add tail emission now pretty dumb because we haven't really tested the fee market out in mass yet. Well, let's call it what it is. That sounds like inflation. Yeah, exactly. and uh i didn't get into this for inflation but i mean going back to greg maxwell he was popping champagne during the last bull run when i believe the the uh fee reward matched a block

reward or a block subsidy um at some point in the 2017 run up um and then do you believe in like jevin's paradox and in things that provide utility on top of the protocol level like lightning will drive demand for fees as well? Or do you think it could survive purely on a protocol layer? I think it's totally possible for Lightning to increase demand for Bitcoin fee. But honestly, I mean, Lightning is a service for payments. And it works.

And I am very interested in Lightning as a payment service provider, as a payment protocol. However, I'm not in this for payments. that's not my personal mission you know that's someone else's mission i guess what's your what would you say your your mission is oh i'm i'm much more interested in the store of value perspective i suppose and okay and like the the difference between me being able to issue a million transactions and like a hundred million transactions doesn't particularly excite me i can't really think of any use cases where i need that particular scale jump for me personally now

in terms of, like, other users adopting it and using it and using these payments regularly. Yeah, I mean, look, that's great, and it's going to happen. It's just not my battle. Yeah. Well, you've been fighting a strong battle. Most recently, you made a proposal on the Bitcoin mailing list, the first written proposal of concepts referred to as covenants,

and your proposal is Bitcoin vaults, and this is something I'm fascinated by and definitely want to spend a lot of time talking about here because in my mind, just reading the proposal conceptually creates a far superior UX for hodlers who are worried about their coins being stolen. So the Bitcoin Vaults and Covenant's original Covenant's proposal, or one of them, was actually in 2016.

And they called their proposal Bitcoin Vaults. And it involved a proposed, well, at least a proposed soft fork, but they called for a hard fork to introduce a new opcode to the Bitcoin system for covenants where you can check whether the script of an output matches certain expectations that you pre-program. Unfortunately, this required that fork. And so if it requires a fork, it becomes really hard to get this introduced into the network. I was looking at that recently as part of another project I'm doing. it's this it's a broader project around cold storage basically someone asked me the question what is the best way to do cold storage and it's this huge old project I guess anyway so I was thinking about this and the solution that I came

up with was based on pre-signed transactions and relative time lock where you can have pre-signed recovery options that can work immediately and And then the attacker or the owner can only spend from a hotkey if they wait for the relative timeout to occur. The actual proposal that got written up in the media turns out to be slightly broken, actually. And this is the benefit of publishing ideas for peer review, so that other people can look at it and tell you why it's broken. and in particular the the attack is well an attacker shouldn't be stupid enough to broadcast this delay period transaction and instead they'll just wait for the user to broadcast that thereby bypassing the way that you notify the user that their key was stolen

so in response to that um this the the setup can be partly modified by instead of having a a just a delay period and then either all the coins are stolen or they're not stolen what you can do is you can make a bitcoin transaction with one input and then 100 outputs each with one percent of the value and each of these output scripts have an instant recovery option where you can immediately spend a pre-signed transaction to send it back into a or they each have a relative time lock where the attacker key can spend it. But what you do is that for each output, you increase the relative time lock. So each one has an increasing time lock.

And what that allows you to do is that you first have the first output expire or unlock, and you can spend it. But if the attacker spends it, you know that the key is compromised, and you run the recovery route on all the other outputs. and so you have to do it by an individual output basis in this that's right so so what this does and allows you to do is you can limit the total amount that you fund your attacker to only like one percent or something you can actually do less than one percent but it increases the amount of bitcoin fees that you pay so it gets a bit complicated and what do you see this being

adopted more by institutional users but regular users i mean i'm still investigating this and still testing it myself but i mean it might be something that almost everyone might want to consider doing yeah and you can set it up in a way where it's like a multi-sig transaction you have a friend across across somewhere in the world or a family member and you say hey this delay period is going off and i didn't initiate it and i need you to sign this multi-sig with me to stop it absolutely you can in fact you could have the same idea from like lightning you have watchtowers these nodes that are online always monitoring all sorts of things are possible like bad yeah yeah take your time 16 12 completely fleshed out how do you see this vault's proposal

helping bitcoin and bitcoiners like what bitcoin overall and then bitcoiners individually like what is well so one of the problems with bitcoin is that if it gets stolen that's it you're you're done you there's very little chance of being able to recover that money being able to minimize your losses to a certain percentage is a huge deal and i think that that's uh really worth looking into yeah um and i i completely agree and one of the core aspects of this is pre-signed transaction broadcast correct and let's dive into this i've i was at a bit devs and andrew chow presented this to us but it was a very thorough presentation but i think uh for the freaks out there for my audience i don't think uh we've ever gone over uh pre-signed transaction broadcast here well

pre-signed transactions are kind of interesting um and in particular when i talk about pre-signed transactions here i'm actually talking about having a private key signing a transaction and then deleting the private key and this is kind of dangerous and what it does is it locks you into only having that single transaction is valid if you did not sign another transaction then that is the only transaction that will ever be valid for that key. And what's the problem there? You could have signed it with a low fee or something like that, and you get stuck in purgatory?

Yeah, that could be the problem. Or maybe the blockchain state ends up in a situation where you don't want to broadcast that single transaction and you would have rather had something else. There's another variation of this technique where you can do multi-party pre-signed transactions. And the way this works is that it's basically in-of-in multisig, where you require the same number

of signers as the number of keys in the multisig setup. And what you do is everyone promises to delete the key, and as long as there's one honest user, you can make sure it's locked. Yeah, because you would need M of M to... In-of-in. The same number. I thought it was like a five of five.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Interesting. And there's other aspects to it, too. like you in your proposal you said you could make like a nuke option if you wanted to and just burn the funds oh yes so so what the vault proposal that i put forward does is that in the event that you know that an attacker has your key and he's still operating perhaps what you do is

you send the coins into a basically back into the vault over and over and over again and the way this works is that you've pre-signed a huge chain of transactions that are pushed out into the future using relative time locks and the problem with this is that it requires you to be online for a number of years and if your attacker's online for a number of years you're going to be doing this for the next 50 years because in the proposal you pre-sign up to like 150 years in the future which isn't that many transactions like if you do exponential back off or something you know you can get away with like one transaction a year for the rest of uh bitcoin's expected lifespan or something so the problem with that though is like okay you're you're doing this and

you're paying for these watchtowers to constantly monitor this and constantly broadcast these transactions and store all this data and it's like 20 years into this and you're like this really sucks well what you can do is you could just say you know what i'm just gonna do my nuclear abort option i'm gonna just wipe out all the coins and now not neither of us can have it yeah if it's gonna if i'm gonna spend all this time and it's eventually gonna eat all these bitcoins like might as well just nuke it now it's crazy it's crazy you can do that with bitcoin well you probably want to do that a few years out and maybe maybe that's not an immediate option no give your give yourself some time but that's actually just had like something jump in my head

here like talking about within bitcoin within the bitcoin network having future events happen based off block time how do you sort of bring that like and we were shitting on clock time earlier and like the time zones and stuff like that like if you like you're saying you can delay this till years and ahead but really it's n blocks ahead right and so i guess the question i'm trying to get at is like how good is uh equating an amount of blocks with amount of time into the future i mean honestly i think it's uh pretty good and uh that's probably as as you commented that's probably what we should be um calibrating ourselves to is block time not uh not wall clock yeah why like so how accurate is this because don't aren't block times like they're

not necessarily exactly 10 minutes nine and a half up to this point i mean look there's all sorts of conditions on the blockchain that might be able to manipulate the the time uh the time stamp but i'm not particularly worried about it at the moment i mean part of the problem here is that there's actually no universal time there's no universal clock in the real world there's no way to know what time is it like there's no like time variable you have access to or something it's just all it's all relative is the bitcoin blockchain that is the bitcoin blockchain that the bitcoin blockchain is as close as you're going to get to a reference clock um speaking on time timestamps though this is a a problem i get yelled at by developers for

bringing up because they think it's trivial but one that fascinates me is the 2038 bug and how that influences Bitcoin or may influence Bitcoin in the future. So can we go over that? No, not worth it. See, I piss off a lot of developers talking about this. Why do I piss you guys off? No, you're not pissing us off. It's just boring.

Why is it boring? You know what? So many people have already described solutions for the 2038 problem. And probably why a lot of other people don't want to talk about it is because they probably remember rewriting a lot of code for the Y2K bug. and you know some of that was bogus yeah so it's in the long run it's probably a non-problem right in your mind yeah i would say so yeah um we're about to jump into transhumanism i hear we've got a guest joining us at the table here

i'm marty joseph nice to meet you thanks for having me join in here for a second well well Brian said you were going to join us, and we should talk about transhumanism when you get here. That's one thing. I don't know if you freaks know, but Brian is a transhumanism enthusiast. Is that? I'm sure. I'm an enthusiast, and also I'm somewhat active in developing technologies and funding different technologies. Yeah, you have a lot of YouTube videos online about transhumanism.

What's your website again? AskBrian.com? what's your website your website sorry what your website which one which one the one in your um when your twitter bio oh hey brian that's what it is hey brian.org yeah i'm gonna hey brian.org and watch a lot of videos on transhumanism and also get some bitcoin knowledge so what is transhumanism transhumanism is just a concept of human enhancement the idea that you can use technology to improve human conditions in some way and is it so when i hear transhumanism i hair the combination of technology and people like getting chipped and stuff like that is that

i mean that that could be one part of it i i personally find um basic um chip implants like either finger magnets or rfid to be somewhat boring but uh other people seem to be very much entertained by it just looking at joe right now what do you what do you find exciting in the transhumanism realm uh well i mean lately i've been focusing on biotech really uh find biotech very interesting it's basically a form of programming um like crisper and stuff like that or oh all sorts of things yeah i mean crisper is just one of the newer versions of genetic engineering but there's all sorts of other techniques available and what particular about the combination of like technology and humans like what would you like to do

with transhumanist technologies is that well i mean i mean one thing that i've been looking at is a genetic modification of human embryos if we have this ability to change genes or to choose particular genes then we should do that instead of playing the genetic lottery in my opinion yeah do you get a lot of pushback of who are you to play god and uh um it's not so much who are you to play god it's that people are just scared of this and and they don't know how to think about it yet and it's just so new that it's just like it's painful why shouldn't we be scared and how should we think about it in your mind um look i mean we use all sorts of technologies to improve the human condition we've been doing that for tens of thousands of years you know hundreds of

thousands of years from the very first stone tool to the modern microprocessor we naturally use technologies to better ourselves and that's totally okay that's fine and also you don't have to you can choose not to you can choose not to well i'm like it scares the shit out of me i'd be straight up it scares the shit out of me it's like oh my god what are we going to do are we creating a nefarious future that we don't even know what to expect but i also will recognize that it's probably inevitable because if it's possible somebody's going to do it well on that note i mean uh joseph here runs a uh a community lab a paid community lab uh in biotech where people can rent out lab space to work on biotech projects let's hear learn more about this show

yeah so i guess we should point out there's kind of a continuum of uh this sort of biohackers um started about a decade ago actually 2008 was kind of the first meetings of this group in boston um well i met brian originally on some other mailing lists in around that same time because you were on the open manufacturing list and all these other. Actually, both Joseph and I were on the same mailing list where Satoshi's email got sent, actually. That's right. We were all part of this peer-to-peer foundation group. Michelle Bowens had started in like 2005. He's a philosopher who kind of observed all of these trends in the early 2000s around peer-to-peer systems.

We were all inspired by Napster, a lot of us originally. and he was he's been a kind of focal point for different philosophies and thinkers who are you know looking at how we completely change capitalism to a new sort of economic system that can come next and supplant you know do better than capitalism in many ways some of the drawbacks of capitalism and we see this happening now of course with the rise of all the you know socialism in the u.s yeah well that's a backlash do we really do we really want to supplant capitalism or do we want to bring pure capitalism back because i would argue that there's the law this is a whole bunch of can of worms on the history of economics and political philosophy

i myself am an anarchist right and uh there's a big tradition of sort of left anarchism and right anarchism and you've got sort of the anarcho-capitalist that spun off of this which many people think is a contradiction in terms because you can't really have anarcho-capitalism it's sort of inconsistent but basically i i always point out to this for people i try to say there's such a thing as free market anti-capitalist so markets are not equivalent to capital and capitalism and i arrived at this after many years um so there's a bunch of this goes back to the 1800s there was a whole school of thinkers around mutualism um and there's a tradition in europe and And then in the United States, we had Benjamin Tucker.

The modern kind of proponent of this is named Kevin Carson. He's on some of the same mailing list, I believe. So he's kind of written a bunch of books about this idea of free markets but not capitalism. But, again, you end up almost at the same end result. Isn't that what capitalism is, though, free markets? Well, there is a long school of political theory that says capitalism actually destroys markets and ends up capturing all the markets and becoming monopoly. So if you're going to continue to have free markets, you have to have distributed, decentralized production.

And the means of production can't be captured by any one big entity. So there's a whole kind of rabbit hole on that. So I'm assuming you're a Bitcoiner? Yeah, exactly. But I was kind of late to that party, unfortunately. But we dismissed it. Brian saw the light faster than I did. but at the time i was like many you know you think you're too smart too clever uh for your own good

you're like oh this is you know this is not going to be the money of the future because it's xyz right and you know no one could think that it would catch on obviously so i try to i have a lot of regret over this obviously i'm trying to forgive myself hey you better get some just in case it catches up for a lost time as best i could you're you're here now you're still early Yeah, I'm obsessed now and I'm hodling and accumulating any time I can. I'm constantly tithing into Bitcoin to stack my sats and get any bit that I can. Welcome to the front lines. Thank you.

Glad to have you here. But yeah, so a decade ago, we started this kind of biotech movement. And basically since then, there's been dozens and dozens of groups in different cities and around the world who kind of start their own lab. Some of them are just a clubhouse model. And others are more sophisticated. We actually convinced the city government to give me an old unused building in north of San Diego in Carlsbad. And we were able to take that over, turn it into a lab for about five years, and then renewed our agreement. So we had a total of seven years, and now I'm finally purchasing a building to move for our permanent location.

So what are most people experimenting with? I mean, my crowd is much more like established older scientists. They're more startups rather than like biohackers. If you look at the different projects, you'll see ones that get a lot of publicity. Sometimes they're kind of stunts more so than serious research. I remember it was a very long range of years in Bitcoin years. But between 2014 and 2016, I think I remember somebody putting like a hardware wallet into their hand. And they were able to like into their hand.

Oh, they can plant it, a wallet. There's other biometric stuff. I mean, there seem to be a few popular things that are always coming up. There's myostatin doping for some reason. People are obsessed with this idea of getting muscles without working out. It's not really going to work that way, right? Exactly. Existing performance-enhancing drugs are probably better than any gene hack that you could do at this time.

So just learn how to use the existing enhancement tools that are out there already before, you know. I find it amusing. I actually am a bodybuilder myself. So I've done this for many years and competed. But, no, I mean, we are pretty much, you know, there's different aspects to this biohacking movement. I started this idea of open science was my inspiration, the idea that we would bring principles from open source software into life sciences and into the scientific field because since the 1980s, it's become really competitive.

Academia is broken. Everyone's miserable pretty much at universities, and it's inefficient as they basically spend all the grant money on these administrative overhead costs and then you have a bunch of PhDs with no positions nowhere for them to go and they are miserable for six years like in the lab slaving to the big name professor and then they basically you know you're cut loose if you can't make that cut you've got to go out and you know figure out what to do next so yeah and so that's been part of it as a diy and then some of these other spaces you know again it's not all just hackers there's many independent uh inventors

that need a space to go outside of you know like corporate big lab or a university and a place to do science what are i'm sure the main breakthroughs do you see coming coming through transhumanism Well, I mean, it usually clusters around these big categories of life extension, longevity, so radically increasing the human lifespan and reversing aging. Nanotechnology, which has been since the 90s, but it's always 30 years away. But the idea of post-scarcity, being able to replicate anything that you want on demand so you can just print out whatever abundant material, resources. um artificial intelligence of course this is on you know the whole thing of greater than human

intelligence and then what what happens at that point yes it's one of my favorite uh buzz phrases i like to throw out there about like human longevity i don't know if this is true i think i heard it somebody somewhere and i just been parroting it for a couple years now and i think you two gentlemen will have more insight into this than i i do but i've been saying that the first person to ever live to be 250 years old has already been born well this is something that's been bandied about i'm not sure if i'm convinced of that um aubrey de gray and others use this kind of phrase and it's very attention grabbing but it's unclear where the cutoff point is going to be i would think it's more like people born right now that are one or something

you know if they're then they probably they may have a chance i'm not sure anybody who's 20 years old i'm pessimistic about this okay because i'm in i've been watching it and i'm in the industry by the time it's just so slow and people are not organized properly but um i don't know but yeah we'll see do you see it improving at all over time like the yeah i mean we're getting there it's just frustratingly slow um people that aren't you know from the outside looking in you can be deceived with this idea of false progress and remember everyone has an incentive to oversell what they're doing so there's a bunch of well-funded longevity companies recently who are hyping up all this stuff and this one is this category of senolytics which

is refers to a type of just different compounds drugs peptides other agents we're going to administer to basically kill off your old cells we have a lot of old cells in the body hanging around that we accumulate and they then throw off this inflammasome a damn a bunch of cascading signals of damage so if we can do this and program them program cell death because they lose the mechanism to you know to get the signal that they should die then the idea is you'll clear that out and it kind of reboots your system to some degree i think they're really overhyped and it's only going to get you like five years of this and then basically the old cell population builds up again so our blood boy is better well well that could be one of it's going to be a whole combination

of therapies and strategies that blood boy model is obviously not a very scalable one which is why they're trying to isolate those factors of which blood protein protein factors and other signaling molecules are present in the in the young blood and see if we could just produce that at scale and infuse you with it it's going to probably be hard to do i think we're going to need a bunch of other advances right like better mechanical blood pure recirculating devices right because the animal experiments over 100 years old right that did this and it really relied on stitching the old and young animal together and the old one gets damaged while the i mean the old one gets rejuvenated while the the younger one gets damaged basically but it's not clear it's going to work

outside of that type of thing and it may be a transient effect yeah you know it's interesting actually there's actually been a lot of recent advancements in um blood conversion technologies to convert one blood type to another. What? Yeah. How can you do that? Well, it's science. What is it?

Just the iron in the blood? No, it's not just iron in the blood. It's all sorts of antibodies and other markers that need to be switched over or translated to be compatible with other blood types, basically. Again, so you're talking to somebody who this scares the shit out of. Again, it scares the shit out of me,

but I also think it's inevitable. Well, you know, all right, so keeping to the namesake of the show, back in 2011 and 2012, I think, many of us in the biohacking community were invited to the FBI conference on basically biohacking and stuff like that. and uh this was actually uh put on by the fbi weapons of mass destruction division because they were terrified that these biohackers were like creating viruses that were going to like wipe out humanity or a certain part of humanity like all the stupids or something um and like yeah i mean it was interesting because like when i got there i noticed that um the way they seated everyone was like at this it was a conference but they had like planned seating and they had like agent biohacker agent biohacker agent biohacker and your buddy got buddied up with an agent no

we really did they said look to your right this is your agent you will be reporting to him in your home city uh for a while what really yeah yeah are you still talking to your buddy uh no eventually they realized that i was harmless and i'm not actually planning to kill all the stupids um thank god what are you what are you planning to do like how do you want to how do you want to use this that's i'm seriously like longevity is that your mentality you're like i know you guys are saying like you cannot you cannot inject muscles into my main priority is life extension that needs to be the focused in the eyes on the prize a lot of the other enhancement technologies are kind of people are sort of frivolous sometimes in what they're trying um you know i've done

bodybuilding for such a long time it's like it's silly you should just use the existing technologies that are not uh well applied you know what we need for this because when i bring this up when i bring up the uh the the hype fact of first person lived ever be 250 everybody's like oh i don't want to live to be that long i'll never be able to retire or like i'll have to work well that's a common thing most people fall into these usual traps and they all regurgitate the exact same critiques the reality is you're not going to know how you're going to feel um at that age if you survey people that are 80 and they're not in really debilitating bad chronic pain and other degenerative conditions they're going to say they want to be 81 and then you need to ask them again

at 81 they're going to say they want to be 82 you don't just become decrepit these people either lack imagination or they're already so bored with their life yeah they can't imagine what this is not a problem except for people that don't have imagination essentially so so i have a slightly different perspective i'm definitely interested in longevity and even immortality however i'm of the opinion that it's going to be incredibly difficult to fix aging in people who are already aged or are already aging. I actually believe that if we are to have any solutions to these problems, it will occur before birth, actually, in your genome. Thank you, sir. I just had a beer delivered by Crypto Brekkie. Thank you. So that's where things get hairy. Like, should we

be messing with embryos of course we should the idea of playing the genetic lottery on your children is just completely abhorrent to me abhorrent yes it is wrong and in a hundred years we're going to look back on this and say oh my god we were doing what what about the beauty and the miracle of life that's gotten us to this point the beauty and miracle of life is they're independent of what we are doing expand on that a little bit what do you mean i mean you someone isn't any less of a miracle just because he happens to have an IQ of 200.

Are you saying we could modify embryos to make that happen? Well, I mean, that's certainly what a lot of people are working on. I'm actually of the opinion that IQ isn't necessarily the sole target. I mean, I'm very interested in intelligence. What does the world look like this, though?

I'm very interested in intelligence, but actually the thing that I think to really go after is actually memory. Having better memory is so important and that's in my opinion it's just such a huge factor of intelligence yeah we were talking about this before we hit record i've had six pretty bad concussions and that's why i write you know you know those are bad you're not supposed to i know i know seek those that's why i stopped after my last one so that's enough playing sports but that's why i write every it's

not why i write every day but writing every day helps me with my memory and this is actually a good segue into the topic of your transcription practices like this do you do this for memory reasons as well or well i i originally started writing all these transcripts i guess i should describe what this is first yes i'm somewhat well known in the community for writing transcripts very quickly and you had our panel discussion online already before we left that place yeah i have a very quick publishing process as well i'm just simply a very fast typist and the way i became so fast was by arguing on the internet where if you want to win an argument on the internet you just have to type faster than anyone else um so that so that uh honed my skills um

but originally the interest in doing all these transcripts was um started back in high school where i was really fed up with the school system and i was like if i actually recorded what these lectures are i think people would look at them and realize this is like complete bonkers to be forcing people to do this is just crap crap crap my idea was that okay i'll do a transcript for every class in my high school and uh for every single day of the school year and i'll um you know give the booklet to like the principal at the school end of the school year um it turns out they don't care but um but i mean like i had documented evidence that this is just crap like here you go like you're wasting my time with this um but but then it evolved into things like well

if i'm going to be sitting here listening to this presentation at a conference you know it sort of makes sense that like instead of having people watch a video later wouldn't it be faster if they could just read it i mean that's what makes sense to me it makes i mean and thank you for doing it because it's incredible like at these conferences you're able to just go to your your what is it distro transcript d-i-s-p-h-y d-i-y-h-plus d-y-h-plus that's where you host it yeah you go there and you get it right away yeah so i recently did some stats on this and there's over 600 transcripts from the last 10 years um i think a few like a million words or something i don't know it's i had a tweet somewhere it's just a lot of content basically yeah um a lot of valuable content yeah

absolutely i mean there's also i mean in particular um i also do this like um when the bitcoin core developers meet up and stuff like that i mean there's a lot of arcane knowledge that would otherwise get lost and no one would have ever heard of these ideas basically and so that's that's part of why i do it is to capture all these fleeting ideas no it's people like you and david harding who do an incredible job of documenting stuff and articulating it to the layman so again thank you for your service and it is something i've i've watched you at rega last year that's where we should have first met i went up to introduce myself but you were typing away and i did not want to interrupt at all

that's i got to see you in action and it is it is impressive you're gonna hop in joe yeah no well brian transcribed some of my conferences i hosted years ago we had a couple of these summits about open science and the future of collaboration and in the in biotech and brian was there typing away well to bring this back to like the beginning of the transcription does this help with your memory do you oh sure i mean it's always better to have an accurate representation um i mean i happen to have a okay memory myself um but you know more is always better i would i would are yes yeah so that's like i have very vivid childhood memories but because of my concussions my short-term memory is not the best which is actually funny

when you think about it like i can i can remember vivid dreams when i was like four or five years old and i can't remember why i walked into a room and what i was trying to do like sometimes not all the time but uh it is something you think why the transhumanism thing is sort of appeasing to me i'm like damn can i fix my brain it's been bruised a lot um is there hope for people with a lot of concussions i mean currently one of the interesting things out there are certain brain implants that are meant to help with people who have memory loss and uh i've seen some promising things um i'm very interested in seeing elon's uh neural link move forward i think that'll be fun um yeah i have one friend that had a severe brain injury he was almost killed the guy somebody

assaulted him with a crowbar and then he was in a coma for like three weeks he finally came out of that I was pretty impressed at how well he has functioned now because he somehow, you know, he was in his 30s, I guess, but he still had enough neuroplasticity. But, I mean, there's different drugs that people are experimenting with now. There's a lot of forums you can look at for brain injury. And some of these are the same nootropics and other cognitive-enhancing drugs that other people are using

that don't have brain injury but are just trying to enhance performance. Um, one is this nicotinic riboside in our stuff, which is also used for anti-aging. It's a big time supplement that people presumably use a nasal spray version of that. And there's one doctor I corresponded with like a couple of years ago who treats people with Alzheimer's and, and veterans with, with a brain injury from, from Iraq and stuff. And he's using this blend of a ginseng plus this in our compound. You can get it ordered from a compounding pharmacy. and there's a couple peptides used out of Russia usually is where they pioneer this stuff

and people use this one I have another friend she's like in her 40s and has some memory loss because of some other concussion or car accident and she's using this one called C-Max and then she measures herself on a some kind of computer programmed memory test thing and then uses this spray I mean it's an inhalable usually deliver these peptides through the nose because it's the best way for the bioavailability i feel like you generally know more about this than i so after my last concussion in college it's been god it's hard to admit it's been almost seven years but that was my last concussion i took a biology of the brain class to sort of learn what was going on i don't know if i had a quack teacher but he said cannabinoids cannabis

cannabis can can help too because like if your brain's bruised and your synapses aren't firing cannabinoids serve to make your cells work better is that true yeah i mean that would make sense the cannabinoids are a gigantic bunch of receptors we have all these different things in the in our system the opioids obviously this opioid epidemic that class of compounds was targeted against this set of receptors and the cannabinoids are distributed in all sorts of tissue types right So you've got all your bros in the cannabis field pimping it for everything. You can have a cream for X, Y, Z, any condition, right? Then you also have serious pharmaceutical companies developing a version of it for seizures, for example.

That's one of the first ones that's being approved for childhood. Charlotte's Web, right? For kids that have seizures, yeah. So, I mean, it's hard because these things have so many effects. it's hard to pinpoint it and you can use so many different compounds but you're basically just trying to influence inflammation in some way well that's a great segue into a pushback here there's so many effects like sure with what we're doing with experimenting with genome and embryos like if you had to give a devil's advocate for what the worst effects could be what do you think

it would be i mean look what i usually say is i mean everything everything is a like there's no really philosophically good way to define a side effect or an off-target effect from an externality because you know so one person's side effect might be the other person's desired result you're going to have certain limiting things and ultimately the embryo is not going to be viable probably if it's too weird of an edit it won't implant and it won't go to term there is a chance that yes we could create a new rare disease there's already about seven to eight thousand rare diseases on the planet and and they may have 12 kids that have it to about 2 000 so the population is between like a few a dozen up to a couple thousand people on the planet that have

been identified and and they and they're discovering new uh these ones all the time because we can sequence people now for the first time cheaply so this is a problem for the industry because we have not had an economic model that can develop drugs and cures for rare diseases because our model is usually a blockbuster drug and you want to make it you know sell it to a few billion people and when it comes to developing it for a like a hundred thousand person or less population now they provide these incentives for orphan drugs but usually ends up being a million dollars a drug for each patient which is a broken business model for for sufficiently desperate very ill people it becomes very appealing the idea of biohacking and just do it yourself right because if these

if these drugs cost a million dollars do you have any idea how much lab space a million dollars can buy you like the economics don't really add up here well the other thing they usually will do is you go and look at existing old drugs generic generic drugs and things that have been out there for 30 years and most of the time you can repurpose them and reposition it it's called and use one of them there was approved decades ago for some other thing and it turns out it has some efficacy some action against your target your gene target and that can actually be done cheaply if the red tape is cut but unfortunately the insurance companies and fda all of them act like you've got to go back and run a multi-million dollar study for a 30 year old drug that's already

safely used in this disease over here for like gastric reflux or something for example right but if you're going to call it this for your and it's crazy because then a company will go and they'll actually sponsor that trial and then they'll earn the right to sell the exact same drug but just do a label on it for the orphan disease and charge fifty thousand dollars for this drug that costs like five dollars basically to make and has already been sold as like you know antacid or something over here like at the pharmacy but that's all the game the system gets rigged by monopolies right where you're talking yeah the the pharma industry has completely captured the regulatory apparatus and the insurance company it's mostly in the united

states other countries actually negotiate with them and have the usually the government's negotiating pricing in some way so as we're fighting for free competitive money you're also fighting for free competitive health care exactly well this is one thing i've been trying to advocate actually sort of like a silk road for medicines so it's like we build this next silk road 2.0 for essential drugs we're having this problem in insulin in this country insulin has been around more than 90 years and they keep raising the prices for the last 10 years you can actually go and martin sure kelly to do well he was we was doing it for some other drugs he wasn't an insulin but he's one of like dozens of these pirate like well these freaking monopolist

pricks who do this so what i'm saying is we could basically you can go and and people do it now where they order their own drugs from india we can import it for your own personal use i've been trying to see if how we could organize buyers clubs to do that the problem is then you become a target for enforcement action ultimately the DEA could get you if you're distributing medicines though you're trying to basically form a co-op or a collective that's obtaining it for their own use but there's ways to do this and ultimately you know it comes down to I have a whole like long term plan for like creating generics drug company that we would you know the patients could fund to finance and obtain their own factories to essentially produce the supply they need

and become their own pharmacy. That would be beautiful. So this is really one of the trends that's behind medical tourism. This idea that if you want good health care at a low price, go overseas. Go to Germany. Kobe, go to Germany. So this is actually... Medical tourism is going to be huge.

Brian, this is fascinating because I feel like there's a lot of parallels here between the Bitcoin community and this transhumanism. Yeah, exactly. So one of my next missions has been to go out and start talking to all the Bitcoiners about this biotech anti-aging. Again, because you get a long time preference, a long time horizon. Suddenly, when you realize you could be alive 200 years. Well, that's what I was going to say earlier. Like, is the world that you envision via transhumanism only enabled via a currency like Bitcoin that allows you to make long term investments?

Yeah, that is what has started to click for me. and i've become obsessed with this in the beginning i didn't understand the significance of bitcoin and then i realized well we're going to need this as our like base layer for a different kind of civilization can propel us to a type one kardashev scale energy civilization because we'll actually have basically a price always for this renewable energy that otherwise wasn't going to be competitive with fossil fuels and then if you've got people that have a bunch of bitcoin and they're going to want to be around 500 years. Now they have a motive to do all of this stuff to ensure that future.

But we've got to get the word out, and we're going to have to bring them over. Because I'll tell you that our transhumanist community is kind of dysfunctional and not very mature and not very built out. It needs a lot of better engineering talent and people that aren't. I mean, this is a whole other thing, but you basically have a division of labor between evangelists and people that come early that are good at prophesying stuff and people that can actually get shit done. And we lack that in most of the anti-aging, cryonics, all of these fields.

One of the interesting parallels between Bitcoin and transhumanism is actually one of the original philosophies of transhumanism was called extrapy. Yeah, extrapy. The opposite of entropy? In particular, that actually started from a group of libertarians. So, yes, there is a lot of overlap. Although I was totally unfamiliar with that until Bitcoin. And in particular, one of the prominent members there was Hal Finney. Yeah, Hal had very, very...

Who some might suspect might have been Satoshi. I think... I don't like to throw my Satoshi, but if I'm going to put money behind anybody, it's Hal was a part of it. Well, I mean, at one level, one other level of speculation here is, as you might know, Hal is currently stored at Alcor. Yeah, he's Kriah. That's right.

And some people speculate that perhaps he has the passphrase memorized for Satoshi's coins. And this is the ultimate bug bounty to go develop this technology to be able to resuscitate brain matter to read memory. That would be crazy. No, that's just speculation. No, it's speculation. I've also heard speculation that Satoshi's coins are a huge quantum computer alarm system because they're in pay-to-pub key. Have you been hanging out with Vitalik? No, no, I have not.

But John Newberry actually told me this. I hung out with John Newberry and he told me this. Because it's like pay-to-pub-key, it's not pay-to-pub-key hash. So they are more susceptible to a quantum attack than most addresses. So if Satoshi's coins move, you'll know it's likely a quantum computer. Or Craig Wright just got bored and wanted to move some coins. Kidding, obviously, there. But sticking on the parallels between the Bitcoin and the transhumanism,

With you in particular, Brian, like, I feel like you've got to have, like, a lot of, like, you're pulling a lot of information from one vertical and bring it to the other. Like, it feels like there's a lot of, again, parallels here that make you more well-rounded than many people might recognize. So, the interesting thing here is, like, okay, so one perspective is some people know me for, like, writing transcripts very quickly. I'm a very fast typist. But I actually have other skills. It turns out I'm a really good programmer. That's actually what my whole career has been. It's been software development.

I'm quite good at it. Ask my agent. And then on the other hand, there's all this biotech stuff. And, you know, at one level, I mean, biology is a technology. And DNA is a form of programming. Now, biologists will cringe when they hear that because they'll say, well, I mean, you can't program it as precisely as you can program a computer. But it is still a form of programming. It just happens to suck.

But, I mean, it's there. And it's a form of molecular nanotechnology, which all the transhumanists were wanting back in the 80s. This is a real form of molecular nanotechnology that is available right now. So, again, I'm just hearing people scream right now, like, you can never fight Mother Nature. It's not about fighting Mother Nature at all. But isn't even the editing of genes, we are part of nature. Like, if we come to this conclusion logically by ourselves, is that nature? Well, again, this always comes up for some reason.

People have a very cognitive trap on this. Look, there is just nature. That's all there is. There's no artificial or non-natural. You can't have anything that exists be non-natural. If it exists under the laws of nature in this universe that we're inhabiting, it is part of nature. Whether it's arsenic, HIV, Ebola virus, all of that is, quote, natural. now you can have things that are organic or inorganic or you could have things that are

random or there have some purpose behind it so they're designed or you can have this term of synthetic which implies it has been designed or made into an artifact in some way so this is the whole pipe of synthetic biology says that we do not have to just accept biology how it is we're going to be able to start engineering it and refactoring it so that you have modularized gene circuits or whatever if you will they took inspiration from semiconductors and the microelectronics industry and and it said in just the way that you have these transistors and capacitors resistors that were standardized parts we're going to configure biological systems to behave in that way and that's a very big engineering challenge we're only like a few

decades in to this since the early 2000s right and then that's where you start to build different natural systems or you refactor existing pathways to try to do something economically useful in a way that's better for the environment than our petroleum-based industry for example are we going to end up like the characters in prometheus like is that we're just gonna be like huge jacks from prometheus um i don't know i mean there's a bunch of science fiction do we send this do we send this out to the galaxies or well there's some theories that say we already are some pam sperma or something that landed on earth and that's where we came from what is it the um the tanuki or whatever the well there's all these yeah stuff of how life originated but i think basically to get

to mars or do anything you're going to have to have a very good synthetic biology because we can't uplift a bunch of mass and matter stuff up there to do it so the idea is you would send the instructions to mars and then you you know with the bioprinters the dna synthesizers you can then start to extrude the raw input materials you need to bootstrap your base there. All right, Mike, back to Brian. This is a parallel with sending radio waves of Bitcoin transactions to space, too. You could hypothetically send Bitcoin via radio waves, similar to what you just described, to space, correct? And we're already doing that.

I mean, there's already the satellite, yeah. What do you think of the satellite's first killer app in the sat node? um i i don't know what i mean so you're asking what is what will the first killer app be of satellites oh i think we found it already it's anonymous messages um sent via lightning uh maybe i mean um there's other possible use cases though that i've been quite interested in um like first of all in one sense a satellite is actually kind of an ultimate form of cold storage why do you say that well it's extremely hard to access and the point of cold storage is to be extremely hard to access so you're saying we could hide private keys in the satellite i mean

some way you could but i mean if it was a business then the problem is you have to trust the business to not have a copy of the secret on on the on the planet so as the individual how would you do this well you'd you'd have to have your own satellite okay and there are ways to do that there's cube sad and a few other options but yeah i didn't uh i think that the uh consensus or something bought up that uh asteroid mining company like the ethereum consensus yeah the consensus guys bought up this one called planetary resources that james cameron or a bunch of these people were involved in but it kind of all went bankrupt how can you buy asteroids so you have no access to company was totally premature as usual they came up with this speculative business plan there's

like 30 years or more too soon so as soon as they went defunct i think the consensus people bought them because they had some satellites or micro satellite or something like that so i'm just remembering this from 2018 but brian i i don't think i've ever seen you speak publicly about this or or mention what are your thoughts on ethereum and that whole project i i'm trying to stay away um you know i i was asked once by a company i worked for to integrate ethereum and um without revealing too much um my biggest problem was getting a node to stay synchronized and not crash and being able to do all the business integration i need to do because i wrote about this yesterday and i got a lot of pushback from the ethereum community because i

said eric wall from he used to write for bitcoin.com luckily he doesn't anymore he writes for the has written stuff for the human rights foundation but he's going through the process of downloading a fully validating full state uh uh storing node from scratch for ethereum i think He's on day seven right now, and he's probably two or three weeks out. But the Ethereum fanboys will push back and be like, oh, you should download a FastSync version. That's just as good as a full node. And my question is, and I'm not technical enough to answer this,

and I've never gotten a straight answer out of an Ethereum developer. If all the nodes storing the full state and state changes fall off the network, don't those FastSync implementations have nothing to reference? am i wrong in saying that uh look i mean a lot of these blockchains uh these competitor blockchains have all sorts of weird ideas for how they're gonna maintain the blockchain and get state i mean honestly a lot of them have said that the solution is going to be just phone a friend to get the information you need and honestly i'm okay with that as long as those projects are honest about that and um it just happens to not be what bitcoin needs yeah interesting note uh

vitalik is a disciple of eliezer yudkowsky who is a prominent transhumanist so and interesting connection there the transhumanist you guys agree with or well yeah there's a bunch of factions in the transhumanist i can't even imagine okay and then there's some that are ai obsessed and they're all about the singularity so that's a whole offshoot singularitarianism then you've got others that are more focused on biotech hacking i'm kind of on this end because i think we're we're biological life forms so you gotta in some way bet on carbon-based life form rather than digitized you know the machines everything and and we don't know how it's going to coexist right yeah because we're carbon i think we have to prioritize our source code and figuring out how

to master that and then i don't know what's going to happen the machines may be hostile to us or we'll merge with them some sort of combination thing or you'll have biology finds a way so some other form of our genes may go somewhere else and mutate into another organism or something you know pulling out your inner jeff goldblum there yeah no i mean jeffy g yeah i mean uh genetics is the most powerful force on the planet that's quote straight from jurassic park it's completely true So I agree with Joseph here. I mean, that's my perspective as well. Eliezer, on the other hand, is more of the, oh, my God, AI is going to kill us all.

We need to do something about this. Do you agree that most AI right now is just maybe eloquent if-and functions, if anything? Remember the Rokos Basilisk thing? This is the most ridiculous meme or thing of Facebook. I don't know. It was on Facebook or something one time, right? There's this one particular AI researcher guy that's part of that same group who got completely angry at everyone because of this scenario. It was proposed where you would have to work for the future AI, will come back in time and torture your past self if you don't do everything there is to bring it about, bring about its existence.

And this became known as this basilisk, I guess it's a Harry Potter reference. There's a whole lot of Harry Potter nerd fanaticism in this subculture as well. Eliezer wrote an entire bunch of books of fan fiction on Harry Potter that explains the principles of Bayesian reasoning and rationality. So this is like for kids, I guess, for children's books. Yeah, so that's one of my criticisms of him. I mean, look, those books were good for fan fiction. However, I mean, if you're really trying to bring about the development of artificial intelligence technologies, maybe writing Harry Potter fan fiction isn't the right thing to be doing.

It's always like the shades of gray for, you know, for transhumanist AI nerds or something. It's basically porn for rationality fetish freaks. So would you agree with me that, like, AI is nothing but, like, somewhat sophisticated if-and functions and it's not really as fleshed out as people think it is? There's actually two different versions of AI. There's artificial intelligence, which is the stuff that drives your car or answers your emails and plays Go, I guess. I don't know. And then there's artificial general intelligence, which is more like on the level of either a dog or a human, where it is generally capable of figuring things out in a way that computers currently aren't able to do. um i think the big problem is that we don't know how to do that and that's why i fall on the other side towards biology because we do have humans that are somewhat uh intelligent or

they have brains that seem to be doing something interesting i'm not really sure how or why um and and that's what we should be working from in my opinion i agree because it if i had to pick a dog in the fight of biology versus ai i definitely would pick biology because again homer here i like humans i like being a carbon-based being i like having individual thoughts if they are individual who knows um but that's again like one thing it scares me like am i a bad person if i get my wife pregnant naturally like that's what you're like well the answer is once the in the future technology is at a certain standard yes it's not moral for you to do unaugmented reproduction because it's not a very good it's i mean you're giving them a

bunch of bad traits we all have bad genes for heart disease we're all vulnerable to these things right we're going to like it becomes as technology it's just like it was not responsible to not have a child vaccinated once we have childhood immunizations and that technology now means that it's immoral and irresponsible not to give your kid the mumps measles shot because we have it and if you're a technophobia one of these anti-vaxxers same thing is going to apply to these enhancement embryo editing technologies it will become immoral not to give the cardio protective heart you know upgrade gee not the alzheimer's protection dementia package to protect your future you know offspring against cognitive decline and that will be a sliding scale that

evolves you know over time and then you'll have other things that are not necessarily therapeutically protected but might be just a matter of taste and preference so so taste and preference yeah um so it's important to to note that we are both staunch advocates of personal choice here it's up to the parents um and this is actually a clear distinction from what people usually call this eugenics but the difference is that eugenics is usually government mandated it's where government intervenes in human reproductive choices and makes decisions for you yeah eugenics is all about like pouring acid on people's body parts and shit like that i mean that that's not what we're advocating for here the idea is that this is a choice yeah

yeah i mean the reality is everyone is reproducing constantly willy-nilly and most of them probably shouldn't be so it's like how are you going to start now imposing some standards on this it's ridiculous you either got to be in the business of sort of legislating who can and can't reproduce and you look at what a nightmare our politics is now over stuff with immigration or you've got to be hands off and let people make decisions to whom they already want to have sex with that's how people choose now mate selection is already a form of eugenics that always has been how people pick traits based on you know and we have the competition between men and women basically because you have different evolutionary strategies and you've got people trying to fake their

signals that's just a good parallel to bitcoin bitcoin is the only thing that's actually honest proof of work you have some of that in nature because you've got costly signals testosterone high testosterone actually is a disadvantage because your immune system is weakened and only the more robust specimens the alpha males can actually sustain that extra muscle mass all these things are a big burden it's proof of work right so we do have this in nature now with fitness signaling right now we have instagram and a bunch of technologies that let people subvert these honest signals so you can now use makeup cosmetics and other technologies to fake your genes so you're actually a beta but you're making you know putting on things to deceive them women are very good at

this with the mate trap um and of course with men it's different because women are looking more at status and stuff right but um so i see a great you know bitcoin is the only kind of thing that's still an objective uh the only objective truth in the universe right now exactly but the point is i think it's going to sort itself out we want to be able to democratize this technology so it's not just rich people that have access to enhancing their children and when we can do this it's just like fashion it's like different clothing choices everyone can choose different types of styles of dress well that's what's so scary to people right it's like what is like how do you design a perfect baby and what is i mean no it's gonna be there's not gonna be it's a moving target right you're

gonna want to some things are going to be uncontroversial that you're gonna agree on certain types of disease vulnerability the other problem though is that most diseases are not we don't all have the same cause of heart disease your heart disease is not my heart disease it turns out these population studies have disproved the common variance thesis which thought that most of our chronic diseases are all from same it's actually it's a bunch of different long tail distributions that ends up that your heart disease is one set of genes this other guy's you know population is a different set of underlying genes how much did theranos set you guys back well theranos is like one of several of these high profile fraudulent things i've been

watching it for years i knew it was bs from the very beginning i feel like this has to piss you guys off it pisses me off primarily because they raised all this money i tried to raise a little bit of money years ago for a dna testing thing couldn't raise any money these guys got hundreds of millions of dollars and then after 15 years you know 15 years of fraud yeah that's that's one of the things here is uh in this area of venture capitalists they don't do due diligence it just doesn't happen and uh yeah the biggest thing i can't understand tim draper how he still like defends this except that his daughter was friends with elizabeth holmes wasn't he one of the first ones out and he was he was invested in it and it's like he has a complete cognitive sunk

cost fallacy or something in that but it's like i don't get that people are really weird there's like selectively insane about stuff not angry but yeah i mean i i can't stand it because there's so little money to go around in the biotech world and then you get these bad actors that soak up the funds and then have this chilling effect but that's what i'm afraid is going to happen in the aging thing because there's several related there's a few startups like that that are kind of trying to be unicorns for anti-aging i think they're super overhyped and it's not going to have dramatic success let's name names so we can well the one that i would piss some people off i guess i probably not really listen to this unity is the one unity therapeutics uh jeff bezos is one

of the investors because they they always trot that out because he's the huge name right i mean he did like an early angel round or something in that but um i think their senolytic thing is they don't even have it in the clinic yeah they've got like a lead candidate and they have this crazy evaluation i hate to see that kind of stuff because that's really that's the what's wrong with our biomedical system it rewards these companies that don't even have a treatment in the clinic yet and they get these high speculative valuations that's why we have to change the process to open up the data earlier and have more of a like i'd say like a prediction market type system mostly these companies get to ipo stage and they still haven't even had success

with their therapeutic drug and it just gets unloaded to the public market it fails and then they've all cashed out or gone on to the next thing there's no discipline and there's no learning i mean david sinclair is another one he's a huge name in anti-aging he's at harvard for like 20 years he sold one drug it was based on this resveratrol molecule resveratrol was all the hype in the late 90s and 2000s the red wine molecule responsible for the french effect of why the french people can eat all this crappy high fat cheese stuff and still live a long time well it turned out the whole thing failed after he sold it for 700 million dollars to glass glasgow smith klein they abandoned it no consequences for him he's on to the next

thing this nad compound and he's still raising tons of venture money but it's like you look at it none of his stuff ever like had great success in the marketplace for patients and i don't want i mean george church is not quite as bad but he's a similar phenomenon where it's like he's attached to every single company in the genomic space like there's no real commercial metric of success there's not a marketplace success for these things whether they fail or not so you get these i mean church is kind of just like a technology factory right but what we're lacking is like a real feedback mechanism there's no discipline because there's never any marketplace right effects so so for those in this community who don't know george church the best way that i would describe him is

He's the Greg Maxwell of synthetic biology. The biggest hard-ass in the world? Well, no, I just mean he's the graybeard, the resident graybeard. I mean the graybeard slash hard-ass that knows it all. He's super prolific, but what I'd say is, like, the pipeline, it's all dysfunctional because we don't have a good mechanism for spotting winners and losers. They get into it, like, you know, 15 years down the line, and it all turned out to be built on foundations of sand,

and then you're back at starting over. And that's how the pharma industry is for the last 40 years. Well, you're talking to somebody from Philadelphia, the mecca of the pharma industry. In many people's eyes, we've got Glasgow, SmithKline, a bunch of other medical companies within the city. And this is a trend I've been following because economics and the economic state of our country in particular will lead you towards these externality trends, one of which being like the opioid addiction. I think people are turning to opioids, one, because they're very cheap. They're very accessible via the current pharmaceutical industry. And then, two, there's a lack of mission out there.

There's a lack of mission-driven people out there. So they turn to these opioids pretty easily, and the pharmaceutical companies are there to basically provide them with these. And I think just for you freaks out there, this is my first intro to transhumanism-like hardcore conversation ever, and I'm loving it so far. And just like being exposed to these arguments for the first time, I have to imagine that the biggest hurdle for you guys is getting people to break away from traditional pharma companies. So part of the problem with transhumanism is that you're basically asking people to do a lot of hard work, which is kind of the same with Bitcoin. You're asking people to do a lot of hard work. Stream ownership, right? Yeah, I mean, that's what it comes with.

Yeah. And on that, I'll point out only Bitcoin has this thing built in where you use greed to harness people to learn to do that work. And then you get economically rewarded. The reason why we're failing in transhumanism and anti-aging stuff, there is no mechanism that rewards you for that, which is why I don't see a good path forward for us. I'm not sure how to hack the incentive problem. Bitcoin somehow ingeniously did this mechanism where it's built in to the protocol. If you do the work now, it goes up in value and you're holding it and you're rewarded for being a hodler. Well, I mean, that goes back to the idea that with Bitcoin and sound money, you can possibly have a long time frame and investment preference. Exactly. That's what I was going to say. Maybe Bitcoin is a free record to the future that you envision.

It's one way to do it. But the problem that comes back is, like, how many people do we need to be on board supporting this idea of anti-aging research? If we're going to, you know, at what point do I have to persuade 10 people to go along with this research program or I'm going to die of old age if they don't agree? And it's a question of, you know, how do we motivate people, harness people, the taxpayers? That said, like, the war on cancer was a bad failure because we started that in the 1970s. A lot of the tools were not here. We didn't have the big data, all this infrastructure to actually successfully carry out a war on cancer from the 1970s when that was funded, right? And still today we're making some good progress with the immunotherapy and some new approaches.

But, you know, I can see us for 30 years being like having this problem against anti-aging and not making meaningful progress for life extension because we're simply not properly organized and the infrastructure was not mature. you have to have these background pieces there people tried digital currencies in the 80s and 90s all of that was not ready until this one event you know 2008 and then suddenly finally that iteration of it pulled all the pieces together and somehow managed to last 10 years right so can't take this for granted like anti-aging may be the same thing where it's like 2050 before all the pieces kind of had congealed and suddenly it's now you can roll this out and it's going to be deployed successfully switch to brian here i wonder if you could use like and lock time verify to incentivize this right oh there's all sorts of uh funding contracts that

have been proposed like mutual assurance contracts and uh uh also uh i'm sure like robin anson probably has a few things up his sleeve all sorts of stuff um for mechanism design I don't know. I still think that if there is a smart contract solution for funding really advanced technologies that we don't currently know how to fund, I mean, they might be out there, but they haven't been invented yet. And in the meantime, I think that just the shifting of time preference with Bitcoin savings might be a strong enough effect. Yeah, I mean, that's one huge thing is the time preference shift. That's probably taking another 10 years before there's critical mass of people who've all bought into this.

But the early adopters are going to need to come together and somehow create a fund or a structure, something with incentives where we can really, it's all about open source technology development. This is something I've wrestled with for 15 years. I originally connected to Brian. And patents and all the secrecy and intellectual property is basically the single biggest damaging factors to humanity's success because it's holding us back from innovating at an exponential rate. Only in a few cases of Linux and a few other massive breakthrough success areas did we create these open platforms commons for technology development

and Bitcoin itself being an open source code. So how do we do that for the hard sciences and areas where they've been accustomed to these crazy models where you build a giant wall around your intellectual property and it's super capital-intensive and only Intel or whoever can be a chip maker and you only have a couple of those in the world. Now, in that case, there still was competition between these chip fabs, so it's actually been good for the consumer and mostly made chip prices be enough of a commodity

to where we haven't been subject to a total monopoly like we are in the pharma industry. So we've got to come together and come up with a new way to finance these big open-source technologies in biotech, nanotech, the big key enablers. So, interesting observation here. Many software developers or even just movie enthusiasts, torrenting enthusiasts, might remember that video codecs for a long time were patent encumbered, and they still continue to be, and we have to expend a lot of effort to work around them. Patent encumbered? In particular, through the MPEG Alliance. An interesting note is that the MPEG Alliance is now doing similar patent pools for CRISPR. And since it didn't work out for us last time, maybe we shouldn't do it this time.

I don't know. So how do we prevent it from happening again, in your opinion? I mean, it's really hard. I think you just got to build a work. Do you need a Satoshi-like figure to create? You need something like that. I don't know what the equivalent is. I've been dealing with this for like 15 years about what is open source biology,

what's the equivalent to Linux. genomic data and genomic technologies a few people have tried to release quote open source licenses or open source equivalents of biological parts and repositories it hasn't like caught on in the same way because it's so hard to do all the cultivation the documentation and to be a steward of these systems we have all these bio banks around the world that take patient samples and tissues and in cell lines and most of them are owned by different like non-profits or different groups that license out and do materials transfer agreements is they all

have different competing business models and even in when they're like non-profit a lot of times it becomes like captured where they have the biggest data set and the biggest bunch of tissues from all the patients and then they're going to charge you on your term their terms for being able to get access to those samples yeah speaking of monopolies like that another big one that people aren't entirely aware of is the library monopoly. OCLC. Yeah, all the libraries are part of a monopoly. The whole interlibrary

loan system is completely corrupt and controlled by this organization. There's an interlibrary loan system? Yeah, like... What are they loaning? What are they loaning? Books. Oh. Yeah, I mean like you go to a library, they don't have the book and they get a loan for a book from another library. That's all managed through a single system.

Yeah, anyway, libraries aren't as entirely free as we'd like to think. Even the Dewey Decimal system is like patented and libraries pay fees for the Dewey Decimal System. It's just completely ridiculous that our entire intellectual capacity of our civilization is just so corrupted. It's just completely ridiculous. Does Bitcoin give you hope that we'll break out of that structure? You know what? I am opting out of our current system and using Bitcoin. That's how I think of it. Brian, I'm going to put you in a tough position right now. If you had to choose

to work on Bitcoin or transhumanism in perpetuity going forward, what would it be? oh don't do that to me i just did it to you oh man you have to choose why you have to do me like that um gosh um you know honestly i would probably pick transhumanism um because i see it as a superset really um i'm not like fundamentally like just committing your entire life to money it's sort of weird to me like like i remember this event i went to uh once and it was a bunch of um i guess it was libertarian event or something i'm and i wasn't previously exposed to this community and it was this like economic forum or something and i started to look around at everyone in that room and i realized that the only common denominator was that we all liked money

and i was like this is not a group that i want to be a part of well that's that's actually what entices me about bitcoin a lot because bitcoin i feel like if we get it to a point where it's ossified it's sort of like a common mission you come together for a couple decades to make sure it can work and get off the ground and then boom you create a new money and yes a lot of people want to get wealthy from it but i i agree with you i'd never want like i consciously try to tell myself like don't get enamored with the concept of money for money's sake and no i mean i mean look money is very important yes greed is not bad self-interest is very important to the extent that you have self-interest you should also have self-interest and things beyond money right

no no but i think but i think there is there is a special nuance to our particular current condition where money is so broken that we need to fix it and like we're the generation tasked with like alright we're the assholes

that have to fix money and then hopefully our future children and their children don't have to worry about this they can worry about extending their lives and stuff like that

I really hope that we can get to work much faster than that I do as well well I think we're all on our way there like we're a decade in Bitcoin works

so I talked to Matt Corallo about a year and a half ago And I asked him to put a percentage that Bitcoin would succeed in its endeavor to become a sovereign currency, digital currency. He put it at 5% in November of 2017. So it was almost two years ago now. What would you put it at right now? Well, I guess I don't really understand the question. I mean, Bitcoin already works, as you just mentioned.

Either it does or it doesn't. Do you think it... All right. Probability that Bitcoin works and is not is not cajoled by the state a decade from now. How about how about this? How about how about what is the likelihood that the network effect ends and starts to even reduce or something? You're better at asking questions. And I would say that it's quite unlikely that the network effect is going to just fizzle out and even be inverted or anything like that. I really doubt that. That's what I like to hear. Is there I mean, we're an hour and a half in here. this is now a transhumanism podcast tales from the crypt

how to bring people back from the crypt we've got a dinner to get to in 40 minutes it's going to take a while to get there do we have any parting notes gentlemen like anything you want to touch on before we end the combination of bitcoin and transhumanism is very fascinating to me I'm planning an event that I'm trying to start

to get the word out and see if I can get enough high influencers everybody on board with this concept that we will do this bitcoin party at these different price levels i was going to say 50 000 would be the first one but it could be 100 it's hard to know because it might go 50k and shoot to 100 like really fast but we'd have the first one of these parties and then do it every five or ten years at different price levels like the first one then the next one would be half a million and then at one million and each one would have a theme of these long-term civilizational challenges so the first event we'd

have it on longevity and kind of introducing the Bitcoiners to radical life extension and try to get everybody, you know, I'm going to invite the leading groups from the anti-aging community and then the Bitcoiners together. Maybe the next second party at 500,000 would be about space and private space flight and how to, you know, mobilize Bitcoin around getting us off planet to Mars. So that is the tentative plan. I'm going to put this thing together in some sort of countdown clock i'm saying maybe it's like may 2020 somewhere in that i'm planning to rent catalina island the ballroom of catalina island and have like a theme of the you know the gilded age the new whatever thing and you know i have all the big you know names in the space come out to sort of learn about

life extension and you know human longevity it's good timing it's right uh right around the next halving so yeah i don't know i mean it's just going to be kind of like a notice as soon as it hits 50k we're going to announce the party within you know this a couple weeks i'll have the venue kind of ready reserved on status and then you know everyone converged from around the world to you know go to this bitcoin celebration well i will be there if invited brian thank you for for introducing me to joe and sitting down with me after being an hour late oh absolutely yeah joseph can be found online at biotech and beyond.com and i can be found on twitter.com slash k-a-n-z-u-r-e uh at canger canger right and gentlemen like i think this was actually

as tangential as this podcast got and we went from bitcoin to transhumanism bitcoin to transhumanism i think they're very intertwined oh absolutely i think they're very intertwined i think you may need one to do the other um brian you have any parting notes on bitcoin in particular or anything you want to shout out? You know, I mean, I guess one thing that I keep repeating is if you really want to know how Bitcoin works, if you really want to figure out what all of this is, because, like, from one level, like, if you're new to Bitcoin,

some of this sounds like a complete scam. This is, like, complete, like, horse crap. The thing to do is go read the Bitcoin source code. There's real technology here that is actually doing something, and that's where you can get your knowledge. Like, if you don't trust people, trust code. Yeah. That's what actually I talked with James Chang, who's at the Chaincode residency this week.

And that's how he learned. He read all of the Bitcoin to teach himself Bitcoin. It was like, oh, this actually works. So that's, from what I hear, a good strategy to learn Bitcoin. Gentlemen, this far exceeded my expectations. This is now a transhumanism podcast. Thank you so much for sitting down with us. Brian, thank you for your time.

I had a lot of fun. Thank you. Thank you. Peace and love, freaks. Look out!