Sean Bowe and Jack Grigg aka str4d are both cryptographic engineers working on the Zcash protocol. Sean’s latest project is Tachyon, intended to bring encrypted money into the hands of 8 billion people.

Topics we discuss are well captured by the timestamps below.

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Timestamps

0:00 - Project Tachyon

10:20 - Privacy can’t be an afterthought for a protocol

15:24 - Encrypted Bitcoin

22:11 - Soundness bug in original sprout pool

30:15 - Sapling

33:00 - A decade of progress

39:04 - Zcash’s anonymity set

51:29 - Using private money as a passthrough doesn’t work

56:04 - The importance of ledger indistinguishability

58:30 - The ultimate privacy stack

1:05:58 - Tachyon removes all cryptographic bottlenecks of encrypted money

1:08:16 - What’s next after Tachyon?

1:15:25 - Weightless blockchains?

1:18:24 - Ragu

1:19:44 - What the next 12 months look like for Jack and Sean

1:31:22 - “Everything worth doing is worth doing on ambitious timelines.” — Sean

1:32:16 - Sean’s advice for young engineers

1:34:18 - What got Sean and Jack into Zcash?

My conversation with Samo Burja, founder of Bismarck Analysis. He chairs the editorial board of Palladium Magazine.

Topics we discuss are well captured by the timestamps below.

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Timestamps

0:00 - Intro

1:18 - Live players

5:41 - Great Founder Theory

11:20 - Our material technology rests on our social interactions

14:23 - Optimism, pessimism, and human agency

23:21 - Operationalized knowledge

25:22 - Lost and dead traditions of knowledge

27:34 - Tradition of criticism

29:36 - The most important piece of knowledge to preserve

32:27 - Common features of declining societies

39:18 - Are the Spartan warriors overrated and just had very good PR?

42:07 - DOGE and bureaucracy in America

45:28 - The machinery of freedom

47:43 - Tech Samo is most excited about over the next 5 years

50:10 - Curtis Yarvin and the orbital authority

55:01 - Samo’s advice for young people

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My conversation with Zooko Wilcox and Josh Swihart on unstoppable private money.

Zooko Wilcox is a legendary cypherpunk and one of the founders of Zcash—private, digital money.

Josh Swihart is the CEO of Electric Coin Company, the team behind the Zcash protocol and the Zashi wallet app.

Topics we discuss are well captured by the timestamps below.

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Timestamps

0:00 - Maya Protocol integrates with Zcash

3:52 - Coinbase social engineering attack

7:43 - Private money negates capital controls

14:13 - Privacy comes from money at rest

18:24 - The Zashi effect and future roadmap

25:11 - Project Tachyon

39:10 - Zcash’s anonymity set doesn’t depend on the number of its users

45:37 - Turnstiles in Zcash and the 2018 inflation bug

57:28 - “ZK” has become a marketing stunt among crypto projects

59:48 - On Binance delisting ZEC

1:01:35 - A transition toward using crypto as it was originally intended

1:04:52 - Should exchanges use transparent addresses?

1:17:38 - Coin holder voting in Zcash

1:23:38 - Sci-fi influence

1:28:37 - Gary Gensler

1:29:40 - Why I like Zcash

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My conversation with Ethan Thornton, founder of Mach Industries.

Topics we discuss are well captured by the timestamps below.

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Timestamps

0:00 - Intro

1:07 - Why Mach needs to exist

3:16 - Early experiments

5:07 - Dropping out of MIT

8:36 - Raising $85 million at 19 years old

11:20 - Decentralized vertical supply chains

13:54 - The most important domain of the next century

15:55 - Betting on hydrogen

18:11 - Overview of Viper and Glide

21:06 - Building feedback loops across teams

25:29 - Facing regulatory hurdles

28:19 - Knowing when to be risk tolerant

29:54 - Time until China invades Taiwan

31:45 - The future of warfare

42:29 - Takeaways from the (unmanned) war in Ukraine

48:23 - Biggest influences on Ethan’s life

49:37 - Mach’s long-term plan

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My conversation with philosopher and author Peter Boghossian.

Topics we discuss are well captured by the timestamps below.

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Timestamps

0:00 - The enlightenment

5:51 - The dangers of moral relativism

21:28 - Modern education is failing us

31:14 - What’s worth preserving in the West

37:00 - Is wokeism filling the void left by atheism?

38:04 - The spread of Islamism

45:49 - Speech is not violence

49:11 - Derangements of science

52:48 - The myth of the framework

56:34 - Why you should learn epistemology

58:05 - The instinct to belong trumps what’s true

1:02:44 - Chasing likes versus pursuing truth

1:05:08 - What is Peter most optimistic and most pessimistic about

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My conversation with Zooko, Nate Wilcox, and Sean Bowe about the Zcash protocol.

Zooko is a cypherpunk who co-founded Zcash along with his brother, Nate Wilcox, and others. Sean Bowe is a cryptographer and engineer who has played a crucial role in the development of Zcash and has made significant contributions to advancements in zero-knowledge proofs, particularly zk-SNARKs, which underpin Zcash’s privacy features.

Topics we discuss are well captured by the timestamps below.

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Timestamps

0:00 - Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn

0:04 - Writing the first blog post on Bitcoin ever

6:21 - Bitcoin’s fundamental privacy flaw

9:40 - Unstoppable private money

12:19 - Will Zcash compete with Bitcoin as a store of value?

14:24 - How many people are using Zcash?

16:18 - Good security is good usability

20:10 - Social credit systems and ubiquitous surveillance

23:43 - Why Monero’s privacy tech can’t work

35:21 - Integrating ZKPs into other blockchains

39:51 - Privacy comes from money at rest, not from money in flight

47:42 - Why did the price of ZEC fall so drastically in the beginning?

51:49 - Zcash stablecoins?

55:50 - Quantum threats to Zcash

1:02:50 - Encrypted love notes in the blockchain'

1:07:07 - Privacy enabled cultural trends

1:12:43 - Nate Wilcox

1:14:38 - Why do you need privacy if you have nothing to hide?

1:16:16 - A brief history of Zcash

1:22:42 - Why does Zcash have opt-in privacy?

1:26:55 - Does Zcash still rely on a trusted setup?

1:30:49 - Upgrading the Zcash protocol to Hybrid PoW/PoS

1:40:50 - A bug that almost killed Zcash

1:52:40 - Zcash’s funding model

2:09:09 - Why can’t privacy be added as an L2?

2:14:35 - Scaling Zcash and making it more interoperable

2:23:16 - Shielded Labs

2:24:39 - Nate’s vision for Zcash

2:27:53 - Sean Bowe

2:32:53 - Censorship resistance is a spectrum

2:35:26 - Will privacy coins be banned?

2:37:49 - Privacy and scalability

2:41:47 - Programmable money

2:43:31 - Summary of Sean’s contributions to the field of cryptography

2:55:17 - Zcash might get privacy against quantum adversaries for free

3:00:14 - Halo

3:05:34 - What Sean’s working on right now

3:11:54 - What has influenced Sean’s thinking in cryptography the most?

3:13:36 - Being a high school dropout working in crypto

3:15:08 - Zcash is just getting started

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My conversation with Naval Ravikant. Enjoy!

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Timestamps

0:00 - The Theory of Everything

4:48 - How do you know what’s true?

7:51 - Groups search for consensus, individuals search for truth

13:07 - We have never run out of a single resource

15:25 - Are we destroying the Earth?

17:48 - Marxism denies wealth creation

21:28 - Regulation kills innovation

27:05 - Degrowth and the fall of Western universities

33:31 - Why the West is best

35:47 - Federalism

38:10 - Everyone wants to live forever

41:44 - Humans are universal explainers

43:25 - Collectivism vs. individualism

50:44 - You cannot explain the universe without explaining humans

55:02 - How David Deutsch’s ideas have changed Naval’s life

1:02:31 - The scientific method isn’t possible

1:05:07 - The low-hanging fruit theory is a bad explanation

1:08:19 - The biggest threats to Western civilization

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I had the pleasure of sitting down with David Deutsch in his lovely garden in Oxford a few months ago. Here’s our conversation.

Topics we discuss are well captured by the timestamps below.

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Timestamps

1:01 - A tragic view of human history

7:04 - Why did it take so long for civilization to arise?

13:31 - Fallibilism

21:32 - Cultural relativism denies improvement

24:03 - Richard Dawkins and indigenous ways of knowing

26:49 - Chemical scum that dream of distant quasars

31:38 - The era of man

37:55 - People are unlike any other force of nature

42:51 - The dangers of regulating AI

48:09 - Are we running out of resources?

54:21 - Everything in existing educational theory is wrong

1:11:30 - When David met Richard Feynman

1:17:33 - Everyone is a Popperian

1:20:16 - Only progress is sustainable

1:26:00 - The biggest threat to Western civilization

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