Podcast notes – Worldcoin CEO Alex Blania – Epicenter (Sebastien and Friederike)

Guest: Alex Blania
Host: Sebastien Couture and Friederike Ernst
https://epicenter.tv/episodes/435

Background
-Vertical farming
-Caltech physics

Sam (Altman) was already working with Max on it
Alex became friends with them, became a cofounder
Brought on friends from German uni, Caltech
Lots of physicists as a result

He’s CEO, there’s 100 people, runs daily business
Sam is cofounder & chairman, involved in every big decision
Max is great zero to one guy

Started Worldcoin 2 years ago
How to accelerate societal transition into crypto & blockchain, should be net positive for society

Initially planned to launch a token, accessible to everyone
How to solve sybil resistance so everyone gets a fair share?
Built hardware device, “the orb” to verify this
It’s a platform for other projects, as well as for their own token (Worldcoin)

Onboarded 450K users already, now ready to scale

Initially thought about sybil resistance for months
Lots of existing solutions with problems – KYC, network topology
Only truly scalable solution is biometrics (it’s unique to each person, only need to do it once)
You can use ZKP in crypto to make it privacy preserving while maintaining scale
Didn’t want to make a hardware device, it’s a brutal endeavor

The Orb
“Proof of personhood” – how to prove you’re unique and alive, not a bot or attacker
First liveness check, checks you’re a real human
Calculates unique ID from picture of eye – from eye muscle – only eye biometric data really works, fingerprint and face don’t
Iris hash stored in L2
User can then prove they’re among a set of people
But doesn’t reveal public or private key – only proves you belong to a group of people
DB of iris hashes is stored on an L2

Team is very extreme on privacy
Biometrics aren’t your identity, just your passport
Orb users receive 2 key pairs – one is eg ETH wallet private & public key, second is biometric data keys (semaphore key?)
Only thing you can prove from the hash is that you belong to a group of users (eg, you use a specific app) – which is more secure than eg, your Google username
Expect to eventually open source hardware designs

SC: Concern that hardware becomes hacked or corrupted, open sourcing hardware would be helpful. Is there a nightmare scenario?

Real concern is malicious people who build own orbs and pretend it’s the official Orb
Need to be very transparent and educational about this

SC: Got a DNA kit for Xmas, but decided to send it back – it’s the unknown unknowns he can’t square

Worldcoin is truly privacy preserving by its design and usage of ZKPs
Token is L2 on Ethereum, optimistic rollup
Will allow minting token on other blockchains like Solana or Near

Right now if you lose your semaphore key (the Orb specific key), then you lose your identity – still need to solve for this

They’re building own app to help with onboarding

New users sign up, receive Worldcoin tokens, with governance rights
Experimenting with incentive mechanisms
10B tokens, capped supply, 8B to users
Early users receive more tokens – a gradual unlock over time (eg, 2 years) – more like UBI
Other projects will also airdrop to Worldcoin network – should start happening soon

They’re very excited about UBI, especially when AGI gets closer

If reach supply cap (eg, if literally everyone in world adopts it), let’s see what governance / community decides to do

Started as small team in SF apartment

Plan to make 50K of these orbs every year
Already onboarded 450K with just 30 devices – think about the eventual scale
Each device can onboard 800-2K people/week – the numbers are much better than they initially thought
Operational load is insane – how to educate, properly onboard

30 devices – spread widely, very experimental, across globe (Europe, Africa, Indonesia, etc)
Want to find operators who would otherwise run companies
Strong Pareto distribution – the best ones onboard a lot more people
Eg, operator ran a crypto club in Kenya, onboards a lot of young people there

Worldcoin not tradable today – you receive IOUs today – wait until main net goes live
Young people find it cool and exciting
Becomes platform for other protocols and tokens
Orb operators receive stablecoin payments, not Worldcoin

How do you align operators?
Eg, operator could trick people, go to elderly home and scan everyone’s irises
Tough problem, still experimenting, seeing these problems already with just 30 orbs

Corporate structure
US entity, German entity, Swiss foundation
Small team in SF, most of team in Europe – in small town in middle of Germany, did this during covid so they could work together
Swiss foundation for token issuance
Figuring out how to properly setup DAO, with governance rights, etc

Raised $25M from top VCs @ $1B valuation – a16z, SBF, CoinFund, etc
Plan 10% to foundation, 10% to external investors (including above VCs)
// I’m not sure if he’s referring to token allocation or equity ownership in company

FE: How does this align with fair launch mission? If want to do global UBI coin but insiders own 20%

20% is less than other projects, those investors like cdixon are great partners to have, but early advisors / investors thought it was too low and wouldn’t work
Even now they think it’s a struggle since hardware + global scale requires a lot of capital

Incentives should all be aligned around the token, not the company itself

SC: seems like it should be a public good

“It will become a public good”

“I love our investors”

FE: What’s the meme for Worldcoin?

Bitcoin is 0.9 Gini coefficient, Worldcoin will be 0.4 (much better)
Everyone gets ownership in this thing, new playing field

FE: You’re creating value first and foremost for the investors…is it gonna rub people the wrong way? Will it get forked?

We can adapt and change – issue other tokens – etc – have talked to Balaji about this too

SC: Ukraine conflict will accelerate crypto regulation
In 20 years, how will WC make world better?

Solve Sybil resistance
Biggest onboarding to web3
See path to 1B users in <3 years – “was very surprising to us”
UBI deployment

Expect 10M+ users by end of 2022

Open SDK soon – under 3 months

Orbs will lead to different user distribution than other crypto networks – because orb operators spread geographically, and then onboard high penetration locally
This network will give other builders access to lots of new users

Will launch Discord and Telegram relatively soon

FE: wouldn’t personally use biometrics, prefers “web of trust” to scale in truly decentralized manner – “you don’t want to have a conductor for this”

Podcast notes – Gone Girl author and screenwriter Gillian Flynn on craft – Writers Ink

Guest: Gillian Flynn
Host: Writers Ink

She wrote Gone Girl (book and movie), Dark Places, and Sharp Objects (HBO series)

Gone Girl screenplay
-Wrote the book, and really wanted to write the screenplay
-her father was a film professor
-she naturally writes “film-ically” (writing in scenes, seeing and visualizing scenes)
-It was her 3rd book and was hard to adapt (unreliable narrators, internalized monologue)
-When she wrote screenplay (it was her 1st professional script), the script was getting too long (after 2 hours / ~120 pages) and she got nervous
-David Fincher came aboard and said “let the writer write”
-They closely developed it together – “We both are real work horses”
-“I’m certainly not afraid to rewrite and rewrite” – “what moments hit”
–no placeholder scenes, “no, let’s figure it out”

Childhood film geek
-Would request printed screenplays to read
-Loved Psycho as a kid
-Saw Alien when she was 6yo
-Would talk w/ her film professor dad after, about what worked for the films and why

Book writing process
-very scatter shot approach
-“only written 3 books”
-Sharp Objects was her first book, talk about female violence and how it’s handled across generations
-as she finished Sharp Objects, started Dark Places about a girl who became famous because her family was ax-murdered
-in this way, the books kinda tie together – some sort of kernel that goes from one book to the next
-don’t outline – tried it and failed miserably, eg, Sharp Objects’ killer wasn’t even in the book’s first draft (!) – someone read it and said “I thought X was killer” and Gillian realized she felt the same way, and so re-wrote the book
-when started Gone Girl, had just gotten married, was thinking a lot about gender roles
-“I just write and write and write”
-was a journalist for 10 years – at last minute your 10K word piece can be cut down to 200 words, so you stop fearing that process, don’t get too precious about work,
-she treats it as a 9-5 job – not writing the whole time, but doing related activities
-sometimes it’s flowing, and sometimes she’s like, “does my brain work at all anymore, how does one even write”
–night owl – prefers writing 10pm-3am and then sleep in, “synapses are clicking the best” – but can’t really do that now with kids,

Revisions process
-how does she know when it’s done? “when I’ve read through it, and it’s the book I would want to read”
-tweaks until last minute, with each publisher print, she’ll notice different fixes and edits
-very small group she allows to read it before she sends to editor: husband and 2 friends

Gone Girl book
-editor was skeptical about the unusual story, unlikable / unreliable characters, whodunnit with reveal halfway
-stunned at its success
-helps to broaden what’s acceptable eg, trend of female main characters who aren’t very likable (before, publishers would turn down such concepts)

She has her own book imprint now – Zando Publishing – seeks quirky books, doesn’t require a large existing marketing platform

Doesn’t use social media often – “I’m a novelist I can’t write in a pithy clever manner”

Podcast notes – Jane McGonigal on future of games and gameplay – Tim Ferriss podcast

Guest: Jane McGonigal
Host: Tim Ferriss

Did large scale (100s to 1000s of participants) social simulation in 2010 that predicted a lot of covid pandemic problems (eg, women stopping work to take care of kids; people violating quarantine restrictions for religious gatherings)

Many of these players were then faster to prepare and adapt to the pandemic – “pre-recognition”

Another simulated scenario was severe disruptions to power supply

5 minutes of vivid imagination (worst case scenario planning) is enough to help you prepare in case

Next pandemic fear is tick-borne
Alpha-gal (sp?) syndrome
Tim’s mom has it, Tim also had Lyme disease twice
Causes allergic reactions to meat and gelatin products – even airborne meat like outdoor bbq can cause adverse fx
Reducing meat in diets can be preventative
There’s infected ticks in public parks, on public beaches – and spreading
Climate change is big driver, as well as closer co-habitation (btw humans and animals)
Caused an epi-pen shortage due to this outbreak

Number one most under-rated threat: Global Youth Disillusionment
Youth rejecting global capitalist trends
16-25yo – majority across 10 countries believe humanity is doomed, future is hopeless
Main reason – “Confusion about government failure to act on climate change”
“Lie flat” movement – Chinese 躺平 – just opt out of modern life

Recently learned about MMT (modern monetary theory)
Makes UBI (universal basic income) more possible
She wants people to work less, care more for their families and communities
Why not a 3-day workweek?
Successful pilots of 20-hour workweeks
Tim: very productive professional writers max out around 4 hours / day (= 20 hours / week)

“Food is medicine movement”
US gov funding allowing at-risk / lower income to buy unlimited healthy foods

Government will create their own cryptocurrencies to replace decentralized ones via bribes / regulation

Play 2 earn – games will create revenue sharing systems w players

AI tech can blend faces – eg, blend friend’s face + your mother’s – to further persuade you in ads or fake media
Trust goes up when faces are familiar
“Trust warfare”
Audio fakes may lag because the datasets aren’t as big as photo / video (tho podcasters are definitely at risk)

Tim: “Ready Player One probably closer than a lot of people think”

Porn / VR sex
Porn at vanguard of new tech
Younger generations having less sex
Rise in neural implants – first wave of adoption is depression / mania – but second wave could be simulated / virtual sex
Neuro-stimulation wouldn’t require imagery – could be better / safer
In porn, violence is being normalized – slapping + choking – which turns off young women

Oscar Wilde: “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power”

Visit UrgentOptimists.org – will have a “future of sex” workshop
What is urgent optimism? Things I can do TODAY to improve our future
Gamers have a well developed reward circuitry system – “I got this”, can-do attitude
Every game is a psychological experiment to convince people they have power

Simple habit – whatever problem you’re worried about, just search Google for that problem + the word “solution” (climate solution, pandemic solutions, etc)

Future Fridays
Once a week, do a search for “future of [X]” eg, lab cultured meat
Gives you hope for future, signals for future

She learned how to operate a drone – very empowering experience

stopped ~3/5 of the way

Podcast notes – Preethi Kasireddy on key web3 architecture – Tom Shaughnessy of Delphi Podcast

Guest: Preethi Kasireddy (Dappcamp founder)
Host: Tom Shaughnessy

Architecture of web3 application
https://www.preethikasireddy.com/post/the-architecture-of-a-web-3-0-application

Formerly Coinbase engineer, and a16z partner (enterprise and consumer, less crypto at the time)

Then she built Truestory for 2.5 years, building blockchain social network, skin in game for online comments, too early for it

Then started Dappcamp – trains web2 engineers on web3 tech
Idea spawned from devcamp lecture
3 week intense bootcamp

Smart contracts are backend code – removes idea of centralized webserver – all logic + state on Ethereum
ETH is your new backend

Securely communicate with ETH blockchain via nodes (json-rpc)
Alchemy, Infura are node providers – provide API endpoints – faster to start, more secure, easier to scale
Centralization risk, but benefits > costs

ETH is deterministic state machine
Users must initiate transactions using private keys
web2 version = user + password login, which provides the service with your key(s)

IPFS, Swarm = decentralized storage = separate network for data storage
Store media on IPFS, IPFS provides hash to that file(s), you save that hash on blockchain
Most IPFS users don’t also use Filecoin, and instead pin to their own server / node, but Filecoin incentivizes true decentralized storage
“IPFS can be competitive with AWS in future…but will take a lot of time”

Querying ETH database is surprisingly hard
Etherscan is amazing – scans ETH for every block, every transaction
The Graph is a service that does all this for you
diff apps also build their own (eg, Uniswap API endpoints for Uniswap-related data)
Read-only, not for posting to blockchain

web3 isn’t more complex than web2
just a different paradigm (eg, gas fees, private keys)
technically, apps can pay for users’ gas, to remove / abstract away

ETH methods for scaling
1. Payment channels (Lightning, Raiden)
2. Sidechain (Polygon) – most popular now
3. Rollups (key difference: execution is done offchain, and post data to ETH) – will take off in a few years, lots of work to make cross-rollup communication possible

Composability – all ETH L1 smart contracts can talk to each other

Most excited about innovation in Starkware, Optimism, ZK-land (instead of dapps)

“Ethereum fan girl”
ETH has lost market share in recent years
Avalanche accepts EVM and builds off it – EVM has a lot of staying power

Podcast notes – Ariel Ekblaw on space colonization – Lex Fridman podcast

Guest: Ariel Ekblaw, director of MIT Space Initiative
Host: Lex Fridman

Parents are ex-Air Force, both pilots
Legacy of pilots > astronauts
Dad was huge sci-fi fan, Heinlein, Asimov
Love affair with civilization scale space exploration

Apollo program leapt far ahead, now rest of space industry is catching up

Favorite book now is Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves
Cycle between authors and engineers – authors dream it up, engineers build it, inspire next generation of authors, and cycle continues

Long Now foundation – what does society need to do now for a long and prosperous future?

Instead of abandoning Earth, how do we use space tech to keep Earth livable?

Harsh conditions (such as those in space) are great forcing function for innovation and survival

Future of space habitats = intelligent structures + swarm robots (micro robots that can inspect, repair)

Distributed systems are critical for redundancy – eg, Space Station as a structure of decentralized nodes where, if an emergency happens, people can isolate it and move to another area

Tesserae – her PhD research topic – self assembling space structures – tiles with magnets for autonomous assembly, a decentralized system with sensors and self-determination
Building human sized tiles now
Want to build large enough tiles to form Buckyball (10m in diameter) – much bigger than current ISS modules
Buckyball is most efficient surface-area-to-volume shape

What’s purpose of next gen space architecture? Can we give you goosebumps?

Programmable matter – she’s focused on big scale, but there’s other research on tiny self assembling structures

What’s a space cathedral look like? Long sight lines, stunning architecture, more organic (vs geometric), like a nautilus seashell

(truncated) Octahedrons as a great shape / structure for this self-assembly – one could be sleeping quarters, one a storage depot, etc
Unlike modern space stations, these can be re-configured, incorporate more space ships and crew and arrangements

Another favorite book – Ringworld (scifi novel by Larry Niven)

Microgravity vs zero gravity – no such thing as zero gravity, always gravity between two objects
Microgravity is essentially floating, but you’re actually in free fall

Flew 9 times on Vomit Comet
True feeling of weightlessness, like flying in a dream
Instructors tell you to make a memory while you’re experiencing it, because it’s so novel and time flies by so quickly

Takes 3 years round-trip to fly to Mars – journey takes 6-9 months, then wait for planets to find favorable alignment before you can fly back (!)

If you stay in orbit a long time, will be lots of physiological changes
“Deep duration space missions”
Problems include:
–Radiation is biggest risk (on Earth you’re protected by magnetosphere)
–Mental health (small space, long duration, few people)
Space food – all freeze dried
Researching fermented food in space – lots of tasty foods (beer, wine, umami), good for microbiome
After several days to weeks, astronauts can adapt to space / micro gravity
Physical changes – Bone density, muscle atrophy, eyeball shape

There’s water on moon – can use it for drinking water, propellent

Sherlock experiment on Mars – searching for signs of past habitability, organic life potential
Search for alien life is profoundly exciting – may not be carbon based life, how do you build a detector for non-carbon (eg, silicon) life?
If life is as prolific as we hoped, why haven’t we heard of it yet? The challenge of Fermi Paradox

Shadow biosphere – concept of potentially alien / unrecognizable life that already exists on Earth

Lex: Challenge of human unpredictability / motivations – if you like someone too much, problems arise; if you don’t like someone at all, also problems arise

We want artificial gravity eventually – so for example there’s a treadmill part that’s near to 1G (Earth gravity) that astronauts can spend part of the day

Many questions about sex in space – how does fetus evolve in low g?

Mars is not a good home currently for humanity
Atmosphere very thin, hard to grow crops
Small outpost is definitely possible – like in Antarctica (McMurdo)
likely early 2030s for first such mission
No supply chain for broken electronic parts, no grocery stores

Thinks floating space cities are more likely – built incrementally

ISS – joint effort of 18 countries, great example of international cooperation even during periods of eg US-Russia conflict

Lex: Space exploration unites us and gives us hope; Look up to the stars and dream

MIT going back to moon as early as this year or 2023
Testing swarm robots that ride on a Rover
Each robot has 4 magnetic wheels

Bill Anders: We came all the way to discover the Moon, and what we really discovered is the Earth

stopped 2/3 of way