36 Burst results for "Quanta"
Level After Next With Katie Barnett
Quantum Physics: The "Spookiness of Life" With Dr. Victor Manzo
"What I really want to get to is quantum physics. I feel like, you know, this is something that's talked about, it's posted about, but I don't think people have any kind of real concept of that term. So, you know, I know this is, like, kind of an all over question. But I do think it's important that you start to at least, like, give us an idea, some kind of just framework for what it means when people talk about quantum physics. Yeah. So, like, the way I like to say the quantum world and stuff like that. So, when I first started teaching, like, doing energy medicine or energy healing and trying to teach it, like, even when I was in chiropractic school, I used to present on it and just share about energy and how does it work and how are we influenced by it. And a lot of times people thought that was woo -woo, especially I was down below the Bible Belt in Dallas, Texas. And so, what ended up happening was that they're like, oh, that's spiritual stuff. That's woo -woo. But then what happened is quantum physics came around. Now, it's been around for a long time. It's not something new. But it started to have experiments. There's been studies. They've done these experiments to see, to understand the spookiness. Because what quantum physics is doing playing is they're around with the spookiness of life. I call it the X factor. And the spookiness is what it means is things don't act in a behavioral way like it should. It's not linear. And I wouldn't say it's random because it's not random. But it's very like, so for an example, they've done a study that was done or experiment called the observer effect. And what this is, it's basically called the double slit study. And what it did is they were through shooting electrons the sea. Is light a particle or a wave? And how is it going to behave based upon that? And so, they did the experiment. And they have it go through the two slits. And when it goes through, it should show up on the sensors like this. And some uniformly it did when they were looking at the experiment. But when they didn't look, it would go into a wave format. So, it's like the light with the electrons spread. So, it looks like thin on the outside bands. And it gets thicker as it goes into the middle. And they're like, hold up, wait a minute. We just messed this up. So, they go ahead and they redo it over and over and over again. And they keep getting the opposite results. So, this doesn't make sense. So, maybe we did it wrong. So, let's redo it all over again. And they do it all over. And long story short, they do the study again. And it starts doing the same thing when they were looking and acted the way they expected it to. When they weren't looking, it didn't act that way. And so, what that means is that when we talk about that from a quantum perspective, we're understanding that... I don't want to use the randomness, but this non -linear experiences of what we have in life, and this is everything. So, the quantum world is that. So, this is the different world that we have with the world of one world where it's like linear. This is what you do. It's kind of like in the business world. It's hard work, grind, hustle, mentality, all this stuff. Put the sweat equity. You do this stuff over a period of time, you get this. You do this, then you get that. That's a very linear type of process. Quantum, there's infinite ways of how you can get to where you want to get to. Just which one do you want to choose?
Bloomberg Businessweek
Fresh update on "quanta" discussed on Bloomberg Businessweek
"Today. Well, it's certainly been an interesting set of days here around the Fed announcement. So if we just look at the picture here, I think prior to the Fed meeting coming up, we had some decent inflation reads. One was a little bit harder than we liked, but overall there was uncertainty but a little bit of stability and corporate earnings were holding up well. The consumer was spending. We kind of thought that this was going to be at least clear skies into the of end the year with potentially a bullish market. And then post -Fed yesterday, we now go back to a little bit of uncertainty around the prospect of whether or not there's a change now in the soft landing scenario. So we know the Fed was a little hawkish. He removed about 50 bits of easing in the dot plot, went from four to two cuts, and the market didn't like it. So I think over the last couple of days, what we saw was a little bit of selling, panic and that's often what happens, unfortunately, on pullbacks. I often think about that and wish we would see it the other way, because for dollar -cost averaging, long -term investors, these are actually the best buying opportunities, but investors get a little bit spooked. So when you say a little bit, when you say a little bit, is it really just a little bit, or is it something enough that you guys... Really just a little bit. Okay. Yeah. Any buying? Just a little bit. We did. So we saw a lot of buying on the income side. So we've got two products that are meant to generate enhanced income, essentially, and we saw really outsized buying, actually, in those two funds. And then we saw a little bit of selling and kind of the tech type of names in the AI play, and that's recovering today, which is of note, but yeah, that's kind of where we saw the flow and the action. When you speak income, equity income, or are you talking about fixed income? income. Yeah. So I'll give you two examples. There are two tickers. One is The JEPY and QQQY, what they do is essentially look to sell in the money puts on a daily basis. So there are zero data expiry puts that are in the money that expire within 24 hours. The idea is that you generate the premium on a daily basis to hopefully, you know, provide enhanced income to clients by the end of the year. So there are products that track an equity index, the S &P 500 and the NASDAQ, but the goal is really to sell puts and to gather the premium to pay that out to and so we've just seen incredible demand and interest in these products. And they've actually only been out for a couple of days too. So income is the name of the game this year. I'm glad you brought up puts because when you're looking at that lack of hedging that's been there the past few months, especially because of just how cheap it is now as well. What do you think that really and when you're talking about puts being shorter for this type of duration, does it mask some of the potential hedging is that going on underneath the surface? Yes, that's a really interesting question. If you look over the last couple of weeks, actually there's been an increase in volume in kind of hedges going on the books. I think So a lot of investors and obviously the kind of the professional hedge fund guys and whatnot, we're probably doing ahead of the Fed meeting, but when you sell slightly in the money puts, it's actually expression, right? So our view isn't so much on the direction of the market, but our view is that there's this volatility aspect to puts that expire within one day that could be captured to generate enhanced income essentially. So it doesn't really have a whole lot to do with hedging in the way that we're doing it. But to the hedging question, I do think that you see the volume increased and I've been actually studying this a bunch just because we've kind of come out with this ETF, but CPO has come out with some information that actually shows that there have been trillions of AUM in options buying and selling in recent days that's been outsized, but it's been pretty level. So the buys have matched the super interesting. So this whole idea of like in 24 hours, is it a case of like, so you kind of always have your money bull kind of thinking or what is it? No, it's actually that, you know, you get more bites at the apple, right? So, okay, so some of the, yeah, the better known strategies out there are the covered call strategies, right, they're where holding, let's say the S &P 500, and then they're employing a covered call strategy to generate income. So we kind of just flipped that on its head and said, well, you know, treasuries are returning 5%. So instead of holding the S &P, why don't we hold, know, you treasuries and have 5 % higher income environment, and then sell in the money puts on the actual index and generate the yield that way. So it's really a way to, you know, outperform some of these great covered call strategies that are out there and are also providing amazing kind of income distributions. But, you know, our goal is beat to kind of that. Should we talk some names? We should. What are some individual names that you are advising clients to buy? Yeah, so I think given what's going on in the last couple of days, you know, there's been so FOMO much this year about, you know, not having gone into the AI stocks, the tech stocks and things like that. And then when you see, you know, kind of days like this and Thursday, Friday, it's as we spoke about before, right? everybody's sort of like panic selling, but really there should be kind of panic buying, right? Or excitement buying there. I think when you get When you think about the future of AI and what that means, you know, it's not just a buzzword, it's right? something that's going to change healthcare, it's something that's going to allow for autonomous driving, for electric vehicles to work, for smart smart cities to be connected, you know, for banks to properly manage their risk and for all of you know, kind of different things that we're we're talking about as they relate to AI and you know, kind of what powers AI. So you don't think it's getting old and crusty yet, the AI trade. I don't think it's even started. I think this is the decade of I think AI is the next tech like AI supercomputing quantum computing is the next five to 10 years, you know that it's going to be the next five to 10 years. Do you also like Tesla? And the revenues will start coming from it? Oh, I'm sorry. I jumped in. Do you also like Tesla and Rivian? We've got about 30 seconds left. Yeah. Love Tesla and Rivian also both knocked off of their pedestals this week. You know, amazing performance at VR, but what you're seeing there is this great interest in climate change, you know, going carbon neutral. You see the growth that CAGR has gone from 5 % of cars sold globally to about 18 % of cars sold globally. More than 60 percent of vehicles sold in China are EV. It's picking up in the U .S. You know, more battery stations, government funding and tax credits. So So it's the, you know, if AI is the future of tech, it's the future of auto. I find it really interesting just because, right, I feel like we get to a point where everybody's like, okay, the growth name, stay away from them. Right. But she's, you know, Sylvia, reminding us that this is the future. And we always have this type of argument with tech and growth. And yet they still continue to power things. They come back. Sylvia, really smart. Thank you. And really thoughtful. Sylvia Jablonski, CEO and CIO at Defines ETFs on the phone in New York City. Don't go anywhere. Just about 11 minutes left in the trading day and the trading week. Jess Metten, Carol Nasser. This is Bloomberg. Hi.
Level After Next With Katie Barnett
Dr. Victor Manzo's Unconventional Path From Chiropractor to Success Guru
"Right, we have Victor Manzo here. I'm so excited. One, because he's Italian and that awesome. is And two, because I have to tell you the weirdest thing, right? When I saw that you were on my calendar, I was like, I feel like I know this guy. And then I went to your website and I was like, yeah, I totally feel like I know this guy, but I don't think I know you at all. But it was just like this instant. I think this is going to be a good one. So I'm really excited. I have not gotten to watch your entire billionaire success formula intro, but I did get to watch some of it and I'm excited to share that with people. I'm excited to pick your brain. I don't know if you've listened to any of my podcasts, but it might get weird because I just, I want to know all the things, but okay, Victor, give us a little bit of your background and what brought you to this point, because I know you've done a lot of things and you have worked through some different businesses and you've created the success formula that has been proven. So I have a lot of questions about that, but give us the background. Who are you? Yeah, I started out as a chiropractor. Never had intentions on being a chiropractor. It's just one of those things in life. In the profession, we always say chiropractic finds us unless you're like, most of the time you have a story or something that intrigued you. And that's kind of what happened to me. Quick backstory. My mom's a fitness instructor and yoga instructor. She's been doing this now for 38 years. She still does both of those at this time. I think she's almost 67. And it's one of those things where I saw the definition of health from nutrition, exercise. She was juicing, taking smoothies, all this stuff. And I just saw this all my life. And so I thought, okay, that's what health is. So at 16, I started studying nutrition. I started working out at 13 years old. I was just so committed to be like, okay, I want to be as healthy as possible. So I'm going to do all these things. At 19, I went to go to Arizona State for school and I ended up being on the club. I ended up getting on the rugby team, their club team. And so talk about taking fitness to a whole nother level. What was puzzling for me at the time is my health kept declining every month. And there's new things coming up, acne on my back. No matter how much I slept, I didn't have it. I was exhausted. I couldn't think straight, just a bunch of different things. But long story short, in the middle of the summer, when I went back, my mom suggested to go see Dr. Frank, who was a chiropractor used to see. And that's when my life changed. And I was so intrigued by it that I decided to skip, forget going to computers, studying computers. I was going to go into chiropractic and I went to business school, back to Chicago and then so forth. That was my journey. And then I obviously went to chiropractic school, came out. But it's one of those things where I've always was interested in the mind. I've always been interested in the deeper elements of life. I used to be made fun of like, you always want to talk about deep stuff. I'm like, well, what else is there to talk about? That makes me feel good. And there came a point when I was in chiropractic school, I started studying energy medicine, not at the school, but outside of it, energy healing and all these things. I want to understand the depth of healing. I want to understand the depths of life. And that was a preface. I didn't use that stuff when I came out of school. I was practicing chiropractic and doing that stuff. But it was about five years later where the way we've been conditioned to what success is in life and what we think business success is and how a successful chiropractor should be, or just business owners, how they should be successful. I think it's skewed in a way because a lot of people are following the same like, oh, this is what it should be. This is what it should be. Instead of what is it for you? And I started asking myself this question because in five years I hit my financial peak. I did everything the business world was saying, well, not everything, but tons of stuff, self -help, personal development. And I was burned out every four to six months on something that I love to do, which was puzzling. I couldn't understand how I can love and be so passionate about chiropractic. But yet every four to six months, I was exhausted, burned out, didn't have energy at certain points. And so when I made a huge pivot change in my life, I ended up changing the way my office was operated. I started to stop listening to business stuff and start listening and feeling within what I think I should feel like I should do, not think, but feel. And I started to define what success was. I started looking back on my energy stuff that I studied years ago and I was like, okay, I understand universal laws. I understand consciousness. I understand quantum physics. I understand these things and how it works in our lives. I want to study that stuff so I can, now I'm going to start applying it. The heck with everything. I'm going to go all in and just start applying it. My business took a 40 % hit on purpose and I started to apply these principles and a year later, a little over a year later, I was back to where I was financially. I was working 50 % less than what I was doing and I was less stressed and I was just, everything in life was just so much better. And I was like, wow, I'm doing the opposite of what they're telling me to do. And I got the results. So that's what encouraged me to want to start looking at coaching business owners because I felt they needed this. And that was the journey that started. So I started coaching about four years ago and this last year, 2022, is when I went full time into coaching and actually stopped practicing chiropractic for the time being.
Blue Collar Bitcoin Podcast
A highlight from BCB127_AMERICAN HODL: Wisdom For Surviving The Bear
"All of your well -laid plans are going to be put to rest by the Bitcoin market. You know, I was very confident we were going to over 100k, I think a lot of people were. Then we didn't. And then I was equally confident, I was like, well, if the top wasn't as high, then maybe the bottom won't be as low. And then I was like, probably 30k, the bottom would be like 30k. And then it was, it was faster to 16. And that really shook a lot of people out, man. I mean, it was brutal. I knew people personally who were getting faken. Most people were just totally inconsolable. They're addicted to their fear. Fear like gets real close to you and it talks in your ear and it convinces you that it's correct. You've got to just push past that and you just you can't give in to fear. This is the Blue Collar Bitcoin Podcast, a show where Average Joe firefighters explore the most important monetary technology of the 21st century. We talk Bitcoin, we talk finance and we talk shit. Ladies and gentlemen, this is it. This is what you have been patiently waiting for. The inevitable, our run in with the legendary American Hodl. We hate to tug him off so obviously, but he was built to hang out on our show. Hodl would be equally comfortable for an 8 a .m. coffee hour at the firehouse as he would be philosophizing with the likes of Breedlove. We hope we evoked both of those extremes. Hodl has been in this game for a long time. He is a proper Bitcoin OG. This gives him the rare perspective of having been in the midst of his third bear market. Even when you have three under your belt, they are not easy. We talk about everything from raising kids to overcoming your fear of being penniless and destitute because you put all your money in Bitcoin. Fear and greed run markets, and if you aren't careful, they can run your life. Understand your psychology. As Socrates said, to know thyself is the beginning of wisdom. We can't argue with Socrates, but we can say that the beginning of wisdom is getting your Bitcoin off of exchanges. The best way to make that happen is by grabbing yourself a cold card Mark 4 and punching your seed keys into a seed plate. We cannot impart how important this is. All of your research, all of your understanding, all of your effort to obtain Bitcoin means absolutely nothing if the exchange you left your Bitcoin on goes belly up and shits the bed. So get those coins off of exchanges and into the most reliable, most secure place possible, the cold card. And if you want to get frisky, check out the new Q1 and its expanded capabilities above and beyond the cold card Mark 4. Before we start, we have some coupon codes to share. If you would like to attend Bitcoin Amsterdam or Bitcoin 2024 in Nashville, get 10 % off tickets to either event with code BCB. Now, relax, enjoy this rip with American hodl. That's a stack of kids, my friend. Four in the litter. How are you holding up? This is only like a few weeks ago, right? It's it's good, man. I love having kids. Kids are the best. I I think parents like to complain about having kids, but like I do with the you know, it's like there's this George Peterson quote, which is like if you weren't going to have kids, like what the fuck would you be doing? That's so special. Like most of us are. Yeah. Yeah. It's not like I'm going to be inventing, you know, a new a new like equation for quantum field theory or something like I'm not doing any of that. So like, yeah, string theory is just a bit above our heads as well, you know? Right, exactly. So hanging out with the kids and, you know, playing Uno or goofing around is like, that's where I'm at. That's my song, right? The other thing you are, but I think of my kids just went back to school. So now I have like full days with nothing to do, but what I want to do. And you start to realize, like, what do people without kids in their thirties and forties do? There's just, oh, yeah, exactly. Yeah. You basically just get drunk in different locations. You're like, yeah, I went to Dublin and I got drunk and then I went to Istanbul and I got drunk and then I went to Rio de Ignar and I got drunk and you're like, okay, that's I didn't get drunk here. I got beer here, you know? Uh, yeah, people, people end up and I don't want to shit in the mouth of, of non parents here right off the bat, but fuck it. Let's do it. Everybody should have kids. It's well worth it. And I think at least based on my circle, most people I see that don't end up having children really, really wish they did. They get into their late thirties, forties and fifties and they realize, oh, I see what this whole thing's about. Um, highly recommend it. Get out there. Fuck everybody. Start fucking, start reproducing. Let's expand the species. Let's get more Bitcoiners. Yeah. Listen, if you don't have a, if you don't have kids, I consider you weak hands, you know, cause there's no one to get a huddle after your debt. So what you only got like max, you know, 40, 50 years of huddling there. All right. Like we need to extend that out. Seven generation thinking like my boy, Marty bent says, you know, I listened to you with, uh, the, your most recent chat with Peter and Peter was spending some time saying like, I love smart huddle. I like the glasses. I like the refined civilized huddle and Josh were like, Josh and I were like, fuck that shit. We want total huddle. If you don't deliver that today, you fucked up. Cause we need you fully unleashed my friend. All right. I mean, I'll do my best. Let's see what I got. Firehouse humor. Yeah. Oh yeah. I think you'd fit right into the firehouse based on some of the stuff I've heard you, uh, spew over the, over the years, I think you'd fit right in, especially coffee hour, eight o 'clock in the morning, just a bunch of degenerates. I don't know if you guys have seen the new Shane Gillis stand up on Netflix, but that's like my barometer for humor. Just like extremely immature playground humor, the way we used to talk to each other, you know, third grade. Yeah, exactly. Those are sort of litmus tests for like how far you can go culturally. You're like, Oh, we weren't allowed to say that 10 years ago. He just went that far in that, in that Netflix special. I guess that's the, that's the tip of the spear for how far we can go. Chappelle broke some boundary. A lot of people have broken boundaries on Netflix in the last, comedy in general has been regressive over the last 10 or 15 years. Like every, so many things have been taboo to say, especially for comedians, which really ruins comedians and only like Dave Chappelle can get away with it and a few others, but comedy has really been shit on in the last 10 years. I think the left went too far and they canceled basically too many people and you can't cancel everybody because then now you just have like half the country that's canceled. Right. And so, you know, all the canceled people, it's not like you killed them. Like they're still alive and they're just like, you know what? I don't give a shit about being canceled. And that's like where everybody's at nowadays. And so I am starting to see, like, I think the, you know, canceled culture has peaked and now we're on the other side of canceled culture. And there's a bunch, bunch of people who basically realize like, if you don't cancel yourself, nobody can really cancel you. You just, you just choose not to give a shit about it. I think it was actually Trump that taught everybody that maneuver. Right. Which is like, you know, whatever, I don't care, whatever you say about me, I don't give a fuck, you know, whatever. Uh, and you know, he's just going to, he's just going to keep going out there and calling you stormy horse face Daniels or whatever. He doesn't keep a shit. And you can be like, you know, you were the worst president ever. He'd be like, that's false. That was the best, best president. So you just don't let any of it get in there. You just go, no, he broke a ton of clown barriers. Trump did. He was masterful with the way he could do that. And if that guy had one characteristic that I admire, it's his ability to spin move out of any accusation by calling the other person, an ingenious nickname that stuck, like just nailed it every single time nickname ever. I think it was low energy Jeb. Who comes up with low energy Jeb. And then you would look at him and you'd be like, man, he is really low energy. Yeah, these things work a cup of coffee, you know, shortcut narratives are really effective. Speaking of presidents, you guys see Biden the other day and it was a yesterday in Vietnam. He literally got hooked off the stage because he started mumbling nonsense about something that was far off of what they were talking about. They turned his mic off while he was talking and he kept talking. And then they had an announcer get on and basically say, oh, you're done here, Mr. President, get, they got the hook out and they pulled him off stage. It was like, watch, watch this clip. Yeah, it was, it was insane. Shepherd came out. It was full blown, like, all right, get this fucking guy out of here before he makes us look even dumber. Unbelievable. You know, in a nation of 360 some odd million Americans, I think many of us are very intelligent. Uh, the last two presidents have been kind of, you know, not up to snuff, right? Like where are our good people, you know, like, yeah, we're not sending our best anymore, unfortunately. It is comical, but it's also downright embarrassing because, and I've heard enough out of you to know that you'll agree with this, I'm still very proud to be an American, I think there's a lot of wonderful things that this, this country stands for and imbues and, and it's done and it's, it's a downhill slope right now on both sides. And I just laugh at, I mean, obviously like most Bitcoiners and Josh and I are aligned on this, I just, both sides are in full blown, full frontal clown mode and, and anybody that's latching onto either candidate at this point, I almost lose respect for it. It's like, how can you take either of these guys seriously? But we need to dig out of that. Like that, that needs to be fixed to your point. That's not something that that's healthy for the average American citizen to just be resigned to the fact that the leader of the entire nation is a complete idiot, we need to dig out of that and hopefully reverse that trend. Well, you know, in general, I lean conservative usually, but I actually have been, uh, you know, found myself very intrigued by Robert F Kennedy Jr. And it's not just because he's a Bitcoiner, but I think he really has the discourse into the Overton window, right? Like by basically being like, why am I not, I'm a Democrat my whole life. My father was, you know, a president, a Senator, a presidential candidate. My uncle was killed. He was one of the most popular democratic presidents of all time. Why am I not allowed to say this? Why am I not allowed to have opinions or questions? And yet in America, I feel like anytime we lose our foundational principle, which is, you know, free speech, anytime we're losing that we're losing our soul as a almost anything you want without significant repercussions, that's, that's just how things are. Like, obviously if you say something that's very racist or hateful or homicidal or genocidal or something, then people are going to be, they're gonna have a lot of feelings about it, but there's very little speech. That's actually illegal speech, right? And we should be able to, yeah, just get together in a room and discuss things as Americans. That's a very rare thing. Like that's, that's not something that you find in almost any other culture on earth. You know, I was talking to Peter McCormick McCormick about this, but like the British sarcastic, dry humor that they're all known for that is because they don't have free speech. So they have to be sarcastic. That's never occurred to me before that either. Right. They have a shield to hide behind and they can be like, Oh, come on, mate. I was just taking the piss. Whereas we as Americans can just say what the fuck we actually think, which is a more effective system. They, they have to, I mean, I'm glad it happened because I love British humor. Yeah. They have to show a side boob. They can't go full frontal. You know what I mean? Exactly. Gentlemen. I'm sure you guys will both agree with this point as well. So we've got these clown puppet leaders that we're, we're just accosted with every four years and have to deal with the shit sandwich or the giant douche. And we've got to pick between the two of them. But then there's also like every time there's like, I mean, I'd say most times there's a new law, some new bullshit with COVID that happened in the last couple of years, I'm stunned by the stupidity and heavy handedness, which a lot of this stuff comes down. And it's like, it's like, I'm disappointed by how bad these takes can be and how bad these real changes are and how overbearing a lot of this has been, especially in the last few years. But it seems like every time a new law is, is instantiated, it's just feels wrong on its face. And I feel like people are so numbed to it at this point that they just say, they just expect it to be the wrong thing instead of what we would prefer to have. Or I think people from our circles would prefer to have at least. What are your thoughts on that? About how there's just like this numbness about how these people operate. Well, there's, you know, we're recording this on nine 11 and one of the reasons I wanted to record with you guys, cause you're both firefighters and I think not, you know, we're all around the same age. Nine 11 was the seminal moment of our young lives. And obviously like certainly had an effect on both of you, I'm sure. And I'd love to hear your stories about that. Um, but you know, to me, I'm, I'm, I have a good, I have a great memory. That's it's a gift and a curse. And one of the things that, uh, I remember is the world pre nine 11. I remember what it was like, and we're now living in an entirely different world. That's not better. It's a worst world. You know, we have an, a heightened security state, a heightened surveillance state. I mean, you used to be able to just, you know, what is TSA really accomplished? Like, did they prevent any new, uh, atrocities? I don't think they did because one guy tried to bomb a shoe bomber shoes, and now we are going to take off my, I got to take off my fucking band, slip -ons every time, you know what I mean? And your belt crying shame. Yeah. Yeah. Fucking shoe bomber. I mean, it is, it is like, we appreciate you bringing that up. It is, uh, in the fire service, it's, it's the day of the year. Um, and it, it's been said for a couple of decades now, never forget. But I feel like the fire service, Josh has done a pretty good job of not forgetting. Like you still see it on a lot of fire trucks. Every single firehouse around the country is honoring it today. There's a moment of silence that comes over dispatch. There's events that happen every year and yeah, I don't know. This is just a complete sidebar on nine 11, but it was fucking insane. Fucking insane. I was in sixth grade. I remember where I was as everyone does. Um, and wasn't fully able to appreciate the magnitude, but as the years have gone watching back in the documentaries and thinking through just like from our vantage point, um, I, Josh, we've talked about this before with our career. Like there is a degree of submission to risk. It doesn't happen very often. We don't want to overplay the hero card here. And the vast majority of our job where paramedics, we rotate ambulance to fire truck, but when this shit happens, it's real. And you've kind of sworn an oath to not have a choice, but to go into that, if that happens in your career, that second story bedroom to risk your life for a kid or whatever, all those men and women that went into that building, obviously hindsight's 2020, but if we worked in New York at that time and, and had the badge on, we would have had, we would have done the exact same thing. So, um, yeah, the heroism that existed by I agree, like to, to get, to get back off the nine 11 is just like, what, how has the world improved in any way, shape or form since then? And it has not in many ways, it's devolved in the opposite direction and we need new currents that flow the opposite way that, that get us back to a lot of American ideals, which is part of what we've latched onto the most about what you've said. And spoken into this community. Totally. We see, uh, so the Patriot act was instantiated right afterwards, which took away a whole, it added surveillance, took away a whole bunch of fundamental rights. And it was supposed to be sunsetted. I don't remember if it was five or 10 years after nine 11, but they extended it and they've continued to extend it since then. It's again, back to what we were just talking about. Like these, it's almost like a peg in, they get a foothold in and the politicians never relinquish any power whatsoever. It's always another step up. Another squeezing of, of the populace. They peg a shit coin into, into American ideals, kind of like potentially pegging shit coins into Bitcoin with drive chains. I don't know. Maybe we ended up today. Smooth transition there. I can't think of a worse way to honor all of the brave guys, you know, who ran into the towers when they were on fire. Then what we've done in the aftermath of nine 11, you know, I just can't think of a worse world. I saw it. I saw an Instagram post that actually made me pretty emotional. It was a, you know, young, pretty girl. She's probably in her like late twenties now. And she went to visit the Memorial cause her father was FDNY and he ran into the building. He ran into tower two and he collapsed on him and she grew up her whole life without her father. Right. And he made the ultimate sacrifice. And that's something that you guys have to, you know, that's an interesting conversation actually like around risk.
The Maverick Paradox Podcast
A highlight from No need for the hustle
"In today's episode I speak to Dr Vic Manzo about there is no need for the hustle. Dr Vic discusses why some of the advice of doing more is wrong and explains how to take inspired action for effortless success. He also describes how you can make the law of least effort work for you and think like a billionaire living in a quantum world. This is an intriguing conversation forcing us to rethink the way we work and our relation to rest. I create a clear thinking and decisive leaders who can amplify their influence. Contact me to find out how I can help you or your organization. And today our guest is Dr Vic Manzo. How are you doing Vic? I'm doing amazing. How are you? You know what? We're in London. The sun is shining. It looks warm outside so the only the only thing is his arm kept here. We don't really get sun so it's a bit shocking.
Bloomberg Radio New York - Recording Feed
Monitor Show 18:00 08-30-2023 18:00
"They are doing increasingly. Well, you've got to go to the AI story, the advanced semiconductor story, the quantum computer story on that. I mean, this is certainly forcing that, right? And I think that it's a very complicated story. We'll try to talk about that a little bit tonight. Will you listen? We'll listen. I'll be there. Thank you. Carol, why are you so quiet? I've got stuff to do. No, of course we'll listen. We'll listen. That'll do it for Bloomberg Business Week. Have a good and safe evening. Everybody listen to Daybreak Asia. It starts now. Broadcasting 24 hours a day at Bloomberg .com and the Bloomberg Business Act. This is Bloomberg Radio. This is Bloomberg Daybreak Asia for this Thursday, August 31st in Hong Kong, Wednesday, August 30th in New York. Coming up today. The US economy shows signs of softening and traders bet that the Fed may be approaching the end of its rate hike cycle. Country Garden posed a record first half loss, and the company warns it may default on its debt. And China will approve its first batch of generative AI services as soon as this week. Hurricane Adalia wreaks havoc in Florida. North Korea could be supplying weapons and munitions to Russia. Visa and MasterCard will be raising fees to retailers. While in sports, a major upset goes down in the second round of the US Open. I'm Dan Schwartzman. I'll have news and sports coming up. That's all straight ahead on Bloomberg Daybreak Asia. On Bloomberg 1130 New York, Bloomberg 99 .1 Washington DC, Bloomberg 106 .1 Boston, Bloomberg 960 San Francisco, Sirius XM 119, and around the world on Bloomberg Radio .com and via the Bloomberg Business Act. It is the Thursday edition of Daybreak Asia, 601 on Wall Street.
Bloomberg Radio New York
"quanta" Discussed on Bloomberg Radio New York
"Back with us is our own Mark Gurman. He's chief technology correspondent here at Bloomberg News. As you know he's a go -to for all of us on everything to do with Apple. He joins us once again on Zoom from Los Angeles. Mark great to have you back with We us. do want to start big picture if we may about Apple's massive supply chain so much of it still in China that seems to be changing but very slowly. Give us a little perspective here. Yeah Carol thank you so much very I'm happy to be back. So the Apple supply chain the modern supply chain I should say set up about two decades ago by Tim Cook. The idea was to build all the products through a company called Foxconn in China have the manufactured there at scale at speed with precision and then shipped globally right but over the last decade or so we've seen some changes there they've added additional manufacturing partners companies like Quanta Computing, companies like Jabble, companies like Pegatron and Tata and now you're seeing them retain their Chinese base of manufacturing all those still build products for Apple in mainland China but in terms of growth in terms of expansion of supply chain that's happening external to China so you're seeing new sites in places like Thailand, India, Vietnam, Malaysia right those four countries but with the majority share of that expansion happening particularly in India and then Vietnam is a close second Malaysia third and Thailand fourth. So when you're looking at that expansion in those particular areas that you were just talking about how does that translate financially for Apple? India Well is a big example of how it translates financially India and their Prime Minister Modi there to tariff related rules and fines that if you produce products externally to India and then import them into the country there's really high import taxes. So what Apple had to do from a financial perspective is build new sites in India to produce versions of the iPhone for sale on those taxes. Do other countries want Apple? I feel like it's a stupid question Mark but I mean I would assume everybody's vying to be like here come produce manufacturer you know here. Is that the case? every I mean country you can name up to the United States is throwing as many incentives at Apple and these other technology companies, chip companies in order to get them to produce products in their respective countries and cities. Obviously anytime Apple comes into your city it's an economic boom for the area. You're talking about much more employment much more spending so it is a positive and that's why those incentives exist. Now speaking of the US I will add you know Apple doesn't do anything other than token manufacturing at a city in a small part in Austin Texas for one Mac so count I really that as basically no production in the US and not being facetious but what they will be doing is they will be working with TSMC to produce a very small number of chips at a plant in Arizona starting time at the tail end of next year. What I want to know though is like I bought an Apple product my husband and I and I just I think over the years and we have been fascinating just kind of tracking it through the supply chain and knowing when it's on our you know on the west coast I mean it's just such an incredibly efficient supply chain and I do wonder will that efficiency potentially change over time and then will it also maybe cost me more for an Apple device? I think the answer is no on both. They've been shipping products from Vietnam and Malaysia and Thailand for a couple of years now and there really hasn't been any hiccups that I think the consumer has noticed either on a pricing perspective but also on shipment times. If you think about the releases where the timing really matters for when you receive the product it's really when a new product goes on sale particularly the iPhone and the first round of iPhones are still shipped from China so you're not going to see any hiccups there in all likelihood. There have been some changes on pricing there are going to be a few tweaks to pricing in some countries on the new iPhones being announced on September 12th. They should also go on sale September 22nd by the way but I don't think those are production related. I think those are parts related and obviously inflation and current the state of the economy globally so I wouldn't put two and two together personally. Do you think would this have happened without the US China tensions that are currently going on? I think that what really got the ball rolling on opening new sites outside of China was the Donald Trump tariffs that were a key issue in 2017 to 2019. Those really scared Apple and made them start investigating how they can push some of that supply chain outside of China. Quite frankly it shouldn't have taken Trump to think outside of China but that's what really did it and I think that acceleration has been caused by those tensions. I think something that people don't talk about enough to be honest with you is TSMC and the impact of production there. So TSMC they manufacture all of Apple's modern chips that go into all their products. They're based in Taiwan so you're seeing a lot of happening production there. I'm no geopolitical expert but I think Taiwan is probably a major risk point for Apple and if the Taiwan factory goes down I mean I'm told it can take even up to north of a year for Apple and TSMC to build up a site at that same capacity elsewhere.
Cyber Security Weekly Podcast
A highlight from Episode 376 - FS-ISAC APAC Summit 2023 AI and Quantum implications for cybersecurity
"Thank you, everybody, for joining us in our podcast today where we are talking about financial services, ISAC and the latest innovation in financial services, obviously, the two aspects that is getting many people excited, which is artificial intelligence and quantum technologies. And today, I'm very pleased and very privileged to have Michael Silverman, who is the vice president of strategy and innovation with FS -ISAC, which is Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Centre, to talk to us about these two very exciting topics. So thank you so much, Mike, for joining us today in the podcast. Oh, well, thanks for having me. It's wonderful. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, great. Yeah. Unfortunately, we didn't have the chance to catch up in Singapore while you're here about I would say that two or three weeks ago, that would have been a fantastic opportunity to catch you and talk to you about these two topics on site. But right. So now you're in the West Coast, you know, five, six a .m. your time and I did my time. So thank you so much for your time today. Thank you. I know it's not your time, too. So thank you. Yeah. Yeah. So for our audience who are not too familiar with ISAC or information sharing and analysis centres, there are some podcasts that we did with executives from the OTISAC and also from the Health ISAC organization. So please listen to those podcasts as well. And of course, if you want to get more information about FS -ISAC, please go to the website FSISAC .com to find out more. So without further ado, let's kick off, right? So I thought we can start with AI first, because that's on the top of everybody's minds. It really is. Yeah, right. Yeah. So I thought we can look at this through three topics. So one, how are financial services or rather the sector adopting this technology? And what are the kind of concerns from a security perspective? And how can organizations mitigate some of these concerns? So tell us, Mike, you know, you are best placed to talk to us about how financial services are adopting this technology, artificial intelligence, given that you are FS -ISAC. Yeah. Well, can I start with the overall, the pros and cons of artificial intelligence and GBT and generative AI and go from there? I think that will lead down to where financial services is specifically using this. So the good parts of generative AI is that, look, it can take a massive amount of information and help you find the answer you're looking for very easily, very quickly, very succinctly. I mean, as it will enable non -technical users to do advanced searches, queries and really find just that nugget that they're looking for. And it's the first tool that I've ever seen that really permeates business and technology at the same time. You know, we've had technology innovations, we've had new cloud or phones or databases or whatever, but this one really changes both the way we fundamentally work and how we deliver it. AI can work across lawyers, customer service, industry SMEs, developers. I mean, every single role in an organization can be impacted by this and it's just truly amazing. But look, there's downsides. Financial services, right? That's right. Especially in financial services. Yeah, absolutely. But look, there's a downside too. While it lowers the barriers of entry for employees to use these things in consuming, it lowers it also for people trying to do malicious activity on our systems. It will be easier for people to write malware. Phishing emails will be far more accurate, right? You know, we used to train people, if you see a lot of typos in an email, probably phishing, just ignore it. Now we're going to have to look at new ways of detecting whether this is phishing or not because the emails will be that much better. Fraudsters will develop tools to do with decryption easier, et cetera. So there's really a lot of things here. Another risk that we have, especially in financial services, is that you don't know whether the system is telling you something truthful or whether it's what's called hallucinating or just inventing some facts, right? And that's really important. You know, I need to trust it. Our whole system as financial services is built on trust, right? We trust that banks or financial institutions are going to trade funds or be there on the contraside of a trade. Our customers give us monies, assuming that they can take that money out, we're going to do the right things on their behalf with that money. So it's this whole system. We've spent hundreds of years building trust into financial services. If we can't trust this underlying tool, we can't have that erode the potential trust of the overall system. Right. So we have to be really careful about where we use these things. There was a lot of discussions about how some of these automators, say, for example, loan approval systems is going to work using AI technologies, right? How are you going to ensure that the data that you use to train these models are unbiased, I mean, that's the classics example I've been talking about for years with traditional AI is loan decisions, right? You don't even, that's just simple, I'll use a fancy term here, neural network that can do that. Generative AI and traditional AI both have the same problem underneath it, that it's only as good as the data you train it with. Right. So let's take that loan decision calculator. I love it. It's a great example. If I only give it people who make a high salary, right, and train it for the nuances of whether yes or no, based on some other attributes, you know, their credit history, other sort of things, then we'll only know how to work with people with high salaries. If then I say, oh, here's someone with a lower salary, what's never been trained on that, it's going to give me erroneous details. Exactly. Right. It's going to have that inherent bias. So we need to ensure the data in is good. We have to make sure the data out is good. We have to know the trustworthiness of everything in the whole system, or we have to know where we can't use the system. And now here are the outliers of the system will not work in these cases. We have to think of different approaches there. So yeah, very much a problem. But how is generative AI going to add to the problem? You were saying that traditional AI, you know, you already see these kind of problems. So how is generative AI going to make it worse? Will it make it worse? You know, it can because there's a few different aspects. One is there's an attribution issue. When you use these generative AI systems, if you look at their terms of use, it says specifically, if you take the output from these systems, you have to give credit or attribution to saying that generative AI put this output. Many people ignore that step or they gloss over it. But it could open us up to legal action. Next, for a lot of these open systems, commercial systems, etc., we don't know the underlying details of what was trained for these what's called large language models. There could be copyrighted materials in these LLMs and this training databases so that the output could also be copyrighted and we could unknowingly be using copyrighted materials, which again, be it us be infringing on copyrights and could really cause issues for us. So it gives us even more concern about what's coming out of these systems. And obviously also data privacy issues as well. You have to make sure that the data that you use, well, with loan decision and all that, right, you will be relying on a lot of personal data as well. You would, you have to know the security of the data you're putting in in the query side. Absolutely. On the query side, firms often also have to think about if you're developers, am I putting my proprietary source code in there? Am I potentially leaking that as well? Right. So there's a lot of concerns about data leakage going into the query, going into the training on the output, the whole system. We really need to think carefully about how we use these things. Absolutely. So what kind of other security concerns did you discuss at the APAC summit while you're in Singapore when it comes to generative AI? You know, one of the big things is ethics, right? Ethics, right. Okay. Yeah. You know, just because a system can do something doesn't mean we should be doing it with it. Is this the right thing for us to do? Is it good for financial services to be doing this? Let's take the overall concept of insurance claims or a loan decision calculator or whatever. You know, at some point we need to ask ourselves, should we be trusting this with a computer? Is it safe or we as an ecosystem agree that that's an acceptable use? Oftentimes we'll say yes, but we need to start thinking about future use cases of where do we actually say yes or no. And we can't wait for regulation or legislation to tell us these things. That's right. Those things tend to be a little reactive, right? And also quite high level as well. They probably won't know your business as well as you do, right? Yep. So we need to rely on what's called Morris prudence or the culture of your firm to really think about, do we, would we feel comfortable putting this out? Would we feel comfortable if others, if following what's called Kant's more categorical imperative, would we feel comfortable if other firms also did this, right? Do we then as an ecosystem say, you know what? Yeah, this feels good. Maybe this doesn't.
The Breakdown
A highlight from Crypto: It's So Over. We're So Back.
"Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Sunday, August 27th, and that means it's time for Long Read Sunday. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying The Breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit .ly slash breakdown pod. Hello friends. Well, today our theme is where we are in the cycle. I think we are in a very transitional moment and both of the pieces today have something to do with exactly that. The first is by John Rizzo, the Senior Vice President for Public Affairs at Clyde Group and was featured on CoinDesk on August 16th. The piece is titled How PayPal Upended the Crypto Debate in Washington, D .C. John writes, As the end of July arrived, House Financial Services Committee Republicans achieved its goal of passing a bipartisan stablecoins bill. Still, they left D .C. without the broad bipartisan vote Chair Patrick McHenry had labored to achieve. The session ended with new recriminations over old disputes, namely the degree of federal versus state regulation in a new regulatory framework, casting a dark cloud over the prospect of legislation that could garner support from McHenry, Ranking Member Maxine Waters and the Biden White House. And then PayPal and Paxos entered the chat. The surprising unveiling of PiUSD may be the accelerant needed to forge compromise in D .C. and bring about the legal enshrinement of a comprehensive regulatory framework for stablecoins. It may also represent a new, more aggressive strategy for how American fintech companies deal with the federal government and D .C. regulators. Now Rizzo continues to explain just why it's such a big deal. There are a couple parts to that. First, he says the sheer scale of PayPal's reach is really significant. As he puts it, with the flip of a switch, hundreds of millions of users can access and transact in stablecoins through a service with which they are already familiar. But the second piece is the contrast to Libra, which obviously became DM, which was Meta, then Facebook's failed stablecoin project that was announced all the way back in 2019. Rizzo writes, had it succeeded, DM would have presented two challenges which were discussed publicly at the time for the federal government to wrestle with. Libra stablecoin would have launched when the U .S. lacked a comprehensive regulatory framework for stablecoins, meaning it would exist in a legal and regulatory gray space. Beyond that, he writes, its regulatory challenge would have been turbocharged by the fact that Facebook's billions of users would have had access to this sort of regulated, sort of not regulated crypto token overnight. Now while PayPal is not at the scale of Meta and Facebook, Rizzo says, it is at a scale that creates a new urgency to actually reach a compromise and figure out a regulatory framework that is workable. And as he points out, that pressure didn't exist when only a handful of Democrats broke rank to vote in favor of McHenry's stablecoin bill. As he puts it, Democratic policymakers in D .C. who resisted McHenry's stablecoins bill in search of a better deal must account for the prospect that stablecoin adoption and usage could speed up rapidly soon, heightening some of the risks that D .C. policymakers identified when assessing stablecoin regulation. Interestingly, Rizzo also points out that PayPal is operating in an area where the federal government's ability to intervene is actually somewhat limited. The piece continues, forcing financial policy innovation without the pre -approval of regulators is daunting unless you operate in the one area of financial services primarily regulated by states. That's PayPal's ace in the hole. It's the reason it could partner with Paxos Trust and change the pool of potential stablecoin users overnight. Its core business, money transmission, is regulated through a state -by -state licensing regime, meaning the federal government's ability to impose a cost on PiUSD's backers for launching a stablecoin without seeking prior approval is limited. Basically, Rizzo's argument is that in this launch, PayPal claimed power instead of asking for permission. He concludes, Having observed power up close during 14 years of federal service, achieving a result in D .C. is not always about winning the competition of ideas. Instead, influencing power is about power and leverage. Supporters of stablecoins and market participants now have leverage over the federal government in a way that didn't exist weeks ago. It could grease the wheels for a comprehensive regulatory framework for stablecoins in Congress and begin an era in which American crypto companies forced the federal government to deal with them on their terms. Alright, so that's piece number one, and instead of discussing it alone, I'm going to read the second piece and then we'll talk about them both together. The second piece is by Daniel Kuhn, also on CoinDesk, and has the great title, The End of the End of Crypto. Daniel begins, Trying to figure out whether crypto is here to stay isn't as simple as tallying up the industry's wins and losses. For a while there, it genuinely seemed possible that the US SEC could wipe crypto off the map. Then again, there's practically a cottage industry of people who've made it their business to count all the times bitcoin or crypto supposedly died. However, as Daniel notices, it seems like the overall mood of the crypto scene has shifted. Daniel writes, Beginning with BlackRock's surprising move into the realm of crypto ETFs and running through PayPal's just -launched stablecoin, it seems like most of the major crypto news headlines are pointing a way forward. Daniel also points to Ripple sort of winning, SPF going to jail, and 3AC getting sued once again. So, Daniel asks, is the bottom in? He's not sure, but he does point out that, Now that the SEC has finally unloaded its worst against sector giants Binance and Coinbase, FedNow didn't siphon off all interest in crypto and meaningful legislation has passed never -before -seen hurdles, it seems like the worst is over. So what are the risks that remain? Daniel points out things like, The proposed custody rule changes that could put crypto in a hostage situation, DCG's bitcoin trust unraveling, and zooming farther out, quantum computers that could one day break cryptography's back. As he says, there's likely plenty of tail risks and black swans and bitter ends ahead. However, as Daniel says, At this point, it seems clear enough now that Bitcoin is battle -tested, and while governments may want to step up oversight of crypto, the real anarchic core of all of this is basically untouchable. There is a technological force loose in the world that enables completely permissionless transactions and that inspires others to build and build and build, creating a functionally self -perpetuating loop. So, okay, these pieces go together, both I think under the theme of the title of the second one, The End of the End of Crypto. And why I think this is such a compelling title is that in the period after the collapse of FTX and the unveiling of the fraud of SPF, this industry was on very, very fragile footing. I hardly need to say this to you guys as you've all lived through it, but between Operation Chokepoint 2 .0, deplatforming from banks, the ceaseless grind down of prices, one could be forgiven for losing some amount of hope. Now, of course, for those paying close attention, not all that much hope was actually lost. People were fighting fiercely against government overreach, builders were still doing all sorts of weird things, and of course, Bitcoiners didn't care really what anyone else thought. And yet from the outside looking in, we have just gone through a two -part inflection point moment. The parts are exactly what Daniel pointed out. On the one hand, BlackRock planting its flag, which by the way was reinforced by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink on national TV a number of times, and then PayPal exerting its influence, which was of course the subject of the first piece we read. These aren't crypto -native companies rising up, these are traditional finance companies coming back in, or rather saying they never left and that they believe more people are coming in the future. It might not have mattered to those who are still here listening to the breakdown this many months into the bear market, but for the people outside who will bring new energy and new capital into the space, these things are signals and they're big ones. And so yes, I believe it is true we have had and experienced the end of the end of crypto. Until next time, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.
The Bitboy Crypto Podcast
A highlight from Crypto Market Dip NOT OVER? (J. Powell Hints More Rate Hikes)
"We are here in the Bahamas working to make it right. If you can't have a millionaire, would you keep working? The commander is here. What's going on right now is California's trying to figure out if they can defeat the government that popped the pot. Yeah. Oh, I can. Welcome to BitBoy Crypto! Home of the BitSquad, the largest and greatest crypto community in all the Interwebs. No channel works harder to keep you in the know about crypto than this one right here. My name is Ben. Come to you live every single day at 11 .30am Eastern Standard Time. Exactly. Also known as 9 .40pm MST, is that what you call it? Mountain Time Zone. Anyways, regardless, I digress. We are here at RARE EVO. We've got our Bencoin booth. I don't know if you saw pictures of it on Twitter. Super exciting. And, you know, it really made me think when we got here about what was going on last year at this time. And I think that's really where I want to start before we get into the show is really thinking about last year, this event was in October. And it was very interesting. I just talked to Charles. Charles just gave a speech on stage. Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano, of course. And last year, him and I did an interview on stage. And the interesting thing that really occurred was not what people got to see. It's what people didn't get to see. The behind the scenes was so interesting. Because if you remember, I made my famous Sam Bankman -Fried rant around the middle of October. This event was towards the back half of October, if I remember correctly. And the thing is, I had already marked the enemy territory with Sam. And our bill was progressing. And I had sent my bill to Charles. And I sent everything that, oh, there's crypto India. She looks like a monkey. She's got a banana. The fact is that we're spending all of our time and our resources and, you know, really trying to put things into this bill, and I asked Charles if he would support it. Same reason we sent the bill originally to FTX. And, you know, there's different stuff going on, but the point is the conversation went kind of like this. Charles, I don't understand. Why do you not want to support our bill? Like either financially or kind of giving it a vote of confidence? And he said, well, you know, I don't think the CFTC is going to like it, is what he said. He's been, you know, on Capitol Hill on the behalf of the Department of Agriculture, which, you know, all crypto falls under. And he said, you know, but here's the thing. I've dug into what you've been saying about Sam. And he said, it's true. Sam is doing all the things that you said he was doing. And here's the line. He said, but, you know, in the end, he's Sam Bankman -Fried. He's going to mess up. He's incompetent. That's what he does. And let me tell you, you want to talk about an accurate statement. Look how everything played out last year. Like being here and talking to Charles a second ago, it just really reminded me of that event. But here's the thing. You've got bad actors, okay? And there's a lot of bad actors in crypto. We know that. But the bad actors, they almost, in a roundabout way, it's like one of those circular staircases where you can't ever find where it, you know, enters and exits. Where are the good actors? And where are the bad actors? And the thing is, is that the bad actors, they almost force the good actors to be shown and to be present. And I think that's what you've seen over this last year is with the contagion and with the Alex Wyshinsky and Sam Bankman -Fried, you know, you really start to see who the good guys are, and they're not who they told you they were. And, to me, being here at Rare Evo again and seeing where we've gone in the last year, of course, you got a lot of bad stuff, but there's something like Bitcoin that now, you know, we're running. We've got our booth here. Super exciting. And it's all about crypto adoption. It's about taking those things that, you know, aren't quite right with crypto, whether it's the public perception, whether it's the education about crypto, whether it's the government, the policies, regulations, or whether it's the media, you know, we've got a lot of stuff to fix. And this technology can be used for the good. And that's ultimately what's going to happen. It's just a matter of the good guys, I guess, outshine the bad guys. So, we're going to get started here. There's Wendy. Wendy, you want to come, just come be on the stage? Do you want a banana, you hungry? I must ask you a question. Where is Bitcoin going to? We're going to go to do our show later today, I think. Tomorrow. Tomorrow, yeah. Our show's tomorrow. We're going to film lots of episodes tomorrow. Yeah, we're going to do four. So, we're going to have four for you guys. And you're going to be wearing something, aren't you? Oh, yes, I bought an apron. Do you want me to wear a muumuu? I draw the line that started to look like a woman. It was a cat muumuu, but they had one in blue. Yeah, they did have one in blue. It is true. It's not the color. It's like a dress. I know, but you could have worn pants. You can't do it. It could have been like ATL shorty. Shoddy. It's shoddy. It's not shoddy. It's shoddy shoddy. Well, from the west side. I can tell. I can tell. ATL. Shoddy shorty. Okay, well, here's orange you glad that you brought that banana? Bye, guys. Okay, guys, let's go get started with MarketWatch here. As you do know, we did officially switch to CoinGecko from CoinMarketCap. Now, I can't really see the chat, I don't think. So, yeah. So, guys, I love you a lot. I can't see you today, but you get to see me. And we're probably going to, guys, we're probably going to plan on ending it about probably 12 .30 today. So we're going to go through the show kind of quick. Okay, so here we go. We are on CoinMarketCap. Okay, there we go. Is BJ manually switching this? He's in here. Okay, looking at the overall markets. By the way, CoinMarketCap did actually start fixing some stuff. So they did email me after my big tirade the other day. So we'll see what happens there. The market cap almost at $1 .1 trillion. You know, we were just barely over a trillion a couple of days ago. Volume, $36 billion. Bitcoin dominance, 46 .4%. ETH dominance, 18 .2%. I'm going to get a little more used to these CoinGecko numbers to know whether that's up or down. I don't even remember. Gas, 15 .0 Paraguay to send you an ETH transaction. And I hope you guys enjoyed us going live from this, thank you, we're going live from rare evo today. This is one of these things where, you know, the more we travel, the more we go to events, you know, we can have BJ with me. He's an animal with the tech. And there he is. There's BJ, ladies and gentlemen. So, you know, we want to be able to bring you guys more live shows even when I'm on the road instead of, you know, look, we love Deezy. He's great. He's here. But I know you guys don't necessarily want to fill in. And all my Deezy fans, I guess y 'all like around the blockchain anyway, so he's going to be going live or going to be doing a show from here as well. Bitcoin coming in at $26 ,000 approximately. Ethereum coming in at $16 ,400. Uh -oh. Scam. BJ, Scam Likely is calling you. Scam Likely is calling you. $16 .48. Let's see. Where is the old XRP coming in at $0 .51? Yeah, I mean, we pretty much wiped out the entire gain from the lawsuit. And I wasn't expecting it to retrace all the way, but I guess it kind of depended on how high that it went. If it had gone $3X, then it shouldn't have. It just doubled. $0 .50 to $1 and then, or whatever it was, $0 .45 to $0 .90, and now it's crashed back down. But, of course, that's a reaction to the overall market. A lot of people are really expecting a big drop here. And I'm just not. Like, I just don't see it. I try not to get too caught up in the narratives. And, yes, there are some things about the 4 -year cycle that do indicate that there should be more down action, especially compared to Ethereum to Bitcoin. You can chart it doesn't look good. But I almost feel like everybody talking about it, you know, it seems to sometimes negate that. When everybody's expecting a big drop, it doesn't really happen. That's the thing. When we got our big drop from $70K at the top, nobody was expecting that. When we got the FTX collapse, right? Out of nowhere, nobody was expecting that. And so right now, everybody's telling you a big drop is coming, and it's like Bitcoin just loves to defy the narrative. It fits within the fundamentals of the 4 -year cycle, but in the micro, Bitcoin likes to defy. So, or defies, I may say. Let's see. Albert Condi with Superchat. I actually have the chat now. Yobin, you guys have lawyers on your payroll, right? Of course, with all the legal attacks from the US government, I want to watch some streams of discussions with lawyers who know crypto. Okay. That might be something we could, you know, might be better for maybe pre -recorded video rather than live streaming. Live streaming would be good too. But, yeah, thank you for the Superchat. Turn noise cancelling off. What does that mean? Is that us? Okay. One. What are you doing, BJ? No. BJ says no. BJ says no. We can only do the best, guys. What do we got? So next time, BJ says we're going to be a little bit even better prepared, so. We got RollBit coming in, 19 .7 % gains. If you guys did not know, RollBit is kind of a competitor to Stake in a sense, so we can't be covering RollBit really too much on this channel other than to say, look, the price went up, went up 20%, nice pump, and it's one of these things that's been running in the bear market, and it's obvious because people just want to gamble in the bear market because there's not a lot of gains to be had in the crypto world, so unless you're shorting or leverage trading, so RollBit's one to watch. Now, you know, Stake doesn't have its own coin, which is very interesting. I doubt they would ever do that. I don't think it's somewhere they want to get it, something they want to get into. But, you know, are we seeing a decentralized version kind of pop up? We'll have to see how RollBit goes. We have some coins up, barely. Big Ed token, Quant, Mantle, Polkadot, DYDX. So, alright, so let's go ahead and move on. Don't forget, guys, in here at the booth over here, we have a ton of Bitcoin merch. You guys, don't forget to check out hitmerch .com. We got an entire Bitcoin collection. So, you know, it's some really cool merch. Hope you guys check it out. I'm going to be in a dunk tank later, and I guess I'm probably going to see if we have some Bitcoin tank tops and shorts for me to get in the dunk tank with. It'll be everywhere now for charity. Alright, guys, moving on here. US Fed's Jerome Powell and Jackson Hole prepare for more rate hikes, so kind of serious, kind of, kind of not necessarily unexpected news, but they are really committed to, you know, lowering these rates and getting inflation under control, at least making it appear that it's under control. It's kind of like this. It's like, you think of quantum easing or quantitative easing, you can kind of think of it as like a superpower for the Fed, I guess, right? Like, what happens is, you know, I used to remember this game we used to play, right? All the boys, the boys, we go to the arcade. There are two games, really three games, that were four -player games that people just loved when I was a kid. You had The Simpsons. Simpsons was a four -player arcade game. It's pretty cool. Whatever. One of my favorite one, but I did beat it because that's what I do. I'm a winner. You also had Ninja Turtles. Ninja Turtles, man, what a great game that was in the arcade. Man, 4x4 action, you and your buddies, birthday party, you know, go to a big place like, you know. We used to go to a place called American Adventures, but there's other places, Dave and Buster's. And so what happens on this X -Men game? They had this X -Men game. And that was the game we all loved more than any of the other ones because it had this cool superpower. You kind of like store the superpower up, and you are willing to go all the way down to like one bar of your energy. You just take the hits, take the hits, take the hits, because you knew the maximum value of when you use your special power that will blow up everything on the screen was worth it. The appeal to use the quantitative easing for the federal government and Jerome Powell for the Federal Reserve is more appealing than the temporary hits that the economy is taking. They know as soon as they turn the quantitative easing back on, that they're going to be able to fix everything just to mess everything up again. But that kicks the can down the road, right? So they're willing to take the hits going down to no energy, your economy not do well, there's tons of stats showing our economy is actually worse than the Great Depression right now. It's all fake, and it's all smoke and mirrors. That's what the government's learned to do better over time is create the optical illusion that everything's fine when it's clearly not. So, Jerome Powell is, you know, basically saying like, hey, here's the thing. Let's see if this is all part of the optics. We're going to keep raising rates. It's what has to happen for us to get inflation under control. There's no such thing as getting inflation under control, guys. Our money is worthless. There's nothing behind it. It's going to happen again. Powell revealed that the Fed staff intends to hold the interest rates at a restrictive level until they are confident that inflation is moving sustainably towards a 2 % target. They made their remarks at the Economic Policy Symposium, also popularly called Jackson Hole Symposium, or Jackson Hole Meeting, posted by the Federal Reserve of Kansas City. I actually took a picture outside that one time when I was there for a Chiefs Finals game. Prior to the speech, traders were anticipating the Fed chairs' comments on the long -term economic scenario amid the ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty. So, there we go. And, of course, Bitcoin price hasn't, doesn't seem like it's really done that much for the Bitcoin price one way or the other. Okay. So, also, guys, we have IRS spares, crypto miners and validators and new broker reporting requirements. And, you know, here's the thing, guys. I told you that this thing about who's a broker in crypto, right? It was in some language of the big Digital Currency Act that got, you know, implemented a couple years ago, and everybody was worried about this broker language because it was going to affect miners. I told you the whole time, guys, the system has a lot of different fail -safes in it, okay? And so when you see one of these stories like China banning Bitcoin, like, okay, cool, you know, it's not that big of a deal. I knew this broker stuff in the United States. I knew it was going to end up not being a big deal. The language was not clarified in the bill, but I said it would get clarified later. And here, you have the IRS saying basically exactly what I just told you, is that even though the bill said one thing, this is what the IRS is going to do and how they're actually going to legislate and regulate this, or I guess the IRS just keeps up with the money. How are they going to hold it financially accountable? The Department of Treasury released its highly anticipated proposed regulations for crypto currency brokers. Notably, it's chosen to exempt individual validators and miners under the proposed rules. And this is big for DAOs, too, guys. Under the proposed rules, crypto brokers will have to adhere to the same rules as securities brokers, including filing information returns and furnishing pay statements for all customers and traders. The Treasury stated that the proposed changes aimed to curb crypto tax evasion and prevent crypto investors and businesses from getting an unfair advantage. Biden said there's as much as $18 billion left on the table. We all know he wanted that so he could give it to Ukraine or his son could squirt it up his nose. The rules that passed would go into effect 2026 for the 2025 tax year, which is absolutely huge because the 2025 tax year is the year to harvest the gains, right? That's when the bull market is going to be thriving, probably ending somewhere around the summer of that year. So, let's see. Yup. You guys, we're in a big room here. This is what happens when you're live at a conference, is what it is. Okay. Alright. Let's move on here to the XRP trial here. And you guys know our XRP section is always brought to you by stake. You know, in my opinion, some of the best bread that exists is a golden crown. Golden crown has got these rolls there. Now, they don't have anything else that's good, but they've got these rolls. They're immaculate. They're so good. They're buttered. They're fantastic. And it really makes every other roll that you've ever had just taste mid. So, BJ, please play the mid roll. Thank you to our sponsor, Stake. Thank you to our sponsor, Stake. Also, thank you to Rare Evo as well. Okay. Why the SEC vs. Ripple trial may never happen. Insights crypto from lawyer Fred Rispoli. Talked to Fred a few times. Good guy. The SEC vs. Ripple Labs lawsuit has been a significant battle in the crypto world. On July 13, Annalisa Torres, the judge, delivered a complex ruling. It wasn't really that complex. Prominent crypto lawyer Fred Rispoli took to microblogging platform X. It's like calling Bitcoin the flagship cryptocurrency. Like, the microblogging platform X. Is that really what we're saying now? Come on. Ryder, I know you get paid for word, but come on. I can do better. Desiria's belief that the trial between the two Ripple Labs executives may never take place. Here's why Rispoli thinks so. Pressure tactics. He argues at Garlinghouse that suing Garlinghouse and Larson was a strategy to pressure Ripple into a weak settlement position agree 100%. Witness challenges. Imagining key SEC figures on the witness stand. Rispoli believes figures such as William Hinman and Jay Clayton could be tied to their roles in the Trump administration, which might not sit well with a New York City jury. Proving reckless. Rispoli questions about how the SEC could prove recklessness regarding institutional sales when the defendants can point to programmatic sales as being acceptable. Weak evidence. Of course, the evidence concerning domestic vs. international sales is considered weak. Reorganization of the SEC's trial team. They've already been making some internal changes to their trial team in this case. Back -to -back trials with the SEC's tight trial schedule may hinder its ability to focus on this case. It's one of these situations where Gary Gensler does not want to let go. He does not want to let go of this. But he's going to in the end see that this is a losing battle for him, and he's got to make the choice to move on. It's a hard decision because it basically means that everything he's been talking about, his entire stint at the SEC, is nullified. And what does that mean? That means that he himself becomes replaceable because he's been in charge forever and he's done nothing. That's the whole point. It's why we need someone to replace him. And the writing is on the wall for him, and he is going to fight until the last second, but at some point, he's going to have to give up the ghost because he's going to start getting pressure from people outside of him. When he starts feeling that pressure, that's when this is going to be over. The lack of bargaining chips. He's just as he has no bargaining chips left if the judge denies the motion for the appeal. So the Interlocutory Appeal, definitely something to watch, something to pay attention to. We had to find out and see, you know, where Judge Suarez rules on that. Alright, guys. Moving on here to Robinhood. And where do we have charts on there at all? Are we going to do charts at all today, BJ? We have it. It's on there, Ben. Did I go by? Where is it? It's after this. Okay. Okay. Perfect. Yeah. Okay. I got it. Okay. Oh, I see it. There it is. It's on my screen. I missed it. Can $1 .9 billion in expiring options shake the markets? You know, guys, we're getting to a place of decision point for the market. We're getting to a decision point. Bitcoin options expiry days come around again. And, guys, the end of Quarter 3 is going to be the end of September. That's going to be a, like I said, a decision point. Where is Bitcoin going to go? Are we going to continue upwards? And are we going to see things slowly ramp up to the halving? Do we need another bloodbath, another dump? Certainly don't see new lows come into play anywhere. But are we going to see a dump down to 20 before we have our resurrection point? It's all very interesting things to think about here. And if you look at traditionally when we were in the bull market, man, the end of those quarters would be absolutely brutal. They would destroy some of the pumps that we had. Now, we're on the backside. Now, we're in the bear market. Will the options within everyone's bearish attitude, will these actually counteract and go the opposite direction and cause a big pump? I certainly think it's possible. We could see that. Now, what does that mean? Well, the pain point for bulls and bears, the middle ground is $28 ,000. So at some point, it's going to either push up above $28 ,000 or it's got to show that $28 ,000 seems to be unachievable in the moment. Right now, with Bitcoin at $26 ,000, of course, it seems achievable. But are we going to dump down lower and make $28 ,000 kind of out of the picture again? We'd have to go below $25 .2K and hold below that. Here's some of the options. You guys can see here what this looks like right now. We are, you know, heading into the 1st of September. This is the 25th of August here on the left side. That, of course, is, yeah, the 25th of August. That's Friday. That's today. That's actually today. Today is, no, no, sorry, today's Thursday, right? No, it's Friday. It's Thursday. It's Friday. It is Friday. I forgot what day it is. We didn't do the show yesterday, so it got really turned off. It is Friday. Today's the day they expire. So, guys, we'll be watching for some interesting action. You know, see, you know, if Bitcoin is going to pumper down based on all this. Right now, it's holding strong. The overall market cap around $1 .1 trillion. So it doesn't seem to have that big of an effect so far. Okay, so let's go and move on to the charts.
Cloud Security Podcast by Google
A highlight from EP135 AI and Security: The Good, the Bad, and the Magical
"Hi there. Welcome to the Cloud Security Podcast by Google. Thanks for joining us today. Your hosts here are myself, Timothy Peacock, the Senior Product Manager for Threat Detection here at Google Cloud, and Anton Juvakin, a reformed analyst and senior staff in Google Cloud's Office of the CISO. You can find and subscribe to this podcast wherever you get your podcasts, as well as on our website, cloud .google .com slash podcasts. If you enjoy our content and want it delivered to you piping hot every Monday, please do hit that subscribe button in your podcasting app of choice. You can follow the show, argue with us, and the rest of the Cloud Security Podcast listeners on our LinkedIn page. Anton, we have returning guest Phil Venables today talking about, well, I guess it's a returning topic as well, AI and security. Correct. But you would see as expected with this guest, you would have a lot of surprises. You have a lot of deep thoughts. You'd have practical things. It's just a really good episode because it's a really good guest. Is he your skip level? I think he might be. Can we avoid this topic for now and just proceed with the show? Yes. Listeners, why don't we get right to it? Let's turn things over to today's guest. And with that, listeners, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast, Phil Venables, CISO here at Google Cloud. Phil, thank you so much for joining us once again on the show. We are talking about, I think, a fun topic. We're talking about AI for security. And I want to start with, this seems like kind of a softball question, but why is AI such a game changer for security? And to question my own question, can we even have game changers in cyber at this point? Does what I'm saying make sense? Yeah. Well, so look, first of all, it's great to be back. I'm still an avid listener of the podcast, so I always feel it's still a privilege to come back on. You know, it's an interesting question because everybody talks about, is AI going to be a game changer for security? And I think most of us would look back and say, already has been a game changer for security. When you look at, perhaps not generative AI yet, but more traditional types of machine learning across everything we do on malware filtering, spam filtering, safe browsing. You know, you had Panos on a few episodes ago talking about safe browsing. That's powered by machine learning. Some of Tim, your own products have got a lot of machine learning under the hubs. Everything we've done with AI recommend has got machine learning under the hood. So it's already been transformational, and I think we've got to remember that. But I think certainly what has started to happen and what is coming with large language models and other transformer based generative AI is going to be significant in the future. I think we probably won't feel like it's game changing because certainly what we're starting to see already, whether it's use on software security, on configuration recommendation, on malware analysis, on suggesting detections based on threat information, it all feels kind of very incremental and it's great incremental steps. But I think it's happening so quickly and so incrementally that it won't feel like it's game changing in the moment, but we'll look back in 12 months, in 24 months, in 36 months and think like, holy cow, this really was game changing. So it is incremental, but it's going to be game changing over time, even though it doesn't feel like quantum leaps every day. It's just incremental, which is great. I think that makes sense. Like a rapid, quick step incremental in a year is game changing. That actually, that logic makes perfect sense to me as well. Let me ask you a bit of a strange sub question to this. We do see sometimes other vendors assume that generative AI would like generate stuff and they would just run the code. And when I hear this, I'm usually a little freaked out inside. So as far as use cases where this type of rapid incremental change leading to game changing may happen, what are you thinking? Detecting threats, reducing toil, where is your mind? Both. Yeah, I mean, it's a bunch of stuff. I mean, certainly I'm excited by generative AI in its ability to enhance the productivity by reducing the toil of everything from people doing security analysis roles, coming up with new operations, detections, many other things like that. I think what is going to be really interesting though is, and you kind of touched on this Anton, is the notion of how do we use this as part of secure software development or establishing secure configurations? And I think that's going to be pretty interesting. And while I wouldn't say any of this technology yet can generate software for all purposes that has no vulnerabilities in it, I think we're a ways away from that. But when you look at very specific use cases around generating code, framework boilerplate code, generating other types of code, I think it does radically transform developer productivity. And you can imagine the use case of it. Imagine if you're in an IDE with a generative AI coding assistant and it watches you code up some SQL query and then says, look, don't do that. I'm going to give you my automated framework for safe injection SQL proof queries to the database, or I see you typing up this web server call and I'm now going to give you the automatic boilerplate to make that a secure call with all of the cross -site scripting mitigations in and all of the cross -site requests for you. That calling up predefined boilerplate within the enterprise context is going to be transformational for security. I mean, that's clearly possible today with many IDEs, but doing it in a generative way that has a much deeper insight into the context of the code is going to be pretty significant. And then overlaying on top of that, the whole controls as code in infrastructure or cloud configuration to be able to generate. And we're doing this, as you both know, with our duet system, taking our AI and applying that to configuration generation. Imagine doing that. And so you're auto generating secure configuration as part of systems development will improve security as well as transforming productivity. That makes sense. And I think to me, much of the excitement is there. And I think that occasionally I do have a fear that the Gen AI would go kind of the opposite way, namely that it would give you something it learned from bad programmers somewhere and instead of secure framework, it would give you the very opposite. So I want to switch it briefly to fears from excitement. I mean, you are a CISO and the classic, almost like a mainstream press question to CISOs is, do you lose sleep at night? So is there any AI security issue where you kind of lose sleep at night? I think not in the way people might expect. So I think there's a lot of great work going on here at Google and in many organizations to take the risks you might expect with AI around training data, making sure that you're putting the right data in that will yield the right outputs, managing the tests, managing the security of the model weights and all the other parameters. So there's lots of challenges there, but there's also lots and lots of work going on, including our own secure AI framework that prescribes a bunch of controls for that. I think the things I worry about is when you think about coupling AI to critical systems that then actuate physical activity or cause transactions to occur or cause some type of activity to occur, and then thinking about whether organizations are building in the right input and output guards around those processes, if you like, circuit breakers to make sure the AI is doing the right thing. I think many organizations have the, if you like, the DNA of how to think about that problem of putting AI in the context of a surrounding set of controls or guards. I worry sometimes that there's some organizations that have not come up in almost that safety engineering culture that won't necessarily think to do that. And then the other thing I worry about is the unintended consequences of the use of AI because AI in many business processes is going to transform those in a way that may create unintended risks that have not been foreseen. And so again, it's definitely encouraging when organizations are deploying that AI they're not just involving their security team, they're thinking about the risk, the trust and safety, the compliance obligations. And that's definitely more than anything I've seen before, a whole of risk management approach to get this right, not just a whole of security team approach. That's really encouraging that you think this is going better than other things you've seen. On that sort of thread, I want to pick at that a little bit. Do you think AI is going to help the good guys more or the bad guys more? And if the good guys have security and privacy and risk and safety engineering all in the room, might the bad guys be able to move faster and do more bad stuff faster than we can do good stuff? What's the right way to think about this race? Well, I'll give a predictably non -committal answer and say it depends, you know, so it depends on the attacker, it depends on the defender. I'm actually optimistic that all things being equal, AI should give defenders an advantage because AI is good at amplifying capability based on the data and the configuration the organization has that the AI can apply to, which in the general case, attackers don't have as much visibility into that. Of course, attackers at certain stages will have visibility into that. But when you think about the possibilities for an organization to use AI to manage its own territory, that's inherently a defender's advantage. And again, when you think about the classic trope that I don't actually agree with, this trope of defenders have to be right all the time and only attackers once. I actually think I prefer the alternate framing of that, which is attackers have to evade detection all the time, but good defenders only have to spot and respond to the attacker making a misstep once. And I think AI, especially for that, tips in the favor of the defenders, but defenders have got to make a good use of it. I think the one mistake, this has been always my motto for hunting efforts, right? What you just said with attacker making one mistake and a good blue team detects them and the breach is discovered or prevented. So that to me makes sense. And I think that AI superpower for that is a really good idea. And I think it's almost like it's worth the price for the entire podcast is that line. Because to me, this actually makes sense. And it's also very rarely represented in other communication. People don't really focus there. That's a way where AI can give defenders superpower to turn this from the best teams can get it to many teams can get it. Yeah, I think that's right. And then you look where people are paying a lot of attention to how attackers may use AI, for example, in constructing new and more sophisticated phishing attacks and other types of social engineering attacks that will thwart authentication systems. My answer to that is people should probably be upgrading their authentication systems to phishing resistant cryptographic token based technology, such that we're putting in defenses against all forms of phishing, not some super powered AI phishing. So I think we don't necessarily need to think of how to use AI to counter an attacker's use of AI if there's a better control that takes the game to a different place anyway. That makes sense. I really like that answer. People get so wrapped up about AI versus AI instead of solving the problem, where AI is just the tool that's used to accomplish it. That's right. Yeah. And similarly, again, if you think about attackers using AI to probe your configuration, to look for weaknesses, to identify vulnerabilities, yeah, of course they could do that. But also as defenders, we can do that. And like we talked about before, the defenders are applying that to superpower their identification of the most critical vulnerabilities, to focus resources on resolving those vulnerabilities before the attacker sees them. It's part of the things we've talked about before, which is the goal of defenders is to have your OODA loop go a lot faster than the attackers. And I think, again, I'm optimistic on this, that AI powers that part of the defender more than it would power that part of the attacker. So let me probe very quickly at one argument, one part of the logical argument is that when we were presenting, preparing the question, I was nervous that attackers would have an inherent advantage in the adoption speed of because they are less constrained by the rules. So I almost feel like I have to ask you, do you have a good counter argument to that? Because the fear is that attackers would just go faster because they have less rules to follow them being the bad guys. Well, it's interesting. I mean, I think defenders in defending themselves don't have as many rules to follow as people might think. Now, there would be some significant constraints. So if a defender is putting in place an AI system, automatically finds attacks and then responds by crafting defenses, and then that automatically then adjust defenses, and the AI is in charge of your entire security, then if that's your goal, then you probably do want to move slowly and make sure that you're actually doing that in a safe way. And clearly the attackers don't have to be measured in how they do this, unless they really wanted to be careful about whether they're detected or not. But I think when look at all things being equal, if the attacker can move quickly because they're not constrained by rules, they are constrained by the absence of the data they might need about your environment or the environment that they're attacking, and they're constrained about being careful so that they're not detected in unexpected ways. Stealth means they're slow. Yeah, exactly. Then on the flip side, as a defender, you may have some constraints because you're operating on the side of safety and managing your change risk, but at the same time, you've got or you could have perfect knowledge of your environment, you've got access to all of your data, and you've got the ability to change your environment in the favor of the defender. I think there's another interesting asymmetry that gets highlighted by the AML model that Google recently released, where defenders can work together, but adversaries are constrained in their ability to work together. I think given that AI systems require data and large amounts of data for training, this is an area where if we can get good at cooperative data sharing without releasing our secrets to each other, I think we actually have a really interesting ecosystem opportunity to be asymmetrically advantaged in training ourselves since we're all on the same side at the end of the day, unlike adversaries who are competing to defraud companies for the same limited pool of dollars. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I think, as you know, adversaries do share data with each other, but it's usually in the context of a black market supply chain rather than the well -intentioned sharing of data for common defensive purposes. You're absolutely right. In a world where the AI is powered by broader and broader knowledge of what's going on, the more that we can share information in appropriate ways, the more we're going to be able to power that collective defense. Yeah. So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about defending AI systems and securing our AI lifecycle maybe. Does that look like defending any other app lifecycle? Is it different? Is it just a big data problem? What does defending AI look like? Well, it's starting to interest me a lot because it's a combination of things. So on one level, it's like software security. So you have a whole bunch of elements of your AI system that you have to manage their provenance. You have to manage their secure build. You have to manage the lifecycle. You have to manage the testing and the regression testing. But on another level, it's like data security and data governance because you have to manage the training data, the test data, the weights and the parameters. You have to show that there's provenance of that data. You've got to worry about the intellectual property. You've got to worry about all sorts of aspects of the data that is then used by the software to implement the AI system. You've got to think about input and output management in terms of the prompts and the output. And then like we talked about before, you've got to think about the guards and the circuit breakers and the API gateways and all of the other things that surround the AI system that act as constraints on how it is used and how it can be prompted to not reveal sensitive information, to not do any outputs that you don't expect or not create actions in transaction and other systems that you may not want or expect. And that's a really interesting combination of controls and risks. And it's funny, the environment it always brings to mind for me is in financial services where you have security and risk management of algorithmic trading systems. If you think about these high -speed trading systems, they're models, in some case, machine learning -based models. They have input, outputs, testing software, data controls, and then they have a bunch of guards and circuit breakers around their behavior to make sure they're operating within pre -specified parameters. And so you've got to imagine, I was thinking this the other day, you've got to imagine that the security and risk teams in large banks, trading houses, or brokerages should get to grips with this set of risks in somewhat pretty intuitive ways, whereas other organizations may have to kind of come up the learning curve of how to arrange together the software security, the data governance and control, and the surrounding environmental guards for the end -to -end risk management of AI systems. That actually makes sense. But you also pointed out that some other similarities, I certainly seek similarities to early cloud years, where, for example, people didn't really get the whole shared responsibility. I mean, admittedly, I still see people out on the street who don't get shared responsibility for cloud even today. But for AI, it seems like we host the system, somebody else tunes the model, we give the foundational model. There are a lot of parties playing here, and it feels like So we, of course, pioneered the shared fate model at Google. So do you have any view or any kind of vision or anything on how shared fate would apply to AI? Yeah, I mean, I think it's somewhat similar to the cloud as we think about layering shared fate on shared responsibility in the sense that, as you pointed out, we provide a lot of the models, the model execution environment, many of the testing tools. And so we invest a lot in our foundation models that we provide as part of the vertex AI model garden environment. And then we also provide a bunch of end to end data governance tools, surrounding tools that control the environment. So we're investing a lot of our opinionated knowledge of how to run these models that we use in other parts of Google into those products. So very, very similar to what we do with many of the cloud products and layering in that opinionated guidance and taking responsibility for how we've done that is a similar moving up the stack that we've seen in other applications of the shared fate philosophy. And that means that we would have similar kind of mechanisms for helping clients with what's on their end of the shared dispensability model. So like pre -secured elements to assemble, landing zones, basically some of the ideas from how we manifest shared fate on the cloud would apply to AI systems. Yeah, exactly. And then how you think about taking the foundation models, helping customers develop their data governance practices to bring their training data inside their secured customer project, where the training data that develops the adapter weights that sit on top of the foundation model, don't make it back into the Google environment. So customers get to protect that, but they then get the apparatus within the vertex system to be able to manage that. Again, it's giving people the tools to run by default in a controlled way as they bring their data to then use the foundation models to deliver a specific use case for them. That makes a lot of sense. And it pains me as always to do this, Phil, but I am at the point where I have to ask our traditional closing questions. One, do you have recommended reading, maybe specifically in the area of AI security, and then two, a recommended tip for organizations to want to start pulling AI into how they defend themselves? Yeah, so like the reading is, you know, I'll be a little bit parochial, is that, you know, there's so much good Google content, either within Google research, and I'm sure you guys can add to the show notes the link to the research website, but then we've done a lot of secure AI framework that we published. And then we also published recently a Google -wide red team guide on how to think about red teaming. AI models, a big part of the testing of these models is not just to do the normal data -driven testing, but do adversarial testing against not just the security, but their overall behavior. And we produced a really good red team guide. That's worth looking at. The other thing I would say as well is, you know, in terms of, and I've kind of touched on this at a few points in the conversation, the important thing about AI security is security is not just the only risk attribute to pay attention to. There's many, many different risks here, whether it's everything from intellectual property to trust and safety and compliance and behavior, as well as all the operating risks of how an AI is plugged into your wider business or mission process. And I think one of the key success factors for many organizations is not just how good a job the security team does, but how good a job all of the teams that manage all of those risks partner together to deliver an integrated risk framework for that organization. And then also, I mean, we've talked a number of occasions about the role of the board of directors, the many major companies that's also involving the board, because I'm finding the board is also very, very conscious and highly thoughtful about how to think about the responsible deployment of AI. And that's something that we've partnered with many customers on as they build their whole risk framework. So again, not just the security aspects, but how the security team works with all of the risk functions to deliver safe and responsible use of AI while driving innovation forward as well. That's such an interesting answer. And I wish we'd had more time to actually talk about the board piece, because I think there's so much interesting stuff happening at that level too. It really, I don't know, sometimes I feel like security can be a bit of an afterthought for people. And this is one place where the intersection of AI and security and board governance are just, they're really coming together right now. Well, it's funny because like I said, you know, we've been spending a lot of time with boards and I find it really refreshing that this is a topic as security overall increasingly is, but it's a topic that boards are considering as they think about how their companies are going to innovate with AI. I've yet to come across a board that isn't also very, very focused on their trustworthiness, safety, responsible AI. And it's been particularly pleasing for all of us at Google where I think we more than pretty much anybody through the development of this technology have been very, very focused on that responsible and bold use, but really thinking about trust and safety and security and compliance and privacy and all of those risk mitigants as a core of what we build to have customers, boards, call that out and thank us for being focused on those topics because they are focused on it even amidst the pressure to innovate is actually a big positive for all the people at Google that work on these things. And listeners, Phil's not just saying that. I mean, you go use the restroom at Google and there are signs in the bathroom teaching you about AI ethics and compliance. It's really everywhere here, listeners. And I think it's easy to say, oh, Phil's just saying that, but really we really do care about these things. And so maybe on that note of Google really does care about this stuff and it's great to see everybody else caring about it. I want to thank you, Phil, for joining us once again. Yeah, always a pleasure. Thanks, guys. And now we are at time. Thank you very much for listening and, of course, for subscribing. You can find this podcast at Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Also, you can find us at our website, cloud .withgoogle .com slash cloud security slash podcast. Please subscribe so that you don't miss episodes. You can follow us on Twitter, twitter .com slash cloudsecpodcast. Your hosts are also on YouTube. We can invite you to the next episode. See you on the next Cloud Security Podcast episode.
a16z
A highlight from From Big Bang to James Webb: Exploring Space with John Mather
"Right now we still have the great mystery of quantum mechanics doesn't seem to describe gravity. Can we find places that are like home? Little Earth's orbiting stars like the Sun. When you look at the history of Earth you see the history of the different forms of life growing. It's taken all of the entire history of the universe for us to turn up. We start off with that can't be done that's impossible. Then somebody invents something and then somebody wants some more and gradually we invest our billions or trillions as it takes because there's a demand for it. Please build us another telescope to look farther back because we've got a big mystery here. Artificial limbs, precision GPS, firefighter suits, insulin pumps, emergency blankets, air purifiers, even the dust buster. Now what do all of these things have in common? Well these were actually all innovations developed through the pursuit of space and I think there's something really profound there. Through our collective deep desire to understand our past and all that we came from we've created technologies that enhance our future. I think it's also an important reminder that history is riddled with people we think they know what is best to build without realizing that there are so many great things that have sprouted from projects that didn't seem immediately useful at the time. And that's why today I am so excited about our guest astrophysicist John Mather. Now John actually won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2006 for his work on the Kobe satellite to which by the way Stephen Hawking described the imagery from Kobe and its implications on the Big Bang Theory as the most important discovery of the century if not all time. More recently John was a senior project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope and that was the feat of science that produced the images of those far -out galaxies that you probably saw as the Biden administration revealed them in the last year. Now this episode came about because I had the pleasure of seeing John speak at the Aspen Ideas Festival and after his talk I had to ask him I had to shoot my shot to see if he'd come on the A16Z podcast and in this complex world of cosmic probabilities John actually said yes. So here we are venturing into the very beginnings of our cosmic history. We also talked about what we've learned in the several decades that John has been working in this space but also the many things that we have yet to understand so things like dark energy and dark matter. Plus we explored the very important question of why space exploration is such a fundamental but also useful human desire in the first place and given that the James Webb Space Telescope that John has been working on recently made its first detection of a new carbon compound methyl cation this conversation is all the more timely.
What Bitcoin Did
A highlight from The Breakdown of Trust with Doomberg
"One of the things that held up the US dollar hegemony was the state of our institutions and the quality of our financial markets and the rule of law and the level of corruption and criminality that is on blatant display in Washington DC is appalling. And once you lose your ethical framework as a society, what do you have? Good morning from a very happy Bedford and a very happy chairman of the football team that just won their first FA Cup game. We're through to the next preliminary round of the FA Cup against MK Irish on Saturday, which was amazing. Also very cool. We had two Australian Bitcoiners, What Bitcoin Did, listeners who'd come into the country. They made the pilgrimage to Bedford and came and watched the game, which was amazing. Speaking of which, we're making the pilgrimage the other way round. September the 9th, Danny and I are going to be in Australia. We've got a WBD Live in Sydney with Nick Bartier, Willy Woo, Checkmate, Rusty Russell, and Dan Roberts all on stage. It's going to be a banger. If you're in Australia and you want to come out, you want to hang out, you want to come and see a live What Bitcoin Did, go and get yourself a ticket. It's whatbitcoindid .com and click on WBD Live. Anyway, welcome to the What Bitcoin Did podcast, which is brought to you by the legends at Iris Energy, the largest Nasdaq listed Bitcoin miner using 100 % renewable energy. I'm your host, Peter McCormack, and today I've got everyone's favorite giant green chicken back on the show, the amazing Doonberg. Now, Doonberg's becoming a regular on the show now. I can find his analysis of almost anything, any weird stuff that's going on in the world, anything related to, you know, recently we've got superconductors, we've got aliens, we've got economic crisis. I find he is a good person to go to and talk to about this. Now, originally when we did book this, we did plan to talk about superconductors, but before we actually started recording, it came out that LK99 wasn't in fact a superconductor. So we talked about this and we talked about how they analyze this and how they came to their thoughts. But then we moved on to a broad range of subjects from cancer cure medicine to the BRICS currencies and everything Elon Musk is doing with X and why Doonberg has gone lurker mode on X, formally Twitter. And I couldn't let him leave without asking him about Bitcoin as well. Of course, I had to after his $5 ,000 call last time. Anyway, listen, I know you're going to love this one. I absolutely love talking to Doonberg. But you got any questions about this or anything else, please hit me up. It's HelloWhatBitcoinDid .com. Big green chicken. Good to see you. It's good to see you, Peter. How have you been? Yeah, really good. Really good. Yeah, just busy traveling a lot. Been out to Argentina since I spoke to you last. And I'm not sure if you saw the results that came in last night from their primaries. Yes, indeed. Making the big news. I might even ask you about that later on. Loads of weird stuff's been happening since we last spoke. Yes, indeed. Well, the good news is that the news flow means that we'll never have a shortage of things for us to talk about. No, I thought we were going to talk about superconductors. I definitely recently read your piece on the cancer -curing pill. And we've also had the US congressional hearings on aliens, among some of the things. So just your standard news flow for COVID world. Indeed, indeed. Where would you like to begin? I know the information has changed. But let's talk a little bit about the superconductor thing. Because the internet was feverish with excitement about the potential of the discovery of a superconductor. It turns out that it wasn't. What happened here? Were we hoodwinked? Were we tricked? Specifically, what was claimed was the development of a room temperature superconductor. Of course, if you cool down certain materials to low enough temperature, they do superconductive already display behavior. The discovery of such a behavior that could operate at room temperature, or in this case, they claim that they were able to observe superconducting activity at temperatures above the boiling port of water. That would truly be a world -changing discovery on par with fission and perhaps the development of semiconductors. And it is a holy grail. And that phrase is overused, of course. But the advent of such material would truly qualify for one of those. When we first saw the piece that was published, we were very skeptical of it. We wrote our own analysis of it in the days afterwards at the peak of the excitement, really, called Conducting Diligence. And over the years, we have used a five -question framework analyzing for such discoveries. And we applied it, introduced it, and applied it here. As background, when I was an executive in the corporate world, I led very large technology groups. And many CEOs get most of their science advance information in the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times. And so it was very, very common for whoever my CEO was at the time to forward such things to me and demand my instant analysis of it. And oftentimes, I had to talk such people out of reorienting investment dollars to chase down the latest hype cycle. And so over those decades, really, we developed this framework that allowed us to systematically write five paragraphs to our executive overlords and to explain to them most of the times why such an advance was worth watching, but perhaps not worth acting on yet. Occasionally, one does pass that screen. And in this case, we use those five questions and concluded by saying that we're deeply, deeply skeptical. Happy to dive into the details as to why. But I do think that piece that we wrote has stood the test of time quite well. Yeah, before we dive in, can you explain why a superconductor would be such a game changer, though? There's the superficial reasons that the media likes to write about, which is, oh, you can imagine transmitting massive amounts of electricity with no loss and reorienting the entirety of our electricity grid. But in reality, in our view, it would be how a room temperature superconductor could facilitate advances in otherwise unrelated fields. And then the second and third order effects of those would be truly a game changer. In particular, collective computing, for example, would stand to benefit greatly from an advance in room temperature superconducting. And that field, of course, has had its own hype cycle. But quantum computing, a true advance in room temperature superconductors, for example, we believe could put the world of computing back on pace of exponential growth. If you squint at the log curves of the rate of computing advances, it seems to have slowed down a little bit in the past few years. Of course, we're still making massive advances. But it's the second and third order impacts from the other technologies that would be enabled by such an advance that we think would ultimately transform society. And look, all manner of sensitive electronic applications, a quantum computing advance would jeopardize encryption, for example. And there's just countless other ways that a step change like this would be very, very useful. And as we said in the piece, vast riches and a quick ticket to Stockholm to collect a Nobel Prize await those who succeed in demonstrating the phenomenon. And many serious physicists doubt that such an advance is even possible. So when you see such an enormous claim like this, it is irresistible that the hype wouldn't proceed in the way that it did. It's totally understandable. But at the same time, we had serious, serious doubts from the very beginning for the reasons that we wrote in that piece. Okay, so can you break down why you were skeptical in your piece? Yeah, so we asked five questions and I'll just list them carefully. They're simple questions. And the good thing about this approach is it doesn't require all that much in the way of specific expertise in the underlying area. And I should say up front, this is not something that I personally have a deep level of practical knowledge in the nuances of the science, but it's not needed in this case. So the five questions are, who's involved? Where was it published? Where are we in the scientific process? What is the scientific context? And then what should we expect next? And if you go through each of those questions, the first one, as with most human endeavors, the reputation and pedigree of the people involved matters. As we said in the piece, if Google and MIT announce a computing advance, you probably would be safe to bet that they have the goods. But if your neighbor tugs on your sleeve at a party and whispers quietly about an invention he's been working on in his garage for years that's sure to change the world, you'd probably be justified in having a healthy degree of skepticism here. The researchers involved have very good pedigree. The team is based in Korea, but they also collaborate with a relatively well -known physics professor at the College of William and Mary, and they seem to be trained in the field. And most importantly, one of the main inventors said they would be willing to support anyone trying to replicate the work, and we took that as a good sign. Things get a little sketchier when you consider where it was published, which is the second question. And here, these results were not published in a peer -reviewed journal of any pedigree. They were self -published as preprints on the internet, two of them, actually, one with three authors and the other with six. And the barrier to publishing a preprint is zero. You and I, Peter, could publish a preprint making claims to this very same website and generate a hype cycle of our own. That's not to say that the work was bad, but in our view, if this had passed peer review at a reputable journal, it would have lent more credibility to the claims. Unfortunately, this is not the world that we live in, and these preprints were hyped. And one of the reasons why this matters is because, as I believe, ultimately the story will dictate the misinterpretation of the data that this looks like is what happened. This would have been caught in that peer review process and would never have made the hype cycle, which is the third question. Where are we in the scientific process since it's unpublished? And basically, nobody would consider these results to be validated until independent researchers reproduce the work in their own laboratories. And one of the reasons why it's important to publish your paper in a journal and pass peer review is because a key job of editors at such journals is to ensure authors provide sufficient, specific details that allow others to confirm the work. And the good news with this is, as we pointed out in the piece, the compounds used were pretty simple and the synthetic procedures were rudimentary, which actually gave us even more pause because typically giant leaps of science don't usually arise from what we call kitchen chemistry, such as this. But on the other hand, the fact that it was so straightforward meant that others would very quickly be able to test whether the results were real. And then the fourth question is the scientific context. And here, we've had example after example of such claims falling flat, data being retracted. Sometimes it's fraud. Most often, it is misunderstanding of the phenomenon. And so, especially, you know, the equivalent would be claims of battery breakthroughs. You know, we've written another piece on this as well. There's certain fields where the prize is so high that the weaknesses of the scientific method as practice in the modern era are really on display. And the pursuit of a room temperature superconductor would be one of those. And then the last question is what should we expect next, which is exactly what has transpired. A bunch of people tried to reproduce it. Nobody has been able to do so. It appears as though experts have studied the preprints and their own experimental work and have come up with explanation an alternative for the phenomenon that was witnessed. And as we said in our verdict, nobody would be more thrilled to see these results validated than us. But we found ourselves deeply skeptical. The last point I would say is the leap was too far, the method is too simple, and the process too premature to get excited. And I think that was a good view at the time. So is their project dead or are they still working on it? Well, the problem with making such a hyperbolic claim is that it becomes difficult for people to continue to pursue the work. And there's really not that much to pursue here if the reinterpretation of the data is as the scientific community seems to be coalescing on. Because it's just not that interesting of a discovery. And so, you know, back to the drawing board. We were going to write a follow -up piece called What If. It's one of these pieces that was sort of written in my head that never saw the light of day because by the time we would have gotten it published it would have seemed a bit silly. But if this had been true, even if it was a small component or a minor byproduct, the state of industrial heterogeneous synthesis using high throughput techniques is such that the big companies would have obliterated this experimental map across all dimensions. Concentration, oxygen, temperature ramp, you name it. They would have done thousands and thousands and thousands of experiments. They would have found the exact molecule that worked. And that it can work itself is a gigantic discovery. And so if one can work, it would have taken weeks for the industry to isolate an entire family of these things, then the theory would have caught up to it very quickly. And there would have been something about these things that teaches theory something interesting, which then would very quickly inform the synthetic chemists as to how to optimize and create. It would have been, you know, like how the first person to break the four -minute mile and suddenly everybody does it. That this would have been one of those situations where raw the power of the high throughput synthesis discovery workflows in the big multi -deca billion -dollar chemical companies would have made short work of this, would have optimized it very quickly. There would have been no barriers to, no meaningful barriers to commercialization because materials involved were so simple and so widely available that cooking them in a certain unique way is of no challenge whatsoever to the industry. So if there was even a possibility that this had once worked, that would have been game -changing, but it doesn't look that way, unfortunately. What is the general state of scientific research and peer reviews? Because there was a period, certainly post -COVID, where this has been hotly debated and the trust the science mean was spreading quite regularly with people just having vast doubts about peer -review studies and the peer -review process. What have you looked at into that, or is that just... Oh, there's a huge ongoing retraction scandal in the scientific world, and as we said in the piece, you know, peer review on its own doesn't mean that this is fundamentally accurate science. It still needs to be reproduced in other labs for it to really go from an observation to, say, an accepted theory or accepted experimental set of results. But the state of modern science is poor right now, and it's because it is performed by humans who are susceptible to the hype cycle, the need for funding.
Bankless
A highlight from Tim Beiko & Justin Drake: The Sci-fi Roadmap to Ethereum
"Welcome, Bankless Nation, to the sci -fi roadmap to Ethereum. You know about EIP 4844, you know about Proposer Builder Separation, but you probably didn't know that the Ethereum roadmap does not stop at these things. It continues. Each component of the Ethereum roadmap has deeper frontiers than what you may be familiar with. 4844, PBS, these are just the first stops on a longer track of Ethereum's sci -fi roadmap. In this episode, we're going to explore these deeper frontiers to Ethereum with Justin Drake and Tim Baikko, the two individuals who can probably see the furthest along the Ethereum frontier out of anyone. We're going to learn about what is statelessness and how it's helping Ethereum make the furthest reaches of the internet even more trustless, how Ethereum is going to absorb ZK tech at the Layer 1 level, how VCs are subsidizing Ethereum's Layer 1 research and development efforts, what is an enshrined rollup and how is it different from all the other rollups that we're familiar with and why does Justin Drake want it so bad, how all of this stuff is leading to Ethereum needing fewer and fewer honest actors to work trustlessly, and what does quantum computing have to do with the Ethereum roadmap, and no, it's not just that it breaks ECDSA signatures, and what are trustless mempools? Who do they protect? All of these things that I just mentioned are just the tips of the iceberg. You're going to learn so much in this episode, so much that you're going to need to put your GigaBrain hat on or else your brain might explode. But first, a message from our friends and sponsors over at Stator. Stator is a liquid staking service provider. You know what these are, but the unique thing about Stator is that it only requires four ether for you to run a Stator staking ether node. You deposit four ether, 28 other people's ether come in to your node so they can stake with you, and then you charge them 15%, so you get extra yield for staking ether because the Stator protocol only requires four ether. There's a link in the show notes if this has you peaked so you can get started staking with Stator. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Tim Baco and Justin Drake. This is the sci -fi roadmap to Ethereum, and we're going to get to it as soon as we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this episode possible, especially Kraken, our preferred exchange for crypto in 2023. If the GigaBrain frontier scares you a little bit, don't worry, Kraken's got your back. You can DCA into your preferred crypto assets in the safety and security of Kraken. Let's go hear from them right now. Kraken has been a leader in the crypto industry for the last 12 years. Dedicated to accelerating the global adoption of crypto, Kraken puts an emphasis on security, transparency, and client support, which is why over 9 million clients have come to love Kraken's products. Whether you're a beginner or a pro, the Kraken UX is simple, intuitive, and frictionless, making the Kraken app a great place for all to get involved and learn about crypto. For those with experience, the redesigned Kraken Pro app and web experience is completely customizable to your trading needs, integrating key trading features into one seamless interface. Kraken has a 24 -7, 365 client support team that is globally recognized. Kraken support is available wherever, whenever you need them, by phone, chat, or email. And for all of you NFT -ers out there, the brand new Kraken NFT beta platform gives you the best NFT trading experience possible. Rarity rankings, no gas fees, and the ability to buy an NFT straight with cash. Does your crypto exchange prioritize its customers the way that Kraken does? And if not, sign up with Kraken at kraken .com slash bankless. Arbitrum is accelerating the Web3 landscape with a suite of secure Ethereum scaling solutions. Hundreds of projects have already deployed on Arbitrum 1, with flourishing DeFi and NFT ecosystems. Arbitrum Nova is quickly becoming a Web3 gaming hub, and social dApps like Reddit are also calling Arbitrum home. And now, Arbitrum Orbit allows you to use Arbitrum's secure scaling technology to build your own layer 3, giving you access to interoperable, customizable permissions with dedicated throughput. Whether you are a developer, enterprise, or user, Arbitrum Orbit lets you take your project to new heights. All of these technologies leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum, and provide a builder experience that's intuitive, familiar, and fully EVM compatible. Faster transaction speeds and significantly lower gas fees. So visit arbitrum .io where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets, and start building your first app with Arbitrum. Experience Web3 development the way it was always meant to be. Secure, fast, cheap, and friction free. Mantle, formerly known as BitDAO, is the first DAO -led Web3 ecosystem, all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle network, a brand new, high -performance Ethereum layer 2 built using the OP stack, but uses Eigenlayer's data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle network's gas fees by 80%, but it also reduces gas fee volatility, providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications. The Mantle treasury is one of the biggest DAO -owned treasuries, which is seeding an ecosystem of projects from all around the Web3 space for Mantle. Mantle already has sub -communities from around Web3 onboarded, like Game7 for Web3 gaming, and Bybit for TVL and liquidity and on -ramps. So if you want to build on the Mantle network, Mantle is offering a grants program that provides milestone -based funding to promising projects that help expand, secure, and decentralize Mantle. If you want to get started working with the first DAO -led layer 2 ecosystem, check out Mantle at mantle .xyz, and follow them on Twitter at 0xmantle. Bienvenue, Bankless Nation. That is the only French that I know. Here we've got Tim Baco and Justin Drake, and we are at ECC, and this is one of the very rare opportunities where I can get everyone here on a couch together. We're going to talk about the future of Ethereum. To me, ECC is, even though it's in the middle of July, it's in the middle of the year, it still kind of feels like one revolution around the conference circuit at the very least. It was the first conference post -COVID, and this is the third ECC post -COVID, so two years. And Ethereum has grown up a lot since then. We've had proof of stake now actually shipped, so that is in the rearview mirror. Layer 2s are no longer hypothetical. They are here. I remember last year, ECC, it was the year of the ZK EVM, and this year seems to be the year of the ZK EVM mainnet.
KAILASH HAZARI IAS ACADEMY /ADMINISTRATIVE CONSULTANT SERVICE (WORLDWIDE)
"quanta" Discussed on KAILASH HAZARI IAS ACADEMY /ADMINISTRATIVE CONSULTANT SERVICE (WORLDWIDE)
"Hello friends, National Quantum Mission on April 19, 2023, the Union Cabinet of India gave the green light to the National Quantum Mission, which will add in research and development in quantum technology. The mission aims to seed, nurture and scale up scientific and industrial research and development in quantum technology to create a vibrant and innovative ecosystem in India. The mission aims to develop intermediate-scale quantum computers with 50 to 1,000 physical qubits in 80 years using superconducting and photonic technology. One of the objectives is to establish satellite-based secure quantum communication between ground stations within India. The range of the secure quantum communication will be up to 2,000 km. Another objective is to establish long-distance secure quantum communications with other countries. The mission also aims to establish intensity quantum key distribution over 2,000 km. It will also help develop magnitude meters with high sensitivity. In atomic systems and atomic clocks for precision timing communications and navigation for thematic hubs will be set up in top academic and national research and development institutes in the domains of quantum computing, quantum communication, quantum sensing and metrology and quantum materials and devices. The hubs will focus on generating new technology through basic and applied research and promote research and development. The mission will benefit sectors such as communication, health, finance and energy as well as drug design and space applications. The national quantum mission will greatly benefit national priorities such as Digital India, Making India, Skill India, Stand-up India, Startup India, Self-reliant India and Sustainable Development Goals. With the execution of the national quantum mission, India will be joining the club of six major countries researching quantum technology including the US, China, France, Austria and Thailand. qubit sort for quantum bit is a unit of quantum information used in quantum computing. It is the quantum analog of a classical binary bit and can represent two states simultaneously unlike classical bits which can only represent either a 0 or a 1.
KAILASH HAZARI IAS ACADEMY /ADMINISTRATIVE CONSULTANT SERVICE (WORLDWIDE)
A highlight from Research and Development in Quantum Technology
"Hello friends, National Quantum Mission on April 19, 2023, the Union Cabinet of India gave the green light to the National Quantum Mission, which will add in research and development in quantum technology. The mission aims to seed, nurture and scale up scientific and industrial research and development in quantum technology to create a vibrant and innovative ecosystem in India. The mission aims to develop intermediate -scale quantum computers with 50 to 1 ,000 physical qubits in 80 years using superconducting and photonic technology. One of the objectives is to establish satellite -based secure quantum communication between ground stations within India. The range of the secure quantum communication will be up to 2 ,000 km. Another objective is to establish long -distance secure quantum communications with other countries. The mission also aims to establish intensity quantum key distribution over 2 ,000 km. It will also help develop magnitude meters with high sensitivity. In atomic systems and atomic clocks for precision timing communications and navigation for thematic hubs will be set up in top academic and national research and development institutes in the domains of quantum computing, quantum communication, quantum sensing and metrology and quantum materials and devices. The hubs will focus on generating new technology through basic and applied research and promote research and development. The mission will benefit sectors such as communication, health, finance and energy as well as drug design and space applications. The national quantum mission will greatly benefit national priorities such as Digital India, Making India, Skill India, Stand -up India, Startup India, Self -reliant India and Sustainable Development Goals. With the execution of the national quantum mission, India will be joining the club of six major countries researching quantum technology including the US, China, France, Austria and Thailand. qubit sort for quantum bit is a unit of quantum information used in quantum computing. It is the quantum analog of a classical binary bit and can represent two states simultaneously unlike classical bits which can only represent either a 0 or a 1.
The Breakdown
A highlight from A Primer on LK-99
"Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, N .L .W. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Friday, August 4th, and today we are doing a primer on LK99. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying The Breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review. Or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit .ly slash breakdown pod. Well, friends, there are a lot of jokes going around Twitter about people pivoting from crypto to artificial intelligence to finally now moving on to superconductors. And so, of course, I decided to completely embody that stereotype and do the primer show on LK99. Now, in all seriousness, you know that the frame for everything on The Breakdown network is big picture power shifts. And if this ends up being real, it would certainly qualify. So today's goal is to give all of us lay folks and non experts out there a base level understanding in what the hell is going on. So we can try to follow along and understand how excited or, on the other hand, disappointed to be as more news comes out. So what we are talking about is, of course, that in late July, a pair of scientific papers were published claiming to have synthesized a superconducting material that operates at room temperature and ambient pressure. The material was named LK99. Now, initially, some optimists were very excited, but by and large, the response was skeptical. This type of superconductor had been the subject of high profile scientific fraud just a few years ago, and some of the data presented in the paper seemed questionable. The following week, one of the authors of the paper, Youngwon Kwon, presented his team's findings at Korea University. And just to add more intrigue to the whole thing, his appearance was shrouded in controversy. There were allegations that Kwon had uploaded the paper without the consent of the other authors. Unofficial from Korea University disavowed affiliation with Kwon, saying that he was no longer in contact with the university. There was even some suggestion that he had shown up unannounced to give the presentation. And already enthralled by the story, the internet tuned into the Korean language presentation, which fleshed out the data and the findings. Kwon claimed to have brought a sample of the superconducting material, but was unable to source equipment to hold a demonstration. Still, despite some of the problems, the presentation did fill in enough gaps from the paper to convert some number of people into, if not outright believers, at least a little bit more optimistic. And what's more, it seemed to people like the implications were really significant. Not only in terms of what a room temperature superconductor would mean, but also in terms of what it said about the scientific process. General Fabrication Engineer Matt Palmer wrote, If the room temp superconductor paper is real, then it's one of the most profound indictments of the way we do science ever made. You could easily have found this with an 1890s lab, which means that we've been effing up the search process over the space of possible room temperature superconductors in profound ways for over a century. Either our discovery process is unacceptably inefficient, or our allocation of resources to research and development is much too sparse. Now at this point, with the idea in mind that this is a primer for people who are just coming into this discussion, let's talk about what a superconductor actually is. Obviously this is very integral to the story. In very basic terms, a superconductor is a material that transmits electricity without resistance. This means a cable made of a superconducting material could transmit electricity over long distances without losing power or generating heat. Keep in mind, for example, the US electrical grid loses around 5 % of its power during transmission and uses extremely high voltage to achieve this level of efficiency. To give a sense of scale, copper wire has around 168 ,000 times more resistance than superconducting material. Now superconductors have a few other interesting properties that give them some unique use cases. Because electrons can move freely through superconducting material, they are perfect insulators for magnetic fields. When a magnetic field is applied to a superconductor, the electrons within it move to cancel the magnetic field out entirely. This property is known as the Meisner effect. This effect causes a superconductor to float in mid -air above a magnet. And if you've been following the story, you've probably already seen a lot of videos of hovering material. However, the Meisner effect is also used in some advanced high -speed trains. The lack of resistance within a superconducting material also means that lossless battery design is possible. Electric current can persist indefinitely within a superconducting loop without any degradation. However, so far, superconducting batteries are so impractical that they aren't used in applications that you would typically think of for batteries. Instead, they are generally only used for things like cleaning the electricity supply for facilities with very tight tolerances like microchip fabrication plants. Now superconductors are not a new discovery. The phenomenon was first discovered in 1911 as a property of mercury when cooled by liquid helium to negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit within an ultra -low pressure environment. Shortly afterwards, the phenomenon was observed in tin and lead at similar temperatures. Since then, over 70 different elements and compounds have been discovered to have superconducting properties under certain conditions. The problem up until this point was that no one could figure out how to create a superconductor that would function at anywhere near room temperature. Most modern superconductor applications use a material that functions while cooled by either liquid nitrogen at around negative 300 degrees Fahrenheit or liquid helium. Thus, this challenge to create a superconductor that could function at room temperature has been one of the holy grails of materials science for decades. Indeed, this long history is why some people with more experience in the field were initially so inclined to be skeptical. On August 2, Professor Michael S. Fuhrer wrote, He goes on, But not every serendipitously discovered, unexpected, apparent, very low resistance state in a strange material is superconductivity. You'd think superconductivity would be easy to detect. It comes with zero electrical resistance, so if you measure resistance and it's zero, you're done. Unfortunately, there are many ways to get fooled. Too many for one thread. So generally, you'll need to see multiple pieces of evidence for superconductivity. Meissner effect, AC susceptibility, temperature -dependent critical field, etc., etc., etc. Even then, nature sometimes throws good scientists a curveball and can fool on multiple counts. So there is a steady trickle of difficult -to -explain results that look a lot like superconductivity, sometimes at unexpectedly high temperatures. The word tantalizing is often used. These are colloquially called unidentified superconducting objects. There are also some more scandalous cases where fraud was known to occur or strongly suspected. Also notable is that there's no clear end to each of these stories. In many cases, if you look into these past examples, you'll find them just as credible as the most recent example. It's just that, after a while, with no news of experimental replication in other labs, interest fizzles out. Unfortunately, many mysteries in science remain unsolved. But with that, let's talk about what this paper actually said. The paper was called the first room temperature ambient pressure superconductor. And while I had started to write my own summary of what it said, aided of course by GPT -4, using the ARVIX reading plugin, I actually think that the best simple description comes from Ars Technica. Given that, I am going to quote it now at length. The more detailed of the two manuscripts describes how to make the material and measurements of its property. The material itself is a variation of a well -known chemical called lead apatite. Apatites are a class of chemical that form similar crystal structures. This particular version is primarily composed of lead and phosphate groups. All of its constituents are cheap and readily available. The version developed here, which has been termed LK99, was made by reacting a lead sulfate with a copper -phosphorus compound. The reaction requires high temperatures for over a day under a vacuum. This strips the phosphorus from the copper, oxidizes it, and allows it to displace the sulfur from its compound with the lead. Critically though, some fraction of the lead itself ends up replaced by copper in the resulting compound. This has a significant impact on the apatite crystal structure because copper is quite a bit smaller than lead. The researchers claim the overall volume of the sample drops by about half a percentage as well, and that change is accompanied by shifts in the orientation of various atoms and bonds. That means changes in where the electrons reside within the material. That change appears to be critical to the LK99's behavior. Superconductivity is associated with a number of very specific properties, and the researchers measure two of them. The expulsion of magnetic field lines, called the Meisner effect, and the existence of a critical temperature at which conductivity changes. It's hard to explain just how strange these experiments are. Under normal circumstances, the superconducting material starts out behaving as a normal chemical and has to be cooled down to the critical point where exceptional behavior emerges. LK99, by contrast, starts out superconducting and has to be heated beyond the boiling point of water to reach its critical temperature. The only somewhat strange result here comes at temperatures just below the critical temperature. At room temperature and above, the resistance of LK99 remains at zero, as far as the testing equipment is able to measure. But it starts to rise ever so slightly once temperatures reach 60°C and displays a smooth upward slope until the sample hits 90°C, at which point it stays flat until the critical temperature is reached. The researchers did not attempt to explain this. So even that, which is well written and simplified for a generalist audience, is still obviously extremely technically dense. But in many ways this story isn't as much about the science, because obviously what do I have to say about that, and instead is about what has happened surrounding this research. Following Kwan's presentation, the scientific community was armed with a plausible set of data, a reasonable explanation of the novel superconducting mechanism, and an achievable process to synthesize the material. That meant, of course, that the race to replicate the result was on. At least 12 attempts to synthesize LK99 are currently underway at universities and national laboratories around the world. At the time of recording, two Chinese laboratories have claimed to have succeeded in replicating LK99. You might have seen the video of a tiny flake of the material floating above a magnet which went viral on Chinese social media on Wednesday. Now this floating phenomenon, which is a demonstration of the Meisner effect, is the easiest way to prove that the replication attempt has yielded a superconductor without extensive material testing results. However, there is still significant skepticism concerning the validity of the proof presented by those Chinese institutions. At the moment, the original samples of LK99 produced by the Korean team have not been given to other labs for independent verification, although this has been promised to happen soon. Now part of the confusion around why replication is taking such a long time is that the method of creating LK99 is deceptively simple while also being fiendishly difficult. It has now been two weeks since the preprint paper was released and a week since Kwan's presentation of the results. LK99 is not created using a particularly complex process or using any exotic materials. Two relatively common lead compounds are combined in a furnace and then a copper compound is added under a vacuum. The limiting factor is really just time. From precursor chemicals to the final result, the process takes around three days. Indeed, demonstrating how simple the process is to carry out with common lab equipment, one Russian chemist live -tweeted her chaotic attempt to cook up LK99 in her garage, including a few homegrown improvements to the recipe. At the end of that process, she presented a picture of a tiny fleck of floating material, but no one is quite sure how genuine this particular thread or attempt was. Now another problem with the process is that it creates extremely low yields. The claimed successful replications out of China have produced samples no larger than a grain of sand. The chemistry involves a good deal of luck to be successful. During the process, copper atoms replace lead atoms within the material structure, which happens entirely by chance. To create a viable sample, this luck has to occur within a continuous chain of atoms to create a superconductor large enough to test. Adding to the problems, LK99 is only a superconductor along one dimension within its three -dimensional structure. This means that some samples may not levitate, making them much harder to detect. Now the latest attempt that people are excited about comes from Varda Space Industries in the US. Varda is a group of engineers working on space technology, but they got really excited about this, realized that they had everything they needed to theoretically replicate the experiment in the lab, and last night on Thursday, August 3rd, shared a video suggesting that they had actually been successful in replicating the apparent diamagnetic properties of LK99. You might have seen this video going around. It has a tiny little worm -like thing moving in what appears to be a glass beaker, and text on top that says Meissner Effect or Bust. In a conversation with Jason Kalkanis just before I started recording, Andrew McCallop from Varda said, and said, Now of course, even on top of the fact that we haven't fully replicated LK99 yet, there are still a number of challenges, even if we do. First of all, we don't really know the other properties of LK99. We don't know whether it can be manufactured into wire, which is not a given for this sort of ceramic compound. We don't know how to increase the yield. Remember, at this stage, the synthesizing process seems absurdly difficult to get a large amount of material from. And another problem is, of course, the political ramifications. The world has something of a checkered history with how to deal with breakthrough technologies. Remember, nuclear technology is still a state secret after almost a century, to say nothing of things like cloning tech or anything else that has been determined to be borderline forbidden. The flip side is that if LK99 proves that room temperature semiconductors can be manufactured, the implications are wild. Take, for example, the implications for fusion. Fusion power generation has been a pipe dream for decades. Multiple functional experimental units have now been built and demonstrated that a contained fusion reaction is possible. The issue has been that containment of the reaction within a magnetic field requires a massive amount of energy to sustain. To date, no fusion experiments have managed to produce more energy than they consume during operation, which obviously makes them useless as the core of a power plant. However, some designs use superconducting material as part of their containment structure, so the breakthroughs that follow LK99 could have significant implications for how fusion power generation progresses. There are also the implications for quantum computing. Presently, some approaches to quantum computing use superconducting materials within their chips. And while the chip is small, the cooling system used to maintain its superconductive state is gigantic and extremely energy intensive. If a material like LK99 can be used to make quantum chips, that could open the door to more realistically achievable quantum computing. In other words, by eliminating the barrier of requiring gigantic cooling systems, the research could be much more accessible, leading to faster advancement and maybe even consumer grade devices one day. There are also the implications for current superconductor applications. Current MRI machines, for example, use large superconductors cooled by liquid nitrogen to generate the massive magnetic fields required for the imaging process. These superconductors are extremely costly to build and operate. If LK99 opens the door to lower -cost superconductors that don't require large cooling systems, it's easy to imagine small MRI machines in every doctor's office to be used for more routine diagnosis. Another current application? The cost to construct and operate superconductor -based high -speed rail could collapse. The current state -of -the -art trains in Japan use superconductors to levitate the train above the rail. But these systems require a huge amount of electricity to maintain ultra -low temperatures. And then there's just the simple but transformative idea that electricity might be one day easily transportable from coast to coast without concerns of energy loss along the way. And of course, we haven't even gotten into the 80s dream of hoverboards and things like that. As Matt Parmer again says, if LK99 is real, we're going to get to redo all electronics and it's gonna be awesome. And one more dimension of the story as we wrap up here is how this is playing out. It's highly notable that the first replication in the United States, it appears, is a bunch of guys at a startup who just read about all this stuff online. Ada Pai wrote, I'm John Massad, the CEO at Replit said, So even if, then, LK99 ultimately disappoints in terms of its great promise, everything that has surrounded it does potentially suggest what science might look like in the future. A world in which peer review is not just some tightly controlled process, but massive, global, and in real time. Pretty fascinating to think about. Anyways, for now, that is going to do it for today's breakdown. Hopefully this was a useful primer on LK99. I will certainly keep you posted if and as developments warrant it. Until next time, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.
Epicenter
A highlight from Alex Gluchowski: zkSync - A new Era for EVM-compatible zk rollups
"This is AppCenter episode 507 with guest Alex Gluforsky. Welcome to AppCenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Brian Crane and I'm here with Federica Ernst. And today we're going to speak with Alex Glucorsky. He is the co -founder and CEO of MatterLabs and MatterLabs is the company that's building ZK Sync, which is one of the most exciting and sort of largest ZK roll -up technologies that's looking to scale Ethereum by kind of maintaining all the Ethereum's trust assumptions and bring freedom to people all over the world. So thanks so much for joining us, Alex. It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me. So we had you on like two years ago and a lot has happened since then, including the ZK space, having gotten lots of traction, lots of interest, it's still an area that's hard for a lot of people to sort of understand and wrap their head around, even people working crypto. So I thought like maybe we can start with just a very brief recap of what are ZK roll -ups and why is ZK such a great technology to scale blockchains? Absolutely, let me try. So with blockchains, we really observe the revolution, the cost starting with Bitcoin and Ethereum taking it to the next level, smart contracts and all the programmability of money, interactions, value, like really this is, to me, it's the continuation of the Internet revolution, but it's a quantum leap. It's a jump from Web 2 .0 to Web 3 .0, like adding value to the Internet on transaction level. The problem is that the very same properties that make things like Bitcoin, Ethereum, decentralized blockchains valuable, they also lead to the difficulties in making it available to a lot of people. There are some key things, in my opinion, that we can distill this value to. Among them are trustlessness, permissionlessness, openness, absolute inclusivity of these networks. And to achieve that in the blockchain world from the early days, we embraced the maxima of don't trust, verify. So essentially everyone has to verify all the transactions, all of the activity that's happening on chain. And you can think of blockchains as the social economic systems, but in the essence, what's happening under the hood, those are just computing systems. So Ethereum is really, Ethereum started with the narrative of being a world computer, and it's what Ethereum really is if you look at it from the computer science. So that means everyone has to redo all of the computations for everyone else, which leads to quadratic complexity of communication, storage, computation requirements. And it's just infeasible to bring it to the work. You know, like when you are scaling the internet and adding a value layer onto the internet, you can't rerun the computation of all the other servers, of all the other, like redo everything that everyone else is doing. So is this a fundamental limitation, which people have tried to solve with different trade -offs, always leaving some parts of this value proposition severely damaged, like either you give up decentralization or you give up security or you give up some other important properties. And it was not until zero knowledge proofs appear that we found a fundamental solution to this. So like we came up earlier, the community came up with some really ingenious ways to make this trade -offs in a limited way. You know, like we experimented with things like state channels, payment channels, plasma, which then transitioned into like optimistic rollups. All those things were important steps on this journey, but the ultimate destination is zero knowledge proofs. To explain why zero knowledge proofs, or specifically like more, more precisely succinct zero knowledge proofs or SNARKs are in fact, they would be better called like proofs of computational integrity. They allow you to verify arbitrary amount of computation very cheaply. It doesn't matter how much original computation you do, how much it would take you to naively recompute, you can let someone do the hard work for you. And then only present you with a final proof, which is going to be a short file, like one kilobyte or maybe a few kilobytes of data that you can process using very simple arithmetic operations and come back to result, whether it's true or false. And the beauty of it, you can combine various zero knowledge proofs recursively. So you can do a lot of computation in parallel and then like verify them, produce a proof that you verified some proofs and verify this proofs of proofs and so on until you get to this one single proof, which attests to the integrity of all the computation that you managed to back in there. And then you settle this on something like Ethereum as in global settlement layer, global layer of consensus, where we all agree, okay, this is the last state. And enables this us to scale support chains, basically indefinitely. And just let's say if I'm to verify all of these proofs, then I need to know what is being proved though, no? So if there's like a huge chain of all kinds of computation, I still need to know like, you know, all of the things you are computing, even if I don't have to do the computations. You don't have to know all of these things. You only need to commitment. Like in cryptography, in Oracle blockchains, we have a really nice primitive called commitment, where you can have a single hash that is a fingerprint of multiple things. Like usually we pack it in a Merkle tree and you have a lot of leaves at the bottom of the Merkle tree. And then you have one hash, the root hash of the Merkle tree, which will be the biggest representation of all of the data that is committed in the stream, if you have to change one of the leaves, this hash will necessarily change and it's really, really hard, computationally infeasible to find, like to fake it, to find some hash that will correspond to the set that you want. So in this regard, you don't have to know all of the things that's happening computationally there. You only have to know that whatever you are verifying has a subset, which is of interest to you. So like I was recently thinking that the best way to describe zero knowledge proofs in the blockchain context would be to call them not zero knowledge proofs, but like partial knowledge proofs, where you can only look at things that are important to you, but you still have the full picture and you know that everything else that you currently don't care about is also still correctly verified. So a good example of this to intuitively understand this, and you can calibrate me to let me go deeper into tech or more high level in this interior, but an intuitive understanding for people out there would be, imagine you're receiving a payment on PayPal or Venmo or your bank account. You will see that your account balance has increased. You might want to see who is this payment coming from, and you don't care about all the other accounts in the world. You still want to be sure that all the other accounts in your, at least in your bank, are correctly managed, that all the other payments are done with high integrity, because if that's not the case, maybe your account is increased, but like all the other accounts are increased by $1 million, and so the bank is really insolvent, and it won't be able to pay you this money when you go to the shop with your credit card, you won't be able to make a payment. So you don't care about those computations, but you still want them to be correct. So like zero knowledge proofs would allow you to verify the integrity of all the other payments without having to care about them, and the way we implement zero knowledge proofs in the world of blockchains, the way we apply them to blockchains today on Ethereum is by building ZK rollups. And so we can talk about what ZK rollup actually is. Yes, let's do that. So in a ZK rollup, who produces the ZK proofs and kind of what's the mechanism end to end? Sure. So a ZK rollup is a layer two scaling solution. So instead of transacting directly on layer one on Ethereum on the mainnet itself, we say let's create a parallel blockchain that is going to process transactions completely separately, so like we will have someone, some entity or maybe decentralized body of entities that will accept transactions and will sequence them in blocks. We'll call this body sequencer. Can be centralized, run by one server. Can be decentralized, run by consensus of multiple validators. It doesn't matter. Let's just assume we have this one blockchain. So the sequencer collects transactions, pack them into blocks, verifies that they're valid, like tries to. If the blocks are invalid, they won't be able to produce those. And after the blocks are complete, they do two things. One is they compute the zero knowledge proofs for all the transactions in the block and they produce a final proof that this block is complete. To make it practical, it probably requires still recursive proof generation. So we will split this block into small, many small multiple chunks. We'll produce the proof for each of the chunk. Maybe we'll move heavy operations into specialized zero knowledge proofs that are more efficiently verifiable than generic purpose transactions. We'll produce the proof of that. Then we will aggregate all these proofs together in one single proof of the block, which contains all the logic that verifies all the logic that we need. Transactions were done correctly, that the user is authorized, and with signatures that smart contract logic executed correctly. And then all the hashes, basically all the computation, right? We have this one proof. And then this proof is submitted on layer one. Along with the new root hash for this block. So we don't publish the entire state. We don't publish all the transactions. We just say, here's the new state. Here's the new commitment to the state, the new root hash. And here's a proof that this new root hash is indeed a valid transition from the previous root hash, the previous commitment to the state, which is recorded on layer one to this new root hash. And layer one, the smart contract on Ethereum can actually verify this proof, come to conclusion objectively by nature of pure math verification, that the proof is correct and make the state transition. And then we need the second thing. We need to make sure that even though the state transition is now verified on layer one and the transition is made and we have the new root hash of the state, everyone else knows what actually happened in this block. Specifically with regard to what is the new state of all the accounts in the block. Because if people don't know it, if external observers, the users or the other validators don't know what changed in the state, they will not be able to do anything with it. Like we will enter a state which is committed on Ethereum, that no one except for whoever made this transition can actually process. I cannot prove to you that I have money, I cannot access this money, I cannot withdraw, I cannot transact on this chain. So it would be like a frozen state. So in order to solve this, we have to publish something to the users, to everyone who wants to observe. We need to publish some piece of information that will allow them to reconstruct the state or to reconstruct the changes that happened in the state from the previous known state. So there are two ways to do it. One is you publish all the transaction inputs, and you just make it available to everyone. And then people can recompute these transactions and reconstruct the state, which is something the optimistic rollups do. And the second approach is that you publish the actual differences for each storage slot that has been changed in this rollup block. You publish the new state of the storage slot. Either way, the observer now can reconstruct the state, and they can work with the new block. But the trick is we have to publish it on some really strong censorship -resistant system. And the most censorship -resistant we have is Ethereum itself. So we kind of abuse Ethereum network to make this data available. We call it the data availability and the ultimate vision for Ethereum to be the settlement and the data availability layer for rollups, making rollups the center of the Ethereum roadmap and really the place where most of the activity on Ethereum will happen. Cool. There's a lot to unpack here. Let me maybe recap this. So basically, from a technical point of view, what a ZK rollup requires is full forward. So you need regular checkpoints on L1 that can't revert. You need a proof of correctness from checkpoint to checkpoint. You need data availability on L1, either directly by call data or kind of in the Dank Schalding world in the sidecar blobs. The first thing is you need forced inclusion. And basically, the next checkpoint is only valid if forced inclusions are provably part of the next checkpoint. So we will go into this in just a little bit to kind of discuss kind of the recent developments and kind of the Villedium world and so on to kind of look at the entire spectrum of kind of shades of L2. But maybe before that, let's quickly talk about the newly launched ZK Sync 2 .0, because that came out recently. So now that we kind of know how ZK rollups function theoretically, let's get down to the meaty part. So what's new with ZK Sync 2 .0? Well, ZK Sync 2 .0, which we call ZK Sync Era, is not such a recent development. We launched it half a year ago, live in Mainnet. And it was the very first ZK AVM, the very first ZK rollup with programmability generic that could execute contracts written for solidity or in solidity for AVM. So you could take a contract that works on Ethereum and you just deploy it and it works out of the box in most cases. And all the tooling works, or like not all the tooling works, but like the critical pieces work, like the Web3 API, the testing, the deploying, the access to it, logs, everything follows the AVM programming model. And yes, since then, we experienced a lot of growth on the platform. And it's in fact now the most popular L2 on Ethereum. We had more transactions in the last 30 days than any other L2, with I think 25 million transactions, both arbitrary and following with 24, and optimism is 16 million and everyone else way below. And it's currently the third L2 by TVL. And it's also growing, fluctuating, but the DeFi component is growing very strongly and we have more and more budgets launching on Era. So Era, yeah, it's a big step for Ethereum. It's what people were waiting for many years and thought it will take many more years to arrive in the full form. Let's kind of look at the taxonomy of different CK rollups, right? So basically it's a space that has grown leaps and bounds in recent years. And even on this podcast, we recently interviewed Jody and David from CK EVM at Polygon. We spoke with Ellie from Stark, with Zach and Joe from Aztec, but there's also other people we haven't had on the podcast yet, like the scroll team, the linear team, and so on. Do you have a taxonomy in your head for these different CK rollups? So basically what kind of buckets do they fall into? Vitalik came up with this post introducing different types of CK EVMs. I'm not sure it will be relevant in the midterm, like it's probably still relevant now, but we're in a very early experimentational phase. So in that post, he broke it down into essentially degrees of closeness to the original Ethereum specification. Like how far do we deviate from pure native layer 1 EVM? Different CK EVMs have, like some of them embrace the bytecode native approach, some of them embrace compiling, some are somewhere in between. Some of them are trying to be as close to layer 1 as to replicate the full blocks of layer 1 and let storage be kept in exactly the same format.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from THE HASH: Miami Mayor Francis Suarez on Crypto Outlook; Looter Behind Curve Exploit Starts Returning Assets
"This is the hash podcast. Stay informed with the latest on Bitcoin, ETH, the metaverse, Web3 and more. All on the hash for your ears. You're listening to the Coindesk podcast network. Hey there, it's Coindesk TV. You're watching the hash. You might be listening to us on the podcast. That's also cool. Thanks for being here. I'm Zach Seward. We've got Will Foxley, Ben Shiller and Danny Nelson today. What a lineup. We've got lots to get to and hopefully including a special guest. Danny, I'm going to throw it to you. The latest hack to grip the world of DeFi. Major update on that. What do you got? Yes, we are starting off with a bang today on the hash, talking about Curve Finance and that $61 million reentrancy hack that happened over last weekend in which a hacker was able to drain a bunch of different token pools because of this unknown bug in a compiler. Anyway, the DeFi protocols that have been affected, Curve, Alchemix and Metronome, I believe, have been trying to get their money back, attempting to negotiate with the hackers. And today there was a breakthrough after promising not to pursue the hackers if they return at least 90 % of the funds. One of the hackers seems to have sent $10 million back to Metronome. And this is a result of some successful negotiations already. And we're starting to see that this surprising outreach campaign is actually working. So Will, I'll start it off with you. What do you think of the situation? Good news at the very least. We like to see when people decide to give money back after these hacking situations, it's become much more common after these hacks to see at least part of the money go back. And that's often spurred for two reasons. One, the bounty, which is typically put out there as a carrot. And two, the possibility of a stick, that being like the US government or someone else coming after you and ruining your life, throwing you in jail. But the last example we have of this was with Mango Markets back in the fall, where there was a developer who hacked Mango Markets using what was actually pretty fairly like open market techniques in order to squeeze profits from the trading platform. Mango Markets was essentially wrecked during it and could not operate for quite a while. And then as more information came to light, this person was found out and that person's now dealing with the Justice Department, which is not a whole great situation. But if you can go in the other way, get like a 10 % bounty, give the money back, and claim to be like a white hack or at the very least a gray hat hacker, then you avoid bars. And so we've seen this quite a bit with crypto. One thing I want to pull on here is just see this idea of like libertarian markets, right? Where often in traditional markets, if you get hacked or something goes wrong, well, you can always call the cops and they can come fix your problem. It might take years, but typically is resolved in some way if there's enough money. In the wild bless of DeFi, I mean, there's not often someone to call unless you really have a good line there. And so sometimes these hacks, they just put up a bounty and then there's reversal hacks, right, where you get docs and they figure out where you are, who you are, what your trading strategies are. And sometimes it's actually worse to not come forward and accept the bounty. So I think that there's some possibility we could see this reversal here, which would be amazing for the Kirk ecosystem, might get everyone off with just a warning as opposed to a lesson, but definitely positive development this morning. Zach. Yeah. The whole, you're alluding to the mango, the Avi Eisenberg episode where one man's quote unquote applied game theorist is another's market manipulator. And that's sort of the essential tension of DeFi. What is off limits and what is fair game? If the code allows it, what's the problem? It's where DeFi intersects with the real world and the real legal system, where you see some of these big ramifications play out on people's lives. And so I think, again, the looter behind this incident is probably reckoning with that and reckoning with the fact that because these systems are transparent, are public, are auditable, it's really hard to get out of the bank vault with the money after you do the heist, right? It's really difficult to escape undetected and with your ill -gotten gains. So often you sort of see, again, this turnabout where a hacker becomes a white hacker after the fact when presented with a path for escape that may be some percentage of what was initially pilfered. And we seem to be seeing that here. I think there's a lot of stuff to talk about as this relates again to sort of the knock on effects that we saw with this, with the whole, the curve crisis and the potential liquidation that Michael Agaroff was facing and all that good stuff. But as it relates to the money taken from the initial incident itself, which is not huge, again, in the history of DeFi hacks, but certainly the ramifications that played out over this past week have been notable and worth opining about. So I'll toss it to Ben in case he has any thoughts on sort of how this whole thing is unfolded. Yeah, I don't have much to add to that. I thought you and Will put it very eloquently there. I just think it's strange as you say that a criminal person could go from criminal to hero the in switch of an eye. So it's fascinating to watch this play out. All right. Well, we'll leave it there. That's some good stuff. I think we're changing gears to our next segment. We have Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, who is now also a Republican candidate for president. Mayor Suarez, thank you for joining us. How are you doing? It's great to be with you. Have a big announcement today, which is that officially my campaign is accepting Bitcoin. And you can do that by going to my website, FrancisSuarez .com, and donate as little as 0 .000034 of a Bitcoin, which roughly is the equivalent of a US dollar. But of course, I denominated in Bitcoin, not in dollar. So look, I think it's a watershed moment for the country to have a candidate who gets their public sector salary paid in Bitcoin and has actually borrowed money against that Bitcoin account, creating more utility for Bitcoin and showing that it is an asset that has value, that has utility. And this is a process of developing technologies that are going to create democratizing opportunities for wealth creation and are not manipulated by human beings that have alternative motives, political goals, etc. Yeah, interesting. That's a very interesting development. Will Foxley, our resident Bitcoin maxi, was joyously celebrating said announcement, one BTC equals one BTC. He loved that as well. I guess my question, I'm super fascinated to see crypto Bitcoin, CBDCs even emerge as a real talking point in the 2024 elections. CBDCs specifically, I think, especially in Florida with Governor DeSantis have become a major lightning rod. I really want your thoughts on why Bitcoin crypto CBDCs are entering the political calculus for cycle's this presidential race. It's really simple. It's because under Bidenomics, the poor are getting poor, and that means rising inflation and rising interest rates because there's out of control spending. There's no check and balance on the monetary system. What happens is the federal government goes crazy, starts giving away free money. And then the Fed, which sees rising inflation, which means that people's purchasing power goes down. Literally, if you have money or bank account, you literally get poorer. And then on the other side, they say, hey, we've got to stop this. So they start raising interest rates. So now you get hit by both sides. You're purchasing power, the money you have in your bank account goes down, and then your borrowing costs go up. So you're literally getting attacked by both sides of the ledger. And that makes people want to hedge and get away from that to a system that isn't controlled by politics, that is completely decentralized, that is completely secure, completely liquid. You can get in and out of it at any time of the day. And that's why you've seen Bitcoin's run this year, which it's up significantly from the beginning of the year. So look, again, and I'm not here to give investment advice, I'm not telling people what to do. But what I am saying is look at the fundamentals of how the system works, right? Do your due diligence. And I think that bodes well for a system, which probably to me, from my perspective, I'm not afraid of that world, right, because the U .S. should be judged on their economic might. And we are economically mighty when we have a strong economy, when we don't have a bunch of deficits. You saw today a Brazil talking about, Lula talking about de -dollarizing, right, I mean, this de -dollarization campaign is happening worldwide. And so we're going to have to compete in a different way. We're going to have to compete, not because we're the world's greatest currency, but because we're the world's greatest economy. And I think that's, if we focus on the digital economy, right, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, virtual reality, obviously crypto, all these things, we're going to create a generation's worth of prosperity. We did it in Miami. We're number one in wage growth, lowest unemployment in America, highest tech job growth, and highest Gen Z tech worker growth, right? So why? Because we want to lean into these generational opportunities. By the way, I've taken a lot of heat for it. I've gotten criticized a lot for it. People will often say, oh, we're in a crypto winter, you know, what do you think? You know, do you regret supporting crypto? And I say, absolutely not. We were number one in blockchain investments. We were up 2000%. We had $800 million of investments in blockchain companies. But in addition to that, I know that these are technologies that are here to stay. One company versus another may win or may lose. But the technology is here to stay and it's going to revolutionize the future. The Miami coin episode versus your personal conviction in Bitcoin, which is something we can maybe get to a bit later. Thanks for unpacking some of those red meat issues, obviously, to the Republican base seems pretty animated by this stuff. I want to ask it to Danny. I know he has a question and then we can continue the conversation. Thank you for joining us. I'm curious to hear how, if you're elected president, you would change how the system works in the U .S. when it comes to crypto policy, like what is your vision for the crypto economy in the United States and what could you do to change it to better it? What's your vision? I think the biggest mistake this administration has made is that they don't understand crypto. So they have gone to a regulate by enforcement mechanism as opposed to, in my opinion, set the ground rules. Right. So you have to be able to classify certain digital products. You have to be able to have certain guidelines and rules that are clear with respect to custody of assets. And by the way, the players in the game will tell you they want rules. They just want to know what the rules are so they can play by the rules. A lot of these offshore companies should have been American and onshore companies. It's a tremendous opportunity for us to bring investment to our country. So for me, on day one, I would create an industry roundtable and create a set of regulations that don't advantage anybody. They're not meant to advantage anybody. What they're meant to do is make sure that you can create an innovative ecosystem and economy based on these products where everybody knows what the rules are, clearly. Yes, Mayor Suarez.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from Was the Curve Finance Exploit a Failure of DeFi Self-Regulation?
"This is Carpe Consensus. Join hosts Ben Shiller, Danny Nelson, and Cam Thompson as they seize the world of crypto. Hello and welcome to Carpe Consensus. This is a podcast from the CoinDesk Podcast Network and I am Ben Shiller. I'm the features editor here at CoinDesk. And joining me today is Danny Nelson. Hi, Danny Nelson. Hello to Danny Nelson indeed. You are indeed Danny Nelson. Can you confirm that very fact? I think so. I don't know. I haven't gotten my orbs. I'm sorry. I haven't gotten my retina scanned yet by the orb coin people. So who knows if I really am who I say I am. So you just have to take my word for it. That's true. I mean, what would we do with that world coin as to prove our identity? We have no idea who anyone is. If we couldn't prove it, Danny could either be in Binance court or he could be doing some NHL practice. You know, too many Danny Nelson's out there. I abide by the laws of quantum mechanics and I am in all places at once. That slightly higher sounding voice was the voice of Cam Thompson. Do you exist Cam Thompson? I don't know. Could just be a glitch in the crypto simulation. But as far as I know, I am here ready to talk about some crazy crypto news that's happened in the past week. So none of us can prove we exist, but we are here to talk about crypto news and everything that is included in that innocuous sounding phrase. So, Danny, the latest news today is about curve, which is a decentralized finance protocol, and it's in some hot water. Do you want to explain about that? Yes, it is. Now, Curve is one of the, let's just say, big four, big five, blue chip DeFi protocols like Compound and MakerDown, Aave, Uniswap, one of those places where everyone goes to to make their trades on the Ethereum network because they just believe, well, this is built stronger, this is built better. It's not prone to the hacks that we see on the smaller DeFi protocols. Well, over the weekend, that presumption collapsed. A zero day in how the smart contracts of these different pools was set up was exploited and a hacker and or hackers, we're not sure which, got away with maybe 70 million dollars in various cryptocurrencies by draining the pools. Now, how the hack itself happened, that's a little techie, but the most important thing to remember here is that everyone's assumptions of safety fell apart because these pools had one little vulnerability and they were exploitable. So it just is another moment where you have to look at DeFi and think, how are these systems set up? Who am I placing my trust in? Because even if we're trusting that these are trustless systems, which is to say, no one person is controlling them, well, we believe that they're trusted that these parties have vetted the code. And that hasn't been the case here. So some of this hacking was apparently down to MEV, which is a very controversial front running activity on Ethereum. Do you want to explain some of that controversy, Danny? So I'm not entirely, I'm not an expert on MEV, but in this case, there are actually two ways that MEV has worked. Well, for starters, what MEV is is basically, you know what, I am not good enough. I can't even attempt to describe how MEV works. It's monkeying around with the unfinalised transactions in the mempool. With MEV, these bots can understand the transactions that are going to occur, the ones that are in the mempool, and they can execute them before those transactions have occurred. So let's say an attacker is attempting to drain a pool. Well, that it takes a transaction and that transaction is in the mempool before it is executed. So in theory, and in practice here, MEV bots saw that and front ran and withdrew some of the money before the attackers were able to. So some of that money is now just stuck with the MEVs. In some cases, though, some of these people who are running these bots have actually returned some of the money. They realise that their bots possibly did an unintentional public service. And I think there was one account, coffeebabe .eth, that has returned $7 million. So there's an upside and a downside to always getting front run by the bots. Mason. Right. Taking a look out here, I mean, everyone says that DeFi is a feature of finance, but these protocols keep on being hacked. I mean, what is the feature here? Abhay Among many things, if I knew the answer to that, I would not be a journalist. But one outcome of this occurrence, in my opinion, should be that everyone takes a step back and thinks, how are we evaluating these systems? And what do we need to change about that? Because you really can't have a situation where one of the big protocols that everyone trusts is falling victim to what really is a simple hack that should have been stopped. So Danny, as you just mentioned, Curve is one of the more popular, more trusted DeFi protocols out there. And as regulation is coming into the crypto space, eventually it'll get to the DeFi space, but DeFi has kind of stayed away from that. But in this case, how do you think events like this hack within Curve, as well as other malicious attacks on DeFi protocols, how do you think that might play into a future of trying to regulate these kinds of protocols and services? Well, what I think is most important to remember is that this is a failure of self -regulation. These entities, the people running them, because there are people who are more influential in contributing to the Coinbase and executing and adding and whatever it is, the people who have some oversight, they need to be trusted to be doing a good job. And the code needs to be very carefully vetted. And that's not happening here. So I don't think the answer is we need to give this to the SEC or some other federal entity to oversee it. There needs to be, I think, some sort of standard setting in the industry where you have a true team of auditors that not are just some company of people in their basement, but actual professionals people could trust when they look at it and say, this thing is good. And they're not just saying it because you paid them to say it. But when looking at who's going to do that, a lot of times these regulatory agencies will try to take that responsibility upon themselves. Obviously, they might not be able to understand the code or what MEV even is or how so many of these intricacies operate. So who do you think is best fit to kind of establish this standard among DeFi? I don't know. It's a big question. I have no idea, right? I don't know. I assume maybe some comp -sci academics, to be quite honest. Definitely not AI, though. I think some people are saying that AI should be used to audit smart contracts. Sure, maybe if you want to get a first pass take on whether or not your code sucks, maybe ask the AI. But you really need someone to dig in to who knows what they're doing in order to catch these before they become a problem. So Dan Kuhn in an op -ed today was speculating that this hack might lead to some changes in how DeFi is done. One of those would be taking some of the crypto trading off -chain. So apparently the new version of Uniswap, which is a key protocol maker, Uniswap X is using something called best execution, which takes some of the transactions, as I say, off -chain. So would that have helped in this case, Danny? Well, I mean, if trading is happening off -chain, it basically means that the money is in a spot and it doesn't leave that spot, but whoever is the ownership over it changes, basically. I don't know if it would change the outcome here. It depends how that setup is in the first place, right? If the money is, if the crypto is in a vault somewhere, it is not leaving the vault. Well, ultimately at some point it might leave the vault for whatever reason and you still have to make sure that the input output is safe there. So yeah, it probably would protect one attack vector, but I'm not enough of an expert to know for sure whether it would have stopped this specifically. Okay. I think this is a good place to leave this discussion. One step forward, two steps back, as usual. Pretty much as usual. Thank you, Danny, for giving some insight there. I will say though, one final note on this. My favorite meme in all of crypto is the crypto hacks calendar, which without fail every month, we have a different logo that you add to the month to just to demonstrate, oh, well this week Olympus fell, this week whatever fell, this week SushiSwap got hit, Euler got hit. Well, in the month of July, we had three. We had, I don't even remember the first one, but it was big. We had Conic and we had Curve and the others were pretty big, but Curve takes the cake because Curve is, like Uniswap, one of those big, respected, long in the tooth DeFi protocols. So good job crypto, keep it up. You can fill out that bingo card.
The Bad Crypto Podcast
"quanta" Discussed on The Bad Crypto Podcast
"So like including like the, the power pipe, like the, the, the material, everything. So if we have the thing in a wall, it's what it looks like. Aren't our problems even bigger than that at that point, Pierre, Luke, don't, because you know, cryptography is not just, um, you know, cryptocurrency and Bitcoin and blockchain, right? We have governments that depend on secure cryptography. We have businesses, we have financial institutions and we see, you know, people hacking into these organizations now with the power of quantum computing, you know, rogue actors will be able to get in and, and mess with everything, right? We, we can have some serious issues in global politics and people's money just disappearing. They're, they're, uh, they're CBDCs, right? Whatever it is that we're going to have years from now. So what are governments and industry doing to prepare for this type of onslaught? They're already starting. So like even the, the big quantum company often, they have a crypto arm and they are starting to upgrade companies. The white house already have directives like for different agencies to like do the inventory start upgrading. Uh, some banks are starting to look at it. Telecoms, Google internal communication is already quantum resistant. They're building a quantum computer, the cloud flare, I think upgraded to like, governments uh, and the fees that are already starting to upgrade, uh, block chains have to follow as well. And that's kind of an historical thing also. So like the, the very specific method that Satoshi picked in 2008 to, to, to sign the transaction, it turns out that it's about a hundred times easier to break with a quantum computer than the one by banks. So like the, the back in 2008, it made sense because like the, the, the quantum computers were not like, it was like two qubits and it was like completely complete noise expert would they would say, okay, like it's 50 years away at least. Uh, but then like progress happened fast. And now it just turns out that the, the, like the signatures of Bitcoin is one of the easiest to break.
InTouch - Think STEAM Careers, Podcast with Dr. Olufade
Dr. Adriana Bankston Unpacks the CHIPS and Science Act
"What is the chips and the science act? And can it help boost your global competitiveness in science and technology? Can you please tell our audience what is it and how can it help boost our competition, especially with China coming along, now becoming a competitor? Yeah. So it's a major legislation, as you know, was adopted by Congress last year with bipartisan support and focuses on global competition in science technology. The NSF director actually called it the most important U .S. science and engineering legislation in a generation. It's, of course, a large bill, covers on the one hand a number of technology areas such as artificial intelligence, quantum and others. And for the purposes of the discussion today, we'll be looking at the end science part of the bill, which is focused on enabling federal agencies to support research and development funding broadly, given that, of course, science and engineering drive innovation and economic development in a number of areas. So just to highlight a few aspects, there are a few areas to look at. One is fundamental science, research facilities and instrumentation, so really looking at the basic research support. And on the other hand, applied research through the NSF, the SIP directorate, so this is directorate of technology innovation and partnerships. It's meant to expand regional innovation across the country and also discusses the sort of basic and applied research of the system. And then also has a strong focus on step education and workforce development through skills and experiences for trainees as well as educators and highlights a number of training programs that can help support the future of pipeline. I think as you too, sort of your second question, how it can help boost competitiveness, I think, and we'll talk about this sort of, it focuses on funding for National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, including the Office of Science and the National Institute of Standards and Technology programs to support education in a number of areas. And a few things, of course, for a few years, sorry, the legislation that has undergone a number of iterations and changes in name was a number of programs have been authorized, but not appropriated. So of course, the real question is where the real money comes from to really support these programs and what will happen.
KAILASH HAZARI IAS ACADEMY /ADMINISTRATIVE CONSULTANT SERVICE (WORLDWIDE)
"quanta" Discussed on KAILASH HAZARI IAS ACADEMY /ADMINISTRATIVE CONSULTANT SERVICE (WORLDWIDE)
"Close friends first international quantum communication conclave on March 27th to 22,023. The department of telecom, the first international quantum communication New Delhi. And. Communications society. Delhi, chapter. The event aimed to learn about latest advancements in quantum communication technology experts from industry academia research and development centers and government participated in this conclave possible applications of quantum technology gene building a set field communication infrastructure where discussing standards on tested guide dog quantum key distribution, system and quantum safe and classical. System real religion. Telecom scale. Excellence awards for project two where the tinted during the event.
Cyber Security Weekly Podcast
"quanta" Discussed on Cyber Security Weekly Podcast
"This is Jane though, I'm here at fusionopolis on site here at one north of the innovation hub of Singapore and I'm here at the spectral new office for the launch of quantum networks experience centers, Southeast Asia first center, and I'm very pleased and very privileged to have mister lamb to young who is the CEO and founder of spectra. And he's going to be sharing with us the latest on quantum technologies as well as more details about the launch of the new center, which is Southeast Asia's first center. And also your successful recent trial of using the latest on quantum technology in enabling quantum secure networks using I understand quantum key distribution as well as content enable encrypted. So thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you, gene. Yeah, thank you. So I thought, before we go into the technical details of quantum key distribution and content enable encrypted, maybe you can take a step back and just talk very high level about what is quantum technology, what do we mean by quantum future and also the role of spectra as well as this new experience center in enabling and also exploring these are quantum future? Yes, sure. So what we mean by quantum future as we have it now, essentially, quantum phenomenon has been used in our daily lives already. So this goes back more than a hundred years when Einstein and other great physicists discovered the loss of quantum physics, what we have today in our cell phones, the semiconductor chips, the lasers to use or use quantum phenomenon. Now the quantum future, we are talking about and this is synonymous with the second quantum revolution, is the ability to control and manipulate each and single quantum bits. We call it it can be a photon, a single particle of light. It can be an atom. So in the past, the lasers and semiconductors we use, we call it bulk properties of quantum physics. Which is. An ensemble of quantum atoms and photons. Now we are able to control and manipulate individual particles. And that's what is interesting and recently that's what we're talking about the quantum future. Now the ability to control this individual particles have great technology implications from quantum computers. With the likes of Google IBM and other big companies
Mount Washington Valley SPIRIT Podcast
"quanta" Discussed on Mount Washington Valley SPIRIT Podcast
"What is quantum entanglement? Miriam Webster defines quantum entailment as a property of a set of subatomic particles whereby a quantum characteristic such as spin or momentum of one particle is directly and immediately correlated with the equivalent characteristic of the others regardless of separation space. The national library of medicine simplifies that by describing quantum entanglement as a phenomenon which entangled systems exhibit correlations that can not be explained by classical physics. How does quantum entanglement relate to parallel investigations? It is theorized by some scientists familiar with the topic that quantum entanglement is also a phenomenon that can occur between people. An example of this would be a mother who is miles away from her child, knowing that something is seriously wrong with the child even though she has not spoken with them. This could be a major health event, a car accident, a crime committed against some et cetera. Another example is a young person gets injured while playing with friends and their twin sibling who is in the mall with a parent shows some symptoms of feeling the pain from the injury of their sibling. Our nervous systems are big in tennis of energy. And it is theorized by some scientists that people who are very close to each other emotionally become bound to each other at the quantum level and can share emotions and be aware of strong emotions of each other even at a great distance. Someone who doesn't understand or is unaware of the concept of quantum entanglement could misinterpret the effects of quantum entanglement as paranormal activity. The human mind has the ability to do something called period dolia. Also known as matrixing. Our mind attempts to organize the chaotic. An example of this would be looking at the static on a television channel where there isn't any signal from a station. If you stare at the static, your brain may start to make you believe that you see figures of animals or objects that are more familiar to you in the static. Our mind tries to see patterns where there aren't any in order to make sense of the random, using images that we are more familiar with. If someone is experiencing quantum entanglement and isn't aware of the phenomenon, their mind and matrix the confusion into sounds or images or smells, which someone could interpret as paranormal in nature. I have personally had multiple cases of reported parallel activity that after investigating I came to the conclusion that I believe the perceived parallel activity was a situation of quantum entanglement between two or more people. While quantum entanglement between people has been studied by some scientists there is still much work to be done to conclusively proof theories. However, like most paranormal science we work off of theories and not undisputable, science fact. Quantum entanglement is another theory like many others that we may use to properly describe certain situations of perceived paranormal activity. Please visit us online at WWW dot MW spirit dot com where you can find our social media sites and blog. Thank you for listening to the mount Washington valley spirit podcast. Well, we don't like to be normal. We like to be paranormal..
Talk Nerdy
"quanta" Discussed on Talk Nerdy
"Fellow teachers say things that will be you know the opposite of motivating mista this positive force that motivating force if you could be the person that says. Oh i'm interested you so for example when i was in the when i first started doing extracurricular activities. It wasn't when i got mississippi. It was just before that. When i was a houston so i live in a community dole at south park which you know the hood and a bus into the third war to attend james ryan high middle school right which is near. Yates high school. That was the hood to but now gentrified so sologub hood. It's now better camps with those teachers. Saw me right. All those teachers are like. Oh my god look at this case performance. They were like okay. I would've put the drama club by english teacher dead. I wanna put you in the bath club. Math teacher did ask assigned to swim. Team at it was brou- extracurricular activities. Be adroit it to the by teachers that i got to be able to compete outside of my school z. That all i'm competitive. When i try right that you know establishing that identity was really important for me going forward. Right to sprinkler activities wants idea so down. Mississippi's and the interesting thing. Is that actually really contributes to the resiliency. Because you're now a multifaceted human being with multiple interest so as you get older and you say maybe i want to go to college and maybe you try on a a major and it doesn't quite fit. You're not just gonna give up. You're gonna say that's okay. I have other things to offer. And i have other interests. Well let me tell you something about mississippi at least back in the day you have to work from the once you get like seven years old your work right and working on the field working in the woods and where i was living. It was hauling pulpwood. And if you don't know what that is good for you let me tell you. It is hard at dirty words of. But i would out there and you know i was a city boy woods and i could not believe how hard it will. Baker does work and there was like zero sympathy. Yeah so you know by and then you know a carrying a tuba through the mississippi. He did military boot camp. And i go to a program..
Warrioress
"quanta" Discussed on Warrioress
"She's like really spiritual. Terry i wanna tap into that. Sorry is funny. How journeys yes. Oh so much. I am in one of my beautiful groups that iran and i said he has felt that ben not psychic enough. Everyone put the hand up and i was like can come in common..
Warrioress
"quanta" Discussed on Warrioress
"My actually came to find that. When i was. I think johnny really sad. When i was about sixteen. I'm twenty seven now. So i went on sixteen diagnosis. May cold paid yesterday. Post traumatic stress disorder from experiences. I had in my teenage years with mexico arlit so trigger warning to everybody listening Messy and yet then. I received diagnosis. And then i remember like feeling lost for a very long time and just was lost heads. That was the that was very very beffa manner. That load of paper who've experienced kind of thinking definitely relate when i got to my early twenties. The diagnosis was elevated from. Ptsd to your complex. Stay at the result of Sexual trauma. I had experienced ozzy in a relationship that was very abusive in in a lot of different ways and especially goes by now all this time i was also in the closet so guy when all stove and i had heeded matt. I had suppressed that. Because i was always scared that it was not a k. And i think like. I run out groping kind of a religious background. I went to a religious school. Might my family went to religious macondo religious but my family very accepting an amazing and they actually always helping. They always have been and going to like. I was told that it wasn't bad to to to to be straight. But like i was told that directly if that makes sense but it was anytime something like that was mentioned. It was odd because like oh. We don't talk about that right so think about what subconscious effect that has is depressed. That because i was like august is not something. I'm meant to north something. I'm meant to experience. Not but it's not okay. Sorry i guess. I might like between the ages of twelve and honestly the start of last year. I was very much in this cycle of hiding and hut and fiat. Because i experienced of these things and i felt very out of control of myself and i think it's worked very much on with my clients. Now if embodiments. I want you to feel safe in your body because you very much deserve that an officer. I know what it feels like in my experience to not to feel safe in your body and that is not empowering at all the opposite. I always knew that. I was sake i always need something. I remember being a teenager and waking up in the middle of the night and saying spirits in my room and being light. And in fact. So i came out of the club. Gabriel's nelson five right so this is two years ago.
No Agenda
"quanta" Discussed on No Agenda
"Thing for sure. He's losing weight. She has news consultant. Bob carlin has watched him battle obesity over the years. He was Pretty seriously overweight and now he's heading back down you can see it. Not just in his face but on his wrist where his watchband seems to have been taken in another notch healthy lifestyle or his gene starting to catch up with him. Both his grandfather and his father died of heart problems in his speech. Kim said north korea must remain ready for war. What he also seemed ready for negotiations with the biden administration. He talked about what he's called the evolving policy of the new administration c. Sounds as if he's saying. Things are moving in the right direction. Us intelligence says warned quote. Little kim remains strongly committed to nuclear weapons. Efforts could include the resumption of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missile testing kim's real intentions. Remain a mystery. But it's safe to say that while he's losing weight he's also gaining nuclear weapons county. I mean what. What is this. The nuclear weapons. Oh scary. but he's losing weight. I don't get it. Kim jong cross fit everybody. I don't understand the the the problem that they can't just report on what an actual threat may be. Anyone said anything. No all they do. Is they notice. The guys lost some weight to they got to come out and make whole story about its. Tmz st mc. Yeah and it sounds like and then we have this little ditty get the biggest kick out of stories from hermit kingdom guests slip by any stories out makes no sense. This is nbc now about china's latest space explorations. And i wanted to wait before you continue. Sorry whatever happened to north korea being this big cyber threat to a bunch of hackers. Whatever happened to that. Whatever happened at storyline. How come only sony. Why not Disney why not anybody since sony go after some Go after cnn. Cyber gun after anybody they all bullcrap. They never had a cyber threat. But okay i just had to get but what we did. Get a lot of embarrassing stuff. The street which i think didn't that ultimately lead to harvey weinstein in some odd way. Maybe it's possible right off because there are some notes in maybe all right. Here's nbc news. On china tonight of i china's sending astronauts to its new space station blasting off from the gobi desert six and a half hours later docking two hundred forty two miles above the earth. This is a for china. it's portugalete power. It's getting there fast. The chinese station called tian gong or heavenly palace. He's a quarter of the size of the international space station but a rival china frozen out of the iss by us security concerns but the iss. Getting old china could have the only space outpost. This phase of the chinese space program is something they'd be chomping at the bit to do for a decade now the unusually public fanfare time for the communist. Party's hundredth anniversary next month. Shows china's growing confidence having also just landed a rover on mars are china and the us now. Technically more advanced says the mission's chief designer but china develops space programs for its own needs despite a ban on cooperation. Nasa sent congratulations while tonight high above the earth. Chinese astronauts smiled waved and took their place in history. So we have a counter to this to this new bitch space station. The chinese have We have a program of our own which is going to really change. Space travel at nasa made a commercial. We're on a mission back. Woody flunking opportunity equal opportunity to challenge and inspire two learn to reach those he's never reached before us and to advance equity to shatter boundaries and break down barriers across america. Great.
No Agenda
"quanta" Discussed on No Agenda
"Other than.
Hustleshare
"quanta" Discussed on Hustleshare
"Really bad. I won't have anything to draw spero kind of like. Yeah i get a performance valley. Discussion may be but like oh. There's no money in the bank for you this month. Because he didn't do right. So i think that's basically the fear right like what if i don't make it. What if i fail. It's but there's always that night when you're lying down. What if i succeed works and that's always that you know balanced there and in my head like i'm not getting any older I remember you know so just bali. Sm i got the meet. A lot of people are now such as you like successful business. People sold their businesses started up multiple times and are successful. And i'm like before i was leading. I remember bryan bryan out. Teo from grab and he's now with Jd summit right. No he also has a new start up the the one. Yes oh definitely. I remember him. Asking if he could put a fall to hail taxis outside the arena right and You know that that guy was like maybe two years ago. You would've imagined that he was the guy bitching. And i was on the other hand listening and saying like how much will you pay me if i let you but a stat so definitely. I think seeing that kind of success you grow like you know. Of course seen a few people try and fail. But yeah there's there are always For every ten tries one probably succeeds. Those succeed. Keep asking how did you do it. And i think. I'd facebook. I was fortunate. Enough like mine So when i started. I didn't have a local boss but halfway through i got local boss which was former. Ceo off a g cash. Right john rubio and half my makeup boss catch up says don't you miss being jeep dash Was it fun. how did you start up an all. You know he'll tell you the stories that he went through very much like how i'm sharing today and that the us much as inspired me to do a good job inside kevin telling me like maybe i should try that too so there was that there is that so. It's it's you. John that push them over to partly again. Credit to nudge right also So just started funding a number of people a lot bunch of x. lozada he's part of the founders for quantum definitely credit there too and i could imagine that and i'm pretty sure a lot of current corporates who feel that it's now are listening to the shows like This is signed. We would all jump as well. But again i wanna find out now. Now you're in deceit quanta. What's what's different. How scary is it. Is it a scary as you imagine. Like or did you feel like holy shit. I quit. I could do this some days. You have that like. I can do this feeling. There are some days like all. I did unanticipated this So definitely it's a mixed so on that roller coaster. I think you know as long as it's slightly skewing up to the right now. We're in a good path. But from my feel. I think you have to learn to self motivate as one thing right Especially pandemic menu ripping alone or you're working at arm hall so saying like. Why did i do this in the middle of a global crisis. When everyone was trying to do the opposite anna well might take. There is the people who did work or starting. Maybe even go back to us on the story of us in the middle of a pandemic built out to henry. Build out like north edsall or mega mall in the middle of right after edsa revolution where everyone loves the philippines he was saying i'm building the biggest mall in asia of the time so definitely a little bit from there and a little bit from seeing people go and also i think one part is also seeing the need. I think Seeing so many businesses tried to pivot not get the support not know who to go to And probably chase the wrong metrics because they don't know any better right so so definitely. There's that as walkout now. Let's beat the the real picture here so quanta digital what do you guys do. And what's the value prop now new company to chew. Seo good chunk of what we do is enabling commerce online right so we do everything. Fob of building out your Ecommerce platform or customizing. Your shop at five store pulling into what i've learned from facebook for data and how you manage data and If one thing that facebook do is actually recognize it. Yes should use that term. No not in a bad way. But business if i were a business right. I know who i wanna target. And it's and they're lying. It's their line not me but instead of people finding your products it's basically your people your product finding the right people. And i think this. Day and adrian foot traffic is dropping by like fifty sixty last year in the height of the pandemic was seventy percent. Like you want if that was your core source of income yadda store in the mall. You're probably closing shop. Because thirty percent doesn't even cover your rent and sue payroll so so all those things you're looking at. How do i give it and basically you know like you. You were saying you chat law and even say podcast. These are solutions that have been around and technology is probably years ahead. And it's readily available by the human adoption of it is probably four or five years behind and so how do we get them up that step and make them feel secure that they get walkup. That stop is basically what we're doing so balance of course The advertising of it I think we do certain things are relatively different. We're not just pure brand. We definitely do branding but definitely returned on ads. And we do have this metric which is aside from return adspend Look at cost per incremental revenue. So i think that's the killer there. So i think the fought there is for if i want. One thousand vessels more in sales. How much should i pay. And if you could get that number down that we could work and in fury that's an endless Channel for sales for your for your company. It's me so skin. S you lower exactly that that would just at the margin is just getting bigger and bigger and bigger with yep exactly and and if if your sales feed to that cost and you know you phthalate thousand. You'd get that five hundred back but it entered the churn.
Hustleshare
"quanta" Discussed on Hustleshare
"How did you bridge that gap though. So yes definitely majority of the time was driving education about educating them on what was possible Then when you get a positive response off the right person being curious or wanting that output that you've put in front of your table menu get down with them and really work it out and it wasn't easy so after times. You know some of these solutions that were running with some of the clients were in alpha stage or beta stage and they were clunky assault right. They break down not everyone knows about it. But internally is the breakdown day rayon and so you have. People and i was fortunate that i had a fantastic team who could really put things together and really You could rely on them to premacy that the whole thing end to end. Yep so. I think that made it easier. It's knowing that you know you don't have to micromanage The people in charge were highly capable dot last question before last week. I want to find out again. I'm just coming in from an outside look outsider looking. In every time. I walked into the book philippines office. I always envisioned myself like shit. If i'm not doing start up. I would love to hear it because i the office is fucking fantastic of course but more than anything. There's just i could put my finger on it. But i felt like you had such an amazing culture that i also feel. Whatever it's up eight. I go to You know it's the same fucking viewing. What's facebook culture like. And what's it like working for a company like that and especially coming from founding team here locally so from my perspective. I think you're right if you were running start Definitely being in a tech company or one of these companies are definitely like the highlight What i would say is one the community. That's there is highly impact driven. That's one thing. Everyone was driving for impact down to their own individual contribution. Everyone wants to feel that they could help those big years. And it's not that. I'm just one cog but i'm vital cognitive ever you are still also. That's that's the whole work perspective of each individual and so they run extreme and because it was lean you could also see in measure much impact your driving across not just the country but region in globally. That's amazing all right now. Let's take our last week injury. Come back let's talk about quanta and pay for. Because i have so many questions that have now popping into my head. Well let's talk about that more after the break. Hi this is donna. And i'm a wellbeing junkie. It's true i admit it. I love everything to do with mind. Body energy and i'm constantly on a journey of learning exploration and self-discovery. So i created a podcast to talk to experts influencers and thought leaders to be inspired by new ideas. So join me on the project. Loving myself podcast. Because the most important relationship you will ever have his the relationship you have with yourself you are. He has covid. Nineteen pandemic has been a big hit for all of us. And it's safe to say that we need to rebuild things from scratch again in the thing about this pandemic it has also rapidly accelerated the need for digitalization in the philippines. There's a big need for tech and tech enabled startups. that are ready to build. Better the famous. Addison once said that the value of an idea lies in the using of it and in preparation for its twenty twenty one. Acceleration program idea space is looking for tech and tech enabled startups that are turning their ideas into action once again now approaching its ninth year. It's still on the lookout for startup. Boundaries that are driven to create lasting change through the work that they do. If you're listening to this podcast and if you want to have a real life startup experience just like what you saw. Net flicks like showdown meat. And non dawson. This is your chance to have that real life non-fictional startup experience which is the twenty twenty one. Acceleration program of idea space is now open for applications for just like dozens of startups. That we've had here to podcast. You can get the chance of support resources and opportunities along one that you need. that started. Rebe reality we're all you need to do is just click the link in the description box of this episode. So you can get application form of the next court and if you do have some questions. Just don't forget to follow idea space inaugural socials and also go to idea space found. They should not worry to ask more questions again. Good luck your application and good luck to your startup iraq. Rick nash who now is no longer with facebook which again. I got shocked when i found that out about that. Because i'm pretty sure you don't leave the nest like that for whatever opportunity because now this guy is to see of quanta digital so. Walk through this how again. It's if again. I told you earlier before the break that i was invasive in a in a if i if i was in a sort of boundary i would love to work for facebook or google. Just amazing free food and whatnot right. What made you leave. and what. What's this new challenger embarking on now being a head honcho. Nco quanta digital. Thanks for that question. maybe before. I'd say i wanna leave. It was always starting. My own company was always. What the apex of my like gene like. You've cry climb the corporate ladder but not just to get to the top but to learn as long along the way and once you get to a point where you're just reading for your bus critter die. The next step she company right So i think that's part of it My dad was a businessman. Here is an enterpreneur time. And i think you know for a lot of us Those of us like me are late. Jumpers the hesitation is really the failure of the fear of failure right. And you know one at one point or the other year light. Let's pull the plug. Let's jewish yup. I think like yeah well So you you were mentioning earlier and former zero on Andrew all these guys were people. I got it in touch. I stayed in touch with. And i'm also still in touch with in knowledgeable as my ceo. Lozada on seeing just gonna do things. There was always that slight envy like. I'm here i'm secure. I'm in a company that's gonna keep me. You know Nicely european nicely. And you know not like if i do.
Hustleshare
"quanta" Discussed on Hustleshare
"We rented a simple as assembly lines. Right either things taught them how to do. You know somebody takes care of picking. The i don. He's not the same person wrapping it up and boxing it up it on somebody who does that they get really good and really fast side. So those are things we brought to the table and right now i see certain things that you know we were doing with serpents sellers recommending it as rough ideas and you see rare standard during the bubble. Wrap over the table. Those big pictures We were we. Were basically hacking those things out and Putting the table. So yes those were the days. Okay weekends in on the mostly. Walk us through the acquisition. How what was the team like again. A lot of the former lozada peeps peeps again eventually decided all right. I'm out also. But what was that feeling like knowing that. Holy shit we got acquired this Was it again. A lot of Nervous tension that your daughter just a lot of deletion at that. So the exact details. Maybe i wouldn't share but definitely there were a few Before alibaba close in right there were definitely different. investors that will come in and visit and there are certain the way we fixed thanks. Is everything every day. There was one problem to solve. Audi look at it personally from somebody insider was like You're on a boat. Lozada was running out of funds. And you're basically patching one bowl after another to keep yourself afloat They did really smart stuff like you know hack the way they did marketing back then They reduce the subsidies that they were playing. Definitely referrals was amplified and that was definitely one of those things that were explored and then on our side. We started policing the quality of sellers that we have on the platform back. Then you know it's anything to not. We started putting in qa teams better. Brad's get on in build confidence or the farm. So definitely there was a lot god So your answer was you. Had a long list of problems will work. you have to do is ruthlessly prioritize which one was the biggest hole. But yet patrick for the week. And then once you're done with that you move onto the next holder batch one at one day at a time and see that you don't think right not too many holes or foreign water then you're gonna drown. Okay now. let's talk about the most recent gig before you went full blown. Quanta you were again. That had clients. Solutions are very very. This is still fresh. All our conversations facebook you you're headed plant solutions share a baseball career in philips and again you were there when the local team was formed. Walks through that new metric. Now that you are talking about and now in the under suck you know you just work on. Thanks guys i worked with ash. When messenger boughts were literally just popping up. So i we went hand in hand and again messenger bots. I will forever be grateful for that opportunity. Because through that i got my company acquired told months after put it up right and again. We are still planning through till now though. It's not that easy now. Because of the fucking game eric. But we're still here right but walk us through an the facebook thing. Sign you what happened. And the the the bought developed resided things. Were those metrics you trying to do when your facebook. When you're starting out in the philippines. Well i was on the business side off facebook so our metrics were not your daily active or but those things definitely benefited us What we were looking at is the seller or at the advertiser adoption of tools their understanding of the tools and the way they use the platform are. They is what happens here. Is you have a project manager in an engineer. Put together a fantastic tool. But the user doesn't know how to use it tool at the end of the day. It's a waste of a fantastic tool so exact. Our goal was to get the right brands. with the interested test To get these tools tested and then also Getting a lot of learning back into the company as well as backout to advertisers. So you get the learning in and say this is working better. that one's not And then back to. The advertisers are the best tools to work with her. It best practice utilize it and of course. Those things change year after year. Actually so you don't have to wait too long. Maybe within a year of things already change. That's those changes were rapid. So i've seen a instagram stories. Blow up in all these new features coming in and out today. But how do you prioritize which one really throw into the right distances because again this business that comes into facebook has a different agenda different metrics and also. There's a big skill gap a lot of them. Only facebook would probably can boost page and whatnot. But they're people who are at best. Hey let's get a chat bot and fully automate that blow. How did you manage in between those that that wide chasm that you had to play around with so i think there was At least a few things that helped me got easier but first one is the number but facebook applied internally was very similar to the network externally it was so easy to connect to anyone and learn so you know putting my ear to the ground with facebook was like with a megaphone tear. You can find out what's happening across the globe in seconds so that was one good source. The second thing that we did was of course focused on the business in back. I think one thing. They slip was keen to do is make sure that at the end of the day. They're not just selling their solution but they're seeing. Does the solution work for the business. We work with and ended up with us building blade books by industry strategies by vertical almos- and that's how it came through. Okay how much of it is. Follow through because even if you do books again giving a very complicated gone to a total neophyte or depending on. Who's who's going to wield the sword wielded gun How much hand holding do you have to do. In order for them to create out or was the product. So seamlessly easy to understand. That even idiot can can can get your again if the your success also depends on their participation. And i'm feeling that crunch now especially podcasts right. Yeah like okay. There's a podcast podcast. And how. How do i feel that. And they're those gap all the time that you had to fill. How do you bridge..
Hustleshare
"quanta" Discussed on Hustleshare
"So that's because and the reason for the wireless because you know the rest of them stuck digital. Let the young guy do it. You probably a lot of the preparations do that. Now let jimmy on that one though but ashok but walk us through because not everybody gets that chance to be those rooms. What are the things you talk about in those meetings. Because again they pick y'all young guy you do the digital ones. Well what are those things that the president and founder. vp's care about at that level. That only you. I guess had the ability to hear from and what are what do they care about the most too. Well there's two things right A company like this are rare number. One in their field is looking at hoppy. They widened the gap. Right and so as much as sms. For example was number one in the philippines. Let you put them side by side with walter mart or put them side by side with say Ah costco there's still room to grow rate and on that what i did was took a lot of initiative in terms of researching. Are these guys doing and bringing to the table. So it's not totally new inter the space but new in terms of packaging or localizing it to that company and saying okay. This is what we have. This is what they did. And how do we localize. Wow that's amazing and the metrics. I yes The is it all about revenue at the end of the day. Like okay. How how widened the gap. Not just execution. But i'm pretty sure that the the revenue and profit through all at an uptick because you're a publicly listed company and that that should matter right so that's where the pitching internally happens. It's who's the company that's willing to adopt a project and you tuck it under their pia. No talks good right but but maybe on a side note. I think i commend. Say even the head. So i was fortunate enough to get ear or get meetings. Stay on see every now. And then he listened. Each curious he was he was open to ideas right. And that definitely was my lucky break if you know if i got the wrong person to share these ideas to Than it might have gone nowhere right. I got the right ear for it so that was a lucky break. That's all okay. So sorry i cut you off earlier again when you were talking about how you transition from designer but going back to that Do that. Because i generally curious what happens inside in those types of conversation with walk us through that again again coming from Being a business unit ahead write room and then all the way through again lozada. Preoccupy technically Well yes so. We'll for context back. Then when i was in s i am having your ear to the ground. You hear about lozada coming up. You hear about All these businesses coming alongside it a bunch of startups together at zone. Laura and everything. And you're thinking hey you know what. I'm the big retailer here. It's my responsibility to keep those guys at bay and part of the pitch internally was hey and back then lozada's not even a marketplace. They were tech e commerce companies. So they were selling your cell phone your laptop strike not everything under the sun which is today right And back then saying you know what. Let me do that. Let me talk to cyber zone. We have to make cyber marketplace We were trying to talk to the laws and also basically get every tenant to Start selling on a platform But then yell you know back. Then i think it was too early or the model wasn't clear Thought point when i was fishing it the clearest model them was group online so comparative picture for them right and they're like why are we gonna do that or can we make sure that they come to the multiple act while but that was about idea but like your competition was making things completely different and that was the push honestly so not being able to land that project or go back and forth on dot project made me explore and really want to move into lozada. I passed my application lozada. It took them seven six months to get back to me. Do something was like This guy tried to copy us trying to build a deal with them so there was that as law. Sm starting to or at least the retail part trying to build a partnership mazzotta. Imagine if that pushed through. They didn't have the compete at all. That would have been a record breaking deal as well but now again let's s. I'm trying to catch up with that Deal not materializing or or do. I not know any something behind the scenes that supposed to be public knowledge so there were many leg halfway. Deals like deals Defend a with dan deal. That would have happened but it never happened. And there are other projects alongside loyalty program that were tested so definitely. Sm did its own share testing Did there was also another thing called e. plus Which was i remember the competitor for beep beep so a lot of those things fell under the i. Yeah there you go so definitely. That was that was a back story there so but definitely lozada changed my perspective in terms of pace in terms of how things are done And like the sheer so coming from a traditional company. He entered lozada. Suddenly everything had to be done yesterday. So that's basically the pace. You start learning to work out right right. I've i've heard about the breakneck speed because i've had also former those i'd be in here and let's talk about a lot more of your experience lozada. Well let's talk about the more. After the break hustlers. I know how difficult it is to hustle now and make ends meet during this pandemic. It's really not easy no matter how hard we try it. There's still no guarantees especially in this type of economic climate however even though that is the case it's still the best time to spot new opportunities. We can take advantage of to earn some extra bucks on design now. We always talk about investing in building multiple sources of income in this podcast. An ask the world economy has gone. Read the crypto market has been steadily growing now. Luckily our friends at be twenty-one dot i o. Want to help you build your wealth and make it easier for you to invest in cryptocurrencies by just using your bank account credit card or debit card. Now all you have to do is just visit be. Twenty-one dot is slash hustle share and get two dollars on us to start your crypto journey. Again that's me. Twenty-one dot co slash share so you can get their money to hustle for you without you doing anything all right now. Let's get back to the show.
WRKO AM680
"quanta" Discussed on WRKO AM680
"You know, this is what brokerage accounts to. So what the the analysis will do is, you know I'm variable annuities. Any form of annuity fixed annuity fixed indexed annuity brokerage accounts. It will expose the sub account fees, the administration fees, the mortality and expense fees the hidden fees within the loads right on different shares. The mutual funds it the overall expense of your account, because a lot of times when you have an account And you know, you're being advised that you're paying a 1% wrap fee on your portfolio. It's so in your mind, that's what your pain and that's that's all your pain. It depends upon what's within the brokerage account. Really? What? Ultimately you are pain, you know, because different different investments have different fees. So the V analysis Will scan your portfolio as we call peek under the hood of your investments using that we use the morning star Quanta report and we have another software, a stress test that we merged together to create for part of our discovery. To see what your fees your pain that aren't disclosed on your statements so that you know what you have, and you know what direction if it's something you want to keep stay with or if you should be moving in another direction, because we all know that the fees that your pain Are taken away from your earning power in the earnings that you will be hopefully retaining every year. So if you would like to have that customs, the analysis performed on your portfolio so that you can see exactly what am I paying for this variable annuity? One of my pain for this broken account? What am I paying for this fixed indexed annuity..
KQED Radio
"quanta" Discussed on KQED Radio
"You were listening. Detect Nation. I've been speaking with Dr Lori in Prep, the chief scientist of Quanta, Leah and the author of Link How Decision Intelligence connects Data. Actions and outcomes for a better world. This isn't a perfect method. All we're trying to do is give a little bit more light to these very complex decisions and simply By shining that bright light. We can collaboratively create this diagram, and then we can improve it over time. And having not done that. I think that's the source of a lot of unintended consequences. I'd like to follow up on one thing You said earlier, I listened to one of your speakers talking about the hummingbird in the Fox. Right. And the Fox is the guy who's if I understood it correctly focusing and lots of detail and cutting problems up into little pieces, And the hummingbird is someone who flits around and sees the big picture. Well, I think the history of scientific thought over the last two millennia has been very fox like And well, that's what you're supposed to be. You're supposed to be smoking. Gun trained on Fox is but you talked about cos silos. People who come from different departments. Turns out we have a whack a mole problem. I talked to one executive during my interviews who said, you know, I'm eating all the K p eyes of every department. But I cos the whole was doing badly. So it's the K P ay que aqui process indicators, So that's one way that people are trying to Optimize things so they would get things great and customer care. They do great things for the customers. But then you know the financial Department would have a problem because they're spending too much of their customers. And so we get this kind of whack A mole where you have a Good impact and one silo, and that hurts another silent because turns out we're pretty good with an independent departments with an independent arenas like water or food or poverty. We've sort of reached a point of diminishing returns. The intelligence the next level of breakthroughs in the interdependencies, whether you're within it between departments and a large organization or between these realms of human existence, like jobs and water in poverty. One key insight in which you have many. One key insight is the tsunami of data that we have today is matched by a desert of systems that can make good use of that data. That's right. So we don't have the tools, Jack. That's right. And, you know, most people talk about how we haven't even analyzed. I think the number maybe you've heard it is a 2%. Of all the data in the world we've only analyzed. But you could take the same data and analyze that 52 different ways. It's not actually the amount of data that's right. But But that's not the whole picture, right? Just analyzing the data. That's not enough. The question is, what actions do we take? So I think we're sort of at the end of this data obsession here in the basic research. Any fact I know you can search all the facts, but But you know there's diminishing returns again. How do I assemble these pieces of data in order to make the decisions that solve the great problems and this again back to Silicon Valley culture? Where some of the smartest people here in the valley why are we solving the hardest problems? I think this is the bridge to be able to do that. You're listening to technician. I'm wear a gun in my guest today is Dr Lori in Pratt, A computer scientist. She is the chief scientist of Kwan Telia, a Silicon Valley firm specializing and applied machine learning and decision intelligence. She's here today with Linc. How decision Intelligence connects data actions and outcomes for a better world. Another key insight is there could be huge benefits from even a simple qualitative diagram where no data has been gathered. The diagram on Lee depends on the expertise of persons in the industry. You mean we don't actually sometimes need all that big? Damn, Yeah, I mean, she know right. One of sorry people were going to shoot me for that. One of the consequences of this data obsession is there's this belief that we can't start thinking about her decisions until all the data's cleansed in its joined and We've got it in a great master database or Federated and we have the data and we have the data and they said the decision is only good as the data No, no, no, no. In fact, if you start with the data, you're gonna waste a huge amount of time because only 10% of the data has 90% of the decision making power and you're going to cleanse 90% of the fields that you don't have to. So you're really you know, for getting technical, even at an a I project if we get back to a I you really need to understand the decision in which that AI is participating the context and I know people talk about the age of context. I like to be a little more focused than context in general, because I know that the decision context is where there's a huge amount of power, so just that chain of events and how that data informs it. And you know, it's funny. You were around back and the AI the last day I summer, right in the eighties, we had a generation project that is really going to go someplace goes nowhere. Well, that was all about human knowledge. Right. We were gonna do expert systems were going to code human expertise and systems. It wasn't so much about data and I'm here to tell you we've pendulum swung and we pinch wants one too far. We've gotten so focused on the data that we've ignored. The things that human knows humans. No, and you know, a I may seem kind of cool, but it does not understand cause and effect. It doesn't understand how these systems together. There's he doesn't understand with Scotts and Michigan and wherever they're the state was whatever that was going on, You know that they're going to get really mad, if if you don't visit him right, and those were intangible factor, so specifically, if there had been more folks going out and asking intangible questions and then building a decision model, I think we would have seen some different results. They're different results at least different behaviors. It was just the results are now of course, everybody today wants to be a dot data scientist that everybody wants. Degrees and data Science computer science. Hate to tell you this lorry. It's so last millennium s So last millennium are their decision. Scientists. One of the job's going to be let me just ask it that way in this whole emerging field, So let me give you a medic. Answer to that So again, we would meet have gone through the transition from coding to software engineering, right? And so Coding was kind of down in the dirt, knowing the technical stuff. No way architectures brushes. Just keep coding, right, No design it all. So you can answer that question in general, I just kind of working by analogy as we built up just just a Zen coding. We built this layer of software engineering to make sure that projects were successful in low risk, and we're finished on time and But the customer's needs all that great stuff. There is also emerging AI software engineering where one of the key roles there's a decision model or the person who has Enough of a knowledge of the tool kit of all the technology that could be used to build that decision model and to help people understand how their actions lead to outcomes but is also pretty good about talking to people is a business consultant about their business problems, and so is like the business analyst that we have with in software engineering. So we are seeing an emerging role. In fact, there's a lot of women in this role as decision modelers people who are both technical and considered span that bridge.