What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sakyan. Super pumped to be talking about building the new world with blockchain and decentralization. We have Jim R. Kondo joining us on the show. Hi Jim. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks a lot Alan. It's a pleasure for us to have you on the show also in your home which is so nice. Thank you. You guys are great tenants. I'm glad to be supporting your work. Thank you very much. We're also super pumped to talk about your work. For those who don't know Jim's background he does business development for blockchain companies coming to Japan. Originally a software engineer. He is very passionate about the technology behind blockchain and decentralization trying to increase awareness of this important paradigm shift. You can find Jim's links in the bio below to his LinkedIn and Twitter profile. Jim I want to start things off by talking about this very big picture. We're having this massive paradigm shift happen. I think people are starting to understand more and more what it meant to have centralization of power. Now things are becoming decentralized. Give us this big abstract perspective on what the centralization of power initially was. Now we're moving to the decentralization. Right. So how did centralization come up? Why did it come about? Previously when we're doing transactions if we're not doing it face to face we have to rely on this intermediary. So maybe I want to send money to somebody. If I can't see you in person I have to send it over a bank or any kind of transaction. If we're not going to do it face to face we usually use an intermediary. Over time those intermediaries get more and more powerful. They start increasing transaction fees. They start censoring transactions. Oh you're not allowed to send money to him or it's going to cost you this. They end up having a lot of power. Now sometimes that's good. They can maybe enforce the law or maybe enforce a certain level of service but more than not these intermediaries have kind of grown out of control in our society and they add a lot of hidden costs in all kinds of transactions. So that's kind of how I like to see the context for why we need decentralized third parties. And so kind of nowhere before now was there this way to do a peer to peer transaction but not in person. You had to trust this intermediary but thanks to blockchain you can do this in a way where we both agree on some terms in advance and then as long as those terms are met some transactions will automatically occur and it's basically unstoppable. No one can change or stop it after we agree to those terms. And so that type of transaction is different words for it but for instance Ethereum would call that a smart contract. So using this Ethereum blockchain we can agree on some terms to do some kind of business operation and then once we commit to that it automatically executes. So that's kind of how I look at it. But what makes me passionate about it is you see how our society is in such a need for this type of technology. If I want to send money Western Union to South America they charge me this huge rate. I have to agree to their terms. I can't send it to certain people. That's the easy example but there's all kinds of intermediaries. You didn't even realize we're there and you know it's going to take time but basically a lot of those intermediaries will be either reduced or eliminated and the fees they're incurring and the power they have will shrink maybe getting to the point where you know we don't need them anymore and then we also can own once we create this network of value we can be owners in that network of value as well instead of a lot of times the intermediary owns the business and it's very successful and they are the one to reap all the rewards but using the same concept that the users and the providers of liquidity in this network can also kind of own the network and share in the rewards but that's a little bit different thread. And you give this you gave us a couple examples but one of the most I think important examples is the way that we exchange this thing called money. This one is one of the most important ones. This one of the most important applications of what decentralization technology can do for us eliminating the third party from the process and giving the power back into people's hands but again one of the things that comes up a lot is well right now we have all this faith in this currency that we use all of a sudden although it is yes numbers in a digital ledger in a centralized banks digital ledger but now it's well what if we just transition those numbers in the digital ledger to a cryptocurrency rather than the fiat currency and then we have the blockchain that enables us to be able to very very immutably store those transactions the way that the money is moving over time do banks even currently have a storage mechanism like that where they can see these traces of money well I mean that's that's probably the reason why it takes like three days to do a wire transfer because they've got these batch processes that run and then they get audited and checked it makes her no one modified it because you know and so but it gets very complicated but one thing I just want to say is that you know simply changing to a blockchain is not you know there can be centralized or permissioned blockchains you know like the the government could say oh we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna make a blockchain that we control right a blockchain doesn't necessarily imply decentralization it can be a centralized blockchain but what we're aiming for yeah is is like a decentralized mod and say ledger for money that's not in control you know for instance some government central bank could create a blockchain based digital currency for their country but they could decide all the rules themselves we're gonna they could still make it just like the traditional one we're gonna control who's allowed to use this blockchain and we're gonna inflate the currency if we want you know like there's nothing stopping them right but say like bitcoin well it's fixed at 21 million bitcoin they can't change that right anybody can participate they can't block someone from participating so that's what gives it these nice qualities but you could you could make a bad you know blockchain solution a very centralized blockchain as well yeah again this big promise of being able to do something like take and put power back into people's hands on a peer-to-peer cash transfer is so so important yet also this is just one of so many of the applications unlike this just this big history perspective it's so interesting looking at the origins of money how money even came to be then what we're actually doing with it today how it even works one of the things that so many wealthy people talk about is when you're not educated about money in school then you become poor when you educate yourself about money you have a much higher propensity to earn money to gain money to become wealthy these types of things what are stocks what are investments into real estate into all different aspects how do you diversify portfolio what are those things how do you save money what's compound interest but then what is this money backed by or is this a shared hallucination of money what are cryptocurrencies are they also in a sense a shared hallucination that is maybe just a little bit immutably stronger in a sense and then what are the other applications that can come from a blockchain style of life where like we initially did thousands of years ago of exchanging things of that we wanted and we wanted to make sure that the other person got the item and we got the compensation for the item now things are happening digitally with these exchanges you you are in the process of selling a vehicle right there's these ideas of can we just smart contract this out skip yeah so there's all these different applications as well yeah there's a lot of great points just kind of unwrapping a few of those first on the whole like do you need to back it or not you know of course I love commodities you know I think gold and silver they're very nice you know they're tangible the price is manipulated it's unclear of the quantity that's out there you know they and it's just you can't really buy and sell it right you've got it how do you splice it up how do you store it how do you send it you know it's good maybe if you're going to store it in your in your secret stash or vault or something but it's not it's not as practical for our current society although I'm not I'm not trying to to criticize commodities but the thing about you know say bitcoin or other decentralized cryptocurrencies is okay yeah they're technically not backed by anything but I would argue that that's actually a benefit because trying to back it with something actually adds a point of failure like say you're going to make digital gold and you say I'm going to have a blockchain with the cryptocurrency where like one unit of this coin is one ounce of gold but it's like you're actually tying into the real world now you're giving yourself a weakness well is that vault audited you know is that is that money there is that ounce there at all times like who audits that you know there's no way to check that in code right like you're relying on someone's you know honor to say yeah we actually have one ounce in that vault and it's always there like we promise we do where if it's really purely digital you can still get the code right like look at the bitcoin code there's only 21 million bitcoin no one can change that they unless everybody in the network agrees to change it and they're not going to do that because it would change the rules no one would you know it's this economic incentive they don't have it no one would agree to that because it's not in their economic best interest basically so then the cryptocurrencies don't necessarily need to be backed by anything right so I think that's one kind of error in thinking it's like people think well it's gotta be backed by something but like backing it by something actually makes it weaker because now you're tying it to a physical thing that needs to be audited so but making it a deflationary currency yeah I don't know I yeah I kind of don't have a strong opinion on that or not it's true like what's going to happen bitcoin like 30 years from now when they stop making new ones like it's just going to go through the roof some cryptocurrencies are constantly adding more every year and so I'm not an economist you know at least you know the terms like it can only be inflated by this much per month or not or deflated you know by this much over you know forward 30 years but those terms can also change well but they but everybody would have to vote on that they'd have to fork a new set of rules into the system and that that wouldn't be an easy procedure but it's true it could it could change but people if you say are going to act in their best in their self-motivated economic interest you have some faith that like they wouldn't just make a really change that would cause everybody to lose faith in the currency and cause the value to go down so that that's one kind of topic that so I that I wanted to pick up on that that you were saying and one other thing I also just wanted to say is it's the whole financial inclusion aspect of it I kind of didn't touch on it before but not only can the intermediary censor or withhold or add fees or choose the marketplace pricing but they can also say well you know you're not in our country we're not going to serve you right all the I mean everybody knows it going back to the unbanked side where it's like with a cryptocurrency wallet you know all you need is a smartphone or a computer and you can be anywhere in the world and now you bank account basically you can go and do some mechanical Turk or task rabbit type bounty task for somebody in a rich country and you can get paid in some cryptocurrency in Africa right and so they they say like it's it's enabling like global a new generation of global commerce with inclusion for all less friction those are some of the the the talking points that that people like to toss around as well I think we were talking about this a couple days ago as well when we were talking about how cool it is to do things like be able to split up the assets into really tiny fractions and then to be able to pay five or ten or a hundred dollars into ownership of these rapidly growing assets which then also gives people the ability to come in as a stakeholder and just inclusive stakeholder in general but then you give this example of all it takes is me to have a mobile phone with an internet connection and a cryptocurrency wallet for me to be able to do things like do tasks to earn to earn money it also you know we we we just had bio on the show and we were talking to him as well about just this interesting philosophical point in general about how everyone just looking at the united states or china or many different places and just saying we want to compete we want to be like and like the the developing world developing like that is not necessarily just all that great in general period so this also goes to thinking about new systems and just new ways of living life in general that don't necessarily need to funnel into the economic machinery that is trying to be pushed on to say that why don't you earn this you know these couple bucks by spending your time on on the specific task as well we were i wanted to also spend a little time on this one with you this this we we we have for the longest time been exchanging things of value and then not necessarily following through with someone else about what that thing that agreement was then we had these notaries or lawyers come into place that then wrote these things into code that we then both signed and then we put things into escrow made exchanges these types of things and now it seems like i can just download a document from the internet and now pay three dollars or whatever for that document and then do the exchange on a blockchain like ethereum and then you give me your car i give you five thousand bucks and it can just be like well we're getting close to that you know it's still you know right now um there are companies that are working on either libraries of smart contract templates that you can use to create these common agreements i think there's i think there's i don't know if any of them have really been completely fleshed out and caught on yet but there are many working on it because otherwise you'd have to you know program some smart contract yourself with these conditions but it requires you know being a software engineer but we're seeing that people are working on both libraries templates that you can like you know you can go online get legal templates kind of something like go online and get a smart contract template right and then we both you know sign it using our our you know cryptocurrency wallets and then we or we put some deposit into it you know and then it holds it until some conditions are met and then you know does it or um also uh there's also technologies that are actually trying to translate like human contracts into smart contracts some of them require a certain amount of like user assistance others just try to use natural language processing and and then create you like oh this is what we think the smart contract version of your legal contract is maybe make some changes and so a lot of people are working on that but i don't think any of them are really you know live with lots of case studies yet but we're definitely getting there um you also mentioned uh developing um yeah developing nations and it's true you know a lot of these blockchain use cases maybe initial or initial users are probably better in developing nations because they have no infrastructure and it's like they are much more need of it we're trying to replace like you know a payment system in a developed country well it already works there's a lot of vested interests in keeping the system as it is but like going to a small new country that doesn't have the same type of network it's a great opportunity to kind of like get these things running and then kind of export it to the rest of the world um which is why you see the like istonia succeeding yeah much with digital citizenry even like philippines yeah istonia like places in africa you know because they just didn't have or even india and like southeast asia um they really need these these systems more you know like land registry is a big one where you know like a lot of countries they don't know who owns what land and the government is a really bad keeping track of it and there's all these claims after you buy it so i don't know i loan that and maybe you can't trust the government because the government is corrupt but why if you put it in a blockchain everybody could see all the transactions and you maybe you don't even need the government in the end you know how does the government adapt to that but it really can force all the parties to be honest by putting the land registry in a blockchain and it's so simple and cheap than trying to make some paper process that relies on employing a lot of people who could be corrupted um what are the mechanisms that prevent uh someone tampering with an immutable ledger of my property being this piece of land in this city well okay that's the beauty of the blockchain right people say like um you know traditionally we've had to share what they call it like a distributed decentralized database but the problem with that usually is that there still is some database administrator and that database administrator can go in there and change records if they're dishonest or cheating or a hacker can go in and also get that right access and go in there and maliciously change records but the whole beauty of this blockchain with the chain of blocks you know each block kind of has a snap like each cryptocurrency is a different time interval but like bitcoin is about 10 minutes it's like each block contains the last 10 minutes worth of transactions and the thing is there's something called a cryptographic hash function which basically says like if i have you know these a thousand transactions here's a number that represents those thousand like maybe it's like you know like a 20 digit number and if you change one little bit of those transactions it's going to change this 20 digit number so like this is called a hash function and so what they do is they embed like the hash of the previous block in the current block and they just keep doing that all the chain so if you try to change some block that was like you know 10 blocks ago you'd have to go and recalculate all the in-between blocks and basically in the case of bitcoin it would take so much computation it would be impossible so by using this cryptographic hash function and this chain of blocks you're basically making it computationally impossible for someone to go back and change the past now someone can try to attack like the current block but you basically need to control like in different different cases could be 51 percent of the network or 67 percent of the network and well that's a sitting here we can get in these discussions about security but the idea is that well hopefully it's it would be impossible for me to like double the amount of computers mining bitcoin so I could attack bitcoin now maybe you know you could try to there you know people might try to scheme ways to do that but it's kind of these are some of the ways that it's secure and so by doing that it kind of guarantees no one can go back and alter the past and so that that's kind of this fun part of the fundamental debate innovation they call like double spend how do I know I'm not double yeah spending the same coins twice or going back and modifying some of this transaction it's basically next to impossible yeah yeah so a cryptographic hash function is the paradigm that exists today that can't be tampered with until something like the quantum supremacy is achieved by google which they just released content on then it gives them computational ability to do so well there's different there's different hashes and some of them are more quantum resistant than others quantum resistant yeah yeah what an what a point if so if one of them does none of them have like fallen victim to quantum computing yet it's true it could happen in the future I'm not a quantum computing expert but what I've heard people say is like if it looks like one of them is getting is getting criss to be broken by quantum computing then that blockchain will just hard fork to a different hash algorithm and I don't know like are they gonna I don't know how that impacts the past coins but basically they would they would modify the algorithm to use a quantum resistant hash function and there are ones that are supposedly more quantum resistant but I'm not a cryptographer really but you're we just have to watch that that that right there is how do you make a quantum resistant hash function how do you make it so sophisticated and successful that then it becomes resistant to the potential malicious attacks of quantum computing it's this is a very interesting conversational point because so many people are deciding to invest their money into things like cryptocurrencies and then and then just believing that it's absolutely certainly never ever ever going to have a massive issue like that but the computational power of quantum computation is just rising so quickly and that one is that one's a big one there's a little risk but people are you know trying to stay you know people are watching it very closely but yeah nothing is is full I like that the quantum resistant hash is everybody yeah yeah yeah I mean it's amazing I'm not a cryptographer but like you know it's so mathematical but it's yeah photography is so important for decentralization and yeah securing the transactions because you don't want anyone to you know all about this you don't want any third party to be able to interfere with what we've chosen so then how do you know then how do how do when I register this wallet how do you know then that it is the funds in this specific wallet but then you don't associate that wallet with my unique identifier of my name and then similarly with when you were talking about the piece of land how do you not identify your name with this piece of land well you optionally can right like you get basically like a public key and a private key for your wallet and that like the private key is some number that only you know and the public key is another number which everybody else refers to you by and so you just pass out that number to a lot of other people and then why do transactions with you you only know is that number you only give out your public key to other people your private key only you know right only you know and you don't even digitally yeah you don't even want to take a picture of it or pictures of it yeah right it and store it somewhere very very safe and so but so public key wise can be widely distributed and that is how people pay you from their also public key to public yes right right right and so they call it like pseudo anonymous and now there are there are waves where people are trying to obfuscate that and add privacy which is a separate discussion but let's just go with the simple case of these pseudo anonymous public keys you know I'm number you know 12 your number 32 and you know people can see that 12 cent 32 12 did a transaction with 32 but they don't know who is 12 and who is 32 but you could actually say like well I am going to sign some other transaction voluntarily stating my ID right I could say like oh well Jim is associated with 12 and I'm going to sign some message with my private key which only I can do and then they're like well Jim says 12 says he's Jim well that's still you're trusting me but you could trust a you could trust a third party could be a government or bank or somebody and that that third party could vouch for it too and say I met Jim and I looked at his ID and he's definitely 12 and they could sign it and then like but so they call these attestations but each you can have multiple parties attest to other people's information of course you you're trusting that party that attested to it but it might be someone you can trust so you could let this is kind of this and they call this a self-sacron identity so like I can have all these I on my same wallet number you know number 12 I can have my name it's tested to I could have my my my salary attested to my payments on time attested to they can all be linked to me but the beauty about blockchain is that they're all encrypted and I can allow other people to see that or not so it's like maybe I have this attestation that says number 12 is Jim as proved by the United States post office but it's kind of hidden by default and if I want to allow you to see it I can I can give you permission then you can go in and check you can give just one public kind of opt-in for this one attestation you say like yeah that when when the post office attested to the fact that I'm Jim here's this I'm gonna I'm gonna allow you to see that one bit of data and then you can go and improve oh yeah that is the post office that attested it but otherwise it stays private so this is this kind of opt-in privacy model they call it self self sovereign identity where you can soft self sovereign identity it's a big blockchain buzzword too so you control all these profile attributes and who can see them under what conditions otherwise they're all encrypted basically until that gets leaked if possible like if you do a little self soft self sovereign identity just self sovereign just self sovereign so if you do a self sovereign identity for the post office or for any of these other well they add an attestation to your identity basically and and then if they know that you're 12 then they know that they if that gets leaked then other people know you're 12 yeah right I mean but you could maybe selectively leak that I'm not sure maybe they they they shared amongst each other but like this kind of leads me to the next bit which is that it seems that you have to study a ridiculous amount of cutting edge yeah knowledge to know you know quantum resistant hash functions right there is a self a self sovereign identity right so and there's just new and new white papers being published in the space all the time and so people you know you gave these use cases for land there's use cases for virtual citizenship for exchanging goods via smart contracts you said there's smart contract libraries there's all the cryptocurrencies you know and you're trying to get you're trying to help them you know get into Japan or you're trying to keep an idea going on of like what's happening what do you do for parsing and what are your favorite concepts too well I mean yeah so user the blockchain industry had definitely has a challenge with user experience and onboarding new users non-technical users older users you know and creating but ideally you should make an app where that the person can't even tell there's blockchain underneath right now we're a little ways away from that but people are trying to do that it's take it's taken to take some time but people so I think we need a lot of evangelism a lot of education telling you know teaching people about it everybody you know if you if you believe in this technology you should teach other people about it and then it's going to take time for people to understand it get comfortable with it also for the user experience to improve so that it doesn't take someone technical to figure out how to back up their key and do this and you know and do this transaction that you know that unfortunately that will take time but I think we will get there and then what was I thinking so that definitely needs to improve also there's also some things for people's expectations need to change where it's like right now if I forget the password to my bank's website I don't lose all my money that I just call up the central authority the bank and they're like oh yeah we're the central authority we'll just issue a new pass password you know and like I get all my money back people are used to being stupid like you verify your identity yeah and then they issue me a new password but the flip side of that is they can confiscate my money they can lock my account the iris can like tap me and say okay stop him don't let him withdraw anything or you know somebody could you know they can you don't own it either they're just like you're you know they have the control but they also can get you out of problems where it's like with a public key and a private key in a wallet you lose that private key and it's like oh my god I just you know lost all this money and so people are trying to come up with ways to get around this problem maybe it's like I get five of my friends to vouch for me and if they all agree that I lost my key then I can reconstruct my private key and that's called social recovery for instance and so social recovery yeah yeah so I heard there's another one where you have a very specific pattern that only you can remember like kind of like if you get immersed into like a virtual reality environment and then you like walk a path that nobody else knows right now it's like 12 words or 24 words but that's still a lot to remember but yeah I could see like condensing that 12 word phrase into some geographic pattern or sequence or choosing some images this is specifically for key recoveries but yeah recovery so you don't lose because if you lose your private key technically because there's no third party now your funds are all gone because you're not actually holding any funds your key just unlocks on the blockchain so proving that those funds are yours so it's like you know the blockchain is this decentralized database the funds are in there but my key proves that those are mine so I don't I I'm not actually holding any funds I'm just saying oh by by with this key I can prove in the database that those that that's actually my funds in there but I lose that key well now no one can prove whose funds those are and you're basically you know like you know unrecoverable so people have to understand that risk maybe there's some recovery mechanisms that people develop and understand the benefits and the cons right like yeah if I lose it maybe I'm a lot my money but I have it in my control I can there's no with daily withdrawal limit I can send it to whoever I want around the world instantly you know like no one can stop me it's you know it's some people for really this self custody you know you're custody for and this asset doesn't have to be cryptocurrency right like we you said it can be like a tokenized share in some hard asset you know or in some revenue stream or in some business model you know it can be all these different things besides just a currency yeah so it gets quite powerful and then what and then what are you when you're looking at all of the different possibilities scape and all of the white papers being published what are you most excited about when you see all of the diversity well the the big industry problems being solved right now are basically scalability privacy interoperability and upgradeability kind of the sport things and so let's break let's break yeah bitcoin kind of suffers on all those or though they're trying to slowly improve it right so like scalability the problem with the blockchain right is that each node traditionally each node is verifying every transaction and so there's just like they're basically just all like clones of each other right which is great for security and enforcing rules but it's like well like after a certain level like you reach the maximum capacity of one load or how many transactions can be put in a block and it's like well then then like bitcoin people have to add more fees to get the transactions process sooner and so that's there are people coming up with different solutions to that and wasn't one of them that we discussed because it's if this heartbeat of the chain is happening every 10 minutes and that's been happening since 2008 that it's now 11 years of this right that's nothing to do or like the changes get so damn big it's like well now I can't put it on a raspberry pi I have to have a huge hard drive in a data center it has to be ssd for the iospeed requirements and it's like basically you want to get as the best decentralization is as many people very holding storing the train and verifying the chain as possible and it's like the more specific the higher spec server you need to you know store and verify the chain the more centralized it's going to be because not everybody can afford that kind of server but there are new protocols coming out trying to decrease those specs and you know make it more decentralized compression well not through cryptography a lot of it's a new consensus algorithm because someone's compressed someone's like pruning out old data snapshotting data at certain times so you can just like so you don't have to check every block cryptography there's a lot of different novel approaches in other cryptocurrencies besides bitcoin and bitcoins got their own thing they're trying to do different ways ways of scaling scalability so when I want to send you just a couple satoshi which is this breakdown so 100 million satoshi in a bitcoin yeah it's like 10 to the eight or something yeah and so then and so then if I just want to send you a couple satoshi my no one yeah no one's gonna want to process right your transaction fee would be much higher wouldn't be worth it wouldn't be worth it so the scalability is also right low cost transactions yeah that's huge yeah okay and litecoin is one that's doing well and well they um yeah so litecoin they they um yeah they they they're they have they're they've improved on bitcoin in that regard for sure okay and then what are the other three yeah so then we said a privacy right so the problem with the blockchain too is everybody sees that you know user 12 sent did this transaction with user 32 um now there are wait there are novel cryptographic algorithms that can basically like we can code that we did this transaction such that it's provable but you can actually see the details of that transaction so there are currencies like zcash and manero and other ones and even it's coming maybe to ethereum and stuff that's called zero knowledge proofs it's another huge cryptographic concept zero knowledge proofs also they they also disguise our transaction there's different way yeah they could they could disguise what the value that the transaction being done or even our identities as well like in z in zcash they don't even know how many zcash is in existence because it's it's obfuscated um for instance because everything is it's all this zk snark encrypted confidential transactions but so the problem with those now is that usually they're much even lower performance right it needs more cpu time you know more network bandwidth and it's like yeah you thought your blockchain wasn't high performance now now just like when now it's even slower just like when this world switches switched to hdps and encrypted websites no one wanted to do it because you could only run you know like one tenth the number of hdps websites that you could have the hdp website but now we've reached the point where servers don't mind everybody wants the privacy so in time they're also so they're trying that's all an area of active research mostly cryptographic and as the computational speed increases and the algorithms improve but then that gets into other problems with governments like no we want to be able to monitor it and so there's there's ways of saying like well maybe all transactions over 10 000 are made public to a certain entity we're other one you know but they could maybe encode rules like that now do they want to but so there's there's all these different possibilities but so I don't want it you know so scale privacy privacy yeah and then we said um like interoperability meaning meaning what so it's like I have I have bitcoin and you have ether and how do we swap it with each other without going to a centralized exchange or I have some transaction that happened on my network maybe my network is process like you know the network for peer-to-peer ride sharing and yours is a network for peer-to-peer hotel share you know room sharing and we want to have a user on both networks or trade a ride for a hotel or something how do you get those two decentralized blockchains to trust each other right what is the best solutions right now well there's there's new you it's very hard to do that with a existing blockchain that didn't already have some kind of thought put into it in advance now you they do it with like auctions or people can like try like kind of like market making or liquidity or auctions or some ways I'm not really an expert in it but there are newer next generation blockchains where that's being built in from the start where it's like it has this feature where you can have two different blockchains all you know into the same spec that then they can like easily bridge between each other and so there's some coming out like that such as polka dot and cosmos and more of these are trying to emphasize compatibility from day one although you know they're still is still evolving you know they're not really completely finished yet either but that's an area the industry is actively working on interoperability sounds super interesting and important it makes it it's kind of like how we each country has their own currency right now and it's it's similar in that sense like yeah you want I want to very easily make it so that the on the ride sharing blockchain versus on the rooms because you don't want to trust the third party sure you can do easily the third party that's what a centralized exchange is yeah we go to the exchange and I pony up this my say this is how much I want for my bitcoin that's how much you want for your ether and the exchange back to the transaction but then you're back to the same problem the exchange can sense the transaction can choose the transaction fees like the same problem yeah it's like well now we've got like you know you you've added this centralized paradigm back again and so everybody is so there's decentralized changes which are one way of doing that but even just this interoperability of transactions on different blockchain networks that want to talk to each other or exchange value with each other or something scalability privacy interoperability and now governance or upgrade ability is what I say the last one and so the problem is you've got this decentralized protocol how do you vote in a new change because basically what you're saying is that like you know we agreed that there was 21 million bitcoin when we made the damn thing but maybe that was a mistake right maybe we need to make you know 42 million and how do we how do we agree on a change when we said this was an immutable you know network and so there it started out you know bitcoin it's like well the miners all have to agree to just change the software they're running right and if enough miners run the new software then it kind of takes hold otherwise it splits in a you know in a hard fork or a soft fork and that's not optimal right and it's very slow and it's very you know political and it can be very separating but there are newer currencies where they're trying to actually put this they call governance process like on the blockchain where like I can say propose making some changes to this blockchain maybe you know changing the rules in some way and then everybody who owns that coin can vote oh I like that change I don't and then if it votes if they get enough votes then it goes to a testing period where they test the changes and then you know if that if that succeeds then like you know a month later it goes into this pre-implementation and then it's automatically deployed in all the nodes so Tezos is one coin that's kind of pioneering this governance this this governance mechanism for making amendments to the protocol but many are working on this problem but amendments to the protocol that's what this governance yeah yeah it's upgrading they call governance but it's really like governing changes to the protocol right there's different ways of not to be confused with implementing governance on blockchain where you could call like a decentralized time-lapse organization or you know there's different that's like a separate issue I'm something like governance here is that like voting in changes to the protocol itself which can be very you know you know you know it can create a lot of a lot of debate when you're trying to change just the idea of trying to amend something that's immutable in code is already in itself you know you but that's kind of what we're experiencing right now even with our constitution yeah right people are saying oh it's now dated document or is it you know like how do you add the amendments which came in and did very important pieces of addition to our code of law here and so maybe there is another way then to figure out how to amend the code in blockchains that make it a little bit more easy to do the upgrades especially to do the quantum resistant hash functions all these types of things like you need to amend as technology scale right and this gets into another point where it's like you can always take the easy way out and and make it more centralized to solve any of these problems but it's like the challenge is like how do you solve those problems while maintaining decentralization and so not every blockchain is equal some say oh we're just going to you know make 21 people decide the blocks we have these 21 block producers and the community will vote them in and out and we're all going to trust them but because there's only 21 block producers we can make a really fast blockchain so now you like sacrifice a certain amount of decentralization but you've added speed but so others will say like no no you can't do that it has to be told in like it's kind of philosophical as well as really kind of political religious battles so but everyone has a different in the blockchain or she has a different threshold for how much decentralization they think is needed and all the implications and difficulties that come with that level of decentralization and so it's kind of people are always arguing about that yeah which the discourse is what gets usually the progress that we need do you have anything that you know people should know about like trying to take business development of blockchain decentralization companies and try and help them gain seed in japan right so what does this look like when you try and migrate a company's decentralization protocols and infrastructures into another country well you know it's more a matter of building the community building the early adopters the customers people are going to use that protocol because the problem with a lot of these blockchains is that they have so little real use it's mostly the values driven by speculation you know they have a lot of potential but it's like yeah Intel that smart contract library is template library is there it's too hard for the Irish person to use so there's not a lot of use right so you're kind of speculating by buying it now that oh it's going to be popular in the future but so everybody wants to get mindshare build a community get get users get developers get people understanding get people building on it get apps you know get transactions that are doing real applications despite all these limitations and difficulties right and so luckily japan being the number three economy and also having a vibrant cryptocurrency exchange market there's a lot of interest in overseas companies to appealing to japanese businesses and consumers there to build or developers to start using their product you know and so that's a lot that uh so i tend to try to help those projects that want to build their community or customer base or developer base in japan uh and they're in you know and vice versa too there's some interesting japanese projects that want to come to america you know there's you know there's the big isolation and you know distance and language and culture and customs and so it's kind of a good niche but it can be very challenging at times for sure community customer base and developers are usually the things when you're trying to go across the borders you want to build those out and try and get the first stepping stones of your company in that it's all like hearts and minds yeah hearts and minds of users and developers and then also customers yeah and it's it's pretty fierce the competition you know just like microsoft had the fame or steven balmer video when he screams out developers developers like that was like everybody's like yeah that was so true it's like you know they knew that like if they have the strongest development developer community they'll have the best apps on their platform you know it's the same story or blockchain and the best apps on the platform or use cases or you know it can be you know it can be an app or a currency or some token or or some business process that's being moved to a blockchain does this only have to be an app per se but they in the decentralized apps are these smart contracts that kind of govern certain outcomes based on certain logic that's been you know committed in advance it could be even like a poker game where it's like we're going to agree on these rules and now we make putting a smart contract so now no one can cheat you know we can all rest assured that someone's not going in there and looking at the other players cards or altering the outcome of the game because we've all put in a smart contract that could be like an app although it's it's kind of it's a smart contract but it's also an app but this is a this is a power law issue where you have in the last 10 years um the big dogs that have come in and everyone's building apps on the big dogs as platforms and then that's kind of what it it's like how do you what happens when you have google that all right so this gets into yeah i know we talked a bit about this the other day too this whole like um as the the centralized service gets start there's a great um medium post on this why decentralization matters i i think i think it's by like christen or something but just look at why decentralization matters and it goes into this case where it's like when one of these like services say it's google say it's twitter say it's facebook when they launch or say it's apple app store google play you know they really desperate developers oh please develop on our platform yeah you know um we'll give you all these apis you know you can do this and then um as they get more and more powerful they just boot off some of those like twitter said oh we're no longer going to allow you know third parties access to our twitter api you know because we're big enough now we we're just not going to do it and all those people with apps they all have to like go out of business or then you kind of you have if you don't like that 30 commission yeah well just don't use the platform so like it turns out we're like at the beginning they court their users that are building the value of the network but then as they get stronger and stronger they're at odds those users like and they end up starting like you know they they start censoring them or controlling the platform locking down the platform controlling the fees controlling what apps you can publish you know all that and it kind of starts going against the community that built it um even you know like ride sharing or apartment sharing right room sharing you know it's the same thing when they're building the network they're really nice and they say oh we're just going to you know cut all the drivers salaries now because we had all those promotions when you're starting the company but now that we've made billions of dollars in this company yeah screw you guys you know like we're going to lower the rates you know and in the centralized model they don't have any any recourse any option to challenge that but in a decentralized model they could actually kind of like they can maybe even own in the network or vote on the the policies of the network or be rewarded in shares of the company for you know each month that they use the service you know there's all these like this co-op business model could be researched into blockchain of course we've got lots of taxation and legal things that need to change in the meantime but you can see that day probably coming where that the users of the network gain value or the people who provide the liquidity and the service the network are also have a have a have a skin in the game to get upside of the value of the network it's not just like the investors that get all the rewards and the users and and liquidity providers are forced to play in that by their rules so that's really fascinating area and it's going to take time to to manifest but you can see it starting to and that's really exciting this is one of I think one of the most important ways to perceive what's been happening with the emerging markets is that there's this deep call for yeah come develop come build with us and then once the the power lot kicks in and they have you know millions and millions of people using their service then they get the ability to decide on what they want to do with the censorship server the precondition they choose the prices yeah they said they they approve all the apps they chew they prove they prove how much everyone's going to get paid they they say all you know they can lock down different aspects of their platform that compete with them or in this in this case of decentralization it would be something like a developer community that is the one that manages the right yeah you yeah you could have some governance mechanism or like say you had some token and the token holders get to vote on changes or right or there are no changes or you know or the users are the owners yeah and they they can decide the the prices and this you know the changes to the system and much more democratically and then the also the the range of possibilities here people are talking about taking in biotech so many people are talking about taking my biometrics and just constantly streaming them up into the cloud and having it be on a secure immutable digital ledger that's constantly being parsed for oh is there a pathology that's developing let's uh make an intervention to keep the person in peak health you know there's like all the stuff with agriculture and the food industry people are like oh did this actually come from this farm we want to know if it came from this farm or not and there's so many of these different use cases decentralization in this sense is kind of like the internet's like the internet just got into everything ai getting into everything it seems like decentralization's getting into everything is there anything that it's not gonna get into that's a great question um but what you're referring to is this immutable property as well this kind of opt-in how people are using it you know those are are very compelling reasons to switch to a blockchain based solution yeah unfortunately you know a blockchain really is an extremely inefficient database you know and by you know this needs to be solved but it's like you know storing stuff in a blockchain well you're storing maybe 10 000 copies of the same thing you know and it's like now do you need all 10 000 copies or can we can we start aging out old copies and so yeah unfortunately there are a lot of benefits but there are also a lot of drawbacks right now although so we need time for some of those to be solved but we I think in time those will be solved and the scalability and even like the amount of data you can store in the blockchain will improve and it will make more of those possible um but we still have to remind ourselves it's not like the the panacea you know like there there are you know cons to you know to a blockchain one of which being all these you know redundant copies that are in a sense could this be something like an ASIC like an application specific integrated circuit for blockchain so there's going to be different blockchain protocols that are made for agriculture for health care etc stuff like that well um you know and then the interoperability is the crucial thing right right so so one of these next generation blockchains that has interoperability from the beginning can yet like these different so like say you have an agriculture thing that's built on that or supply chain thing that's built on that same platform they can easily interoperate um but maybe if it's like on a completely different platform well it can interoperate but maybe it has more restrictions or somewhat centralized you know there's all these different trade-offs unfortunately but we will see that improve for sure now the other thing you were saying you know is there any industry that's not going to be impacted yeah I mean you know you know Fin so just look at like what has been impacted right like you know fintech is an easy one because transfer of value is something that really needs this this this property of like no cheating no this immutability and no censoring right and easy transact frictionless transfer so finances is a very easy one real estate was another real estate yeah like then you got no other other transfers of value maybe it's it's a transfer of value of real estate or some right or some you know stock or equity or revenue share in a physical asset or revenue stream or a company those are also very easy to grasp then you get into like kind of like these intermuted immutability aspects like you were saying like the supply chain where stuff coming from can we guarantee that it's never that it's that no one has changed the the the source that this the log of every place this thing has been in now maybe when you put the data in it has to be audited so that you make sure you're like your you know every data input is kind of like a potential weakness if you put the wrong data in even a supply chain you know so it's like if there you know each warehouse has to be scanning all the items that go in honestly they have to maybe audited you know and checked but then once it's in there you know like well no one could have changed this this log of like all the places this item has come from so this immutability that's really good for auditing as well you know auditing it could be auditing the location auditing any business process right this immutability and then this you know um getting rid of the intermediate well there's so many intermediaries in our society so you know that I think you're going to see more and more areas that that that you know that that it's adopted by reaching into maybe you know media content creation advertising you know matching ads viewing ads um you know creating content attributing content tracking royalties tracking intellectual property um you know doing it in a way that's that's audited and transparent and you know like no one's you know and and and regimented where it's not like I'm going to get my royalties two months later and they might say oh we didn't approve those because they're from this this unauthorized country this unauthorized users you're just not going to get those these are a lot of problems people have now but like putting all that in a blockchain makes it very um you know codifies it yeah it codifies it really well and also um iot and robotics iot like m2m machines talking to each other they can send little transactions to each other you know they can send value or exchange data or verify their identities um yeah and in ai is one the problem is ai such big data sets that you can't really store that in a blockchain right now maybe you can store it in a decentralized database and link that into the blockchain but you're you know people are working on on that so I just want to say like not all these are really doable using today's technology because maybe the database size of the data is too big or it's too you know too fast or you know too many transactions but as the underlying blockchain technology improves more of these use cases that are possible will materialize but maybe some I mean so we're starting to see the easy ones materialized now but there's a whole lot more out there waiting in the wings you know everything from like tracking maintenance you know you could track like airplane servicing or oil field servicing we have all these different parties doing operations on a common asset you're not really sure like do they really clean the oil well do they really you know take out the oil do they do what they said they were that's one use case that some people are doing same thing with like an airplane servicing well this part was put in here and then it was cleaned there and like it was refueled here all these different parties are modifying the same data but instead of having all these different silo databases where they could all be kind of modified by a centralized admin put them all in one database and all in one blockchain database like you know it's it's in sync no one can go in and change the other parts these are some areas that that people working on now that are feasible using today's technology but it'll just keep expanding into many areas but you know it's still it's not the panacea it's not you can still put bad data in you can you know like you know I could I could lie at when it in the warehouse and say some other package came in put that in so you still have to have checks and balances when you're when you're dealing with like physical inputs but you know people will you know like we have ISO certifications and we have sanitation inspections and like I think there'll be procedures in place for that type of thing yeah but something about it seems like there's going to be a better and better application specific protocols yeah I'm not sure that your asik comment yeah machine to machines kind of interesting because it's going to require a specific style that in like there's so many machines talking to so many there might be an asik in some iot device or some node but the whole idea is like your your wallet basically is just going to run some software on your computer or your smartphone but yeah but the physical hardware devices they might have some kind of basic processing yeah I have some other thoughts okay so these other thoughts are um a couple like interesting rapid fire ones um first one is so many people have commented on this that they think that that this that this beautiful technology was gifted to us by something that's not even human what is Satoshi Nakamoto getting all mystic on me um yeah I know well personally I think it's a group of people maybe government or maybe just like anarchist type people who wanted to have you know like unstoppable transactions for free economy or it could be some faction of the government that really that's that maybe it's some white hats who thought like well we need to implement this so we can rebuild the current financial system I feel like there's got to be some amount of divine inspiration in it somewhere personally because it's definitely not one person because it's too complex to be designed by one person you know personally I think so I don't think it's anything to do with Japan either I think it's a group of individuals you know maybe some of them did have some you know off-world interaction or inspiration from some other realm possibly now are they part of a government unit like some secret government unit or some you know some white hat group or even just some anarchist group that it's like yeah we want it we want to do you know transactions without having anybody get in our way could be any of those but it's brilliant how they pulled it off right like no one no if there was a Satoshi Nakamoto that would be the the government could like go and imprison that person and force them to change the code or do and they couldn't really do that but like they could really cause havoc because there's no person to go after it's it's the beauty of it right the way it was like released in phases it's like there's no person to attack and you know it's just so beautiful how like yeah I really don't think one person could have thought all that on their own it's too perfect right yeah these ways of deploying code updates to society I think may become more and more popular over time people may like to just deploy things in a very uh anonymous way and then make it so that um people can reap the benefits of those deployments and I and I like I look forward to things like that you can like build some service put it on the blockchain everybody use it right like maybe it's some you know it could be anything you know it could be some data marketplace where it's like buyers I can go and you know upload my biometric data and you and you can buy it off me and it's just matching buyers and sellers and it could just be like this they call it a utility right where it's like no one controls it it's autonomously running it's doing all the you know everybody can see the code so they can know that it's not cheating it's not doing anything nefarious and it's just you know exchanging your coins for mine for this data and it's like you can make this utility and put it out there and anybody can use it could be on planet could be off planet you know and even non decentralization and blockchain related ideas that could come to our world that people could birth into our world anonymously right you just go and make this decentralized system and put it out there and it's kind of self-sufficient yeah create some sort of new way for us to be able to uh to to measure the chemo electroconnectome in your brain and instead of saying that you are the one that owns it rather deployed anonymously and see what happens with that style of thinking yeah we yeah that's great yeah stuff like that's really interesting to me um I also want to know what has been your relationship with the reason why all of this even exists why are we even here what created this what is the nature of this reality yeah I mean yeah I good good question um yeah obviously mankind is being more aware more interconnected we were in this big societal change of transparency we're like previously opaque processes are coming to the light data leaks so easily um people share information that's part of it but people also are more curious you know they're raising their vibration they're more they're more um more a lot you know more more aware more conscious and I think there's all that's that's the backdrop that that we're looking at and then as we're becoming more aware we start to realize well wait I kind of gave away too much of my power to that authority over there and they're really ripping me off they're just like you know selling reselling the service to me but they're charging this much more and they're not really providing much value I didn't realize like there's there's all these like leeches like what is it um rents so they say in the industry rents converting yeah rent seeking intermediaries to what is um yeah to to basically peer to peer so it's like there's all these rent seeking intermediaries in our society and they're taking this huge leech tax on all of our transactions of prosperity and they're saying that money where you know are they giving it like oh they're like the rich families or these powerful elites or the deep state or um whoever right this this money is being funneled somewhere but we're not getting it you know but then you can actually see well with this and they're not only that they could be interfering with the transaction censoring them changing them and it's like well gee I never realized all the intermediaries in our society that are you know charging these huge fees and doing very little now in fairness those processes used to be a lot harder you know like it used to be meant you know sending a international bank transfer I'm sure like back you know before when the computer's just getting started actually was a lot of manual labor and stuff but it's gotten the point where it's basically all automated but they're still charging these exorbitant rates because they can you know and then they get these these rents seeking intermediaries who are ingrained they're maybe protected by laws or business relationships and they're just getting all this money for doing nothing maybe it's credit card transaction processing fees or maybe it's you know money transfer fees or whatever and it's like are you really doing three percent worth of work you know for that my or it's you know probably not but people are awakening to that fact they're also awakening to like the debasement or you know the inflation of our monetary supply and all that and and they're kind of taking their their their their their self sovereignty back um right now and it kind of fits perfectly into black wall you know using blockchain and decentralization you actually can improve a lot of these processes which you've now awakened to how bad they have been for all these years you know and so that's kind of the backdrop I see um I also like the words that you use there you said that the nature of the reality is becoming more alive it's becoming more interconnected and then there was this there's these ways that we get like oh well why am I paying so much money to the third to the third party and then you kind of wake up more and you we create solutions to that issue that arose in as part of this uh creation that we're embedded in um another question I think is important to ask you um do you think that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence well I'm not a believer particularly in the singularity you know I think I think people try to I think uh technology is kind of as much as I love technology I think um this whole like man merging with machine I think is very against like spirituality because really I think we ourselves can do a lot of these I mean there might be some you know conversion I don't think it's going to be like a cyborg you know I think some of this they've got all these brain machine interface stuff they're working on but I think a lot of that like if we become more spiritual and tap into our own innate abilities we can do a lot of that stuff without having to rely on machines and so people are like well we'll just do it all with machines but it's like well you could or you could become more aware more more intuitive more trusting your own feelings more psychic or whatever if you just stopped and meditated more or you trusted yourself more and I think that I hope that that will also gain in in popularity and also awareness so that people don't think like I have to I feel like there's this feeling it's like I have to rely on technology to make myself a better human but I think really people can look inside and and we can evolve now I'm still working on this personally you know it's not like I can I'm not it you know I'm not like psychic I don't have a lot of these abilities yet but I feel like we all can develop these abilities a lot more than we are and not have to rely on technology as much as people think we're going to have to rely on technology so I'm not really like a fan of this whole singularity and machines you know making man better because I think like that's going to come with a lot of other risks because those machines are also going to be able to control man or people will control the machines or you're going to give up some of your humanity or you know I really think that that's kind of the wrong way to go personally but you know this is all kind of conjecture at this point okay and then personally yeah it's how how about um what about the deepest emotion that you've ever felt um you know I would say probably the deepest emotion is after you have kids you know this is kind of cliche it's not even really sure how to answer that question but probably you know like you know there's this whole thing of service to others versus service to self and that's part of the human evolution is that like as you become more service to others you are fulfilling your mission here on earth and what is one of the things that forces you to be service to others but having a kid it's like you can't expect that baby to like do any of this stuff you're going to have to do stuff for right no matter how selfish a person you are you know like you're going to have to be less selfish if you have a kid especially for you know for moms but also for dads right and so that whole path on like trying to give service to others is is kind of tied into this and I feel like that you know once you kind of you know it's kind of you have to be comfortable with it it's like oh man you know now I have to spend all this and you look at like how parents who have problem kids and they're with that kid for like 30 40 years still like going at it like you know it's like amazing how you know you know putting that other life you know it equal or ahead of their own and it's just like they're not getting anything in return you know they're just doing it out of the goodness of their heart and like that I think that emotion and that transition to service to others is kind of this like probably the one of the deepest lessons that that that we learn um you know it's kind of as you get old as you get older you kind of get wiser but it's true like some people just never they don't you know they're always super selfish but most people as they get older they get less selfish and either they volunteer or they have kids or all that or the universe will force you to in some way too if you're holding out many times what has been your relationship with the with creation or with the divine or with god or with infinite consciousness or whatever you want to call it what has been your relationship with that as you've grown through your life well I'm lucky I was never subjected to the dogma of an organized religion I did go to Sunday school like my mom wanted me to experience stuff so I think she put me in Sunday school one summer and I like you know excitedly studied the bible and like you know but I never we never like it wasn't like you have to do this or we never went to church every week and I feel like my mom was very metaphysical as well as what is like um you know curious about many different disciplines so she would always you know research them all and kind of you know take her best out of all these different ones I think that's a kind of cool attitude um so that's kind of how I was was raised and you know but for the longest time I was you know so I was so of course really I'm not trying to knock all religion but a lot of organized religion is used to control people and there's a lot of dogma and there's a lot of mankind you know man using it for other reasons to control their man um in my opinion and I'm not saying all religion is bad but I'm glad you know I wasn't interested in that dogma and that whole like going to it and FaceTime and you know I I'd much rather like find my own path and what did you find in that yeah I know my path you know um you know I there was a period of time I felt like well who knows if there's a god I must be agnostic you know you go through these phases oh I think I'm agnostic but no I'm not really saying there is a god but life is not a coincidence right like it's too perfect to be a coincidence and I think speak to that a little more yeah too perfect to be a coincidence yeah that mean like the whole yeah I mean I don't want to get started on a whole long discussion here but there's you know really I think what I've well the realization that I've come to is that this is really a classroom right and we come here to live certain lessons and evolve and it's not that like this is the only game in town it's not like this was just we just happened to like evolve from like an amoeba to a person and there's only one place in the world like this and we're so special and I really think it's it's it's everything every day every experience is teaching you in some way and um you know it doesn't make it any easier but at least you can kind of like try to have a good mindset to be a good student you know be a good student in the game of life it's hard knocks but you know we're here we might as well make the best of it but I feel like there's there's definitely the rules of a reality all that I feel yeah it's definitely been set up by some higher force whatever that is and we are here experiencing it because it's fun and it's educational and it's it's giving us um yeah and we're growth right and and we're just trying to grow his souls and I love that Jim yeah that's beautiful oh you're really kind every moment is a beautiful experience of some sort some sort of a lesson something to learn some way for this creation to experience itself yeah yeah yeah exactly and so all of us having that here and wherever else is uh such a beautiful process of growth and such a it's not easy it's hard work right it's hard knocks but but but it's fun right like how would you know like you know how would it felt like to hug somebody or to go on a swing or you know right or watch a movie if there was no concept of time you know or have all these experiences right like it's it's definitely a thrill but it doesn't make it any easier how do you um help your uh your your girls who are three and six yeah three and six now yeah six now how do you yeah hear like oh that is really fast so how do you um help with the rapidly changing world that we're going to with all the different technologies and stuff and also that statement that we just talked about with this being a classroom this creation being classroom how how can how do you work those things into your yeah to be honest you know they're so young we haven't done a lot yet but I think kind of understanding cause and effect and like your actions and the outcome they have another people you know I think kids are by their nature are just selfish because of course like that's how you are when you're young you just want more and you want to be gratified and you want what you want and so but you can hopefully instill upon this like well there's a limited resource and if you don't if you have it somebody else doesn't have it or you can share your limited resource with somebody else or you you might do this action but look how it's going to affect that person kind of this cause and effect and sharing I think they can kind of start to grasp those concepts now hopefully they um they resonate with it and it doesn't cause them to like become more selfish you know I haven't quite this is a chapter I'm still fairly writing I feel but I kind of look at it from that perspective you know and like teaching them the value of life you know the value you know value of work and the impact of their actions and and you know and trying to help other people um some of all that but you know it's not easy and I'm not you know I'm still I'm still figuring out a lot of it I mean there's still how young is too young I don't know you know but hopefully they can at least see what the parents are doing and emulate that so yeah um and then and then how about um we we we have to ask you the the the questions that we ask at the end of the show right the first one is are we in a simulation um well it depends how you define simulation but yeah I mean life could just be I mean it's like a game right like we basically say oh I think yeah it could be something it's like here are all the rules of the simulation like you're doing some atmospheric simulation of how the wind particles are affecting the sun and changing the weather it's like well yeah I mean here's the laws of physics here's like the laws of gravity here's the laws of you know like cause and effect karma whatever and it's like yeah now go and play in that sandbox so it's like your interest so maybe you have this free will to kind of you know choose the path in this simulation but you're still governed by this set of rules which are kind of inescapable at least at this point maybe as a collective eventually we modify them but they seem pretty fixed to me um but maybe as our consciousness evolves we we got we see we governance and we we we voted a new upgrade to the system I don't know about that but or we create quadrillions of simulations with new rules are maybe another way of looking at it um so I do feel like in in if you call that a simulation then yeah maybe it is a simulation but I mean it's not like someone I don't think it's like people predetermined our path through it but maybe there were certain outcomes which were more probably just like you know that wind particle it's 80% chance it's gonna blow up there you know 20% chance it's gonna blow it on here maybe the same in our life like we knew about these probabilities and then we go in and then we just start you know finding a path through government by being governed by these rules and so maybe that is a simulation but it's not like it was a predetermined thing that somebody else is just running or something what do you think is most beautiful in this creation well I mean really the beauty of nature I guess you know just like how every you know it's like every moment has some beauty in it maybe it's the clouds maybe it's the the the trees the branches the leaves you know like all these all that you know like there's such beauty and you know the cell the organism the shape that they know everything is just it's you know it's the I guess the the design of what is it um uh what's the word I'm looking for um gestalt or whatever where it's like every every little you know or also gestalt but also fractal where it's like you know well you know the animal has these organs and these cells and these and after a while they these these DNA and then that repeats in this pattern it's just like all this the way all these different complex systems all relate and also just like the beauty to watch you know the beauty to listen to the to music or birds or see the sunset it's like every every moment has some beauty in it if you just you know observe it and so I think that's that's that's really you know fun I wish we could kind of see the full spectrum of light and maybe hear more frequencies and have a little bit more awareness to all the emf out there but still we have a pretty good you know range of vision and you may be augmenting our senses towards that yeah I hope so I think agreed you can totally in in every experience every moment there's beauty to be seen yeah and maybe some have more like the children and things like that that you've experienced that have had maybe a little bit more a different type of beauty or yeah natural you know they they're unreserved you know yeah yeah um pretend yeah on yeah they're not they're not fake you know they're it's very hard they mean of course they can they can eventually pretend but but they're they're much more real yeah this has been so interesting Jim thank you for coming on our program yeah I really enjoyed this talk yeah thank you for having me and good luck with your channel yeah you're doing great job thanks thanks we get the opportunities to sit down with people like you and help share these messages congrats on all the great work also on trying to build the new world with blockchain and decentralization and also on trying to bring it around the world to places like Japan um also everyone to have more conversations with your friends families co-workers and people online about these types of subjects have more conversations about decentralization and their future with technologies like blockchain check out the links in the bio below to Jim on LinkedIn and on Twitter check those out and also support the artists the entrepreneurs the spiritual leaders the organizations in your communities that you believe and support them help them grow you can find all of simulations links below all of our links check those out and go and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world thank you very much for tuning in we love you very much and we will see you soon thank you all peace


Sometimes you want to be able to show someone the results of your what-if analysis and you can do that using a tool called scenario manager. I've set up some scenarios here one two and three and in those scenarios we're going to change the selling price R the demand D and the amount he buys Q to these different values and one of the things you need to do to make your report really look as good as it should is to use the name manager to name these cells. You can click on a cell and type in a name in this name box up there. I prefer to use the define name tool and here it looks in an adjacent cell for a text value in this case it sees selling price R. Note that it does not allow you to have spaces so it puts an underscore there. I like to only put my names on one page or one worksheet so I'm going to select my scenario worksheet here and click okay. So now I've named that and if you look at name manager here you can see I've named the other four components that we want to show up in the scenario manager. So let's look at scenario manager. Here's our scenarios we go to data what if analysis again scenario manager and we need to add a scenario. I've already set up two and three here but I'll show you how you add it. I'm going to click on add the name in this case is one and I'm going to get rid of those cells. The changing cells we're going to change R D and Q so I want to click on R which is B5. Now because these other two cells are not adjacent I can't drag that down but what I can do is just go down to the other cell hold down the control key and it click and it adds that cell. I'll go down to the Q cell control click and it adds that cell as well and click okay. Now it asks me what prices what values are in each of those cells so I'm going to put in 15 cents 0.15 and then it's 3800 and 3900 and I click okay. Now I've got these scenarios set up and we can show the results. I'm going to click on scenario three there and click on show and it changes over here and you can see the values. If I click on one and click on show it automatically changes everything for me and I can look at the changes on my profit and click on show again and I can see those values. Now I can use something called a summary report to capture these scenarios in one place and it's really easy to do. We go back to data what if analysis scenario manager again and I just if I've got these set up I can just click summary and it asks me which results cell am I interested in. It is in my profit cell B17 and I just click okay to get the scenario summary. We're not going to talk about the pivot table report in this course. I'm going to click okay and it inserts my summary report. You can see with the name cells it makes it very easy to read there. These are the three scenarios it's out of order because I entered the first scenario last but it shows the values and it shows the profit. Obviously there's a bust. You can see that instead of 20 cents I entered $20 and that's the reason the profit jumped up to $77,000. So anyway that's how to use scenario summary manager and hopefully you won't make a type of when you enter your values.


Why did Nintendo and Illumination make the Super Mario Bros. movie? 30 years after the debut of the original live-action Mario movie, Nintendo's mascot is heading back to the big screen for an all-new animated feature. Considering just how poorly the first Mario movie was received, it's unsurprising that Nintendo has been hesitant to license its characters in other media ever since. So why make a new Mario movie? Why make it now? And why make it with Illumination, rather than any of the other many studios that have pitched to Nintendo? The answer to this question involves retro gaming, theme parks, Samurai Jack, Spider-Man, and Sonic the Hedge Dog. No, you heard that right. Sonic the Hedge Dog. First, why make a Mario movie at this specific moment in time anyway? According to Shigeru Miyamoto, this decision ultimately came out of conversations around porting retro games to new consoles, such as offering NES games on Nintendo Switch Online. He said, Our assets include our past software, and we can continue to leverage those assets even now 30 years after the original titles were released. Unfortunately, when the original hardware that supported this software is no longer available, that software must be ported to new hardware. As we continue to port our older games to newer hardware, we have come to think that if we have assets in the form of video content in addition to our beloved video game titles, and if we can leverage both of these assets over the long term, then I can see how our business content could. Miyamoto's point here is similar to one we made in our recent video on retro game piracy. Games have a very short shelf life compared to a lot of other media. A film doesn't age in the same way as a game, and is just as accessible a decade or two later as it was at the time of its initial release. Thus, Nintendo has begun exploring other media to create enduring representations of popular characters that will serve as default, iconic introductions to their properties. It's likely helped that Nintendo has received continued interest over the decades from movie studios who have been desperate to get their hands on Mario. In 2013, Miyamoto said in an interview with Buzzfeed, There have been a lot of cases where we've been approached by different people with lots of different ideas. So in that sense, I am interested in lots of ideas, but we always have to take into account the fact that game entertainment and movie entertainment is quite different, one being passive and one being active. Those don't always necessarily mix. Thanks to the Sony email hacks in 2014, we know a little about one of these interested parties in particular. Avi Arad, the producer best known for his contributions, for good and ill, to the Spider-Man movie franchise. In 2014, on his way to meet with Miyamoto and then Nintendo president Satoru Owata, Arad emailed the Hio Ups Sony to say, I am heading to Tokyo. I am going to try and bring back a little plumber. I guess we can all use our pipes cleaned. He later sent another email to say, I am the proud father of Mario, the animated film. While not finalized, the producers at Sony were fairly convinced that the deal would go ahead, with Sony animations Michelle Raimo Coyata sending Arad a congratulatory basket filled with Mario merchandise, and said, let's build a Mario empire. I can think of three to four movies right out of the gate on this. So huge! Studio Head Amy Pascal made the suggestion that an initial film could be directed by fan favourite, Gendi Tartakovsky, who had gone on to do Sony's Hotel Transylvania films, but is best known for his work on Samurai Jack, Dexter's Laboratory, and the original Star Wars The Clone Wars cartoon. This deal, though, didn't go through. Instead, these conversations led Sony to acquire the rights to a different video game character, Sonic the Hedgehog. Or, as Sony Pictures Senior Vice President Dick Sano said in another leaked email, Dear all, Hannah Minghella just called to give me an early heads up that a very popular video game for years from Sega Game Maker, named Sonic the Hedgehog, will be made into a live-action film. As the subject of the email was also written, Sonic the Hedgehog, we can only conclude that this wasn't a typo, and that Sony Picture Vice President genuinely thinks that this is the character's name. Sony ultimately sold the Sonic rights to Paramount, which turns out to have been a pretty good deal for Paramount. It's unsurprising that Sony's attempts to secure the Mario rights fell flat. Miyamoto has been candid over the years about his reluctance to explore films. To investors, he said, Take video content development using Nintendo IP, for example. I wasn't in favour of the idea originally. My way of thinking changed, and it's not so much that I wanted to make a Mario movie, but that I felt Nintendo should have more video content. More people will have access to our IP with video content, and so the number of people who will come into contact with Nintendo IP will continue to grow in the future. It seems that part of the reason for changing his mind on the Mario movie was finding the right creative team to partner with, and this came about largely because of work on the Super Nintendo World theme parks. There has long been talk that Nintendo could make a movie because making a game is like making a movie, but they are completely different to me. Interactive experiences are completely different from non-interactive media, and to make a movie I want a film expert to do the work. Thinking that way, I have talked with all sorts of different movie directors and producers, and eventually I was introduced to Illumination via Universal Parks and Resorts, with whom we are developing theme park attractions. As a producer, Chris Melodandri, Illumination's CEO, is noted here for movies like Minions and Sing, but he is a veteran with a ton of experience, including the movie Ice Age and Stints at companies like 20th Century Fox Animation. When I talked with Chris, he said he had read a lot of interviews with me and felt we had a similar approach to creation. Talking about our similarities, we clicked, and decided maybe we should do some kind of collaboration. So the reason why this version of the Mario movie has gone ahead with this creative team at this studio at this time is because Shigeru Miyamoto finally found a studio head that he felt he clicked with creatively. The moral of the story then is that sometimes waiting for just the right partnership can lead to wonderful results.


There's more in the name. So I saw over at the NASA, we're at the 15th center. I was like, ooh. I can't remember where. I can't remember where.


We need more than the saturated misogyny of heteronormativity to tell us who we are. We need more than the neo-tribalistic colonialism to tell us where we are. We need more than the late-stage categories of capitalism to tell us why we are here.


Being trans, everyone doesn't have that look that you can walk in the daytime, or you can go and have a regular nine to five jobs. There is a lot of transgender people doing sex work because they don't find any job. It's a survival thing. I immigrated to this country when I was 14. When I get to New York City, I don't have no family here. I don't have no friends or place to go. Piani Garcia is a trans woman and activist who grew up in the Mexican city of Veracruz. In 2005, she paid a coyote to smuggle her across the border. She was hoping to find a community that would accept her sexuality. After living on the street for months, Garcia says she was taken in by middle-aged Columbia men who used her immigration status to intimidate her into working for him as an underage sex worker. I do sex work for him. He always takes the money. He doesn't give me money to me. He forced me to do it because he was, you know, treating me by calling the police. She eventually escaped and landed a job busing tables at a Manhattan restaurant. When Garcia started taking hormones to begin transitioning, she says her changing appearance caused her to lose her job. I was looking for a job for three months and I didn't find anything. I had to pay my bills, rents and everything. I decided to do sex work. But at this time, no one was forcing me to do it.  It's a survival thing. Today, Garcia works for the non-profit Make the Roe, New York, INDS campaign to decriminalize prostitution, which would prevent law enforcement from intervening in the selling of sex, between consenting adults. Decriminalization bills have floundered in New York and Washington, D.C. And in recent months, the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted attention away from the issue. But advocates hope that the latest push for criminal justice reform could re-energize the movement. The first step is for policymakers to acknowledge that, for many people, selling sex is their best option for survival, and criminalizing that choice only makes their lives more difficult. Survival sex is just that. It is survival. I have no other alternative. I need this money. I'm going to do it. That is a cognizant choice. You may not have had the best of options on the table, but you made a choice. Nat Pa is a formal policy chair for National Survival Network. She says lawmakers and advocates conflict consensual sex work by adults with human trafficking. If you're making a conscious choice, it is not trafficking. If there are elements of forced fraud or coercion, and you have a third-party controller who is doing the forced fraud or coercion, that is when it becomes trafficking. Yes, there is the possibility that someone is trafficked and forced into those situations. But the vast majority of consensual sex work is just work. People are surviving, needing their day-to-day needs by selling sex. The federal government has earmarked funding to local police departments to crack down on trafficking, but local law enforcement agencies often use that money to run sting operations that lead to the arrest of sex workers who are over the age of 18 and acting voluntarily. In December 2019, members of the nonprofit Honor Individual Power and Strength organized a Kiki Ball in Washington, D.C. to celebrate the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. We're having an amazing time. End violence against sex workers. Kiki Ball is here, D.C. Number 17. We love you. Come on. Charisse Monay is a former sex worker and advocate, supporting the trans community in the D.C. area. And he's gonna give power to clap their hands. I need you to clap your hands. With sex work, you know, a lot of people don't see it as survival work as I do, because being trans, everyone doesn't have that look that you can walk in a daytime, or you can go and have a regular nine to five jobs, so they turn that 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sex working job where it's safe. We don't get misgendered. We don't get harassed for coming to a workplace. We don't get questioned about what bathroom we use, and they have to change the bathroom sign. You're in your own home. You deal with one individual. So be it, it's a nasty dance, but it's a dance that is done every day. In 2019, two of Monay's friends are Shanti Carmen and Zoe Spears, who are also trans sex workers, were shot and killed in the D.C. suburbs. So one never knows what actually transpired that evening, other than they were murdered senselessly. Last year, Garcia was attacked with pepper spray on the streets of Jackson Heights in Queens. You can get beat up on the street and you cannot go to the police to do a report. That's unfair. In New York, sex workers are sometimes arrested because of a 1976 law that criminalized law uterine for the purpose of engaging in a prostitution offense.  In 2019, a handful of New York state senators introduced legislation that would have repealed that law, but the efforts did not succeed. I can only imagine what it was like to be walking down the street and to be pulled out and being harassed by police officers. Clearly, we need to do something now. Garcia has had several interactions with the criminal justice system, including serving time for assault in 2010. Although she says she was acting in self-defense during a homophobic attack, she served time in Rikers. They put me in a male facility. I was 19 years old at that time and it was so difficult. They didn't give me hormones, no women's clothes, nothing like that. As a survivor of sex trafficking, Garcia says the criminalization of sex work only makes it harder for victims to report abuses. When I was forcing to do sex work, the option of going to the police passed by my head, but I was afraid of going because of the work that I was doing. I know that it's illegal and they can arrest me. Decriminalizing sex work is going to help those who are getting trafficking to not feel afraid of going to the police. If you are not afraid of one, forcemate, if you're not afraid of going to the police because you're no longer the target, in theory, police would then be able to focus on the abuse instead of just these massive street sweeps. When Garcia got out of jail, she joined to Crime New York, a new coalition that helped draft the bill to decriminalize sex work in the state. I have many conversations with people that do survival sex work. I can say that most of the people that are saying decriminalizing sex work is not okay are people that never in their lives have the experience of settling their body to eat.  I pay my mother's rent. I pay my mother's insurance. And doing that type of work, the stigma can be heavy on you. But for yourself, you're not sitting there saying that I give up. I am hustling. I'm surviving.