a better or rater or educator in the space. Obviously his writings for wonderful books. And I think he's inspired very many people along the way and he's kind of got the back of the crypto community. So without further ado, we welcome Andreas to the stage. Hi, everyone. I'm just going to switch presentations really quickly. No, no, don't worry about it. I got it. I got it. I got it. There we go. Fantastic. All right. I managed to use a Mac. Amazing. So I'm going to mostly do Q&A today, which I think a lot of people enjoy the Q&A and I certainly enjoy it. So if you want to ask questions, you have to put them on the Slido because I'm just going to switch the Slido and I'm going to start answering questions right off the Slido. And that gives an opportunity for the people who are watching on the live stream to also ask questions. But don't tweet out the Slido code because then Reddit and Twitter will start asking questions. And you don't want to see those questions, right? Why did you betray everyone and write an Ethereum book? Trader! So thank you so much for coming here today. If you don't know what I do, I've written a number of books. Mastering Bitcoin is a book about how Bitcoin works. It's the first one there. Mastering Ethereum is about how Ethereum works. These are technical books with software engineers. They're also suitable for computer science, college-level people. It's also good for people who have a technical aptitude and want to learn a bit more about coding. But if that's not your thing, these two books, The Internet of Money, Volume 1 and Volume 2, are a collection of all of the talks I've given, edited to remove all of the mistakes I made while giving those talks and make me sound absolutely accurate and prescient and everything I say.  And I tell people that my initial goal for these books was to make them the perfect toilet book. You can jump in at any point, read four or five pages in five to seven minutes, good timing. And then I can deliver really important principles and memes directly into your brain when you're at your most vulnerable. And you can do that to your friends, too. You're like, yeah, this will get them reading. And what you do is you remove all of the other reading materials, including shampoo bottles from Reach, and then you put the books right there.  Yeah, you see the plan? It's working. So you can also get all of this information online. All of my work is Creative Commons free and available. Again, the Slido right there, hash AA, capital L London. So you can ask questions. Today's talk is going to be short. I want to talk about the killer app. What is the killer app? So first, let's start with Bitcoin. What is the killer app for Bitcoin? Let's try again. What is the killer app for Bitcoin? Money. Money is the killer app for Bitcoin. Money is the killer app for Bitcoin. And you can look at different aspects of money. Some people are like, really, it's more about payments, medium of exchange, more about keeping value, so store value. Maybe it's about capital fly to remittances to third world countries or developing countries. Maybe it's about monetary sovereigns. Yeah, steak. Yeah, guns and beer. No, okay, I went too far. And maybe it's just about being able to be in control. Maybe it's about having access to financial services because you don't, because you either live in a country where those things are not available, or because you're part of the population that is for whatever reason excluded, right? You walk into a bank, and as soon as you start typing out your name in the application form, they're like, thank you very much for coming in today, sir. Your name is too unpronounceable for an esteemed institution like, ah, lovely British bank. Please this way, security. And you can't get a bank, right? Which happens to a lot of people. I realized when I started becoming a nomad, and I started traveling continuously, that my inability to produce sufficient documentation about my address, because I didn't really live in one place, disqualified me from banking. The fact that I'm American disqualifies me from banking worldwide because they don't want to touch Americans. They have to do too much reporting. So the moment I say, and I'm also an American citizen, they're like, security. And in the US, they want, you know, two utility bills and proof of address or rental contract, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I had none of those things because I didn't live in one place. I'm like, how about a short-term rental in Airbnb for two weeks? Denied. Denied. Denied. Again and again, I could not open. And that's before I answered the next question, which is, what do you do for a living? The usual answer is e-commerce. E-commerce. I mean, digital currencies, e-commerce. Because if you save the B word, not banking, bitcoin, again, it's like truck dealer, security. And so that's the end of that conversation. Money is the killer app because money as an app hasn't existed before. And money is a very important part of how we organize society, and it's no longer a privilege. It is a fundamental requirement for modern life anywhere in the world. And at the same time, it's something that is often denied to a lot of people. It's often something that's very difficult and expensive. And sometimes you find out that even if you have money, even if you have a respectable job and a respectable paycheck and respectable savings in the bank, you lack these weird qualifications. I got asked most recently when I went back to Greece, and I was trying to deal with some banking situation in Greece. They asked me for proof of my landline. Land what? Landline. Sir, I haven't had a landline since 1989. Get with the century already. But no, landline, they wanted proof of permanent address as provided by a landline. All right. So, you know, my landline is installed in my castle right next to where I park my steam engine in the telegraph office. Now, turn on my oil lamp and let's have dinner by the fireplace. So, the funny thing is that money is not something you can take for granted. Here's the thing. We often talk about, and I often get questions about, what comes next? What do we do other than finance? What is the blockchain application? Can we do voting? Can we do real estate? Can we do logistics on the blockchain? Right? And if you have conversations with traditional corporations, they don't want to touch money at all. They're not interested. It's an over-regulated space. It's full of risk. They don't want anything to do with it. So, you go into these corporate meetings and you're like, listen, 6 billion people who are in banks. We can rise them out of poverty. Money is an important application. We can give opportunity to people who are downtrodden. Think about what we can do to change people's lives. And while you're seeing all of that, Todd, next to you, goes, we could track bananas on the blockchain and do a logistics blockchain. And you're like, but the people who are impoverished, and he goes, bananas on the blockchain!  Give that man a bonus. Let's install hyperledger, or a clone of Ethereum, or some other distributed ledger technology so we can track bananas on the blockchain. You saved us. We can really make some money with this. Nobody wants to hear about what is the important application. The important application matters to those who are principled about the grassroots effort that we're involved in. So, forget about selling this to your boss. But every time someone asks you about building that next generation application, tracking real estate on the blockchain, voting on the blockchain, changing the nature of the nation-state governance model on the blockchain, and even bananas on the blockchain, first, we have to do money right. We can't build any of the other things until we get money right. And part of the reason we have to get money right is because this lays down the foundation. And that foundation is what is required for broad adoption. Until Bitcoin came along, the state of security among all of the people I know around me was so horrific, they all had passwords like password one, two, three, four. What? It's my birthday. What? It's fine. They didn't care about their personal privacy and security. And the reason they didn't care is because the impact of having your privacy violated is not felt directly, right? So, you're like, I'm doing the Farmville on the Facebook, and ads are coming in, and they're so personalized that I'm losing privacy any second now. And 25 years from now, our government is a hellhole, fascistic dictatorship, but I get to play Candy Crush. So, you don't really see the impact of gradually eroding democracy and erosion of all of our social institutions and the destruction of privacy across an entire generation because that happens later. In the meantime, you're playing Candy Crush, so it's okay. But you put Bitcoin on someone's phone, and suddenly they're like, I need a plan. I need some security here. Can I do a three-factor authentication with a quantum secure code? And then suddenly they start throwing out words. You're like, I don't know. I'm not sure. A people wallet will be good enough. I really need a hardware wallet. And people start upgrading their security. And you're like, great, Jim. I'm so excited you finally got it. Like, how much Bitcoin did you buy? I'm like, 11 pounds. 11 pounds. And it was up to 13 last week. And they're like security, long passwords. People get excited. More importantly, when you have money on your phone, it changes your perspective. Now it's a wallet. It's not just a phone. And suddenly you understand why someone will want to steal it. And that creates this really interesting situation because, for the first time, people are using public key cryptography in a civilian setting in the largest deployment of public key cryptography we've ever seen in the world. Until Bitcoin, the largest deployment of public key cryptography was the Department of Defense, United States Department of Defense. And now it's Bitcoin. And that is because people need security in order to protect money. Now, if people need security to protect money, they protect their keys. They back up their keys because it's their money. And if those keys are well protected and well backed up, now you can do interesting things like put a voting system on it. Otherwise, they don't care about security. Also, if you don't have censorship-resistant money, you can't build any of the other applications so that those applications can be borderless, neutral, censorship-resistant, global, publicly verifiable. If we build those other applications without a foundation of sounds and secure money, those applications will be centralized. Those applications will be censorable. Those applications will be country-specific. They won't be interoperable. They won't be on open APIs. We need to lay that foundation. Now, this is a message that's very easy to explain to people who are interested in Bitcoin. So let's switch to Ethereum. Because when you tell people in the Ethereum space, guess what? You need Bitcoin. They don't believe you. They're like, we can do everything that Bitcoin does except security, just as well with smart contracts. There are some fundamental trade-offs. The flexibility you need in order to do smart contracts does not go well with building very robust, secure, nation-state-resistant sound money, which is why, on the other hand, when you talk to Bitcoin, people are like, we can do smart contracts too. They're like, no, don't. Even if you could, you don't want to. The compromises you'll need to make, the flexibility you'll need to introduce, will undermine all of the things that make Bitcoin secure sound robust money. Let us do our thing, let them do their thing, and let's play together. Bitcoin takes a lot of flak. Money for criminals, drug dealers, terrorists, pornographers, same things they said about the internet. That's great, because it provides distraction for Ethereum to go to unicorns, rainbows, puppies, and distributed finance. But you can't do all of that if you don't have a secure basis to on-ramp everybody. You can't do all of that if your network can be attacked and denied service and shut down in certain countries. Bitcoin provides the foundation that allows Ethereum people to be freaky. I love freaky, because there's a lot of innovation and creativity there.  Right? That's Bitcoin. So, what's the killer app of Ethereum? Yeah? Okay, what else? Stable coins? The Dow. I'm not kidding. Governance. The Dow, the centralized autonomous organizations, reinventing the modern corporation, building systems of governance. Everything interesting on Ethereum is a programmable system of governance that is decentralized. Stable coins on Ethereum, which are decentralized, they are based on a foundation of a governance model that's using smart contracts. Everything interesting that's happening in Ethereum is governance. Ethereum is a platform for governance. Let's not talk about how you do governance for Ethereum. That's a whole other problem, but you can do governance with Ethereum. And maybe it's going to be another version of Ethereum, and maybe it's going to be a different blockchain that does smart contracts and virtual machines, and maybe none of that is going to make the price go up. I'm not talking about price or investment. I'm talking about what is the purpose of a programmable, flexible smart contracts platform where you can do public verifiability of the execution and state of a smart contract. And the use of that is governance. And if you combine governance with sound money, something magical happens. You can do some really incredible things, but you can't do any of those until you first lay a platform for sound money. And what are the killer apps for other blockchains that are out there? I don't know yet. This is a beautiful ecosystem full of different things that are evolving in parallel to occupy different ecological niches or application niches that will do different things.  That's okay. The beautiful thing about this open source space is we learn as much when they fail as when they succeed. No, we learn more when they fail. You sit back and you watch that beautiful explosion, and you're like, hmm, I wonder what happened there. Let's tear it apart and find out. That post-mortem of the destruction is actually a great, let's not do that. So now we know one way in which proof of stake systems blow up. Great. Let's not do that. Delegated proof of stake systems that have collapsed into infighting, lobbying, accusations, and lawsuits. Oh, great. Now we know how delegated proof of stake systems fail. We learned a lot from that experiment. We now know how DAOs fail. Yeah, re-entrancy bugs. Nobody was talking about re-entrancy bugs before the DAO. We've learned a lot since. So if other systems in the broader ecosystem of blockchains run experiments, you should have a bit of faith. You should have a bit more faith in the thing that you believe in to say, let them do their thing. I don't need to warn other people that they're scams or shitcoins. Maybe they are. Maybe they're not. I'm not the oracle. Maybe other people should do their own research and find out for themselves. And maybe some of those experiments are going to teach us something useful. I'm particularly fascinated by privacy coins, which are doing some amazing work in zero-knowledge proofs and range proofs, for example. Like, for example, Zcash had a catastrophic inflation bug because of an error in the white paper that described the joint computation mechanism to bootstrap the zero-knowledge snark. We wouldn't have learned that unless Zcash tried to do it first. Now, it really sucks for them because we don't know how many coins were created in the meantime, but it doesn't suck for us because we can learn now that, okay, if we were to introduce zero-knowledge snarks into Bitcoin, we have to consider the trade-off against the sound monetary properties. And maybe it's a risk that's too big, or maybe it's a risk worth taking. At least we know one way in which it fails. Maybe there are more. Maybe we'll find them. Let them play a bit more. We need guinea pigs. We need experimentation. And I don't want this space to close up and round up the wagons and go, nobody else will succeed. There can be only one. Gargan. There's only one leader. There's only one doctrine. There's only one true faith. That's not science. That's religion. I don't do religion. Feel free to do it if you want. I don't do litmus tests. I don't do purity tests. I do intellectual curiosity. And my intellectual curiosity is peaked by all of these experiments going on. So sound money, governance, privacy, non-fungible tokens, utility tokens, even ICOs.  Yes. They're also the greatest revolution that's going to ever happen to finance, because they're going to allow a global pool of startups to access capital anywhere in the world from the most organic early-stage funding all the way through mega-corporation or mega-dow, because they've reinvented the corporation. And they're going to offer the most incredible opportunity to billions of people around the world who are impoverished and have no access to investment opportunities, to invest in great ideas, to learn how to do due diligence, to become better investors, and with that, to secure a better future for their families. The entire VC to stock market space is about to get disrupted by the greatest new developments in funding for early-stage startups that has ever happened.  Can you hold those two ideas in your head at the same time? Can you say, right now it's a zoo, but out of that is going to come the biggest revolution in finance? Can we say right now it's a lot of people who are doing a lot of scams? The traditionalists in this space say, we need vetting and regulation in order to fix the problems of the new model of decentralized crowdfunding. We need to introduce an 18th century model of committee-based oversight and regulation. I say, in order to fix the problems of decentralized crowdfunding, we need to introduce decentralized vetting, decentralized due diligence, decentralized reputation scoring. We can build all of the tools to improve the quality of investments, the quality of research, the quality of reputation management, so we can better serve investors. We can build programmable escrow systems that allow us to ensure that the founder can't run away with the money without the approval of the rest of the board. Or even yet, better, that the founder and the board only get one quarter's worth of funding until the shareholders say, you're doing pretty good, we'll give you another quarter. And they vote to give them another round and another round and trickle out the money. Because if you're a young idealist who just came out with the best idea and the best team and the best execution, the worst thing that could possibly happen to you is $100 million in your bank account. Because within one month, you'll be wondering how it was possible to spend so much money on cocaine, champagne, and strippers.  Turns out, your CFO was doing most of the coke. A lot of money really, really fast destroys startups. I've seen it again and again. I've worked with people where you watch their personality change when suddenly they become richer than they ever imagined, and they start taking shortcuts. So even the possibility that they might become rich, they start taking shortcuts. Greed is a very powerful emotion. Can we regulate that? Can we build systems that gradually deliver funds? I think we can. So before you automatically close your mind and say, this is just all noise, yes, a lot of it is, but some of it isn't. And it's really important to maintain that curiosity and be ready for the next wave of innovation that's actually going to improve things. So look out and recognize there isn't one killer app. There's one killer app usually for each one of these different systems because they can only do one thing well. You can't be a master of all trades because then you become terrible at all of them. We can't have one system that does sound money and smart contracts and low fees and unlimited scalability and full decentralization and nation-state resistance security. Although I'm pretty sure I read that in a brochure of a new blockchain that just came out. They claim to do all of those things. When you see claims like that, you have to think there's one of two things going on. Either they don't even understand the fundamental engineering trade-offs. And that's really disparaging. It's like, so you think you can do all of these things, you really don't understand the fundamentals, or they're just lying. That's a bit more reassuring because lying can understand. If you've been in this industry so long and you can't understand that there are trade-offs and you refuse to believe that there are trade-offs, well, then I can't really help you. There are going to be killer apps coming in many different ways in many different dimensions. And remember the other important advantage, if it's not useful to you, that doesn't mean it's not useful. It just means you, in that particular domain, are privileged. When you hear Warren Buffett say, I don't need crypto, of course you don't need crypto.  Have you been denied banking services? Unlikely. Jamie Dimon, I see no use for crypto. Of course you don't see any use for crypto.  You asked these people to talk about their life. One of them recently said that they think you need ID to buy things at a supermarket. They were talking about how we should introduce ID at voting. Do you know why?  Their butler does that. I've met people who have been stranded by the side of the road because their cars were refueled by the staff, and they didn't know what the little orange light was. And when the car stopped working, they didn't know how to put gas in it. Not 15-year-olds, 30-year-olds, right? So when you say, I don't need this technology, what you're saying is, my life already has this in it, and that's why I don't need it. But think about the people who do need that. Maybe you don't need governance because you have good... Okay, wait, I'm in Britain. You do need governance. Maybe you do need governance.  Well, you'll end up with Boris Johnson. I think I can actually still vote here. Maybe I should come back. Just for that one vote. We're like, hello, I'm a yank. I heard you're having troubles. Let me vote. So, to sum it up, the killer apps are usually very specific. Before we build the next generation of killer apps, we have to lay strong foundations. And often enough, the strong foundations represent technologies that are actually boring. Nobody wants to hear that instead of building AI-driven, deep neural network, drone-based delivery systems for tour routing of drugs on the dark market using smart contracts, what they should actually be building is a decentralized exchange or a wallet that actually works for real human beings that can be understood by people who don't have a degree in computer science. Those are the boring things, but they're the necessary things so we can get to the next level. We're going to do rounds of building boring infrastructure to open up the space for applications that bring new users, which then overwhelm the scale of our infrastructure and requires to build more boring infrastructure to create more room for more applications and rinse and repeat. And hopefully we will continue to do that without failing too bad for 25 years, just like the internet has. Start building simple. Build strong foundations. Don't snare at other people's ideas of what is the next step or what is the killer app. Understand that your needs don't represent everybody's needs. Understand that an app that's not useful to you might be useful to someone else. And understand that in a permissioned environment, you need to have permission to innovate. But in a permissionless environment, you only need a market size of two. You and your buddy who want to make one app to do something really weird that no one else is interested in. And that's the beauty of the internet. That's the beauty of open permissionless systems. You can build that. And maybe when you build it, you discover, actually, there's a few other people who wanted to use it, right? So killer app, money, killer app, governance, killer app, privacy. And then we'll see what comes next. Thank you. Thank you very much, Andreas. That was better than EastEnders, I think. Remember, as Andreas switches over to Slido, hopefully the question's been coming in. If you smell pizza, do not move, okay? If you move to the left, you will be banned from Coinscrown forever. You're never coming back. So just stay still, because it does interrupt everyone. So it'd be good to move into the Q&A. And then here, Andreas is Pearls of Wisdom. I think we're ready for this. Let's go. Let me see if I can put it in watch mode. I don't know if I can do that when I'm locked in. No, don't give me a dictionary. No. See, this is what happens when you try to use a Mac. Let's see if this works. This should put it in present mode. No, it isn't. That's fine. Just leave it like this. This is good enough. All right. I have one very, very important request to make. It has been my experience that by the time I finish all of my presentations, book signings, and things like that, and I go to get the pizza and beer, there's no frigging pizza and beer. So at this point, Paul, please, one IPA, two slices of pizza, any kind. Thank you very much. Yeah. Can everybody see this Slido? Everybody happy with it? Okay. And you can also use that. The code is hashtag AACapitalLondon on Slido.com. Let's start with the first question and see what happens. If and when Bitcoin reaches one sat equals $1, will transaction fees be $100? No. They won't be, I think. I don't know. We've got to consider the fact that we cannot get there with the scalability we have here. Not just the scalability on the second layer, but the scalability on the blockchain itself. I think a lot of people think that the scalability debate was about which avenue of scalability should we pursue to the exclusion of all others to solve all of the scalability problems forever. The truth is, there is no solution to scalability that is forever. There is a solution to scalability now. And as soon as we do that, it opens the door for people to write applications that do things at a greater scale, which they immediately do, which then uses up all of the scale we just built, which then creates a scalability problem again. If you haven't heard this talk, I've done it before, but I remember when sending an email took three days to cross the internet. And then the infrastructure got better, and you could send an email in seconds, and then someone invented what's called MIME, multi-part internet mail extensions, or, as we know them today, attachments, and then the internet melted down. Because people started attaching things to email, and the capacity wasn't there. And then we started putting images in emails, and then the internet melted down, so we had to build a lot more infrastructure. And then people tried to start attaching videos, and then we invented the web, and then things really melted down. And then eventually we could do video on the web, and then things melted down again. And then eventually we could do voice across the web, and then the internet melted down again. And in every one of these stages, the capacity that's created gives an engineer a bright idea, and they go, huh, I wonder what I could do with all of that bandwidth. And immediately they have 100 ideas, and they implement half of them, and the next day there's no internet left, right? I was once given a one gigabit fiber connection to the home, and one of the places I was living semi-permanently, it was a few years back before I became a full nomad. It was like a gigabit internet connection. I wonder what I could do with that. 50 ideas come to my head.  I'm like, yeah, I have a one gigabit fiber internet, fully symmetrical, one gig down, one gig out to my home. I'm like, yes, you do, sir. Great. Can I actually use it? Absolutely, sir. No, no. I mean, can I actually use it? Of course, sir, why would you not be able to use it? I was like, because I'm an engineer, I can actually use it. Like, yes, yes, of course you can use it. Okay, can you put that as a note on my account that I called, and you said I could use it, and I will use it, and I warned you I would use it. Okay, great. We're good. Thank you. Upgrade router, upgrade switch, and then I pegged it. For the entire time I lived there, the utilization of that fiber line was one gig up, one gig down, 24 hours a day. And somewhere in the vast ISP realm, there was an engineer going, I told him we could use it. I didn't know he would. And there's a little map of the city where I lived. And there's one huge red dot over my house, which is like, how is 80% of our capacity going to one house? How did you let that happen? This is what happens in scaling. So I don't know how we're going to solve this. The bottom line is that the scaling debate wasn't really about which solution we do. It was really about who has the power to decide that. And then there was a lot of people going, I do. And a lot of other people going, no, you don't. I do. And I was sitting back going, oh, boy, I'd better not get involved in this one, because it's going to turn ugly, and it turned ugly. We are going to do all of the things. We're going to do layer two. We're going to do optimization within transactions. We're going to do compression. We're going to do network optimizations. We're going to do signature compression. We're going to do signature aggregation and batch verification. We're going to increase the base block size. We will have to. And by doing all of these things, including side chains and connecting through layer two to multiple networks that can take more capacity and be used for different applications, we will get to a point where we have the ability to onboard the billions of people who need this technology. And how much of the fee is going to be? All I can tell you is that the fees are going to represent the cost of the intermediaries that exist. The current financial system is expensive because it feeds the profits of giant intermediaries, and that cost is passed to you. If we can do it with fewer intermediaries, it's going to cost less. So is it going to cost $100 to make a transaction? I don't think so. I mean, we're trying to make it so that Wells Fargo and Western Union can't charge you even $35 to move money across borders. It would be really embarrassing if we couldn't beat that price. We'll need to do lots of different things. I don't know the answer yet, but I'm an optimist when it comes to engineering. Proof of work means tons of pollution. Do you want the planet to die? Yes, as long as I get rich. I don't have children. I'm taking it with me. No. First of all, Bitcoin doesn't cause tons of pollution. Proof of work doesn't cause tons of pollution. Pollution isn't caused by energy consumption. Pollution is caused by some forms of energy production. If you produce energy with solar panels, you're taking sunlight that was going to fall on a patch of grass and turning it into electricity. You're not producing pollution. Instead, what you're doing is you're subsidizing the cost of solar panels and making them cheaper and more efficient for everybody, which is actually better for the environment. I'm not going to say this is an environmental plan. If you're concerned about pollution, we should be having the real discussion. The best way to allocate resources is markets. The best way to have markets incorporate the cost of pollution is carbon taxes and carbon markets. If we do that, the miners will see an elevated cost of using electricity from carbon-producing sources. Because they are highly mobile and because it doesn't matter what time of day and location you do mining at, they will immediately migrate to sources of electricity that do not have a carbon impact. They will leave those sources of electricity with a high carbon impact for the usual players who cause most of the pollution. Weapons manufacturers, the war machine, oil companies, plastics companies, a dozen companies in the world produce a significant percentage of the entire carbon footprint. You buy from them every day. They have cute names like Johnson and Johnson, and Pal Molliv, and Tesco, and ESO, and British Petroleum. Bitcoin is not destroying the planet. Bitcoin is using the cheapest form of energy that exists, which is waste energy that can't be used for anything else because it's either too far from sources of demand or because it's produced at times when there is no demand. For example, solar panels in the middle of the day when no one is running their lights. Are you concerned that the Facebook Libra coin will result in a truly... It's gone. It's gone. And it's gone. Oh, there it is. It went down. Are you concerned that the Facebook Libra coin will result in truly decentralized permissionless coins like Bitcoin getting replaced? If they can build a truly decentralized permissionless coin, I will fricking join the board of Facebook. They can't. Yes. This show is sponsored by Paul's MacBook Pro. Facebook can't do that. The five pillars, or if you like, the broad principles of the types of blockchains we care about are open, borderless, decentralized, neutral, censorship-resistant. You can add to that publicly verifiable, immutable. Could I have a bottle of water at some point, please? Thank you. And Facebook can't do any of those. Why? They're not an open source project. They're not operating across different countries. They have legal jurisdiction in specific countries. And in those specific countries, there are laws about what you can do with money, laws that Bitcoin doesn't have to deal with, because it's an open source decentralized project that doesn't have anyone you can stomp on to stop them from doing the things that we're doing. But Facebook does have people you can stomp on. So, as a result, they say, let's do an open network where anyone can join. And all of the regulators in every country go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Actually, that's all that has to play out. First, they're going to have a committee meeting inside Facebook, and they're going to say, let's build a completely open, decentralized cryptocurrency, and the lawyers at Facebook who outnumber everybody are going to go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We can't allow that. They can't be borderless because they have to abide by the regulations that prohibit transfers across borders without knowing your customer and anti-money laundering. They have to vet every participant in the transaction. They can't be neutral because they can't just transfer value from anyone to anyone for any purpose. You can't buy certain things with money through the traditional payment systems. Now, you're probably thinking, drugs. Well, yes, in some countries, drugs. In Saudi Arabia, it's Bibles, right? In every country, it's a different set of moral codes, some of which you agree with, some of which you don't. And we don't allow the morality of different countries to impose a single set of rules that are the least common denominator. We don't say, well, in one country, it's actually illegal to pay for a driver's license for a woman. We can't have women driving around on their own without a guardian, plenty of countries where that's the case. So, we actually have already a system that does not abide and is not regulated based on the least common denominator of all jurisdictions, and that's the internet. But you can't do that with money. Facebook cannot be neutral. Facebook cannot be censorship-resistant. There is a requirement in law to censor transactions of certain types. Try it. Go to your bank tomorrow and send a wire transfer to Ahmadinejad and see how long your bank account lasts, right? Not allowed to do it. So, Facebook cannot build an open decentralized cryptocurrency because they're prevented by law to do so. No company can do what Bitcoin does. So, what do they really compete with? What they really compete with and who should be terrified by this, or banks? Because banks are currently now squeezed between a rock and a hard place, or Bitcoin and a face coin.  So, that's out of bounds. And then, the thing they pride themselves the most, which is being progressive technology companies, well, Silicon Valley can do better.  Everybody's going to get into this game eventually, especially if Facebook shows that it's successful, and suddenly the banks are competing for the same fundamental financial services with a whole bunch of Silicon Tech giants who not only know how to do user experience and user interface better, I mean, imagine banking plus Candy Crush together. The banks will lose a whole generation of customers. I remember when I was a customer here in the UK, Nat West was giving out toasters to students in order to get us. And guess what? I got a toaster. Yes, sir, I got a toaster.  It was. It was like one of those really, really cheap Argos models that fell apart within two months. But I still got a toaster, which is more than I can say about my Greek bank. But imagine what goodies Facebook can give you. And the best part of this is that they have to compete with these giants who actually have perfected the art of using artificial intelligence to tickle your dopamine receptors. And they're going to deliver banking to you. Now, this is a horrific surveillance capitalism dystopia in which everything you do will be tracked.  But for the banks, it's worse. Their profit margins are going to go down by at least 8%. And that's really serious. Crypto Cobain was here. Hi there. Come on. What is happening here? Okay, can we, we're being spammed here. I can't believe this. Okay. Hi Andreas, do you believe that the Lightning Network second layer is the best scaling solution for Bitcoin or other other interesting scaling solutions? Again, the issue here is not which scaling solution solves scaling. The issue is which scaling can we do now? Which scaling can we do now without other trade-offs? And which scaling do we do first? So my opinion, which changed by the way, in 2014, I thought we should do big blocks. And then I changed my mind. And part of the reason I changed my mind is because I was paid off by Block Street. That's what you'll hear on Reddit. No, part of the reason I changed my mind is because I've never been paid by anybody to do this. I wish I could get paid. I get paid by Patreon. Part of the reason that I changed my mind is as I saw the debate play out, I had made some very specific predictions in 2013. I said that as we develop this technology, the protocol is going to become ossified. That means that it will gradually harden. As the protocol gets deployed to more devices, as more people participate in the consensus rules, it's going to get harder and harder to introduce disruptive change. Now, I thought we had two or three years until that window closed. When the scaling debate happened, and I thought a pretty straightforward technical conversation that was happening on Segwit suddenly got derailed into this really, really ugly battle over who should have power, I realized the window is closed. It's already closing much faster than I thought. Then I'm thinking, what is the most important thing we need to get into the base layer before that window closes? What is the thing we can't do on layer two? The answer to me is obvious, privacy. We have to do privacy on layer one. We cannot do privacy effectively on layer two. If you build a layer two privacy solution with layer one being wide open, that's like building SSL on top of a wide open internet. The intelligence agencies will have a field day and turn it into a surveillance system. We need to build privacy on layer one, because we can build it well in layer two. Can we do scaling in layer two effectively? Yes, we can. It's not a final solution. It's a magnifying effect. We can take every one transaction that happens on layer one and multiply its effect, so we can do hundreds, thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of transactions on layer two, which gives us leverage. What do we use that leverage to do? Optimize layer one further, compress transactions, compress signatures, fit as much as we can. Every little thing we do on layer one now gets magnified by a factor of 100,000 or 10,000 in layer two. Once we build sophisticated wallets that can use layer two, we can now make incremental improvements of 10% in layer one, and those balloon up to very big scale in layer two. Then eventually, we will have to do an increase in the block size. Absolutely. That's sensible to do when we have established sufficient incentive mechanisms, when we can achieve levels of decentralization, where we don't have to sacrifice decentralization and mining in order to increase the block size, when we can ensure the more people have skin in the game, so they're running fully validating nodes so that our system is robust in all of service attacks, because if we make it so expensive to run a node now that only companies run it, only in data centers, well, companies can be coerced. They're the easiest organization to push around. They have lawyers who are going to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You can't do that. The government sent us a letter. It had a letterhead and everything. In fact, we got a letter from a tiny, tiny town in Texas, and they had a star of a sheriff on it. We give up. This is too hard. So we need individuals, individuals with courage, to be running nodes all over the world in weird little holes, hanging off lamp posts, running underground. This needs to be a grassroots environment, and we can't sacrifice decentralization to do scaling now, because then we lose everything. So, yes, lightning is the important first step. It is not the last step, and it is not the step we take instead of scaling on the base blockchain. It's just the step we need to take first, because we need to do privacy on the base chain. What will happen to Bitcoin if it's banned by the United States or another major world power? Do you see this as a likely scenario? Yes in the UK, not in the United States. So here's the thing. Compare and contrast the Constitution of the United States with the Constitution of the United Kingdom.  You don't even have one. Here's the bottom line. In the United States, we have a very strong rule of law, and it is especially strong when it comes to freedom of speech. In fact, over the last 15 years, the Supreme Court has repeatedly said that money is a form of speech when it is used for political campaigning. They have gone so far as to say that Congress has no right to regulate campaign contributions because money is speech. Now, they can't really walk that back very easily. So the moment that the United States goes, it's banned. Many of the big companies that are based in Silicon Valley that now have billions of dollars and thousands of lawyers are going to go, ha ha, we'll see about that. And then they're going to sue the government before the law goes into effect. Then they're going to get a temporary restraining order that says this would really screw our billion-dollar business. So hold your horses there. I think this is unconstitutional. This will go all the way to the Supreme Court. Now what happens there? We don't know. But here's the best part. Neither does the government. Now imagine the scenario where it goes all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court says, no, actually, Bitcoin is money, and therefore it's protected by the Constitution. Now at that point, they're fucked. A ruling like that really messes things up because now that has a trickle down effect. Now you can't regulate any of it. Not just. You can now put some minor restrictions as they call time, manner, and place restrictions on speech. Regulation of speech is subject to very, very strict scrutiny, constitutional scrutiny, based on specific elements. You can limit it only in terms of time, manner, and speech, and you cannot limit it based on content. You also can't limit it a priori, and you can't limit it when it's used for the expression of political ideas or association with political parties. So they get an outcome like that in the Supreme Court. Who knows? Screwed. They're not going to attack it directly. China will. China has. They've banned Bitcoin 17,462 times. Has Bitcoin been eradicated from China? Of course not. Still there. It's removed all of the Chinese companies from China from participating in it, but all of the people who want it, including the people who wrote the law to ban Bitcoin, and now stuff their wallets with Bitcoin as fast as they can, they still have it. We're not going to see straightforward bans. There's not enough collusion and cooperation. If governments could get together and make decisions where they all agree, how about we fix climate change? We won't, right? So every time one government goes, it's banned, another government goes, come to us. And right now it's Malta next year. It's going to be Singapore the year after. It's going to be Guernsey Islands or whatever, right? So there's always that variety. This is asymmetric warfare. You cannot fight a globally decentralized system from locally imposed regulation by 194 different legislators that can't agree on anything in 194 countries. To what extent do we have a right to privacy in our financial lives? Should we be incentivized to be public? Does privacy perpetuate or enable injustice? That's a great question. Privacy is a human right. It is also the fountain head for all of the other human rights. If you don't have privacy, you don't have freedom of expression, you don't have freedom of association, you don't have freedom of assembly. I saw a really stunning picture, which was this week in Hong Kong, they're protesting against the extradition law that China is trying to pass so they can extradite dissidents to China and disappear them into the gulags. And so they're protesting really, really hard, but they learned. Last time they did protests, they used their subway cards to track who went to the protests. So this time they had lines of people lining up with masks on so they can't do facial recognition in the stations, buying tickets with cash and using paper tickets that are untraceable. They learned an important lesson. Without financial privacy, you don't have political rights.  It can happen here just as easily. So it's a fundamental right. We should not incentivize people to make their private financial information public because what happens is the people who are powerless will be forced to make their information public. And the people who are powerful, who for centuries have maintained their financial privacy, including criminals, will elect to remain private. They will put their bank accounts in Switzerland. You can read their names. They're in the Panama Papers. You remember when the Panama Papers were released and we found out that the world's financial elite had been stashing trillions of dollars in foreign bank accounts and then all of them got prosecuted and half of them went to jail? Oh no, they just killed a journalist who wrote the story and no one went to jail, right? So you think they're going to give up their financial privacy? No. It's up to you to decide if you wanted. And does it perpetuate or enable justice? Justice is a fundamental requirement for peace. Peace is not the absence of war. Peace is the presence of justice. As Martin Luther King said, without justice there is no peace. You want to fix the world, give financial future and take people out of poverty. If we continue to let fear dominate our political life and we continue to separate people into those who have the privilege of a future for their children and those who don't, those who don't will come and kill us. And they have every right to do so. That is the next one place to stop. Andres, thank you very much.


But can we talk about things that don't exist? That's the question I'm trying to answer on the 33rd episode of Patterson in Pursuit. My guest is a professor of philosophy at Tufts University in Massachusetts, and he takes a controversial position. He says not only can we talk about things that don't exist, we talk about them all the time, including mathematics. My guest is Dr. Jody Azuni, who's been arguing for quite some time that mathematical objects don't exist, and our conversation turned into one of my favorites so far. If you remember some of the earlier conversations I had on this topic, like with Dr. Williamson and Dr. Isaacson in Oxford, they took the position that mathematical objects have a real existence separate of our conception of them. They believe in the so-called Platonic universe. My position has been, well, I don't actually think those mathematical objects exist out there separate of our conception, I think they're constructed objects, they have a mind-dependent existence. Well, Dr. Azuni rounds out the spectrum and he says, no, they don't have a mind-dependent existence, they don't actually exist at all. So before we dive into it, I want to tell you about the sponsor for the show Praxis. Praxis is a company that is looking for young, enthusiastic talent, people that are in college and realize that, ooh, the college experience is not living up to the height, or people that want to avoid college altogether because they see academia is slowly crumbling from the inside. They take those individuals and they give them a nine-month program. It's three months of a professional boot camp that's followed by six months of a paid apprenticeship, and after you graduate from the program, they guarantee you a $40,000 a year job offer. As I've been saying for several weeks, Praxis is exploding in popularity and there's a good reason why. So if you want to be part of it, check out discoverpraxis.com and on their homepage, they have a button that says Schedule a Call. Click it, set up an appointment, and see if Praxis is right for you. So this interview is yet another that I honestly can't wait to break down. There's so much material here, there's so much here to talk about. For some reason, metaphysics gets a bad rap as a philosophic topic. I don't understand why I think these kind of conversations are a blast. So please enjoy the interview with Dr. Joni Izuni of Tufts University. Dr. Izuni is the author of eight books and growing, and I'm sure you're going to find what he has to say interesting and provocative. We like to use numbers all the time as humans. We use mathematical reasoning constantly. Mm-hmm. Let's call it indispensable. Indispensable. I think it's absolutely indispensable. Yes. We think about mathematics, so we try to formalize mathematics. We have all of these, but seem to be, self-evident truths, two plus two equals four. Everybody goes, oh yes, of course, that's a truth and they move on. But what I want to know is when we use numbers and we make mathematical claims, what are the actual objects that we're talking about? What is a number? When we say two plus two equals four, what is two in the first place? I'm going to describe my position. My position is that numbers don't exist. I'm a nominalist. My position is that lots of things don't exist, but my first focus and my earliest work was mathematical objects. And I became very interested in the main reasons that philosophers were pushing for why they did exist, which was a kind of indispensability argument. The indispensability argument turned on the idea that when you formulate a scientific theory to make it work and in fact just to express it, especially in physics, you end up crucially relying on numbers in the following sense. You have all of these, there are statements that come up. And so the idea was that if you were going to use these theories in a straightforward way, assert them, use them to describe, the whole package comes with it, including the mathematics. And that motivated other kinds of nominalists to say things like, well, we can sort of factor the mathematics from the physical stuff and exhibit a pure physical theory, which would then, then the mathematics would be shown to play a kind of instrumental role and we wouldn't be committed. Those programs all fail in my view. But there's a more direct way of going after this, which is in terms of the logic, there is an item called a quantifier that comes up in formal logic. And the thought is what's driving this indispensability argument is that that item plays a kind of committing role. You use it, it corresponds to the there is. And I suggest that as matter, as far as the formalisms are concerned and as far as natural language is concerned, this is simply not true. Okay? This is just false. In natural language, I tend to have lots and lots of examples of statements that we make that are true, that use there is statements, but we don't commit ourselves and we don't intend to. Can you give a few examples of that? Oh, absolutely. There are as many Greek goddesses as Greek gods. There are cartoon characters and animators who resemble one another. Okay? And that particular one that there is is, as it's sometimes put, quantifying over both something I take to exist, namely animators and something I don't take to exist, namely cartoon characters. You and I might be in the peculiar position of dreaming of the same imaginary woman night late. So we would say there is an imaginary woman. We dream of her. We might compare notes. Yeah, she was dressed and wearing the same thing the other night, blah, blah, blah. There are what are called hobnob puzzles kind of due to a geach, which say things like knob thinks that a certain witch has poisoned his pig and hob worries that the same witch has killed his cow, where the speaker doesn't think there is a witch. And so there's lots of examples like this where items that are playing these quantifier roles are nevertheless fun and the sentences are non-committing, but true. And that's key. The truth is important. And you have to, there's a lot of philosophical flanks to fill here. How do these things get to be true if there's no objects that are being talked about and you have to tell a story? And how do these truths operate with sentences that are this way? How can we have the kind of attitudes we have towards these things if they don't exist? Sure. I tell stories about all these things. This is why I spend so much time writing philosophy, because the nominalist position, if you go this route, opens up a lot of other things you have to tell stories about. I focus, and sometimes I go on the offensive in the following way. Is it okay that I keep talking this way? Certainly, of course. Okay, I'm just making sure. Yeah, yeah. So there's something I call the aboutness illusion, which I think very powerfully drives not just the need to believe in mathematical objects, but the need to believe in fictional objects. And the aboutness illusion takes the following form. Let's say you and I agree there's no Hercules. And let's say you and I agree there's no Pegasus. There's no object in any sense at all. So there's nothing that has properties. Because if it doesn't exist at all, it doesn't have any properties. Nevertheless, we have a rather unavoidable cognitive impression that if I say Pegasus doesn't exist, I'm speaking of something specific that doesn't exist. And if I say Hercules doesn't exist, I'm speaking of something else specific that doesn't exist. Not the same as the Pegasus. But if you're going to strictly say these things don't exist, that's not correct. Okay? Now that cognitive illusion I think drives a lot of very weird philosophical positions. My Nongianism views that fictional objects do exist because how else could, or the hallucination, is that a dagger I see before me? He's thinking of a specific non-existent object that's floating right there. This is very powerful. Okay. So can I ask you a question? Yeah. Anytime. I have to ask you. I'm very tempted by this because if what you say is true, you can reduce the amount of existence. Ontological clutter. Exactly. Exactly. However, we have to ask you what do you mean by exist? Because if we're talking about something, isn't a necessary part of something being a something is that it is. It is existent. How can you have something that isn't? Well, that's right. But keep in mind what's going on here is when you say, how can I have something that isn't? I can't. How can I use the word something to talk about what doesn't exist? I can. Okay. But let's not put it that way. Let's put it a different way, a way that's going to push back on this temptation, which is let's just talk about the fact that some of our names don't refer and some of our terms don't refer. Okay? Okay. So I use the word Hercules and I use the word Pegasus, these don't refer to anything. And now what we're really focused on is the question of how can a sentence like Pegasus is depicted in ancient Greek mythology as a flying horse, how can that sentence be true if there's a word in it that doesn't refer? And that's a different point. And now I have to tell a story and I do tell a story which involves something I call truth inducing, which is we do fiction and we do mythology and then we talk about the mythology and in particular we talk about the contents. And the way we do it is we formulate terms that don't refer to anything and we give them a truth value based on the nature of the story so that we can say correctly Sherlock Holmes is depicted in the Arthur Colin Doyle stories as a detective living in Victorian England, okay, Victorian London let's say. So we can say something like that. And now I'm talking about a sentence, I am not talking about an object. Now psychologically we experience it a certain way. We're thinking about just as we do with novels, we recognize these things don't exist and yet we think about them. So would you say then you can't reference Sherlock Holmes outside of a sentence or outside of a story? Well no, you don't reference him period, but there are sentences in which the word occurs which have truth values, okay, and those sentences get their truth values in some derivative sense from the stories. You can compare Sherlock Holmes across stories, you can talk about Sherlock Holmes in movies, you can compare Sherlock Holmes, I can say Sherlock Holmes is depicted in all the fiction he appears in as far smarter than Donald Trump is depicted in anything that talks about him, perfectly good sentence. One that's not true because of, as it turns out. Well when you say stories that's depicted in stories, does a story have an existence? For the sake of our conversation let's take stories to exist. What they actually are might be words on paper, interpreted sentences, etc. I have very radical views about what ends up existing at the end of the day. Okay, well I have a book which unfortunately I don't have here so I can't give it to you, but I can always send it to you if you can give me the address called Semantic Perception, How the Illusion of a Public Language Arises and Persists. So that also focuses on certain other class of what I call cognitive illusions. What's going on in Semantic Perception is the idea is you and I have basically language organs, I'm going to use Chomsky style language here, I'm very sympathetic to a lot of what Chomsky has to say about this. We have, as it were, each of us has a faculty, a language faculty. What it produces is we end up competent in an idiolect, an individual idiolect. I have mine, you have yours, that's going on here. They overlap sufficiently that we enjoy successful communication, but they're not exact. But that's not our experience, our experience is very different. Our experience, you're a native English speaker, you have an involuntary experience of meaningful words on a page, there is no object like that in the world. There is design, there is just ink on a page here. Nevertheless we involuntarily project that into the world and we furthermore have the experience. I have the experience that this has a meaning as well as, you know, a grammar, but I'm really focused on its meaning and I am experiencing you in the successful communication as having a seeing the same thing that I am, just as I see you as seeing this pen just as I do.  That object is not out there. So there are several things I want to ask you, and then we'll get back to mathematics, but this is so directly related. Is your claim that what you could call concepts, maybe, that those don't actually exist? I was focusing specifically on public language, a concept, if we think of it as a mental entity. I mean, concept and philosophy, there is a use of it where it's a kind of public entity. But you know, concept, actually concept is this mongrel concept that's used in all sorts of ways. But if you're thinking of it as a mental entity, there is this, we have a psychological theory, a folk psychological theory, which talks about all sorts of entities, images, etc., etc. Not that, if that theory actually refers to anything, or not, I'm not prepared to say. Okay, okay, it's the reference part that I'm getting at. Right. What I'm focusing on specifically here is that when you talk about a public language, which we do, and we talk about English, and we talk about the grammar of English, and the meanings of words that are held in common, and we talk about, if we talk about the practices that we engage in, where we defer to others sometimes on the meaning of a word, I had this tendency to think of a tomato as a vegetable, but in point of fact I'm wrong and it's a fruit, right, we're deferring to certain botanical, I'm not going to say that right, experts. That object does not exist, is what I want to say. So the sentence though, that object does not exist, makes me think, well then it isn't an object. No, it isn't an object, but we experience it as an object, and we talk about it, and we rely on it, and we communicate with one another. And so we have certain experiences which we indispensable have to describe a certain way. But if I were to step back and do linguistic theory about this kind of public object or pragmatics or whatever, my theory would talk about public objects that would quantify over them just as if I were writing an essay on a novel of Dickens, I would talk about the characters and quantify over them, and in both cases those things don't exist, even though I say the sentences will be true. Okay, so moving from fictional characters, do you also have the same perspective on something like government? Does government exist? Governments, countries, yeah, I have not yet started to write about social ontology, I'm approaching it, I'm intending to write about it very shortly. But the answer is yes. The situation is a little more complicated because there's a sense in which we, it's only a sense though, it's not absolute, in which we take countries or think of them at times as composed of people or constituting of territory. Again, it turns out it's a very complicated notion. In fact, just a notion of a city like London is very complicated. This is the sort of thing that Chomsky has pointed out, and that it's playing a multiplicity of ontological roles and it's very shifty. But in point of fact, and so when you analyze what we would be dealing with here, there's going to be the only way to put it now, just informally, is that there are aspects of it that exist and aspects of it that do not. Okay, so. Okay, whereas in a certain sense the way I want to analyze fiction is it just doesn't, the terms don't refer, and I'm going to say the same thing about mathematical entities. Okay, so what I'd like to do is present to you something that I want you to tell me why I'm wrong, because I don't like the idea of Platonism, and I don't like the idea, well, I like the idea of nominalism, but I don't like sentences like we can say true things about non-existent, non-odd. That's a misleading way of putting it. The right way to put it is that we have sentences that are true with terms in them that don't refer. That's the way to, you're right, the other way of putting it, well it's not that the other way is imprecise, it's that the other way invites a position, which philosophers have adopted that, well there are two kinds of objects, there are ones that exist and ones that don't, or there are ones that have being and ones that don't, or maybe then none of them have being but then they are in some sense or have properties even though they don't exist and don't have being, and I don't want to say any of this, all of this to me is crazy metaphysics. Okay, so, but I think there's another option here. Okay. This is my own position. All right.  So when we're talking about something like government or we're talking about something like Pegasus, Pegasus exists but what I mean by that word is a mental unit in my mind. Don't want to say that. Okay, so why is that, why don't you like that? Why you don't want to say that is that sounds like what's called a use mention error and so it goes something like this. Let's start with the keys on my desk over here, okay? I certainly have a concept of them, I have an idea of them and that's a mental entity and that's probably dependent on my mind in the sense that you're describing, although, you know, I'm going to have problems with that, but let's not worry about that because that's not important. The crucial thing is that we want to distinguish the keys, the physical keys from the mental entity. So there's at least two things that we're talking about here. And when I say the keys exist or the keys are heavy or any other number of things about the keys, I am not talking about the mental entity. The mental entity has a different set of properties. So here's how I might respond to that. Right, and so I want to say with Pegasus, you've got the mental entity, but you don't have the Pegasus. So that's the difference between the keys and the Pegasus. What do you think about something like this? That there are different types of existence. So you have a spatial existence. Yeah. The keys have the keys. Keys have spatial existence, sure. And fictional objects have fictional existence. Or what I would say is they have a conceptual existence. They have a mental existence. They're not spatially located. There are philosophers who at least sound like this. As I said, you'll find a philosopher for any position because logical space, surprisingly, logical space is as rare and expensive as apartments in Manhattan for whatever reason. So you'll find every space you'll find some philosopher. I'm a person who thinks, and now I'm going to try to try to out linguistic evidence for this, that that's not how the word word exists works. Exists does not have many meanings. Exists does not have many uses. It is not ambiguous. Now, one of the tools I use for this is I believe it's called the conjunction reduction test, which is if a word is open to multiple uses, you can't combine them in a way. In a single locution, you get oddities. So here's an example. Getting beer and getting up, different uses of get. And it's hard to say he got beer and up, right? Now, however, recall the example I gave to you a little earlier where I said there are cartoon characters and animators who resemble one another. One use of there are covering both two different kinds. And you can also say the same thing would exist. Yes, I totally agree. But what I would say is all that's reflective of is an imprecision of language that comes up in circumstances like this. So the way we clear that up is not by saying, oh, exist is intrinsically ambiguous. We just say, oh, well, we have to specify what we mean by the term. So if I say something like Harry Potter has square glasses, that's a false sentence. I could meaningfully say, no, that's false. Harry Potter has round glasses. What I mean by Harry Potter seems like a very clear concept. It's some kind of a mental unit that I can describe in various true or false ways. Other people might share that concept in their own minds. There's going to be this overlap between your concepts and my concepts. But we don't have to say Harry Potter doesn't exist. What I'd say is Harry Potter doesn't, that term has no spatial referent. That term is just a pure conceptual. Look, this is a view. This is a view. And you can even inoculate the view against the linguistic evidence. You don't have to call language imprecise, which seems mean. You can say, well, we're going to revise the language or regiment it. We're going to allow exist to work this way. Your metaphysics in a way is going to drive your revisions in language. That can happen. I'm going the other way. I'm going to say, you know what? I can get by without messing with existence. Now, parentheses, I have other arguments about this. I have trouble understanding different notions of existence. To me, what you're describing is something that exists in the same way but has different properties. It's mental or it's in space and time. And so I'm saying, you know, that's actually your position. Your position is actually just good old fashioned. You believe in different kinds of objects. Some of them are mental. Some of them are. And some of them are numbers. And you're labeling it. Now, I want to, I, in my back pocket, I haven't mentioned this. I have a criterion for what exists, which is not is in space time. But which would sound like it would just blatantly beg the question against you. I have a position, which is something like if something exists, it's mind and language independent. We have to, we don't get to dictate its properties. It gets to tell us what its properties are and we have to find out. So you reject the category of fiction. All mind dependent, you say mind dependent existent is those things. Yeah, that's not. There is no such thing as a mind dependent thing except in the following sense. And this is why I wasn't ruling out mental entities necessarily. Look, I make a chair. The chair is in a certain sense, carpenter dependent. That is to say the chair would not have existed unless the carpenter would have brought it into existence. I don't think that makes its existence dependent in any way except causally in the same way if there was no big bang, there would be no me. In that way, I can see mental events under a different description perhaps as brain episodes of a brain. Brain neurons fire, blah, blah, blah. That's an episode. And it may be, although I'm not positive this will ever work out, I think it might not that mental, the folk talk about ideas and in prayer we'll all turn into episodic descriptions of episodes and then that depends on what episodes are. So that would be the way I go. Now when it comes to therefore fictional entities, again I want to say what makes the Potter claims true or false is the movie and storytelling discourses that have been created and then do these sentences describe things correctly or not that are taking place in them? Not do they describe Harry Potter correctly because there is no Harry Potter but do they correspond in the right way to the sentences which occur in the Harry Potter stories? That's the story I'm going to tell. So what I'm saying is that at the end of the day I think you can tell your story, I can tell my story, where I would want to apply pressure against you in argument would be with my criterion. Okay, so when you think of an idea in your metaphysics, ideas don't exist. Let's say, I might think of them as, as I said, episodes and then- Okay, I guess that would mean- That they might exist depending on how I feel about episodes. Right, so what would something like that be? Is it something like a brain state? Yeah, or a perhaps a brain state or perhaps a particular event of the brain because one of the things that's going on in the brain is that things are happening and those are events and I think strictly speaking, for example, everything that I'm seeing, et cetera, et cetera, this can be characterized, not everything that I'm seeing because I'm seeing tables, chairs, et cetera, but the act of seeing as it were is a certain, in part, an event of my brain over a certain period of time, neurons firing, et cetera, et cetera, if that kind of language is still neurophysiologically accurate. So that's an event of the brain.  There are events that occur in it. It goes over a process of development when new memories occur. There is neurophysiological changes. All of that would be the stuff I would end up talking about. Okay, so when you are thinking about creativity, human creation, because I have this wiggle room in my metaphysics for mind-dependent things, I would say something like, I can actually conceive of, let's say, a song that hasn't been written or a song that's in my head and it's never been fully there but I can almost, in a sense, hear it. I can say all those things with a language of like, yeah, well, in some sense, that song exists. That's what I'm referencing. That's what I'm super, like, so pseudo-hearing but its existence doesn't have any spatial reference yet. How do you think about creative objects? Yeah, creative objects, it's going to depend on the object. Let's assume that an object is a certain, the objects we're talking about here, there are such objects are time-bounded. They come into existence at a certain point. They go out of existence at a certain point. And so, and let's say these are the things we create. This is a very simple toy model because I think there are things we create that don't exist in a certain sense. Again, I'm speaking in this terrible way but I can anticipate and there are things we say, like, you know, the house I am going to build is one I can barely afford, okay? And that's a statement about a future house, okay? I am able to refer to, there are real questions about, am I actually referring to it? Because it exists in the future, let's say it really does exist and then I, maybe I'm able to refer to something in the future at the present moment and that would be an actual object that I was referring to. It may be the house never comes into being. In that case, I'm not referring to something, okay? But nevertheless, what I'm saying is true because one of the reasons the house never got built was because I couldn't afford it, right? So what I'm going to do in these cases and if you think about the creation of fictional characters which I treat as creation, those are the creation of things that don't exist and what we're going to describe instead if we say, well, what did the person create metaphysically? Well, it depends if it's a story, it's a bunch of sentences or it's ink on paper that's interpreted or whatever and then it's something that we allow to accrue over time the way we would treat it. In other cases, we're just going to talk about a practice that we can carry on of a certain sort, a way of talking and that's what we're actually creating when we're creating these objects. I have one more question for you and then we'll bring it back to mathematics. Okay. For me, because I can, I feel like I have a little easier of a time talking about mental objects in this realm and in this kind of non-spatially-existent realm I can also throw something like consciousness. Oh, okay, I just have a big basket of non-physically-existent things and I'm just going to put consciousness in there so that results in any kind of problem. When you think of consciousness or the experience of awareness or how does this fit into your metaphysics? Is this, am I referencing anything in the world? That's really complicated and it's a little like government. What's going to happen? I have not written about this. I have plans if I live. The book you will write in the future. The book I will write. Well, the way I've been going, I'm like at eight now so there's a chance I'll get there. Consciousness, I'm going to say, in some, we talk about it in a lot of ways and we have certain kinds of experiences and there are these issues about first person and about the way it seems to be, et cetera, et cetera. There are enormous puzzles here and not all of those puzzles are puzzles about metaphysics. But as far as the metaphysics is concerned there's going to be aspects which exist and aspects which don't. It's going to be the same thing as government. Having said that, I want to stress again, this goes very little towards saying anything very distinctive about what's going on with consciousness or addressing the issues that arise. So do you see any qualitative categorical difference between consciousness as a metaphysical something and the regular kind of stuff, the keys, the physical stuff? What I want to say as far as the metaphysics is concerned there is nothing else going on. That's right, as far as the metaphysics is concerned. And I have a book coming out in 2017 called Objects Without Borders which already says that a great deal of what we take to be in the world actually is not there. We project it, okay? This isn't even going near consciousness. This is worrying about things like what are called individuation conditions for objects and saying we project the individuation conditions. And that projection has no actual existence. There's nothing in the world that corresponds to it, structurally or otherwise. That's basically the thesis of that book. So what's happening here is a great deal, what I'm engaging in in metaphysics is a process that a lot, an earlier generation of philosophers thought was impossible and dating back to Kant everybody thought was impossible which is I'm actually trying to factor what we're projecting onto the world from what is actually there. I'm claiming we can do it, okay? The Kantian style view is something like, look, mind and world are all bundled together. You can't figure out which part is one and which part is the other. I don't think that's true, okay? I mention this simply because in saying that what's going on in consciousness there's nothing more than what's already in the world. I had to add, perhaps I was cheating a little bit in advertising a book but the stress I was trying to put on this was there's a lot less out there than you think. That was the idea. Okay, so now I'm coming full circle back to numbers. If it is true that numbers don't exist, then what is your explanation for the incredible explanatory power and use of these numbers? Well, that's a big, big, that's what I concede. If you're going to be a genuine nominalist of the sort that I am, you have got to tell a story about what is so valuable about geometry, about numbers and about so much other higher mathematics and there's a story that has to be told. It's a long story, it's not quick and obvious. There's a way in which the platonic story made life easy. There are these guys, in fact Plato's version made it especially easy and the rest of the world kind of approximates it and that's why you've got application. Plato's story had an application story built right into it. I don't have an application story so I have to tell a much more complicated story and one of the things I wanna say is it's a piecemeal story. So when you're explaining it, it really turns on the application. So like if you're looking at your application of you cling geometry to a table, the story you're gonna tell about the success of the application is going to turn on the physical properties of the table and how they allow you to extract the information and extract descriptions of the table that are approximately right from the mathematical formalism. So you've got to tell a story that looks at the mathematics, looks at what the application of the mathematics looks like in that case and why what pops out is close to what is going on on the table. So that's generally the kind of story I tell and it's gotta be told in a way that doesn't presuppose that these things exist. So in particular, I can't tell a story of the following story. Draw a triangle on the blackboard and that approximates a Euclidean triangle. I can't tell that story because I've just invoked the Euclidean triangle. What I have to do is tell a different story which focuses on the theorems of Euclidean geometry and then are interpreting those in the physical application and then cranking out results which are close to the results that are empirically predicted. Am I at all communicating? Because as I said, this is a long story. Yeah, so let me ask you. Geometry is a great place to talk about this. Because in a certain sense, the success of the application is so visible in a certain sense because you've kind of got the physical item, big and large macro object to do the comparison with. That's what makes it an easier case for me than other cases. So in geometry, something like the Pythagorean theorem. Right. What I really don't like is the Platonist approach where we're talking about the ideal triangle that is separate of our conception of it that has these properties and sometimes correlates to this world, sometimes it doesn't. I like the middle ground of thinking of what I mean by the Pythagorean theorem has to do with my own conception.  Now in the mental world, then you can preserve kind of the explanatory power of Platonism and you can even say things like universal mathematical truths with this constructed object. But when we go to the nominalist perspective. You don't have that. You don't have. Do you have any? You still have concepts. Do you have any universality of mathematics in nominalism? You don't have it in principle. The universality of the applicability. I mean, look, mathematics as a whole is applicable. Okay, and that looks universal. But it's an illusion to think numbers are always applicable. Not if you're dealing with jelly-like things that are mutating into one another. Is that so, though? If there's nothing to count, then you're not going to apply numbers. Some mathematics will be applicable. I'm not denying the applicability of mathematics. I'm just saying, keep in mind you've got lots of different mathematical theories and they are often applied in different ways. And they're not necessarily the same. That's all I'm saying. So I'm trying to tame a kind of impression that you can have as like, oh my god, look at this miracle. Mathematics that applies to the world. And the right thing to say is, a chunk of it applies here. A chunk of it applies here.  Yes, and I agree with you on that point, but for different reasons. Well, I understand. It's perfectly good mathematics. And often applications can emerge later. I can tell stories about that. There are cute stories. But let me not focus on that part. Let me point out something that's very unusual about mathematical concepts, which is the interesting thing is, if you think of the Earth, you can have an empirical concept of a triangle, which is, I draw this thing with chalk. The lines are irregular. They have a certain thickness. They're kind of thin, but not really very thin. And the angles, et cetera. And then what you realize is that if you use those concepts, you can prove very little. They are implicationally intractable. The reason being, the angles don't add up to a on something well, it's not going to be quite flat. And it's not going to add up to 180 degrees.  What you can actually prove is very little. And most of our ordinary concepts, even if they have rich semantic structure like house, like London, it's very hard to prove much with them. The crazy thing about the original set of Euclidean concepts is that they're implicationally tractable. All sorts of things can be proved. And that was what made it valuable. You could prove that the interior angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees. So one aspect of the advantage of mathematical concepts, there's nothing to do with whether they refer or not, is that they are implicationally tractable. And what we don't realize is that that is a rarity in ordinary language. Most of our concepts are implicationally intractable, which is why we find ourselves arguing with each other so much, even with perfectly sincere people. Again, I don't mean Donald Trump. I mean people with the best intention using concepts are going past each other, finding it very difficult to tease out implications. And in philosophy, the same thing, but not in mathematics.  It's just a very specific to the concepts. In the case of one of the things that you do is you are narrowing, think about it this way, the empirical notion of a triangle includes so much more than the Euclidean triangle does.  The advantage is that you don't want to get something that has not even a hope of an approximation empirically, because then you'll have stuff that you can pull out lots of implications, but there's no use. And as I again want to stress, there's lots of mathematics like that. You get something that's implicationally beautiful. You get lots of interesting results that you can show, but it has no application. And the people have to realize there's a lot of mathematics like that. Modern mathematics, I think, in particular, yes. Well, it really started in the 19th century. And there's nothing wrong with it, as I want to say. This is not a plea to cut back practices and mathematics programs by no means. It's to point out something special about an aspect of mathematics. And it's one of the reasons why mathematics became the backbone of physics, because physics, based on that mathematics, inherits the implicational tractability. Again, comparatively speaking, compared to ordinary concepts, which are just implicationally, they're utterly opaque. So something as simple as just a geometric triangle, which I have this, I have a, seems like there's some kind of a mental unit that I'm talking about that I can make true statements about. Think of it rather that you're using a mental unit, which is enabling you to infer, and you've got an image in your head, but that's not the object. There is no object. You can do that. If it is the image, though, can't we just say that the image is the object? No, because there's a bunch of ways in which we talk about mathematical objects that doesn't make the image the suitable rillata. In particular, we're both talking about triangles and Euclidean geometry. But my images are my images.  They're not the same images. That's true. But that's not what we're talking about. We're not talking about anything. But can't we at least talk about the image? Doesn't the image? And that's a subject for psychology. And one of the interesting things is that, broadly speaking, when psychologists study the concept of a number, for example, they do not get the numbers. They get something else. I mean, there are lots of literature on this very interesting stuff where we have a number of concepts of numbers that are operating in us. We have an analog notion. We have tiny 1, 2, 3, and 4 that we can recognize without subtilization. We've got, as I said, we can sort of estimate large groups of people and other objects. That's a concept of number. We have something that's coming out of the number quantifiers. But the actual mathematical numbers are not instantiated in anybody's head. Well, so let me ask you. So I'll start with an analogy and we'll bring it back to mathematics. I were a masterful artist, which I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination. And I were to share with you a technique for creating some amazing drawing on a wall. And I describe it as, hold the paintbrush this way and make this motion and blah, blah, blah. You might be able to construct something very similar to what I might have constructed. That's correct. Could this not be the same thing that's going on with mathematics? So what I'm talking about. It is the same thing that's going on in mathematics. But if that's true, though, if that's true, it seems like the image is the object. The triangle is like the painting that I'm. The reason it cannot be is because of this element that kicks in, which is if you're talking about the image, there can't be any right or wrong. The image is what it is. But with mathematics, we treat there being a right or wrong that's going on. We've got a language practice and a proof procedure, which in mathematics, that puts conditions on what the objects are supposed to be like. But I think I can explain that. So let's say we were talking about the image on the wall, the painting on the wall. I can make false claims about it. I could say, you know. No, no, no. But this is different. This is different. Of course, you can make false claims about it. But the point is, you're not making false claims about your image. If your image, for example, condenses the number line so that numbers that are larger are actually closer together than numbers that are smaller, which is how our number line works, that's correct about the number line in our heads. That is the image. That's not incorrect. That's correct. Yes. Well, but when you say the number line in our heads, what I'm saying is the way I think of you of mathematics, it is if somebody is a skilled mathematician, as they're a skilled linguist, they can tell rules and procedures and techniques to somebody to help them create a similar construction in their mind as the mathematician holds in his head. Actually, what they'll get them to do, probably they will not get them. If I'm a very skilled mathematician, and in part, there's a certain phenomenology accompanying that. So I have ways in which, when I'm thinking about certain higher dimensional objects, I slice and dice them a certain way so I get certain three-dimensional images, which are nicely connected to the properties of the thing. And I write down proofs. Now, my proofs don't echo that phenomenology. And then I teach somebody how to do these proofs, and they get the hang of it. They're likely to have a very different phenomenology, but they're going to be able to do the proofs the same way. Well, the core features would be the same, though. Just like if we're going through, and I like to do the artist example, the rules I tell you are about making an image of a horse. But I don't specify the color of the horse. We can still make true and accurate claims about that constructed image of, I could say, oh, you did this part wrong. You drew him, and he's wearing a top hat. No, you've done that wrong. You see, in that particular case, you've got a drawing on a wall, but you're actually going to say false and true things about. In this case, you've got a phenomenology that never goes public. And when psychologists study that thing, the only way it goes public is psychologists study it to some extent and get some idea. But when I'm teaching you mathematics, or you're teaching me mathematics, we are not sharing the phenomenology. Now, that's not, I'm not invoking another mind's problem. I never get access to your from. That's not the point. The point I'm making is that you have to get on to doing the mathematics. And there's no reason to think that you get on to it by getting the same phenomenology in your head that I get. In fact, if you end up being a really creative mathematician using the stuff that I started with and coming up with all these new proofs, you probably have a very different phenomenology. OK, OK. So let me, you're correct to point out the error of the horse example. However, I have another example. Just like a real philosopher, he's just, OK, you don't like that example? Here, look, I've got six more in my pocket. So let's say it's not drawing the public thing. Let's say it's storytelling. OK. And let's say I'm trying to communicate to an apprentice storyteller. And I say, look, here are the absolutely essential features of constructing the story. Here's what you do with the plot. Here's how you get the characters to be liked. Here are their names. And this is the storyline. If I want to construct the same phenomenological experience in you, here are the key details. But I say, there are things that you, if the color of the jacket that the person is wearing is different than it is in my phenomenal little experience, it doesn't really matter. Yes, so we would disagree. We'd have a different phenomenology, but the same core meat of the story is still there. If I've done a good job in communicating, the core construction of that story is going to be. I told you how to make the story. And now you go on to do the same thing I was doing with the story. Yes, there's some irrelevant details. Right, but none of this is really tracking the, again, it's the same thing. The phenomenology is not really necessarily tracking it that closely. It may turn out that, I mean, what's going on in this case is we are learning how to create a certain kind of external object, which is a story, which is a bunch of sentences following one another. And that's what, often at the end of the day, that's what counts. See, that's a good point because what I've done is smuggled in my metaphysics because I wouldn't have considered the story an external object. I'm considering it as a, that's why I gave the examples to say, oh look, this is not an external. Even if it's not written down, even if it's an oral, it's still an external object. And that's the kind of thing that's being passed to one another and that we're learning to make. And I agree that the phenomenology is crucial to pulling that off. It may be, for example, that someone who cannot psychologically entertain imaginary beings of a certain sort and start to attribute to things to them psychologically is not gonna be able to write a story. Or if they do, it's gonna be a really bizarre kind of thing. But nevertheless, that phenomenology enables them to do it but is not showing up. So in conclusion, because this is an excellent note to end on, I was having a conversation with a mathematician at Oxford. And we were talking about this subject. It came up fairly briefly. And he was saying, there is a school of thought. I don't know if you've heard of this because I don't know very much about it, but if you do, I'd like to follow this up just on my own research. There's a school of thinking in mathematics and in metaphysics called fictionalism, which essentially says that numbers are fictional objects. They're in the same, which is, that is my position. They're like, they're different versions of the story. Yes. Of this position. And what I would say is I really like that position because depending on the nature of the fictional object, the numbers or the concepts, you can create the story in such a way where you can make true claims about the spatially existent world. So when I talk about the idealized sphere, to the extent I make that a very clear concept, that applies to the real world. And that's how we get the amazing explanatory power of mathematics. But have you, is this a position that is not? Yeah, no, it's out there. There are different things called by fiction, called fictionalism. Usually the fictionalist position doesn't want these things to be true. At least among many philosophers, the fictionalist thinks that fictions are pretended true rather than true. So it's often, it's not invariably, but one way to think of it is as a pretence view. I'm not a pretence theorist. I think that these things just are true. And it's the fact that they're true that contributes to their value, okay? And what I'm saying is these sentences can be true. In fiction, just as in mathematics, without referring, but it's the truth of them and it's the nature of the truths that makes them successfully applicable. So I want to avoid the fictional world picture. In fiction, let alone in mathematics, okay? So I don't give the kind of explanation that you just mentioned. I'm gonna give a different one. As long as I'm successful in giving a different one, we can then get into a fight over the specific issue of should we, do we need to have a kind of fictional object for our story or not? And I'm going to say no we don't. Well that's an excellent note to end on. Thank you so much for this conversation. Yeah, thank you. All right, that was my interview with Dr. Jodi Azuni of Tufts University. I hope you guys liked it. I certainly did when I edited this interview up. I thought, damn, this was a good one. I got lots more coming down the pipeline. My wife and I are moving to New Zealand to continue our travel around the world. And I got some new articles and videos that are coming out soon. So the next few weeks are gonna be super exciting. Make sure to stay tuned. All right, that's it for me. Enjoy the rest of your day.