Hello and welcome to the session. This is Professor Farhad and this session we're gonna be looking at the famous accounting equation. I'm gonna cover the accounting equation as you would cover it in a financial accounting or introductory course. So you don't need any prior background. I'm gonna go ahead and break the accounting equation for you and hopefully by the time you are done you will be good to go. This topic also could be used if you're studying for your CPA exam. This is basically basic. You need to know this if you're studying for your exam. As always I would like to remind you to connect with me only then if you haven't done so. YouTube is where you would need to subscribe. I have 1,600 plus accounting, auditing, finance and tax lectures. I don't only cover financial accounting, I cover all these courses as well. Please like this recording if you like it. Share it with others. If you're benefiting from this recording it means it might benefit other people. So share the wealth. On my website farhadlectures.com you will have access to additional resources if you're an accounting student or CPA candidate. PowerPoint, true, false, multiple choice and 2,000 plus CPA questions. Check it out. It's an investment in your career, investment in your education. So let's take a look at the basic accounting equation. The basic accounting equation and here's the equation. It states that assets are equal to liabilities plus equity. That's the accounting equation, okay? Now it's very important, very powerful equation. And once you understand the accounting equation it's easier to always see the big picture and that's why that's the first thing with each in accounting. So now you're gonna learn about basic concepts that you need to have a good understanding about because it's gonna help you throughout your accounting courses throughout your accounting career. So most likely there's a good chance this is the first time you are listening to this topic or you never learned it before and this is the first time you're gonna learn it and learn it well. So let's get going. So the first term is assets. So you need to know what is an asset. Simply put asset is a resource. Asset is a resource. Asset is a resource that will provide future benefit to the business. So that's basically what is an asset and that's all you need to know for now. It's a resource or assets or resources. Resources that will provide future benefit for the business. So what does that mean? It means you have something, you have something. Now you don't have to own it. It's good if you own it, own or control. You don't have to own an asset. Let's think about the real world or think about yourself personally. What could you have that will benefit you in the future? What could you own or control? Think about the car. If you own or control a car, if you could use the car, you can go to work. Do you have a computer? Do you have a cell phone? Okay, those are all assets. Now we're not talking about personal assets. We're talking about business. Remember when we do accounting, we do accounting from a business perspective. Now, that's what assets are, but the most important asset that you could have or a company can have, and I'm hoping you are thinking about it and that is cash, cash in your pocket. If you have cash in your pocket, it's the best resource that will do anything that will provide future benefit for you in any way, shape or form. What can you do with cash? You can pay bills. You can pay your employees. You can buy supplies. You can pay dividend, which is some of the terms you may not understand now, but you can do anything. Cash is an asset. Think about land. If you own a piece of land, it's an asset. If you own or control a building, that's an asset. If you have office supplies, it's an asset. If you have car or vehicle, it's an asset. If you have truck, it's an asset. If you have a machinery, it's an asset. So notice all of those, all these that I named cash, land, building, office supplies, truck, machinery, vehicle, car, all these items, they fit the definition of providing future benefit. You can use them in the business to get benefit. So that's basically what an asset is in a nutshell. And that's all what you need to know for now. Now there are many other assets that we would learn about later. Many other assets, but for the purpose of this session, just we need to know what an asset is. So that's what's an asset. So we are done with assets. Let's talk about liabilities. If you wanna use one word for liabilities to make it easy, liabilities are debt. Now what is a debt? Hopefully we are all familiar with debt. You might have, hopefully we are not, but we are, okay? So you might have credit card debt. You might have student loan debt. You might have, hopefully not, personal loan, loan that you took out. You might have a card loan. So notice you have debt or loans. Those are all liabilities. Now what is a definition for a liability? Well, a liability is something, it's something that's gonna use up resources to settle. Simply put, liabilities, it's an obligation. Obligation that will require the future, the future sacrifice of assets, generally speaking cash, generally speaking cash. We need cash. We need to use cash to settle the obligation. So obligation that would require future sacrifice of an asset, usually cash. Liabilities, something happened in the past. Liabilities occur, liabilities occur because something happened in the past. What do I mean by this? Think about it. When do you have a liability is when you did something in the past? Like what? You borrowed money. If you borrowed money in the past, do you have a liability today that you have to pay in the future? So basically a liability is today, the liability is today. For something that happened in the past and in the future, you have to pay. So it has a past effect, a current effect, and a future effect. And once you pay it, it goes away. Once you pay the liability, it goes away. Now, we talked about personal liabilities like car loan, credit card debt, personal loan, student loan, so on and so forth. Now for businesses, or a mortgage for a house, for businesses, you do have also debt. Now, for the purpose of today, we're gonna only cover two types of debts, just gonna illustrate the point. The two debts that we're gonna be defining today for businesses are accounts payable. And what is accounts payable is when the company buys goods or services on account. What does that mean? It means when the company buys goods and services. When we buy inventory, when we buy supplies, when we hire someone to do some work for us. Well, we tell them, we tell them, we're gonna pay you later.  So the company buys those goods and services on account. On account means we don't pay now. If we don't pay now, we have a liability called accounts payable. We have another liability. It's called notes payable. And what is notes payable?  So notes payable is a fancy word for a loan. And what is a loan is when the company is when the company borrow money. And the company always borrow money. Company borrows money, they always borrow money. Most companies, as far as I know, borrowing money is part of doing business. So those are two liabilities. Okay, that's what a liability is. Now we know what a liability is. We know what assets are. Let's see if we can determine what is an equity. So let's use some numbers to start to kind of explain equity here. Let's assume as a company, I have 200,000 worth of assets. So I have 200,000 worth of assets. And we know what assets are. We have all sorts of assets. And we have 200,000 worth of those, a list of many things. And we happen to have 80,000 of liabilities. We have 80,000 of liabilities.  If I told you we have assets of 200 liabilities of 80, well, I can kind of find out my equity is 120. Why? Because if assets equal to liabilities and equity, you're telling me I have 80,000 of liabilities. Therefore I can fairly assume my equity should be 120. Now let's rearrange this formula and make a little bit more sense of this equation. Another way to look at the equation is to say equity equal to assets assets minus liabilities. That's what equity equal to. If I rearrange the formula, simply put, if I say my equity is 120 equal to assets of 200,000 minus 80,000 of liabilities, all is fine and dandy. That's what equity is. So what does that mean? Well, another way to look at equity, we can call equity net assets. We can call equity on a personal level net worth. We can call equity residual value. All these words can be used for equity. Net asset means the difference between asset in your liabilities.   Those are three words for equity, but that doesn't help us. So what is equity really? Well, equity is what's left in the company, the value of the company after you pay off your liabilities. The question becomes, we know how we can obtain assets or kind of we know how to obtain assets, how to obtain liabilities. If we borrow money, we have assets and liabilities, but what affects equity? So what can think about it? What can increase my net asset? What can increase my net worth? What can increase my residual value? What can increase my equity? Oh, well, let's think about it. There are four things that you need to be aware of. Four things you need to be familiar with. Four, four, four things we need to be familiar with. Those four, two of them, two of those four will increase equity, okay? And two of them, they would reduce equity. So we need to know about the account that increases equity and the account that reduces equity. So now we are working only with equity. We're only working with this part of the equation. What are those two things that increase equity and the two things that reduce equity? Well, think about it for a moment. If you want to increase your net worth, if you want to have more assets than liabilities, what would you do? Well, I need to get more assets without increasing, without increasing my liabilities. What can I do? How can I get more assets? Well, guess what? If I get a second job or a better job, or if I can generate more income for myself, I can increase my assets without increasing my liabilities. So what do we call this? We call this a new term called revenues. What is a revenue? A revenue is what the company does to generate more assets. Each company does something different. For example, your university where you are attending, generate income by tuition. So they charge you tuition and that's your revenue.   That's your revenue, engineering revenue. So each individual, they'll have a different type of revenue. So revenue is what the company does to generate assets. What does on a day-to-day basis? That's what they do for a living. Basically what the company does for a living. So revenues increase equity. Now that's good. So revenues are good. So let's look at something that decrease equity. What could decrease equity? Well, think about it. If you have a business, you're gonna generate revenues.  Well, what are expenses? Well, expenses reduces equity. Expenses reduces equity. Revenues increases equity. So what are expenses? Expenses is the cost to run your business. Cost to run your business. So no company can generate revenues without incurring expenses. It'll be great. It will be excellent. It will be excellent if I can just generate revenues without incurring expenses. For example, when I teach at the university, I have to drive my car over there. So yes, I am generating revenue, but I also have to pay for gasoline. I have to pay for parking. I have to pay for other expenditure. So those are expenses. For example, a company might have to pay for their utilities. They have to pay for their cell phone. They have to pay for the internet service. They have to pay for insurance. They have to pay for rent. So what is an expense? It's the cost to run the business. So that's the second item that affect equity. And it's kind of think of it as the opposite of revenue. Now here's what we need to know about revenues and expenses. We have a formula that says if we take our revenues minus our expenses, it's gonna give us the difference between those. It's gonna give us net income or net loss for that matter, or net income. So that's the first thing I want you to learn or loss. Simply put, if we have revenues of 80,000, expenses of 30,000, we have a net income of 50,000. And that's what net income is. Net income is the difference between revenues and expenses. They are both equity account. Both revenue is equity and expenses are equity. One increases equity, the other one decreases equity. Now those are the two equity account. Now, I said there are four, so we have to look for the other two. Let's think about if you like a company, what can you do if you like a company? If you like a company, you can invest, you can contribute capital. So you can give the company money. So if you like my company, you would like, I like your company. Great, if you like my company, invest in my company. Give me money, give the company money and I'll give you shares in the company. So what we need to understand is we have something called kin-tributed capital or we're gonna see it, the account is called common stock. What is that account? Well, if you like a company and this is gonna increase equity, this is gonna increase equity. So we already identified the two accounts that increase equity, revenue and common stock. What does the common stock represent? It represent how much the investors invested in the business. What does that mean? If when the investors give you money, when the investors give you money, they invest in your business. It means they want to be owners. If they want to be owners, they have to give you money.  So that's another way to increase your equity is to try to convince people to invest with you, to invest in your company, not invest in you, it's the company. That's what contributed capital is. Now, why would people invest in your company? So why would you like a company? Well, you like a company for one reason. It's because the company is good, good in a sense that it's making a profit and when it makes that profit, they're gonna give you part of the profit. So what's gonna happen is this. We have another account that when they make a profit, let's go back to this, actually to this example. You remember this fictitious company here, they made 80,000 of revenues, 30,000 of expenses. The company made 50,000. Well, the company might decide to give 30,000 to the owners. When they give 30,000 to the owners, this is called, the term is called dividends. So we're gonna say, we're gonna say dividend 30,000. So they pay dividend of 30,000. Well, if they pay dividend of 30,000, it means they took the cash from the business and they gave it to the owners. Well, guess what? The equity of the business will go down. The equity of the business will go down. So when the company pays out dividend, the equity of the business will go down. Now, let's go back here and expand this little bit further. Let's go back. So we made an income of 50,000. Then we paid dividend of 30,000. We paid dividend of 30,000. No reason why I put in an parentheses. What's left in the company is 20,000. Well, what's left after we pay out the dividend is called retained earnings, retained earnings. It's what the company kept after they pay out the dividend. So the company made a profit of 30,000. They pay 30,000 in dividend. What they left is 20,000. So net income minus dividend is retained earning. And but all of those, all these accounts, revenues, expenses, common stock and dividend, they're all under the umbrella of equity. Now, let's look at what we called the expanded account and equation. I'm gonna erase everything that's on the board. So let's look at the expanded account and equation. Assets equal to liabilities minus equity, common stock minus dividend. So remember, equity. So now we have the umbrella of equity. Under equity, we have contributed capital. And contributed capital is common stock. Then we have revenues minus expenses. Remember, everything under equity here. Everything under equity, revenues and expenses gives us net income. And remember what we were doing, we said revenues are 80, expenses are 30. And for the purpose of our example, we had income of 50,000. Then we paid dividend of 30. I should have had used a different number, that's fine. And what happened after we pay out the dividend, retained earning is 20. So notice dividend, revenue and expenses, they are all retained earnings account. Then we have common stock. So simply put, all in all, equity is composed of contributed capital. One, retained earnings too. Now retained earnings can be broken down further into revenues minus expenses, which is net income, net income minus dividend equal to retained earnings. So this is basically the expanded accounting equation. Now the only reason you're gonna learn how to do this is to first understand the big picture and what we're gonna do in the next session, we are going to analyze business transaction using this accounting equation. Now, as always, I would like to invite you to connect with me. Also like this video if you like it, share it. Please visit my website if you're looking for additional resources and serious about your accounting education, especially if you're studying for your CPA exam. Study hard, good luck and like the videos and share them. If they benefit you, it might mean they might benefit other people. Good luck.


A question for you, Pooja, as the co-author of the Decentralized Society paper, what was sort of some of the inspiration that led to wanting to write this in the first place? Thanks. So thank you first of all for having us here. Before I answer that question, I just want to acknowledge that the paper was actually a coordination of many individuals, including Divya and Leon, and members of the Radical Exchange community, and it was building off a lot of intuitions and questions that we've been asking for many years. So throughout this conversation, I really want to draw on Divya and Leon's expertise as well. So to answer your question, from my perspective, there was a really key, the key question we were trying to answer was, how do you build composable bottom-up networks of coordination for the 21st century in a decentralized way? And what I mean by decentralization is you can think about it sort of with three properties. One is where one level of social coordination isn't dominating, say, the level below it or say a level above it. Another way to think about it is where no particular actor or institution or nation state or set of actors can dominate another set of actors. And a key principle around this is consensus across difference or cooperation across difference. And the idea there is that we draw on a maximally diverse set of participants to draw out consensus in decision-making. I want to also draw on Leon and Divya and see what they have to say about this question. Okay. So what I find pretty valuable interest, like most interesting maybe around like the DSOC paradigm is that economics as an academic tradition has this very rationalist philosophy where we kind of, when you go to economics classes or business school, people tell you, okay, all our models kind of make sense based on the assumption that we are isolated from each other, rational individuals. And turns out like everybody is not like the most rational possible actor. And like we actually are not isolated.  Like we have all these, we are embedded in like a network of communities. And the weird thing is that like even say like Gitcoins quadratic funding in its current form is kind of only like assuming like isolated individuals in its model, like where we don't really have any measure to account for the relationships between the people that are contributing to the project on the Gitcoin platform. And I think like, you know, the exchange community and then why specifically like, I'm not realizing we need a actually built formal institutions that can recognize like all these social culture groups that people care about. And like who cares about what social culture groups or as a member of them, and then feed that reality into the decision making models like Gitcong grants or quadratic funding. And I think the DSOC paper like, like incredible job and kind of bridging that social philosophy to Web three, as you might have recognized, like on social media, there was like a lot of like debate around like how it would particularly be implemented. And I think like it was super fair for the paper to like suggest that the Ethereum community or which like natively uses Ethereum tooling, right, would kind of use Ethereum native technology to to bring pluralism to its institutions. I think, you know, other institutions say like governments might use different data structures, maybe pen and paper, like usually or like, you know, like other technological communities, you know, Facebook could also do more pluralistic like content curation or like sortition, right. And their data obviously lives in different places and not on public blockchain. So I think, you know, whatever, like all kinds of like institutions, including web three, and I guess I was kind of the focus of the DSOC paper could like work on recognizing social culture groups and then like fostering cooperation between groups and not just between like supposedly isolated individuals. Yeah, I think for me, my background is in working on technology and democracy. I started out studying, you know, decision making processes and institutionalization of social movements, cooperative organizations, collective data ownership, things like this. And when you're in that space for a while, it sort of becomes clear that we need new primitives over time to allow for, you know, the subsidiarity principle that a lot of our democracies are built off of local autonomy as much as possible. And then you move to the next level up sort of questions to for those to flourish in an increasingly connected increasingly in need of coordination world, you need to constantly be pushing on what types of mechanisms can enable that and plural intelligence and collective intelligence to come together and have, you know, the three things that we want in a governance system, which to me are information processing. A lot of people have different information capacity and have different pieces of information.  You want to process that, you want to coordinate people to take action, and you want that system to be legitimate, right? I think there's a significant normative component here where people should have that ability to affect their circumstances. And for those three things to be true, we need to constantly be iterating new primitives, identity and verification and ways of belonging in a community and deliberating are a big part of those primitives and always have been. So to me what's exciting about this paper, but more importantly as we've discussed this sort of like invitation to research and an invitation to create sort of more knowledge around this is what are those primitives going to be going forward while working with the structures that we've always had for this. And I think that's a big part of what we see here. We're not trying to replace, you know, wholesale any particular piece and really pluralism is about that organic growth forward and recognizing and correcting injustices that we currently have as well as building meaningful innovative positive visions for the future, which I think these primitives can lead us to. Yeah, thank you so much for providing sort of the baseline and thinking of why is this important from sort of philosophical and high level. And I guess coming down to more say a use case specific area, what are some actual application domains of this kind of thinking of soulbound NFTs or non-transferable NFTs, but of these SPTs? Yeah, what's an area that gets all of you excited? So, as I said, from my perspective, the goal of the paper was to think about how we build decentralized networks of coordination and one network that I think is really in need of disruption is actually scientific networks and the production of scientific knowledge. And as many of you who are researchers in this audience know, there is a particular rent extractor called journals who have placed themselves in the production of scientific knowledge that are, you know, very rent extractive and coercive towards researchers and peer reviewers. And I think non-transferable tokens or even verifiable credentials for that matter could be harnessed as a identity substrate to recreate these knowledge networks bottom up in a way where we can transition closed science to open science and also, you know, transform competitive science to cooperative science and creating research dows. And I gave a talk recently at DSI Berlin, which you can look up, which goes into this further. But for me in particular, I'm very excited about scientific disruption. And actually, the kind of flip side of that is also open source research, which sort of has the opposite problem where there's, you know, where scientific communities have a lot of status but low sort of closed information. Open source research communities have struggled to represent status and accomplishment, but have open information. And I think, you know, both of these communities could be very well served by non-transferable identity substrates. Yeah, Leon or David, what do you think? Yeah, sure. So I'm kind of, I think, like a cool area for like near term experimentation with this paradigm is like KitKoin grants, this like matching funding system that like KitKoin has been operating for a couple of years now. Basically, like, we'll usually have like a philanthropic organization or like wealth individuals like who provide matching funds, where you'll have like projects that kind of need like open source projects usually so far that need funding. And then based on community donations, which also kind of count as votes that matching fund will like, match the community contributions to these projects. And it's already kind of innovative in its current form because using this thing called quadratic funding where actually like, you'll look at the square roots of the donations, of the size of the donations. So kind of give proportion more weight to smaller donations and to larger ones. But even though like this already kind of strikes a better balance than like current mechanism designs like between like preventing tyranny of the majority and at the same time, tyranny of the minority. It's kind of like a cool trade off. It is still like assuming this very individualist notion and like doesn't, you know, it only considers kind of headcount and the square root of the size of the contributions. And like, obviously, this seems a bit ridiculously simple to like provide like very rich scalable social cooperation.  Then like, although like we kind of allow minorities to kind of show how like much I care through like making, you know, larger donations, like that that anyway has a limit since like the costs are like growing serverly like with a square root and everything. Like it would likely be the case that like a large homogeneous group, let's say people in California or like people in New York or like people at the coasts would be able to dominate every decision, right? Because like, they care about like coastal issues or like New York or California issues. Well, like, the countryside might be less populated and just smaller headcount. So like to address it, we could and the system is kind of trying to address it already, right? By like giving local representation to the states, but that's like adding just one dimension of complexity to the system. We could also look at like where people work or like what universities they went to or like what high schools they went to, whatever. And I feel like basically we can map out like this like multi dimensional sociograph and like even one or two dimensions, I think would really help making making quadratic funding more pluralistic by then like putting increasingly like more matching to projects that not only have high headcount and like contribution sizes, but also diverse groups supporting it.  And I think like this is something we could explore like other people who are building like quadratic voting or quadratic funding type stuff. I mean, optimism is also working on similar stuff. So I'd be pretty excited like about making these quadratic models more pluralistic. Yeah, I think for me, it's it's kind of a symbiotic process, right? It's not just use cases for Sylvain tokens, but really, why did we write the paper? Certain use cases for which they were created are the ones that I'm sort of excited about. And one of those I think it's around a network of how people handle and have voiceover and utilize data. And so a lot of my work has been around data as an input to AI governance and different types of technology governance. And one of the big problems that we face there is I actually came in in this space and was super excited about direct democracy over data, like people should have control over data, they should have an idea of the kinds of questions they want to solve, they should be able to target and basically donate their data to specific things. And quite quickly, which maybe you've all realized quicker than I did took me like a month or two direct democracy over data would be terrible, right? No one wants to have that kind of granular decision making power. You have no idea exactly where everything is going and where it's being stored. And that's not really the level of abstraction at which you want to operate. And yet there are major, there's rent seeking problems in the data space. There are so many ways that positive externalities and positive some outcomes are being curtailed, because a couple of organizations have access to so much more of this inherent problem solving input than others do. There's a lack of competition. And there's huge privacy problems. There is extraction from communities to build tools that will then go back and harm their communities. There are just a lot of issues here. And moving from direct democracy to then realizing, okay, we need something much closer to a network. We need liquid representation. We need new kinds of institutions. And we need ways to figure out what problems we can be solving. Suddenly you need these primitives like soulbound tokens to get a sense of what communities are people a part of, how do we track those values? What kinds of places would people be interested in delegating their values to so that they can be acted on their behalf? How do we have the appropriate inputs? Data lineage tracking is a big problem. I mean, how do we know what data is a part of which data set? We can imagine some use cases there. So to me, it is one of the inputs. It's not the only input that can build this kind of ecosystem. And of course, I'll speak to what I'm familiar with, which is the data space and the AI space. But this is true in creating a lot of different kinds of networks, I think. So I think that the networks that this can enable is what's most exciting to me. And it feels like that's kind of true for a lot of the space that's coming up around this paper. Right. Like, I just want to add on to that. So earlier in Juan's talk, he was talking about networked coordination. And so what we were trying to do in the DSOC paper is not just create like one big monolithic network, but actually recognize that we have different levels of coordination, right? There's local coordination, there's state, there's federal, there's global coordination problems like climate change that we need to solve, right? So how do we create this diverse, pluralistic network, composable network that is very dynamic at these different social layers and social levels, right? And as I said before, in a way where like one layer doesn't come to dominate the other or a set of actors within that layer doesn't dominate another set of actors. And, you know, IE is a truly decentralized network at different social scales. So the work that Divya does on AI and the work that Leanne does on quadratic funding, right, they're seeking to solve those problems at different social layers. That's great. And as we transition to questions, please raise your hands and I'll come run up to you. But a quick question for the panel as I start running around and catching anyone who does have questions is sort of what do you think is needs to happen in the next six months to really start making progress in these directions? Is that more of a tech problem or a culture problem or something in between? And yet if you do have questions, let me know and I'll start. So I would actually say first and foremost, this is a research problem. We need a lot of really creative thinkers in incentive design and a lot of small, you know, scale local experiments. We shouldn't be introducing any technology, in my opinion, whether it be soul ball tokens or whatever, unless they're actually solving like genuine coordination problems. So running small scale coordination experiments that can like scale up, right. And I would say I gave the initial use case around, is this still on? Yeah. Okay. I gave the initial use case around science and open source research. That's a great use case because there's already a high level of publicity. We want science to be open. We want research to be open. We want people to get recognized, right, for the contributions they make to a field. So that is a great place to run like experiments, but it is a research. There are a lot of open deep research questions. And if anybody is a researcher and wants to get involved, feel free to DM me. Leon and Divya, I'll let you also answer. Yeah, I'll shake up the order a little bit. Yeah, I think exactly like you were saying, a lot of it is around tight feedback loops and identifying what's going well and what's going badly, right. And so I think that, and I may have said this already, this is kind of like an invitation to enabling a network ecosystem. That means that there is a huge amount that hasn't been figured out. I mean, there's not a technical spec in the paper for a reason, right. And there's a lot of governance questions. There's a lot of questions at which level of communities this can be plugged into. And I think a lot of that comes around, you know, can this be piloted in small sorts of ways? Some of the questions we've talked about that are definitely still open are like, what are the ways that you have checks and balances on negative reputation? I mean, that is a, is a massive open question. But it's also been an open question for a very long time. It's not an open question that this kind of new primitive created. It is a problem that we contend with daily as we tried to live with each other in a pluralistic society. And so those types, you know, bringing together the research that has been answering those questions for a long time with some of the ways that we can use technology to enable this. And I think consistently being really humble about the role of the tech here, because it is purely an enabling mechanism. And the second that it stops enabling positive outcomes, we should not choose the technology over the outcome, right. And I think that that's something it's easy to be blind to when we are excited about a technology. And it's something we are really sort of invested in being careful and humble about as we determine whether experiments are going well, going forward. Cool. Yeah. I want to give space to the audience too. Yeah. So this is a question that's similar to what you just mentioned, Divya. So in a DSOC world that is doing a good job at producing good things for groups, for amplifying good things for groups, are you worried about the ability to amplify prejudice? And if so, what should we do about it? Yeah. So that's an excellent question. And we talk about this in the paper in dystopia as much, right. So one of the key principles is cooperation across difference or consensus across difference, for example, right. Elevating and surfacing consensus amongst the most diverse participants to signal, say, broader shared goods, pluralistic goods across, you know, broader networks. Like you could do the opposite, right. You could do consensus across similarity, right. And amplify, you know, the interest of the majority or say even the interest of a minority over a different set of groups, right. So ultimately in whatever technology we design and we make these sort of tacit decisions every day already, we need to sort of at the forefront, you know, declare sort of what our values are and what our goals are. And I would say like an existing technology like, you know, web 2, which I don't actually see as being very different from like Chinese surveillance state technology, right. We are making tacit value judgments when we use that technology as well. And we should just be aware of what are the values we're actually subscribing to and enabling. I think DSOC just makes it much more transparent that, hey, we are actually making value judgments. And like, what are those value judgments? But it's a concern, but I would say it's a concern not specific to the substrate, but is actually implicit in the substrates we use every day today. Yeah, I'll second that. I mean, if you think about it conceptually like the social credit system and like the people's republic of China and like kind of the attention driven like social networks like Facebook, Google are kind of that world where like we use a social graph, right. That's pretty rich, like much richer, I guess. And we can even imagine to like foster homogeneity to foster like attention bubbles like these like eco chambers, right. And like people start talking to each other in like social media world. And I guess the people's probably of China is like trying to like make their citizens more compliant and like homogeneous and like supporting the government that they have there. So I think basically we could, I mean, like all these systems for like pluralism will kind of have a similar architecture of like some social graph that you'll look at. And then the only question is like how do we define diversity instead of homogeneity? Obviously diversity is very like broad term and you need to make a lot of like normative judgment there, you know, like, it's not like that there'd be like a verifiable ground truth, you know, now this group is diverse or not. Like it depends on like what you consider diversity, right, or like valuable diversity. So, yeah, I think that the key will be like to at least have more accountability than like kind of the like homogeneous virtual societies that have been developed. And like people can understand, okay, why do I now get like lower matching in my good congruence program than like previously or like why do I get higher matching than somebody else? It should be like accountable like why why is it happening? I don't think like for instance, like that China or Facebook or Google are like very accountable in like how they do algorithmic recommendations or whatever. And on the other hand, it should be value aligned with the community that gets impacted by these algorithms, which is also not the case I would say on the like bad example side. Didn't mean to show you I mean like Facebook and just different. But so yeah, I think as long as it's accountable and like value aligned in the in terms of like value aligned with what the community that gets governed through this stuff thinks is like diversity, we are kind of going to the right direction, but it can like totally go wrong. And I think it will be like, like we will never like reach a perfect like diversity algorithm, right, will be like continuous iteration on like these algorithms and like aligning them closer to the community that it governs. Yeah, I think the short answer to your question is yes, we are worried about this. I think we're very worried about this. I mean, it's it's one of the major open points of research, right? And I think that as both Leon and Pujo were saying, the way to mitigate that is basically checks and balances is ensuring that we are creating a system that has as many different points of input and feedback and accountability as possible. And recognizing the ways that concentration of power means that that is cannot be done. And how many, you know, different power concentrating systems there are, whether it's at the nation state level or at sub levels, which is true in, you know, most of the systems that we see today, they're just incentivizing these types of power concentrations that don't allow for pluralism. So I think we are concerned about it. And building these countervailing forces is basically the best way we see to preserve that sense of non domination. Hey, a big fan of the paper, a lot of that provoking stuff in my community. So one of the big ones is this notion of like soul boundedness or non transferability. And I'm curious, basically the question is like whether either from your research or in circulating these ideas, like what seems to be the way that we can facilitate that? Like, for example, in the Linux Foundation public health working group where they're working on like COVID passport stuff, they have a whole task force on what they call the identity binding problem. How do you know the token or credential isn't isn't isn't is bound to a cryptographic identity, which we could share keys or something with versus like my soul or this human or something. So what's the, what's the, what, what seems to be a good solution or candidate solution from your y'all's perspective on that? Okay, so I hope I understand your question. Eugene, maybe you can go back so I can clarify. So I think your question was like how you were differentiating between like other identity systems and like soul boundedness. Yeah, like let's say I get a non transferable token from my academic credential, but it's bound to a cryptographic key. If I get to share my private key with someone else, all of a sudden they could impersonate me, but it seems like there's something with this notion of soul boundedness where we would want to potentially prevent that for the decentralized society. Right, right. So part of the key thing to understanding soul bounded tokens or non transferable tokens or community bound tokens, because ultimately we see individuals as a nexus of their social relationships, right? So they're different sides of the same coin. A key to understanding the idea around non transferable tokens is also this idea of community recovery where you cannot credibly sell your wallet because you could always just recover it through the communities in which you participate in. And we talk, we sort of gesture towards a mechanism which is very similar to the mechanism of consensus across difference. And the idea there would be that you would draw and say, for example, the most maximally diverse set of participants, ideally participants that maybe you know, but nobody else knows each other, right, in real time in a programmable way. So if somebody tried to steal your keys or you gave your keys, it would always sort of be recoverable. And so nobody would do it to begin with. And so this is like a very critical part of DSOC, right, is having these community recovery mechanism, which doesn't exist anywhere. And so this is a key, you know, thing to be innovative in like security research communities. And at the same time, though, like, we talk about it at the end of the paper, like, well, what comes first, right, these non transferable tokens or community tokens or community recovery. And actually both of the things are, you know, should instantiate relatively at the same time. And we kind of recommend, you know, these proto-solbound tokens, which are revocable by the issuer, right. So if you do need to, you know, take a new wallet, you can have those tokens like burned and then reissued in the new wallet and like carry on until we have community recovery in place. I hope that answers your question. Yeah, I think super briefly on the particular, like, what is it tied to? Is it tied to your wallet? Is it tied to your passport? I mean, what what is the mechanism by which it is tied to your quote unquote soul, which is not something you can really tie stuff to yet. To me, I think part of the way that we do that is also by attestation. So for example, if you shared your private key and shared your academic credential, well, everyone you went to school with would know that that person wasn't there, right, that whoever you shared your thing with, your school administration would know. And so we want to kind of maintain quote unquote soulboundedness by adding attestations on top of the kinds of credentials so that sharing in this fraudulent way is is basically made more difficult. Will there be slippage? Yes. And I think that's why we need to start out these experiments in, you know, the more environments in which we're okay with slippage basically where it's not like for death, right. And we're definitely not suggesting that that replacement happened early because there are all of these kinds of research questions that need to occur before we figure out, okay, is this really tied in the way that we wanted to or not? Much for joining. Unfortunately, we do have to cut off the panel here just because we're at time and we're already running slightly behind today. But big round of applause for our panelists. Thank you, Pooja, JV and Leon.


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and we are live. What's up guys? Hope you're having a good weekend. Like always let's do some sound checks over here. So if you can hear me in the chat box just say yes. I just want to confirm that the audio is working well and also that you guys can see me and the connection is strong. And then we can start off a question. So I'm going to come first serve questions like always. If your question is about price predictions, I won't answer it because I really don't care about it or do I really study it? But if your question is more related to technology, business building, spirituality or whatever you want to talk about, I'm all game for it. This is a complete open session. So go ahead and ask me whatever you guys want to ask me. Someone's exams are approaching soon. So rich. Good luck, man. All the best. I can relate. My fiance has been in med school for the last four and a half years, four years. What do I think about steam it? I think it's a great platform steam steam it. The technology is good. There are a lot of issues with the token economics. There's a lot of issues with fraud. I'll give you example with block geeks.  At least with Google, if somebody rips off your content, you can have a form at the MSA, something I forget the name of the form is and report that they're copywriting and plagiarizing you and monetizing off of your content. And for the most part, Google's pretty good within like an hour. So Google will penalize them and take down their website.   So if they can fix that, that will be a good start. What's my views on hash graph? It's a private patented technology. So with any private, let's say distributed ledger or DAC or private blockchain, you can do whatever you want. Simple as that. Do you, do I think this is from digest yourself? Do I think EOS will make ETH obsolete? Guys, anybody who thinks in absolute terms and you guys need to study startup life and you need to study how software works and you need to study how businesses compete against each other. It's not simply something just disappears. And the problem in the blockchain space is a lot of people are making promises, a lot of people are making what if, a lot of people are making assumptions. And if we're looking at this, that's not how reality works. It takes tremendous amount of execution, timing to create an ecosystem such as Ethereum. Will EOS destroy Ethereum? I'm going to be honest with you. I'm going to say no. Can they coexist? Yes. And at the end of the day, we're still in the first inning of this technology. And we have a lot of room to grow, a lot of experimentation to do.  Okay. Next questions. Somebody wants to launch a project is from Neil. He wants to launch a project. Which platform do you think I should launch it on? Neem, Ethereum, Waves? That's up to you. A couple of things you have to take into consideration is what are the differences in the platform from Ethereum to EOS, to Waves, to Neo, to Quantum, et cetera. And is there enough of a network effect on these platforms that makes sense for your DAP? Next thing is where are the developers? Can you actually find developers to develop for you? The next thing is, doesn't even make sense from a technological aspect, like how many transactions are you expecting on your DAP? Next thing you need to ask yourself, is there actual business model to this?  Canadian Tire money. That's not a business model. A business model is like, you allow me to pay with Fiat, you allow me to pay with Ether or Bitcoin, you collect the transaction fee off of that, or you have a profit margin on a product or service that you're selling. And that's speculation. If your token is the sheer speculation, that's a pyramid scheme. Any comments on the Lume Network upcoming DAP chains to help Ethereum? Yeah, Lume Network is interesting. Anybody who is working on tools and platforms to make DAPs easier to create is good. My only concern with a lot of these DAPs is business models. Like how are you going to create a business, and this is where we have to think outside of box, new business models.  A business model is very simple. You accept Fiat, you accept Bitcoin, you accept Ether in exchange for a service or a product. That's how it works. Okay, next question. Would I have been able to create blockheeks on my own without a co-founder? Yeah. But every single company I've ever had, I had co-founders. I just like to work with co-founders. Everybody has their own strengths, and co-founders could be investors, co-founders could be part-time, full-time. It depends on what kind of relationship, how well you know them, how do you organize your organization, how do you create your startup from the ground up, what skills you have. For me, I'm not the most detail oriented, but I like to move fast. I like to break things. I like to create beautiful teams that work well together. So that's my strength. So it all depends. For me, I'm not a developer. I don't like to program whatsoever. So having technical co-founders, having, let's say, even proper CFOs at the beginning who really understand the accounting, profit and loss, etc. It's really important.  I think it's about 3.2, 3.3 co-founders. Question, what do I think about the educational platform and blockchains like big degree? Yeah, there's like big degree. There's Academy. They have a token, I'm gonna be honest. People ask me, why doesn't blockheeks have a token? Why do I need a token for blockheeks? I'm actually gonna ask you guys a question. Why do I need one? Why should I force an artificial token to be used to purchase courses on my platform or our platform? It makes no sense to me whatsoever. And plus we have much different goals and, let's say, approached than other people. From Robert, do you feel like having a donation percentage built into a DAP is a valid business model? No. If it's a donation, that's a charity. It's not a business model whatsoever. A business model is something that's predictable, sustainable that I can calculate exactly from quarter to quarter from Q1 to Q4, right? Every 90 days. Exactly how much I'm gonna make and how much I'm gonna lose. Sustainable and predictable. Donation is not sustainable. Well, it is sustainable, but it's not predictable. And pretty much as a charity, it's a donation. So you could run a DAP as a non for profit charity where you run it that way, if it makes sense, but that has to be a public utility. Our next one. Crypto X planet, what type of business to run block cakes, go check it out.com. Yes, what I think about polymath, polymath, I know the team way before the plug chain space, they want to create a standard ST 20 token for securitized tokens, but themselves, they're not securities. They did the not they did the foundation route in Barbados. That's run by Trevor Corverco. And I know the whole team very well. I don't know, I'm not sold on securitized tokens yet. I don't see them as a massive benefit yet. The technology is still brand new. Regulations still trying to figure out things. So I think we have a very long way to go. I think polymath is just a first generation move. There's going to be second, third, fourth generation moves. And in the future, truthfully, this might just personal opinion, I don't believe I will come. I don't believe startups will need platforms to create a secure securitized token, you can just do it yourself and follow regulations no different than if I want to do a corporation today or reggae today, or do jobs act crowd equity funding, like you can do it yourself. But that's my opinion, everyone's different. Thoughts on iota. Lately, they've been having a lot of issues from a PR perspective. A lot of researchers from MIT. That's one school, but there's other ones, I think Berkeley as well. They've been coming out and poking holes at it. And I think iota just needs to have better public relation and have a sit down and start talking publicly. So far, what I've been reading, and I'm not a researcher, and I'm not a cryptographer, things that I've been reading and talking to cryptographers and security specialists in the industry, things don't look that well for iota. But I could be wrong or they could be wrong, but I would like to see more of an open dialogue between both people who are poking holes and iota that defends themselves, as opposed to just each of them screaming over the table, I'm right, he's wrong, blah, blah, blah, blah, but actually having a real communication. From Abbas, any thoughts on Tezos, Tezos problems, Tezos foundation problems, foundation problems were fixed. They appointed two new people to the head of the board or the foundation board. Tezos is interesting self governance on Tezos. They have the worst token name ever, Tezzi or something like that. I think it's good what they're doing. I think they should experiment. I think governance on a root blockchain has were really long way away from figuring out what governance is. And I think governance needs to be put into a box of context, meaning it's all case dependent. You can't have a generalized governance. So I really want them to work hard. And I want to see what they come up with. And it's going to be a great case study, and a great experimentation to be utilized and learned from for other people to implement. Where am I from? Any chance you're coming to Vancouver, BC from Toronto, Vancouver? I don't know. I don't have any plans really travel anywhere. Except mostly maybe going to Japan in April for conference. No, no, I don't know if it's for conference. I got something for business. What's my thoughts on the Telegram ICO?   Every single smart blockchain full stack developer cryptographer that I know is just saying it's a joke. And it is like it's a money grab. You'll see it's gonna be so much pump and dump with early tranche investors. Sanjos, I was before in older videos, you're better in shape. No more time for training in nature with kettlebell workout. I still train. I'm more lean, actually. I'm actually on a eight week program to put back 12 pounds of muscle. But then again, I really don't care for aesthetics. You know, people care about aesthetics.  I actually care for performance. And one of my loves in life and I always love this since day one is fighting. And for me, it's about how do I perform as a fighter? Monero roadmap adoption. This is from Sky Walker. Does the future hold? I like Monero. I like the team. I like the community. I like the use cases. And I've been bullish on Monero since day one. Future privacy coins more the better the more experiments the better. Simple as that. And it's needed. That's a thing. It's actually needed. Any updates on rootstock? No, I have no idea what they're doing. They've been working on for a while. It's like a long, long, long time. Golem. You're still working on it. Simple as that. When will EOS mainnet launch? I have no idea. They launched testing it. Well, a month or two ago, maybe less something like that. So this year, sometime I think they said maybe summer. What do I think about the Lightning Network? I think it's great. You know, there's pros and cons. But I think any and all scaling solutions, second, third, fourth layer scaling solutions are needed. You can't be running all the users on the root chain. There has to be side chains and drive chains. And right now, I think it's like plus 1500 nodes or something on the Lightning Network.  Sunny, what platforms do you think will survive in five years? Sunny, you can't predict that in any market.   Predictions are overrated. Let me put it that way. From GXT, I'm the type of guy that like Neo. I know the Neo team. I know the Neo team. I know the Quantum team. What other teams do I know? I know I know majority of the team. They're all good. Yeah. I like, Neo's okay. Quantum is good. Quantum is a good team. Most of the new ICOs is a big joke. Yeah. Majority of these new ICOs are money grabs, pump and dumps.  I've heard this one ICO wanted 400% discount on token or giving away 400% of discount. Like, what the fuck, man? That's just sort of targeted. That's not a good word to use, but it's, I would say giving away 400% has a lot to say about the people building the business. That's insane. And majority of these ICOs, it's a pump and dump with wheel groups and institutional investors coming in on the pre-seed sale or pre-token sale and getting ridiculous discounts. As soon as it hits the market to get like a 20x liquidity event, they dump it and then the public comes in like, it's complete pump and dump, no product, no business model, technology can't function with thousands of users, might as well, millions of users. It's insane. What do I think about Tai Lopez? He's an opportunist. That's simple as that. He's in an internet market. He tells you this fucking, what's it called? Warning labels are seen on his ads pop on YouTube. He's like, I'm a professional internet marketer. That's all you need to know. Adam, Adam, as you said, your fighter, question is, do you have all your teeth? No, no, I don't. I have a, on the front one, this has been massively chipped. I've constantly have to keep on filling it and I'm actually missing a tooth completely over here. Funny enough, I'm actually having facial dental surgery probably end of March or April to finally fix that. It's a big job, but yeah, I've been hit too many times in the face. And when I do spar these days, I'm fully equipped.   Like, getting hit in the head is not healthy. Cauliflower ear from Robin.  I used to wear guards all the time. Fuck. It's a badge of honor for a lot of people. I hate it. You can actually, the thing is like cauliflower ear, once you catch it early, you can completely remove it. You just cut it and let it drain. But a lot of the fighters don't want to do that to consider a badge of honor for me.  What do I think about Shopify?  They're in Toronto.  Highly recommend them to anybody looking to start e-commerce company. Questions one second, they're coming in quick. Skywalker, again, best books on business investing, building brands, some books on top of my mind, market, like you mean it. Um, professions of a price, professions of the pricing man, how price affects everything is really good for business. How to get rich by Felix Dennis. Don't let the title fool you. Felix Dennis is one of the, was one of the best entrepreneurs, former founder of Maxim magazine, passed away, I think a decade ago or something like that. Um, seeking wisdom, author Peter Bevelin, chronicling Warren Buffett and sorry, chronicling Charlie Munger. And then a segue to that, Charlie Munger's almanac is good. Anything by M. Clay Christensen, like I said, innovator solution, innovators dilemma. So those are some books on top of my mind. Oh, Peter Teal, zero to one is another one. Anything by J. Abraham is another one. Good for marketing. Another one is chat homes, ultimate sales machine. These are just ones on top of my mind. From sunny personal question, quit my job. Last year struggling a little bit. Any books I highly recommend Jordan Peterson's last book, 12 steps. Forget the full title, but it's 12 steps. Jordan Peterson, get the book, read it from Neil Gunner, the gunner smart contracts on Bitcoin. Yes, they just created an option for that. I forget what the coding is called. But you can do that with rootstock too, which is pretty exciting. So I'm excited for that smart contracts on Bitcoin. Super excited for that. Do I think the stock market is in a bubble? I think we are in an economic bubble and it's been progressing since 2008 in the United States because it was never fixed. The problems are suppressed with QE quantitative easing when trillions of dollars have been printed out. What happens when you increase supply of something? Obviously devaluation of that supply or it devalues the supply because there's more of it. Not to mention suppressing interest rate levels. So combined QE quantitative easing, printing of trillions of dollars of money, bailing people out, having very low suppressed interest rates, people living beyond their means. Think about this. If the interest rate goes up like 0.5, so half a percentage, that can put people out of a house.   Like buying a house, going to debt half a million dollars or a million dollars and literally scraping by every month.  Simple as that. For fuck's sakes, it irritates me how people live beyond their means.   Why aren't companies like Google and Facebook paying attention? Oh trust me they're paying attention. Come on, come on. They're paying attention deeply. Listen, all these funny daps coming out and in Telegram doing all this stuff. Imagine Facebook did something with cryptocurrency. They'll put everyone out of business. Come on, it's all about network effects. Facebook, Google, they have the users, they have your data. They can easily adopt some variations of technology and put 99% of all these other daps and blockchain businesses out of business. Simple as that. They have the resources to do it. This is from EI. I created a crypto review site for people to review fundamentals of cryptos. Rating is based on security, dev team reach, coin distribution, fungibility, privacy, transparency. I would add business model.  Come on guys.  What is the business model?  Simple as that.  End the story.  So if you can have that on your review section, where how they're actually making money without forcing me to use your shitty token, that'll be really good. From Frank, and what's the best product use case you find for blockchain? Enterprise would be supply chain, so logistics, but that's private. That's not public. And for public, still digital identity is really important in protecting your own data. And guys, we still haven't solved the original promise of the Satoshi White Paper, which is peer to peer commerce. A secure private coin is peer to peer commerce. That still needs to be solved. And for more merchants and companies to accept it, that's why I'm super excited about Lightning Network where you can instantaneously get Bitcoin. Like send it, I got it right away. Okay, questions are coming in. Timothy Miso, can you give me some advice on being an entrepreneur? Yeah, ideas are worthless.  What matters most is identification of problems. Because problems are pains for company or people. And if you can solve that pain, if you can identify first that pain that people have currently in the marketplace of the timing as of today and solve that pain for the company or the person, then you have a business because people willing to pay you to fix that. So identify a problem first. And how you do that is just talk to companies, talk to people and do research. Do I follow the UFC? Time to time. There's so many events these days. But yeah, time to time, I'm fairly follow it. You know, loosely. People keep on talking about minor one.  So I'm not going to comment on it. And I probably won't research it because I had no time. So that's that. I have no idea what minor one is. How many languages do I know? I know two and I'm trying to learn the third one, which is Spanish. So I know Yugoslavian, which is Slavic language, which I understand a bit of Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, English, obviously, and then currently learning Spanish. How do I make time for everything?  Simple as that. If it's not in my calendar, if it's not booked, it's not part of my reality. That's it. Usually my life is booked out 14 days in advance. I know exactly when I'm going to the gym. I know my business meetings. I know what I'm learning. I know when I have dinner or I'll say date night. I know everything. Every fucking, let's say, thing that I'm about to do in a day is booked out 14 days in advance. I'm going to answer one more question, guys. And then I got to go. So let me see a good question from Frank. I don't know if it's Frank or Frank. It's what it is. So do I still microdose to stimulate your state of mind? Here and there, silly side been Iboga, so Ibogaine, and sometimes LSD. That's one 16th of a tab. And I do it sporadically when I feel like I need to do it. Lately, I've just been doing a lot of cold, sorry, hot cold therapy with saunas almost every day and a lot of deep breathing like Wim Hof. It's been really good, good experimentation. But like always consult your physician. Talk to shamans.  And if you can afford spare a dollar towards them, they're a nonprofit research foundation. Try to help them out. They're amazing. Okay, guys, I'll keep it at that.  The sun is out. I want to catch some sun. I will see you guys next week. Have a great weekend. Adios.


So I am a mathematician. I'm also an ultra-runner, which really just means anything over the standard marathon distance, usually on trails. And I would argue that mathematics and ultra-running pretty much exactly the same thing. So that's what I'm going to talk about today, mainly focusing on community. I would not be a mathematician or a trail runner if it weren't for the amazing community of people that have motivated, supported, and helped me along the way. And so my goal, really, for this talk is to inspire all of you to just go forth and be a good math citizen. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to tell a few stories from my ultra-running experiences that I found have really paralleled with my mathematics experiences. The first one is this idea of recognition, very simple idea. I have had so much trouble thinking of myself as an ultra-runner.  What it took is it took the recognition of ultra-runners that I really respected, people that started talking to me like I was an ultra-runner and inviting me on their crazy loop runs, they're ridiculous. And it took that before I finally was able to call myself an ultra-runner. And if it weren't for them, I would have never signed up for this 50K trail race that I just did three weeks ago and I actually finally felt like an ultra-runner for the first time. Similarly in mathematics, I kept waiting to feel like a mathematician. I was like, all right, all right, when I go to grad school, I'm gonna be a mathematician. Okay, no, maybe when I get my first paper or okay, once I get my PhD, well, I finally feel like a mathematician. No, none of those things worked. What it took was it took mathematicians in my field who I really respected treating me like a mathematician and valuing my mathematics and calling me a mathematician before I could call myself a mathematician. And so I guess the moral of the story is really just, let's recognize and respect each other's mathematics. It feels a little silly to say that, but it actually makes a huge difference. It made a huge difference for me feeling like I belong. But that's kind of the end, like, oh, I feel like I belong. Let's go back to the beginning. When I first started trail running, I hated it. Oh my gosh, it was really hard. I was going up these hills and the hills were hard and I was so slow and I was like so used to road racing where I was fast and now all of a sudden I'm slow and it's really frustrating. And it really didn't help that I was running with this guy. So this guy, you can tell he's freaking gazelle. He like leaps up the hills and he looks back. He's like, oh my gosh, how did you get so far behind me? Really frustrating. But what was great about this guy is he never said, hey, I've just been like naturally gifted with this my whole life. No, he said, I used to be really bad at this and I've been doing this for a lot longer than you. And if you do it for a while, you're gonna be good too. And the crazy thing is, it was true. So I've done it for a while now and last year I ran five trail half marathons and I got second place overall female in every single one. What? Okay, and I actually, most of the passing I did was on the uphill. I used to hate hills. Now they're kind of fun. In mathematics, we are so often surrounded by gazelles. But sometimes we are gazelles. And I think as mathematicians, when we're surrounded by gazelles, we've kind of gotten used to like, okay, I'm gonna put my head down, I'm gonna work really hard and it's gonna be okay. But I think more importantly, when we are the gazelles, we need to recognize and be open about the amount of time, effort, and struggle that it took us. Because that'll help the people around us kind of stop seeing us as gazelles and it'll make us human. Final thing I wanna talk about is this 50K I just did because it's kind of recent. So I was training for this and it was kind of awful. This is my training plan. A lot of miles. I had to run 26 miles twice. Those are trail miles. That's a really big time commitment. It was kind of horrible, really actually. And I think the whole reason was because I did every single mile by myself. I logged all of those miles by myself. And I started to feel like it just wasn't for me. Flash forward to race day. It was the greatest day of my life. And the reason for that is because I had my family there and my dog. And a crew cheering me on. I made a friend and we ran 10 miles together and we kept like high fiving each other. It was so weird. And what I learned is that when I'm running with people I run faster and further than I had ever done in a training run. And so a lot in isolation. And we almost cheer the isolation of mathematics. So let's just remember that together we can do hard things and usually better. I wanted to end with this because my sister-in-law, she's a former track star. She just posted this on Facebook like literally two days ago and I thought it was kind of amazing. So she said, the lovely combination of age and mom mod have certainly made this challenge a great one. So as my stiff and sore self hits the roads I start to think about all the fun memories I have of running. Interestingly enough they don't include winning or necessarily running fast. Although I do enjoy both of those things. But our comprised of friends and teammates and competitors that have made me laugh, work hard and run strong. So let's all just remember to be good math teammates and make each other laugh, work hard and math strong. Thank you.


Hey everyone we have a giveaway going on right now for a special edition Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom OLED we also have the collector's edition Tears of the Kingdom and more being given away down in the pinned comment or in the description thank you so much for subscribing to the channel we are on a new subscription goal to try to get to 133,000 subscribers well let's say by the end of May I know it's kind of a crazy one we're pushing hard here but why 133 because Nintendo is 133 years old all right let's hit on this news and we have three things we need to talk about and the first one is a commercial that leaked for Tears of the Kingdom I'm gonna take a little bit of risk I'm gonna show you the commercial a little bit it's gonna be slightly blurred there's no spoilers in this commercial to be clear it doesn't show us anything we didn't already know other than the name of the Gliac monster which to me isn't that big of a spoiler now there are new gameplay footage in here of course but the biggest thing is the new attachment that's on Link's shield again slightly blurred so you guys can discover that attachment for yourself and we don't even know what it does because Link doesn't use it it's also notable that the Gliac itself now has a name it's called a flame Gliac that's really interesting and does seem to suggest that there will be other elemental versions of this Gliac which matches something we talked about in a supposed leak months ago on our channel now it does show an underground area as well that appears to be as far underground as one of the lower sky islands that we've seen and Link shoots an arrow at a plant that seems to light it up and provide some light underground so this is one of the biggest confirmations of underground we've had to date since we have actual underground coordinates and that's really it he does use a send at a bokeh blink camp but of course he can because there's a ceiling people are making a big deal out of this whole thing I don't know it's sort of a big deal that it leaked because this is official stuff that probably wasn't supposed to go public for a while and it's supposedly an unfinished commercial but it's whatever it's out there so I figured we'd talk about it now another piece of news we have four tiers of the kingdom deals with Matthew Mercer that's right Matthew Mercer is actually the voice of Ganondorf he got permission from Nintendo yesterday to share the news now he's done a lot of voice work in the industry so first off just in terms of animation he's worked on Attack on Titan Jojo's bizarre adventure killed a kill persona for Naruto and several others in video games he's voiced characters such as Leon Kennedy from Resident Evil 6 Curtis striker for Mortal Combat 9 Crom in Fire Emblem and so many more in other words Matthew Mercer is an extremely accomplished voice actor and it's really cool they got him to do the voice of Ganondorf here in English now we also got some new official art first off the Ganondorf here cool right this is the big one that everyone's been sharing but did you know we also got new official art for other characters such as Sidon, Riju and Tullen the three characters that we know fight alongside Link at some point during the game I do have a theory about these characters I think they might be related to some dungeons but we'll we'll talk about that in another video now there's some other things I do want to talk about with Tears of the Kingdom but I'm going to split it off to its own video because it deals with the visuals in the game and some actual evidence we have on all those visual improvements but I just want to say that Tears of the Kingdom trailer you know getting away from the live reaction and the breakdown we did the hour and a half deep dive we did into it I just want to say that Nintendo's marketing has just been brilliant I've been pretty critical of their marketing up until the final month and I did mention along the way the way Nintendo handled the marketing for this game was a bit tepid they were keeping things close to the vest and I did say with a month ago they were just going to blow our minds they were going to give us a whole bunch of stuff I don't know that waiting until a month out is the correct move I think that you could have enticed consumers much sooner but then we see all the pre-order numbers and this is where I admitted that the point of marketing is to sell the game right when you're marketing before the game comes out pre-order numbers are really what you're looking at and pre-order numbers are passing Breath of the Wild so quickly pretty much worldwide that it's undeniable the marketing was already good before this trailer dropped or at least good enough for what marketing is supposed to do and that is sell the game before it comes out now this trailer has dropped and it's getting universally praised some people even think it's better than the 2017 Breath of the Wild trailer some don't think it's quite as good as that one I will note one interesting thing is both trailers do repeat some of the same beats in terms of how it's presented but both trailers were trying to do two different things tears of the kingdom needed to tease a ton of stuff to us because we knew so little whereas Breath of the Wild trailer didn't necessarily contain as much new but rather just resold us on the world and that's totally fine because we had actually already seen a lot of Breath of the Wild by the time that trailer came out and that's what made that trailer so brilliant is despite seeing a lot of Breath of the Wild that trailer still felt epic and amazing and tears of the kingdom we really didn't see anything until this trailer so this trailer really did a lot to show us a lot of new there's gonna be a lot of people that are gonna voice their opinions one way or another which one's better but all I know is that this is probably if anyone was sitting around waiting to see what this game has to offer this was the trailer for them this obviously was the trailer for people as well that just don't care about spoilers and want everything told to them so look we're gonna get more information on the game this isn't it just because the final trailer we could get another gameplay session we're definitely gonna get media previews and media reviews and screenshots maybe more official art heck they might not be dumb and merchandise we could still get new amiibo hello we need the samurai Ganondorf amiibo it needs to exist we need a short hair Zelda amiibo I'm sorry it needs to exist heck we need a construct amiibo it needs to exist but beyond that yeah they could still have other announcements like a master's edition that I've heard about not announced yet that could still be something they just randomly drop because they do random drops they could also have other merchandise we're starting to see some stuff coming in from play Asia some new little gimmicks and flaps and little things you can buy for your switch that is official merchandise with all of that's coming out of Japan we could see more announcements like that so there's gonna be other tears of the kingdom news along the way but today I wanted to bring you that three pack of stuff we've gotten over the last you know 24 20 hours or so and yes I will immediately begin work on my next video which details out a lot of stuff about the visuals in this game and showing shot-for-shot improvements that are pretty much undeniable that this game is much better looking visually that being said later today around 1 p.m. central time we are going to be over on game over Jesse's channel on his highly in gamecast I'm gonna put a link to it down in the description I really hope you guys come and check it out I'm gonna be featured on there talking about tears of the kingdom along with obviously game over Jesse Andres restart the geek apprentice and yes Andre from game explain we're getting game explain up in this conversation so it's gonna be a lot of fun and I can't wait thank you guys so much for tuning in and as always we'll catch you in that next video