ZKPodcast: Catch up with Anna & Fredrik

Transcript

[Music] welcome to xero knowledge a podcast where we talk about the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web the show is hosted by me anna and me frederick before we start in i want to say thank you to this week's sponsor elio alia was the first platform for fully private applications it uses blockchain and zero knowledge cryptography to deliver a web experience that is both personal and private with alio

developers can write private applications without a background in blockchains or any expertise in cryptography the team consists of world-class cryptographers engineers and designers and as a quick side note i've also been working on a special project with elio that you will be hearing more about later this fall so alio has released developer preview 1 which is an early peak at what the future of the web will look like the release introduces a new programming language called leo a new community driven package manager for leo and a new development environment or ide called elio studio we recently had howard wu who is a co-founder of elio on the show for an interview if you haven't checked it out yet

i highly recommend giving it a listen i'll provide a link to the podcast as well as a link to the developer preview in the show notes so you can learn more about elio and start contributing today so thank you again elio and now here's alexandra's interview with us [Music] today we have something very different for you we're going to be turning the tables and so instead of frederick and i asking the questions we actually have our friend alexandra with us who's going to be asking us some questions so hey alexandra hi so the questions have been collected from some call like we've put a few calls out to get some outside questions

and i know alexandra you've put some together as well a quick intro to you so alexandra is an independent marketing consultant that we have both worked with in various contexts and still work with today and i guess today we're going to hear about these questions we actually have not heard we have not seen all of these questions before and so i'm very curious to see what it's like do you want to maybe just let people know who you are yeah hi i'm alex my background is mostly in marketing uh several years ago i fell down the crypto rabbit hole and ended up working at parity eventually as their head of marketing so recently i went freelance in order to pursue the question of how do we spread important and complicated ideas in

a world where people are increasingly constructing their worldview via memes and microsecond impressions and i've got to say how excited i am to be on the show i have a very fond memory from the time when i was interviewing at parody and trying to quickly remedy the fact that i knew very little about blockchain tech and i didn't want them to find that out so my memory is of driving around san francisco listening to episode 15 with robert habermeyer on consensus algorithms my learning strategy was to just listen to it over and over and over um until it made sense which kind of worked and i got the job so yeah i just wanted to say thank you to both of you for creating such a great

learning resource thank you very much oh thanks alex that's a funny story so before we begin i know that you both have shared your bios um on the show but maybe we can just do a quick recap um so if you could both give a quick bio plus something about your background that you have not shared on the podcast yet who goes first oh okay for me i i like to start sort of the path to this podcast probably like eight nine years ago when i first got into tech in general but you know i was based in berlin and i started to hang out around the hackathons and startup worlds here locally and actually yeah i think the first hackathon i went to was like a

games hackathon or something like that and so i started going regularly and from that i actually you know developed an idea around an interactive video product i met my co-founder for that project we ended up building a company founding a startup and working you know doing kind of the full startup thing like the pitching and the decks and the freaking you know i think there's like a startup bible or some startup guide we were pretty much following that model and it was interesting and intense and i was pushing myself and it was pretty cool but you know after a few years of doing it i realized that like it was pull it was pushing me pretty far away from like

myself and i was following the model as defined by in a lot of ways like other people and then i would say like around 2000 end of 2016 2017 this was when i started to become more and more interested in the blockchain kind of stuff and i had met you to steiner like a few years previous when i was like pitching my startup she and i had actually met and we'd stayed in touch and i knew she was in that space but i hadn't really before then dived in so i started to get into it around that time and then as like 2017 started to heat up my startup had sort of plateaued even though we still actually had some customers it wasn't growing in the way i'd hoped

and i saw this kind of exciting new industry where a lot of the rules that i had learned in startups could be disregarded like and were being disregarded by the successful people in that space so they were actually like breaking the rules that i had learned and it was working and that for me was incredibly exciting and inspiring and also just like it was relief it was this idea like wait wait maybe these models and this way that you're supposed to do things is kind of and maybe we can actually try doing it in a very different way and that was one of the big attractions for me in the space it was having come from this startup you

know guide like scenario with y combinator rules and all the things you're supposed to do right and then seeing people just like yeah be themselves in a much bigger way and so yeah that was sort of the leap that i made it like later that year in 2017 i joined parity i worked there for nine months in total from that point onwards a lot of people think i still work there i don't i haven't worked there in a long time but i am still friends with a lot of the people at parity so that's why you might hear me sometimes mention that i joined in in the summer of 2017 that's where i met frederick and i think in the fall of 2017 that's when we actually started the podcast and i think working in the space has been

incredibly exciting because here i can i've been able to challenge myself but also definitely maintain like a closer proximity to my core and to what i what i am what i'm good at and what i like to do than i was when i was kind of trying to be a startup founder i'm putting quote air quotes around that oh yeah and then the thing that i don't haven't talked about and people might not know so that startup the interactive video product continued to live on while i started this this podcast and actually this year like right before the pandemic hit we were able to sell the tech stack to accompany a new startup in san francisco called intelling media and the

company that i sold was video path and this is something i'm super excited about and have had no reason to mention it on this podcast but it's definitely like in my life it's been a pretty cool event and something i'm i'm happy that like that tech product which i was always very proud of it and i'm super happy that it has a new home yeah i don't know my background is as a programmer and i mean i i don't really like the term but like tech entrepreneur as well right like startup background i came into it from the freelance angle so i started freelancing in software development super early i mean i was working at not even working i was like 13 and i was at this internet cafe helping

the guy who ran it like build computers and then one day he was like i i need to set up a web store and need to find someone that can help me with that and uh i had played around with websites i was like yeah i could probably help you and then i helped him and he gave me some money for that just as a token of gratitude and i realized i could probably make money doing this and so i started freelancing around then at like 14 and i did that for a long time and then after college it was like it never entered my mind that i would join a company because i'd always freelance i'd always worked for myself i'd always i'd never had problems getting work that way

it was just like okay what do i do now and oh there's this cool guy let's work on that project together and so i was never like founding startups and like cargo culting this the startup thing uh it was just like here's a cool thing we can build let's try to make some money with that i don't know that's how i got into tech and everything and then at some point i had done this for a long time this is kind of a thing that i haven't shared on the podcast before too and like why i stopped doing that cycle is i realized i was working a lot in the sas space right after freelancing and then getting into web products and web 2.0 software as a services was the thing still is the thing to a

large degree on if you want to make money on the internet and i realized that quality does not matter in sas startup world the only thing that matters is time to production it's how quickly can you iterate how quickly can you get something out there the way we would build features often was like we have an assumption of the user wants x we add a button that says like do x but we wouldn't build a feature we just put an analytics tracker and see how many people click that button and then if enough people click that button then we build the feature and like quality innovation and driving

things from first principles it's not really sas world and uh i was super intrigued by i mean i've talked about why i got into crypto in general before but like one thing that i haven't talked much about is it was super intriguing because quality matter security matters it's systems programming it's it's like hardcore engineering you're dealing with networking you're dealing with low-level stuff as well as high-level stuff and just this notion that you're you're building a protocol you're trying to satisfy a spec and your main focus isn't like oh will this user pay more if i

have this or that thing right it's you know how can i implement this back as efficiently as possible this protocol and that was super intriguing to me to make that shift from a place where engineering and quality doesn't really matter at all to it matters a lot and like it's it's almost everything so that that's a large part of my shift into crypto can i ask what what's another kind of random thing that nobody knows about you i don't know you haven't mentioned yet on the podcast this is my pandemic hobby is making sourdough bread it's uh i've actually gotten decent at it it's it's

hard to get the oven spring that i want but it's i'm starting to get consistent and that's good i don't know otherwise it's sort of i don't know stuff that people that me that sometimes surprises people when i tell them it's like i did martial arts for many years i did powerlifting for many years being a computer person that doesn't necessarily look like i do those things i guess it's uh interesting i don't know it's not that much else interesting about me so there's a story that i've never that i don't think we've ever really told here but it was a very i think the word would be fortuitous story or fortuitous event so

frederick and i have a shared friend emmanuel who we both knew independently before we met each other and we we were both very good friends with this person and so i before meeting frederick had actually heard of frederick this really smart guy who's one of emanuel's friends i remember hearing about fred's like wedding and like all of this before meeting him and then when we actually met it was like we both had started at parody on exactly the same day but had heard about each other and so i remember the first message i sent over to you frederick was like hey uh i think we have a friend in common you're like are you anna i'm like

yeah it's kind of weird cool yeah it's it's a super strange coincidence it's a i mean it's a friend that i've known since since high school and uh grew up in the same like little area of sweden and it's very random that we'd uh have that friend in common totally cool we should get into the ama questions so pakushbu asks how much time per week does each of you invest into researching the topics you are presenting and he would also be interested in how and if that has changed throughout time hmm yeah it's definitely changed a lot and this goes a little bit to the story

of how this whole podcast started but we maybe we get to that at some other points for me it you know it's it's a huge shift i mean the podcast in general from day one where anna and i spent the same amount of time initially i did all the editing and i did a lot of the prep work and it was spent about the same amount of time can you remember can you remember how much time that was back then i feel like it was a lot for every episode probably yeah so i mean i got better at it and got more efficient initially i was probably like four hours per hour of content and then got down to like three and then at my most efficient i think i'm at like two hours per hour of contents

it's it's a lot of work to just like listen through everything cut out all the um's all the pauses all the weird stuff and yeah but over time you know my work in this has decreased drastically nana has taken over almost everything at this point so uh when it comes to me for prep today uh i do almost nothing i mean but both both in terms of like reading up on what i'm supposed to be talking about i do almost nothing i just show up and no this is seems interesting and i just ask questions i mean i think that in part also comes from just having done a lot of it being in the space i know most of this stuff before

coming on the show but there it is it does happen every once in a while that it's something i don't know anything about and i'm just like i have no clue and i need to spend a couple hours reading up and then it is like a couple hours probably like that i suggest episode i remember both you and i had to do quite a bit of background on that because it was a topic that was new yeah so i think that i agree with kind of the story that frederick told so early on we definitely spent more time on it researching and nowadays i've actually i mean we also have some help so we have henrik who does the editing for us and henrik's a friend of mine who so he composed the

intro music actually both versions the older version and the new version and more recently um he's been taking over pretty much all of the editing um so thanks a big shout out to henrik for helping out also a fellow swede um but yeah i would say like nowadays i think i also probably do a lot less prep than i used to although it depends on the episode and as mentioned we do have some help but i would say like one of the things i kind of like about the show is the name the fact that we're called zero knowledge i feel like we can always kind of fall back into like the whole point of this isn't for us to come deeply prepared and understanding all

the nuances of project the point of this is for us two people who kind of do know a fair bit now about the space to come and have someone explain it to us somewhat from scratch and so actually i think i i think we've gotten that feedback once or twice where people were like oh i wish you had prepared your questions better but i'm kind of like well that's not what this show is about yeah the show is actually for people who don't know about the topic to come with us as we explore it so it's always been the goal i mean from day one we still keep that today as the goal is to be conversational it's not an interview show per se it's not like grilling someone is not like trying

to like study all of the interviews done with this person in the past and ask new questions the goal is to come and have a conversation that's hopefully enlightening to people and interesting to people and i mean i think for me at least that comes from the kinds of podcasts that i like to listen to like one of my favorite podcasts of the past it doesn't run anymore or does but with different hosts uh is the bike shed podcast where it was just two guys who were both in the same field of programming talking about their kind of weekly issues that they run into and with work or programming news or whatever right and it's just like having a conversation on something that's interesting to them

and i like listening to that because it's interesting to them and it's a good conversation and so i don't know it becomes engaging and i super appreciate like a really good interview show as well where it is super prepared where the questions are really like insightful and trying to get at something new but it's just a very different thing yeah and i really appreciated and especially you would be kind of the voice that i would you know if i were in that conversation i'd be like i i don't really get it like can you you know explain it a little bit differently or you know in a different perspective so that always was beneficial for me as a listener yeah i i i get that feedback a lot actually i mean when i talk to people about the

show that it wouldn't work if it wasn't the two of us because like if it's just me i think the show would have two listeners and i would be one i don't know if it was just anna like it it's also a different vibe where i tend to do that deep dive into something and anna tends not to and so i think the combo is what makes it different i guess like i think if it was just anna it would have way more listeners but except it would probably be kind of i don't know i feel like there was

sometimes directions that i would try to go in and you like in a good way were like let's keep it on you know on message so i actually appreciate that we have the two of us i think it's made for a higher quality show i wanted to know if you have any advice for non-technical people in the blockchain industry just because i feel like in this space it's all about the technical people and like that's where the emphasis is so yeah would love your insights i do find so in like it's a very technical space it's a very engineer focused space and in a way i kind of think about it like they're the artists or the like if you think of like the music industry or something also an industry i was in a

long time ago they're the talent right they're the the creators of a lot of the stuff and so i think the non-technical tends to be a little bit relegated and and sort of not as that like i don't want to say that but it's like it's a little bit less valued and i think that is very frustrating to non-technical people who want to be involved but i do think that there are there's like these bridge roles that are still missing which is like understanding how to work with engineers but not necessarily be an engineer yourself and that's definitely a place that i see myself which is like i'm not a dev but i've worked with devs for many many years i understand the languages i do do a lot

of research into like how basically they're expressing themselves and then work really hard to figure out ways to channel that into language that a non-technical person could understand i mean i don't know if that fully answers your role because it's not really like i don't also i don't consider myself totally non-technical i just don't consider myself the technical person i think there is a big need for that role actually the people who can translate from the very technical to the non-technical and i i do think that like more and more teams are recognizing that like a lot of teams right now are looking for technical writers or people who can pull out of their engineers a lot of the information and make it into something that their customers or the general

public could potentially understand and so yeah i actually think that there's going to be more need for people like that and so maybe that's just a way for someone who considers themselves non-technical to start thinking about it yeah yeah yeah uh so pakishmu also asks uh what is your personal favorite episode and why other than this episode of course oh that's a tough one i don't think there's like one there's a couple i definitely like the episode with uh zuko just because it's a great story he's a good storyteller and introduces a lot of cool stuff as well in hopefully a relatively understandable way the story with griff

same thing it's just a great story i remember one of my favorites with sean beau the first time he came on because i remember that was like the first time he had talked about something pretty intense that had happened when they had discovered that zcash vulnerability and like how that affected you know that was in a way like a lot of his life's work or for the last few years and and i think in that episode i don't know if we kept that part in but like he had sort of said at some point like wow this is the first time i've spoken about it it's quite cathartic and i felt that when we were interviewing him too yeah i also like a lot of the early episodes that were just friends like we we had an episode with just parody people

it was cool to hear people's backstories but it's like probably not interesting to a wider audience it was just interesting to me i think that's like episode five we were sitting in a in a house in brandenburg around near a fire the sound is not good but it was a cozy interview setting there was five of us it was really cool we also talked about like eips that were going through and being implemented and hard forks coming up and i mean i that's what i started the podcast for like originally was talking about blockchain client development like that's what i wanted to learn about in there and trying to find that and not finding it going and starting it right and so i think um

all of those episodes that dig into you know what are the engineering challenges how are you actually building that and you know that's that's always interesting to me i think more recently too i really i did like that episode we did on isogenese with uh luca and i also i mean i i we've met to me like through this podcast we've gotten to meet and get to know some really really interesting people like dan bonnay yeah for sure and ben and ben and tyrone i i we met taron because we did an interview with him so that like there's a lot of people that i feel now our friends who we originally had an interview with i

can't name them all so gotem damija asks i'd love to learn how to market and grow the audience subscribers of your podcast can really use some advice on this for my podcast and of course he's talking about his podcast blogshots.fm about learning blockchain ah well i don't think we have any advice for this because we don't do any of the things you're supposed to do as far as i know like i hear there's tricks i don't think either of us have really done very much in that department yeah i mean i think it's sort of also a little bit like um

there's all these youtube videos from big youtubers on like how to become a famous youtuber and they're almost all and it's a little bit like you got lucky and there's an element of luck but there's also like timing and a bunch of other stuff right changing the name of the podcast i think had a huge effect and we were kind of lucky in that we picked a good name we picked a name that accidentally grabbed on to a whole community that didn't really have any other contents and kind of just okay cool they hear something but there's also we do like some basic stuff right where don't have an intro that's too long and like all these like micro optimizations but um other than that

it's just like anna you're the the twitter person promoting it and like we do do twitter i think that's a bear minimum actually more recently i should say more recently we do have more channels so we've started a subreddit there's a youtube channel but i think what's weird is these things all kind of came organically like when we needed them they got created like we didn't start a twitter account until like eight months in i think yeah and um the conference has helped too right where not necessarily with like listeners but building a community so getting more loyal people in that will keep listening and building that community like whatever you can do to

build that community i think is that that's the startup world saying right like get your first 100 or a thousand loyal customers that love you and then you're you're set right where they then start promoting you and acting on your behalf so i think it's uh some of that too that's good advice so uh zk fart amazing username says uh first off a giant thank you for all the effort and craftsmanship put into this podcast and community current circumstances have opened up more time to listen to podcasts are there any other podcasts that you personally enjoy and also are there any that pair well with zero knowledge hmm well frederick you mentioned one

podcast that you liked bike shed yeah it stopped uh running though or at least in the way that i like it the only i i don't actually have i used to listen to a lot more podcasts um but there was one that i started listening to recently that's that's really good it's called distributed with matt mullenweg and uh it's in part it's talking about distributed companies and like that's a core part of it but it's also giving a ton of insight into how automatic the company behind wordpress works and runs and i don't know that's super interesting to me but it's not z cane related at all and barely tech related i listen to a bunch of

other stuff but also almost nothing that's tech related uh or like crypto related i know if people want general podcast recommendations go for it there's a there's podcast called extremities which is super interesting super well produced i do tend to listen to the accidental tech podcast every once in a while just because it's that same theme of just a couple of people who have interesting opinions and insights discussing mostly apple news but uh also just general development stuff i think on my side so i the podcasts that i really have gotten into over the years have tended to be history related ones so i really loved uh history of rome and revolutions

podcast from mike duncan i think he's my favorite podcaster probably and then i've also listened to hardcore history and a few months back i don't know if anyone noticed but i actually did an intro where i tried to sort of mimic the hardcore history uh like accent or intonation but i don't know if anyone got it and they might have just thought it was being really weird those are really the main podcasts that i listen have listened to for a long time i've dabbled and tried to listen to some other ones i think when it comes to tech podcasts i know that the one that is often paired with us or compared to us or we've been compared to is like epicenter because and you'll see often we'll have sort of similar

projects be on both and i have at times wanted to hear their version of like you know them interviewing a guest that we'd had on or vice versa just to see if they you know were able to glean a little bit more info so yeah i think that seems to be one that pairs well yeah so one podcast that's pretty new but i've enjoyed is uh the uncommon core podcast from hasu i think that's the name of the actual podcast as well i've enjoyed that one so that might be something for people to check out yeah i i think the epicenter comparison was also more accurate early on where we did a lot more blockchain stuff and we kind of go in and out of waves of

doing blockchain projects topics and like hardcore just crypto or zk topics and i feel like they do less of that but i agree it's probably still something that pairs well you know other stuff that i would say is worth listening to but i i do very piecemeal and just pick like episodes where it seems interesting and would pair decently with irises like the a16z podcast uh the bitcoin podcast network which is like a whole range of different podcasts and sometimes you find interesting topics in there uh pluto egg asks are there projects that you wanted to be on the podcast that you didn't interview due to perceiving them to not be interesting for your listeners but that you later wished you had

interviewed oh i certainly never thought that but but that's also like my nature is not really that like i don't come from that angle i think about what would i think is interesting and then i go after that i don't necessarily think like oh this is not going to be interesting to this audience or that but there's definitely people that i would still like to interview and i don't have a means of of getting right where it's more that category yeah i'm trying to think i mean we we've been pitched a lot of projects the thing is is like and i do appreciate when people do pitch to us i think it's it's interesting to see what's out there but we tend to actually follow like

something we're curious about so a lot of our interview guests it happens because like we reach out to them we've heard about them we you know we want to find out more but this is a tricky question like there are people who've pitched us where i don't think that they'd be interesting to our listeners and then they don't come on i don't know that there's anyone that that would you think that they're interesting i mean like would you interview them for yourself i think sometimes i have interviewed projects that i just find interesting yeah there are some people who've pitched some i there's actually some really great projects that have pitched us where they just wouldn't fit there may be too much in the financial side of things

where it's really much more like it's closer to finance and pretty far away from zero knowledge and blockchain and those projects we don't tend to have on because those ones like maybe that's one where i would maybe be interested but i don't think our listeners would be interested but it wouldn't work yeah i don't think yeah i i hear you in that there are are interesting like higher level apps that are just i mean it sounds like a cool app but there's no tech here right it's just like a new like thing that someone introduced and like it could be interesting but it's just not what we do on the podcast right uh i think there has been stuff like

that what would you what would your tip to people who want to pitch me what's the way to convince you to be gotten on the podcast oh god i don't know if i want to say this um well definitely one one thing i definitely prefer is when projects pitch with a topic that isn't just how great their project is because i don't really find that that interesting i don't know and like i think if there's like a like a theme or a topic where somebody really feels like this is their focus and they think it's relevant to zero knowledge research space or deep blockchain space

that's where they might pitch that and then i might be actually into it even if i haven't like heard of them but i would say like like i said a lot of the projects that come on they're projects that we seek out so we have heard about them somehow we've kind of been you know made aware of them or we've like discovered them ourselves and they're like oh this is kind of neat let's let's dig into it um but yeah i think that when people are cold pitching that would be a maybe a good way to at least start a conversation is like this is a topic of interest and this is what we're really into but it can't just be like we're really into being more efficient efficiency or like it can't just be like the one unique selling point of your project and you that's your good thing

or that's your topic it should be a bit more uh nuanced yeah it shouldn't be the uh elevator pitch of the company or the project i feel like that's yeah it's uninteresting to me as well so will from parody asks why start a podcast of all things when i joined parity i so i think a way that i learn is listening to a podcast about that thing right so i joined parity i wanted to learn about how do people do blockchain client development and i started looking around for a podcast that covered this and i couldn't find any and i asked around in the company chat and no one else knew about anything either and so i said okay let's start one then

and we started toying around with this idea in chat and i know jeff who was on the podcast in a couple episodes in the beginning jumped in and i jumped into the conversation and then i was like okay cool we can make this happen and i went and talked to parodies then comps department and i talked to ashley and said here's my idea i want to do a podcast about this can we do this in parody she was like no i don't think it really belongs in parody and it's probably not a good idea and then i was like well i don't know who you are like i just started that company i'm just gonna do it on my own then um and i started talk to anna and jeff and we we pulled it together and started doing a test recording in the in the

cafe next to the office didn't turn out that good but i don't think we used i think that was one that we didn't use yeah we didn't but it was also like intentionally like oh let's just figure out how to speak to each other and then we'd i think even starting with the second episode i think that that we use that's what's weird about the show if you go back to the first episode of this show it's rust fest 2017 or something like super random it's not an introduction episode at all and that was i guess version two of our attempt so this leads to a question from anonymous uh which i'm very personally

interested in um why don't uh why doesn't frederick or anna shill more [Laughter] i've been getting this criticism a lot i think it's a nice criticism to get why don't you chill more and for me it's two factors one is that i'm just not a very silly person right it's sort of i like to talk about the merits of the projects that i'm working on and i'm i'm happy to do that at any point but it's i don't know shilling to me is also like a superficial empty thing like that's part of the concept of shilling if shilling just means like saying positive things about stuff you work on then

i wouldn't be opposed to doing that but then that leads to the second thing which is this is not a parody podcast and it's not why i'm here it's not i'm not here to pitch what i'm working on or say why what i'm doing is better than what everyone else is doing even if i might believe that okay it's not my role here to say that and i think it's important just from a moral standpoint to separate those two things like what why are you doing things and like being rigorous in how you split those things up i think in my case i think shilling is kind of tacky i think it feels gross to do it but i do i actually do do it a little bit like you know a lot of the work that

i've been doing does revolve around the zero knowledge research community you know that we first tapped into because of the podcast and a lot of the things i work on have zk at the beginning of them it's in my twitter bio if you want to check it out but in general i mean i have i have gotten the feedback like for example earlier this year there was these episodes where there was no sponsor on it which is actually fine in my opinion but i did have someone say like why weren't you just talking about the projects that you're doing you should have been talking about the validator like you should have pitched it at every moment and i and i was like yeah but like i don't know then maybe there's too much of a it's too combined like i actually i like that i wear these various hats at

times and i also like that on the podcast like i get to just be like curious person and not co-founder of this or you know doing running this thing like i i don't know i do think that there's a little bit more mixture for me but i do also just find it weird to constantly talk about like all the you're proud of although i did earlier in this episode brag about my my exit but whatever so another question uh why pick this as a niche to make a podcast about zero knowledge we named the podcast zero knowledge as a joke i think it was jeff who came up with it basically said like

you know would be a good name zero knowledge and we all burst out laughing we're like ha ha because we have zero knowledge and then it stuck and i think it was i think kobe girkin actually tweeted something about this i can't remember how he describes it but it was like it was one of the was it retconned is that when you the retelling of old stories so he was like this is one of the most epic ride concerts like we named ourselves by accident and then became the zero knowledge podcast for real it's a good niche though it's a it's an underserved niche which i think is also contributing to like cow tom's question of like how do you make it popular pick something that's underserved but

it's also an amazing community it's like the zero knowledge community is really cool because it's people who are super passionate ideological academic like researchy and engineering and like finding this intersection of people who like research and academics like engineering have some ideological leaning and like support web3 and the things that i think are important as well like i don't think there's any other community that actually intersects these things as much as their knowledge community another question how can i introduce this podcast to noobs i tend to point people at episode 21 the introduction to zero

knowledge proofs that frederick and i did i don't think it's necessarily our best episode ever but it does introduce why like what the name of the podcast stands for and we do very basic introductory exam like we go into basic basic introductory examples like the where's waldo case and the sudoku like we really try to like i i've i've sent this to family members and they've been able to like understand what zero knowledge is roughly and then they understand why our podcast is named that so i mean that's where i usually send people i never recommend that people start at the beginning for a rust fest 2017 or that they start on the latest episode

because like we've been learning a lot over the years so we may sound like more advanced now and it's also like the latest episode is also not like if that's a good entry point or not depends very much on what that episode is at that specific time like trail it could be a completely random jump into the deep end of the pool of like some here's you know presentation on halo 2 and what your crypto primitives it has like that's makes no sense to introduce with or it might be a completely random blockchain project where it doesn't tie into the name at all because we we do go like in and out of different tangents right so i think it's good to pick some starting point that

sort of is on theme and makes sense but i i actually i've never even tried introducing this to anyone so i don't know where i would send them one last question uh from the ama how do we fix the internet we uh make things verifiable i think that's the core of it right it's even if you have to trust someone you should be able to verify and in the internet today we have no ability to verify anything at all and um you think you might have like if you're being served in https websites you think that you might be able to verify that the publisher of that content is the person who bought the certificate but that's not actually true

it has happened many times where this isn't true and the certificate authority up and so i think the core of web 3 and how we fix the internet is introducing verifiability there are many means of doing that and we're working on various ways of achieving that uh but i think that's the to me that's the core of it we spoke about how some of your favorite episodes have been about people telling stories so are there any stories that are really exciting that you want to tell here from our own lives or like from podcast history or um i think like your experience in the space i think

would be really interesting and it's a it's a really crazy space for sure i mean the space i'm not talking about the blockchain space and not the zero knowledge space the zero knowledge space has interesting stories too but i think that the major one is the zcash exploits which is like a big story otherwise it's still like so cutting edge so academic so like i don't know non-story friendly non-drama yeah exactly there's a little drama but it's pretty tame yeah but in the blockchain space yeah there's a lot of drama a lot of craziness it's i don't know if there's any specific story that comes to mind but

i think for me like a big story of my past three years is obviously parody's interaction with the ethereum community and how we've gone in and out of favor of or i mean i completely recognized like we up with the hack and and all this stuff and went out of favor with that but then i mean a thing that i've learned is like communicating intention is incredibly hard to do especially when there are malicious actors in the space right so when our intention has been to try to fix things and try to go okay let's figure this out together and make things

better it's come across as we're trying to destroy ethereum and it's just holy how did that how how did that twist happen and like for me that's you know the the most dramatic things that i had that have happened over the past couple years have been these really wild things where we think one thing and then we send something out there and like the world interprets it 180 from the way we intended it yeah so i've been outside i have lived outside of i mean i'm friends with a lot of people at parity but i'm also friends with a lot of people in the ethereum community and i've seen some of these go down like i think you you nailed it where

that is definitely a point of tension and and drama and has been for a long time and i hope that in a way like with the disconnection with the oprah ethereum and now like parody focusing on polka dot maybe that tension can just be put to rest they're just different they're in different spaces now and maybe there's bridges that can be built in the future i've always really wanted like friends from these two camps to talk to each other or get along and and hopefully maybe with some time that can happen my feeling on this the sort of the time that i've spent in this space and also the time that i've spent while kind of being the host of this podcast i mean the most dramatic exciting times

in my opinion were at the beginning um in 2017. just what i find cool is like i'm happy that i got a chance to like go through that and i didn't gain anything and i didn't lose anything from the the like hype of 2017 in the crash do you know what i mean like nothing life-changing happened to me at all but i got to go along with it i got to see it i got to see friends lives change i got to see you know in the good and bad ways and i and it was really exciting and then 2018 was sort of like a little bit of a slow descent back to reality 2019 felt like this is an industry that we're working in and it wasn't

particularly overhyped at all um and now we're seeing kind of like something's brewing again and i'm happy that i've gone through the first i'm glad that 2017 that i got to see that um and i am very curious to see how the next few months pan out or years i don't know i don't want to make any predictions here but it definitely like the one thing about it is there does tend to be consistently something going on that keeps us interested the one thing i do worry though is like okay so in our new year's episode i made two claims that i've since been called out for one that defy is stupid and two that like memes are dumb like both fails i'm sorry i think i've

already mentioned this one some podcast were i was wrong i got it wrong why i got it wrong that it was like not going anywhere oh you're right maybe dumb is fair but um i mean we're not going anywhere we we don't know that yet right where is it going it's not gone anywhere so far i guess what i like people are paying attention to it i guess that that is happening yeah but i do get this feeling like as we've been kind of like going along and doing the zero knowledge research deep dives and like learning about the math and the engineering i feel like in a way we've become the like healthy snack and there's a lot of other things going on

that feel like they're really exciting and shiny but they're fast food and they're gonna make you feel sick at the end and you know that but you can't look away and you can't stop trying it because you're like oh well i wanna i wanna taste that too but i do feel like what we do i get the sense more and more that like what we're doing is at least trying to be pretty feet on the ground and genuinely be curious and not be swept away but that does mean that we'll you know i might come off as like a grumpy old lady once in a while and be like no memes [Laughter] yeah i mean for me i think the podcast has the opposite effect where i think i would be in a very small engineering bubble

that just looks at like a pretty narrow scope of like layer one blockchain building and the podcast pulls me out of that a little bit and i go out of the bubble a little bit and i go more into fast food this is your this is your on board for me it's my my you know you know vegetable yeah diet that's funny like i think my bubble would be extremely small otherwise and that this expands it a little bit but not so far as to think that uh d5 has done anything productive for the world yet i think it's such an interesting industry because

you have all this idealism and and genuinely building something for a better society and then you have a lot of people who have invested a bunch of money and want you know a certain thing to be the winner and it's such a conflict of interest um with that so yeah it is crazy i mean it's with polka dot launch it's also so interesting to see how many speculators suddenly appeared like the community was relatively small relatively quiet very focused on what are they building and when is this feature coming out and you know when can i get this rpc endpoint from the client and like very grounded feedback and then it was like

launch and suddenly have completely random out of the blue questions opinions people who are saying this is the greatest project in the world ever like you've never heard of them before you never they've never been part of the community and they're saying it's the best thing that could possibly exist it's like okay cool thank you but i i don't know how you came to that conclusion i don't think you know anything about the project but uh it's it's fun so polka dot just launched what are you looking forward to seeing happen on polka dot uh it being used i think that that's the main thing now i think

we as a company are switching around from trying to deliver on a white paper to thinking more broadly what is it that people need what can we do to help build a healthy ecosystem what even is a healthy ecosystem right the parity has had this kind of thing it's not as widespread within parody that i would like it to be but it's certainly at like sea level it's definitely a thing that we say quite a lot is the things that we build should exist beyond the company like if the company ceases to exist tomorrow everything that we've started like the

momentum that we started to build up the the movement that we've started building up should persist beyond us and and continue to exist and while i recognize that parity's role in polkadot right now is maybe still something right where we still maintain one of the main client implementations i think if parentheses ceased to exist today polkadot would still continue but what is like parody's role going into the future then well it's to to make sure that it's really easy to build on it that the tooling is there for for builders who want to build taps and yeah just make sure that

we get to a point where this thing can live on its own and just continue to to thrive and like actually have meaningful applications built on it and that's i think is a huge question that no one in blockchain has solved yet right how do you build an actually meaningful application well some there there exists some right currency is a meaningful application but yeah how how can we continue pushing towards web3 i think it's the general theme and uh yeah i'm i'm excited to see where we can go with that and see how far we can push things so question for both of you is there any project that you'd like to see that you haven't seen yet

i would love to see more projects like the zk game like things that use your knowledge proofs in these really accessible interesting ways and it might be a way like maybe there's still a ways off before that can happen because it's very new and the tools aren't there and the ideas are still being developed but like that kind of thing is what i would like to see more of which is something that i can communicate to other people and they could actually participate in that use zero knowledge proofs in their core not just kind of added on to something that already exists that's what i would like to see more of yeah

i agree on that like getting more quote-unquote end-user applications that are just cool and fun like they don't have to be making people money or or like significantly changing the world or changing people's lives it can just be fun and and that's cool so definitely like to see more of that too and then there's like a bunch of projects that are a bunch of things that have been tackled in some way but i don't think it there's enough players trying to solve the problem so we run a centralization risk i think there's not enough players trying to solve file storage like incentivized file storage

i don't think there's enough people trying to solve dns as a problem i mean there's like handshake and there's ens and there's various approaches but i just don't think that there are enough of them and i don't think any of them go far enough to actually solve the whole problem i don't think decentralized compute anyone actually has like a viable solution to that messaging like status is trying to do like completely private metadata leakage free messaging is a huge topic that i would love to see a thousand companies working on but uh there's like one or two i think there's

there is an almost infinite amount of stuff in this space to do and uh would like to see being done and where do you see the zk industry going as a whole in the past couple of years there's definitely some trends that you can pick up on right one is going towards not having a trusted setup even though that's still the most efficient snark in the end for for verification there's more and more research being done on non-trusted setup systems and then obviously there's there's tons of innovation on like the crypto layer but another trend is also like standardization

starting to standardize how do we express circuits how do we interoperate between different proving systems how can i send one circuit over to another proving system and have that actually be able to generate a proof release usually the the circuit the way you express the circuit is specific to the proving system or the specific library for that proving system and so nothing is interoperable or like composable i guess is the more correct term and then um another trend is tooling right is is sort of making things more accessible we can't just rely on the the paper being published and then calling it a day building really good libraries building

really good languages ides like tooling throughout the whole stack to enable developers to actually build stuff so i think that's where the industry is going is to being without you know trusted setups standardizing and building more tooling for accessibility and i think on the use case i think we are also seeing trends where projects that originally came out you know using zero knowledge proofs maybe for privacy but now finding their state like finding that actually where they're going to be used more as in the scaling idea or compression idea that emerged in the last year and then you like you do what i sort of see now is like a lot of the zk projects will kind of like

be falling into one of these various camps as to what their main focus is you also see some that are very much focused on existing blockchains primarily ethereum as like the zk roll up or volidium type models but then you also see some projects where they're like we don't care about blockchains at all and we are going to service existing companies with this sort of novel zeronology thing and they might actually have a blockchain underneath it but like they're going more towards the enterprise and what would you work on if you had unlimited time and funding the best bakery in the world that's what you would be doing sourdough all day long

or maybe farming i think there are many industries that require a ton of starting capital that i've that i want to do but i've never been able to do because tech is the only industry where you don't need starting capital yeah i don't know what else i would do fix uh global warming and world hunger clean water for the whole world i mean if you have unlimited time and money like there's a lot you can do that would be a good thing totally i wanted to shed a little bit of light onto frederick's role as a cto of parody i think you don't see it a lot uh on this podcast so i wanted to tell the story about one of my favorite

memories of working with frederick so this is one time and i'm freaking out about a deadline and talking to frederick and he's like eh let's just do whatever we can in a reasonable manner uh that's that's all we can do and he said it in this way where i really tapped into the truth of that and was just like oh yeah you're right and i stopped freaking out went back back to work which is exactly like what you want to do in that situation right and only later did i realize like wow that's like a really judo move there so i told this story as a way to convey the sort of fierce chill and reasonableness that frederick brings um so that's my

long segway into my question for frederick uh what is your management philosophy and how has it evolved over the years yeah i don't know management philosophy is a big big word i'm not sure i have one really i mean as i said uh in my intro like i've worked in startups i've managed people before i've been cto before and i've had worn a bunch of different hats in mary's roles but i've always you know been a programmer at heart and i joined parity as a programmer i worked only as a programmer for a long time in parity and eventually grew into being cto and even in in the beginning of being cto it would

be coding a lot and over the past two years it has gone from some programming to no programming i i do struggle to even call myself a developer i don't think i am a developer anymore today i am a manager and it's definitely been a learning curve for me as well and and my management philosophy has been to spend a lot of time with the people right i i don't want to get disconnected from the people doing the work because ultimately the organization is just a collective of those people so if you understand those people you know you understand the organization and its needs question for anna what have you learned through being

a validator a validator yes vk validator let's talk about that project okay i think the validator project i've mentioned this before but like it started very much as a test we wanted to see if it would make sense like now the zk validator is project that we i do separately from the podcast but it's also related to zero knowledge proof research and working with the networks where we act as a validator in the proof of stake sense actually like working with those networks to champion xero knowledge proof and privacy tech as well as connect with the teams that are potentially building that kind of stuff in or around those networks so i think the thing that i've actually learned

about the most was just like how rich these networks are i think uh before this point i was very much still kind of only seeing a lot of like the ethereum and the ethereum ecosystem projects but i think by being a validator on other networks you just get closer to like all these other projects that are working in those networks and you may not have heard so much about them but in the networks themselves they're actually kind of you know a big deal or doing some pretty cool stuff so yeah i think it's a for me it's a great project to learn more and to like see more of what's going on in a wider space although i must say like the space that i still don't know and don't know if i'll ever know

it's like all the bitcoin stuff and everything that happened before it's like i started 2017 and just went forward and i have not ever been pulled into anything older and i don't know if it's like maybe it's where i live the fact that i'm in berlin maybe it's you know how i entered the space in general but yeah i have not had much intro into that part you should get get someone to talk about the current state of bitcoin what's what's going on in the ecosystem because i i don't really i mean you hear about random stuff oh there's lightning network but that was like three years ago what what's actually new in bitcoin i don't know either we were approaching the next online zk summit uh what's your favorite

aspect of zk summit well i think the summits are amazing um i also happen to organize them i have a ton of fun i get to see all my friends i get to learn new things i mean i don't know what's the favorite the in person we did four zero knowledge summits before we went online we went online in march and we didn't i mean it was out of necessity but um i think the summit is just a great gathering moment for people that are working on this stuff and i think it's i think it's a lot of fun the next online zk summit is not yet confirmed for when it's going to happen

but very likely it's going to happen this fall probably later in the year um and i will be sharing some details about that as it comes like i mentioned earlier like the zk summit was the spawn of like the community around the podcast and i think that's the best thing about it too is like it is an opportunity for the community to come together it is harder when it's not in person yeah then it's an extension of the telegram group but but it's still it's a cool event it's so so there's always something new that shows up and like new ways of talking about things so it's somewhere like in feeling between an academic and an industry conference which is interesting i know that there are people who save up

a little bit for the zk summit in terms of like you know coming out with some new project or something like that and that's cool yeah i hope that the online version can kind of maintain some of the momentum until we can get back to the real the in-person version i mean it would be amazing if next like march or something we could do another in person but i don't think it makes any sense for the fall like i have zero hope for the fall no yeah everything will remain cancelled cool i think that about wraps up all of our questions well thank you alexandra for coming on and asking us all these questions yeah thank you it's an interesting angle right it's a very different format i i wonder what people think of it and if they want

more of this i don't know maybe it's a format that's interesting to some cool well thanks for having me it's been fun so thanks so much and to your listeners thanks for listening thanks for listening thanks for listening [Music]