INTERVIEW: "We are doing God's work": Tether's CEO talks stablecoin, China, and dollar diplomacy
THE LOWDOWN:
Ten years ago, Tether was an upstart tech company that had coined a new technology called “stablecoin,” a cryptocurrency tied directly to the value of the U.S. dollar.
While Tether itself tries to stay out of politics, Ardoino didn’t pull any punches about how their technology places it on a collision course with China as they attempt to prop up the Yuan as the world’s reserve currency, the disastrous Biden administration, or his high hopes for President Donald Trump’s vision for the cryptocurrency industry.
Tether aims to spread dollar dominance worldwide by providing access to digital dollars in countries where inflation runs rampant or in places where people do not have access to the banking system.
In this brave new world, Tether is able to reach what Ardoino thinks is its full potential — and it is helping American dollar diplomacy in the process.
Ten years ago, Tether was an upstart tech company that had coined a new technology called “stablecoin,” a cryptocurrency tied directly to the value of the U.S. dollar.
Now, it is one of the largest operators in the entire crypto space, and its CEO, Paolo Ardoino, spoke with the Washington Reporter about how he got into the space, and where he thinks it’s going.
While Tether itself tries to stay out of politics, Ardoino didn’t pull any punches about how their technology places it on a collision course with China as they attempt to prop up the Yuan as the world’s reserve currency, the disastrous the Biden administration, or his high hopes for President Donald Trump’s vision for the cryptocurrency industry.
Tether aims to spread dollar dominance worldwide by providing access to digital dollars in countries where inflation runs rampant or in places where people do not have access to the banking system. That means building physical “kiosks in Africa, bodegas in central South America, and a lot of touch points in Asia.”
In fact, if Tether were a country, it would be the 19th largest holder of U.S. debt, expanding Treasury demand beyond traditional buyers and thereby reinforcing the strength of the Dollar and the U.S. economy.
Under President Joe Biden, the crypto industry mostly dealt with “law enforcement…We collaborated already with the Department of Justice, the FBI and so on. But when it came to the last administration, look at the SEC, I mean, it was a disaster.”
“And so I must say that not just us, but every company in the industry, was fearing for its own future, given the past administration,” Tether said.
However, Ardoino couldn’t be more excited to work with President Donald Trump and with his top administration figures — including David Sacks and Bo Hines, who are running point for much of the administration’s crypto policies.
“Now we are seeing an industry that can be flourishing and it's just just purely a game changer,” he said.
The Biden years saw the crypto industry languish in America, which came as a surprise to Ardoino. “Despite all my Italianness, I am a child of the 1980s, and in that era, in every single movie the U.S. was leading on everything — tech, digital, future things, and it was awkward to see the U.S. missing out on the digital asset space for the last four years. It was not only awkward for me.
Everyone was expecting the U.S. to lead that race. Every single person and entrepreneur in the tech industry was very surprised to see the U.S. dropping the ball on that.”
With Trump, “the message that we have seen coming out from the White House was that what we did was a mistake, and now we are going to fix that, and we are going to do it at the speed of light, and we are going to put resources, and we are going to make sure that it is going to be done properly, without trying to kill the technology, but trying to empower America and the rest of the world with the technology that will revolutionize finance and will make access to financial services affordable to everyone.”
In this brave new world, Tether is able to reach what Ardoino thinks is its full potential — and it is helping American dollar diplomacy in the process.
“The beauty is what our product has been doing for the last 11 years, and I need to be able to double down on that, but I need the support of the United States in doing so, because again, we are little Tether, and we are not the country,” he said. “We are not the government, so we are doing our best to to continue to push for the usage of the U.S. dollar out there.
Around the world, “people there love the U.S. dollar, but the U.S. presence is not there,” Ardoino explained. “There is only Tether's presence. We are doing our best to build infrastructure and giving jobs to people in Africa and Central South America and Asia, so that we are creating this huge distribution network…we are giving jobs, and we are giving them the best money they can ever have and dream of, that is U.S. dollar in a digital form, in the form of USDT.”
USDT is the name of Tether’s trademark stablecoin, which is pegged at the exact same monetary value as a standard U.S. dollar.
“We are actually acting as the last stronghold for the U.S. dollar hegemony in all these countries,” he said. “If you go in Georgia, if you to in Turkey, if you go in Uzbekistan, if you go in Vietnam, if you go to Nigeria, you will see our logo, not because we placed our logo there. It's because people want the U.S. dollar and they learn the fact that they can keep the U.S. dollar on a smartphone through USDT.”
“We have 400 million people out there using USDT in the emerging markets, not because we had the best advertisement campaign out there…the common denominator of the emerging markets is that they have a very young population. And so the very young population, they make more children, simply put, and the young population is the one that is entering crypto before anyone else.” The coronavirus pandemic jumpstarted Tether’s business, which explains why the company had relatively little interaction with the first Trump administration.
While any new technology is not without risks, Ardoino believes that stablecoin, and not cash money, is more secure in preventing crimes, now and in the future.
“We believe that cash dollars are used for most of the trafficking, for all the nefarious activities, and we are creating an alternative that gives the comfort to the holders in emerging markets of safety against their own governments, but also gives and empowers law enforcement tools to monitor and track the activity. So if the activity is deemed to be illicit, then we can take a swift action and freeze the money,” he said.
For his part, Ardoino put his virtual money where his mouth is; Tether “froze Garantex [a] Russian cryptocurrency exchange,” he noted.
“We created the best technology for money out there, without questions,” he said. “Imagine law enforcement having to track a wire that hops across three different jurisdictions, and having to inquire with three different international accords to try to track the money? It is impossible for them. But with the blockchain technology it is actually all out there. It is all transparent.”
“When I talk to people in the Congress, in the Senate, House, they are very interested in our activity with law enforcement,” he said. “I think that we are doing God's work in that sense.”
Below is a transcript of our interview with Paolo Ardoino, the CEO of Tether, lightly edited for clarity.
Washington Reporter:
Tell us about yourself and how you got into this crypto space. Everyone has their own origin story, I'm learning.
Paolo Ardoino:
I've been a developer since I was eight. My story starts in a very small town in Italy. My parents were both public workers; my mother was working at a kindergarten and my father was working at a public electricity company, and my grandparents had a farm where they were producing olive oil and sage, rosemary, and tomatoes, all the best stuff that you can ever taste, very good Italian stuff, and the oil that my family produces is just insane. So I didn't have much time to spend with my friends at the when I was kid. But since the Italian electricity company was was the first one in Italy that started using personal computers, my father was kind of obliged to learn personal computers and start loving them, so he brought the personal computers home, and that started my journey. I spent basically 32 years on computers, and always loved the Sci-Fi part of it. I always loved building things in a different way than others. I always loved decentralization, even before Bitcoin; that was my entire thesis — that we need to build technology that works for the worst case scenario, rather than now, all the technology that we have in our lives is built for the best case scenario where the world is mostly at peace and the world is working properly. There are some wars around, but most of the world is at peace. But what if the world will stop being a piece? Or what if there will be an asteroid? What we what if there will be catastrophe? That is basically the core of every Sci-Fi movie. I thought about technology and how I can build technology that is resilient to the wrath of God, if I have to summarize it. So that is how I thought about technology forever. And then when I learned about Bitcoin in 2012 I was like, all right, this encompasses both money, so the financial system, and technology, in a way that really resonated with me. Bitcoin is the only type of money that is governed by math. All the different types of money that we have apart possibly, gold, but we are not using gold as money anymore. Every single type of money that we have is governed by humans, and human decisions. And humans are not necessarily the most intelligent when it comes to money. They are changing their minds. They are changing their opinions. Governments change. So the way money is dealt with is treated will change. Every new government will have different policies. And so the way we deal with money and the way we interact with money will change, and there will be inflation, deflation, and the money is being printed, there will be sections, and all that is because humans will take decisions. Bitcoin is the only thing that is governed by math. That is the only thing that we know is certain in the universe. And so that's what drove me towards Bitcoin, because it's money that is governed by math. I did math, computer math applied to computer science when I was in university. So math money really resonates with me. And on top of that it is the only type of money that is extremely resilient. As I said, I like things that are resilient to the wrath of God, and Bitcoin is exactly that, no matter what will happen. There is cryptography that is ultimately math that will prove the ownership of my money, your money. That is the reason why entering this space is because I think there is nothing more sacrosanct and fundamental for a person to keep hold of its own wealth and money, and that cannot be in control of others. It should be control of math, because this is the only sure thing that we have in our world. Given this initial expertise and excitement for Bitcoin, I started working for BitFenix very early on. BitFinex was one of the most prominent cryptocurrency exchanges in 2014 up to 2018/2019, and then still in 2014 I met Giancarlo Devasini, that apart from being the founder of BitFenix, also was the creator of Tether. Tether was very small back then, it was probably had a couple of million dollars worth of market cap, and it grew immensely after 2020 but that is, in short, my story.
Washington Reporter:
So it sounds like Bitcoin is the like your grandfather's olive oil of crypto, in that there's a limited supply, it's very good, and it's very expensive.
Paolo Ardoino:
Man, I should have said that.
Washington Reporter:
It’s yours for the taking. So let's start globally, then focus on America. What are your priorities with Tether globally? You've talked in the past about how you have boots on the ground in countries around the world; where do you see your company going amidst a little bit of global economic uncertainty? What are your priorities as CEO of this company?
Paolo Ardoino:
Everyone is talking about stablecoins. By the way, we are very honored that everyone is talking about stablecoins today, because that's the technology that we created. Our company created this in 2014 and now stablecoins are part of legislation that is going to be written. And so there are very few companies and very few entrepreneurs that can say that. So that is very exciting. But it's also important to understand that stablecoins are very cool and nice to have in the U.S., but the most important feature of stablecoins is outside the United States. In the United States, people have 15 ways to pay each other, and most of the people never fail to pay each other, if they have the money, of course, but outside of the U.S., that is one of the biggest issues that people have. They don't know. They fail to pay each other. They don't have good payment rails, especially where they don't have good access, or fair access, to financial instruments that will make sure that they will remain safe, and that their family’s wealth will remain safe. So if you live in Argentina, if you live in Turkey, if you live in Vietnam, you name it, you live in all these countries, if you work 12 months from January to December, after 12 months, you will be poorer compared to the beginning of the year, because your money, your currency, your national currency, will devaluate against the U.S. dollar. And the U.S. dollar is the global trade currency. So if you want to buy anything from for your job, for your activity, if you want to buy supplies for school, for your children, if you want to buy most of it in Turkey, your national currency will depreciate against the dollar, and so at the end of the year, you will be just poor. So that is our people. That's why we have boots on the ground. That's our entire focus. We are not focusing in talking with institutions in these countries, because these two institutions in these countries are the ones that took away wealth from the people. But we work with this, with these communities in the emerging markets, to give them access to the best product that the U.S. ever created: the U.S. dollar. And what we are seeing in these countries is that there is no U.S. presence, almost. There are embassies, there is McDonald's and a few other things. But there is, there is no U.S. infrastructure being built. Even if you think about African sense or in central South America, there is BRICS infrastructure, especially China infrastructure, being built. In Jamaica, there is this four lane highway in the middle of Jamaica. It's not built by America. It's not built by Jamaica. It is a gift, and if you go in many countries in South America, there are plenty of gifts in the form of infrastructure. There are ports on both sides of the ocean in South America. There are ports in Africa and airports and schools and all that. And so they're built by China. So now think about this: BRICS countries announced few years ago that they will launch a digital currency, first backed by a group of a basket of national currencies. Pardon my French, but you cannot put four pieces of shit and make chocolate. So then they realize that, and so what they announced is that they want to create a digital currency backed by gold. And look at the gold price in the last two years. It more than doubled from the last two years, and it is making almost all time highs every single week. And so China’s Central Bank is buying gold, Russian Central Bank, India Central Bank, Brazil Central Bank, every single bank is buying gold, so they announced that they want to do a digital currency backed by gold. Gold price is going up because all these central banks are buying gold, because they will. They are preparing themselves to launch this digital currency, so they create infrastructure, they give jobs, because these ports, airports, schools, stadiums and all that that they build, they give jobs to local people, and on top of that, soon they will give them money. So at some point, it's becoming a very compelling interesting thing for people living in emerging markets, because the U.S. presence is not there. People there love the U.S. dollar, but the U.S. presence is not there. There is only Tether's presence. We are doing our best to build infrastructure and giving jobs to people in Africa and Central South America and Asia, so that we are creating this huge distribution network with physical touch points, with kiosks in Africa, with bodegas in central South America, with lot of touch points in Asia, we are giving jobs, and we are giving them the best money they can ever have and dream of, that is U.S. dollar in a digital form, in the form of USDT. So on one side, there is China and BRICS countries. On the other side, there is little Tether that is trying to do its best to actually create pushback on what is clearly happening. I posted a few days ago a chart on how in 2000, 70 percent of the countries in the world had the first trading partner as the U.S. In 2024, the first trading partner of most of the countries in the world was China. I also posted how actually that chart is looking different if you add the presence of Tether. So the presence of Tether really is in all the emerging markets and is overlapping with the attempt of presence of China in these countries. So we are actually acting as the last stronghold for the U.S. dollar hegemony in all these countries. And if you go there, if you go in Georgia, if you to in Turkey, if you go in Uzbekistan, if you go in Vietnam, if you go to Nigeria, you will see our logo, not because we placed our logo there. It's because people want the U.S. dollar and they learn the fact that they can keep the U.S. dollar on a smartphone through USDT. And the craziest of the stories is that this activity deal, we have 400 million people out there using USDT in the emerging markets, not because we had the best advertisement campaign out there. It is because, if you think about it, the common denominator of the emerging markets is that they have a very young population. And so the very young population, they make more children, simply put, and the young population is the one that is entering crypto before anyone else, and into the year 2020 when the pandemic hit, the younger population was looking at their parents going to the streets trying to buy cash dollars in the black market paying 10 percent premium. And the kids were looking at their parents and telling them, ‘dad, why are you going out to buy dollars? I have dollars on my smartphone that are called USDT.’ That is how USDT got so many users, with Tether spending zero in marketing. It is a crazy story.
Washington Reporter:
Can you explain, then, from a business standpoint, why is it in your company's financial interests to be positioning itself fairly squarely against China? And what would you say to other CEOs who are clearly far more willing to grant a lot of concessions to China for the fake promise of access to Chinese markets?
Paolo Ardoino:
We started trying to stay away from politics, but the reality is that we are concerned about the current situation in the world. I'm pro freedom. I believe that freedom and the freedom of speech are the ultimate rights of everyone. And honestly, I feel like there are countries where freedom of speech is impaired. I am a big advocate of freedom of speech. That's why we invested in a Rumble, for example. My company needs to bring freedom, financial freedom, to hundreds of millions of people who have been living under tyrannical governments and cannot have access to a better form of money. And I believe it's my duty to help them. The beauty is what our product has been doing for the last 11 years, and I need to be able to double down on that, but I need the support of the United States in doing so, because again, we are little Tether, and we are not the country. We are not the government, so we are doing our best to to continue to push for the usage of the U.S. dollar out there.
Washington Reporter:
How have you seen in the first 100 or so days of the second Trump term go versus both the Biden administration and the first Trump administration?
Paolo Ardoino:
When it came to the first Trump administration, I must say that we were very small. I mean, the entire industry was so small that it was not that interesting. Keep in mind that the first Trump administration went from 2016 to 2020. So the growth actually of the crypto market, and especially of our stablecoin, started from the pandemic. So that is when things actually changed dramatically for the industry and for us. What we saw with Biden and the past administration was enormous aggressivity. They wanted to regulate the industry, not just stablecoins, but the entire industry, before understanding the potential of that technology. That is exactly what Europe is trying to do. I think Europe is known for regulating before understanding. A way of saying it that I created is that Europe is the ghost of Christmas future of the U.S., like in Christmas Carol. So Europe is regulating AI, is regulating digital assets, even before understanding them. I can say it because I spent a lot of time trying to talk to regulators in Europe, trying to explain to them why it was a bad idea to lose the train of digital assets. And I never saw the openness from European regulators that I saw in the U.S. with the new administration, with the current administration. So the previous U.S. administration was just negative. We had Senator Warren sending letters to auditors, the Big Four audit firms, and the OCC basically shutting down banking relationships that were for banks that were dealing with crypto. There was clearly Operation Chokepoint 2.0. That was a real thing that was very aggressive, and that resulted in Silicon Valley Bank, Silvergate, Signature all blowing up and and creating a complete mess. The new administration is taking this opportunity very seriously, and they want to regulate this technology and this new financial market in a way that is very sensible. So they have elected part of the administration to deal with this issue, to understand this issue. David Sacks, Bo Hines, all of them really deeply care about it, and deeply care about creating a fair market, a market that can grow and then can position the U.S. in the right way, protecting the consumers, but at the same time making sure that this technology will be one of those technologies that is born once in a century, and can be led by America.
Washington Reporter:
What message does the Trump administration send to you at Tether and to the rest of your industry about crypto when it hosts a crypto summit, and when it puts people like David Sacks and Bo Hines in top positions?
Paolo Ardoino:
Despite all my Italianness, I am a child of the 1980s, and in that era, in every single movie the U.S. was leading on everything — tech, digital, future things, and it was awkward to see the U.S. missing out on the digital asset space for the last four years. It was not only awkward for me. Everyone was expecting the U.S. to lead that race. Every single person and entrepreneur in the tech industry was very surprised to see the U.S. dropping the ball on that. And so the message that we have seen coming out from the White House was that what we did was a mistake, and now we are going to fix that, and we are going to do it at the speed of light, and we are going to put resources, and we are going to make sure that it is going to be done properly, without trying to kill the technology, but trying to empower America and the rest of the world with the technology that will revolutionize finance and will make access to financial services affordable to everyone. Because again, what we did at Tether was take the blockchain technology and put the simplest thing that we could ever think of, that was the U.S. dollar. We didn't create crazy things. With Blockchain, you see all this project creating crazy, crazy things and very complex, super futuristic things, and all that we did was make the sliced bread of technology, a very simple thing, but that was actually the thing that everyone needed. And also, as of today, our technology is helping the U.S. Treasury in selling $200 billion worth of U.S. debt. Tether alone has more than $120 billion in U.S. treasuries. And last year, we were the seventh largest purchaser of U.S. treasuries in the world. Meanwhile, China is selling U.S. Treasury bills for their own reasons, and you have Japan that is selling Treasury bills. So they were the two largest holders of Treasury bills. The Japanese were selling to defend their national currency, the Japanese Yen, that is not having a good time. And China is selling, probably for some strategic reasons. And on the other side, you have Tether that was the seventh largest purchaser in 2024 and actually, before us, there were Cayman and Luxembourg, that include many hedge funds. If you remove the hedge funds, Tether was actually the fifth largest purchaser of US Treasuries. So that is the power of the technology that we created. And again, it's not rocket science. It's very simple is very transparent, works on a blockchain so everyone can look at it. And that's the message that also we got from the administration: Scott Bessent talked about the importance of stablecoins. And again, we are very humble, because we created that thing in a very simple way so many years ago, and it took 11 years to explain or to see what we created understood by the most powerful people in this world, but now it's very well understood, so we know that they will take good care of it.
Washington Reporter:
Was there any olive branch, any proactive help, anything useful from the Biden administration, to you? You mentioned that a lot of their interaction with you and your industry was through Operation Chokepoint 2.0, but was there anything that they did at all that helped you and your industry, or was it just four years in the wilderness and now you're reorienting yourselves and trying to reposition?
Paolo Ardoino:
Our interaction was mostly with law enforcement during the past administration. We collaborated already with the Department of Justice, the FBI and so on. But when it came to the last administration, look at the SEC, I mean, it was a disaster. And so I must say that not just us, but every company in the industry, was fearing for its own future, given the past administration. And now we are seeing an industry that can be flourishing and it's just just purely a game changer.
Washington Reporter:
Are you in El Salvador right now?
Paolo Ardoino:
No, currently, I'm in Italy to visit family.
Washington Reporter:
To get the olive oil, right? Normally, you are in El Salvador, correct?
Paolo Ardoino:
I spend a lot of time in El Salvador, but have traveled a lot as well.
Washington Reporter:
So what have you seen from El Salvador? President Bukele is also one of the most pro-crypto leaders on earth. He launched the Bitcoin reserve that we're seeing the Trump administration wants to do, what else is going on there that Americans should be paying attention to that could be coming down the road for the crypto industry in the United States?
Paolo Ardoino:
So El Salvador is a country that first of all, is beautiful, and now is very safe. Until 2021, it was the murder capital of the world. There were gang members like MS-13, everywhere. There were 60,000 gang members that were almost imprisoning 6 million people. So 1 percent of the population was keeping the other 99 percent of the population in prison. This meant that they were acting as mobsters and there was a curfew after 5pm. No one could get out in the dark, because they’d get shot. People were getting shot in the streets at the rate of 5-10 people per day sometimes. The peak was 80 people in two days. The situation was crazy. Bukele said ‘enough is enough.’ Now, we reversed two things: the 60,000 gang members will go to jail and that will free up the 6 million people from their jailers. El Salvador is now safe. I myself go around during evenings and nights, I walk around, I don’t need protection, it is super, super safe, even for a person as public as I am. People have smiles on their faces. Before, no one could even get ice cream after 5pm. We organized an event in El Salvador and it was basically the first big event in the last 20 years, because no one could organize an event before. These are small things, that for us seem obvious, but for them it is coming back to a new life, it is a renaissance. We wanted to be part of that story, because it is so rare to see a politician like Bukele who puts his life in danger, and the life of his family, to do what’s right, and what’s right is fixing the country and making the country safe for everyone. And the second thing was dealing with bitcoin and with digital assets. So they came up with the regulatory framework that is strong, that is very forward-looking. I was reading some articles where journalists were saying that El Salvador is a small country, almost a banana republic, but if you look at the regulatory framework of El Salvador with digital assets, it is very thorough, strong, and intelligent. It is much, much better than the one in Europe. The one in Europe is a disaster, it is very risky, mark my words, it will create a systemic risk for European banks, especially the small and medium-sized banks. The El Salvador regime is intelligent and well-written. I am very pleased to see Bukele and President Trump having good discussions and working together. There could be a very strong partnership between those two countries.
Washington Reporter:
Tether invented stablecoin, but what else do you do to ensure that the U.S. dollar remains the world’s reserve currency?
Paolo Ardoino:
What we actually built is the biggest physical and digital distribution network for the U.S. dollar. On the digital side, think about Rumble, for example. On the physical side, there are hundreds of thousands of kiosks, bodegas, small shops that we acquired and built in the last 10 years. We build millions of physical touchpoints and billions of digital touchpoints with the world. We had more than 90 portfolio companies in our group. All of them in one way or another are used to push the U.S. dollar into emerging markets and developing countries. No one has ever built something like that in the history of humanity. Tether made $20 billion of profit in the last 2.5 years, and we distributed only a small portion of that to our shareholders. The rest has been used to keep building this network to make it stronger and more resilient, because I don’t want to live in a world where we fail, not because of us. We will remain successful, but if we fail, there will be a huge imbalance and there will be bigger risks in seeing one single monopoly of money be controlled by the BRICs countries.
Washington Reporter:
Tether recently froze millions of dollars on a Russian crypto exchange; how does Tether make sure that malign actors aren’t using your technology for nefarious and illegal purposes?
Paolo Ardoino:
That’s a very good question. Since the beginning, Tether has worked with law enforcement. We work with dozens of law enforcement agencies in over 50 countries. The most prominent ones are the FBI, for example. We work closely with the Department of Justice too. We collaborated on more than 400 law enforcement actions with U.S. law enforcement alone. The example that you mentioned, the the Russian example, it's, very interesting. We froze Garantex, that was the Russian cryptocurrency exchange but remember that we are not a nation, we are not a country. We don't have an army. So when we are doing these activities, we are collaborating with U.S. law enforcement. We are working with the enforcement arm of Treasury. We follow up. We follow the SDN list. So we believe that we are a net positive and a true force for legality in the world. We believe that cash dollars are used for for most of the trafficking, for all the nefarious activities, and we are creating an alternative that gives the comfort to the holders in emerging markets of safety against their own governments, but also gives and empowers law enforcement tools to monitor and track the activity. So if the activity is deemed to be illicit, then we can take a swift action and freeze the money. So we created the best technology for money out there, without questions. Imagine law enforcement having to track a wire that hops across three different jurisdictions, and having to inquire with three different international accords to try to track the money? It is impossible for them. But with the blockchain technology it is actually all out there. It is all transparent. Money can be followed, and we prove that we can help. Tether has his own investigation team internally that works with these 230 law enforcement agencies. So our ability to scale up monitoring and collaboration is incomparable with the traditional financial systems, and that's what I'm trying to explain when it comes to the U.S. and with this administration, I've been heard, and I'm being listened to, and I find a lot of interest from my counterparts. When I talk to people in the Congress, in the Senate, House, they are very interested in our activity with law enforcement. I think that we are doing God's work in that sense.
Washington Reporter:
You were very locked in. Tell me this. As you were mentioning at the beginning, science fiction and that universe is important to you and to your intellectual or ideological formation, and that leads you to sitting here today. Is there a specific author or book that you've read that leads you into the mentality that you have now that you would recommend to people?
Paolo Ardoino:
Oh yes, that is actually the question that I should have asked myself, because it's something that I always talk to everyone about. The best answer is a short novel written by Asimov. It is called “The Last Question,” and to me, it encompasses religion and science. If I can spoil the end, there is this humanity and we are basically set in the in the 1950s. There is this new computer called the "multivac" that is a computer that is built by scientists and the scientist asked to this computer ‘what is the reason of the universe? What is the what is the reason of for the entropy? What is the ultimate goal of the universe?’ And so the computer answers with simply, ‘I don't have enough information to compute the answer.’ So 100 years passes, and basically, the scientists build a better computer, a bigger computer, and they ask the same question, ‘what is the reason of the universe? What is the what is entropy?’ And the computer says, ‘well, I don't have enough information to compute the answer.’ And then 1,000 years pass, same thing, right? So 1 million years pass, and the same thing. Eventually the computer is across multiple planets, multiple universes, and is bending all the laws of physics and all that. And the super futuristic humanity ask the same question, and the computer still does not have the answer. And eventually we are the at the end of time, humanity is is not there anymore, and computer is actually embedded in the universe. And the last sparkle of of life in the universe asks the question again, to this AI that now is the universe, and the answer is ‘let there be light.’ And the universe starts again. So in a way, it's basically humans created the computers that created the AI. The AI merges with the universe, and then the universe basically shuts down slowly, but then restarts again out of the actual computer that the humanity created in the first place. It's like if you think about quantum physics and the theory of relativity, the theory of Big Bang, how the universe expands and then stops, how the time was not there before the Big Bang, because it was created during the Big Bang. And so, in a way, it's like humans created the humans, created the universe, that then created the humans. That's why I like that, that short story.
Washington Reporter:
I love it, and I don't think about quantum physics, but that's why you're the billionaire and why I'm the journalist.