2025-06-05
1 小时 15 分钟Oh hey, it's the sweatshirt that you will never get back from them, Allie Ward.
And I have wanted to cover secret codes and cryptology for years and years,
and I thought one day I'll go to Maryland and interview someone at the National Cryptologic Museum.
And then I realized that it's run by the National Security Agency, and I was like,
they're going to be tight-lipped, they're not going to give it the goods.
So then a little more digging unearthed a better... more perfect guest,
the guy who wrote the literal book on code breaking titled The Codebook,
The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography.
Done.
He's in.
He's a PhD theoretical particle physicist by training,
an author by trade now and has worked at CERN and the BBC,
even made a BAFTA winning documentary about a mathematician called Fermat's Last Theorem.
He's also the author of the books Big Bang,
The Origin of the Universe, and The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets.
He knows so much about the function and history of secret ciphers and code breaking and has several additional honorary degrees.
And he joined the video chat with a salt and pepper mohawk and for some reason,
a mic and earbuds that refuse to play ball with our recording software.
enigmatic indeed so our first introduction was amid an absolutely horrific amount of tech diffs and i was pretty sure he hated me thank you for spending a half hour troubleshooting i swear that is not typical at all no no no these things happen but look at that brilliant and forgiving.
So let's get to this great convo.