Oh, hey, it's the sweatshirt that you will never get back from them. Alley 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 Code Book,

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 book's 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 refused 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 combo. But first,

thank you so much to all the patrons who support

the show at patreon.com slash ologies, where you can join for a simple dollar a month and submit your

questions ahead of time. Thank you to everyone who is buying and wearing ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com,

where we have some lovely shirts and stuff. Thank you to everyone who leaves reviews for me to read.

And as proof that I do read them, they help so much. Thank you to everyone who leaves reviews for me to read, and as proof that I do

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