Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. This is part two of a series of videos I'm doing on the next steps for Cardano, the next roadmap, and where to go from here. Last time, we talked about heterotopias and Discord. Heterotopias are a concept from Foucault, and yes, you know, heterotopias of punishment, like prisons, and heterotopias of time, like museums or libraries. You can have heterotopias for other purposes as well.
The thesis of the last video was that we need to move the governance conversations to a bespoke channel custom-designed for it, and I spent about an hour discussing some of the philosophical reasons behind that. This video is a little more practical, focusing on how such a migration works and what to do next.
The first step is that before you do anything at all, you have to design the space. There's this concept of conduct. When you look at a place like X, this is the "everything goes" space. You can do pretty much anything you want and say anything you want because it's a broadcast mechanism, and there's no supposition of what an appropriate broadcast is versus an inappropriate one. There's very light moderation in that space. This is equivalent to a library where, if people don't like you, they run around and smash pots. I keep coming back to this example because it's really visual and helps people understand the point I'm trying to make: you clearly understand the purpose of a library.
So, what's the difference between an effective and an ineffective library? There are properties. There's a social contract. Conduct is connected to a social contract, spoken or unspoken, and there's a concept of enforcement of that social contract. The voluntary agreement to follow this leads to a fulfillment or satisfaction of purpose. The library has a certain design, and we agree to behave ourselves in a certain way. By doing so, this allows the library to fulfill its purpose.
Then we ask, what would a governance-oriented conversation look like? What would the purpose need to be? It needs to be governance-oriented. What would the conduct need to look like for that to be appropriate? That's really the crux of the question. When you build an effective space, if you've designed it correctly, it naturally flows in that direction. You want a situation where there's finiteness to it.
What does that mean? It means that it's not unending. There's a convergence of many different ideas and threads to a concept of a milestone, something we should aspire to. There are many ideas, but they don't go on forever, and they don't diverge. There's some concept of finiteness and convergence. You say, "Okay, this is what we're going to do. We're going to choose protocol A over protocol B, company A over company B, market A over market B." But there's a convergence to it.
Ineffective governance conversations diverge. Everything just goes all over the place. What does that mean? You can't create a milestone. You're not able to figure out the future. You're not able to have any conversation about where to go, what to do, or how to get there. So, finiteness and convergence are essential.
Then, there's the idea of inclusion. This is not total inclusion; it's statistical inclusion. Statistical inclusion means that if you have a million people, there should be some form of representation of the totality of the interests of those people instead of just one small group over another. This is very important because it yields legitimacy. Legitimacy is super important. So, finiteness leads to convergence, and inclusion leads to legitimacy. These are some of the properties of a governance-oriented conversation that we're looking for.
Then, there's a goal-directed process. The meta-properties are that this is goal-directed. We engage in these conversations to produce a goal reflected in a milestone, and the milestone is execution. It's possible to execute that. When you look at the structure of X, it goes for total inclusion instead of statistical inclusion. There's no finiteness, no convergence, and no legitimacy behind that. Instead, you have a bunch of tribes, all over the place, forming walls around themselves. The goal of the tribe is war—attack, attack, attack. This person's bad, that person's bad.
The goal of something like this is to create a specialized space of convergence. The reason this requires conduct requirements is that you'll notice in these types of conversations, if you are trying to work on a common goal, you have to ask fundamental questions like: Do you like the person? Do you admire the person? Do you even trust the person? The answer doesn't have to be yes in all these cases. In fact, in many cases, it's no, maybe, or I have ambivalent feelings.
Imagine if there was an asteroid flying towards Earth. Earth has countries like China, Russia, the USA, Israel, and others. Do they like each other? Do they admire each other? Do they trust each other? But what happens if the asteroid hits Earth? We all die. Every single person.
In practice, despite massive geopolitical differences and issues, some form of special space would be constructed, and an agreement would be made for all these entities to work together. Is there finiteness there? Absolutely. The asteroid will kill us if we don't converge in time to a solution. There needs to be enough statistical inclusion that all sides can agree. Legitimacy comes with a pass-fail event: Did we get rid of the asteroid and save the Earth, or did we not?
Generally speaking, these types of things are nice to have, and exercises like this organically create trust. Once you can collaborate on one thing, you can collaborate on other things, but they're not necessarily requirements for it. Your codes of conduct can't be that you have to like somebody. They have to be much more existential.
When we look at Cardano's constitution, there's absolutely nothing about growth and long-term purpose. There are some rough ideas, but nothing specific that is actionable. Some people say that's perfectly fine; we don't need that in a constitution. The U.S. Constitution doesn't talk about how to achieve a harmonious union. That's fair, but from a governance perspective, it's important to say that this is probably the next iteration.
Once you've established some baseline social contract, there needs to be a legitimate universal understanding of what good growth looks like. If you look at what all these tribes are doing, the lowest common denominator is simply the price of ADA. The harsh reality is that if ADA were $5, for the most part, Charles Hoskinson would be a genius and walk on water. There would be very little toxicity on Twitter, and there would be a giant cult of personality. But because ADA is less than 20 cents, Charles Hoskinson is considered evil and a failure, even though I don't have any control over these outcomes.
That is the standard of the vast majority of this particular group. The issue is that this is not a good standard, as we discussed in the prior video, for a variety of reasons. There has to be something bigger than that, and we need to go deeper.
The first step, I would argue, is to create a code of conduct that allows people, regardless of their resting state, to participate in a conversation that will result in the creation of a growth milestone and a better definition of long-term purpose and growth. This is the first element of marketing. This is the "Why Cardano?" When people ask what it means to be in Cardano, you say the success of Cardano, the growth of Cardano, will achieve this purpose.
We have to first define what we want to grow and what that will produce. What is the purpose of all of that? Then you have a philosophical "why" that every single person in the entire ecosystem can pair with. It's simple, easy to explain, and can be delivered in a 30-second elevator pitch.
The first challenge of Discord is to achieve this type of task. In practice, you write a beta code of conduct. This beta code of conduct facilitates this process of conversation. Combined with it, you need some concept of tools for conversation. There are plugins, dashboards, and a large collection of things we can bring into this. Then people agree to follow that code of conduct, and moderation enforces it. This agreement and moderation allow, with those tools, for the first iteration of the conversation, which is roughly speaking, how do we grow? What does growth even mean?
Long-term purpose must be established, and you have to have a conversation that converges and is finite. It can't go on forever. There has to be a grouping of people that most would look at and say, "Okay, that's a legitimate sampling of the ecosystem as a whole." Once that's done, you have a group of people who vote on the code of conduct to get to V2. This establishes what's known as a Nomic property.
Nomic is a game created by Peter Suber back in the 1980s, where the game's rules are voted on by the players. This allows a participatory evolution of the code of conduct based on the achievement of a milestone. You don't take a raw vote; you only vote after the conclusion of an iteration of the system. This way, you have a referendum on what worked and what didn't work.
Then, the next thing you do is establish the next asteroid. If we don't solve it, it's going to kill us. If we have no common definition of growth, it is physically impossible to establish a unifying message and strategy. The ecosystem will simply die because we all have different definitions of success.
Then, basically, every person is fighting for their own achievements. "I shipped my DApp, I did my job, I created my DApp and got some users for it. Our community is fine; we got the Olympics to come; we launched an RWA platform." Everyone else failed. This creates a common frame to say, "Okay, all these things here, how do they relate to that thing?"
The establishment of the next asteroid, I would posit, is the establishment of executive function. You build your executive function bespoke for what you want to do. Your next asteroid is how do we go from two branches of government to X branches, and we don't know exactly what X means. I would argue that maybe five would be sufficient.
Currently, we have a judicial and a legislative branch. We need an executive branch. I'd argue that we need some AI and some form of representation of the DApps and projects, which we currently don't have. With legislative, we have DREPs; with judicial, we have the constitutional committee; but we need an executive branch.
If you ignore DApps and projects, this is the Lawrence Lessig problem—they end up co-opting and taking over the system because they have undue influence and control by the amount of ADA they have in custody. A great example would be Yoy, which has about 20% of voting power. It's a project, and there's an aggregation of power there. Just to pretend like that's a normal DREP is fundamentally different.
That's the next conversation. You've established growth, and you say, "Okay, the next asteroid is we need executive function because we need something to achieve growth." Then you have this whole debate. The space is built for that; it's been iterated in that particular way.
Then we ask, does this require an update of the constitution? Yes. The new constitution will reflect these new goals. In your preamble, you mention the growth goals. You say, "Hey, in order to achieve this more harmonious union, we need these capabilities here."
Then what do you do? You vote on your next code of conduct, V3. Then you establish your next asteroid. The next asteroid is the budget and strategy. Now you have specialized roles that add in. These are not just people who showed up to talk about things in Discord; these are potentially elected. What does that mean? There's legitimacy there.
The more you do this, the legitimacy grows, and the tighter and more rigid your code of conduct tends to become because people become addicted to success. They like that. Over time, the people who participate build trust in each other because they're slaying asteroids.
So what have we done? We've established the growth goals, the executive function, and then we've come up with a budget and strategy process. What do you do next? You update the constitution to V3 to reflect or give new powers to these new roles from the constitution, which results in perhaps even more rules being formalized inside the system.
At this stage, all the drama dies. It's gone—100% of it. Meaningful internal drama, I should say. There's always external drama, but all the internal drama dies. You go back to the Shelly era, where there's a unifying rally cry, a roadmap, a vision, a common understanding of growth, and a strategy. There's a whole bunch of tools and techniques, and there's a government accountable and responsible for executing it. It's financed enough to pursue it, and we actually just go and do it.
What happens is this enters an infinite recursive loop. You can go back to ask, are our growth goals still reasonable? Are we happy with the structures we have, and what's the next budget and strategy for the next window of time?
My critics will say this is just IoGG trying to do a power grab, and the goal here is to enrich ourselves and control you, satisfying ego and all these other things. Where exactly in this entire structure did I say IoGG owns, operates, and controls the whole thing? Any person can execute this structure, and any person can participate in this structure. This structure purposely divorces any semblance of ego and personality.
This is why I use the China, Russia, Israel, USA concept. There are things like the asteroid that transcend petty rivalries or differences of opinion. In a world where the asteroid is barreling down, there will be extremists who say that their petty rivalry is so strong that even though everybody's going to die from an asteroid, they still need to push their agenda.
What this process does is it exposes the radicals from the good-faith people. It separates the weak from the chaff.
I clicked the button, and it didn't launch. Oh my god, I didn't check it. You've got to be kidding me.
Recapping, because I've been talking for a long time without the whiteboard: you have this concept of heterotopias. You create a specialized space specifically to enforce a purpose—the purpose of governance. The purpose is to establish milestones. You have finiteness, convergence, inclusion, and legitimacy. You create conduct, and from that, you're able to establish tools. This allows you to set a goal.
The first milestone needs to be growth. Once that's achieved, you vote on the next code of conduct, establish the next asteroid, and I would argue that this would be the establishment of executive function, among other things. This is a new operating government, akin to the Articles of Confederation compared to the U.S. Constitution.
This then feeds into the next constitution. The next asteroid is budgeting and strategy. You establish V3 of the constitution, and then you are able to enter a recursive loop. As I said, the drama dies because this unifies the entire ecosystem.
This is a thought process that one works their way through, allowing you to bring lots of diverse people together. It has to be statistically inclusive, so you need a good sampling of a variety of people. This is participatory, and again, they don't have to like, admire, or trust each other. However, you can't have the radical extremist minority hijacking the process to push a particular agenda.
You can't have someone in the process who says, "I don't like somebody. I hate Emergo or Charles or the CF, and I think they're crooked and corrupt." If they enter this process with that mindset, the entire process will die. Everything I've discussed will die if you allow that type of dialogue.
You need to have a code of conduct that says, "Yes, those may be legitimate questions and grievances, and yes, you get a gold star, and yes, you can go protest on X or other things, but the purpose of this medium is a discussion that is finite and will converge to a milestone. The first milestone is what does growth mean for Cardano?"
Of course, you're allowed to have many different opinions. You could say the only thing that matters is the price of ADA. If your faction wins, that's it. One important thing to understand is that after convergence, there will be winners and losers. You will try your best to maximize the number of winners through compromise.
Typically, when you have these conversations, you build trust over time. As long as you have the different sets of goals I mentioned in the prior video, this concept of empathy, where we try to understand each other's positions, and you have common goals, you can create a reality where more often than not, people win. You find a compromise for people to come together and win-win.
However, if they're too far apart or if there's no attempt to create empathy or shared goals, you cannot converge. What do you do in this situation? If lots of people are converging and a minority of people are converging to something else, you pick a winner and fire the loser. This is the Ethereum Classic situation.
It wasn't possible with Ethereum and Ethereum Classic to resolve the situation because the situation was fundamentally split. One group said code is law, while another said some people can come in and edit the system for the best interest of the system. There's no right or wrong; these are philosophically different.
This is like Jews versus Muslims versus Christians. There are different faiths, and you're not going to get anywhere saying, "My faith wins, and all the other faiths are wrong." You can't create common ground because they're dug in. So, you have to pick a winner in that situation.
You'll notice that there are groups of people whose only purpose in Cardano is the statement that we must kill the evil enemy first. They're saying Cardano can only succeed if we purge our enemies first. This is Monad, Josephine, and a lot of the anti-Charles crowd who have Charles derangement syndrome. They imply that only when Charles leaves Cardano can Cardano be successful.
I'm not putting words in their mouth; this is literally what they say. They've made their entire purpose in the ecosystem a referendum to expose the evils of Charles Hoskinson or a particular entity so that enough people will turn against him, and then this person can die, be thrown in jail, or go away, and then we can move forward.
This viewpoint is insane and inspired by the politics of personal destruction we see today. It's a road to nowhere because there's always going to be the next evil enemy. Once you establish a purity test, everyone basically becomes the enemy at some point.
Furthermore, why am I a barrier to the growth of the ecosystem, or for that matter, anyone? We haven't even defined what good growth looks like at the moment. If you define it through this channel that the only thing that matters is the price of
What happens is this becomes kind of like test-driven development for organizational design. They are read tests like you're writing code. When you're first starting to write the code, the code doesn't compile. The code doesn't work, so you need something to correct that. You create loops and work your way through, and eventually, they all go to green. Similarly, in real-time, as you're building, you can reach a point where the VC wants to invest, and you can pass the premortem with a very good business model canvas instead of retroactively discovering it.
As people come together, you can establish empathy, shared goals, and shared incentives through an AI-driven process, so that everyone at the table is there in good faith. We've all made a good faith attempt to understand each other and what we want to achieve. Then it's a negotiation to reach a good compromise set. If it's statistically inclusive, that set should represent the interests of the ecosystem as a whole, especially if it's a good idea.
You also need an embedded marketer. Why? Because everything has to be understandable and broadcastable. It can't just have some abstract growth goals. We have to ask why. Why should people care? What problem does this solve? How do we sell it? How do we talk about it? How do we communicate it? You have to push your way through and get that done. If you do these types of things rapidly, you converge. You get rid of the toxic hellscape people, and then you actually get to the business of designing something.
The something you design has democratic consent because one of the meta conditions of this is decentralized gates. You have DREPs and the constitutional committee. The output will be constitutional updates. Does Discord get to decide that? No, Discord has no official power. It is not an organ of the Cardano ecosystem. It is a specialized space, a heterotopia that has been established to do a job, and that job is constitutional updates. Once the constitutional update is done, there are new institutions—call that plus+—and those new institutions are responsible for executing that job. They've been built bespoke to this process and now have this process as a mechanism.
I was originally hoping this would have been done at Intersect, but for a variety of reasons, it didn't get done. You can't litigate the past. You can't wake up every day and say, "Oh, well this person didn't do this or this person stepped in." We just haven't moved forward, so we need a new process to do all these things. Then you have decentralized authorization of it, and you have structures that do all this.
Now, does this have to be on Discord permanently? No, Discord is what we call a minimum viable product. There are plenty of decentralized social networks; they're just not fit for purpose yet. You want to run a collection of codes of conduct and interactions, build tooling, and after several iterations, your desires drift from what Discord as a platform can provide. One of the things in this recursive loop is the recursive self-improvement of the fundamental tools.
What you want to do is blend in a Cardano native governance space. But to build it ourselves in the very beginning, you have to ask yourself: does that produce any value? Do we have a clear set of product requirements? Do we have strong opinions about what works and what doesn't? Is it ubiquitously accessible? Is it easy as a consumer product for people to download on their phones and use it on their browsers? Is it secure? Is there 24/7 uptime? Is there data persistence? The answer is no. We don't have any of those capabilities if we built our own solution.
That's why you start with something that gives you about 80% of what you need. You highly modify it; it's enough to get through the process, and then you can build something bespoke as you iterate. That bespoke thing gives you 100% and has the added advantage of being decentralized, allowing little social processes to work their way through.
So, we're going to work on this entire flow. We're going to create a lot of product requirements for it. We'll write the initial beta code of conduct. Version 1 will be a product of Mergo and Input Output, and as I said before, as people come in, they'll be able to modify and change it. Then we'll have a hackathon once we've identified some of the tools of conversation, with prizes for those tools to facilitate it. We'll build some ourselves and otherwise.
We're going to start working on these things and get the shell put together. It's not a free-for-all; it'll be a slow drip of people into Discord. A lot will initially be invited, and then people who come in have to sign the code of conduct and agree to it. The first wave of moderators will be hired as this becomes social infrastructure. They can be employees of the ecosystem as a whole or sponsored by volunteers. I don't care; it's a minimum viable product.
Now, there's a group of people who think this is antithetical to everything they stand for. They're in instant criticism mode and believe the only purpose here is to take over and co-opt the entire Cardano ecosystem, putting Charles Hoskinson in control and executing a hostile takeover of everything. At the end of the day, I just don't care what these people say. They're trash. I say that not because they attack me, but because after I die and Cardano fails, they will leave, laugh, and say it was a great time destroying it. That's why they're trash. They don't want to save Cardano. They don't care about your bags. They don't care about you or the sacrifices you've made. All they care about is being right, placating their ego, and saving face for whatever bizarre world they live in.
So, they're not part of this process. You build a system that gets people who actually care. I don't care if those people like me, admire me, or even trust me. All I care about is whether they want Cardano to succeed and grow. Do they want this ecosystem to be larger and more capable tomorrow than it was today? If you have the right code of conduct and everyone agrees to it, they work their way through. You get through one cycle, you learn a lot. You get through another cycle, you learn a lot. You come out the other side, and then you have a sustainable, stable ecosystem.
Again, I wanted to do this with Intersect. That was the plan, but it didn't form. It is what it is. No sense fretting over spoiled milk, as I said. A final point is that I don't think Cardano is dying or failing. I think Cardano needs a rebrand, a refresh, new life, new people, a new message, and a new roadmap. It needs to recover from the past. There are so many people addicted to the past, wanting to turn everything into "I was right. You should have listened to me. I knew how to save it. This person's incompetent. This person's bad."
I stepped away from the process for years, trying to let everything naturally move through and for the community to form its own things. It just wasn't quite ready for this to happen organically. So, this is me stepping back in and saying if you think this is a good idea, then pick up a shovel and be part of this process. Be part of the hackathon. Be part of the discussion process. Give us advice on what Discord needs and how all these components are going to be, and participate in it. Help us get to a point where we can define some things, and then when those things are defined, vote on the constitutional changes to empower the ecosystem to pursue them.
Then we'll never have another budget or strategy fight because we have a process to get there, and we can get rid of all the drama. We can also fire the people in the community whose only purpose is to win and burn everyone else down in the process. That's my advice to you. If you don't want to follow that advice, then I don't really know how to save Cardano. I don't have the ideas. Maybe someone else does, and someone else can step up and do it.
The CF now says they're going to come and grow Cardano. It wasn't their responsibility; they literally said this in an interview. But don't worry, they're here to fight, and I'm just a community member. That's their view now, taking advantage of the fact that my brand is taking some hits, and a lot of people are dancing on my grave. They were waiting for this moment, and they smell blood in the water, trying to gain power. I just don't want to see this thing die. I spent so much of my life, time, and cognitive effort into waking up every day and asking, "How do we build something great and make something successful?"
We got lost sometimes in the weeds, and I had to give space for the community to see what they wanted to do and what they didn't want to do. Something like this needs to exist. If you don't think I'm the person to build it, that's fine. Convince the ecosystem you're the person to build it, get people to join it, and show why it's going to achieve this. This is a blueprint; it's not a specific destination. I didn't say foocoin.com is the website we go to and that's where we're going to do all of this. I said this is what we need to do. If your thing satisfies these conditions, it's as good or better than anything I've written here.
So go do that. Either fall in line, join something like this, and work towards getting it done, or build your own thing and invite all of us to be part of it. If there's a reasonable code of conduct and the purpose of this thing is to grow Cardano and establish the organs and functions necessary for Cardano to reach the next level, then I think we can all agree to do that. If the purpose of your thing is the no homers club, only to exclude certain people or punish people, or say we have to move beyond the founding entities because they're evil, then where the hell are we? What have we achieved? Absolutely nothing.
A lot of people have asked me if I will become a DREP. This process is what creates a political party. Once we go through it, this becomes the political position of the party. The party believes in this growth, and the people who win the election here, the winners, are the members of the party. That party will represent a DREP, probably the largest DREP in the ecosystem. What will it do? It will use its voting power to push for those constitutional updates. This is what gives it teeth; otherwise, it's just me yelling at a screen.
Those updates create elected roles, and members of the party start taking those elected roles. Those elected roles are then responsible for executing a strategy funded by the budget, and the strategy's efficacy is measured against the KPIs established in the growth. Marketing is easy because marketing lives here. What are we trying to achieve? How are we going to get there?
When people make a decision, "Do I want to join Cardano or not?" we have the party, we have the growth, we have the vision and strategy, and we go for it. There you go. Sorry that it was a disjointed video a little bit; I forgot to screen share. I'm a little tired, as you know. A lot of things have been going on, and we're pushing through. I don't give up. He can hit me; he can do a lot, but I don't give up. I keep going and pushing forward. It's been the hardest few years of my life, and it's been very diminishing and revealing.
A lot of this has been letting go of things, you know, letting go of the illusion that I could be admired, liked, and loved. It's not going to happen—not in a world of social media and not in a world of politics of personal destruction. No matter what I say and do, the hate is real. You can't live for love, so you have to have higher purposes. You have to say, regardless of whether everyone hates you or loves you, it's immaterial to the things you want to do.
I want to live in a world where we can trust each other again. I want to live in a world where everyone is held equally accountable and gets the fruits of their labors, held accountable equally regardless of birth, geography, political power, or economic position. Every single thing I do, every day I wake up, I ask, "Are these things pushing us in that direction?" Banking the unbanked with RealFi? Yes, because they're in systems with ethics and integrity. Liberating the assets of Bitcoin and getting them into systems that are programmable? You can give privacy to it and make digital gold better. Midnight gives the freedom of association, commerce, and expression to everyone everywhere, putting controls into AI and other systems that are robbing us of our autonomy and humanity, and evolving the governance of Cardano to a point where it continues to grow and get stronger.
That's what I care about. I don't care how much money I make. I don't care how much you like me, whether you agree with me or disagree with me. I'll stick around as long as I feel there's a chance and a group of people willing to give it a chance and fight for it. I'll leave if I feel there's no one left and that it's become corrupted or my efficacy has diminished to a point where I'm unable to rally people anymore. There's not much forgiveness in being a revolutionary.
The longer you do these things, the more compromises you make, the more damage you take, the more scars you accumulate, and the less humanity you have in the process. It's a lesson that every person lives, unfortunately, to realize. And that's where we're at. It's been 11 years—a mostly thankless job. Every single thing I've done has been litigated, relitigated, attacked, and reattacked, including random people entering the ecosystem and transcribing hundreds of hours of my AMAs to find some vector of attack to sue me or create a scandal. Most sane, normal people would simply retire and give up. That's just the reality of it.
But I'm not a sane, normal person. I'm an insane person. I'm a glutton for punishment. I'm a revolutionary. The whole reason I joined this industry was to change the world. Somewhere along the way, I also created a dual goal: I'd like to be liked and loved. That's the most dangerous thing in the world to want. You can't want it. You have to have the courage to be disliked, misunderstood, misrepresented, hated, shamed, and saddened. You have to be willing to be out there alone, asking yourself, "Do you believe you can win?"
What I've shown you here is a strategy. It's not the only one; there can be others, but it's a strategy for how we can get back to the business of winning and pick ourselves up. My advice to the entire Cardano ecosystem is that if you want to win, you also have to adopt this mindset. We have to stop complaining about the fact that VCs don't like us and that other people call us a ghost chain. We need to stop playing the victim and saying no one treats us fairly. Why would they? They don't own any ADA.
We are out there in the middle of nowhere. Just shut up and do the job. We don't need a billion people; we just need to grow again. We need to speak with one voice and have one strategy and one philosophy. That's it. As long as we have that, we're in the game. If we lose that, we're out of the game. It's not rocket science; it's a binary of success. This protocol hasn't grown for a while, and it's been losing people.
Processes like this create a crucible where you burn away the fat and reveal who actually cares about what this all means. Even if it's 10 people, that's 10 good people. They can bring in 10 more good people, then 100, then 1,000. Eventually, you wake up, and it's an army. That army is committed; they want to win. They don't care what they have to do to get there because that means you've made something better for everyone everywhere. It's a world we all want to live in.
That's why I was able to do so much so quickly. It wasn't easy going to Japan and figuring out how to raise $72 million, keeping large groups of people who were very difficult to deal with together, and spending years building some of the most exhausting and incredible technology the world had ever seen while maintaining message discipline and fighting. It certainly wasn't about the money because if it was, I would have just sold my ADA at the beginning when it first came out at $1.48. I was a billionaire in 2017, and I had no legal requirements to vest. I held on for three straight years, didn't sell a single ADA, and watched it go from $1.48 to 2.5 cents.
We exhausted way too much of the Bitcoin we received following that roadmap instead of just holding it. There were many ways to bow out and say, "Yeah, it is what it is," and move on to live as a rich man. Instead, I said, "We have to fight the good fight." I was a revolutionary, and I carried it all the way through till today, and I'm still here. My critics say it's just pure undiluted narcissism and ego, that I like the attention and that's why I'm still here.
But if you really understand my psychology, I'm still here because I don't want to let go of the idea that humanity could be better tomorrow than it is today. I don't want to let go of the idea that we have agency over the future. We can change things because the future is incredibly terrifying: designer diseases, armies of humanoid robots, nanotechnology in every part of our bodies, AI controlling everything we think and do, a panopticonic government that spies on us from cradle to grave, our money being worthless, cars with computers that turn off the minute we're not good citizens, and we can't even travel anywhere. Our money could be turned off at the push of a button.
Wokeness is walking through every aspect of society, controlling our language and thoughts, telling us what wrong speak is. It's terrifying. I'm told my only agency in a democracy is to vote for choices that are non-choices. I didn't choose Trump or Biden. I didn't choose Trump or Hillary Clinton. I didn't choose Trump or Kamala Harris. And let's be honest, you didn't either. You were told, "These are your two choices. Pick them." And by the way, you have no accountability thereafter. Four years later, it's the most important election of our lifetime. Again and again and again. Does anything change?
The reason I love this space so much is that it's the only thing that gives me hope in a hopeless world. It's the only thing that makes me believe we have some agency over where the world goes. That's it. If we lose this, where's the hope? If we lose this, where do we go from here? We can't control our own money. We can't control our own vote. We can't hold the government accountable. We can't stop the wars. We can't stop
1:01:15
1:48:40
1:07:35