Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is November 26, 2023. I hope everybody had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I feel a heck of a lot better, mostly recovered. My voice is almost back, and coughing is at a minimum. I'm wearing my ninja suit and getting prepped for some cold stuff tonight. It even has a nice little hoodie. There we go! Yeah, ninja suit for the win; it's a onesie.
How's everybody doing? Today is the surprise AMA. You didn't think it was coming, did you? But it is! I've missed you all. It's been a lot of fun. The last month has been a whirlwind. I traveled all around the world; I went to Dubai, then Abu Dhabi, over to Greece, and I had a birthday—I turned 36 years old! How about that? That's pretty exciting. Just chipping away at things. We had the Cardano Summit, which was really amazing and a lot of fun. Seeing all the different projects actually get to the next stage and really start building is pretty humbling.
I remember in 2021 when we were in Laramie, Wyoming, for the Cardano Summit. I said, "Hey, you guys are building now. Smart contracts are on; let's see what you do with it." It's pretty amazing to see how much progress has been made. You've got OXO and Indigo, you've got Jed, and dozens of really interesting and cool NFT projects. People are building, people are excited, and they're filled with joy and passion, even in a deep bear market. Lots of stuff is going on, and we're just getting there. It takes time and effort, but you all are getting it done, and I'm proud of each and every one of you.
I'm pretty excited. There's still the usual FUD. It's kind of funny; there are hundreds of engineers every single day working on Cardano. They're saying we need to get Ouroboros Paris out and Genesis out. There are lots of ledger improvements that need to be made, tons of optimizations, and a huge amount of testing and discussion around LEOS, which is input endorsers. Then people say, "Oh, they're distracted. They've just moved on; there's no more love here." That's the entire point of Cardano—to have a service layer so we can have dozens of chains that work together to augment your Cardano applications, so you can actually build things that are true Web 3. We're in the meat and potatoes of it; we're working our way there.
Governance is coming. If you don't like the direction of things, change it—SIP 1694. I think Soncho Net is in like 86 or 87. There's a huge amount of progress that’s been made on the code. A lot of people are building, and people are starting to register as DApps and understanding how things work. 2024 is really the year of governance. 2023 was the year we built it and talked about it; 2024 is the year we live it. It's going to be difficult. Hopefully, we don't turn into Jacobians, but we'll see.
Anyway, I'm really excited about BLS support. I'm excited about all the things that are coming. Plutus 3 looks amazing; SIP 1694 looks amazing. It's going to be a fun year, and I'm glad that we're deep into building. I'm glad that we're starting to bring a lot of best-in-class technologies together. It's super cool to have seen the space evolve over the last ten years and finally start linking these different things together. We never lost our principles; we never lost our core. We're still in Africa. We have a whole company for it. John O'Connor lives in Kenya, rolled up all the things we were doing, all the pilot programs, and started a company called Realo. We're putting many millions of dollars into it, growing it, and the company's going to service the needs of millions to tens of millions of people.
Ethiopia is still going on. Some people are floating around saying there's nothing there. Well, I've got news for you: we kept the program going despite the fact we haven't been paid and there's a war going on. We're working hard and pushing hard, and we'll just keep rolling out things. We honor our commitments and build things, but that's just how the internet works and what people do. Sometimes the ultimate frustration is that you can't control the macro; you can't control the politics.
In 2021, we lived in an environment where crypto was on fire, and everybody wanted to be our friend. Our phone would ring off the hook; everybody would call us and say, "Hey, you want to work with us? Can you sponsor this?" The NFL called me and said they thought Cardano would be an amazing sponsor. I first said I don't do that; other people should reach out to the foundation or talk to the Cardano community. Second, I didn't know if there was an alignment there. But you know, Formula 1 would call us, Formula E would call us. I saw Susie Wolff and all these other people—dozens and dozens of Fortune 500 companies. I went to the Milken Institute, and crypto was special. All the people came over and said, "Oh, Charles, you're so brilliant, so amazing, so incredible." I got invited to speak before Congress and all these things.
Then FTX collapses, Luna collapses, the bear market comes, and the U.S. government turns against crypto. They say, "Oh my God, how are you not in jail? You should be broke by now; your whole crypto industry is evil." The technology didn't change; the philosophy didn't change; the principles didn't change. Who we are as an ecosystem didn't change at all. We just keep building, and today in 2023, Cardano is so much stronger than it was in 2021.
People get caught in these groupthink dynamics; they just push forward. That's okay. That's why we have the AMAs; that's why we engage; that's why we talk to you guys. We try as hard as we can to just be human, be direct, and connect. You can't always win, but at least you can share in the losses in the games.
Okay, let's talk to you guys. Let's see what you got.
We will get to the question: What is the relationship with Parity? In the end, we're just leveraging that for Midnight. There’s no formal relationship with Parity because Parity is both a protocol and a family of technologies. Some components of Parity's Substrate have been leveraged to build out the Midnight Network and run the Midnight DevNet, soon to be TestNet, and later on, incentivized TestNet and hopefully MainNet.
Now, it's not just stock Substrate; that would be a gross oversimplification. Hundreds of thousands of lines of custom code are being added, and many components are being taken out and replaced, especially in the network consensus and other components of the system. The reason being is that stock Substrate is not fit for purpose for a Cardano service layer, but it has embedded within it a ton of really good ideas, like the pallet system and a lot of how they thought about the interfaces and how to deploy, monitor, and maintain blockchain infrastructure. There’s some world-class engineering that was done there, but it's not Substrate proper; it's inspired by it, iterated, modified, and you'll see that reflected in Midnight.
So, there are two projects at the same time: part Cardano partner chain toolkit and Midnight. One is downstream of the other; Midnight is downstream of the partner chain toolkit. There's a separate team that works on that. They're both in Rust with heavy modifications, but one is a blockchain builder kit, and its intention is to build out the partner chain ecosystem. The other is specifically Midnight, and that’s what’s being tested right now with the DevNet, with over 1,500 teams that signed up.
Charles, have you flown the Blackhawk yet? Well, we've flown in it, but I don’t have a pilot's license yet. I just haven't had the time to get one, but it's definitely on the list of things to do over the next 24 months—to learn how to fly that bad boy.
That is a glorious red CL crab.
Yeah, I am sorry, sir, that is a lobster.
Lobster named Logan.
The NFL really called?
Absolutely did! Got the emails and everything to prove it. Let me see if I can find it. You know, it’s kind of funny; everybody on the internet is so close to calling me a liar, but I have so many emails. You would not believe what we got.
Let's see here—NFL sponsorship... Yeah, I’ll find it for you guys one of these days.
What else we got here? Why is ADA the only token still in a bear market?
It's not.
What do you think about Vitalik talking about UTXO more and more often?
He's starting to realize that there's actually a reason you have UTXO in addition to Ethereum. He's rediscovering what we discovered from Satoshi, and that’s okay. When you follow a peer-reviewed process, you learn an enormous amount of stuff. When you don’t follow that process, you learn it, but you learn it after the fact, after you’ve deployed it, and it’s in the hands of millions of people. It’s super hard to change things, and in many cases, you can’t work with their infrastructure.
Charles, what’s your favorite wine, if any?
American wines from the Russian River Valley are the way to go. California wines.
Is Cardano competitive against Solana?
The better question is, is Solana competitive against Cardano?
Firsthand evidence is greater than hearsay from an IOG insider. So yeah, I know that one. There’s this troll floating around who’s really disgruntled, and he’s absolutely convinced that I’m a despicable evil man. Apparently, he’s talking to some ex-employees of ours who are violating their NDA. Third, fourth, fifth hand, he apparently knows our whole business strategy and who we are and all these things, and me as a person, and he’s very liberal about it on Twitter, enjoying sharing it.
Outside of the fact that when you hire thousands of people throughout your career and let people go, some of them might be disgruntled or only have a particular view of things. It’s their character when they go ahead and anonymously leak things that are privileged. It’s extraordinary to me that people care. You look at any entrepreneur, whether it be Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Bill Gates—pick your favorite one—and the reality is they leave a wide wake of things.
Especially if you’re a billionaire and you’ve done things involving tens of billions of dollars, a lot of people are floating around, and you’re going to piss some people off along the way. Why? Because you won and they didn’t. You got a better deal than them. You held them accountable for something they screwed up on, and they thought you were wrong, and they’re not wrong. They were treated unfairly. The longer you’re in business, the more this exponentially increases because the number of people you interact with, touch, and talk to increases.
At any given moment, even if you’re a rock star, you’re going to have an 80% approval rating, which means you have a 20% disapproval rating. Of that 20%, about 5-10% of the backlash down there hates you with a passion, and they’re real angry and disgruntled. Those people go and write stuff, leak stuff, and do something to balance the scales. That’s the price you pay for being an entrepreneur. It’s the price you pay for building stuff.
If you want to be liked, then be vanilla toast. If you want to be effective, then accept the fact that you have to have the courage to be disliked, and you have to develop a pretty thick skin for what people say about you. At the end of the day, it all works its way out because we tend to forget the politics of the day and remember the big broad brush strokes of things.
Almost 200 academic papers have been written, a $12 billion ecosystem has been created, 4 million people use it, and thousands of engineers, project managers, and product managers are involved. Hundreds of projects have been built on it, and we are relevant. We’re in the top 10; we’re in the game. Every day we fight, people talk about us, and people invest in us, build us in one way or another. They choose to build on Cardano as an ecosystem. That’s our track record—10 plus years building that.
Now, we’re going to break some eggs along the way and piss some people off, but that’s what we’re doing; that’s where we’re at; it’s who we are. If we don’t have critics, it means we haven’t achieved anything. I’m very glad that we do.
Now they lie, and they get very personal, and they say things that are out there and crazy, but you know what? Alex Jones tells us the frogs are turning gay. Does it really impact anything? Does it really change anything outside of being a great sound bite? It’s entertaining. That’s the way you have to take it, and that’s the way you have to think about it.
It should be a lesson to you if you ever want to change anything or build anything. The reality is that you will face criticism, fair and unfair, and you’ll be judged at your worst moment. For example, the other day I was reading the Bance ruling. I was tired, had been up for a while, and I saw trillions of dollars of trading volume. I read the number and said, "Oh my God, there was $1.6 trillion in fees." I read it like three times, and every time I read it, I thought it was $1.6 trillion. I went ahead and took a screenshot, posted it, and said, "This is unbelievable." Then I looked at it again and said, "Uh, it’s 1."
Six billion in fees from U.S. people now, and for the rest of time, that screenshot's going to be up there. Just like the "Do you know who I am?" tweet from 2018, five years ago, it's going to be posted again and again. Or that picture where I'm hanging out with Rachel Seagull at the Cosmopolitan will be posted repeatedly. I'm getting tired of it. Again and again, as if it happened yesterday, with no context or the worst possible context. That is what it's like to be an entrepreneur. Every day is that, amplified a thousand times in a thousand different directions.
Then they write books, they make movies, and if you're really, really successful, half of your country hates you for the rest of your life for no reason other than the fact that someone told them to. It's why changing things is so hard because that's how we treat the people who change things. That's how we treat the people who tell the truth or who are creative. Do you know there's no correlation between academic success and creativity? Jordan Peterson made this amazing video about all these people who go and try to get PhDs, write dissertations, and write theses. They wash out because there's no correlation between their raw creativity and unorthodox way of seeing things and how the system works.
For medicine, did you know that if you take stem cells and grow your own stem cells, suddenly it's a new drug? You have to go through the entire FDA approval process. Imagine that! I can just take your stem cells, grow them, do nothing to them. We know they're just your cells; there's nothing there, there's no harm. They have to go through FDA approval, 10 to 15 years of animal trials. How does that even work? The Section 251 exemption doesn't apply. There are so many things that are so messed up in the world, especially here in America with our government. You say that's bad, and everybody agrees with you. You go and try to change it, and then suddenly half of America hates you.
That's my soapbox. That's exactly right. Richard Gere still gets flack for that unproven Geral thing. For those of you who don't know, there were some rumors spread that Richard Gere likes having a gerbil crawl up his ass. Does that sound true? There are still people who believe that.
From our good friend Lucas, thoughts on the new Argentine president Javier? It would be great to set up a meeting when you come to Buenos Aires. I would love to meet him. I know you know him. He is in the libertarian family; he's an Austrian economist. The first world leader who believes in the Austrian School of Economics wants to get rid of the central bank. As a friend of mine, you're never going to find a perfect politician. They're always going to have some edge cases that you disagree with or find distasteful. But you know what? That's a movement in the right direction. Somebody who says government is the problem, not the solution to the problem, and that the government creates the problems? I like that guy.
And you know what? Crypto is the answer. We have to get him completely on board with the blockchain industry and talk about self-sovereign identity, blockchain-based services, and blockchain-based voting. Because by the way, if you don't have that, you suddenly lose your office and you wonder why. And blockchain-based money? So we're going to get there, and I think Argentina has a chance to lead the world.
As a fact, having an opinion divides your audience. Absolutely it does, and that's their fault, not mine. Grow up! When people talk to you, if they're real people, they're going to have an opinion you may not agree with, and that's okay. You can still listen to those people, be inspired by those people, admire those people, and work with those people. If the only people you want to listen to are those who have the same opinion as you, you live in a very small world.
Please talk about the SEC. There's nothing to talk about. Nothing at all. I see all these people saying, "Well, can you go and prove you're not a security?" Guys, everything is a security right now according to the SEC. They would say Bitcoin and Ethereum were a security if they could get away with it. The reality is that the way the 1933 investment contracts are defined and how the Howey test is defined is overly broad. What happens? They litigate it. If they really cared, baseball cards could be securities if they wanted them to be. Why not?
When you have policy through enforcement instead of legislation, it leaves catastrophic harm to an industry. Normally, what happens when you have a well-functioning government is whenever a new technology comes, like we saw with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the NSFA, other things that were passed in the 1990s with the Internet, the legislative arm of the government shows up and says, "Our rules that were written 70 years ago cannot possibly have imagined and comply with this new industry that exists." In the United States, we regulate things by boxes: your currency, FinCEN and BSA, your commodity, CFTC, your security, SEC, etc. What do you do when you have an asset that could be everything all at once? It can be a security, a commodity, a loyalty point, a representation of real estate, intellectual property, or a collector's item. It could be all of those things at the same time. Who regulates that?
So you're in full compliance with the CFTC and all these other things, and this other guy comes and says, "Come in and register." How? There's no path to do it. There's no explanation on how to do it. When you go in and ask, they say, "We can't tell you. Ask your lawyer." You ask the lawyer, and they say there's no path. Coinbase tried to do this in 2021. They filed an S-1. The SEC looks at it and says, "You know what? Your business model is okay to expose to retail investors, millions of retail investors. You can sell stock to them; we will let you do an IPO." They explain their listing, all the assets, including ADA, were on that as you see. Checkmark. Then two years later, after talking to them like two dozen times, they come back and say, "I can't believe you're selling these cryptocurrencies on your exchange."
Well, we don't understand this model. You guys are an unregistered broker-dealer, and we have to take you down. They say, "What? The business model is exactly the same as the business model that you approved and allowed us to sell our stock to retail investors with. You spent a year and a half with us and millions of dollars in legal fees talking to you guys. Why? Why then wouldn't everything be okay?" No, now it's not. I said, "Well, what about all the time the two years we talked to you? We have a broker-dealer license; we certainly could figure out a way to do this." You ghosted us, and now you're suing us and Kraken and Bittrex and everybody else. What do you do? The courts obviously will resolve this, but the problem with executive branches is they know that if they sue people, resolution takes two to three years. Even when they lose, they just keep going until the legislative branch stops them.
This is a failure of Congress in the United States. They need to pass a law and set clear rules, and the vast majority of people in the industry will follow those rules. The rules are not clear; it's impossible to comply with them. I would love a memo to be drafted to show how, because it's not possible. Also, to argue that every single thing is a security if the founders all die and the protocol still operates and runs, and the value of it is based upon the efforts of a collective of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of independent people, how is that a security? We already have a term for that; it's called a commodity. If you kill any person on the planet, any person at all, the value of gold, regardless of whether that's the CEO of Barrick or the owner of the largest gold mine in the world, is still going to be there. Why? Because gold's value is a collective of a marketplace, and the participation of these things is permissionless.
Who comes to me and asks, "Can I build on Cardano?" You have to ask Microsoft to do something with their products. You have to sign their licenses to do something with their products; it's centralized. But in a commodity, anybody at any time can wake up and say, "You know what? I'm going to grow some wheat. You know what? I got some gold over there; I'm going to take it and sell it in a global marketplace." That's why the CFTC exists. Kind of makes sense, right? These are open protocols. But then they come in and say it's a security. Okay, well, what the hell does that mean? If it's decentralized, how does Bitcoin register? Oh, but it's not. Then explain to me the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum and Cardano and the rest of the gang. Explain it to me like I'm five years old. Run the goddamn Howey test on it and show me the difference between the two. Tell me, is there an expectation of return with the goddamn orange pill moon boys?
There are so many different planks and angles that you can take a look at this thing from. By the way, if you subpoena attack about three different entities, you could perform a 51% attack on Bitcoin because that's the way the cash power works. But it's decentralized, apparently, and Team Orange gets a complete pass. It's a pathetic joke. It's an absolutely pathetic joke. You know, it would be funny if not for the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees have been exhausted in this public war that's being fought on the industry. They'll lose court case after court case, as they already have and will continue. At some point, it'll stop. There will not be an apology; there's not going to be any money that comes back, and we'll just move on like we did with the Kennedy assassination. We'll just move on like we did with Vietnam. We'll just move on like we did with Iraq and Afghanistan. We'll just move on like we're doing right now with COVID. We'll just move on like we did with all the things that have happened in the last 50, 60, 70 years in United States history. It has to stop. It honestly has to stop.
Why do I praise libertarians? Because the only people that seem to improve the situation are the people that are unraveling the government. It's not accountable anymore. People harm people, they get away with it, and they just move on, and nothing changes. I'm tired of it. I think our industry is tired of it. The entire reason cryptocurrencies exist is not because somebody woke up and said, "Man, tokens on the Internet is such a good idea." The entire reason cryptocurrencies exist is that we're trying collectively to reestablish the social contract because the social contract is horrifically broken. If the people in charge are unelected, unaccountable, and don't ever have to prove to us, the beneficiaries of the public trust, that they're doing good for us, and when they screw up, nothing happens to them. They get a promotion; they get elected to a higher office, and we just have to move on as a society. That is not a government for the people, by the people, of the people. That is something else that looks a lot more like the thing we rebelled against when we founded this goddamn country.
So it will change because we don't have any money left. We're $31 trillion in debt; everything is collapsing down, and the American Empire can't sustain itself. You run out of money, eventually it's going to fall apart, and we all know that. It's just sad because so many people have invested so much effort, time, money, blood, tears, and sweat into trying to preserve, protect, and empower the American dream. And by the way, it's not the American people that are doing this. We want to change. If you poll people, over 80-90% of the American people are fundamentally unhappy with the legislative branch, the judicial branch, and the executive branch, and want different leaders and different governance. Yet the American government stays exactly the same. Then change! The American people are good people. Go all around the United States, and you'll find very hardworking people, honest people, high-integrity people.
It's hard to go to a country and go to Gillette, Wyoming. It's -5, -2 outside, 100 mph winds, and they're out there working outside building something because they have a family to take care of. That's the American people in a nutshell. That's who we are. We get it done. We build the best companies; we build the best infrastructure. We're the smartest people, not because we're born smart, but because we import smart. If there's someone smart outside somewhere else in the world, we find them, grab them, and bring them here. It doesn't matter where they're from—be it Uganda, South Africa, Mongolia, or Russia—we don't care. We'll bring them in and work with them. That's who we are at our core.
Then we have this government, and it's a catastrophe. It harms and hurts so many people, and it never says it's sorry. It never says it's done something wrong. There's no accountability anymore. It used to be the fourth estate was the media, and they'd hold the government accountable. They'd say, "Oh, look at what the government did—Pentagon Papers. They lied to you. Let's publish it; let's talk about it." Now, whoa! Oh, WikiLeaks! We have evil Julian Assange. How dare you compromise our national security and talk about that stuff? It's a joke; it really is.
So we'll change it; we'll fix it. You know, there's a two-prong approach. One is the blockchain stuff. It's really about social engineering. It's saying, "We're reinventing money; we're going to reinvent our voice." So change all the voting systems, reinvent identity and property rights, and that's a philosophical movement. We own the young; it might take 10 years, 20 years, or 30 years, but they're Gen Z. They're not going anywhere. They're here in this movement because they understand this is fair; this is high integrity. You can't trust people anymore. They grew up with the Internet; they see all the hypocrisy. They see news in real-time.
The other prong of it is that the federal government is impossible to change. People say, "Charles, why don't you run for president?" What's the point? Obama couldn't change it, and Trump couldn't change it. I'm sorry; there's no way to change it. Think about how powerful Obama was when he came into office. He had a supermajority—60 senators, a supermajority in Congress. There was no filibuster; he could pass anything on a party-line vote. We were on the back of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. He didn't go after Wall Street; Iceland did. It's extraordinary. Trump comes into office, is unconnected to everything, and couldn't get anything done. Why? Because the beast does not permit change. The Deep State is a thing; it exists. You can't vote your way out of it.
So the only way to change it is a constitutional convention. That's the escape clause the founding fathers were smart enough to put into the Constitution. You need two-thirds of the states to come together, and it will happen. The whole government needs to be rewritten, and we'll write a new constitution. We're learning how to do that right now in the Cardano ecosystem. But, goddamn, the American people have to do it. The world will rejoice because we can return to being a bastion of democracy and actually be something better than what we were. Crypto is the Deep State; it's the antidote.
As someone from Croatia, Vivic, I always think of Vivic from Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Seems to be the best candidate—a young person. How about we have somebody that was born in the second half of the 20th century as opposed to the first half as our leader? The central banks need to go. Yes, sir, they do.
I went to the summit in Dubai a few weeks ago. Incredible! Thank you so much for being there; we really enjoyed it. I love what you're saying. Absolutely! I'm going to do an America tour one of these days, just go all around, talk to everybody, and say, "Hey, you know what? You're in charge, not them. Let's take our power back." Yes, Iceland did hold the banksters accountable; they absolutely did. I feel this guy's pain; the passion is real.
Well, I feel the American people's pain. You know, it's so crazy because you can see it in the culture. In the 1980s, The Simpsons came out; it was a very transformative show in my life and in the lives of so many people of my generation. I think it started in 1988. If you pull back the layers of The Simpsons and look at the basic premise, you have a guy who's a high school dropout who works at the local nuclear power plant in a blue-collar job. He has a stay-at-home wife and three kids. They have two cars and a house, and that's not an extraordinary thing. People didn't bat an eye in 1988; they said, "Oh yeah, you could sustain a family by that."
Now, two college-educated people can barely afford to rent and have a single car. In many cases, they have to take the bus because there's just not enough money to go around. How is it that you can be in a more productive place in life, have a higher wage in life, but your buying power is less than Homer Simpson from 1988? Because they robbed us all. It's called inflation. They destroyed the money; the politicians did it to pay for their wars and their graft and all these other things. They stole it from us. Okay? And it wasn't at the barrel of a gun; they just did it through printing money. It's why they hate crypto so much, because it's honest. It's that simple.
What is your opinion of NAD and IV therapy? Okay, so NAD is a class of drugs or supplements, or whatever you want to call it. There are all these other things floating around, like metformin and rapamycin and these other things. People are... and you're absolutely right—constitutional republic based upon democratic consent. You have to give me that. But anyway, back to the NAD. Basically, it's just a class of things, and people seem to think that it helps with cellular energy and mitochondrial health, among other things.
There are three books if you're really curious about anti-aging that are really good because they put everything together, and they're awesome and well-respected. Lifespan by Peter Attia—actually, let me bring them up. I'll share them right now with you guys because I want to make sure I get the
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