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Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is April 13th, 2023, and it's been a long day with a lot of stuff going on. I haven't done an AMA for a little bit, so I figured I’d go ahead and do one with you. I'll let the people trickle in.
So far, it's been a lot of fun. I've been doing a lot of work. JJ is here; let me go ahead and invite him to this thing so he can help me out. It's your invite stream yard link, good old JJ Seiler. As you guys slowly but surely work your way into the Charles Zone, let’s see if he jumps on in.
Ah, well, I thought he would. Let me clear the room quickly. All right, there we go. Do some room clearing. Hello from San Antonio, Texas! Good to see you, Gary. How’s the hospital coming along? It’s coming along really well. The clinic up in Gillette, Wyoming, is probably going to have its grand opening next month, and we're really excited to share that with everyone. We've been operating with a satellite clinic nearby, and we already have 2,500 patients with that.
It's really been a lot of work, more than I thought it would be, but it’s good to see that the initial clinic is finally going to open its doors. The problem with Gillette, Wyoming, is that there's just nothing there. There's no talent, and it's not good infrastructure for what we wanted to do. For every three doctors you need, you only have one physician. So to build all that stuff has been a joy, but we had to import a lot of talent, and there were a lot of construction delays, some weather-related. We didn’t anticipate having such a brutally difficult winter in Gillette. We were pouring concrete, and then a foot of snow would come down, and we’d have to wait, and then another foot of snow would come down, and we’d have to wait.
But we got it done, and it’s just a testament to will and hard work.
Hello, Charles! I love your Mas. Well, thank you so much, Cassandra. I guess you’re part of the cult according to certain people on Twitter. It’s nice to have you all here; we really enjoy it. Big pay! Good to see you.
Let’s see what else we got here. Happy Lace! First, there you go. Bare Bones wallet—very simple. It’s deceptively simple; there’s an enormous amount of work that went into it. The key is to add to it every three to six weeks, keep growing it, and move fast. That’s really how you build great products.
Okay, let’s see. Thoughts on the Ripple lawsuit coming to an end? I think we probably have another month or two, and there’ll probably be a decision. I suspect the decision is going to be in Ripple’s favor. Who knows? XRP tech is anything different? The data can’t do or radically different protocols. We are significantly more decentralized, and we do a lot more. Ripple is old tech; it was designed way back in the day, more than 10 years ago. But it’s perfect for the applications they work on and the bridge they want to create.
You know, not everything is a competition.
Charles, will Ethereum be labeled as a security because of the stake lockup and slashing stake pools? Some people still do believe that. It’s an interesting one.
See it from Eric Taylor. Hello, Charles! Have you seen the D&D movie yet? I saw the original D&D movie back in the day that had Jeremy Irons in it and all the other people. It’s a terrible movie. I haven’t seen the new one, though. Is it a movie or a show?
You know, it’s hard to know. What hair products do you use on that epic beard? Um, shampoo—the same I put in my hair. I probably should do that.
Foreign date for the next Cardano convention? It’s actually going to be in November, I believe, right around the fifth, I think, in Dubai.
Share an embarrassing story with us. All right, I got a story for you guys. I think this is a pretty good story, actually. So, as you know, I’ve traveled extensively throughout the world. I’ve been to 70-plus countries, the last time I counted 72, and I’ve been to almost 40 states.
So I went to Atlanta, Georgia, for an event, and I used to travel as Spartan as possible. Like, coach negative, negative—you know, as they put me in the cargo hold if I got a discount on these flights. I’d stay at really cheap hotels. So I arrived in Atlanta a little late, around five or six o’clock in the afternoon. I finally got out of the hotel, and the person at the front desk checks me in and says, “Here’s your card and here’s your room.” I said, “Thank you very much.”
I go upstairs, I open up the hotel room, and there’s a dude sleeping in the bed. I was like, “What’s going on here?” I’m sorry, man. I go back down, and the guy says, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I got the room wrong.” He gives me the new room key.
So then I go back up to a different floor, a different room. I open up the door, and there is a naked woman inside the room. She just got out of the shower, screams, and I said, “I’m so sorry!” and I slammed the door. I go back down and start yelling at the guy at the front desk. I was like, “What the heck, dude? You’ve given me the wrong room twice, and I just walked in on a woman!”
Well, that same woman, after I was yelling at this guy, comes down really pissed off and says, “Some guy tried to break into my room!” Then she looks at me and says, “That’s the guy!” I look at the guy at the front desk, and I’m like, “What the hell, man?” Then he says, “Let me go get the manager.”
So then he goes off and grabs the manager. She starts yelling at me, and I said, “He gave me the wrong room key!” The manager comes out and acts as if I broke into her room or something like that. The manager is just listening, and he’s like, “Why did you break into a room?” I said, “You gave me the key for the room! This is nuts!”
He says, “I gotta call the police now.” I said, “Please do!” I started threatening to sue him and all this stuff, and we’re just going at it like a domestic violence call. I fully expected that the Bad Boys song would start playing or something like that.
But anyway, along the short of it, eventually the manager realized they made the mistake, and he tried to apologize to me, but he still asked me to leave the hotel. I said, “Okay.” I won’t mention the particular hotel chain that did this, but to this day, I’ve never stayed at those hotels again. That was really embarrassing because, you know, you’re tired and traveling a long time, and you just want to get to your hotel room, take a shower, and go to bed, relax a little bit.
And you go, and not once but twice, you’re given the wrong room key, and then the second time, they try to say that you were breaking into somebody’s room. To have the hotel manager basically say it’s my fault was pretty extraordinary to me. But you know, that’s the nature of travel. I’ve had pretty much everything you can imagine happen in a hotel room. I’ve had people walk in on me, I’ve had bed bugs that I’ve had to deal with, stuff has been stolen out of a room. It’s been fun.
Oh look, we have a new guest! Add you to the stream. Hello, Tyler! Okay, trying to do an audio test here. Welcome to the Decadent American Podcast. Yes, thank you!
All right, let me see here. I’ll go ahead and put the Chiron on to show display names, and it should show your name now. Yeah, there we go. Check it out—Charles Hoskinson, JJ Seiler.
Charles, thank you for having me back on this. Can you see the comments on the side? I can.
All right, pick one of them.
All right, JJ, what’s up? Oh, shout out to Corey Costa! Where is he? It won’t let me highlight it, though. I think I can point it out.
Well, hang on a second. You can’t highlight it? I can’t click on them. I can’t give you that power, can I?
Solo lamb. Okay, oh, that’s stupid. Stream yard. Wow, why can’t I give that power to you?
All right, well, let’s look through them. Pick a few of them.
JJ needs more sound. Yeah, I’m trying to max it out here. For some reason, it’s very quiet. That’s why I was so slow joining. I apologize, folks. Hopefully, we can get it a little bit louder. But you guys can hear me too, right?
I can hear you loud and clear.
Oh, there we go. Siler’s too quiet.
All right, what’s your favorite mushroom?
Hmm, is that to me you’re asking?
Yeah, gosh, the—what is it? The oyster or the chicken in the woods? I’m messing it up. God damn, son, what is that one? The one in the woods? That’s very descriptive.
No, this is a specific—here we have a chicken, chicken, chicken in the woods.
With chicken in the woods fungus?
Yeah, oh, you may know of it as the Laetiporus mushroom.
The lettuce?
Yeah, turkey tail for me and Lion’s mane. Turkey tail and Lion’s mane are both absolutely extraordinary mushrooms.
Oh yeah, and so there you go. Some shiitake, love a good Portobello.
Stan says, “Wow, I just told him the story about the hotel walking in on two different people in Georgia.”
That is a fantastic story. I thought about that one recently. When you go to the hotel now, I just put the deadbolt on. I’m like, you know, as much as I like Charles, I don’t want a random intruder just because some inefficient employee happened to give out the same card twice. It’s a little odd.
Yeah, and here’s the crazy part—they asked you to leave!
Crazy, yeah. That was the craziest part. I had a reservation and everything, and I was like, “Are you going to refund my room and everything?”
Did you actually get a refund for that?
No, no.
That is insane.
I just didn’t have time to assume. They just said, “You’ve caused a lot of problems; you must go.”
Right. It’s like, do you understand? It’s like you guys gave me the wrong room twice.
That’s good.
All right, what else we got here?
Let’s see here. We got, “Charles, what impact does Mark Cuban’s project with Cardano have on ADA?”
I think he’s referring to Book IO.
Yeah, you know, we love the Book IO guys. We have a great relationship with them.
Charles whispers, “Please, what is the volume?” Is my volume okay? Is it coming through for you?
I think this is on my end. I’m going to try to do an audio test. I can try to rejoin.
I can hear you just fine.
That’s so weird.
Yeah, well, maybe it’s because I have the headphones on. It’s kind of crazy.
You know, I have no problem with Mark. He was a bit skeptical of Cardano, and I guess he tried to extend into his portfolio, but he did invest in Book IO. We love the Book IO people, and we have a great relationship with them. They love innovating; they’re Haskell fans, and they’ve been in the Cardano ecosystem for some time. Wherever we can help out, we try to, and it’s been nothing but a joy working with them.
I don’t know how much Mark cares about a particular chain over another chain, and I’ve never met Mark Cuban in person. We’ve had the Twitter back and forth when all that was him saying bad things about Cardano and then me making a video saying, “Hey, Cardano’s great! Come to the ranch, and we’ll have sweet tea, and I’ll show you the donkeys, and we can talk about it.”
And that was that. I think that still may happen someday. We got to make sure that he knows we love Mark. Even that’s all right. Shark Tank’s pretty good. He does all right with the Mavs. He did okay with Dirk. He’s a good business guy. Maybe he’ll come around someday.
I think he’s already here. Book IO is going to maybe go to other chains in the future, but they’re a Cardano project.
Right, right. So let’s hope.
There we go. I set it to auto-adjust your mic settings. Let’s see if that does anything for you.
Oh, hopefully that helps.
Yeah, yeah. I’m not sure why people are having trouble.
Let’s turn it up to 200.
There you go. You’re at maxed.
Okay, all right. What board are you using?
I’m using the Rota board, and I’m actually maxed out on my input, and it’s just a lack of testing on my part. That’s my fault here, so I’m trying to make sure we’re doing the best we can.
Ah, there you go.
Yep, JJ is still way too low.
Well, I’m sorry, CT guitar guy. We tried our best, but we do have the Rock Lobster.
Rock Lobster!
Hey, Charles, why not much chatter about layer 2 zk Roll-Ups on Cardano?
We are actually doing that, and there’s a huge, wonderful, beautiful plan for it, and it’s heavily related to Midnight. We shall talk about it at a later date. I’m such a tease; it’s my terrible management style, according to certain Cardano moderators.
Charles, when will the paper wallet be issued?
It’ll come in Lace, and it’ll be done this year.
Whoa, I’m here!
Wow, I think you’re very loud now.
Let me go—here, is that good?
You’re very loud. I’m automatically adjusting it.
Okay, and turn it down a little bit now.
All right, we’ll get this sorted yet.
Okay, how about that?
Much louder and better.
Very good! We just changed mics; that’s all.
That’s the trick with it, right? Never give up! You just gotta keep iterating.
Turn it down a little bit.
All right, I’m on a lot of background noise on it now.
Yeah, okay, talk now.
Yeah, I just muted it briefly for a second. I’m trying to find where that input was.
Ah, you’re supposed to be the audio guy! Come on!
All those years of Twitch streaming.
Do you consider staking to be utility?
Yes, for the most part. Staking, you have to do work for most reasonable protocols, and if you don’t do the work, you don’t get paid. That is utility; it’s just that simple.
You know, and anybody who doubts that, say, “Okay, well, are you entitled to receive money regardless of whether you do work or not?” No, that’s not a dividend; that’s not an interest payment; that’s not a bond yield. That’s work. And if you bet wrong, you pick the wrong stake pool, you make nothing.
Go ahead.
Okay, no, go ahead.
Yeah, testing. I can hear you, but it’s still probably too quiet for everybody else.
Yep.
Why don’t I hop out real quick? I’m going to do an audio test. I’ll join back. I just want to try to resolve this.
All right, fair enough. Be right back.
All right, let’s see what else we got going on here.
What dApps can be built only on extended UTXO versus account model? They’re isomorphic, which means that if you build one for one, you could build one for the other. There’s no implicit advantage in that you can only build on UTXO or account style. There are just different views, and one is really nice when you want to do multi-chain or off-chain, and the other one is not, also for parallelism and concurrency. So where the entire industry is going, it makes a lot of sense to do extended UTXO.
Will you rebuild a mushroom farm?
Yes, sir! We’re working on it right now. It’s a process; it takes some time.
Let’s see here. Is Cardano like the Luna case?
I don’t think so; it’s over-collateralized. The biggest issue it has is being economically inefficient. But you know, nothing’s perfect, and there are a lot of people thinking about this stuff.
Charles, was there an abnormal reward distribution last year to satisfy the claims of the original Japanese ICO?
No, that never happened, and there are no claims there. It’s been the same since the very beginning. You people and your conspiracy theories.
Did you like the 1694 in a nutshell diagram?
I tried to make it understandable for everybody.
I really did enjoy it, and thank you so much for that.
Do you wish you were a little bit taller? Do you wish you were a baller?
I’m six feet tall, and I’m as baller as it gets, son. Not worried at all.
Do you think Steve Jobs invented Bitcoin?
No.
Foreign Woods?
I do! I really do. He’s in a good place right now, being the CTO over at the Algorand Foundation, but I miss him. I liked working with him. But you know, when people get a promotion, they get a promotion, and they go for it. It’s a much bigger role; it’s a bigger opportunity, and I’m glad to see him over there.
And Card
Just to avoid the fear of GPT-5, everybody's writing these letters saying, "Oh, we can't allow GPT to advance beyond GPT-4." Sam Altman was just at a place, I think it was MIT, and he said, "Oh no, we're not working on GPT-5; right now we're just working on improving GPT-4." It's like, ah, so I see. You're going to take the GPT-5 label and make it 4.5. That's like when Xbox just did the Xbox One and then the 1X and the 1S or something. I mean, it just got so confusing. They just loved the Xbox One name so much that they didn't want to let it go for like eight years.
It's scary how many game companies Microsoft has acquired. I think they own like half the market at this point. The HoloLens and all the Xbox experience really played into their ability to deliver on, say, defense contracts and things like that, especially in AI work. When you're talking about how to capture a 3D object in a set of images, the easiest way to create a database for the AI to check against is to have the AI photograph a 3D object from every single angle. They were only able to do that because they understand 3D modeling and HoloLens so well. They do kind of have a leg up; a lot of their gaming stuff is really going to help their various verticals.
So, what would you advise an artist who runs a project with no business background and is in danger of missing the chance of never having to work again because he doesn't know how to run a project? It's one hell of a question, isn't it? Yeah, it's serious. No business background. I would say the first step, and this is what Charles and I have talked about a lot, is to set up the business model canvas. Just try to organize your thoughts and really narrow down what you want your business to do. That's a really simple way to focus on what you're going after first. It sounds like you're already in progress, but it might be good to sit down and really drill down to figure out what you want to be doing, who you want to market to, and how you make money.
Let's talk about your experience using the business model canvas. Oh yeah, it's a really interesting process. The most important thing is you first have to identify who you're trying to sell to. It's that market segment. What's amazing about the process of developing a business model canvas is that every time you dig a little bit deeper and go toward that sort of back of house that drives the business forward, you always refine the first thing too. Each component that you fill out eventually allows you to work back to the customer segments. So, customer segments being the first thing, you have to try to figure out who specifically the customer is. People always say, "Okay, if you're going to develop a product, go talk to the customer first." A lot of people think, "Well, who is the customer? Am I making a mass-market device? Am I making something that is just a SaaS service and we're just trying to advertise it as broadly as possible?" You have to really have a good idea of who you're trying to sell to first.
Having an understanding of what your relationships are going to look like with those customers is important too. Are you going to have a loyalty program? Are you going to email them on a weekly basis and run a newsletter? Are you going to create an online community? Every one of those considerations follows from that. So, don't start a weekly newsletter if you don't have the desire or the personnel to send out that email every week with consistency; otherwise, you're just going to confuse everybody. People have to know what channels to communicate with you in. I think marketing channels are incredibly important, and a lot of times nowadays, you get the same answers for some of these different businesses, but there might be something that's really helpful for your product as opposed to another product.
From the start, think about what communities you want to market to, whether or not you're going to be on certain social media networks, how you're going to have your customers evangelize through word-of-mouth advertising. All of this, when you really are kind of pulling together the front of house, shapes what the value proposition of your product looks like. Trying to make that as focused as possible so you can communicate that really quickly is very important. That's kind of my experience so far. There are a lot of other components to it in terms of cost structures and cost centers, but it's a good overview. It's actually a pretty novel concept; I had no idea, but the business model canvas is not even 25 years old. It's a pretty new way of helping you organize your thinking.
If you want to try to take a novel approach to it, you can really help organize your thinking visually. We used to just write on the whiteboard directly, but if you capture it on sticky notes and stick them to a whiteboard, you start finding that removing ideas makes it a tangible process. It's really interesting. You know what's the coolest part about the business model canvas? It really does force you to think concisely, in a single picture, about every angle and dimension of how your basic business idea is going to operate: who your customer segments are, the channels you're going to use to reach them, the key activities you need to actually do your business, the partners you need, what the value proposition is, how that value proposition differs from your competitors, where you make money, where you spend your money, and just very quickly, the key resources required to run the business.
In that conversation, you start realizing the holes in your business model. I wish more people would spend the six to eight weeks it takes to become familiar with this and really understand it before doing anything at all in business. The vast majority of the time, you learn through that process that A) what you think is original is probably not original, B) what you think is creative has probably been done before, and C) even if it is original and creative, you probably don't have enough information to make a good call on whether it's a good idea to spend money on it and if you're actually going to get customers or not.
Now, if you go through this whole process and you're still absolutely convinced that you have a great idea, then the next stage would be to say, "Okay, I need to find real customers, talk to them, and start building a minimum viable product for them," and start understanding my commercial model. All too often, what ends up happening is that people get caught up in the concept that, "Well, everybody else is making money, so if I'm just fast enough in this bucket, I'm going to somehow also be like them." If you're chasing the luck of others, you will almost always lose. Ninety-nine percent of the time, you can almost never time a rising tide.
It's usually just stumbling over something. Dogecoin is a great example of that; it's mostly a dead project for a long chunk of its history, and then for some reason, Elon Musk decided that he really liked it, and he took Doge into the top ten. Had he picked a different coin, you know, he could have picked any one he wanted, like Iota or something like that, and it would have gone to the moon. But he just picked a meme coin, and he decided that he liked it, and because he's a big guy with a network and money, it made it grow exponentially.
Now, there were a ton of people in the Doge world who owned a big chunk of it, and it was worth nothing. They just never got around to selling it. That brings me to another point about business that I've had to learn the hard way, and I think everybody has to learn the hard way. You have to know the difference between when you are smart and when you're lucky. It's really important to have some humility about it. Just because you got lucky doesn't mean you're a bad business person or that you're not smart or capable. You have to know the times when that was actually a deep-seated bet and a lot of hard work and you correctly predicted it versus when you stumbled over something and made a fortune from it.
Unfortunately, our industry is filled with a lot of people who got lucky and weren't very smart. They got lucky enough to perpetuate very bad business models for a long time. I don't know if you saw early last year, or I guess it's 2021 at this point, but Elon said the most entertaining outcome is the most likely to succeed from the perspective of an external observer. I think he just loved the meme coin idea.
I thought it was going to be Ada there for a second; I saw rumors of that. You know, that's before I was working with it, but that was ill-fated. You had to pick the meme coin because it was just too funny to make the little Dogecoin go. I kind of got really upset about it sometimes because we had to work so hard with Cardano. Nothing has been easy. Seventeen papers have been written; we had to build a whole company. I had to deal with the foundation having its challenges twice, going through all those multiple ups and downs, having to rewrite code a few times. It's like so hard every step of the way.
The problem is, because of the way it was launched, no VC friends. No one made any money in California or other places. So they went from totally ignoring us to saying it's not real, and now they're grudgingly saying, "Yeah, I guess it's around." But you have to fight for everything. Suddenly, something else is wildly successful, and they didn't do any work at all. It's just a patron billionaire who shows up, and in a day, it's like just a Litecoin fork.
Exactly. That's the thing. But, you know, on the other hand, there are a lot of good people now, and they enjoy it. I can't be too sour grapes over it. That's the other side of business: nobody owes you anything. Whether you're lucky or smart, whether you put a lot of hard work in or you won the lottery, you are where you're at. You just have to accept that and be willing every day to put in the work.
So, my first advice to you is, if you're thinking about going into business, don't. Ninety-nine percent of the time, people are waiting for it. There's a difference between an entrepreneur and an entrepreneur. If you really want to do that, then you have to be prepared for failure because the most likely outcome is failure. You're going to lose all your money, lose a lot of time, and everybody around you is going to think you're stupid.
Here's the crazy paradox of it: I'm a wildly successful guy by any objective metric, but yet half the industry still thinks I'm a con man, a scam artist, a horrible human being, and has very polarized political views about me. Objectively speaking, just looking at the things that have actually been done and what we've constructed is very hard to do. If you're a reasonable person, you would actually take a step back and look at that, but most people don't.
That's the other problem with being an entrepreneur: if you're in it for external validation, if you're in it for people to love you or to say you've done a great job, the reality is it just won't happen, and everything will be trivialized. Even Steve Jobs suffered this. When you look at it, he starts Apple, gets kicked out of Apple, and people hate him. Then he comes back to Apple in 1997. There were articles written when he came back to Apple, when they bought NeXT, saying the company would be bankrupt in a year. The guy was an asshat, a megalomaniac.
He survives, but he faced criticism year by year. In 1998, 1999, 2000, the iMac gets announced. People say it's going to fail, but it succeeds. The iPod comes out; it's going to fail, but it succeeds. People threw shade on him for the iPhone. Steve Ballmer said, "It's not going to work," and he was actually right about the price point, but he didn't realize Jobs was a business ninja. Jobs got the price point down to $200 from $650 with the AT&T deal.
Every step of the way, they’ve deified him now. He's dead, so everybody looks back and says he was the greatest businessman of all time. But while he was alive, they all crapped on him. They said the best-case scenario is that he was just an arrogant dude; the worst-case is he was incompetent.
So, that's the problem with being an entrepreneur. It brings up the final point: you don't do it for the fame; you do it because you want to solve a problem. I've always been super concerned about this, as you can see from 2014 in my TED talk and throughout my career in the crypto space, with the developing world and this concept of economic agency for those who don't have it. In our organization, I'm very militant about whether this is getting us closer to a world where the poorest have access to financial services. That's the metric of success for me, whether we've done the right job or not.
We've been to dozens of countries in Africa, throughout Latin America, and Southeast Asia. I think you went with us to Mongolia. We've been pretty much everywhere you could imagine, and it's always the same drumbeat: will this actually improve the situation there? We're still quite a bit out for a single global system, but at least we're closer today than we were seven years ago, and we've learned a lot along the way.
You have to have that mindset and mentality because it's too hard otherwise. No amount of money is worth the abuse of waking up every day and having half the world hate you. No amount of money is worth the stress of something going wrong at two o'clock in the morning that you have to show up and fix, or dealing with HR issues like people poaching and the economy going up and down. Speaking before Congress, thinking you've made some progress, and then FTX happens, and you're like, "Okay, I guess everything's reset." No amount of money is worth that. You have to have a mission.
If you're willing to get a mission, that's what you want to do, then you can get the business skills. Once you have the business skills, then you can watch it. Then you just have to convince other people that you're not crazy, or at least you're crazy like a fox and they should follow you. I think that's it.
I know I've just been speaking about half the community. I've watched it for a little while, and I know that you've been mission-oriented for a long time. It's not about the money necessarily; it's about making sure there's equality of opportunity and access, and that not everyone can rig the game, so to speak.
What's interesting about Jobs too is that he just didn't stop building. When he was at NeXT, that just became OS X as soon as he took over at Apple. It's beautiful; it just never stopped. My computer right now is still running some variant of OS X. It's Monterey Mac OS, just never stopped, version 12.
2 Tesla MRI and they do a lot of outsourcing. So, we’re trying to build a more comprehensive program that really focuses on the patient experience and outcomes.
Now, regarding the question about the executive scan, yes, I went through a process that involved a lot of different tests and evaluations. It was quite extensive, and they really went through everything to ensure a thorough understanding of my health.
As for the clinic in Connecticut, I can’t share specific details about the location right now, but we’re working on establishing a program that will provide similar comprehensive evaluations. Our goal is to create a facility that not only matches but exceeds the standards of existing executive health programs.
In terms of future roadmaps and releases, we’re definitely planning to propose one for 2024 and 2025. There will be announcements regarding the MBO and other initiatives, so stay tuned for that.
Lastly, I appreciate the shout-out to the Cardano Stormers Club in East L.A. It’s great to connect with the community, and I’m always excited to see the enthusiasm and support from everyone involved.
With our 5 Tesla MRI, we have much higher resolution, and we have spec scans. We're setting up a whole lifestyle institute and forming partnerships, like the one we're developing with the Buck Institute. We're likely going to start doing some clinical research with them. The depth and breadth of our capabilities are truly transformative.
However, you need to go beyond the executive field vehicle. Once you've done that, it's just an onboarding mechanism to an overall care plan aimed at improving the wellness of the patient as a whole. You should consider your lifestyle plan, including diet, exercise, and nutrition. Then there's the aspect of stress reduction and mental health, which is just as important as physical health. If you don't have these elements right, you risk dying young. While having everything right doesn't guarantee longevity, getting it wrong certainly guarantees the absence of it.
Next, once we have that lifestyle plan, we manage what you have and look at ways to augment it. We're exploring hyperbarics, stem cell therapies, and other new treatments. That's why Peter Attia's book is interesting, as well as what Sinclair writes about in "Lifespan." Peter, the X-Prize guy, just wrote a surprisingly good book with Tony Robbins called "Life Force," which has a lot of great ideas.
Regardless of which path you choose regarding the causes of aging, you need to develop a bespoke plan and stick to it. You should focus on the physical aspects, but also seek local support to hold you accountable. We are also setting up a compound pharmacy to manufacture medicines within the scope of a doctor-patient relationship, allowing us to create bespoke formulas for individuals.
There’s a lot to consider. PLC is great, and they’re a good starting point, as are Elytra and other centers, but they are by no means the end-all, be-all. Continuous monitoring is crucial—using devices like Oura rings for sleep tracking, pulse oximeters, and continuous glucose monitors to understand what spikes your blood glucose levels.
I wish there were a perfect protocol I could point to, but some people have come close. Mark Hyman, for example, is a functional medicine doctor who looks like he’s in his 40s, even though he’s in his late 60s. He’s an example of someone who has balanced health well.
The challenge is the time investment required for these health practices. I weigh more than I should, and I have no excuse; I have all the resources available and know what to do. But I’m busy and stressed, which often gets in the way. How can I preach good health when I don’t practice it myself? That’s the hardest part.
That’s why we emphasize mental health, goal setting, and performance psychology. You have to find ways to motivate yourself to commit long-term to daily health practices. This can be creative, from auto-hypnosis to using devices that provide reminders to comply.
At the end of the day, the most important factors are your environment and the people in your life. You cannot be healthy in a toxic environment. If you have the wrong people around you, the wrong geography, or a poor work-life balance, it doesn’t matter how well you eat or how much sleep you get; it simply won’t work.
Getting the right environment may require sacrifice. You might need to quit your job, move, or leave a toxic partner, which can be a painful transition. Many people aren’t prepared to make those changes, and they wonder why their health falls apart.
On a different note, I used to play chess and would love to get back into it. Mark just asked if I’ve researched mitochondria. Yes, mitochondria are the power plants of our cells. Research shows that when your mitochondria malfunction, bad things happen, including accelerated aging. Some even believe that cancer is a metabolic condition linked to mitochondria, although that's not mainstream medicine.
It’s essential to keep those cells happy and healthy, which involves diet, exercise, and some red light therapy.
Regarding ground bison for sale, we’ve been working on that. We’re trying to get a processing facility set up. Alex James cited an interesting essay about the delusions of certainty regarding AGI.
As for video games, I loved Diablo but was frustrated with the plot of Diablo 3. Diablo 2 had an amazing story, while Diablo 3 fell apart after the first two acts. I even wrote an alternative plot for Diablo 3 because I was so disappointed.
Switching gears, I’ve always wondered if IOHK has considered offering a certified career path for understanding the ecosystem and educating new generations. The Cardano Foundation is moving in that direction. We have an education department, and my hope is that they can create credentials that people can earn on the Cardano blockchain.
We’ve done programs like Plutus Pioneers and Marlowe Pilots, but we still need a formal certificate program. We’ve debated whether to embed this at a university or create a Coursera partnership. It’s an ongoing conversation, and while we’ve made progress, there’s always more to do.
In terms of video games, Pool of Radiance and Gateway to the Savage Frontier were classic gold box games. They were the first serious D&D games on computers, using an isometric 2D view. They had limited resources, which made them unique.
I’ve thought about building a new gold box engine and open-sourcing it, embedding it in the Pathfinder universe. That would be a fun project for the future.
As for the question about my mid-20s, I’ve had four major phases in my life. I was homeschooled until 15, then transitioned to college, followed by my entrepreneurial phase, and now I’m entering a diverse industrialist phase. Throughout these phases, a strong sense of integrity and a desire for fairness have guided me.
I’ve learned to moderate my passion and anger with execution ability, partnerships, and delegation. The enemy of success is cynicism; you must maintain optimism and hope while self-regulating. The skills I need today are beyond anything I could have conceived at 21.
That's just my Thursday. Every day is like that, and I don't have anybody with a gun to my head saying, "You’ve got to take that class or learn that, or else you lose your job." I have to be self-motivated, and that really is the hardest challenge: to wake up every day knowing you have to climb a mountain and have so much money that no one can hold you accountable for not climbing it. You can live really well despite the fact that you didn't climb it.
It is a unique position to be in, and what I found is I still climb it more days than not. I do it because I still have that fire in my belly about how unfair the world is and how bad it is for a lot of people. It does take some thinking. The other thing is that I exposed myself throughout all my travels and experiences with people to a lot of different viewpoints and perceptions of the world. I've met people from the former Soviet Union, people who lived in theocratic systems, and people who grew up in the Maasai Mara. We went to Kenya and spent some time with the tribesmen there, and I met camel herders in Mongolia who literally live without any electricity in an agar.
Look at those Kazakh guys who do the eagle hunting; it's incredible. In Western Mongolia, having exposed myself to all these different viewpoints, I realized there are so many different ways people can live life. We tend to be very ethnocentric and egocentric, thinking there's one way to live life well, and nothing could be further from the truth. Whether you're poor or rich, very smart or not so smart, wise or not wise, there's a reality that humans can make a choice to put themselves in an environment where they can find peace and happiness. That’s probably the highest pursuit.
One of the things about modern life is that it seems to have found that human beings living in a state of torment is profitable. There's a lot of money to be made in dividing us, hating us, tearing us down, and fighting each other. It has made me take much more time to reflect on how to change systems to be more profitable by helping people instead of harming them. I think that's the biggest change as I've gone from that third bucket as a cryptocurrency entrepreneur to kind of an industrialist doing many things. I'm trying very hard to figure out ways to promote sustainable living, work-life balance, stress reduction, and keeping your passions alive. These types of things are very important to me, and I wish more people would value that.
I was listening to Lex Friedman's podcast the other day, and he had a guest on who lived in the Amazon River basin for years, on the Peru side and the Brazil side. His job was to go around capturing anacondas. Can you imagine that job? You live completely off the grid, and if you die, the insects will eat your body within two days. No one will ever find you; your bones will be picked clean. He was talking about how one of his guys, who was actually named JJ, needed to get something to eat. He had these giant calluses on his feet, so he took his knife out, cut a callus off his foot, made a crude fishing rig, and used it to capture a six-inch fish, which he then used for bait to catch a larger fish. Within 30 minutes, they had a 36-inch fish. That is hardcore.
Just think about it: cutting something off your foot and going through this elaborate series of actions to survive in that kind of environment. He’s the happiest guy you'll ever meet. He was sharing all these crazy stories about being in uncharted areas of the Amazon and stumbling upon hidden gold mines run by Russian mobsters. It's just wild.
This all happens at the same time as a high-valued lawyer in New York City in a skyscraper, and at the same time as the decrease in contemplation and prayer in D.C. It happens at the same time as ranchers taking care of bison in Wyoming and an avocado farmer in the Southwest United States. All those things are happening at the exact same time in the same world, the same environment. We all live in that, and that’s magic to me. I think so many people miss that point; they get so stuck in the routine and loops of their life that they don’t realize there’s so much more to it.
As I've gone through those four major stages in life and entered this new stage, that's the thing I'm much more aware of every single day, and I treasure it so much more. I like using the position I'm in to broadcast that and try to make people aware of it. That's a good message; it really is. You have to challenge yourself a little bit. There’s no one right way, and that’s beautiful.
This is a great question right here: Charles, you need to go talk to Trump about being his vice president, then eight years of Hoskinson as the President of the United States. I love your intelligence, brother. You were in politics, you know, with Senator Moran and Luger. I've had a lot of people come to me and say I should run for office or be involved in politics. The problem with politics right now is that the system is deeply sick. You don’t get brownie points for being honest, having integrity, doing the right thing, being accountable to deadlines, or actually making the nation more prosperous.
You don’t get brownie points for anything. Imagine being a shareholder saying, "We need to pick a new CEO for our company," and then saying, "Okay, here’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to take two radically incompetent, sociopathic, super toxic people and hold an election where they spend a billion dollars each to make each other look like Satan. Then the shareholders will pick the lesser of the two toxic candidates."
You’d ask, "What do you have to do for Microsoft?" And they’d say, "I’m going to make it great again." But what specifically are you going to do? The other guy is a pedophile. This has nothing to do with Microsoft. How do we beat Apple? How do we beat Google? What are we doing with AI? What are we doing with the Hololens? What KPIs are we going to hold you accountable for?
A normal CEO runs on their record: "I did this much profit, I got this many customers, I did these things right." No political CEO runs on their record. The guy running against me is a monster. While you’re leading Microsoft, you’ve doubled our corporate debt, gone to war with Samsung, lost half our good employees, and have existential failures in the system. It’s like, fire this guy.
You look at politics and ask yourself, what objective criteria do you hold a president or an executive leader or bureaucracy to? Honestly, is the state of the union they come out and say, "Here are 15 benchmarks that we all agree are good benchmarks, and we’re going to measure them"? Are we number one? For example, I’d love to see a state of the union where the president goes out and says, "Here’s our education system ranked according to some objective measure. Singapore is number one, and America is at 29." When I started off, we were at 17. Do they do that? No, because they usually end up losing.
Then they lie. "Oh yeah, I reduced the debt." No, you didn’t; you reduced the deficit, which you increased. You tripled the deficit, then cut it in half, and then you get to say you cut the deficit in half, which you tripled. That’s still 1.5 times higher than when you started.
This is just where we’re at. Any person currently in the system who desires to be president is not a human; they’re narcissistic people. It’s about their ego, their desire for power over the good of the nation. A real person would say the system is sick and we need to change it as a whole. If this is a real person, they should be saying we need a constitutional convention. Why? Because there are three branches officially of government, but we actually have a fourth one: the bureaucracy.
The bureaucracy is no longer constrained by the other three branches. They don’t listen to the courts, they don’t listen to the legislative branch, and the executive branch is no longer able to control them. Let’s just put some people at the top, and if they don’t like the people at the top, they hide in the mid-levels. The Constitution now needs to account for the fact that we have this gargantuan 10 million person federal bureaucracy that’s a multi-trillion dollar organism and somehow constrain and control it or get rid of it and return it to the states where it was originally intended.
A real politician, a real person who wants to help, would tell you what the objective criteria of success are and would fight for a system that can be successful by design. Just basic stuff, like the election of the president. No one’s happy about it. So how about we have a system where every state elects a delegate? You run against each other as a ranked choice, and it’s a runoff system, a playoff-style system where you gradually winnow down to two candidates. You can completely get rid of the electoral system with this.
Why? Because every state gets representation, plus you now have a demarcation between personal funding and public funding. You can spend unlimited money if you’re running for your state delegate, but the minute you become a state delegate, all elections are federally funded. There’s no external money inside the election, and everybody gets equal time in all 50 states.
You have more states, you have more delegates, but now you actually have guaranteed every presidential election at least 50 credible candidates that are federally funded and equally given time. That’s beautiful, and that’s just a basic idea. Then to elect those candidates, why don’t you allow preference ordering? Instead of voting for Bob or Alice, you just rank them. You say, "I like Bob and Alice and Bill and Jim," and then maybe you say, "I like Alice and Bob and Bill."
There’s no notion of throwing your vote away. You see, what does it mean? You get a lot more candidate diversity inside the system, so you don’t have this two-party death monopoly. That alone would radically change the United States of America. Then, you know, you have to upgrade the Senate and Congress. We need term limits instead of the system. I’d say two terms in the Senate, five or six terms in the House of Representatives.
That alone means you don’t have barbershop boxers who actually have dementia, like Dianne Feinstein, who’s resisting resigning. What’s hilarious is that Schumer could replace Feinstein on the Judiciary Committee. He has experience in this; he can do this easily. It’s a non-problem; they just don’t want to give the seat up. They don’t want to let an AOC in.
You lose seniority too in the Senate. Everything in the Senate is run with seniority, so her whole political machine is resisting this. It’s crazy. You give up. That’s the craziest thing about it. It’s all theater. There’s a term for it; it’s called KFAB, and that’s right, professional wrestling. One of the rules Vince McMahon had is that even though everybody knows it’s made up, you can’t break character.
You always have to pretend like it’s real. If you’re Hulk Hogan and they’re interviewing you about the stuff you did in the 1980s, you’re going to say, "Yeah, it was all real." Politics is basically there. We know they’re lying; they know we know they’re lying, but they have to lie. This is the theater, and there’s no grounding of accountability.
That won’t bail us out at a systemic level. In a way, a lot of the work we do with Cardano is actually helping because SIP 1694 is about running a constitution; we’re building a government. We’re figuring out how to be accountable to the progress and growth of something. This is the yeoman’s work that will actually heal a nation or a company.
After a few years of that and a few years of learning, I think we are ready to actually push the issue of a constitutional convention and have a real conversation about how we restrain and control this Leviathan that has caused so much harm in our lives: nine wars in the last 23 years, $15 trillion spent, and 23 million people killed or injured throughout the world as a direct or indirect consequence of this.
It’s just unbelievable, the scale of that. Did anybody go to jail? No. Did anybody lose their job? No. The only political candidate they’ve decided to put in jail is Donald Trump over hush money to a porn actress. You could start wars, spend tens of trillions of dollars, kill millions of people, and they just move on. We don’t have time for that; it’ll be harmful to the nation. We can’t even talk about it.
But you know, we have to do that. The orange man is bad. It’s just theater. Why did they go after Trump? His number one sin wasn’t the pathological lying, the incompetence, the corruption, or the nepotism; everybody does that. His number one sin is he didn’t play KFAB. He didn’t play the game. He walked out and said wrestling is fake, and they said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! Hey, what’s going on here? You can’t say that!"
But it’s true. That’s the only difference between him and the other people, whether it be George Santos or Chuck Schumer or any of these others. By the way, no one’s talking about Santos anymore, and he’s still in Congress. It’s just slipped to the side a little bit. The number one thing is that he didn’t play that game.
That is a systemic danger to the entire game because the minute somebody stops playing, everybody starts looking like an idiot. A great example is when he was being interviewed by Tucker Carlson. Tucker asked him who he thought destroyed the pipeline over in Europe. Trump said, "Wow, I don’t want to get the United States into trouble, but we did it."
George Bush couldn’t do that; Bill Clinton couldn’t do that, but Trump did. That’s the big difference. I love what Dave Chappelle said: he was the first guy to come outside of the house and tell us they’re doing exactly what we thought they were doing. Then he was right back at the house and did it himself.
You have to be intellectually honest about it. Just because he didn’t play the game and didn’t do the KFAB, he still did all the corruption stuff. He still went down that road, and he’s no better than the rest. But at least he was an honest crook. It’s like that drug lord who says, "Well, yeah, I’m a drug lord, but I live in Colombia. What are you going to do?"
He didn’t even play the game with the media. In that same interview with Tucker, he said, "You actually made my life very hard with Kim Jong-un. You remember that, right? That was very embarrassing for you." It’s like the top-rated newscast in the country right now, and he’s just saying, "You remember how bad you made that for me, right?"
This crazy guy is just too unpredictable; they didn’t like it. He has a ton of issues, but it’s like they’re not playing the game. He’s not participating in the theater. He said, "I don’t want to do that. I’m going to do it my own way."
The crazy thing is there’s so much anger in the United States over the last few years that he has a legitimate chance to be president again. That’s the craziest thing. The media is never self-reflective; the institutions are never self-reflective. They don’t take a step back and ask the very fundamental question.
They don’t have it; it’s like Principal Skinner saying, "No, it’s the children who are wrong." They don’t take a self-reflective step back and say, "God, institutional trust is at such a low that an orange reality TV star who seems immune to any scandal is a better choice than anything we do."
So obviously, what we should do is just, you know, because Buttigieg isn’t doing well, let’s roll out our good friend Gavin Newsom. We’ll see if they like that guy. It’s almost like The Truman Show, where they were picking his next love interest and trying to push him in that direction.
It’s like the woman he loved: "Oh, we’ve got to get rid of her; let’s bring this woman in." It’s like he’s going to have the divorce, and this is his next woman he’s going to marry. This is nuts; that’s a mess.
I think you’re right; there’s a real concern. There’s a serious chance he could become president again given the sentiment right now. People are going to live it. If he does become president again, it goes back to that CEO question: how does the ship actually do things? How do we pay down the national debt? How do we have a more peaceful world? How do we grow the economy? How do we make sure unemployment is low? How do we make sure that people can live a good life and actually get the government off their back?
These basic things—how do we hold them accountable? No one’s honest. So the short answer to the question, after this long monologue, is no, I have no desire to get elected again. I have no desire to run. But I do have a strong desire to try to affect change at the constitutional level, and I think a constitutional committee is probably the way we have to go down.
But it’s going to take some time to get there, and you have to learn how to walk before you can run. We’re humble enough to realize we don’t have all the answers. I also think AI is going to help a lot. If you look at the evolution of GPT, GPT-4 can almost write a constitution. GPT-5 can, and GPT-6 can write the best one humankind has ever seen.
Using AI, I do believe there’s a very good chance we can actually design collectively a system that is fair for everybody and is very inspired, wise, and objective. We shouldn’t aspire to do a constitutional convention until we have that kind of capability. I believe we can fix the nation and begin to heal.
The other thing is, in any relationship, if the relationship is damaged, you need to find a way to go to counseling, get it all out on the table, and fix it. The problem is the U.S.
The government has lost legitimacy. It doesn't want to admit it, but every institution has lost legitimacy. No one believes in it anymore. When I was a kid, if someone said, "I'm going to the White House to meet the president of the United States," it was a prestigious, huge deal—an honor of your life. You'd never stop talking about it. Now, if you say, "I'm going to the White House to meet the president," people joke, "Make sure to bring his Alzheimer's medicine." Sports stars don’t even go to the White House anymore. It's heavily politicized now.
I think there's a fundamental lack of respect for the office. The same goes for Congress and legislators in general. It's just gotten so bad. People recognize that it's a horrible situation, and we need to look at the fundamentals. Maybe there's something to the approach where you don’t play the theater and instead ask, "Where are the results? Where are the actual metrics by which we’re objectively judging how we’re doing as a country?" We need to be honest with ourselves—intellectually honest. That’s the only way we can get out of this.
So, here’s a thought experiment for everyone listening. Can you name one institution in the United States that still has a modicum of dignity? To the extent that if you say you work for it or are affiliated with it, people would actually look up to you? The Library of Congress pops into my head; it’s very apolitical. But I don’t know; it’s somewhat political if you determine what gets saved in the registry versus not.
A lot of things are broken right now. I think maybe DARPA still does some good work, or IRPA and Energy ARPA probably made COVID. But half of America hates them. They’re pushing an agenda. The NSA, of course, with the angel emoji—yes, we love the NSA.
Politics touches everything nowadays. Everything is so political, and everybody is so angry. That’s the problem. It didn’t used to be that way. Ten years ago, if you were sitting at a bar and someone said, "I’m from the CDC," you’d think, "Wow, that’s really cool. You’re a brave guy." Now, you hear, "You’re the guy checking my child with poison. You gave me cancer. My dick is small now." Whoa, whoa, whoa! About that last point, I’d like to test that. I had nothing to do with that. The other stuff, you may have an argument, but I did not cause you to have a small penis.
That’s the problem. When you have that loss of legitimacy of institutions, you need to take a step back and ask, "How do I get the legitimacy back?" You get that legitimacy back by admitting that you made mistakes. The problem is the current system does not reward you for saying, "I’m sorry, I got it wrong. It won’t happen again." That system punishes you for this, so no one is ever accountable. No one ever admits to making a mistake.
Look at Ripple and the Securities Exchange Commission. Let’s say Ripple wins against the SEC. The SEC will issue a statement saying they disagree with the court and may or may not appeal. But after it’s all said and done, if Ripple wins, there is no ability for Ripple, the company that got sued, to recover the hundred million dollars in legal fees they spent. The people who prosecuted that enforcement will get promoted at some point because of the federal bureaucracy system and then go get high-paying private sector jobs after retiring from government.
I cannot think of a system where you conduct an enforcement action, harm somebody, and they have to spend a hundred million dollars to clear their good name. You lose, keep your job, and get a promotion, while they can’t recover the money they spent defending themselves. We just accept that as business as usual. That kind of system has no legitimacy in my mind.
Think about CBDCs and civil asset forfeiture. With a CBDC, that will come if we do nothing. It’s the default thing. They’ll say, "Hey, I didn’t like what you tweeted the other day. You’re a domestic terrorist," and then click a button to turn off your money. But if you’d like to appeal, go ahead and appeal. Here’s your appeals process: you have to hire a lawyer and sue the government. But what money? They’ve already debanked you. You have no money to pay the lawyers. The lawyer has to take on a contingency, spend two or three years fighting them, and then they say, "Okay, maybe we got it wrong. We’re so sorry," and they turn your money back on.
The civil forfeiture stuff is wild. I saw a stat—I’m pulling this out of thin air, but I don’t remember where I saw the graph—that said civil forfeiture amounts have exceeded burglary amounts in the past year. What are we doing? This isn’t just billions of dollars taken. I understand that some of this is piles of cash in a drug den, but some of this stuff is money taken out of your car during a traffic stop. How do we distinguish between the two? It’s craziness.
This problem is on steroids. They say they’ll never do that. Look at the no-fly lists. There have been so many cases in the last 20 years where the Department of Homeland Security mistakenly put people on no-fly lists. Those people can’t fly, can’t travel, and they’ve had to sue. The government refuses to even tell them why they’re on the list. Eventually, they admit, "Okay, we made a mistake," but there are no consequences.
That very same system is now going to be applied to every dollar in your pocket. You’ll have to fight for years to get it turned back on, and all the money you spend fighting, you don’t get back. The time you spend fighting, you don’t get back. You can judge a society by how it treats its weakest people, the innocent, the vulnerable, the people who can’t protect themselves, the people lower on the economic chain.
There’s something to that. Nobody is intellectually honest because accountability means excommunication. How does society treat someone who knows they’ve messed up? What recourse or path back into good standing do we offer these people? It’s very hard. While they’re doing that, where do they live? What do they eat? How do we treat them? If you start to dehumanize people as soon as they make a mistake or commit a crime, of course, they’ll pay the time for that. But along the way, we dehumanize people and wonder how we end up with the society we have.
There’s a huge population of people who have been imprisoned or jailed at some point. It’s just deplorable. I can’t believe someone would think they have the moral authority to lead the country and call people deplorable in their country. "I want to be your leader, by the way, half of you are deplorable." It’s astounding to me.
No, it was Russian interference. It’s absolute stone-hearted nonsense. What’s so crazy is that people are so propagandized. If you say a statement like that, it must mean you automatically love every single thing that Donald Trump has ever done in your entire life and agree with all of it. No, it just means you’re propagandized. You’ve been manipulated to carry water for something, and therein lies the problem.
The uncomfortable truth about America is that it’s the way it is not because of a particular politician, but because of us. Benjamin Franklin famously said, "I’ve given you a republic, if you can keep it." The notion of self-governance means that you have to invest constant vigilance into keeping the system sustained. It’s just like a garden in your backyard.
People often ask me, "Charles, how do you get to know people? How do you know the level of maturity a person has?" I say, "Usually, I’ll buy them an AeroGarden or some form of a garden because I want to see if this person can keep something alive, be accountable to a schedule, and tend their garden." Voltaire, in Candide, has a famous quote about tending your own garden.
We are doing a poor civic job of tending our own garden, and we are to blame for that. We need to rise up and realize that it’s not going to get any better unless each and every one of us does that. For the cryptocurrency industry, this is an example where we actually try to make it better. We didn’t complain; we said we’re just going to make our own money because the money you’ve given us is wrong. We’ll make our own banks because the banks you’ve given us are evil and corrupt. We’re going to build our own identity system because the one you’ve given us gives all the power to Facebook and Google.
We’re going to build our own economy effectively because the economy you’ve given us is unfair. It is absolutely biased and harms the poor with lots of regressive policies. Do you think the million-word tax code benefits the poorest among us? No. So we went and just did it. We didn’t say you had to do it yourself; we just said we’re going to do it.
And then the very first thing instead of saying, "Boy, we have a problem," it’s, "How do we shut these guys down? These guys are racist, these guys are criminals." Look at Elizabeth Warren; she’s fundraising to build an anti-crypto army to protect you because cryptocurrencies are racist and hurt poor people. You think to yourself, "This is the only thing we have to protect ourselves from you—the guys who have just debased and destroyed our money and are debanking us at a rapid rate." And they just say, "Go screw yourself." It is frustrating.
You’re absolutely right about the justice of society. A society is not just based upon the exceptions to the rule; it’s based upon how it treats its weakest people, the innocent, the vulnerable.
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