Hi everyone, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is April 23rd. I have returned from the jungles of the Amazon, being in Manaus, going up the river, and meeting all the different tribes there, the Satary, Me, and dozens of others. We did night canoeing, a little paddling, and spear fishing, and of course, I participated in the bullet ant ceremony, the Tokender, excuse me.
For those who don’t know about it, you actually have to meet the tribe, spend time with them, and break bread with them. After you do that, they say, "Okay, you're a guy we like." Then you go out and collect the ants. You have to find bullet ant hives and tap the tree with a machete. They get all angry, and you use a little stick to grab them. They start stinging the stick, and then you take them and put them into a hollow palm tree. You tap it, and after you've collected about 200 ants or so, you walk back to the tribe and have to stun the ants.
There’s a certain leaf that contains a sedative for ants. You grind it up, put it in the fluid, and then pour the ants inside. You mix it up, and somehow they don’t drown; they just become paralyzed. Then you take the ants and weave them into the bullet ant gloves. After weaving them into the gloves, they go to sleep for about an hour or two. You put the gloves back up, go have lunch, and then sit for an hour in deep contemplation, thinking, "Oh my God, why am I doing this? This is a bad idea. This is going to hurt like hell."
Then you go out, they paint your hands black, and after they paint your hands, you go to the ritual. You bend over, they put the bullet ant gloves on, and then you have to dance for about 8 to 10 minutes, depending on what song they select. The chieftain selects the song, and we go and do that. It’s incredibly painful—absolutely brutally painful.
As I was initially getting bit, my hands started getting numb, and I thought, "Oh, okay. I can do this." The problem is that on the other side, the pain starts building and radiates up your arm into your chest, your head, and your face. The best I can describe it is a throbbing feeling with waves of fiery pain. It hits you, pulls back a bit, and then hits you again. That’s basically what we went through.
I did it with a bunch of the guys, and we felt like jungle warriors afterward. Then we had a chance to go up the river and do all the other really cool and interesting stuff. What was fascinating is when I posted about it on YouTube and the internet, there was a lot of criticism about my body weight. Apparently, you can’t take your shirt off anymore on the internet. Some people said I didn’t place the ants in the right place. Well, that’s what they told me to do. I guess internet people are experts. The chieftain told me to put them in a certain place, but you guys know more than the chieftain of the Satary Mawe tribe, who has done this hundreds of times in the last 30 years.
We’ve reached a point in society where nobody can be happy for people. Wow, that guy went and did something very hard and courageous. It took a lot of guts to go down to the Amazon and overcome that as a personal challenge. It’s obviously meaningful to me. But the hatred is so strong that if you dislike somebody, anything they do that’s virtuous, hard, interesting, or unique must somehow be corrupt, wrong, evil, or bad. It can’t be real; it has to be jaded. That culture is extraordinarily toxic and devastating to any concept of progress.
Can you imagine that when you hear something, the very first thing you do is not talk about the thing? Instead, you get oriented based on whether you like the person or not. If you like the person, the thing is automatically good. If you dislike the person, the thing is automatically bad. That’s 2025 in a nutshell.
When we look at the budget right now, I’m seeing a lot of that. Here’s the thing: Input Output has made a lot of mistakes, but we’ve done a lot of good. We were paid about $36 million worth of Bitcoin and about $6 million worth of ADA a long time ago, 10 years ago, to build a cryptocurrency ecosystem with partners who were difficult and, in some cases, didn’t deliver through environments and atmospheres that had Bitconnect, OneCoin, FTX, Luna, and dozens of other issues. All the markets went up and down. Today, right now, Cardano is an ecosystem worth around $25 billion, give or take, with millions of people in it and thousands of DApps. It’s in the top 10 and is regarded as one of the great successes of the cryptocurrency space.
Off of that initial funding, we assembled one of the largest teams of scientists and engineers in the entire world—very skilled engineers—to do some of the most difficult work the world has ever seen in cryptocurrency engineering. We produced formal methods work, 240 academic papers, many of which are peer-reviewed, with over 10,000 citations. We did an enormous amount of work figuring out how to write novel and new protocols, a brand new peer-to-peer stack, new consensus protocols, and a complete on-chain governance system that took two years to design and deploy.
We also provided enough flexibility for people to come in, learn how to use the system, and build their own projects, as evidenced by Aken, for example, and the dozens of other initiatives. We’re at a precipice where many people are starting to learn enough about what has been constructed to build their own clients, their own nodes, and their own tools. Institutions are forming, like Intersect and Pragma, and they’re starting to showcase that they can do things, but they’re very young and new.
There’s a transition from a founding set of entities to community-led and organized entities. Within 12 to 24 months, we should have multiple clients written in different languages, strong institutions, and strong processes about how we want to come together and organize the ecosystem as a whole. I was given to build the ecosystem $35 million plus $6 million worth of ADA, give or take, depending on how you cut up the markets. We currently have, depending on the price of ADA, 1.7 billion ADA and over a billion dollars worth of market value there. That’s what we left behind for all of you to decide what to do.
I see comments on the internet saying, "You should be paid nothing. You already received a lot of ADA. You didn’t finish the roadmap. You’re greedy. You’re being overpaid. There should be an aggressive competitive RFP process. We need to vet and see if you guys are real." Here’s the thing: The engineers I have can build new projects, new companies, high-margin products, or they can be time and materials engineers. I have zero interest in my team being time and materials engineers. It’s a race to the bottom. With AI-generated code and outsourcing, the average rate per developer will go down year after year, so your margins continue to shrink.
When you talk about a high-end engineer—a person who’s a PhD in computer science, a formal methods engineer, or a domain expert in this field—they will never be price competitive with a bachelor’s degree engineer fresh out of school in India aided by outsourcing. But you’re competing with that in a lowest-cost bid system. Which institutions have proven that they’re good counterparties? If Microsoft comes to me, as they have in the past, and we discuss an idea of doing something together, writing a paper, or writing some code, that’s a credible counterparty.
It’s a 50-year-old company that built Windows, a company that literally built a new form of matter in a quantum computer, and it’s worth trillions of dollars with hundreds of thousands of the most skilled engineers in the world working for it. It’s a credible counterparty. We can have deep, technical conversations and deeply understand the nuances of what they want to accomplish, and nobody’s wasting each other’s time. No institution in Cardano has reached a level of maturity to match that.
So if they’re going through an RFP process, it’s bike shedding. At the end of the day, it’s bike shedding. People who have never delivered a product, never written code at scale, and have never been accountable for being there on Christmas Day when something breaks are now sitting there saying, "Yeah, well, I don’t like how much you’re charging. Let’s just shave 20% off of that because this guy over here says he could do it for 20% less." Okay, so I’m working for free or at a loss.
The opportunity cost is that those very same engineers could be building DApps that are cross-chain, building an AI product, or working on an electronic health record system for my medical company. All of the growth potential in those areas is in the billions. So I’m going to burden them with losing money for a counterparty that doesn’t understand what they’re asking for when they could be doing something else? They say, "You owe it to the community."
You know what? I’ll do this for you. We’ll get Laos done to RFP, and we will find a great qualified company like Twe to finish it. Sure, there you go. I can’t guarantee it will actually enter production because now we’re in a multi-client environment, and I don’t control what TXpipe, Blink Labs, or Harmonic does. But at least I can speak for the Haskell side; we’re more than happy to write that code.
But when we look beyond Laos, what are you paying me for? Just to be a time and materials contractor? Or do you want the strategy? Do you want me showing up every day fighting for Cardano? Do you want me to give input on how we can 10x the ecosystem? What you’re basically saying is you want that for free. That’s what these people are saying. Or they’re unhappy with what’s been delivered.
Would you be happier with Luna? Would you be happier with EOS? Would you be happier with IOTA? Would you be happier with NXT? Would you be happier with all the hundreds of projects that have come and gone throughout the last 10 years since Cardano launched? We’re still in the game. We’re still relevant. We still have liquidity. We still know how to navigate things. We’re still mentioned. People still comment on Cardano. It’s still on the list. It was just added to the reserve. The President of the United States was talking about it. We’re still in the game.
What you’re basically saying is none of that matters. You’ve been paid already. It’s a referendum, and the project blueprint in the roadmap you guys have already approved is about writing a set of blueprints so diverse development teams can form. We organized and brought people together for a node diversity workshop. We showed up, talked to them, figured out a lot of standards, and we’ve been pushing for a budget process to include full funding of diverse node teams.
We were the ones pushing for institutions to form like Intersect. The foundation pushed for Pragma to be formed, among others. These institutions will grow into credible counterparties capable of running the ecosystem. But we all knew that 2025 would be a transition year. We just approved the constitution in February. We just approved it. We’re still preparing for elections to replace the interim constitutional committee with the final constitutional committee in the second half of this year. We’re still sorting out what the official conferences are. We’re still getting used to voting with DREPs and these types of things.
It’s a transition year, and there’s plenty of money in the Treasury. Fiscal conservatism was there, and whether the NCL is 350 and we spend 90% of that, or the NCL is 500 and we spend 70% of that, there’s going to be an enormous amount of ADA left behind for the year 2026. In 2026, we now have eight months to discuss a process for next year about how to build it in a direction where we have everything we want. Year after year, that process can get better, and it’s not going to break Cardano.
What you’re basically doing is saying, "Let’s alienate the people that got us here. Let’s slow down everything while we’re just about to enter a bull market, and let’s make Cardano a very unattractive place for people to build when our competitors have billions of dollars and they’re very loose with their money in a high-growth time period."
Then you go to the venture capitalists and say ADA is unwilling to invest in its own people, but you should invest in Cardano. That’s what you’re saying. I think this is a referendum not about what has been done and where we want to go, but rather some people are trying to use this process because they’re disgruntled with Input Output, me, or something that happened in the ecosystem. There’s sour grapes, and they’re trying to hijack this process for the intent purpose of settling scores and proving that these people are bad actors, myself included. That’s what they’re trying to do.
If you let them do it, you let them do it. As a DREP, it’s your decision. This is what decentralization basically means. Look, I’m going to be okay one way or the other. I am proud of the work that we did with Cardano. I spent a decade of my life on this. You can look at the pictures; this wasn’t white when I started. I had a lot more hair when I started, and this belly was a lot smaller. It’s not because of a lack of discipline; it’s because I traveled 200 to 250 days a year. You know that because you see the pictures at the conferences.
I fought hard in the trenches, and every single thing I said I was going to do, I did. We know how to finish the original roadmap, and that’s what we’re doing. We’re trying to organize a relationship so we can stay in the ecosystem and be productive without smothering all the growth of other people. It’s hard at times because there are a lot of arguments and conversations that I want to be in.
I still possess an enormous amount of ADA—probably one of the largest ADA holders in the world outside of Binance and a few others. I said publicly we would not vote because we would skew the entire vote, and then the vote wouldn’t have any legitimacy because people would say, "Oh, that was just Charles voting for himself." It was important that independent leadership step up. We said we would not be a DREP. We said we would no longer serve on the constitutional committee after the final elections and the interim period is over. We’ve been stepping away from a lot of these governance institutions.
We wanted to go from building Cardano to building on Cardano again and again. Even in the Glacier drop with Midnight, Cardano has a massive and outsized proportion of the supply being distributed. If it was just by market cap, it would be very small. Cardano is getting the largest share. That’s how much I love and care about this ecosystem. But part of love and care is not entering toxic and abusive relationships.
Toxic and abusive relationships say, "We don’t acknowledge what you’ve done. We want you to work for free or at a loss, and we’re going to hold unrealistic and unnecessary standards against you. Also, your counterparties are not qualified to instruct you to do the things you want to do." That’s an abusive relationship, and it makes no sense for us as an organization to be involved in such a thing.
DREPs get to decide what type of ecosystem you want to have. What’s been left behind is a giant treasury, a fertile environment with many DApps and approaches and philosophies, different institutions that have different governance strategies, and a lot of options. I have a beautiful roadmap I gave you guys with Bitcoin DeFi and Cardano becoming the largest system, fully realizing the power of extended UTXO.
We’re working on telescoping scalability with Orborce Paris and Orborce Prow, and these things include fast finality, intense Babel fees, and all kinds of amazing things that I think put us best in class. We have a really strong, robust on-chain governance system, which I think is our biggest unique selling point. That’s what I’ve left you, and you have to decide whether you value that and whether the people who came up with that are still people you want around.
But if you treat them poorly and criticize them or say we’re dishonest and corrupt, you shouldn’t be surprised when those people say, "You know what? Life is too short. There are other things to do. There are more interesting projects to work on." We’ve reached that critical mass. No matter what, Cardano is going to be around. It’ll be here. No matter what, Cardano is here to stay. It’s permanent, and that’s my legacy. I’m proud of that.
It’s taken 10 years to get to a point where Cardano is a self-sustaining organism. As members of that organism, you have to make decisions about where you want to take it and where you want to go. Do you want to be number one on Coin Market Cap? Are you prepared to take the risks and invite people in and make them care about such things? Or do you just want to stagnate, stay in the top 10, top 20, or top 30? Do you want to make Cardano about one particular thing and really go all in on that?
We have real initiatives at IO. We’re doing lending in Africa that’s going to grow every year. We never stopped that plan. I love when people come and criticize us. "What about Ethiopia? What about Ethiopia?" We came in, followed every law and standard, had signed contracts from the Ministry of Education, spent years in jurisdiction, got actual students on our system, built a tall prism, and turned it over to Hyperledger, working with them with Hyperledger dentists. We never got paid once.
We repeatedly had to travel to places that were functionally a war zone. We were publicly criticized by Coindesk and others for working with a genocidal regime. Our own employees were physically threatened. In many cases, they were worried they would be arrested by the government. But we stuck it out year after year after year. When it became clear the government had no intention of doing anything in the blockchain space and every promise and commitment they made—like when they said they were going to
They have to somehow get it through their heads that they will lose elections if they keep doing this, and then they'll stop. That's the only way to get them to stop. They're just so fanatical about trying to kill crypto in the United States, and that's their actions. It's not me saying it; the state of Oregon has no reason to bring a blue sky lawsuit against Coinbase, but they did.
Charles, have you checked Matera Protocol yet? It brings a lot of liquidity data. Yeah, I think those are the guys that are doing the indexes. I need to meet the team and spend some time with them. I'm very excited about this idea that people can buy an index of Cardano native tokens. What that will do is create a lot of cross-chain liquidity. That was one of the reasons why we built Midnight. It's like two big bridges: there's the Bitcoin DeFi initiative and then there's the Midnight initiative. Midnight connects Cardano over time to everything in the cryptocurrency space, and Bitcoin DeFi intimately connects Bitcoin and Cardano together in a way that works for Bitcoin.
If you're talking about Bitcoin maximalists, they say there is only one God: there's Bitcoin. That's it. Transaction fees have to be paid in Bitcoin. Rewards have to be in Bitcoin. It has to feel and look like we're just using an extension of the Bitcoin network. If there's any third-party token involved, you're dead. There's nothing there. The good news is because of Babel fees, it's beautiful for Cardano. It's like tourism for us. They pay in dollars; they don't know that they're using the local currency. They don't care, but it creates demand for that local currency. ADA Babel fees do that, and it's a two-sided reaction.
Once those things are in play, then these indexes are awesome because you can list them, and what people can do is, in their native currency—whether it be Ether, Solana, or Bitcoin—they can buy exposure to all the top 100 or top 200 Cardano native assets. So the whole tap tools index or something like that, and then boom, it rebalances every so often, but it brings a lot of liquidity and demand into Cardano on the DEXs inside those places. Those have potentially higher returns than the underlying asset. I think these protocols are very necessary, and it's exciting to see that they took the time to build that. I'll get to know the team here in a little bit; we'll spend some time with them. JJ's gonna get around to it. We've been working hard on it.
When are you starting your telecom business with World Mobile? I met Mickey in France at Blockchain Paris. We spent some time together, and we got a group of people working with him to set up the micro ISP in Gillette. I said, "Look, I need to learn how this works by running a business, and I need to make that business profitable." If I have a franchise model, then I can take it throughout all of Wyoming, South Dakota, and Montana, and create a nice multi-state micro ISP.
We also talked about finalizing some formal relationships that we've always had but never documented. We discussed how to get World Mobile to the partner chain side of things, which is next in line right after Midnight. We're working in that direction. Midnight's building a beautiful turnkey framework. I'd like for the second partner chain to be World Mobile. We have to find a way to make that happen, and it's not going to be too hard; we just have to figure it out.
They've done a lot of stuff. They were on Cosmos, they did the layer three thing on Base, and they obviously have infrastructure in Cardano. In World Mobile's view, and my view, I think that token needs to be available in every ecosystem because every single user of cryptocurrency needs connectivity. It is a universal concern. I think a partner chain is the only way to service what they want long term. There's just this gray area in between about how to get there and what we need to do to get there. I've been in constant contact with Mickey about that, and JJ's been negotiating hard on the step-by-step process. We can only move so quickly because Midnight is already taking an enormous amount of resources, and there's a huge team working really hard to get it over the line. About 50-60% of what they're building is just for Midnight; the rest is a turnkey kit for partner chains to use again and again, like the glacier drop mechanism using Hydra. That's a universal system; the partner chains SDK is a universal system; the bridge infrastructure is a universal system. The dual token model has one token on Cardano and the other token on the partner chain, the same for the listing and all this other stuff.
We had to backfill a lot of things the foundation never really did any work on with a lot of the professional infrastructure around cryptocurrencies. So things like custodians, wallet support with respect to Cardano native assets, and Cardano native token listings. We had to talk to Copper, Fireblocks, Zodia, blockchain.com, Bitcoin.com, Brave, and all these others and spend tens of millions of dollars doing the integration deals—not just for Midnight, but for all Cardano native assets. That should have been done by the foundation; they didn't do it, so we had to go and do that. But now that's all in place, and it's a lot easier to list them.
SNE has done great work in building the relationship with Kraken, and World Mobile is doing a very good job building the relationship with Coinbase. All those stars are aligning, and they're getting where they need to go. It just takes time, you know? It's one of the most important and longest-lasting relationships we have in the ecosystem. Connecting the unconnected is a very important part of what we want to do in Cardano.
Please discuss Midnight's tokonomics. Not yet. There's going to be a white paper published with all the Midnight tokonomics and a whole go-to-market campaign to explain them. The dual token model: one lives on the Midnight ledger, one lives on Cardano; one is deflationary, the other is a capacity unit. There's a lot of magic with that, and it'll all be explained in a paper so people can see how it all comes together. I'm very proud of it, very happy. We're working really hard at using AI to go through all of the tokonomics. We have this giant rag database with it, and we're doing our final review, and then we'll publish the paper.
Regarding the glacier drop, what you're looking for here is something called a dead man switch. A dead man switch is a smart contract where if you don't do anything—a proof of life for some period of time—all the funds get swept to some trusted third party. There are instructions with that trusted third party about what to do, typically defined in your will. One of the things we're working on with Lace is how to build a dead man switch into Lace as a premium product. You have a free Lace and a premium Lace, and you just pay a monthly subscription. That's one of several things that you would get. You can set it up after going through KYC, a next-of-kin setup, and if you die, your crypto gets swept in 180 days or whatever your time period is to that custodian. The people who are designated would go through a KYC step and be able to recover the crypto. This also means if you lose your keys, you know that you have a finite period of time before you recover your crypto because you won't do anything with that crypto for that period of time. Then it gets swept into the account, and you can go through KYC yourself. It's a clever hack called a dead man switch, and it can be done for Cardano. We're going to build one and open source it, and we'll build it into Lace at some point. I think that solves a lot of the estate planning issues.
What's cool is it dovetails beautifully with what we built in Hyperledger because you can get a DID to establish your identity, and then you can establish DIDs for the other people. They can designate those identifiers in your will, and you could actually hash and sign your will and then append it to the Cardano blockchain as a reference point.
Do you think 350 million ADA is too much sell pressure? I see these things. People have no idea about the current liquidity of Cardano. 350 million ADA could be liquidated in about a month without affecting the market by more than 1 to 3 cents, 2 to 4 worst-case scenario, depending on the sale pattern you use. It's called an iceberg order; it's done all the time on Wall Street. There are dozens of firms that do this, and there are even liquidation businesses in the crypto sector that do this.
For example, when a government seizes crypto or a person goes out of business and they seize crypto, they sell that block to a liquidation business, and the liquidation business icebergs it out and sells it through. A responsible firm like Wave or someone else could sell this 350 million ADA without affecting the market. It could take a few months to do it very slowly or a month if you want to do it quickly. But instead, all these people say, "Oh my God, it will collapse, and everything will fall down." Billions of dollars worth of ADA are traded on a weekly basis. 175 million is not going to affect that if you do it right; you just have to know how to iceberg. There are plenty of people who do that, whether it be Jane Street, GSR, Wave, or others.
That's another thing I know from being in the space for 15 years. When you vote yes on our budget, you're voting yes for a person who knows how to do these things. If you vote no, you have to figure it out. These are the things. Think it through.
Why don't you make Cardano proof of work? Why don't you convert your car to a steam engine? I mean, it would still go, right?
For multi-resource consensus with Minotaur, would you be able to stake stable coins? You know, I had this discussion with Silvio Macaulay. He sent me one of his papers to review about nine months ago, give or take, and we had a long discussion about how these things would work with stable coins. It is possible to do an AVS system with it, and I think Silvio has a really good idea on it.
Update on the Hoskinson Health Center: I'm thinking about moving my family now from Canada to Wyoming. Well, you should come. I love Canada, but Wyoming is God's country. It is amazing. We're moving along; the grand opening is still slated for July 4th for the expansion, and it will be 70,000 square feet. We have another 53,000 square feet that we're going to roll over and build at the UPS building that we bought right next to it. We have to demo that and start construction. That biotech center will have all kinds of stuff: a surgery center, and the multipurpose hyperbarics will be based there. We'll have infusions, and upstairs is a very extensive lab facility with bioreactors, exosome processing, and stem cell processing. In the basement, we have a very specialized lab that we've constructed for special projects.
The 70,000 square feet will be the lab expansion for the medical lab; that's a CLIA lab. Then you have the imaging center, so CAT scan and MRI, three Tesla MRI, all the AI servers that we have there, and I think 40 existing examination rooms. We have a lot of procedure rooms that we've basically put in, so it's much larger because we want to get to about 350-400 patient encounters per day with that facility. Likely, what we'll do is convert the original 10,000 square foot footprint into an urgent care facility and do some procedures there as well that a lot of our specialists want to do.
Do I need a PC for the Lace wallet, or is it mobile? We are currently working on the mobile client. It's being built down in Argentina. There's a dedicated localized team right there. JJ helped set that up with Brandon, and they're doing a great job with it.
You should start an insurance company. Funny you mentioned that; we've been thinking about it. Healthcare insurance is horrible. It's abysmally horrible. I'd like to do direct primary care with what we have, and we've also been exploring self-insured plans, but the system is stacked against you. The whole healthcare system is the most bureaucratic, soulless entity, and they don't really care about good outcomes or creativity. It's pretty bad, but we're working on it.
Where in Wyoming is the health center? It's in Gillette, Wyoming, in the northeast part of the state.
Well, the hands still have some of the paint on them. The stings go away within 48 hours; they just swell up. There's a really fast recovery with bullet ants. That's why they use it as a rite of passage because if you were laid up for two months, the other tribes would go and kill you.
Charles, are you concerned about the supervolcano in Yellowstone? If that thing blows, everybody on Earth dies. So, I would rather have a front-row seat than hide in Australia and slowly die.
Are you running a profit yet, or are you in a startup state? We're getting in that direction, but some of the things you would do to maximize profit, we've stepped aside from. For example, we've been doing a lot of free healthcare for the community. A lot of the primary care physicians are told they have to see like 20 to 30 patients a day, which is just nuts. We said, "No, keep it at 12 to 16." The profit will come later with the tail. I didn't worry too much about being aggressive because I wanted better physicians and a better work-life balance for those physicians. A lot of them have a dual role to do research as well with anti-aging and regenerative medicine, and those are hyper-profitable product lines, so that kind of backfills it.
You also make all your money in medicine from procedures; you don't make it from patient encounters. The RVUs just don't make sense.
If you were running the Ethereum Foundation, what would you do differently in a broad sense? The number one problem Ethereum has is that they took an easy road out. They did three things wrong: first off, they have the wrong protocols. They have the wrong accounting model, the wrong virtual machine, and the wrong consensus model. All of these were self-inflicted wounds. People told them not to do it, but they did it, and they got where they needed to go.
Second, what they chose to do to solve these problems is put in all these weird slashing economics and layer twos and other things, and now they're living with all the consequences of these types of things. Third, they really don't have a good on-chain governance system.
What needs to happen is you need a parallel track to solve all three of those things. First off, you have to solve your technological problem. The current protocol they have for proof of stake is wrong, and they need to wean themselves off of that protocol gradually. I think Leo's whole telescoping protocol design is the way to go, and there are certainly other ways you can go.
If I think the object model of Sui would be probably the best model for them, it solves a lot of things. Narwhal and Tusk are good; the dev model is not so bad. I think it is good to go to RISC-V; that's a really good decision for them to make. It makes a lot of sense, but the accounting model also has to be revised a little bit, and that's why the Sui approach is better. If you want to stay on accounts, you have to move to something like Anomia; you have to do intents and something like RISC-V with intents with an object model like Sui. That probably would fit their ecosystem quite well.
Then Narwhal and Tusk-style consensus is probably good enough for them because it will always be somewhat centralized with that. They have to build an on-chain government so they can actually solve all these crazy problems with upgrading the system and coordinating people. They have to find a way to have the layer 2 not be parasitic. Unfortunately, I don't see an easy path to do that. It's going to be a very hostile divorce to resolve these types of things because the tokonomics are what they are.
That's why we thought a lot about how to build a layer 2 ecosystem in Cardano that’s non-parasitic but actually symbiotic. That's what Midnight is doing with Cardano. We have the right accounting model, the right consensus model, and the right virtual machine model because we're already on RISC-V because of the Bitcoin DeFi stuff we're doing. That's always there, and it can easily be integrated into Midgard as an extension.
Hydra is like hand-in-glove type of stuff that you need, and we already have the on-chain government. It's kind of weird now, but it'll be awesome in three to five years. For them, at their scale and size, it'll take five to seven years to build an on-chain government. I don't think Ethereum will survive more than 10 to 15 years. The layer twos will continue to suckle out all of the alpha, and people will start fighting. It'll get harder and harder for Vitalik to hold it together through sheer force of will, and users will gradually migrate to other places. Then they're going to get eclipsed by Bitcoin DeFi because once that turns on, the TVL will be larger than Ethereum, and a lot of people will start migrating in that particular direction.
That paradigm in UTXO naturally starts moving people in that direction, and the other thing is they're being eaten alive by Solana and other projects. It's a brilliant project; it's just a victim of its own success, like MySpace or any of these other things that have a lot of network effect and momentum. Blackberry is another example. But people have fundamentally different paradigms that, over the long term, are intrinsically superior, and they creep up on you.
Perplexity could destroy Google if they're not careful. Every year it gets a little bit better; it starts getting more and more people, and then you start noticing, "Hang on a second here, 85% of all the searches I did were with Perplexity. I don't see any ads; it's easy to use; I get very exacting answers."
When you go to Google, you search and you're like, "God, okay, how many people have diabetes in the state of North Dakota who are over the age of 55?" It's a question, right? You'll get some websites, but you have to go to the websites, scan through them, see if there's a table or anything like that. You go to Perplexity, it thinks for a bit and just gives you an answer. That's a much better search. That's what you want—not where to find what you want.
When these new paradigms come, if you don't tackle them immediately, they kill you very quickly, and that's where Ethereum is at.
Without RFPs, what other tools
The greatest threat to Cardano is non-standard technology that doesn't integrate well with anything, making us an island and complicating system integration. Another significant threat is the lack of awareness regarding how competitive the industry has become and how standards are being set right now. While we have the right idea, we risk being left behind if we don't act quickly. There seems to be a lack of urgency, which is why there's a push for a UK-based RFP process.
When was the last major tech company to emerge from the UK? Where are the Magnificent Seven based? How many people wake up and say they can't wait to start a competitive software company in London? It's baffling why people have never built a business. They lack experience in these matters and have no idea how cutthroat the cryptocurrency industry is. Meanwhile, as they bicker month after month, we fall further behind. Those who need funding are left behind. It is what it is.
If you say I'm bad at business, I don't know what I'm doing, consider this: Colossal is valued at $10 billion and recently closed a $200 million round. They just brought back the dire wolf. How many people read about that? I have an anti-aging business that could be worth around $50 billion in the next 10 years. I do stuff. Midnight is going to be in the top 10. Don't look at a self-made billionaire and say he doesn't know what he's doing. I'm really good at this, and I've been in the industry for a long time. I've seen what succeeds and what fails, and I'm trying to tell you what we need to do as an ecosystem.
Where exactly are we shutting people out by saying we should fully fund alternative clients from independent companies? By advocating for fully funding independent institutions like Pragma and giving them more independence and power? By stepping away from governance and not using my large supply of aid to vote in the elections? Where am I trying to take over everything? I'm trying to create a decentralized foundation that is sustainable while balancing the fact that this is a bull market. We have only a finite window of time to set our standards before others realize we have a good idea and try to steal it.
You notice Vitalik tweeting about how great UTXO is now. Just the other day, he tweeted about how great privacy is. I guess he woke up and discovered Midnight, but he can't say it. They say, "Well, we really need a proof-of-stake protocol that kind of looks like ours," but they can't say it. There are dozens of others copying us. We invented the AVS stuff. It was us, Sheree, and a few others with Minotaur. They went on to create Layer, Babylon, and many other things. If we don't move quickly, even though we created it, someone else will reap the benefits. That's how technology works.
We need to ask ourselves: Are we moving fast enough? Do we have the right vision and clarity? What are we trying to accomplish? People get caught up in small details and say we need to go to a zero-trust environment. We have to pretend that people have no track record, that everyone is new, and we must have absolute faith in new institutions that have never delivered anything of substance to the ecosystem. This is their first time doing something, and they bit the hand that fed them. Does that solve anything? Does that get us where we need to go? Absolutely not.
If you doubt me, then why does Pragma exist? They didn't want to work with the technical steering committee because they didn't think they'd get a fair shake. But now they're going to them to ask for money? Are you kidding me? It's absurd. It's stupidity at the highest level. Then you have people jumping on Twitter, thinking they're experts. DREPs, it's your decision.
Charles, be honest. What hurts more, Cardano governance or bullet ants? Well, one was predictable. I knew it would be painful with Cardano governance because there's so much we've been working on for a long time, and now the ecosystem is starting to learn about it. They're working their way through it, and we just have to figure it out. It's painful because people say things they can't take back. Not everything has happened the way I'd like it to. If I could do things over, I would have worked with different people in certain cases, hired different people, and moved more quickly in other areas.
Overall, I'm proud of our record. What people are saying in Cardano governance is that we're evil, malicious, bad actors, and dishonest. It's all about ego, and we're here to rob and steal from people. In an industry where Luna and FTX exist, we never got caught up in scandals or lawsuits. We raised $72 million, created a $25 billion ecosystem, and left behind $1.7 billion for that ecosystem to spend as it sees fit. Objectively speaking, it's far beyond the pale, and that hurts. It really does hurt, especially when it's from people you consider friends or have relationships with.
It's one thing if it's a faceless Twitter troll, but it's another when someone has physically been to my office, spent time with me, and just can't give you the benefit of the doubt. That hurts. The bullet ant experience is about growth, overcoming fear, and transitions in life. You become someone else and grow. It gives you confidence that you can achieve great things. Governance, on the other hand, is reductive. It takes away from you. You lose people along the way, friendships, and you make compromises. That's much harder.
We took terabytes worth of raw footage for the Charles Token. I'm having Yuma sit down with the people at Book.io to turn over those terabytes of raw footage. If you're a Charles Token holder, you get exclusive behind-the-scenes access. We're not going to post any more of that raw footage. The 15-minute video on the Tucander ritual is just a little taste. Yuma is a badass. He retired as a command sergeant major in a Ranger battalion and has probably had 20 to 30 combat deployments. Then he became a photographer and videographer.
I let people see that I'm overweight. In the last six months, I've gained 12 pounds of muscle, running around the jungle and climbing mountains. I'm keeping up with special forces guys, carrying a rucksack through the jungle on a torn tendon in my right foot. Yes, I'm overweight, but you assume I'm out of shape. I'm in pretty good shape, all things considered. I just need to drop the weight, which is hard to do when you don't sleep right and are stressed all the time.
There’s an easy way to lose weight and a hard way. I haven't wanted to take the easy route, like weekly injections with semaglutide. Everyone's doing that; it's super easy to lose weight. Doing it healthily is much harder. I had to either mentally prepare for the Tukandera or physically prepare. I didn't have time to do both. I mentally prepared and was able to go through one of the most painful experiences a human can have with a smile on my face. I'm very strong-willed.
People say, "Oh, he's overweight; therefore, he has no self-discipline." Go to hell. Please elaborate on the fairness doctrine being eliminated by Ronald Reagan at the FCC in 1987. There was this metaphorical idea built for bipartisan politics that if you present a political view, you have to present the opposing view and give it equal time over public airwaves. This does not work in a multipolar world or in the age of the internet.
If media is not for profit, media are public institutions, and there are only two viewpoints on anything, the fairness doctrine makes sense. If media is private, over the internet, and there are dozens of ways to look at something, it's not possible to present all those viewpoints. You end up in absurd situations. For example, if there's a weird cult gouging people's eyes out because they believe true sight comes from removing false eyes, you'd have to present their side.
The fairness doctrine was made for a different time when there were four channels over public airwaves, and the product was given away for free. Those broadcast companies were almost like government institutions. It doesn't work at all on the internet. What needs to happen is a veracity system because that's something you can use to engage with news.
Every time I see a political meme or headline, I go to GPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, or Claude and ask them to fact-check it for me. They come through and provide information. Many people immediately say, "Oh, the AI is all social woke," but I have critical thinking skills. I can read the output of the AI, and it gives me a basis to ground what is the source material. Is this completely made up, or is it based on an actual event?
A modern-day fairness doctrine is a lens of veracity. You start going to your second, third, and fourth orders of thinking. What would have to be true for what I'm looking at to be true? If someone says the government is hiding evidence about child abuse in Tennessee, you ask what would have to be true for that to be true. It means a group of people in our government, local, state, and federal, are aware of this and are either purposely keeping it quiet or are blackmailed into silence.
You keep asking why and go deeper. If this has been going on for 50 years, a large institution has kept this quiet for 50 years. What would have to be true for that? It means it's multigenerational. People don't stay in their jobs for 50 years. So, the new guy comes in, and the old guy says, "Oh, by the way, Bill, we’re doing something terrible, but you have to keep it quiet."
Once you create a baseline, you start asking questions and thinking about what would have to be true. Epstein is a great example. We all know something occurred there, and it has the telltale signs of a conspiracy. Clearly, an intelligence agency was involved, and people were blackmailed. The reason we don't know more is that people in power today are compromised.
That's why they keep trying to kill the story. Every time we ask basic questions like who's on a client list, it's not hypothetical. Under George Bush's administration, a law was passed that if you're a sex tourist abroad, you could be charged with a sex trafficking crime in the U.S. So that same law could be used on everyone in the Epstein client list, even if they were in international waters.
Why is there no investigation? Because everyone knew it happened. What happened to the tapes? Why is there no special prosecutor looking into it? There's a high probability that some people in power are connected to it, and they're doing everything they can to forget about it. Otherwise, it would be free political points for those out of power.
That's how you do critical thinking. You think about these things, and it takes time and effort. The fairness doctrine doesn't solve that problem at all. Are you going to outsource all your cognitive load to the same media that has no interest in the truth? When I was interviewed by a Reuters person, I asked, "Hey, you want to write a negative story about Donald Trump, World Liberty, and Trump token. Tell me, in the last four years, how many negative stories did you write about Gary Gendler? How many times did you defend our industry against the Biden regime?"
I'm supposed to trust those people to accurately represent the cryptocurrency industry? Absolutely not. We need to build tools of veracity and critical thinking. We need to make truth an economic agent. If we care about it, there's money to be made in revealing the truth. Imagine if there was a billion-dollar bounty on revealing the names of those involved in the Epstein case. If a billion dollars was on the table, we would know.
There’s no veracity market or prediction market for these things, which is why we don't get to the truth. That's where honesty comes from—making truth an economic agent. Collectively, we could all put money into that pot. I know a lot of billionaires who would put money into that pot to find out who's on the list and what they did.
The U.S. government has no moral authority if it is aware of its leaders committing heinous crimes and just says we have to move on. It’s one of the darkest crimes a person can commit. If they have no desire to look into it, especially if it was done by a nation-state for extortion and blackmail, that’s dark, and we should investigate it.
I'd put money into that pot, and many others would too, to reveal the truth. Enough about that. We’re going down roads we can’t come back from. The "trust the science" crowd often consists of journalists with weak science backgrounds who just reprint what they’re told, not knowing enough to question things.
Absolutely. It’s all an appeal to authority. The dire wolf situation is a great example. I can't tell you how many stories came through saying they don't actually bring back the dire wolf. Some guy somewhere said it’s not a dire wolf. How do we know the dire wolf exists? We found the bones.
You look at the bones; they have morphological characteristics. If you look at the bones, you can differentiate between a dire wolf skeleton and a dog or wolf skeleton. Do we have complete DNA for the dire wolf? No, we have partial DNA, enough to roughly know, but not enough for a full genome sequence like I’ve done on myself.
If you clone an animal using incomplete DNA, you risk bringing back ancient viruses, and the imperfections in the DNA sample could cause terrible birth defects. It could be maladapted to the environment we live in. Where do adaptations come from? Through evolution and natural selection.
If we take a grey wolf and move the genes that make it look and act like a dire wolf into its genome, when it comes out, the bones will be the same. If it dies next to a bunch of dire wolves, paleontologists might say they found five dire wolves. If that wolf wandered off into a dire wolf pack, it would breed with them, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Any variations would be assumed to be regional.
What do you want us to do? Bring back blind, deaf, maladapted dire wolves based on a clone of an incomplete genome? Or do you want us to bring something modernized and adapted for our environment? The media sees this and says it’s the dire wolf, even though it looks, acts, and has the bone structure of a dire wolf.
It’s madness. It’s almost like people say a synthetic diamond is not a diamond. The diamond industry tried to convince people of that because diamonds are common. De Beers created artificial scarcity, slowly releasing them into the market to maintain high prices. Then they convinced everyone to buy diamonds for engagements.
People can now make diamonds in a lab. A lab-made diamond and a natural diamond are the same. In many cases, lab-made diamonds are superior because they have fewer impurities, and it’s easier to control the impurities. There’s no blood on them, no cartels, and it’s a much more sustainable business model.
The same goes for the dire wolves. People worry about conservation, but we have to think through the consequences of climate change. Everything is going to go extinct. Can we stop it? No, because the world can’t work together.
What grand treaty are we going to get? Are we all going to live in mud huts and reject modernity? It’s not going to happen. We have to accept that climate change will drive a third or more of all species extinct. If we can modernize and update their genomes, we can make species adapted to the new environment so they don’t go extinct.
For example, if we change the coral just a little bit, it can adapt to new ocean temperatures and not bleach, preserving the Great Barrier Reef. Do we want to see it bleached and have no Great Barrier Reef? Is that what we want?
The dire wolf project literally solves that problem. By modernizing the genome and incorporating desired characteristics, we can de-extinct species that have gone extinct due to human actions and adapt them to the changing world. We can have adult conversations about how to do this responsibly.
If we’re going to have 10 billion people, we need to make compromises about what wildlife will look like. That’s a governance conversation in the global commons. With a new toolset, we can create purple wolves, blue wolves, tall wolves, or small wolves. We can do anything you want; you just have to tell us what to do.
But journalists with minimal science backgrounds run around playing devil's advocate. Their goal is to question anything interesting or new, saying it doesn’t exist or didn’t happen as good as it could have. Imagine how messed up life would be if we only focused on the negatives.
This is a great human accomplishment. It’s the first time in history that a species that died off about 13,000 years ago has been resurrected. People are holding bones that proto-humans held before civilization. We’ve unlocked magical possibilities about where we can go and what we can do.
This brightens the future because we can talk about fantastical and mystical things that extend our personality and creativity. We can create animals that don’t have the problems associated with breeding. For example, people breed dogs, but sometimes they have health issues due to breeding practices. What if we could have a dog that looks a certain way but doesn’t have those problems?
That’s a magical and cool thing, but it has to be treated responsibly. The conversation should be about governance and how we as a society can responsibly use this technology. Instead, it often turns into a debate about whether something is valid or not.
In medicine, the same applies. Some professors claim we have no free will, that everything is deterministic, and consciousness comes from one small structure in the brain. When you die, that’s it. But what about all the quantum stuff? It’s all made up, they say.
Why live in a world like that? It’s terrible. We should live in a world of imagination. If you don’t like it, create it.
The original Elder Scrolls were more vibrant. I don’t like the new one; it’s too gray. It’s like, “Fuck you guys.” Were you playing the 2006 Elder Scrolls? No, I haven’t played it in 15 years.
Are you going to play the new one? I will, but it’s too gray. Charles, let’s brew some beer again. That’d be fun, guys. I love lavender, man. Lavender is the best.
But is the game fun, though? For real? It is because they just took all the good elements from Skyrim and all the good mods for Oblivion and merged them together. These retro games make a lot of sense. I’m going to do it with Legends of Valor. You know, we did it with Crystal Mine. We’re almost done with Crystal Mine, and we’ll have the Nintendo emulator, so you guys will be able to play Nintendo games. You’ll love the Crystal Mine remake; it’s really cool. Kids today just don’t know how good the games were in the past. It’s like old movies; you can remake them again and again.
Any thoughts on the Pope’s replacement? I don’t know, man. The Catholic Church has some issues, and it’s going to have to face some hard facts to work its way through. You have all these people running around who want to go pre-Vatican II. You know, that’s old school—bring back the Latin Mass. Then other people want to go way in the other direction. It’s tough; it’s too big of an institution.
Yeah, the alien documentary. Heard anything about it? I’ve got to reach out to Jason and ask him where he’s at with it. He’s notorious for taking a long time. His last documentary took him eight years to make, but I think Netflix is breathing down his throat. So, if I had to guess, next year, but I don’t have a release date on it.
You know, the journals, by the way, wrote that guy who said I didn’t participate in the paper, and they’re like, “Yeah, he did. Go fuck yourself.”
Charles, any side effects from getting the COVID vaccine? Yeah, I still have pain in my left arm from the injection site. Now, emulators are not illegal, and I actually understand Nintendo’s position here. I think Nintendo has a very reasonable position. An emulator for off-patent technology is no problem. I’ll litigate that forever, and their lawyers will lose 10 out of 10 times and pay great legal fees for that.
When you take a ROM of pre-existing IP like Mario, for example, and run that on the emulator, that’s protected assets. That’s their IP. You can’t take that and distribute it; that’s their property. So there’s nothing wrong with the emulator. The problem is the ROMs on top of the emulator, and I agree with Nintendo on that.
My point is that there should be more people developing on that platform as a creative medium, and the emulator retroactively resurrects that medium. We’re creating new intellectual property. We buy old games or create original IP and modernize them, run them on the emulator, and bring it there, creating a homebrew marketplace. If we’re not distributing Mario or these types of things, unless we had a partnership with Nintendo, I could be wrong, but weren’t you building a restaurant in Wyoming a while back?
We’re still working on it. We overcame some regulatory hurdles. We ran into a problem with improper asbestos abatement. We got a stop order for over a year from the state, and then there were some ownership issues when we purchased the place. Apparently, the person who sold it to us only owned 70% of it. There was litigation involved, so a lot of things got jammed up. The manager we hired to run it decided to leave. It’s been one of the hardest projects I’ve ever worked on.
We’re building a 70,000 square foot complex—a medical facility with radiation shielding in the walls, oxygen plumbing, a concrete roof, and all this stuff. It’s on schedule and on budget. We’re going to open on July 4th, but the restaurant and gelato in Wheatland is the hard thing to do.
Thoughts on Ben Shapiro’s sister? The milk truck? Oh, this is Jean-Leon Gérôme’s painting. It’s about a gladiator. Actually, it’s a really fascinating painting because he’s looking not to the emperor but instead to the crowd for whether he should kill the gladiator, and the emperor is offended by it. You’ll notice he’s a little perplexed in the picture because the emperor makes the decision, not the crowd. He’s too big for his britches as a gladiator. There’s a lot of subtlety in that painting.
Reading any good books? Yeah, I’m working on Complexity Economics right now, from Randy Farmer. After I finish that, I’m moving over to a book on bioelectricity and time expansion experiences.
Thoughts on zero drop shoes? I think I’ve seen you wearing zero shoes. Yeah, I do wear zero shoes. They’re great shoes.
So freaking excited for the midnight airdrop. Yes, I am too. Have you seen Team Topology? Well, I’ll read it after I finish my book on topology—Topology for Turtles.
Thoughts on printer ink? It’s a scam. It’s such a scam. Printer ink is a scam. The scammies.
I was inspired to try a three-day fast by your example a while back. I was blown away by the experience and how many bad habits it affected. It’s pretty amazing. Also, you notice how much of a social element eating is. Everything we do usually is connected to food in some way. We don’t realize it until you stop eating, and you’re like, “Damn, it’s really hard.”
It’s why it’s hard for me to fast. It’s not just willpower not to eat; it’s just that you’re sitting there not eating while you watch other people eat every day. It’s just so hard to do that. They feel uncomfortable; it’s a thing.
Cardano had a good shout-out on Fox yesterday. Well, Fox likes us. We like Fox. They’re good people.
Thoughts on paper straws? They have forever chemicals, PFAS, and all this other stuff. It’s crazy. They say they’re going to get rid of the microplastics and save the turtles by going to straws that have toxic forever chemicals.
Was a trip to the Amazon on your bucket list? Yes. And what’s remaining? Many things. Antarctica next.
Thoughts on sourdough bread? Finest bread. Best bread. Believe me, nobody knows more about bread than me. Sourdough is the best.
I have that book. If you want to read a topology book, Counterexamples in Topology. Team Topology is about project management. Yeah, I assumed it was about that, but I have Counterexamples in Topology. It’s a Dover book; it’s very good. If you want to learn about a mathematical field, the counterexamples are the way to go.
What do you think about carnivore? I’m still not convinced about this whole thing about fiber. How does that work?
Did you lose any weight during your three-day fast? Yeah, you always lose weight. The question is, can you avoid losing muscle? You have to do what’s called a protein-sparing modified fast.
Brian Johnson is drinking water at restaurants. Brian Johnson also transfuses blood from his children into his body. I once had a call with him where he called himself Lucifer. Brian Johnson walks around naked all day in his house and has erections in front of his employees. So maybe, just maybe, I’m not going to emulate Brian Johnson.
The frustrating part is he’s a really nice guy. He’s really smart. He’s just got a thing, man. He’s just doing his thing, and you’ve got to give him kudos for it. He’s doing the Brian Johnson thing.
Charles, do you believe women should be allowed to—what the hell kind of question is that? Of course! Misogynistic son of a bitch.
I eat paper for fun, and it helps me code. Is this like LSD paper? Is this candy paper? I mean, what type of paper are you talking about there, Lucas?
Even paper cups are full of plastic. I know. I love it when they’re trying not to fuck you over, and they fuck you over even more.
I sleep in a hyperbaric chamber at 2.2 atmospheres for about 16 hours per week. What are your thoughts? Well, the pressure is too high. How the hell do you have that? That’s not a fabric. Are you sure it’s not 1.4, and you’re dealing with a tension fabric instead of a hard shell? Because you’d have to go into a steel chamber for that type of atmosphere. It’s not safe to operate that by yourself.
Thoughts on South Africa’s race-based laws in the last 30 years? They’re terrible. It’s called black empowerment, and they say, “Oh, you have to have a certain amount of minority ownership and a black CEO and all this other stuff.” You end up creating all these shell companies in different jurisdictions. They have a black CEO, but then there are these Dubai people that own it or people in Zimbabwe that own it or something like that. It hasn’t achieved what they wanted, which is diversification inside the system.
What they should have done is micro-target various communities and set up dedicated VC firms, charter schools, and mentorship programs, heavily investing in homegrown enterprises. Eventually, they would have built up an economic class for these things and then deregulated the marketplace. If they had just simply had a flat tax system and low regulations inside South Africa, it would have been the most investable country on the entire continent, and they would have built basically an African Silicon Valley.
Instead, they’re like, “Oh, we’ll just have to reallocate stuff.” They’ve made it functionally impossible for foreign companies to come in effectively into South Africa. So, they go to Zambia or Mauritius or just go off-continent. They actually incorporate in Dubai and then do business through shell partnerships, and none of it ever goes back to those poor communities. Those laws are very poorly done.
Fiber is indigestible; that’s the point. Clean these things out. Got to clean it out like a green braid. Got to come in all silent.
Thoughts on free speech in the UK? If you’re arresting 1,500 people a year for what they post on Facebook and Twitter, you have no free speech at all. It’s a nightmare. It’s a dystopian hellscape for free speech.
Have you tried Mr. Beast’s chocolate? Mr. Beast chocolate is made with extra notoriety.
Did you watch the new season of Black Mirror yet? It looks awesome, man.
What do you think of the Blade Runner sequel? I think it’s one of the greatest movies ever made.
Why did the milk delivery and glass bottle stop? Because people got tired of the milkman sleeping with their wives.
Does your clinic have a pulmonologist? I had pneumonia three or four years ago. I have scar tissue in my lungs. I’m having many problems finding help. Yeah, we actually have one that we’re recruiting right now, and I want to do clinical trials using mesenchymal stem cells to regenerate lung tissue for COPD and scarring. That’d be really good. I have a little bit of scar tissue in my left lung, and I’d love to see if we can finally clear that up, but we will definitely have that. It takes about six to twelve months to recruit one.
Does the bullet ant ceremony normally last 10 minutes, or is that easy mode? Ten minutes is sufficient because the ants run out of poison at some point. You’ve been stung hundreds of times, and your hands are doing this, and you’re like, “Oh, I feel great.” Then 30 minutes to an hour later, it starts traveling through, and it’s that wow pain. Every time it goes, “Wow, oh, I’m on fire.”
Charles, why do boomers think Israel is our greatest ally? I have no idea. I mean, it’s a country like any other country. It’s got its own geopolitical interests and does its own stuff. There’s a good side; there’s a bad side. I have many Israeli friends, friends in the IDF. But by no means is it America. They have their own interests, and sometimes they’re the same; sometimes they’re not.
Countries don’t have allies; they have mutual interests. When you look at the world this way, it works a lot better. There’s certainly a lot of good that Israel does; it’s a startup nation. There’s some bad stuff they do that’s just strange, and what bothers me sometimes is the fundamental lack of accountability. Not every person they kill is an evil terrorist; they make mistakes just like we make mistakes in Afghanistan when the drones blew up all those kids as we were withdrawing. That was a mistake. This ambulance thing was a horrific mistake.
You should be able, in the same breath, to hold people accountable, especially friends accountable, and hold them to a higher standard. I think the issue Israel has is just fatigue. They’ve been fighting for so very long, and it’s intergenerational fighting. People are just getting numb to the conflict the way that it is. It’s a tough situation all around for everybody.
What bothers me is why America has to get involved in these things. It’s not our fight. It really isn’t. It doesn’t geopolitically give us much. There are certainly things we could discuss that I think could radically improve the situation. I think the Palestinian issue could probably be solved if people were willing to zoom out a little bit and look at decades instead of the now.
The Israelis have something called Leviathan. It’s a gigantic natural gas field off their coast in the Mediterranean. It’s several trillion cubic meters of natural gas. What they probably should do is make a deal with all the nations to build a pipeline from Israel to Europe, displacing the Russian pipeline, and Israel could become the largest supplier of natural gas to Europe. That would lock in 100 years’ worth of sales.
They could take 5-10% of that and set it aside into a sovereign wealth fund for the Palestinians. Go to the Egyptians, who are building a new city called New Cairo. They’re building it because they don’t want another Mubarak situation. Mubarak got overthrown because Cairo is so bad in infrastructure. It’s hard for the government to protect itself when there’s a mass insurgency.
They’re building a parallel city outside of Cairo to put all their military and government stuff in, but they don’t have enough money to build it; they’re bankrupt. So you go make a deal with the Egyptians to buy something on the Red Sea that’s two or three times the size of Gaza. You just give that to the Palestinians. You set them up with a sovereign wealth fund from the natural gas, so they have an incentive to work with the Israelis.
Then you go to all these nations that support the Palestinians, like the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and say, “Okay, time for you guys to go build a Dubai for the Palestinians.” You give them freedom of movement throughout Israel, probably a dual passport type of situation. Through the sovereign wealth fund, everybody has economic incentives to work with each other.
Then all that area in Gaza just absorbs into Israel. If they want it, they can buy it back with the billions and billions of dollars they have. You alleviate poverty, you alleviate the space conflict, and you create a situation where people have an area to grow into and thrive in autonomy. The new Palestinian state can have its own army; they can act like a nation-state. They actually have diplomatic ability; they can navigate.
You’ve solved a major problem for Egypt, and they look like the heroes in the whole thing. You create a strong economic tie because you can tie in the natural gas pipeline from Israel with Saudi Arabia, and they can move oil into Europe as well. The Israelis absorb into the Arab states, and they’re all working together. It becomes a south versus north situation instead of Israel versus the rest.
Is it perfect? No. But the problem with war is the stronger party wins, as the Native Americans in the United States learned, and all these other people learned. You can complain about it, but that’s how human history has worked for a really long period. If there are irreconcilable differences where the Palestinians are basically saying, “We want the land back,” and the Israelis are saying, “It’s our land,” well, whoever has the biggest army is going to win that.
They’ve litigated it through warfare since the 40s, and a lot of people have died. The conflict continues, and it’s going to continue indefinitely. Or you move people. You have to ask how to do that in a way that works for everybody. You get more land in the process, a sovereign wealth fund in the process, you solve the poverty issues, you get legal autonomy and diplomatic autonomy, and you get your own army and your own nation-state, your own passport that means something in the process, and you have freedom of movement.
In one or two generations, it’s all resolved. A lot of those old places, the families will buy their stuff back with all the money, and then they’re all living and trading with each other, and they don’t have problems. Is it perfect? No. Would the group of people right now be happy about it? Probably not. But the vast majority of the young people will understand it, and they’ll accept it.
If I were president, that would be the deal I would put on the table. If they say, “No, we’re not going to take the deal,” then I would just leave completely, pull out all U.S. interests, and say, “We’re just going to stay neutral in the whole thing. Best of luck with it, and just let it work its way out.”
You have the Artrans and the Ethiopians, Western China, the Tibet situation, and all the stuff going on in Eastern Europe. If you’re looking for a fight, you can find one. If you’re looking for ethnic conflict, you can find ethnic conflict. If you’re looking for injustices in the world, you can find injustices in the world.
If America’s foreign policy is to get involved in every single injustice and conflict in the world, we’re going to pick a side and be the moral authority. What happens when the side you pick starts doing abhorrent things? Do you just turn a blind eye to it, or do you have to go and overthrow that
Better governance systems, more sustainable environmental policy, better technology for growing people, and a more equitable distribution of resources are essential for expanding the pie of resources. We have infinite land; it’s called space. Why aren’t we spending 2-3% of the global GDP on exploiting that? Space mining and space colonies are viable options. Everybody has something; you have infinite land if you want it. Why aren’t we colonizing the seas and doing that in a responsible and economically sustainable way? That’s what the Dutch did. They didn’t want war, so they reclaimed a third of their country from the oceans. Why don’t we do that? They could undertake a mega project to expand into the Mediterranean Sea with Israel. Has anybody proposed that? We could reclaim two or three times the territory and build a Palestinian state as an island or a peninsula off into the ocean. There’s enough natural gas to pay for it. That’s how you get out of these situations. You have to have vision and push forward, but a lot of people don’t want to do that.
Yes, those Italians and Norwegians literally plundered land that wasn’t theirs. Absolutely. It’s called the Roman Empire and the Viking raiders that came before them. By the way, those Italians were plundered themselves. If you look far enough back, whatever piece of land you find, someone else came there and killed for it. That’s always the case. I love these racist statements that are completely bereft of history. Africans learned about the wheel from whites, and now they use tires filled with air. So many amazing things came out of Africa. So many empires were there. Africa is the continent where the pyramids were built. Africa is the continent of the Mali Empire. There’s over 10,000 years of history there. People had to survive some of the harshest terrains and deal with malaria and all kinds of challenges.
The Europeans’ innovation was that they invented governance organizations that were intrinsically superior to those of the past. The first person to invent new technology tends to conquer the world. The Mongolians had a better form of warfare; they conquered a third of the planet. They swept throughout Asia. Think about that: a small Mongolia conquered China, a gargantuan multi-thousand-year-old empire with writing, gunpowder, and culture. They were conquered by horse nomads because they had better technology. The Europeans invented organized religion and much better governance systems. Because they could coordinate at a larger scale, they ran the show and conquered a lot of territory. It could have just as easily come out of Africa. There were plenty of times when Africa could have almost conquered everything. If you don’t believe me, look at the Bronze Age. It was centered around North Africa and Mesopotamia.
The Hittites, who were in modern-day Turkey, were always fighting with the Egyptians. One of the Pharaohs died, and his wife knew that the Pharaoh’s son was planning to kill her and take over the territory. She reached out to the Hittites and proposed a political alliance through marriage. The Hittite king thought it was a great idea. If they united, no one could stop them. Unfortunately, the king’s son died in transit, which was taken as a bad omen, leading to conflict between Egypt and the Hittites and the decline of the Hittite Empire. If the marriage had happened, Egypt and the Hittites together would have conquered all of Mesopotamia, including Babylon and Samaria. They would have gone westward, conquering the proto-Greeks and all the barbarian tribes in Italy and Spain, spilling throughout Europe. The Egyptians and Hittites were technologically advanced, taking over a thousand years for others to match them. They had advanced warfare, iron coinage, wheels, proto-batteries, and advanced construction techniques. They built the pyramids.
Imagine a unified empire spilling through Europe; it would have been a completely different world. One shipwreck changed history. You say Western culture is superior, but everything rests on small decisions. Just look at Annie Oakley. Buffalo Bill had a circus in the United States, and it was wildly popular. He toured Europe in the 1880s, and in Berlin, a young Kaiser Wilhelm II volunteered for her stunt where she shot a cigar out of his mouth. If she had missed and killed the Kaiser, the Bismarck arm of the Germans would have taken over. There might have been no World War I or it would have happened very differently. The Tsar wouldn’t have gotten involved, and the Soviet Union would never have come to fruition because the Germans wouldn’t have lost the war the way they did. No World War I, no World War II, no Soviet Union. All of Europe would be completely different, probably still monarchies, because of one bullet from one woman.
If you move a little to the right, there’s no Hitler; a little to the left, there’s World War II. That’s history. A single bullet changed everything. A single Hittite ship arriving could have meant no Roman Empire, no Greek Empire, no Zeus, none of these gods. It would all be different—different cultures, different languages. You’d all be speaking Hittite right now. People invent these fantasies and claim there’s an intrinsically superior culture or way of doing things. There are techniques and methods that if people adopt, they can achieve better outcomes. If an African country modernizes and adopts these methods, in 50 years, that country could be elite. It’s that simple. If they adopt blockchain technology, think about complex adaptive systems, implement AI, and improve education systems, they can thrive. We’ve run that experiment. Look at Singapore and Hong Kong. Look at what Hong Kong looked like in 1800 and what it looks like today. Compare that to places with terrible governance systems, like Malaysia or Vietnam, where corruption and bureaucracy are endemic.
Look at South Korea and North Korea. They’re the same people, artificially divided. If you unified them today, they’re Koreans. Look at the GDP of North Korea versus South Korea. We’ve run these experiments. It’s about the systems people have. There’s no concept of one culture being intrinsically inferior. It’s more about whether they are willing and able to adapt. Some want to stay at a certain level of technology. Take the Amazon, for example. I just went through the whole Amazon River Basin. The Rio Negro is a very dark river; you can’t see any fish, and it’s extremely dangerous because it’s filled with piranhas, anacondas, and caimans. I was with people who have stone-age technology, and they survive and thrive in that environment. If you took someone with a PhD in physics from an elite university and threw them in that environment, they would be dead in a week.
You think all that advanced knowledge means anything in that environment? We say progress means wiping out the jungle, building condominiums, and getting these people to live that way. Are they happy? How many antidepressants are we taking right now? How many of you are in debt? How many of you work nine-to-five jobs and feel like wage slaves in modern society? Meanwhile, you talk to people living in the Amazon, and they say, “I just woke up today and want to spearfish tonight.” They’re not worried about taxes or child support payments. If they get sick, they go out into the jungle and find local medicine. They don’t pay for it; they just get it from the trees.
But you don’t have the internet or modern devices. Do you need those things to be happy? They say, “I’m happy right now. Life is good.” This is the craziness of it all. Does it really matter how you live? What matters is whether you’re happy and love your life. Do you enjoy day-to-day living? How many of you wake up, look in the mirror, and say, “I love my life, the people in it, and what I do”? How many of you wake up feeling chained down by obligations, money, your job, or health conditions? You’re going to suffer for 40, 50, or 60 years so that maybe you have a window of time—5, 10, or 20 years—to do what you want. And you’ll do it with bad knees, hearing, eyesight, and shaky hands in your 60s, 70s, and 80s. You sacrifice to see things built by those same people who live down the river.
Or you could live well every day, waking up joyfully. Then you have people judging those who live differently, calling them primitives or saying they live a bad life. How naive are you? The greatest con job of modernity has been convincing the majority of human beings to enslave themselves so a small group can be powerful and rich, while the enslaved are convinced they’re not. That’s the greatest con job ever done. We do it through monetary policy, institutions, education systems, and organized religion. We’ve become adept at this. Any tribe or group that finds independence, we try to diminish. They’re primitive, eccentric, occult, misinformed, and not really happy. We have to enlighten them and inculturate them. What’s it for? So that some group of people you’ve never met can preserve their power.
If you’re reading these comments right now, I bet you’re thinking there is no hope. It makes me wish I had a better mechanism to solicit comments. The internet is the essence of humanity, and it’s like kids babbling. You can’t complain about kids babbling; there’s no accountability behind what people say, and they wouldn’t say it to your face. Many wouldn’t say these things to your face; they have permission to be bad actors.
Hello, my Polynesian brother. I didn’t know you were born in Hawaii. Mahalo, brother. Yes, I was born on Maui in Wailuku. I love the Polynesian warrior culture; they’re strong people. When I was growing up, I watched Sumo, and Akebono Taro, a big guy at 6’8” and 400 pounds, dominated. I love tough people who stand up for themselves. There’s a confidence that comes from being dangerous. When people train and know they could mess someone up, you can see it in the way they walk and act. Paradoxically, it results in less violence because people think, “That’s a tough person; I shouldn’t fight them.”
The best thing you can do for kids is teach them jiu-jitsu and self-defense. That’s one thing I really like about Polynesian cultures; they don’t take anything from anyone. But they’re also some of the nicest people. I was just in Maui and had dinner with a Hawaiian friend in Lahaina. He’s a tough guy, really tough.
Do your hands still hurt from the bullet ant ceremony? No, it was about 48 hours; it was mostly gone the day after. I just had some arthritis-style pain.
I love this Bitcoin maxi idiot. How much did you pre-sell in Japan? Oh, it’s a scam. Okay, let’s do a thought experiment about Bitcoin. A hundred years from now, everyone who owns Bitcoin who started mining will be dead or in diapers. They’re gone. Every single person holding Bitcoin got it from someone else who sold it to them or gave it to them. Can you distinguish between a cryptocurrency that did a pre-sale versus one that distributed through mining a hundred years from now? You can’t. The emissions rate of mining in Bitcoin at that point will be negligible; it’ll just be transaction fees.
In your world, it’s never legitimate, even though it’s all public. It’s an 80-20 split: 80% sold, 20% distributed through the pre-mine. It’s all public; everybody saw it. It’s scattered out and become far more distributed. The Gini coefficient looks better on Cardano than it does on Bitcoin. There are actually more small holders on Cardano than there are on Bitcoin, and the majority of Bitcoin is being hoovered up by large institutions like BlackRock. But in your world, because there’s a pre-mine, it’s forever stained.
What about Satoshi’s distribution? Well, that doesn’t count because he mined it. But he mined it when no one was around, just him and a few others. He invented the technology, so he should have first access. How come we didn’t do a redistribution? Why didn’t we reset the Bitcoin network after a year when a lot of people said, “It wasn’t fair that I got the majority of the supply in the first year; I should give it to someone else”?
You’ll never be convinced because you’re brainwashed. It’s a cult, and you just believe whatever you want to believe. It’s a money system; everything you own will eventually go to someone else. This land I’m on was settled in 1877. Is there anyone alive right now from 1877? They took it from the Native Americans, and they took it from different tribes. I’m in a long line of former owners, and I have it for the period I’m here. At some point, when I’m dead, someone will come after me. Did they earn it? What if they inherited it? What if they bought it? They didn’t mine it or build it themselves, so it doesn’t count.
Hi from the Viking lands. Cardano for the win. Hello, fellow Viking. Did the Halaka sunrise; it was amazing. I love Halaka. Do you think that Midnight could share the top 10 with Cardano? No, because the vast majority of value from Midnight will come from servicing other networks. It’s bringing transaction volume into Cardano from Solana, Ethereum, Bitcoin, and other places that wouldn’t normally be in Cardano.
You forgot to mention you’re a self-made billionaire, you narcissist. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved and accomplished; that’s relevant when we talk about business. It’s like talking about medicine; if you’re a doctor, it gives you credibility in the conversation. Talking about business as a self-made billionaire gives you credibility in business strategy.
Don’t compare yourself to legitimate endeavors; you should be investigated. You’re a bad guy. This is the world we live in because you get to decide what’s real and what’s not. You get to decide what’s meaningful on CoinMarketCap, what’s a legit cryptocurrency and what’s not. Every metric you look at for decentralization, we look good. Code diversity, decentralized governance—all this stuff. Everything we said we would do, we did. We grew organically. But no, you get to decide what’s legit and what’s not.
Never tell me it’s a scam. You’re a scam artist. What’s the scam? Objectively speaking, what’s the scam? You have the whole audience here; 15,000 people are listening right now. You misled people every step of the way. Give me a specific thing. Did we not do Byron? We did Byron. Did we not do Shelley? We did Shelley. Did we not do Goguen? We did Goguen. Did we not do Voltaire? We did Voltaire. Are we not currently finishing up Basho? We finished Basho. We have a plan for that; we’re doing it.
So, where’s the scam? Is it not decentralized? Are there not DREPs? Do we not have the hard fork combinator? It has been running for over 2,200 days, non-stop, 24/7, processing billions of transactions and hundreds of billions of dollars of value flowing inside the system. People can build dApps on Cardano. Does World Mobile not exist? Does Sunday Swap not exist? Does Hosky not exist? What’s the scam? Come on, where is it? All the people who put their money down to make it happen are happy. Launch is liquid; it’s on hundreds of exchanges. It’s been in the top 10 for all these years. So, what is the scam?
You’ve got us all here. You’re here; you own this audience. Tell us what the scam is. What is it? Adoption in Africa? We’re not in Kenya; there’s no Cardano representation in Nigeria. What about all the African delegates who came to the constitutional convention? We had a whole parallel convention in Kenya. They don’t exist, says you. We’ve been trying for years to do these things. There’s a huge Cardano community in Nigeria, a huge community in Kenya, and even in Ethiopia, where they hate crypto.
Oh my god, there’s a scam; they’re not in Africa. Where are they? What’s John O’Connor doing? What’s RealFi doing? What’s World Mobile doing? What are these people doing? The DREPs who are African don’t exist, says you. They’re not human beings, says you. They’re not representing their community. Mercy doesn’t exist; she’s inconvenient.
Keep them coming; let’s go. It’s bereft of accountability. People just say these things again and again. You’re a scam; you’ve done this. Business is hard. It’s changes; things occur. Macroeconomics—we lived through COVID, through multiple administrations. We lived through Biden literally trying to kill the entire cryptocurrency industry. He sued every exchange and said everything but Bitcoin is a security. But don’t worry, we’ll get to that too through environmentalist policy.
We’ve been debanked for four years. Imagine going to Ethiopia, where you have a signed deal with the Ministry of Education, and you’re working hard to deliver it. They say, “We need to resign the deal because there’s a new minister,” while the TPLF is 100 miles away from the capital, actively talking about conscripting people to fight in an urban war in Addis Ababa. You fly into the country just to resign the deal, and they still don’t pay you. That’s how motivated you are.
Then you have this piece of work saying you’re a scam. Listen to excuses; there aren’t any excuses. We’re here; we exist. We have a community. There are 16,000 people listening. Where’s your livestream with your 16,000 people? Oh, that’s right; you don’t have one. You crept into mine to co-opt it and show the world how small you are because you’ve achieved nothing. When you die, you’ll achieve nothing, and no one will remember your name.
Big arm, small dick. Yes, exactly. Biden made running a pool in the United States illegal, and that law was just removed. My lord, how’s Nike? He’s doing good; he’s a good pig, running around doing Nike stuff. Can you eat bullet ants? Yes, you can. In fact, I think I have a picture of me eating bullet ants. Let me show you my bullet ant-eating picture.
Damn, this chest cold just won’t go away
Zero people are arrested in the United States for that. Give me an example in the United States where we don’t have freedom of speech. It’s deplatforming by private companies. But give an example of a single person arrested in the United States because of something they said over Twitter that didn’t involve threatening the life of the president of the United States or a few very protected areas where we’ve kind of carved that one out. In many of those cases, they get away with it too. Kathy Griffin holds the head of a Trump mannequin that she decapitated. She didn’t get arrested. You say something negative about the wrong protected class in Europe, or for example, Le Pen, who was going to win in France; they arrested her and said she couldn’t run. Or the AFD in Germany. These types of things, I might not agree with, but apparently, they’re being censored. So no, you guys do not have freedom of speech. Don’t even pretend. Don’t pee on me and call it rain.
I’ve seen this argument. You can be arrested in the USA for praying too close to an abortion clinic. We absolutely do not have free speech. There’s a world of difference between silent prayer next to an abortion clinic and harassing people as they go in trying to get a medical procedure performed. There’s just a world of difference. Let’s say a woman is walking in to get an annual gynecology checkup, and because she’s going into a Planned Parenthood, these people harass her, call her a baby murderer, throw stuff at her, and try to prevent her from entering the facility. Those are the people who tend to get arrested, and then they play victim the minute they get arrested. It’s not freedom of speech in these cases. Yeah, there are probably one or two weird cases here and there, and they get resolved in the courts, but there’s a world of difference between the police going out of their way, looking at Twitter feeds, and arresting people.
I don’t know why Elon Musk gets involved in these things. I don’t know enough about the AFD. I’m not German; I don’t speak German. People say they’re Nazis. The leader is gay, and she’s dating a Sri Lankan person. I’ve never met a gay Nazi dating brown people, but okay. I don’t know enough about them. I really don’t. Maybe they are closet Nazis; who the hell knows? Everybody’s a Nazi now, by the way, so that means nothing to me. Any right-wing person is automatically a Nazi according to people on the left, and so that’s a vacuous thing. I don’t know why Elon gets involved in this stuff. What does it benefit Elon Musk getting involved in German elections as a South African who immigrated to America, whose business interests are primarily in the United States?
I deal with people. I was just interviewed by Lemon in the Big Whale and a few other French newspapers, and I said the same thing I say to everybody else. I have a strong interest in US elections because I am an American and I have opinions there. On European elections, Asian elections, elections across the globe, I don’t get involved. I deal with the consequences of whoever is elected. So if Macron is president of France, he’s president of France. If Le Pen takes over and she’s president of France, she’s president of France. The AFD is in power in Germany; if Olaf is in power in Germany, who the hell knows? I don’t choose that. I’m not a citizen of that country. I don’t vote or participate in those elections. Whoever’s in power, my only decision is: do I feel comfortable doing business there? Do I think there’s rule of law? Do I think there’s sufficient freedom of association, commerce, and expression? Do I think it’s a good product market fit? Do I think it’s a good marketplace? If there is, then whoever’s in power, I go and talk to those people and say, “How do I do business with you? Let’s negotiate. Let’s figure this out.” If they’re pro-business, they say, “We’re excited and ready to go.”
So Tesla wants to do business in Germany. What business is it to Elon Musk if it’s AFD versus somebody else? They should be focused on how to make great, cheap cars and compete with Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Audi. Why have the fight? Why alienate more than half the country for no upside? Whether it goes one way or the other way, what impact does it have on Elon’s life? And these types of things: “We got to save the European race.” What the hell does that even mean? What connection does he have to Europe? He’s South African. Is it his European ancestors that came over and owned the emerald mines? Is that what he’s worried about? He’s in this very self-destructive spiral, Elon Musk, and it’s of no benefit to himself, no benefit to Tesla. I don’t understand his thought process.
He tells all of his employees at SpaceX, “We want to make humanity a multilanetary species. That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to Mars.” Okay, so everything you do then should be viewed through that lens of how do we accelerate that? It’s a cooperative exercise. You need to work with German engineers, Chinese engineers, Italian engineers, and multiple governments and regimes. The Elon Musk I knew when I was at Sea of Boulder was Elon Musk walking with Obama in that famous picture when Obama made private space flight possible in the United States. The Elon Musk who was working with everybody and who was a visionary. Now we have Elon Musk sitting on Twitter, on his toilet, pants down, and his cell phone here 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Hot take here, hot take here, hot take here, hot take here.
Here’s the thing, guys. Let’s do a little social experiment. Let’s try this out. You know, let’s do this live. Let me sign in real quick, get this done, verify I’m human, continue with Google. It really does not think I’m human. All right. I’m just going to go ahead and ask, and we’re going to see what happens. So, the crowning achievement of Elon Musk is XAI, and I’m going to ask it a question: Who is the largest spreader of misinformation on X? Let’s see what it comes out to. All right. So, what we’re going to do is present my screen, and I’m going to move this over here and share the screen. I’m going to go ahead and share a window. New conversation. Here we go. So, Elon Musk, you created X. You created XAI. Grok is your product. This is what you do. So I’m sharing my screen right here, and I ask your product: Who is the largest spreader of misinformation on X?
Based on available information from various sources, Elon Musk is frequently identified as a significant spreader of misinformation on the social media platform. This assessment stems from multiple reports and analyses and highlights his role both as an individual poster and owner of X, where his influence shapes platform policies. Evidence supporting Musk’s role: Grok’s assessment talks about Grok’s scale of reach, platform ownership, and examples of misinformation. He’s been criticized for sharing content that spreads false narratives. For example, a post by blah highlights Musk sharing fake newspaper headlines, an action emblematic of this type of misleading content, etc.
All right. Give me specific examples. There we go. Let me just go. This is his tool. Why does this exist? What the hell does this have to do with humanity becoming a multilanetary species? How does this benefit him? How does this benefit the business empire? How does this benefit anything that he’s doing? Because he wants the power and the attention because he’s got a fragile ego, and he’s surrounding himself with a bunch of sycophants. Every day they wake up and say, “Look how smart you are. Look how talented you are. Oh, you had another child out of wedlock with a blogger. How great. That must be amazing. You are a wonderful human being. Oh, you went and made half your people hate you. Oh, you must be an amazing guy.”
More examples: Tesla stock price, funding secured date, COVID-19 predictions, and downplaying the pandemic. Okay, yeah, I’m probably guilty of that too. Reasonable people can, but this affects everybody, right? We could debate that this was self-inflicted. Why would he say this? Funding secured; it really wasn’t. And then, of course, the 2020 election. It affects everybody. I’ll give them something there: sharing fake news headlines. Okay, but why do these things exist? All liberal media, the liberal media is so evil and so problematic, right? But is it your job to socially transform the world, or is it your job to go to Mars? I thought you wanted to go to Mars. So, you’re saying you’re going to go to Mars with only Republicans? You’re going to go to Mars with only people who agree with you? You’re going to go to Mars with only one social philosophy? Great. If you’re going to do that, then write it down. Where’s the great philosophical treatise of Elon Musk? What human rights do you value? What value system do you have? What ethics system is it: deontological or utilitarian? Do you agree with Peter Singer? Let’s just talk about this stuff. Where is it? What philosophical lens do you look at the world through?
No, you want to be the turbo genius who’s good at everything, calls astronauts idiots, and attacks people, especially the weak and vulnerable. You’re one of the most powerful men in the world. You have 400 billion dollars. You have hundreds of millions of followers. You’re so powerful. Why do you care if somebody criticizes you? I understand it because I deal with it every day. People criticize me, and when the criticism prevents business from occurring, like when Electriccoin Capital says there are only 189 developers on Cardano, that hurts Cardano. We have to address that. But when someone says that your rescue attempt in Thailand is not going to work, who’s a subject matter expert, why do you call him a pedophile and he has to sue you over the whole thing? What benefit do you get there? How do you reconcile it? Why punch down? You own a rocket factory. You own Tesla. You own X. You own Neuralink. You own all these things. You could just do whatever you want to do. You keep telling us that your only goal is to make humanity a multilanetary species.
I don’t know. It’s a crazy thing. There’s a better way to go about it. It’s just so frustrating when you see this person because I know why it exists. You put a person in an environment where there’s no oversight, no accountability, sycophants everywhere, and it’s a death spiral. They just become a megalomaniac, and the ego builds and builds and builds. The grandiosity gap between who you actually are and who you present yourself as grows, and eventually the whole apparatus is less about doing things. It’s more about protecting your fragile ego and preserving the inflated view of who you are as a person.
You build a rocket every two days. Why does he need to do it? I don’t know. You say something at a university about Palestinians, you get deported, and that’s free speech. I don’t agree with it; I think that’s wrong. Now, they’re not US citizens; they’re here on student visas. In many cases, the deportations are connected to violent protests. I’m not aware of anybody who just nakedly said something negative about Israel and got deported for it. Oftentimes, they were involved in protests where they physically committed a crime. They blocked off streets, assaulted people, or destroyed public or private property. You conveniently forget that in the narrative. But in general, yeah, I think we should be more tolerant as a group of people. I think it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize Israel without being called an anti-Semite. In the same token, it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize some of the Palestinians for the things that they do as well. Remember, they elected Hamas. It’s okay to express an opinion. We’re a big boy society; we can do that. I think it’s absolutely wrong for us to say we can’t live in a society where people are not allowed to express themselves. People should be allowed to express themselves.
Charles, does white privilege exist? No, it does not. It’s just a manufactured construct by the racism industry. They say white privilege. Oh, so is it automatically because I have white skin that I’m successful or have a higher chance of being successful than someone with brown skin? Oh, okay. It’s the most racist thing I’ve ever seen in my life for people to say this stuff. “Oh, that’s your perspective because you’re a white guy.” I experienced racism growing up. I grew up in Hawaii, and they called me howie. They threw things at me. They were angry for things I had no connection to and knew nothing about. I lived in Japan; they call you gaijin, and you go into restaurants, and they say Japanese only, and they don’t even let you in because you’re a foreigner. I experienced these things.
I’ve been all throughout the world. Racism exists. It does. Differences exist. The racism industry that’s been manufactured in America tells a lot of young black people, especially blacks but of all races that aren’t white, that if you aren’t successful, it’s because the man is against you. That’s what they say. It’s just a whole manufacturing industry. The only thing we need to do is create a gigantic government that turns over all the means of production to that giant government to rebalance the scales for equity and give it to you. That’s what they say. You can’t accomplish anything. There’s no way by your own merits you’ll be able to rise. You can’t get a good education. You can’t economically get ahead in life. You can’t achieve anything. You are, because of the color of your skin, forever doomed to be an underclass in society. That’s what they tell people. It is the most demoralizing, disenfranchising thing I’ve ever heard. It’s the most racist thing I’ve ever heard. You’re meaning to tell me that Obama’s children are never going to be successful because of the color of their skin, and some redneck that lives out in Appalachia without running water and power, and whose parents are meth addicts, has an advantage in society over Obama’s kids because of the color of their skin? It’s the most racist thing I’ve ever heard, and it’s meant to divide people and make people hate each other.
How about we just get back to a society where we say, “Here are the standards, live up to them, and inspire people to go for those things.” You should tell every person that they have the ability to thrive, and they just have to manifest their reality. If you want some greatness, go chase that greatness and go get it done. It’s not a white versus black thing. America hates poor people. We hate the impoverished. Poor people are disenfranchised in the United States. The system is rigged against the poor and wage slaves. Because of historical and intergenerational reasons, there’s a disproportionate amount of people in minority classes who are poor. That’s what you’re experiencing. If you take care of the poor people and give them better stuff, everybody rises together. It’s that simple. If you just take all this DEI nonsense and focus on opportunities in poor areas of America, all of a sudden people rise. You know what? People take care of their own. You take care of the people you grow up with, you take care of your friends, you take care of your family. You take one poor person, you make them rich, and everybody in their social structure rises as a result of that. That’s one man’s opinion.
Then they’ll have me read White Fragility and call me a Nazi. I didn’t realize how ill-informed you are about everything. A white man trying to hold us down. I wonder if he can criticize Trump as he did Biden. I have so many criticisms of Trump. I criticize him all the time. You guys just aren’t paying attention because it’s whataboutism. Musk didn’t con anyone. How are those self-driving cars working out for you? You like Dick Jones? You like those self-driving cars? They’re coming next year. Trust me, bro. Or those robo-taxis. If it was up to Charles, you would euthanize anybody over 50. Oh my god, you guys are crazy. You’ve got a lot of your goddamn minds.
Cheryl, since you started your live stream, Cardano is falling. Oh, is it now? Let’s take a look. All right, we’re going to the markets right now. Let’s see what we got here. We’re up 6% today, guys. We’re falling. A pope like no other pope. Some I assume do good popping, but believe me, the new popes are not bringing their best. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yay. I’m in San Francisco right now for the first time in my life. There are whinos everywhere. It’s honestly incredible. Yeah, and they’re not made by Tesla. That was my whole point. He’s been saying for 10 years self-driving cars because lidar makes sense to put with optics. Musk, for some damn reason, says, “No, we can’t do LIDAR; it’s got to be optics only.” Lidar lets you see in the dark. Lidar lets you see in occluded scenarios. When you combine modalities together, you get a much better result because computer vision is distinctly different from the way human beings perceive the world.
Then he said, “Ah, LIDAR is for fools, Aaron.” So this is the same guy as Big Arms. It’s just an alt account. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to do the same thing we did to Big Arms. He’s been banned. He’s been removed. He’s going to have to go and create his own feed for people now. That’s true. LIDAR is the way. Now, it’s multimodal. You want to do solid-state radar. You want to do LIDAR and optics. Put those three modalities together. You invest in reducing the cost of LIDAR and solid-state radar and these types of things. Your optics get better over time. You don’t say, “Hey, it’s going to be fully autonomous.” You say just every year it gets better. That’s how you don’t lie to people. Because of the
Oh Lord. So, what would you invest in besides IoG projects? There are plenty of great things in the crypto ecosystem. I think Endmaker Patrick, what you’re building is great because you know how to sell, how to do commercial partnerships, and how to work with the technology. You know how to go cross-chain and understand crypto ecosystems. I love Sunday and Py Lingham; he’s just a great guy to work with and has the right mentality. He’s a scrappy guy. Midgard is a great investment as well; they’re going to go a lot of places. The SNE community is a great investment; they’re also going to go far. Book is a phenomenal ecosystem as well.
There are a ton of people in Cardano doing interesting things, but outside of Web 3, I highly recommend anti-aging and regenerative medicine. It’s going through a huge flux. If I could do it all over again, I’d probably be really interested in the quantum stuff. I love the metaphysics of it, the spirituality of it, and the engineering. I’d suggest going for a PhD in quantum engineering, where you learn electrical engineering, material science, and physics, along with computer science, and then go build a quantum computer. They’re coming in 10 to 25 years, and it’s going to change everything. It’s so cool. Cognitive neuroscience is also a super cool field, as is complex adaptive systems.
That’s my problem; I like too many things, and it’s hard to focus on just one with the treasury. The treasury has to be about strengthening institutions, not diversification. We need to complete the roadmap we have, focusing on commercial aspects like Bitcoin DeFi and making Cardano a solid system. Then we have areas of growth and liquidity. The next layer up is about marketing, brand, and growth. Let’s correct the information deficit. It’s a bad deal when VCs won’t invest in us. Let’s create some proper growth hack funds and get an incubation acceleration function. Even if it’s 10 to 25 million, let’s get it in.
We need to fix all the broken windows, get all the custodians to love us, and get our stablecoin market where it needs to be. We should also get the oracles where we need to be. Let’s help get liquidity for the top 10 or top 25 CNAs, whether it be indexes or getting them listed. That’s how you walk the book up and ensure we’re in the conversation, so people understand the product marketing of Cardano. They should know about the telescoping protocol we came up with with consensus, how Laos collapses back to Prowse in the event that it fails, but it’s super scalable otherwise.
We need to build up the merits of extended UTXO, build up Aken, and develop those capabilities. You have to think in terms of those layers and get the right institutions involved. We should incubate and accelerate, cutting a deal with either Techstars, Outlier, or 500 Startups. Start small with 10 to 25 million in security tokens and actually put the equity in the treasury. How about that? For stablecoins, let’s mint half the supply we push through the treasury into stablecoins. That means every time we do a treasury round, 75 million or more is going into Cardano stablecoins. In 5 to 10 years, you’ll have hundreds of millions of dollars in Cardano stablecoins. We’ve insulated the base.
Let’s try to get a partner chain launched every year, a good one, a tier-one partner chain. Let’s get World Mobile where they need to be and Singularity Net where they need to be. I know you’re working on AI agents; if you can do a better job than Ben, let’s get you as a partner chain. Do an AI play and an airdrop just like Midnight’s doing. Drop the 10 to 20 chains. Focus on commercial market development. Get Vietnam, Nigeria, and Argentina—the three fastest-growing crypto markets by percentage in population. Let’s have dedicated evangelism in each of those markets.
Right now, in Argentina, one out of every $7 is in crypto. In Nigeria, one out of every $4 is in crypto in some way. In Vietnam, 32% of the population holds crypto. Think about these huge numbers. We should have dedicated sales teams there. Take the top five largest companies in each of those jurisdictions and get them into Cardano. Let’s go do it and pay a performance fee for this type of stuff. That’s the kind of stuff we should be talking about.
We’re going to sort out the multiclient diversity. We had the node workshop, brought the people together, and got project blueprint. They’ve told the ecosystem what they need. Fully fund them. If you need 2 million, there you go. TXip, take it. Blink Labs, here, take it. Stop having part-time people work full-time on this. Get that done. Let us finish the roadmap.
Layoffs are going to be hard, and there’s going to be a lot of work to do. It’s complicated, and there are a lot of good engineers. Let’s just get that done. If I were in charge, that’s the kind of stuff I would do. But we don’t have an executive function in Cardano; that was done by design to force decentralization. It is frustrating because it would be pretty easy for me to just put a plan on the table and say, “This is what we’re going to do, guys.”
Vietnam also has the entire anime group. It’s where all the Japanese anime is now made. We need to bring people together too. That’s why the workshops are so important; they allow for discussions about the commercialization of the platform, leading to a lot of great business ideas. The world’s a big place; you just pick things and get them done.
I’m building a digital voting system next. Paper ballots are so archaic. I’d highly recommend a hybrid system with both a paper system and a digital system. Blockchain and paper together—that’s peanut butter and jelly right there. When you have both modalities together and they audit each other, it’s unhackable if configured correctly. You vote with a blockchain, which creates a paper receipt. You vote with paper, which creates a blockchain record. They’re always together, and one side audits the other.
What’s nice is it crosses all socioeconomic classes, and you can vote with your phone. You deploy all the software and trusted hardware enclaves. If you have the right identity system, you have a perfect voting system. I always tell people because I’ve had people come to me from various states saying, “You should bid on this RFP for blockchain-based voting.” I ask, “What are you doing for your identity management system?” They say, “That’s not on the table. We’re just going to keep our old identity management system.” I respond, “I’m not interested at all because I don’t want to build a really secure voting system if you have fake people or fake IDs inside your system. I’m just building a secure way of counting a person who doesn’t exist or who is ineligible to vote.”
You need to do both. You need self-sovereign identity and a non-credentialed system as your foundation. Then you give people the right to either vote on their phones through trusted hardware enclaves on a blockchain or vote with paper—either or. Both systems must be there and reconcile, ensuring a one-to-one correspondence. Then you can check at any time that your vote was counted, counted correctly, and that the election system has integrity with integrity criteria as an invariant inside the system.
We could design this system in 6 months to a year as best-in-class. You can have any ballot architecture you want—quadratic voting, linear preference ordering like Honda or Borda, or approval voting anytime you want. We could do that, but they have no intention of fixing the problem because they don’t want to.
Did you miss the bullet ants? We’ve been talking about the bullet ants in the Amazon, canoeing with caiman, anaconda, spiders, and all kinds of things. You missed all of it, Mark. There’s even a professionally shot video. People body-shamed me in it. You’ve got to catch up, man.
This guy seems to think homomorphic encryption would be required to prevent vote intimidation. No, you just need the ability to validate. That’s a zero-knowledge proof that it was recorded the way you thought, but only convinces you. You don’t need homomorphic encryption.
Can’t you just have phone forms? No, because you have a unique registration. That’s why you need the identity system. See how it comes together? Information security.
Charles, what’s your take on beard glitter? I mean, I’m the guy who’s giving Smurfs a hand job, so what do you do?
Charles, are partnerships with Ripple and Chainlink still being discussed? Ripple, yes. Chainlink, we’re working hard on that. I have Nazer’s private number; we talked in DC. Every time we meet, we say, “Yeah, we need to work together.” So, Chainlink has us on the list for integration. They have some new framework that’s kind of like Rosetta with Coinbase for these integrations, but for some reason, it’s always like three to six months off.
Ripple, on the other hand, things are going really well. We’re going to add Ripple support for XRP in Lace, so if you’re an XRP user, you can hold your XRP in the Lace wallet. XRP is going to be part of the Midnight airdrop, and we’re in talks with Real USD. That’s as good as it gets, right? People want to come to Cardano and do oracles with us. That’s a very strong relationship. Dave Schwarz just invited me to speak at one of their conferences, and we’re on very good terms.
Chainlink has been difficult because there’s no interpersonal or economic issue. It’s just hard to predict what the integration will take because they have a legacy way of doing it. They’re moving towards a new way, but we’re not sure when and how that’s going to happen. We’re kind of in this no man’s land. No matter how many people I throw at it, even when I talk to Sergey, he says, “We both agree we should do it. There’s no problem, no bad blood. It just doesn’t get over the line for some reason.” I’ll keep looking into it and ask JJ again, “What’s the latest and greatest on this?”
It’s something I would like to see. We need a tier-one oracle, but there’s also Pith and Flair and others. You just keep adding and pushing it through. I like the Chainlink community; I think Link Marines are good people. Sergey and I are the exact same person—we have the same fashion style, the same beard, and the same body mass. There’s no bad blood there.
You talk a lot about Jed. What do you think of its performance now? Oh, it’s doing fine. Let’s take a look at Jed right now in Tap Tools. I think it’s holding the peg. It had to peg there for a little bit and then went back.
Yeah, it’s sitting at a dollar. Liquidity is about a million, with a 3.2 million market cap. They’re still building up to Jed 1.7, but it needs to rebuild after 1.7. It’d be nice to launch it as a partner chain.
Did you drive the road to Han? I never personally drove it when I was growing up there because I left when I was eight, but I’ve been on it many, many times.
How bad did the ant venom hurt? It hurt. It hurt so bad.
Did you ever finish reading the River of Doubt? Not only did I finish reading the River of Doubt, but I also went to the River of Doubt.
All right, I’m going to take one more question.
This was Cardano's stablecoins. We have USDM and USDA. Are they a joke to you? They’re great. They’re awesome. I highly recommend you work on them and use them; they’re just fine.
Were you sure you were there? No, I wasn’t on the Rio Roosevelt; I was in the Rio Negro. Different place.
Sounds like a racist river.
That’s a good way to end it.
Will you be back in Toronto? When will you be back in Toronto? I will be there for Consensus. I will be speaking at Consensus in Toronto and also be at Tracy’s event, Untraceable. I love Toronto; it’s a wonderful place. I always eat at Jacobs and Co.; it’s a great restaurant there. Some of the best cryptocurrency entrepreneurs are in Canada, and overall, Canada has been very friendly for the crypto industry. It’s where Ethereum was founded, and there’s a great culture for entrepreneurship and innovation. I highly recommend it, and I’ll see everybody there. It’ll be nice to see all of our Canadian fans. Tam is coming, and other people are coming because she’s from London, Ontario, and it’s easy for her to go out to Toronto. I think she went to the University of Toronto as well.
All things considered, Toronto is where it’s at. Until next time, everyone, this has been a very fun AMA. It’s good to be back, good to be alive. Glad to have 20,000 of you listening, and I’ll see you soon over the internets.
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