Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado—always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado, and often these days, Wyoming. Today is June 5th, 2024, and we're making a video about Wyoming. It is my future home and a big part of my life. As many of you know, I split my time between Colorado and Wyoming. We do a lot down here in Longmont, Colorado, but I also live up in Wheatland, Wyoming, a very small town with about 3,500 people. There's Cheyenne and Casper, both on I-25, and right in the middle is my home in Wheatland. My brother and dad have lived for nearly a decade in Gillette, Wyoming—actually, probably even longer these days. I have strong roots there; my father grew up in Montana, in Big Timber and Mill City, so that's kind of the legacy of the family.
The reason I make this video is that I came across something very close to home and interesting. It's a tweet responding to Representative Hagaman from a Wyoming resident. He says, "There's a reason they want traceable digital currency, and guess what? It's supported by our Rhino Governor Gordon. From New York, billionaire Charles Hoskinson has set up a huge Bitcoin computing center south of Gillette, and there's another one in Buckskin Coal Mine north of Gillette. Zuckerberg's Meta is setting up a huge computer bank in Cheyenne, acres of solar panels. Bill Gates is sponsoring a nuclear power plant in Kern. They're coming to Wyoming because they know with their money and lax tax laws, they can easily set up shop here. Low population—these people see an easy takeover. They think we're all low IQ redneck country cowboys. Teton County and Jackson Hole have already been taken over by millionaires and billionaires, left-wing liberals. Soon, all of Wyoming will be."
This guy doesn't like our crypto industry very much, and this is actually a surprisingly popular opinion among certain people in Wyoming. We've noticed a slight political shift that has occurred. First off, I didn’t set up that Bitcoin mine. It's actually quite interesting; it's right next to my construction warehouse off Highway 50. When we drove by it, I said, "Holy, that’s a Bitcoin mine!" We reached out to the owners; they’re from New York and Dubai, so we're going to help them out a little bit because they need better internet connectivity. Power was cheap, so they set it up there. That's how decentralized Bitcoin has become.
The implication here is that cryptocurrencies are some sort of bizarre scam to track people, and it’s just a low-rent CBDC. Anyway, that's my ranch, Twin Pine Bison Company, and it’s about 11,000 acres. You can see all the fire damage that’s been done here from the Arapo fire over ten years ago. This is a nice little drone picture, and it goes on forever. I sell bison hunts; that’s how the ranch runs. Since 2019, we have a construction company with over 100 people employed in Gillette, and we do a boatload of concrete work. If you ever go to Gillette, you’ll notice a lot of trucks with my name on them. My brother and I started this company, and we build a whole bunch of stuff—not just in Gillette, but in South Dakota and Montana.
Of course, we have our clinic, Hoskinson Health and Wellness, with 7,200 patients. We built the Mayo Clinic of the West. If you actually go there, you’ll notice that it’s a multi-specialty practice with internists and specialist physicians. When we entered, they needed three doctors in the county for every one they had. Neurology, for example, had a year-long wait list, and it’s the most advanced medical facility around. You see this a lot in small towns—this concept of protectionism. They say, "Oh, this guy came in with all this money, and his only job is to take from us." But we built a lot there. Wyoming is my family’s home, and it’s slowly becoming my home over time. It’s really hard to move all my affairs up to Wyoming these days, but I move as much as I can because I enjoy the people and the culture. I like the fact that it’s low population density, and a lot can be done. You have an obligation to build things and create jobs.
We’ve created over 200 jobs in Wyoming, just in Campbell County. We’re starting the process of creating jobs in Platte County in Wheatland now. I make some money from these things, but believe me, I make far more money in the cryptocurrency space and synthetic biology. I do this because you have to make the home around you better. The reason we invest in cryptocurrencies and build them up is that we want payment systems where you’re in charge. This is relevant because Wyoming is in political flux right now, and it’s something we’re going to have to spend some time as an industry coming to terms with. Some lawmakers responsible for endorsing and passing the laws that made Wyoming the most crypto-friendly state in the United States have been voted out of office, like Tyler Lindholm, for example. They’ve been replaced with an extremist right-wing faction that seems to think cryptocurrencies are actually foreign to the U.S. government and that the intent is for evil billionaires, like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, to take over and destroy the culture of the state of Wyoming.
There’s a political fight between the more moderate factions that are embracing the future and trying to diversify the economy of Wyoming and some factions that don’t seem to have any clear direction or foresight. I came and created 200 jobs in the state of Wyoming; that’s an indisputable fact. Because of the work we do, Campbell County is going to have the best healthcare in the entire state of Wyoming—that’s another indisputable fact. Because of the work we do, Campbell County is also going to have some of the most advanced construction techniques and technologies of any state, including investments in geopolymer concrete, which, if properly applied, can last over 2,000 years as opposed to the 30 to 50 years, which is the shelf life of most concrete pours.
We’re training a lot of people on new technologies and techniques, including building an AI supercomputer. Campbell County is the first place in the United States to combine a Siemens PACS system for AI upscaling of digital pathology and images with three Tesla MRIs and a 128-slice CAT scan. It’s something you’d expect at Mayo Clinic or Johns Hopkins, and we get it there. Additionally, we’re starting to manufacture adult-derived stem cells. We take them from your fat, culture them, upgrade them, and re-inject them. So, Campbell County is going to become a center of excellence for regenerative medicine.
It doesn’t really sound like people just coming to take advantage of lax tax laws. In fact, in many cases, it’s about 30 to 50% more expensive to do things in these rural areas because of the cost of relocating talent, training talent, and building infrastructure. It’s very easy for me in Denver to rent a sophisticated synthetic biology lab or biotech facility; it’s a lot harder in Gillette, Wyoming, because it simply doesn’t exist. So, I had to build it from scratch, and I did this because it’s my home, it’s my brother’s home, it’s my father’s home.
This protectionism worries me at times because most of the people who are currently leading Wyoming are aging out. Senator Lummis is retiring soon; who knows about Barrasso? It’s very clear that we’re going to see a change in leadership, from the governor to the state representatives. My concern is that if those people are replaced with individuals who don’t even care to get basic facts correct, such as who owns what, where, and what people are actually doing and their intentions, they may attempt to lump everybody together. For example, saying that I’m from Jackson Hole when I live in Wheatland, which is about as far as you can get from Jackson Hole. I’m not there to go ski; I live on an 11,000-acre working ranch, which creates a lot of jobs, by the way, and brings a lot of revenue into the county.
When people don’t care about these facts, what’s going to happen is they’ll undo all of the laws we’ve written as an industry in partnership with the government to create a favorable business environment to make Wyoming the best place in the world to incorporate cryptocurrency businesses. This will be intimately involved in the economic, political, and social systems of the future and potentially create tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of high-paying jobs across Wyoming.
So, what we’re going to do in this election cycle is make sure that we support pro-crypto politicians in Wyoming as much as we can, within the legal limits. We’re also going to make sure that misinformation gets stamped down because we, as an industry, have an obligation to protect Wyoming and invest in Wyoming because it’s been good to us. As an industry, we never got a subsidy; we didn’t ask for money from taxpayers. We just asked for regulatory clarity and for the government to get out of the way and let us be innovators.
When I was growing up, that’s what Reagan’s Republican Party was all about. That’s what conservatives seemed to stand for: getting the government out of the way of business and letting business do its job. This faction of the party seems to think, “Well, we’ll do that for the industries we like, like oil, gas, and coal, but for these new technology industries, we have to somehow discourage them from spending any time in our state,” even though those are the jobs of the future and the jobs that are going to revitalize the economy.
Wyoming has a lot of problems: high suicide rates in certain areas, high cancer rates—all the things you would expect living in a rural economy, including poor access to healthcare, among other things. But it has the strongest and best people that I’ve met across the entire United States. Ranchers are tough, and they’re willing to do amazing things. They’re some of the friendliest, nicest, and most honest, high-integrity people you can meet. That’s why I like living there; that’s why I like investing there and building there. It really means the world to me, and nothing would break my heart more than to watch the state of Wyoming descend into a depression. Unfortunately, if we don’t diversify the economy of Wyoming, that’s what’s going to happen.
What will occur is all those multigenerational family ranches, because of Wyoming being in a depression, will be sold off, fractured, and end up in the hands of transnational organizations or governments like China, or as ranches for people to take vacations in. We saw this happen in Colorado; we’ve seen this happen in Montana, especially in places my dad grew up, like Mill City and Big Timber. It’s harder and harder these days to find a 5,000 to 10,000-acre ranch, and even harder to find somebody capable of putting a ranch together.
When I was talking to the president of the Senate, Wyoming’s OG Driscoll, one of his biggest marks of pride in his entire life was putting back together his family ranch nearby Devil’s Tower. Think about that—it took him decades to do it, and it was enormously time-consuming and expensive, but it was something he did for the family. I’d like to see more of that. I wouldn’t like to see an economy that promotes the opposite trend.
So whenever I see a comment like this, it means a lot more to me than a normal internet comment. It is a reflection of a protectionist political wind that’s in my backyard, and it’s very close to home. It runs against everything we try to do and all the investments we’ve made for the state, as well as the public trust that the state has put down. The reality is the state of Wyoming opened its doors and took a chance on us as an industry, and in exchange for that, we as an industry have a moral obligation to take a chance on them and invest in them.
I would rather not see that door closed, which is why I’m making this video and reminding everyone of our commitment, financial and otherwise, to the state and how we’re going to keep fighting for economic diversification and also create jobs. My construction company is probably going to grow by 3 to 5 times over the next 36 months, and my clinic is growing from 10,000 square feet to 70,000 square feet. By the middle of next year, it will have the largest hyperbaric center in the Western United States—a multiplace dual-chamber center—and will have one of the largest stem cell facilities in all of Wyoming, including the University of Wyoming. That’s our commitment.
So we’re going to keep growing, we’re going to keep partnering with people, keep evolving, and ultimately bring the best of all technologies. Of course, blockchain is a big component of it because that’s what returns liberty to all these systems. You are your own bank, you own your own data, you’re in charge—not Mark Zuckerberg. That’s always been the social contract, and that’s why the state opened up; it wanted to push power to the edges and give those ranchers and other people in the state the opportunities that their fathers and their fathers before them had. It’s very important to all of us.
Thanks for listening, and of course, we love rough and rugged Wyoming. Cheers!
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