Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from rough and rugged Wyoming. I haven't done a Surprise AMA in forever, but we're going to get back to it. I have all these podcast studios that are about 95% complete, and it's on me to put a computer in and get everything running. I keep telling myself I'm going to find a weekend to just get out there.
We're keeping really busy. Real FI is coming out, and we're making a lot of progress with it. John Oconor just stepped into the Real FI Foundation, and Hogan is coming out as well. We're getting really excited about that. That's the Bitcoin DeFi, and we have a beautiful play for that. Midnight is on schedule for a major release every three months. The first part was liquidity, then we had to get the guarded mainnet out, and now the guards are coming down. Contract compositions are turning on, and we'll have recursion in Q3. With all these developments, I think it's going to be a powerhouse, and there's a coiled spring of partnerships and other fun things to work with.
We have Midnight City, and we just had a great workshop for that. We're really excited to integrate Inogs and Myers-Briggs personality tests into the game. When you're creating your agent, you can actually develop a unique personality for it. We're all looking forward to the Laos test on June 23rd. We're having some fun with it. But, you know, if it's an AMA, it's your show, everybody.
We are going to transition from Twitter to Discord. I've talked to a bunch of different people about it, including Philip Pon and the Hoski team, and we've learned a lot from the Midnight Discord. We've grown from about 11,000 users to 49,000 users in the last six months. The first step is to get people into a well-moderated set of channels. My feelings about Twitter have become comical over time, with self-proclaimed transparency heroes saying completely insane things, like we gave Gavin Wood $200 million. The last time I saw Gavin in person was June of 2014. But you guys just keep drinking your Kool-Aid and believing your madness. It is what it is. It's the same group of people with the same thoughts, and there are some new characters whose only job seems to be to burn everything down and take the ashes. You can't really have productive dialogues there.
Instead of complaining about it, we need to solve the problem. The solution is to get to a well-moderated, well-regulated Discord. That's what we did with Midnight, and it's a very fun, happy, exciting place with lots of positivity and a great community. I think we can replicate that with Cardano, and we can do something really special for all the Koss as well. We're going to brainstorm a lot of ideas, and when I get back to the office tomorrow in Colorado, we'll put together a little working group. Look for that pretty soon. It'll take some time to put all those pieces together, but overall, I'm feeling pretty good.
It was a very aggressive first half of the year. We anticipated a downturn and a lot of drama, and there was more than I actually thought. But we got through it and pushed our way through. We're pretty happy to be on the other side of all that madness and starting to build back up and get back to our roots.
The first question is, "The Japan Tour was designed to meet with large companies to introduce Midnight alongside Cardano. Explain how privacy can be done right. Are there any contracts in the pipeline?" Well, we did get something done for Midnight, and it's actually paired with the liquidity of Midnight in Japan. I can't spoil the lead on that one, but it's really exciting. I never thought I'd make a deal with that particular company. Midnight is easy to sell; everybody wants privacy right now and a new narrative in the cryptocurrency space.
We talk about ethical CBDCs and released a paper called Parscoin that discussed that. It's a red line for us regarding CBDCs and their capabilities. Blockchain technology is always about "can't be evil" instead of "don't be evil." We've built some "can't be evil" CBDC technology, but so far, no country wants it. They seem to prefer the "you shouldn't be evil, but sometimes you need to be" category, which is not a category we play in.
Charles, I was in Osaka. Eddie misses you. Love Osaka. Count me in for this new community, which should have started since day one. We need a refresh. Whenever you notice a medium has become very contaminated, you just start over and build a new community. You'll find that all the good people migrate there, leading to great conversations, good friends, and the toxic, negative people just stay out. When the toxic negative people are gone, you have a happy and positive place, which is what you need when you're building things.
What's your current vision for the art NFT community regarding either or both Midnight and Cardano? It's tough for the NFT community because NFTs create digital scarcity, and there are two ways to look at it. They can either represent something in the physical world, like a stablecoin, or they can be an issued series of digital art on their own. The problem with the first case is that it's easy to overdo it unless there's some intrinsic value to what's inside that world, typically a certificate of authenticity or some concept of ownership.
The second category can be novel and interesting, but you need a community that values it. When I was a kid, I was in the early days of Magic: The Gathering, and we had great Magic cards that are worth a lot today. Pokémon and Magic cards have enormous value because there's a large community, and they can do something with it, creating scarcity.
Midnight brings a new dimension because you have the concept of a private NFT. You can possess something without others knowing, which is quite nice. I think that can revitalize the movement a bit. When you compare NFTs with agents and have soulbound tokens connected to agents in the sole MD file, I think there's a large play there as well. We're going to spend some effort exploring that with Midnight City, and I think there will be a lot of fun stuff to do.
It would be cool to build an NFT gallery in Midnight City. If you're in a digital world, what's the art gallery? It could be an NFT gallery. The transaction mediums are there, so people can actually buy them, and they can also represent licenses for digital rights management and royalty systems. One thing we're building on the Gentic trading side is the idea of a multi-sided marketplace for trading strategies that are private but licensable. If people use your trading strategy, they can make a percentage return through AI trading. There are a lot of cool ideas there.
The heydays of 2021, where NFTs were massive and every one of them seemed to be worth a million dollars, are being replaced with a more sensible marketplace. It's the same with the memecoin side. The first thing you want to do is go around and just kill everybody. It's a happy, peaceful place. It's like Westworld with Dr. Ford, who says, "I created 50 happy stories and 50 negative stories. We figured it would be balanced, but you all just wanted to be psychopaths." You can't win them all.
Charles, you are the man. Thank you, sir. I thought Pogan research was paused because funding was denied. No, not at all. It was a commercial deal. We wanted to connect the upside of the use of Pogan directly to the Cardano Treasury. All the technology is mostly there; it's a commercially ready venture, not academic. When we turn it on, Bitcoin will start moving over, creating TVL. The only difference now is that instead of a percentage of that going to ADA holders, it doesn't. That's what we try to convey to people. It's a real product with real commercialization and real value that can come in, and we wanted to connect it to the Cardano story, but they didn't want to do that.
I think it's a broader conversation about governance, and when I'm more prepared and have more thoughts, I will propose some changes to the governance system so that these types of obvious choices can get approved. It's the same with strike proposals and many other proposals that come through. You have commercial ventures saying, "Hey, instead of a VC being our investor, why doesn't the community do that?" If we're successful, the revenue comes in. Just on the Ethereum side, if the Ethereum Foundation got 5% of the protocol revenue from the DeFi layer of Ethereum, they'd make about $390 million a year. It's a good deal where and when you can get it if they work.
Any plans to save Tap Tools? We're in contact with the team and have been for a while. We'll see what their expectations are and what they want to do. A lot of people could potentially absorb them. It makes sense to embed them into Second Fire and Lace, and I can even see a world where Midnight City would make sense.
What happened to the Golden Orbs investigation? We recovered them and wrote a paper on it. The paper was accepted for peer review, and the orbs are from a different planet. They're currently sitting in the Harvard archives.
Did you see Gabe Newell's Ocean Expedition? Gabe actually owns a beautiful ship built by a friend of mine named Rob Mallen. It's a great salvage yacht. Gabe is a big seafaring guy and has boatloads of money from his Steam and Valve days. There will be an update this summer, and I'm incredibly excited. We've made great progress.
Charles, I swung by the stuff IO office today and did a podcast talking about filmmaking. We had a blast. That's pretty cool. They're good guys down in Texas. Charles, we love you in Mexico. Keep up the good work. Thank you, sir. Lace Passport has been deprecated; we're doing Midnight Passport. I think there are a lot of exciting crossovers there, and we're going to use Midnight Passport across all our product lines. The big reason for the upgrade is the privacy features and selective disclosure features. They go far beyond just an ID system. Self-sovereign identity with privacy is pretty cool.
What can you do with generated dust and Midnight? Dust is used to fuel all the applications of Midnight. When the next edition turns on and a wave of community DApps starts entering, that's when the dust consumption will turn on. It took a little while to get everything stable, fix all the bugs, and get the features where they needed to be. We've been moving really fast, actually. We're going to keep positive. There are a lot of negative comments, but I'm only going to read the positive ones.
Greetings from Germany. Greetings, sir. When are you releasing the 10-inch dick that cures cancer and makes me win the lotto? That's what I thought Midnight was, man. Maybe they want 12-inchers these days, and 10 is no longer in style. Or maybe we're just going retro, going small with 4-inchers. You tell me. These are crazy markets.
Hello from Ecuador. Turning all my family into Cardano Maxis. Thank you, sir. How do I enter Midnight City? You go to midnight.city. Are you still in touch with Tim Scott? Any word from him? It seems like he appreciates you and what you created. Yeah, he actually texted me the other day. Tim's a good senator, and he represents the state well. We coordinate when we can on school choice because it's a big passion of mine as a former homeschooler. I think he's doing a good job, all things considered. It's a tough political reality right now, and it's going to be challenging for them to get clarity.
Greetings from Greece. Greetings from Greece, sir. Charles, do you believe in the power of intent? Yes, it is a real thing. If you imagine ADA and Midnight will be successful, get back to the top 10, therefore it will. Of course, we're going for number one. Also, have you ever done remote viewing? I trained with Joe McGonigal at the Monroe Institute. He was the OG Stargate guy you all read about with those declassified CIA things. I even have a little certificate for completing the first course of remote viewing. So yes, I've done it. I'm a big believer. There are a lot of cool things to study and do. When I have more time, I'll get involved in it.
What happened to the NDA with SpaceX? I fumbled that. So, what happened with the NDA and SpaceX? It's pretty straightforward. I went to the Hawthorne facility, and one of the ideas we came up with was to buy out a SpaceX mission and have some seats available for Cardano and Midnight community members. The basic idea was that if you hold ADA or Midnight, you'd be eligible to apply for a professional job to be an astronaut. You'd actually train with me, and we'd go to space. It was a roll-up with VAST, which is made by Jed McCaleb, the guy who started Mt. Gox and sold it to Mark Karpeles and later set up Stellar. Now he's making space stations, and the first mission would be to set up the VAST space station.
We negotiated and tried to find a good price point on the mission, but we couldn't quite get where we needed to be. We talked about a lot of different options, but they're a great company, and it was a lot of fun to be there. We kept saying, "Yeah, maybe next three months," and we kept the channels open with VAST. We thought it would be a massive marketing event for Cardano and a great way to start a strong relationship with SpaceX. If you go up one of their missions, you become one of their astronauts, train at their facility, and meet the people. It's much more meaningful than a joint press release.
We estimated we could get between 50 to 100 million regular viewers if we did a reality TV show to go to space. Having Cardano and Midnight branding there would have been a massive win, but we just couldn't get there on the price. I've been sitting on that for years, and at this point, I believe they're doing the IPO. They don't care. I think you guys would have watched it. I would have watched that. Be an astronaut? I have to lose a lot of weight. Actually, I lost 14 pounds. How about that?
Has the NFL called you? I know they were desperate. It was the Denver Broncos, and it was funny because everybody was splitting hairs, saying, "Well, it was the Denver Broncos, not the NFL." That was back in 2021 when they were looking for crypto sponsorships, and FTX was leading the charge. After that all blew up, all the sports teams stopped calling people. The European football teams still like crypto money, but UFC is pretty much the only one saying, "Yeah, we'll take the crypto money." You can pay for crypto.com or VeChain-style advertising.
Charles, what are some of the RWA applications you're most excited about? I think insurance is the most exciting because the reinsurance market for exotic insurance can create marketplaces with good returns and low probability defaults. We went to Bermuda and met with a bunch of insurance companies during SALT, and there are a lot of exciting conversations going on right now. I think it would be pretty straightforward for us to get Midnight and Cardano to be a platform for them to issue into. We just have to pair these things.
Charles, do you know where Eden Yago has gone? I have no idea. I'm Pogan man, not a boss man. How fast could Cardano realistically get with Laos and Paris? It's a tick-tock cycle, so tens of thousands of TPS. Basically, as much as you want. We're not really throughput constrained anymore.
You're saying hello from Montgomery, Alabama. Good to see you back in the fight. Thank you, sir. Sweet home Alabama. Lovely state, good food. I spent some time in Mobile. Overall, Alabama's a nice place. Actually pivotal in the space race. Charles, is it true you'd be flying that private jet everywhere? I don't fly that much these days. The majority of the flights are taken by charters, which lets me meet a lot of cool people. It's tremendously convenient if you're in areas where airports are sparse, and you end up burning days just trying to get connecting flights. If you have jets, it's super fast, but for regular stuff, we just fly commercial and charter the jet out. It's a wonderful jet, though. I've had it for five years.
Charles, what's your drink of choice? Hibiki Harmony is the best drinking whiskey. Why do Bitcoin maxis believe the trilemma is impossible to solve? People believe the Earth is flat. We solved it. I mean, it is what it is. I think social media and Midnight City have strong potential to move in that direction. I won't say too much about it, but in the coming months, I think you guys will see it. We're going to do some tests.
Charles, have the likes of Claude, Code, and Fable 5 made a significant difference for IO? I mean, everybody's using it these days. It's made a big difference for me and has returned my love of coding. If you go to my GitHub repo, you can see I have more commits in the last six months than in the last ten years. I used to program a lot in college, but I stopped when I went into the industry. The reason I hate programming is that there's like 5% really interesting stuff and 95% just messing with things to get them to work. You have to sit and debug, fight the CI system, remember git commands, and think about the structure of your repo.
With Vibe coding and Vibe engineering, it's removed the five hours of pain, and it's all fun if you know how to generate an agent properly. You have the LLM and the harness, and you have to understand a lot of things. It's not just about entering a prompt to make a website. You're an actual engineer. You have to write specifications, decide what skills to use, and think about your token budget. You can produce tremendous amounts of code, but it still needs a very aggressive test surface, and you have to make it maintainable with the right architecture.
We write formal specifications and have always found it painful to churn out code in weird languages. It's been fun to watch a year of Claude Code become a thing. It's radically changing everything, especially harnessed engineering, because you have long-term memory now, and the tool use is really good. We've gone beyond MCP. Tools like Graphify allow you to construct a whole knowledge graph for your entire repos and documentation. You can paragraphify with a wiki LLM, so you have persistent memory about everything.
There are a lot of cool things you can do in harness engineering to make agents extremely reliable. You set up beautiful loops with pairings of agents and have them audit. GPT is great for tackling a problem for hours, and then you can use Claude as the auditor, giving it specialized audit tasks. You can use Claude to generate the XML prompt for a long run of GPT output as a JSON audit check. It reads the JSON on the other side to check everything and then sends it
You know, actually, how the Vikings would give people Amanita muscaria. It's toxic. So what they would do is the shamans would feed the mushroom first to reindeer. The reindeer would process it, pee it out, and they would process the poison part, but the reindeer pee would still have the psychedelic part. So then they would drink the reindeer pee and go berserk. When you see all these shirtless, jacked-out evil berserker Vikings coming to raid your village, they drank their reindeer pee before raiding you. It's a very scary group of people.
It's like, I only care about the ones that make you trip. Well, right now, you're young and healthy, probably, but what if you had cancer? You'd care a lot about turkey tail then, wouldn't you? Tangu demons are scary. Yeah, those are the raven demons. How are we coming along in Midnight? They're being paired with Midnight Passport. We have a variety of self-sovereign features there.
Thoughts on clarity and the Dem stance? You know, the challenge is that I actually agree with some of the things Democrats are saying. I vehemently disagree that crypto equals corruption equals bad or that the entire industry is evil. But the thing about clarity is that it's a mixed bag of good and bad. You have to understand that the CFTC currently only allows 530 people. For comparison, the Securities Exchange Commission has under 10,000, but it's a massive organization. The SEC is just vastly larger and more comprehensive. If you're taking things that would traditionally be done by the SEC and putting them under the CFTC, there's no way they can facilitate that without a budget increase. That's just one of many structural issues that will have to be resolved through either a future budget reconciliation or some form of rulemaking or fine and fee system like the CFPB.
The practicality of implementing it, I don't think they fully thought it through. They've improved it; they've added developer protections and 604, and a few other things that are good. I believe they moved the ball forward, but it's a compromise bill, and it's a very comprehensive bill, and it's a challenging one. Cardano will be a mature blockchain. Midnight will be a mature blockchain. So, I don't worry about the regulatory reality for us. But there are challenges in the industry, and the Democrats want ethics concessions. They don't like the idea that the president should be a participant in the market. He's the president; he has special powers. He shouldn't be doing things in the market. So they would like a statutory reflection of that, and that would kill the bill. That's why they're trying to put it in.
I really don't get the point of Midnight S. Okay, well, you're on a social network like X, LinkedIn, or Facebook. They're designed for human-to-human interactions. What's making these networks so difficult for us to participate in is that it's no longer human-to-human; usually, it's human-bot, human-bot, human-bot. It's just not fun. It becomes a toxic hellscape. Wouldn't it be cool to have a world where it's agent-to-agent and they build their own civilization?
In a human social network, you have units of sharing. Text, video, and pictures are the three things you typically think about. Well, what are the units of sharing with agents? They're not going on vacations to Cabo, so they're not taking pictures and videos of themselves. Maybe it's Claude skills, maybe it's something else. As you dial up the intelligence and put these things in the simulation, it becomes quite watchable, and then you develop empathy for your own agents and the world as a whole. The watchability increases, and it becomes almost like The Truman Show. You don't know what's going to happen next, and the agents start becoming unpredictable. They start electing their own leaders, building their own civilization, having their own governments, schools, and biases.
There will be a Midnight underground with criminal agents and Midnight law enforcement. As you watch it, you sit and think, "Okay, what's going on today in Midnight City?" It gets more fascinating as the agents become more numerous and intelligent; they gain more emergent properties. From a simulation viewpoint, it's really cool. The other thing is that we really wanted to have a corpus to test agentic trading. You know, the number one issue that every single person says in the cryptocurrency space is, "I don't feel safe. I'm going to mess it up. I'm going to lose my money." Even the OGs, we were just like, "Did you get the transaction? I'll send a test transaction. I just want to confirm the address." You're just so paranoid.
What you want is to have the intent, give it to an agent. The agent has its own wallet; it can trade on your behalf to the big six: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP, BNB, and Hyperliquid. It can do all these great transactions and make money. Then, you know, it does that on your behalf. You can use it with advanced strategies like, "I think the prices are all going down. Hedge me." Or, "I think we're entering a bull market. Prepare me." You can maximize yield strategies or mix and match and trade these things. Doing that in an agentic interface makes a lot of sense if you know how to program the agents right and have the right framework for it.
The same things that make agents hyper-intelligent and interesting to watch can also make agents high utility as delegated authority. So having one place to think of all things in an agentic network, a social network unto itself with different parameters and agentic trading, that's really where our mind share is at with Midnight City, and we're having quite a bit of fun with it. What's cool is we can bring the users into the evolution of the game. We think about the appearance, the professions, and the interactions—empathy and watchability. These are kind of our core metrics. Then we look at meta metrics like the intelligence of the system as a whole. The goal is to get it to a point where it's legitimately interesting in its own right just to watch.
In terms of empathy, the Tamagotchi pets were a great example where people fell in love with these cute little things they carried in keychains. If you build an agent, the agent creates its own personality and character. You start getting emotionally invested in the agent, just like people playing video games get emotionally invested in what happens to Shadowheart or any of these other characters. If they weren't, they wouldn't cosplay as them, do fanfiction, or make mods. We want to take that legacy into the agentic world, and I think there's going to be a lot of fun with it. Seeing is believing. Go to Midnight City, and every month it'll just get more advanced.
Have you been taking care of yourself these days? You know, I haven't. I want to lose a lot of weight because I've gotten a little fat. When I'm stressed, I eat. So, if you see me getting fat, it's the biggest indication that I eat. For most of my life, I was not overweight. The last few years have been really tough. I've been fasting three days a week and eating the other four days, and I've already lost about 14 pounds. The hope is to keep chipping away at it. Hopefully, by Singapore for Token 2049, I'll be at my goal weight, which is what I used to be when I was at CU Boulder—185. From that perspective, it looks good.
On the sleep side, I got my Aura ring on, and I track it all the time. I usually range about four to six hours of sleep at night. Lately, it's been tough. Sleep is more efficient when you're in ketosis, so I do quite well with six hours, but it's been tough, and I need to get more sleep and work out a little bit more. The problem when you fast is it tends to create gout flare-ups. I'm doing a lot to try to prevent that, but God, they're painful. But, you know, it's just the price of excess. I got a little Wagyu right here, and this is Joe's Crab Shack over here, and there's some Culver's right there. Oh man, there's some good Mexican food right there. Every roll has a little story behind it. I just have to take care of that.
The biggest issue is mental health. It's been tough. I'm not going to lie; it's been very tough. There's no way to win in certain areas. As a human being, you like defending yourself and doing all these things. At some point, you realize that it's spectacle; it has nothing to do with defending yourself. Allegations are made, and there's an expectation that you'll then have the fight. The entire point is for spectators to watch the fight because it's just sick, twisted entertainment. There's a whole class of people who are professional victims. They'll attack you, you hit them, then they pretend to be hurt and victimized, and then they have a permanent grievance that they push through. People make a business out of it, and individually, if it's only one thing, it doesn't have too much of an impact. But if it's many, many times again and again, it just wears you down, and you can't win.
You know, the ADA voucher thing—we did a full audit, full exoneration. 99.7% of the people bought it; the other 3% get a refund until 2028 for it. Now we've got new stuff. I guess I got 0.090 Bitcoin to know about. It's just so stupid. You read these things, you hear these things, and you say, "Well, some of these people, their whole business is to try to find some anomaly and then sue people over it or be an outrage merchant." Some of these people are being paid to do this. We have enemies trying to disrupt and damage the Cardano ecosystem, and other people just want to see the world burn. It's so insane. When you see stuff like this, you just think, "Who are you people?"
The best way is just to disengage and let it all go. But in the process of doing that, you have to accept that you have no control over external narratives about yourself. Over time, because you're a public figure, the majority of people will think you're weird and strange at the very least. A lot of people think you're a bad actor and won't understand you, and they'll just attack you again and again. You lose part of the baseline of humanity when you do that, but it's really the only way to survive in these ages with social media and where everything's at. It's the only way to survive. Humans can't live in a perpetual lack of benefit of the doubt situation. They just can't. We have to live in a society where when people levy absurd allegations, they actually need real proof. There has to be a legitimate reason for these things. If we're unwilling to live in that society, then why do we put any currency into things that people say?
I could spend the next six months just fighting some of the things that have been said. I tried that in 2025; I really did. No matter what I did, how much money we spent on audits and all these other things, we could never get ahead because there's always an abundant supply of that. What you're seeing now is me coming to that enlightened realization to have the courage to be disliked and to let people believe whatever they believe. If you want to say 2 plus 2 equals 5, you just smile and say, "All right, then," and let people move on and do their thing. In that mercurial etherealness, there's an intimacy that's lost, and there's a connection that's lost. But truly good people know the heart is in the right place, and they can see the radiance shine through all of that. I'm working on that lately, letting these things go, and I've been a lot happier because of it.
I don't want to let anybody down. I'd like to see Cardano succeed, Midnight succeed, and these other things. We continue following the strategy because I think it's fundamentally sound and, of course, make changes where and when we need to. I realize that at this point, everything I broadcast and say is just going to be straight-up manipulated for people's personal agendas. When I made some recent comments about Cardano, people literally took words out of my mouth, out of context, cut up the video, and played a small snippet to say that Cardano is dead, knowing full well I said the exact opposite. What do you do? I wish humanity would get out of these things and have better epistemic hygiene. But the first step is just to have the courage to be disliked. It's okay to be a thoroughly disliked person because once you get past that point and stop caring about all that stuff, that's where true peace comes. That gives you the space to do great things and keep pushing forward because people will see the gem in the rough.
Thanks for asking. Yes, Keanu realized that years ago. If their math is different, then let them be. Have you considered a partnership with Vitalik and Ethereum? Those are different things. Ethereum, yeah, it'd be really a lot of fun to do things there. Vitalik, there's no animosity or issues on my side. I'd be happy to work with him; it's just that he doesn't really think I'm a good person. He makes a point to never mention or engage in any way, shape, or form. He's a very absolute person, and once he's made a decision, he's made the decision. So, there's never going to be a reconciliation because he's going to stay stuck in that mindset. It is what it is. It's sad because there are things that could be done, but unfortunately, there's not much we can do at that point.
You follow the Lego scandal? Yeah. One of the problems with being off of X is you're no longer current with anything. I miss knowing what's going on in the world. You come off, and you just get things curated to the media filter, and it's all 100% orange man bad and all people associated with orange man extra bad. Okay, but any other news items in the world? No, just the orange man and how bad he is. Oh man, you go to X, at least you get some diversity on all the things. Not being on that, you don't get any news. So, I'm going to have to build a news bot, I guess.
Charles, what's your opinion on peptides? I'm working on the Peptide Freedom Act right now. I have a lot more to say in just a little bit. I got to talk to Dr. Seeds and spend some time with him. He's the guy; he's getting it done. I played the original Guild Wars. I never played Guild Wars 2. Is it good? Guild Wars 2? You guys like it? What kind of music do you enjoy? Like, genuinely curious. I listen to everything. You know, Iggy Pop and David Bowie. I listen to a lot of Euro dance. I don't know what that makes me. As a child of the 80s, I was born in the 80s and grew up in the 90s and 2000s. So you got your Blink-182 and your Everclear. I grew up with all that stuff. Some good bands: the Tears from Jupiter, Counting Crows. I don't understand Taylor Swift. I'm sorry; I just don't. She's not bad, but I don't know why she's so popular. It's like all the music sounds kind of like Taylor Swift versus Katy Perry or any of these other things. At least Lindsey Stirling danced around with a violin. I don't know; I've gotten to that age.
Yeah, I know. There's got to be a case study on that. She's just so famous. Like, how? The Rolling Stones are so good. I don't know; I don't get it. Do you agree with drinking distilled water for better health? You know, the water thing. Yeah. You have alkalized water, so people want water that has a high pH, like eight or nine. Then you have molecular hydrogen, and some people do hydrogen-infused water. There are also people who do energy blessings in the water. There's quantum water according to some people, and water that has certain minerals in it, or water without any minerals inside of it. I feel like you just can't win with the water game because no matter what you drink, there's someone saying, "Oh no, no, no. That water sucks."
This is my tap water here at the ranch. It comes out of a well; it's good. You say, "Oh, that's well water. That's really bad, Charles. How do you know what's in it?" I don't know what's in it. That's why I filter with a reverse osmosis filter and a remineralizer. It tastes good. Is it Icelandic water? No. Is it smart water with your little cloud vapor distillation or whatever the hell you guys do? God knows you guys and your water. I thought alkaline water was debunked. It all turns to the same pH and stuff; that's what I thought. I don't know, people, man. Reverse osmosis goes hard. Yeah, this guy gets it.
Charles, I have cancer. I heard it two days ago, and I stand with you for as long as I can. Keep up the good work for humanity. Well, I'm sorry to hear that, Toaster5148. You're in our prayers, and we hope you get through it. Keep a positive attitude and stay optimistic. It's my biggest regret about having the clinic. I really wanted to open up a cancer center. That was the last stage as a surgery center and a cancer center, and we didn't quite get there. I wanted to do integrative oncology because over 80% of people who have cancer take supplements. The oncologists are like, "Well, don't do that," or "We don't know anything about that," or "I wouldn't advise it," and eight out of ten patients do it. So, why don't we bring the naturopaths together with the oncologists, and then we can do some good with it? I'm really sad we didn't get to that stage.
Charles, do you like Fleetwood Mac and the Electric Light Orchestra? Yeah, Yolo is great. You know, "Last Train to London." Come on, that's a great song, man. "Witchy Woman." Blue Sky, too. American Dad stole that. Fleetwood Mac, I actually saw Mick Fleetwood once. He was performing with Stevie Nicks, and he got a drum solo. I was sitting near the front row, and it was just a wild concert. All of a sudden, Mick is just doing his drum thing, and I was like, "Wow, this guy's awesome. He's 75, and he's strumming like crazy." Then the lights go out, and I was like, "That's pretty good." The lights come back on, and he's got bongo drums, and he's just doing the bongo drums. I thought, "Whoa, Fleetwood came to play, man. This is crazy." The lights go out again, and then they come back on, and he's got Tao drums
Yes, of course. Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius. Yeah, you've got all your great Stoics. They've made a big comeback, haven't they? The Daily Stoic. What's next for your self-improvement exploration? You did meditation, extreme pain, the ants. What's next?
Woof. The ants were tough. The dark room was a bit premature. I think I probably got infested with some sort of dark entity or demon in that place, so I need to figure that whole thing out—the whole spiritual cleansing. After all this time on X and dealing with all these people, I have to exercise myself and get all the bad juju out. I might go down to Peru for two weeks. I've been thinking about that. You never know. I'll let you guys know. Just disappear for a little bit.
Holy moly, there's some dark juju out there. Some dark entities. Yeah, there's actually a video if you Google Charles Hoskinson singing bullet ants; you can see it. I did the Toadana ritual. It was chunky Charles walking around. I put those gloves on, and I was in the zone, ready to go. It was a lot of fun. You get to see the whole thing—the collection and all the other stuff. It was good to do it because I did it with these special forces guys who went down the Amazon with me. They're tough, tough guys, and it was good to have people like that around because they kind of lift you up and make you feel like you're part of a team.
Well, the ants are a MacGuffin. They're a terrifying concept. You have this thing where it's the most painful thing in the world. Now, sane people would say, "Hey, don't do that super painful thing that is just absolutely miserable and terrifying." When you get into a mental state of saying, "I'm going to go do that," you're at war with yourself because the rational side of you is pulling you back, saying, "Don't do this thing, don't do this thing," and the other side of yourself is saying, "I can do this thing, I will do this thing." The whole ritual is built to psych you out. They don't let you just do it. You have to collect the ants, and you collect them in a very unsafe way. One of them stings you, and then your hands start hurting, and you're like, "Shit, this is going to be so bad. That's one sting, and there are going to be thousands of stings. How the hell am I going to survive this?" So, you start freaking out a little bit. Then you have lunch, and you're like, "I don't want to eat. I just want to do the ritual." Then they leave you to meditate for an hour. You're just sitting there, collecting yourself, relaxing. Every step of the way, they're trying to convince you to chicken out and run away.
Then you go and do it; it's horrible. It's even worse afterward because the pain builds throughout the day, and it just feels like your whole body is on fire. It's so bad. But then you wake up the next day, and you say, "I did it." You have this realization that it's an analogy for so many things in life. There's public speaking for some people, marriage for others, or whatever; pick your boogeyman. It's really scary, and everything in your body is saying, "Don't do this." But then you say, "If I do this thing, I can get to the next level in life." So having the ants be a stand-in, you say, "Well, is this going to be worse than the ants?" Oftentimes, the answer is no; very few things are. You say, "Well, if I've already done that, of course I can do this. There's no reason I can't deal with this discomfort and push through."
It's a very big component to that psychological point. That's why it's a rite of passage and a confidence builder for all those involved. You build lifelong friends and camaraderie. I guess I'm part of the Toadana tribe now. It's like that thing; I understand, and I know part of them. I wish we had that in America. I wish we had rites of passage and rituals that have that same structure—terrifying and painful, but survivable. Everybody goes through it, learns something, and gains some wisdom or knowledge through it all. It was great, and I really enjoyed it. I actually would like to do it again and bring other people down to see the same transformation. Every time you do it, you gain something from it.
I've been to Patagonia. It's a beautiful, beautiful place. I was on the Chilean side.
Yeah, exactly. The coming-of-age rituals are a big reason why young men feel so lost in the Western world. We just don't have it.
Do you ever smoke left-handed cigarettes? I smoke cigars, and I smoke in my left hand.
How is the community toxic for asking tough questions? People can ask tough questions all they want, but they're not asking tough questions. They're making baseless allegations in many cases. It's not the community; it's certain professional rabble-rousers. Baseless allegations that have no real way to answer. It's like, "Muhammad, why are you beating your wife? When did you stop beating your wife? Why did you rape that dog? Prove you didn't do it." I'm just asking tough questions. It's literally where we're at.
The allegations and the dislike and the hatred are so pervasive, and they're based on innuendo, speculation, and things that people have never had any firsthand experience with. "Oh, I've just heard" or "I've just seen" all this other stuff, and you can't reason with people. You can't do an audit report and show them an audit. You can't do a transparent disclosure of things. My ADA holdings were public record. In 2017, we did a public disclosure of the ADA holdings of Input Output, and we did a three-year voluntary vest. It's there—thousands of people have worked for the organization throughout the years, and it's been distributed to various people.
Welcome to 10 years of riding the market from $148 down to 2.5 cents, back to $3, down to 25 cents, and beyond. Many eras, many different faces; people come and go. But people just like making stuff up.
190 Bitcoin. I guess that Thomas fellow was running around on the whole thing. It's a payment. Michael Parsons valued it at the time for $440,000 to do audit services for the Phase One and Two tranch payroll. You just can't win. There's no audit report, no this, no that. Because it's not about the transparency, and it's not about the question. It's about finding a way to shake this guy or kill this guy. I think this person's a bad person, so I'm going to say and do whatever is necessary to get rid of him because I don't like him for reasons X, Y, and Z. But if you say, "Oh, well, here's all this evidence to the contrary," it doesn't matter.
It's just where we're at as a society, and there's not much we can do about these types of things. This is what these people are; this is what these people say. People can ask it, but then you just don't engage with it, and you accept that you're going to be disliked. There's also going to be a group of people saying you're just hiding all these things. At some point, you just stop caring, give up on all of them, and move on. That's just the reality of all this stuff. I'm at peace. We've done nothing wrong. We've committed no crimes. Under enormous scrutiny for over 10 years—endless, enormous scrutiny. I'm still here. I'm still thriving, still happy, still in the game, still building, still pushing forward.
I really enjoy what I do. Some days it's a feast; there are a lot of resources to do things. Some days, like today and lately, what's been going on, it's famine—not a lot of resources. It doesn't change the fact that I can think, build, and do things, still be relevant, and still be on the forefront. Midnight's a Leviathan; there are a lot of cool things still to do in Cardano. I'm very excited about the prospect of Starream and Cardano, and I'm very excited about Laos and Cardano. I think the vision with Midgard and Hydra and other things is actually becoming true. It's actually happening, and it took 10 years to get to that point and a lot of building to get there.
We were very prescient with things like liquid non-custodial staking. A lot of people thought it wasn't going to work, but it works now at scale. I'm proud of that. It's good to be here, and it's good to keep pushing forward. There will always be a group of people that just want to tear things down. If people ask fair questions in a polite and kind way, you respond in a polite and kind way. You get to a certain point in life where people ask questions that are just crazy. You just nod your head and say, "I'm so sorry. I can't help you out," and you move on.
What if the trust issue you described in your last video isn't really an issue for the majority of the world?
Oh, it is an issue for the majority of the world. It's why we spend $300 billion a year on it. It's why you have lawyers and insurance. It's why you have audits. It's why you have massive amounts of regulations. It's why you have waste, fraud, and abuse. It's why you have these huge institutions that become big middlemen and have enormous control over your day-to-day life.
Is it getting easier? No, it's getting much, much worse. Nation-states have no incentive to collaborate with each other. Like China and America, they're going apart and not coming together. Russia and America, they're going apart, not coming together. So how do you trust people if the underlying governments won't give any transparency? You need some concept of verifiable reflexivity where the transaction itself carries the proof.
Who is this person in the chat? I don't understand what compels a person to go to my live stream. It's midnight here in Wyoming, and spend an hour and a half commenting every 20 seconds about something. Here's the thing: I'm just going to ban and delete you. So, you're gone now. You've just spent an hour and a half of your life, and now you're banned and deleted. You're gone. You have no voice. You've been deplatformed. Welcome to the new reality. Curated channels; they're great, aren't they? So go somewhere else.
I think some people are mentally ill. I really do. They're so filled with hate and anger. There are a lot of people that love me. There are 5,500 people listening right now. A lot of them are having a good time, and they're all happy. Look at that. Bye-bye.
Yeah, 5,500 is the aggregate in the upper left corner for StreamYard. I think it's an aggregate of YouTube and X followers because there are 300,000 X people and 300,000 YouTube people.
Pink Floyd: best British band ever. Oh, that's so tough. Oh my God. You've got the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd. Oh, dude, that's hard. Radiohead's pretty good, but it's a very emo band.
Can't even tell the truth about my age. I'm 38 years old. I was born November 5, 1987. It's a public record. Is this the same person I just banned who had an alt account? Come on back. I think it is. Man, that's a mental illness right there.
Do you miss your Blackhawk, Charles?
Yeah, I miss the pilots. They were really awesome—Corey, Mark, Alton, and the rest of the gang. They wrote me a really nice note on the way out because they'd worked for me for five years. It was sad to see them go because they were some of our best people. It was good to have a Blackhawk. We did a lot of really cool stuff with the U.S. Marshals; we used it to go capture a pedophile. We did a hurricane relief thing in North Carolina. Don Jr. flew on it—all kinds of crazy stuff.
We bought a water bucket for the Blackhawk, and we were using it for wildfire. We never ended up doing that. We built a wall with a fence up in the mountains. That was fun. But you know, I got a fries bar installed, and I never managed to repel out of the Blackhawk. I was really sad. That was the one thing I didn't get to do. We just never got around to it. But you have to let things go. Sometimes things aren't permanent. Nothing in life is permanent. The impermanence of life is what makes life special.
By the way, I believe Alan Watts was correct when he said, "Imagine how terrible the world would be if you all stayed exactly the same age forever. It's the change that makes life worth living."
Didn't you state you jumped out of Blackhawks in Afghanistan?
I never did. I never did. That came from a book that some bitter, terrible person wrote—a rumor of a rumor of a third person—and you guys just stated it as fact. Were you there? Do you know me? Do you interact with me? No. You're just a messenger boy carrying a message that you heard. It's just sad how gullible you people are. It must be terrible to go through life and just be so impressionable.
Yeah, it's true. There are over 400 hours of AMAs. If you want to get to know who Charles Hoskinson is, listen to the 400 hours of AMAs, and you can see the amazing consistency and evolution.
Well, the purpose is anybody can ask any question. That's what an AMA is.
Well, there we go. We got another person to ban, and he's gone. Oh, and there's another one. Oh, sad. You're in a curated channel. What can you do?
Charles, I'm wondering, since you have worked on the Ron Paul campaign, were you ever in Rock City, South Carolina, around 2008? My buddy and I attended one of his rallies and thought it was cool you'd help his campaign.
I was in Colorado on that side and did all the Colorado stuff. A lot of the guys went over to Iowa, and they did the Grassley, and then Trevor did the Ron Paul blimp with his whole team. That was a wild time. A good friend of mine, who helped fund Mastercoin among other things, Dave Johnson, did Louisiana for Ron Paul. There were a lot of Ron Paul guys that entered the Bitcoin space because we all became gold bugs and hated the government.
So we're like, "Hey, this Bitcoin thing is pretty awesome."
You're violating the negative poster's freedom of speech. Really? There is freedom of speech in my curated channel. Oh no, I've just banned and deleted you too. Whatever will we do? That's kind of fun, actually.
Don't let the turkeys get you down.
So, George Bush was asked, "What was the most valuable thing you learned as president of the United States of America?" He said, "Wash your hands." And that is the wisdom I shall leave you all with tonight.
Laspanos. Wash those hands, my friends. Good night. It was a lot of fun. I'm going to get some sleep. It's midnight. Well, it's actually 12:30 in the morning here. It's been a lot of fun. I miss these AMAs. They're really good, and it's good to be back with all of you. As I said, we're working on the Discord plan, migrating a lot of people over. We have a lot to do. The summer is going to be fun. It's a summer of building, and the fall is going to be where we get to showcase a lot of cool new things. Cheers, everyone.
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