Hi everyone, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is June 30th, 2023, and I am back in the saddle after a nice sojourn to Papua New Guinea, as well as a few family affairs.
First, I want to thank everybody for their well wishes and condolences regarding the recent death of my grandfather. As many of you know, I’ve been in the cryptocurrency space for 10 years, and during that time, I started with four grandparents. My grandfather was the last one to go. I’ve lost all four of them—three from neurodegenerative disorders, and my grandfather Austin died of a lung ailment. He was in the Marine Corps and, like many of his generation, never complained and fought the wars he was told to fight. After leaving Marine demolitions in 1952, he became a lineman in the cable business and worked his way up to become a researcher and eventually an executive.
I posted an interview today where he talked about his 50-year career in the cable business, which started in the early 50s and ended in 1999. He held more patents than most, the most prominent of which was for the cable box. He was a great innovator, but unfortunately, many of his generation picked up a lot of ailments along the way due to their hard work. In his case, silicosis and asbestosis were significant issues, as he was exposed to asbestos while crawling through attics and working in demolitions. Later in life, this caused a lot of damage to his lungs. You’ll see in pictures from his 90s that he was on oxygen; he never smoked, had no vices, and didn’t even drink. He was a near-perfect man who raised five sons and two daughters. We made sure he received his last rites as a good practicing Catholic.
We miss him. It wasn’t unexpected; he was 93 and in poor health. However, it’s a great moment to take a step back and reflect on life in general, our personal places in it, the meaning of life, and the friendships and associations we have. If you have parents or grandparents still around, whatever you hear in the news about loss is a good opportunity to take some time out of your schedule and call them. You don’t have to talk about much; just call them. A close friend of mine who works at IO told me he calls his dad every weekend, and they mostly talk about the weather. He once said, “Dad, why do we only talk about the weather?” But he told me not long ago that he’d give anything just to talk to his dad about the weather again.
I have very fond memories growing up as a teenager, mowing the lawn at my grandfather’s place and sitting down to talk with him about politics and life. He always had strong opinions and often got into arguments about things. He didn’t like the way the world was going because his generation was the “don’t complain and get it done” generation. He had probably the strongest work ethic I’ve ever seen. There was never a time he wasn’t working on something, even in his 90s. He always wanted to build something, and everything was done with pen and pencil. He had a pocket protector, a ruler, a slide rule, and a compass, always drawing something on graph paper.
I remember helping clean out his basement years ago and seeing a vacuum cleaner with a manual. It surprised me because his generation never threw anything away. The instruction manual even had detailed schematics on how to fix it. I asked my grandfather, “Papa, why do you have these schematics?” He replied, “We never bought anything unless we thought we could fix it.” There was a mentality of repair, maintenance, and sustainability. His generation grew up with a lot of scarcity. In fact, in the basement, they had ration coupons from World War II. To buy things, you needed more than just money; you needed the right coupons because things were scarce, and everyone was involved in the war effort.
The Great Depression and growing up in a poor family in Michigan were formative elements that created that scarcity throughout his life. Despite starting as a lineman and working his way up, he retired a millionaire, which is truly impressive. He saved 20% of his paycheck, working with Dean Witter at Sears, where my grandmother worked. He would say, “You’re my investment guy; take care of the money, and I’ll make sure to give you 20% every paycheck.” That’s pretty impressive when you think about a single breadwinner with seven kids being able to achieve that.
This was a very different America, and it’s one that’s sadly gone. These relics of the past remind us of that, and we try to take the good and improve on the bad. I’ll miss him.
Looking to the future, many of you know that I spent two weeks in Papua New Guinea. I can’t believe the internet’s lack of prescience. Years ago, I started following 'Oumuamua and the amazing progress Avi Loeb was making out of Harvard. I thought it was really cool that he was putting an expedition together. Once he announced he was looking for funding, I called him up and said, “Avi, I’d love to work with you and find a way to get you the resources you need to recover it.”
When you look at the science, it was clear to me that the object we potentially may have recovered—still verifying that at Berkeley and Harvard—is probably interstellar, meaning it’s older than our solar system and came from a very faraway place. This would be the first interstellar object of that nature ever recovered. I thought it would be cool to document it, and he said, “Well, if you fund it, Netflix will come.” Jason Cohn from Netflix traveled with us, and they’re doing a 90-minute documentary on our quest to Papua New Guinea. Hopefully, that comes out soon.
If you look at the ratings, these things usually have about 50 million viewers. Avi was also on The Joe Rogan Experience, so it’s great to get exposure and show a human element of curiosity. I think it’s great marketing and visibility for who we are, what we’re about, and our commitment to good science.
What’s strange in astrophysics is that astronomers tend to get stuck in loops. A recent paper came out discussing the object we recovered, and what was extraordinary to me was that the author, a prominent figure in meteorology, stated that it couldn’t be iron; it had to be stony, and the government data must be wrong. They claimed there was no way to find it after we discovered spherules. It’s extraordinary to write a paper knowing that people are in the ocean looking for something and have published that they probably have recovered something, yet not contact us to confirm or deny what we found.
He said it couldn’t be iron, but we found iron. This is a strange field where they don’t believe their eyes or the physical objects in their hands; they believe their models are more important. It shows the groupthink that forms in science. The same thing happened in economics when we discussed deflationary monetary policy and full reserve banking. If you talk to Paul Krugman about cryptocurrencies, he’ll say they cannot work; they lead to a deflationary spiral and will collapse. We’re now 13 years into this experiment, almost 14, and it’s working. The ecosystem continues to grow, yet somehow that’s not seen as a success but rather as a collective delusion that will collapse at any moment.
Yes, I’m wearing this hat; it was a gift from John Vandergriff, who attended the MAPS conference in Colorado. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend because I was in the middle of the ocean. It’s a big conference on the science of psychedelics, and there are many great people studying that. What’s extraordinary is that they’re publishing groundbreaking papers showing that mushrooms, MDMA, Ayahuasca, and other substances are not only useful in treating conditions we typically can’t fix or cure, but they’re transformative in that they cure them.
There are cases of people who have been raped, tortured, or victims of war, as well as those who have had profound abuse or terrible childhoods, who go through psychedelic-assisted therapy and emerge as functional individuals. Their panic attacks and PTSD are gone. This is evidence you can see, yet the modern psychiatry field still seems to have a stigma about it.
It’s very similar to what we’re encountering in astrophysics, where the model dictates what’s true, regardless of evidence. I’ve always lived on the edges of science, in the pioneering areas where you can be wrong. I don’t like the safety of the shore, and I don’t think anyone should. You don’t make progress or change the world if you’re too obsessed with having your feet touch the bottom of the pool. Greatness comes when you’re willing to take risks and be wrong.
Avi asked me why I funded this when we could find nothing, and I said I funded it because we could find nothing. It’s an uncertain endeavor; you have to roll the dice, and someone has to be willing to take the risk. I thought that was the point of the NSF and scientific endowments. Why would we only fund things that are sure? If it’s safe, you learn nothing, you don’t grow, and you don’t get anywhere.
We have so many revolutions coming in the next five, ten, or fifteen years, from the large language model AI revolution to the synthetic biology revolution, the psychedelics revolution, the robotics revolution, and the aerospace revolutions. These things will transform everything. It doesn’t take many people; a small group out in an aluminum boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean can find something that’s 200 microns in size that crashed into the ocean years ago, which may just be artificial and from a different solar system.
What would you do? How would your life change if you found definitive proof that we’re not alone in the universe? Suddenly, all our differences seem small because, despite different skin colors and cultures, they’re still human. Those are aliens. Maybe that will unify us and make us realize there are bigger, more important things in life.
This is what I talked about in the documentary, and we had a great team. We had salty sea captains like Art, 87 years old, who fought in Vietnam. He’s a sailor through and through and probably the best guy in the world to find things in the sea. He worked on secret government projects to find Russian nuclear subs and even found booster rockets. His white whale is looking for Amelia Earhart’s plane; he thinks he knows exactly where it is.
We had a geologist named Jeff, who invented many things and turned out to be a seventh-degree black belt in jiu-jitsu. There were a lot of young people too, like Ryan, an Air Force test pilot with a PhD in nuclear physics, whose expertise is in antimatter propulsion. I didn’t even know that was a thing!
I got to spend two weeks with them; they became my shipmates. While we were there, many of you saw that I tweeted about the OceanGate sub, stating that everyone was dead. I received harsh criticism from many people on Twitter as they watched the countdown of air running out. However, I knew about OceanGate before it was reported in the news because it had leaked to everyone in the submarine community. It’s a small community, and they knew the Navy had picked up the implosion signal.
They understood how submarines work; they don’t sink to the bottom—they float up. If you lose power while descending, you drop your weights and float up. So, there was no reality where they were stuck somewhere. Having found a signal, we all knew they were dead, and the Navy did too. They couldn’t admit it because the solstice system is classified, and they didn’t want to reveal capabilities.
What was horrifying to watch was that while a certain group of people were fully aware that these individuals had died instantly, the media decided to turn it into a spectacle. Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN literally had a countdown for people running out of air. I saw a “Lord of the Flies” situation on Twitter, where people speculated whether those in the sub would kill each other for extra air. Think about how messed up that is when they were already all dead.
I had a personal connection to the company, having reached out to them a few months ago about the Titanic tours. I had correspondence regarding the quarter-million-dollar tickets and thought they were too expensive. There were also some red flags in the correspondence, so I moved on. I didn’t realize how bad it was until we all found out. There are great companies like Triton, but this was certainly not one of them.
It was strange to be in that seafaring culture, knowing something for certain while everyone else debated it. Imagine how horrifying it was for the family members sitting on the sidelines, holding on to false hope manufactured for ratings. That’s one of the worst things that could be done. Deep-sea exploration is tough; it’s actually easier to land on the moon than to go to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. At 380 atmospheres of pressure, if you lose hull integrity, you die.
Three times, the air bubble compresses and gets hotter than the surface of the sun. You get mechanically crushed by the submarine, and there’s no way to survive. An explosive implosion is horrific, but it’s quick. Human beings can’t perceive more than 10 to 15 milliseconds, and implosion usually happens within one to five milliseconds. Before you’re even aware that something has occurred, you’re already dead.
That’s the story that should have been told, but instead, it was portrayed as if they were stuck on the bottom somewhere with 96 hours of air left. Even if you believe there was no means of getting a rescue vehicle to the bottom of the Titanic in that time frame, there was no reality where they could be saved. We allowed a spectacle to push its way through, and it’s sad. It’s more of an indictment of us as people than of any particular incident.
On to more positive things. Talking a little about Cardano and the ecosystem, things are looking really good. The Voltaire page is out, and we have a wonderful Voltaire animation showing all the cool places where workshops are being held. I want to take a moment to thank everyone participating.
What’s happening right now is that throughout the world, all these red pins indicate places where workshops are being held. For example, in California, there’s a SIP 1694 workshop. Latin America has had six different countries involved, and we did one in Ghana and another in Kenya. I was actually in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and there are several in Asia. The Cardano Foundation was kind enough to do one just outside Zurich, which is super cool.
All the feedback from these various places will be aggregated together, and we’ll have a closing workshop in Europe to sort through all the community commentary and come up with a draft final specification of SIP 1694. The next step is to get a fully functional testnet, and then people will vote. If they vote for it, we’ll fork it, and Cardano will have an official governance structure.
Everyone can become a delegate, and they can start opening up the treasury. It’s going to be really cool. When we opened up staking, thousands of people came, and thousands more are going to come for this. There will be lively debates, and it’s going to be exciting to watch. People will talk about priorities and vote on SIPs and other things.
If you like SIP 50 and Michael has convinced you to vote on it, bring it through. This is the point of SIP 1694: for people to be in charge and do all these cool things. I’m incredibly excited and fired up about this. It’s just so cool to see all the progress.
We have a wild, out-of-control U.S. government that’s going around saying everything is a security. If I find alien artifacts, the first thing Gary is going to do is show up and say those alien fuels are securities. It doesn’t make sense why they would be. We’ve explained it, and everyone else has too. Who cares? The world moves on.
The reality is that we’re all working together, and we’re making a lot of progress. Cardano is really maturing. Cardano Node 8.11 is incredible, and Plutus is shaping up, especially with BLS support. There are many wonderful things happening on the sidechain side and with Hydra. It’s exciting to watch all the moving pieces come together.
What’s really important is that every single step of the way, it’s become a giant open-source collective. There’s a lot of amplification, and we need good governance. That’s the point of things like an MBO in SIP 1694 and other institutions that are coming in. It’s about right-sizing the government to respond to the fact that we have so many people now, and things are moving through many different gates.
We’ll get there; it just takes a little time and patience. I don’t care about the noise. If you zoom out and focus on the signal, Cardano’s TVL is up 148% this year, and it’s growing. We have Jed, Cody, World Mobile, and amazing developments happening with sidechains. We have a ton of protocol upgrades occurring.
We have a whole governance structure with millions of people who will not only be engaged but will actively debate every single day about how to make Cardano better. Who else has that? Honestly, nobody. They look to leaders, to a strongman, wanting someone on a hilltop to tell them what to do. That’s not sustainable; it doesn’t get you anywhere. You need institutions and leadership from the many, not the few.
We held workshops in 43 locations around the world, from Ghana to Vietnam, Japan, Zug, and throughout Latin America to Philadelphia, where the U.S. Constitution was written. They came together not in two years but in two months. I’m pretty hyped about that. It’s completely bottom-up; that’s Cardano. That’s what we have, and that’s what we’re custodians of together.
All those people will be activated because those who ran the workshops are likely going to be the delegates. You can go to them and tell them what you want, and they’ll find a way to get it done. Thousands of people around the world are working together to make this organism we built together. It’s pretty magical and exciting.
I’m fired up about that. Those are the good things in life. Please tell me how I run Cardano when I can go to Papua New Guinea and look for aliens for two weeks, and all this stuff happens while I’m gone. Come on!
Yeah, I must be there pushing the button, right? Bureaucrats gonna bureaucrat. I’m starting to feel a bit of sympathy for you XRP guys.
1:07:35
26:05
26:19