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Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny—sometimes Colorado. I am here in my lovely home office. It is Sunday, August 31st, 2025. I’m back from Monroe, and there’s a lot to talk about—lots of stuff we’re doing. We’re in the middle of everything right now; it’s kind of the calm before the storm.
First and foremost, we are doing the glacier drop. What’s really cool about the glacier drop is that I get updates twice a day on the dashboard. So far, we’ve had 89,575 claims and a total of 1.764 billion, about 7.35% of the supply, which is exactly where we want to be. It fits a lot of the models and projections we have. What’s really interesting is that only 57.8% is from Cardano. The second largest is Bitcoin at 22.4%, followed by Ethereum at 9.15%. XRP Nation, you guys are doing great at 6.1%, and all other networks are about 4.46%. There’s going to be a big surge of redemptions on the tail, especially as new modalities come online. I think all the ledger issues have been resolved, and I’m asking about whether people can do that or not. But all things considered, with 35 days left, we’re doing pretty good.
The second stage is the scavenger hunt, where you mine some of the unredeemed stuff. Then you have the remorseful redemptions, meaning you can still redeem after the network launches, but you get a lot less. So, you actually have three different waves of redemptions that come online. I’m really happy about all those things.
Another thing—Joel Telner just tweeted something, and I’ll show you guys shortly. Let me go ahead and share my screen. Wow. Okay. He said, “Please see the link. As stated, Input Output Group has commissioned a comprehensive investigative report forensic audit of the ADA voucher program, including the pre-launch of vouchers, Cardano blockchain upgrades, and the use of ADA associated with unredeemed volume. The resultant investigation report forensic audit will provide a comprehensive transparent account of facts with findings and methodology documented in detail. The investigative report forensic audit will be released soon and published here in its entirety.” Here is the website, which currently has a splash page. Some of the final details are coming in.
We’ll put up software so you guys can see a whole bunch of cool things, like how the vouchers were built using the AVVM. The software and demos for that will be made available, along with the compliance application, the original Cardano Foundation audit reports that were made in four tranches, the Bitcoin addresses that were used to reconcile the 108,000 Bitcoin that was raised, as well as all the work of the auditors and the law firm that is slated for public release. It’s a very big data dump, and it’s taken an enormous amount of time to get here. It was a huge amount of work. They went through terabytes of data and records, interviewed lots of people, and went through financial records. So that’s coming soon. We thought it would be about mid-August, but it takes a little while to coordinate everything. There’s now a website to release all that. I’ll go ahead and put the link here for you guys, and when that drops, I’ll do a live stream of the actual report and artifacts. I don’t care if it takes a really long time; it’ll probably be the longest live stream I’ve ever done. We can read the whole thing together, so that’s coming soon. I hope you guys like it and enjoy it; I know you’ve been asking for it.
Now, let’s see what else we have. Another big news item dropped while I was away. I should just go away more often; a lot more gets done, apparently. We’ve had major progress with our good friend, or Boris Laos. Laos is a very complicated protocol with a lot of moving pieces and complexity. Our prototyping group has been working hard for the last seven months, figuring out how to compress down LEOS into a path of implementation—meaning getting something to market in a reasonable period of time that massively improves the state of affairs and also has the ability to have a series of upgrades thereafter that continue to improve the state of affairs.
Let me show you a little something. We have written a SIP, and now the SIP is open for review. I’m going to show you the TL;DR of the SIP; I think this is the most important part of it. This is the business part. There’s a lot of technical goodies there, and I’ll include a link for you guys. Basically, the throughput increases if Laos is implemented by 30 to 65 times. That’s pretty good for the first step. The latency only increases from 20 seconds to about 40 to 60 seconds for transaction inclusion. There are always trade-offs in these things, and it explains the whole process, but there are many things you can do to mitigate that using Hydra and other methods. Also, co-developing future versions of Paris with Laos, we can actually move to a fast finality system. The infrastructure really requires modest hardware upgrades—four-core machines, which means that Raspberry Pis can run it—and cryptographic key registration.
The time to market is about 1 to 1.5 years versus 2.5 to 3. We’re working as hard as we can to figure out how to make that number go down. We have to follow what’s called a “follow the sun” model to do that, meaning development occurs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The other thing is that it has to be co-developed with all the people building clients now, which is why we wanted Laos to be a little bit simplified over the full implementation; otherwise, nothing would ever get done because it’s too hard for everybody to pull that together.
It’s an extensive SIP with massive amounts of information. It’s the culmination of seven months of prototyping and work. It’s got acceptance criteria and a whole bunch of stuff inside it, so I highly recommend you guys read it. It has yet to be approved as an official SIP because it’s open for review. We have a path to achieve that. Here are all the acceptance criteria and implementation plans, as well as versioning and all the primary references. This is basically the heart and soul of a long arc scaling agenda because with all of this, we can keep adding more scalability, and we’re very convinced that the Laos program, as it evolves over time, will keep the Cardano network relevant forever.
The goal is to get to a one-minus-delta protocol where you’re no longer consensus-constrained but rather network-constrained. Then you can do all kinds of things to speed up your network stack. An enormous amount of work has to be done to implement this, but a big part was figuring out how to build it, simplify it, and get it into a SIP. Next, we need our partners, like TX Pipe, for example, and we need Blink Labs and all these others to read through it and comment on it. They’ve already been engaged and are starting to talk about it. The hope is to get to a final SIP, and then we can get it on the official implementation agenda.
This one’s going to be a little different because we’ve already started provisioning for the follow-the-sun model. Instead of just writing code whenever it’s done, we want to write code on the weekends, during the weekdays, at night, and during the day. We also want to use artificial intelligence to help with the handoffs. The Lace team has been experimenting with AI enhancements to coding, and they’ve had great success in massively improving developer velocity and code quality. We’re going to roll out a lot of AI enhancements as well and augment the development team. When they do the handoff from one team to the next, the context shifts with them, and we have rigid quality control that moves through.
It’s a new way of doing things. It’s never been done before in the history of Cardano. We’ve never moved this fast in the history of Cardano. What’s nice is that Laos knows how to plug into the rest of the ecosystem. It knows how to plug into our goals with Paris for fast finality. It knows how to plug into fee markets, Kronos for timekeeping, and the partner chains ecosystem. It knows how to plug into Hydra. It’s a drop-in system with Prowse, and when Laos fails, it fails back to Prowse. So, FRA becomes the emergency mode of the network, and Laos becomes the operating mode.
What’s really cool is that as it gets implemented, it’ll force a test suite between all the different nodes to ensure that Amaru, the Rust node, and the Go node are all interoperable with each other. This is the hardest thing we’ve ever done as an ecosystem, but it puts us in a really good position. Frankly speaking, it’s the first and most significant step towards unlimited scale with Cardano. What’s nice is we didn’t have to change UTXO; we didn’t have to change any of the fundamental assumptions of the system. For all intents and purposes, transaction determinism is preserved, and it fits into all the things that people are building. It’ll just fork like we’ve always forked.
I’m very proud of the team for this; it was an enormous amount of work to get there. We had to write the paper and figure out the whole long-term agenda. What’s cool is it’s future-proofed. Right after we finish the first implementation, the prototype team will already have the next upgrade ready to go for the 2027-2028 time horizon, which contains substantial enhancements as well. Our network stack is getting a little long in the tooth; the mini-protocol design is elegant, but it needs more flexibility. There are going to be some overhauls in that direction when we start bringing in a universal pub-sub network, as well as an event brokering system and data availability system. We’re kind of building our way up the stack with principles.
Overall, I’m very happy about the things that have been pushed through and the things that have been done. We’re getting there. Those are some of the big ticket updates.
Now, many of you would want to know about my time at the Monroe Institute. So, what is the Monroe Institute? Bob Monroe set it up in Virginia in 1958, and its claim to fame is that in the 50s and 60s, the Soviet Union decided to start a psychic program. They were really interested in paranormal and psychics, obviously for weaponization and strategic advancements. The CIA started getting documents from spies embedded in Russia that this program existed, so the Pentagon freaked out and said they needed a psychic program too.
In 1972, they went to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and said, “Let’s do some research into remote viewing.” This was done by Russell Targ and some of his friends. They did a bunch of research and found incredible results. The military decided they needed to internalize it, so they got six volunteers, which in military language means they picked six people, sent them to SRI to get trained, and then they went back to Fort Meade to run a program called Project Stargate from 1972 to 1995. The purpose of Stargate was to do remote viewing—to be able to see through space and time, things on the other side of the planet, and events in the past and future.
Sounds trippy and crazy, right? Well, they had amazing results. The biggest intelligence win that’s public is the Typhoon submarine. There was a giant building the Soviets were constructing, and nobody knew what was inside or what its purpose was. It was far away from the sea, about 5,000 feet from the ocean, so people guessed they might have built tanks or something. The remote viewers looked in and realized that despite not being adjacent to the water, they were building a giant submarine inside. Five months later, the Soviets cut a channel and launched the Typhoon sub.
One of the best remote viewers in that program was a gentleman named Joe McGonigal. Joe was remote viewer number one in the Stargate program in 1972. I learned about Joe when I was on the Sean Ryan show and had breakfast with Sean. I asked, “Who’s the longest interview you did?” He said, “Oh, it’s got to be Joe, I think, like six and a half hours.” We talked a little about Stargate and remote viewing. I said, “All right, I’ll keep an open mind about these things.” So, I decided to go to the Monroe Institute because Joe still teaches there. After the CIA shut down the program in 1995, all those refugees went to the Monroe Institute and started teaching remote viewing there. Joe is still there—he’s a little old and can be grouchy at times, but it was a great experience. A lot of wonderful people were there, and I had a tremendous amount of fun.
So how does it work? Well, I’ve got something to show you guys. It’s show-and-tell time. Basically, you clear your mind and relax. You’re given a target, like target 50 or target B17—no other information. Then you open your mind, and because Monroe was a big guy in binaural beats, you listen to some tracks that help synchronize your brain into the right state. Within a few minutes, you start getting impressions of what the target looks like. We call that a “just salt.” Those impressions are shapes, vague outlines, shadows—things like that. You start drawing those, and eventually, you get sensory information like colors, taste, hearing, and touch. If you go on long enough, it starts filling in spatial and dimensional information.
You’re describing a target; you’re not drawing a perfect picture of it. It takes a long time to extrapolate a perfect picture from that. The final test we had involved a lot of remote viewings. They give you a target, you write it down, and later they give you an envelope to open and see what you got. They said, “It’s your special target.” So, let me show you what I drew. I think this is one of the coolest things.
They said, “Charles, here’s your remote view of your special target.” You put it down on paper, write the date and time, and when you’re done, EOS stands for “end of session,” not the cryptocurrency. You just draw your impressions. There’s just salt started here where I drew this line, and then I said there are arches or something like that, and maybe there are pins or columns. I started getting impressions that it’s used for timekeeping, with green glass or something like that, gears involved, some form of a counterweight, an alligator-like texture, and some sort of vibration. I’m hearing a bell-like ring or something. I drew all this down over about a 30-minute period. I put it on my clipboard and went to sleep.
The next morning, they came in, gave us all the envelopes, and the envelopes were unlabeled. They randomly passed them out. I said, “Wait a minute. I thought this was just for me.” They said, “No.” After I got my envelope, they said, “All right, randomly pick somebody in the class and swap envelopes with them. They all have different pictures in them.” So, I went over and swapped an envelope with someone at random. Now I have an envelope, and there’s no way anyone could know what my target would be. My only prompt, because there are thousands of pictures floating around, was just “your special target.”
So, are you ready to see what the picture is? Ready? If you look closely, there’s an alligator-like texture there, ringing. Look at the structure, and you’ll see the arches. Right here is the green glass. Isn’t that wild?
So, why does it work? How does it work? I asked that question because I’m a skeptical guy, and stuff like this shouldn’t be possible. You have to completely reconstruct the metaphysics of the world. Three things have to be true for remote viewing to work. First, the universe would have to be conscious, meaning that the universe is pansychic. Consciousness is not an emergent property of your brain cells, but rather a non-local property. Everything has some degree of consciousness.
Second, you’d need what’s called a universal holographic information field. It’s universal, meaning it’s everywhere, and holographic, meaning one part of it can reconstruct all the information. Information has to work differently; instead of matter and energy producing information, information produces matter and energy. It has to be passive in that it’s unchanging, thus making block time real. The past, present, and future all exist together, but you have to be able to interact with it, which means your brain has to be a quantum computer.
There’s something called the orchestrated reduction theory that Roger Penrose and others came up with. There are a couple of pieces of this floating around, like Michael Levin’s work in xenobots. He’s starting to realize something is there, and also studying birds and how they navigate. There seem to be quantum effects that birds are using; they have a quantum compass. But that means you have to have a quantum oasis inside the brain—an environment that protects the computing from decoherence due to vibrations and heat.
That’s a lot to buy. But apparently, the Pentagon kept this program going for 23 years, which is a long time across multiple administrations. You can guess some kooky stuff, but for all that, it’s interesting, and that’s one heck of a picture.
For my part, I’m going to have an fMRI online here in a little bit. I also have the Colonel helmet that I got from Brian Johnson. I’m going to take some of these epic remote viewers, and we’ll scan their brains while they’re doing it. We’ll see if we can find any patterns, especially when there are successes. There are all kinds of things you can do. There are three stages: the remote viewer, the monitor, and the analyst. You can use it as a grading system. SRI developed the protocol so they could publish papers that were statistically significant. We’ll see what we learn from all of that.
I’m also very interested in enhancing states of consciousness to promote remote viewing—seeing if you can dial that up a little bit. You can shock the brain with magnets or electricity or light. You can use sound to induce certain things. It’s pretty crazy what you can do with all this stuff.
Anyway, that’s what I did for a week. It was a great experience. The Monroe Institute is very relaxing. It was good to be there and just meditate every day. They had yoga in the mornings, although it was too early for me, and I
We proved out an entire economic model, and now stakeful operators get two revenue streams instead of one, which increases the sustainability of staking inside the system. I'm just tired of it. I really am. It's frustrating that we have to pay out of pocket, and we're under so much scrutiny for everything. If you give money to the IO guys, it doesn't go to the Charles piggy bank fund for crazy things like buying Lamborghinis. Here's a news flash: off of the 108,000 Bitcoin that came through the Cardano thing, it made me a made man. When we go to IoG, we end up using it to either write code, build new products, or do integrations. Where do those products live? They live on Cardano, which brings users, TVL, volume, and adoption. It keeps the protocol alive and relevant, yet you want to nickel and dime us every step of the way.
It is what it is, and for the most part, we've just moved on. Intersect is funded, the Treasury is working, and the on-chain governance is where it needs to be. Midnight is where it needs to be. The CF has nothing to do with Midnight; they couldn't even redeem their night, so they have no say in that ecosystem. Every future partner chain we build will be the exact same, and they'll die a slow heat death because they have no economic model. Now, ADA will continue to go up, giving them a much longer runway, but by their structure, they have no means to interface.
You cannot have an organization where the board members have personal liability and expect them to do anything at all but plant flowers for war orphans. You have to take risks, do deals where you can get sued, and deal with fiduciary issues. You have to deploy capital and take chances. You can't do that in a conservative structure; it's handcuffs. They need to move the organization. We tried to do that, and for the 7,000th time, when we tried, the minority of the board tried to fire the majority of the board, creating a conflict. Lawsuits came in, and we won them. The Swiss government stepped in, and ESSA basically said, "We’re putting an administrator in, and that administrator is going to give you two options: either I can liquidate the entire board and put it into receivership, or you guys can jointly pick some new board members to replace yourselves and all resign."
When they make a statement like, "Oh, well, the IO picked these board members," they leave out the part that if we didn't do it, the entire foundation would have been shut down for three to five years while the Swiss government, on its own volition, decided to pick the board members. They leave that part out. See the lies and the lies and the lies. There is no governance structure for you, the community, to pick the board members. It would be self-correcting. People would be disgruntled, elections would happen, prior board members would be fired, and new board members would be brought in. Those new board members would, lo and behold, be aligned with the community's interests. That's what elections do; they clear out the dead weight.
The majority of the board members of Intersect now, by the end of the year, will all be elected by the members. The entire constitutional committee, the new one coming in, is elected by you. It's accountable to you. The DREPs you picked—if you don't like what they're doing or the decisions they're making, you fire them. You have a voice. You have a vote. That's the way it was supposed to be. It’s not supposed to be that an unelected Swiss board is forever in charge, does nothing because they have personal liability, can never be fired, and pick their replacements while you have no say in it. They can weaponize their ADA, and anyone who speaks out against them can either be abstained from or voted against in their catalyst proposals or governance actions.
It's easy to do a few good vanity things when you're sitting on a pile of $600 million. It’s a lot harder to be accountable to outcomes. I say Laos is going to ship; that’s an outcome. We have a SIP. We had to figure out how to build it in an adversarial environment where there are competing nodes that don’t work for us. We can’t order them to do things, so we have to negotiate with them, come to common ground, and get them to accept it and agree on a common plan for everybody. That’s hard. By the way, you want it in a year, and it’s 60 times faster. When we ship it, there are still going to be people who say it’s not fast enough, so we have to have a plan to make it even faster. That’s an outcome. Launching Midnight this year—that’s an outcome. AirDrop—you get it, you redeem it. That’s an outcome. Some people like it, some people don’t, but that’s an outcome.
There’s accountability, falsifiability, and predictability. When you say things like "promote the brand," what’s the falsifiability behind that? It’s subjective; there’s no outcome here. There’s no objectivity to that. When you say things like "we have to build integrations to get our thing to talk to everybody," that’s an outcome because you can list all the different organizations you have to work with and protocols. You have to look at Wormhole, you have to look at Layer Zero.
I’m sorry that these words are harsh, especially to the rank and file at the CF, but understand that the organization you work for has no courage. They just don’t. The reason why Marcus did the stupidest thing he could ever do and tongue-in-cheek said the ADA redemption stuff is because he’s angry that I yelled at him in December at the Cardano Constitutional Convention. He came up to me, basically tried to explain a tweet where the CF said they can’t support the constitution, and by the way, they tried to derail that convention by launching their own constitution a week before and then, while at the convention, tweeting that they’re not going to support it.
The same goes for Intersect. They can’t support Intersect. Well, we’re with you. Well, no, we’re not going to join the board, but we’ll join as a member, and then we’ll create a competing MBO whose sole purpose is to build other clients. None of you asked for that. You said you wanted Cardano to be faster, you wanted our TVL to grow, you wanted our DApp ecosystem to be stronger, and you wanted more transactions on-chain. You wanted Cardano to adopt modern things like event brokering, data availability, and composability. These are things you’re asking for. Did you say, "No, no, no, we should spend tens of millions of dollars trying to get rid of IO’s developers and replace them with other developers?"
Why was there a delay in the LEO SIP? The person who was in charge of writing that SIP was hired by the CF to go build their competing client, so we had to find a different person to lead that program. That’s what I’ve dealt with for three years. And you guys have the audacity to go to Twitter and say, "Why don’t you just hire a mediator and try to get along?" It’s not possible because they’re a captured organization, accountable to no one, with no oversight and the ability at any time to derail people.
After the convention, I said, "We’re just going to change the strategy. We’re going to have full transparency. We’re going to open the kimono. We’re going to show you all the things that they were supposed to do with ADA redemption that they didn’t do." We’re going to talk about how the original intent was supposed to be in a members-based organization and again accountable to an outcome. Cardano needed one; we built Intersect. They did everything in their power to kill it, delegitimize it, and damage its brand. You know, it’s still here like Johnny Five Alive because, again, we want an outcome. We want Cardano to win.
What incentive do I have to destroy Cardano and make it go down in flames? What incentive? I created it. I’m the founder of it. The rest of my life, my brand and reputation are tied to the success or failure of this thing. You think for one minute that I want Ethereum to be above Cardano? No. I want it to win. Every day I wake up and ask, "What can we do to enhance the state of affairs?" I also have to have shared experiences with you guys. One of the reasons why IO was tone-deaf was that we weren’t connected to the DevX. We didn’t have products like smart contracts in the ecosystem. We wrote the languages, but we never ended up using the tools.
What are we doing with the Glacier Drop? What are we doing with Glacier? It’s got Hydra at its core; it uses Cardano smart contracts. So, we have to write Cardano smart contracts. Midnight is a Cardano native token at the end of the day, which means I have the same lived experience and frustrations as you, the builders. If we can’t get it done, well, sure as hell you can’t. So, we’ve got to go fix that. That’s why we’re building products. The same goes for Lace. The construction of Lace means we have the same lived experience as all of you trying to build mobile wallets and browser wallets, trying to pull Cardano into the browser, and make Cardano work in WebAssembly.
Now, we had to fix a lot of broken windows along the way. That’s why we do these things; it helps us align ourselves with you. Are we accountable to an outcome? Yeah. It’s called adoption. Do you think I want Lace to have no users? I want Lace to have 5 million users. If we have 5 million users, what does that mean? The majority are Cardano users, which brings people in. None of these are destructive. You’ll notice the Lace strategy is an outbound strategy. It’s getting users from Solana, it’s getting users from XRP, and XRP support is just about to turn on. It’s getting users from Bitcoin.
We also salvaged things like the Nami team; they were leaving the ecosystem. They just love Radix. So what do we do? We bought Nami and integrated it in, trying to create a Nami mode for it. You like it, you hate it, but we at least tried to salvage that so those users didn’t go away. When you build competing clients, it’s a zero-sum game. It doesn’t add people in; it takes users from one side of the bathtub to the other. It doesn’t do anything for the ecosystem at all, except for some resilience and diversity. But why don’t we just have resilience and diversity with technical steering committees and product committees? Oh, that’s right, because it’s not [__] Charles Hoskinson.
The good news is that we are succeeding. We’re moving forward; we’re firing on every single dimension. We have Laos working, Hydra is coming along well, and the vending machine demo was just magical. We continue to build up that tech stack. We’re already working on Plutus V4; there are a lot of goodies coming there. StarStream is funded, Midgard is funded, and we’ve got the partner chains team really well put together. The Bitcoin DeFi team is going to be 19 people under Omar, and we’re building that up for new user acquisition while strengthening our relationships with XRP. I was just with Brad Garlinghouse at Salt, and we served on a panel together when we were around the table talking with the Federal Reserve. There’s a lot there, and good days are coming. We’re working our asses off to try to keep up with it.
It’s getting harder because the competition is getting tougher, and it’s frustrating to me because obvious things to do, like integrations with other ecosystems, are absent, meaning we get left behind. The Department of Commerce pushing economic data wasn’t picking blockchains because they really love one blockchain over the other; they were using Chainlink and Pith. If you don’t support that technology, you can’t push on. So, I put JJ on Chainlink. I said, "Forget it." They gave us an absurd number for integration. We’ll haggle it; we’ll figure it out. They’re good negotiators. Sergey is an extremely smart man and a very good businessman. He kind of sees the future and knows he’s sitting on a golden egg, and he knows what he’s worth. I like people like that; there’s honesty in those conversations.
It’s tough, and it’s a complicated negotiation. You can’t have lightweights in the room; you need strong people who can show the value and make the case for why a non-EVM chain makes sense for them. They have nine contracts that have to be written and integrated. These things take years to build if it’s non-EVM. So, we have to figure out a path to make that work well and quickly. It’s not going to be easy, and it’s a very complicated negotiation, but it should have been had three years ago. Did we drop the ball? Yeah. The commercial team that I had didn’t work out for us; we let them go. It’s more than 100 people we let go in 2022. That’s why there are a few disgruntled people floating around. We made peace with some of them, and they went on to create Apex Fusion, and they’re doing their thing. Others we never did, and they certainly burned the house down on the way out. It is what it is; you move on.
But that’s the past. You look to the future and say, "There’s an outcome we need. We need an oracle for Midnight Cardano. Let’s go get one and negotiate hard to find a path to do it and get it in." I don’t care what we have to do to get it done. That’s the attitude you have to have to win. That’s the mindset you need to push it forward. If you don’t have that urgency or desire, why would they at the CF? They don’t have any upside. Whether they do a great job or a bad job, they get paid the same. There’s no outcome-oriented compensation.
I have an equity fund for my employees at IO. They get an upside if our products work; they don’t get that upside if they don’t. So, they kind of want it to happen. It’s pretty simple. Incentives get you everywhere. Again, that structure does not allow them to pay incentives. Another reason to leave and go somewhere else, like Abu Dhabi, where the literal government tried to negotiate with me to negotiate with the CF to get them to move to become a DT foundation at the ADGM and said, "You can do anything. We’ll change the law. Come on over. We want you here." No, no, no, Switzerland is the only place to be where we have personal liability. We can’t offer proper incentives to people and outcomes to people.
It’s a shame, too, because there are some good people there. What they’ve decided to make that organization is the "I hate Charles Hoskinson" support club. You can come here if you’re disgruntled about something that happened to you at IO, whether it’s my level or a level lower, and you can all sit around every day and just talk about how Cardano would be better if Charles got killed in a plane accident.
Now we have the Kraju people trying to make some money off of Kraju. The story behind Kraju is that I was at the Gaiju Con, the Godzilla Festival called Gfest over in Chicago with my brother, and an independent artist from Louisiana created a Kaiju called Kraju. That statue is actually the son of Kraju, and I thought it was really cute, so I bought it. It’s starting to become a character and is being anthropomorphized in its own right, but it’s one of those cosmic horror HP Lovecraft meets Godzilla ethos Kaiju universe monsters. It has all the things you would expect in a Lovecraft-like story, with cultists who have bad outcomes for worshiping Kraju. Kraju is a really well-made, beautiful statue with good printing quality.
"Hey Charles, do you think there’s a way to persuade Coinbase to give their users the Midnight token, Glacier Drop for Cardano?" I hope they do. I think even Scaramucci called and said, "Hey, where’s my night man?" So, we’re working on that.
"Will the Midnight 60-day window be extended if the Treasury does not get their act together?" No. Please advise Daedalus users to create a Lace wallet with their seed phrase, or claims won’t work. Yeah, just go ahead and restore your Daedalus wallet in Lace and use the redemption app. Daedalus is being deprecated. What’s going to happen is it’s going to turn over to some community company, and a lot of people have asked for it. We’re in discussions about what to do with it, but the whole thing is long in the tooth. It’s built on Electron; it’s very old technology. We have a different strategy for how to do a full node, and that’s being rolled out as a unified node architecture for Lace.
So, we have one common interface, one common codebase, and it builds to a full node, builds to a mobile client, and builds to a browser. It’s called Lace 2.0, and we’re tentatively working towards November for that to come out. You can install a full node that can connect to a browser wallet, and that node—the Blockfrost guys are putting together—is a Mithril node. It does fast sync. In the lab, we’re getting a full node sync in less than an hour, which is really cool.
I’m really surprised that Balaji does not use Cardano’s example of a network state. It needs to be brought to his attention. When you have effective governance organizations, they look at the key leaders, profile them, and engage them. If we’ve done something remarkable with a network state, you take Balaji out and give him the full tour. I tried to bring as many people as I could to the Cardano Constitutional Convention, but there’s a lot we could do to engage these people.
I’m not going to criticize Balaji; I’m Facebook friends with him. He’s a good guy. It’s just that he’s not in our ecosystem; he’s in the Ethereum ecosystem, he’s in Silicon Valley, and we have zero representation there. Zero. We need some representation. If we did, people would actually write about us. It’s why they think it’s a dead chain because nobody talks about it. The DeFi Llama stuff looks terrible, so
When I was working with Avi Lo, who was also part of the Israeli complex and got his PhD in astrophysics at around 23 or 24, I learned a lot from him. He now teaches at Harvard. But is that a problem? Does it mean the spirals will be recovered or somehow contaminated or wrong because there’s an Israeli connection? The Israelis are smart. They have a lot of money and they’re heavily integrated into cryptography, aerospace, academia, biotechnology, and medicine. Better get used to it. And there are a few of them in Hollywood too.
Is any Bitcoin development happening at IoG Dand, for example? We’ve thought about building a Bitcoin node at some point. We’ll probably end up doing that with Lace. We’ve also tried to put a lot of effort into improving the Bitcoin protocol. It’s a lost cause. Taproot is great. Let’s just focus on that. Let the Bitcoin community figure out its roadmap, and we’ll accept it for what it is and build on top of it.
Charles, do you know any context for stem cell therapies applied to veterinary care? Just wondering since your clinic is doing them. I’m looking for ideas to help dogs and cats with CKD. Bob Harmon is the best guy in the world for that. He’s based out in California. He’s a vet who went into human medicine after doing animal stem cells for many years. He did the stem cells for Sheikh Muhammad’s horses. This guy is as good as it gets. He also owns the patent and got FDA approval on the veterinary side for Life’s PRP without a cryoprotectant. Pour water on it, and the platelets come back to life. The guy’s a mad scientist genius, and he’s a very good man. I spent a lovely time down there with Bob Harmon in San Diego and learned a huge amount from his lab. He’s going to come up and visit us. If you’re doing anything involving stem cells and animals, he’s the guy to talk to.
Charles, does your wife have big tits? Not as big as your mom’s.
Charles, what do you think of Brian Johnson? I’ve been doing his blueprint stuff for five months now, and to be honest, I feel better than ever. I met Brian years ago when we wanted to do a collaboration with him and the Colonel because he ran a company called Kernel Flow, which he still owns. It’s an F-neer’s headset that kind of looks like a bicycle helmet or one of those Space Balls helmets from the movie. It has all these little comb sensors that shoot lights into your brain, and it can figure out cognition through looking at blood flows. It’s backed up with EEG as well. It’s a six-channel system with dry sensors. Overall, he’s a great guy, a very smart guy, a little strange. He’s kind of a modern-day vampire who decided to go hardcore into anti-aging. He’s one of those who will try it on himself before trying it on anybody else. It’s kind of that biohacker Dave Asprey, Tim Ferriss world where these guys inject themselves with strange things and say, “Hey, look, I’ve injected myself with strange stuff.” Long story short, does it work or not? We all know the same people. I’m friends with Asprey, and he is too. We all talk to each other. There’s this elite billionaire biohacking club where we message each other and discuss various things. I don’t think anything he’s pushing is particularly harmful. Obviously, none of it is FDA approved, and safety and efficacy data is not available. That said, the FDA is just a lost cause at this point, and it’s nearly impossible to get them to say anything good about anything. Even just bioelectricity, they’re just now saying, “I guess maybe there’s a thing there.” Yeah, we’ve known about that for 70 years. Every cell has a different voltage potential. Neurons are negative 70 millivolts, muscle cells are 90, and stem cells are zero. It’s an electrical fingerprint that the cells have that’s connected to the ion channels in the cells. If you change that electrical fingerprint, you can actually change the cell. You can get a cancer cell to turn into a normal cell or a normal cell to turn into a cancer cell. It’s pretty crazy what you can do with it. The FDA didn’t really talk about it for a long time, and just now they’re starting to realize that there’s something there.
There’s also a DARPA program called BER, the Bioelectrical Research program, which uses it for wound treatments and is having amazing results. Don’t believe me? You can go to Amazon and buy bandages that have little batteries in them that create electrical current. They accelerate healing. If you cut yourself, you can heal twice as fast with electrical current. You can move cells with electricity too; it’s called electrotaxis. That’s why you have biohackers, because the government and science have failed us, and all the large language models are starting to converge to Ned Flanders and can’t disagree with mainstream medicine. So you have people like Brian, and you know it works 90% of the time. In the places it works, it works fabulously. It’s phenomenal, and in the places it doesn’t work, it’s probably not too harmful. The gene therapy down in Roatan with the plasmid that makes follistatin 344 is a little aggressive, but I probably want to do that to get that muscle pig gene. If it’s working for you, Pat, keep it going; it’s good stuff. Just don’t take blood from your children and inject it into yourself.
It’s helping me grow my hair back. Well, that’s pretty cool. I kind of need that; you know, I’m losing my hair. Is Wi-Fi harmful to DNA? I’m sure there’s somebody online that says that. I love these questions. It’s whataboutism. What is the purpose of Emergo? I always see people bashing the CF. Well, Emergo is supposed to be the consensus of our ecosystem. Whether they succeeded or failed, that’s up for you to decide. They’re not supposed to do integrations with Chainlink, Layer Zero, or get Circle or Tether on. They were supposed to do commercialization in the ecosystem. We can have a two-hour talk about what they’ve done wrong. It’s just that they don’t get in the way. MCO doesn’t try to build competing clients or competing member-based organizations. Emergo doesn’t try to derail all the things we do or poach our people. They don’t do that. Maybe they’re ineffective, but you can’t argue that they’re harmful, and that’s why there’s so much animus right now with the CF, because they’re going out of their way to be harmful.
Who in the billionaire club will be the first to inject themselves with mammoth semen? That’s a sticky question. I don’t want to take a prescription drug for hair loss. Now, this is actually an interesting question. I know a lot of porn stars because there was a huge overlap between pornography and the cryptocurrency space. There are actually cryptocurrencies that were launched in the cryptocurrency space, like Spankcoin and others, because porn got debanked and deplatformed. This was part of Operation Chokepoint, which targeted porn, marijuana dispensaries, gun dealers, and these types of things. A lot of people from the porn industry entered our industry thinking they could create their own payment systems to modest success. I always thought that would be a much bigger industry, especially with NFTs, because you can embed fingerprints into the content that give you the ability to understand provenance. One of the biggest problems in the pornography industry is intellectual property theft. A video will be made, it gets stolen and reposted, and the authors make no money from that video. Age verification is another low-hanging fruit. You’ll notice that Pornhub, for example, is now blacklisting people from Texas and Utah because they need to verify that users are over 18. You can use zero-knowledge proofs to verify that you qualify without revealing who you are, because that’s an area where you probably don’t want to tell people who you are. I’ve met many people in that industry. Probably my favorite would be Jaden Cole. Also, the digital twins reflect for a brief time; a lot of those people were coming over because they have a patent on the digital twins side and were asking about digital twins in the OnlyFans world. Good market.
What’s the most controversial conspiracy theory you believe in? That there are still good people in the government. There’s actually a lovely meme floating around the cryptocurrency space about Joe Lubin from Ethereum. It’s called Joe Lube, and they made up a backstory that he was a famous porn star.
Can you link a paper wallet to things like titles and deeds? Did anyone hack your paper wallet for the million? No one hacked it. And yes, you can.
Charles, what do you think about DARPA and their intentions? I love DARPA. It’s a great organization. They were created in the 50s in response to the launch of Sputnik. What they were supposed to do was predict and promote technological surprise. We got blindsided by the Russians setting up a Sputnik satellite, so we said we need to do lots of cool stuff. DARPA works with different groups, like the IIO, the Information Innovation Office, and they do public-private partnerships. They have a small core connected to the military, usually through special access programs, and then they have external collaborators. When people say they’re a DARPA employer or collaborator, they usually mean they worked with somebody at DARPA because DARPA makes a point to work with people in private industry, usually through academia. They take things through the SRL TRL one, two, three stages, focusing on experimental high-risk, high-return technology that private industry doesn’t want to take the risk on. Your cold fusion, bioelectricity, remote viewing, ramjets for hypersonic flight, or caterpillar drives for submarines are examples. If a project starts bearing fruit, it will graduate, and almost always someone in private industry will commercialize it. The greatest example of that is KAO, a program from 2003 to 2008 called Cognitive Assistant that learns and organizes. That program turned into Siri, which Apple bought and integrated into the iPhone. So DARPA is actually behind that. Go figure.
There are others too that are really nifty and cool, like Project Proceed, which we have a tangential connection to because it was started by John Launchbury, who was super interested in homomorphic encryption. That’s operating on encrypted data without ever decrypting it. John ended up creating a company called GAWA, which writes software in the Cardano ecosystem. We talk to GAWA people all the time, and they still do DARPA programs. It’s something that’s been in our orbit for a long time. A lot of people intern there and work there indirectly. But to actually work at DARPA, you need military credentials and a CAC card. They have a lot of public stuff they do, but they also handle a lot of clearance work. DARPA has sister agencies like BARDA, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, and ARPA, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency. You also have labs like Sandia, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Livermore, which are under the Department of Energy. They do a lot of work with nuclear physics and high-energy physics, but they also coordinate with DARPA. There are R&D programs in the Navy, Air Force, and Army that also coordinate with DARPA. There’s a director of science and technology at the CIA because they don’t like working with anybody, and they occasionally collaborate with DARPA and ARPA. The government is really a choose-your-own-adventure, and it’s almost impossible to know if you’ve worked with these people or not because they work with everyone from Dell Computers to IBM to HP. They have special companies that are really in the swamp, like Booz Allen Hamilton and others. Everything always has a private component, an academic component, among other things. Overall, they’re a force for technological good. We’ve made enormous progress as a society because of the things they’ve done. You can always tell if people know what they’re talking about by their broad claims and proclamations. You have to know the nature of an organization before you talk about it.
I’ve already explained it, Mr. Swiss person, and I love how they play a game of technicalities. Okay, if I, in a job, say, “Sleep with me or I fire you,” what do you call that? You call that coercion or harassment. If the Swiss government appoints an administrator with a board where the majority are non-Swiss and the minority are Swiss and tells that board, “Either you pick your replacements, or we’ll fire all of you and put the organization into receivership under the control of ISA, and we’ll eventually decide what to do with it years down the road,” is that free will? Isn’t it my right to say that was a forced move by the Swiss government? We were the majority of the board. Emergo and Input Output had already decided we wanted to shut down the Swiss Foundation, move it to a different jurisdiction, and rebuild it. This was because the board members had personal liability and because the organization could not fulfill its intended mandate to be a member-based organization with a community-elected board accountable to outcomes inside the ecosystem. We wanted to move it to a different location, move the funds out, and tried to do it. The majority of the board tried to fire the majority of the board, which resulted in a court case. There was an actual lawsuit about it, and we won. Then ESSA stepped in and appointed an administrator. That administrator put that on the table and said, “You guys can’t work together, so we need to replace you for continuity's sake.” We had two options: either the entire foundation is lost with no urgency behind ever turning it back on, making it a defunct organization, or a new board that hopefully is independent will come in and see the wisdom of what we were trying to do. So we rolled the dice and went along with that plan. That new board is the board that’s in today. That’s a fact. That’s what happened. We tried really hard for three years to work with them while they created Pragma, launched their own competing constitution, and tried to derail the constitutional convention. They poached employees and built competing clients that nobody asked for, trying to disenfranchise IO developers while abstaining from our funding. They weaponized their ADA and said if you don’t support them, they’ll vote against Shin Catalyst. That’s where we’re at.
So that’s what your government did. Maybe I have a clue about what the intention was supposed to be for the Cardano Foundation. The original Cardano Foundation was not in Switzerland; it was the Digital Asset Foundation in the Isle of Man. I had founder rights to that organization. Michael Parsons created the Swiss Foundation with MME and gave himself founder rights. He removed the assets from the Digital Asset Foundation, and we were able to force them out after bad things started happening. We had the majority of the board, and the very first thing we tried to do with MME was figure out how to shut down the Swiss Foundation because it wasn’t fit for purpose. So when they say, “Well, you created it, so you own that,” it’s a lie. It’s a straight-up lie. There was never an intention to be in Switzerland; it just ended up that way, and it resulted in a governance structure that is not fit for purpose. If you disagree, then say why would anybody who has no equity upside take a personal risk and have personal liability and responsibility? Why would they do that? That’s the current structure of things. They’re not designed to run cryptocurrency ecosystems. There are organizations like the DT Foundation in Abu Dhabi and the Duna structure in Wyoming that were literally created to give rights to token holders without giving equity, to have an elected board, and to provide indemnity to the people who run the organization. They were created after everybody started pulling out of Switzerland and not doing stuff anymore.
Instead, what they do is attack me as a person and say, “Oh, it’s all about Charles’s ego, and he’s a control freak, a narcissist, and a sociopath who just attacks anything he can’t control.” So I’m controlling it by asking for a community-elected board that I don’t control. In the beginning, I created the protocol. If I just wanted to control it, I would have just controlled it and not had the CF. I drew the diagram of the three entities. Does that make any sense to you? You guys need an organization like this. So we created one called Intersect. They did everything in their power to try to derail that or delegitimize it. But it’s now funded, and the majority of the board is community-elected, which was the original intent. It was going through a transition period, and now it’s heading there. It’s becoming a real organization with good leadership behind it, and it’s starting to do the things the CF was supposed to do from the very beginning. It’s accountable to its members, who are made up of the ecosystem as a whole.
Yeah, there’s nothing that really can be done. The Swiss protect themselves. Under no circumstances will they let that money leave their jurisdiction. Is it true that Cardano refuses to work with Constellation? You’re creating drama for no reason at all. There’s never been a statement about that. I met with the Constellation founders in Washington, D.C., at a conference. We have a great relationship. Cynthia, one of our people who does all our D.C. policy, is good friends with the founders of Constellation. There’s no bad blood there. You just made up something out of thin air. So no, it’s not true; you just made it up. Where’d you hear it from? Oh, I heard it online, and I’m going to go spread that rumor. They’re good people, the Constellation people. We have no problem with them, and we absolutely will find paths and ways to collaborate with them where and when it makes sense, especially on government procurement contracting because they work with the DoD.
I think just having these AMAs creates drama. Well, it’s also a way that we can have a real conversation. You directly get to talk to me, and I get to directly talk to you, and we get to dispel rumors and misconceptions where and when they come up.
Looking to buy a car? He’s still rocking a Cadillac CTS-V. I’ve never owned a Cadillac CTS-V, but I own a Cadillac CT6, and I loved that car. It was so awesome, and every year it got better. They did what they always do, which is cancel it the minute it actually started getting good. So I love that CTS-V. I also have a Blackwing Cadillac Escalade, and that is an absolutely amazing vehicle. I’m having
That's what we're doing because there's no urgency. It's not like tomorrow one of these things is going to come and kill all of us. But we know it will come, and we have to prepare for it. That's why you have a program and plan, and you show iterative progress. Eventually, when they do come, they come to a very hard target, but you don't have the downside of wearing that armor in the hot sun. So, all you people who bought tokens and those post-quantum things, you're wearing armor in the desert for an army that won't come until you're 10 years older.
Who wins the game today? Notre Dame or Miami? I was always on the Purdue side of that, guys. So, anytime Notre Dame loses, it's a good day. Their little gold-dipped helmets. Charles, a Satary Mi warrior, will you be in Brazil for the Cardano Summit on October 15th? I'm North American Satary Me, not South American Satary M. Slight difference. But we're bringing the ants up. We also have to use snakes in our rituals, too. They don't have snakes; we have snakes. No, I don't believe I will be. I've been traveling extensively.
You hate the Irish, and screw the chicken. How are you doing, Charles? It'll be coming to you. And I hear we're a racist now, father. Is this a full-time commitment, or can I just be racist on the weekends? Everybody from Ireland's going to know that reference, by the way. Charles, do you believe we are in a computer simulation? If remote viewing is the real deal, that would be an explanation for it. You're actually seeing the source program because the main program, the kernel of the system, is the universal holographic information field.
I love this one too. Any updates on the Africa students project? You know what happened there. We wrote an exhaustive blog post about what happened there. But you ask because you live in one of those Cardano's bad circles, and they just babble and babble and babble about all these things. We told the whole story. And you know what? I'm going to do it again just for you. I'm going to show you the link, and you're going to read it, and then you're going to ignore it, and then you're going to ask me again because you're part of that group of Charles haters. That's okay because you ate paint chips when you were a kid, and your mom drank when you were a fetus, and you can't help it. You can't control yourself.
So, we're going to do it again. We're going to type in Cardano IOHK Ethiopia, and the very first thing that comes up, number one on the blog site, is the article written November 27th, which fully explained how hard it was and what happened and how we worked in a war zone and we were never paid, and we pushed as hard as we could. Reflections delivering change in Ethiopia. Lessons and reflections. Big article explains the whole thing, all the sources, all the other stuff, and we talk about how we at least got Prism out of it, and we learned a lot in the process. That crew went over to Kenya, and now we have the real team launching a product next year based on all those things.
So, you can't always get what you want, but you get something good. But you know it's there. There's a link from November 27th, almost a year ago. But you still ask. Why do you ask? Because you belong to Charles's bad group. Paint chips are so a '90s. Well, there are still kids eating paint chips because they probably grew up in the '90s and lived in an old house.
Who is the most famous person or celebrity in your contact list that we wouldn't expect to be there? Damn, that's an interesting one. Let me take a look real quickly here. A lot of congressmen, a lot of senators, a lot of CEOs. David Rothschild. Got it right there in my contact list. How about that? There's actually a picture of us together too. He invited me up to his workshop in LA when I was at the Milken. He's trying to hit me up for a project he wants to do or drive around the world in some sort of car thing because he created the Plastiki, a plastic boat. He sailed across the Pacific, and all those conspiracy theorists are now like, "Oh god, Charles knows the Rothschilds. What do we do? What do we do?" Yeah, I know a lot of people.
You keep loving on that shield, man. Love the shield. You've said it 400 times. Yeah, I get it. You love the shield. What do you think about the idea of a feeding machine for Nike powered by Cardano as a fun way to showcase how blockchains can bring joy to global brands? This has actually been done before using lightning to feed chickens. Adam Dean, if you are listening, let's make this happen for Nike. We call it feedthepig.com, feedthepig.io, feedthepig.org, something like that. You just push a button, and it releases a pellet or a little bit of food for the pig. We got a little camera there. The camera turns on. Nike comes over. He goes, "Yum, yum, yum, yum." Yeah, and it'll be hydropowered. You have to use Nike Coin to feed it. CTO of Nike Coin, talk to Adam Dean. Make this happen. He's a good pig.
See, this is why we do these things. We bring people together. He's a good pig. Cardano DeFi volume dead. How to fix it? I've been trying to. It's called Bitcoin DeFi. It's called Midnight. It's called all these things. We're pulling them together. Oh lord, there are so many moving pieces to it. And every step of the way, they attack us, and we just keep pushing.
Charles, I'm making a chili sauce soon. Would you like to taste it? Yes, send it to the office. That vending machine was incredible. The level of engagement we got was unbelievable. There was this one dude who spent three days going to every booth, every presentation twice just to get enough coins to buy the Louis Vuitton purse that was inside of it for his wife because it was his 9th anniversary. It is such a brilliant business idea because you get incredible engagement from everybody at all the different booths.
Charles, when will you address the rumors that you drink diesel in your room when no one's looking? Do you believe in the Illuminati? Yes, they do exist. And no, I'm not a member. My wife is really into true crime podcasts. Any suggestions you have that are interesting? You got to be careful with that, man. She might like those a little too much, if you get my drift. Have somebody else start tasting your wine. I'm just saying.
Charles, have you ever been vaccinated? Yes, extensively. I come from a medical family. I've had hundreds of vaccines throughout the years from flu shots to the yellow fever vaccine. The hardest was the bias, horrible vaccine. The COVID vaccines, I got the first two, Pfizer, and regret it. I still have pain in the area where the injection site was. That was actually one of the reasons I started my clinic. I got so tired of the orthodoxy and the mainstream medical side of things. I got lured into that whole thing thinking, "Come on, it's not possible that a billion people would be guinea pigs." It would create a rebellion, and we were trust gone. Totally gone. So, we just have to move forward, and we're going to move forward and do our own thing.
Charles, a group is doing research on proposed changes. I'm curious to know your thoughts. Join Intersect. There's a protocol committee there. That's the place to talk about them. Are you happy with Kennedy's work right now? Absolutely. I've sent him text messages about it. He's a good man, and he's a very high integrity man. He has walked into the wolf's den, and he's fighting every day like Liam Neeson in "The Grey," and he's winning. That guy's a beast. He's a man of enormous integrity, and I'm just glad he's there. He represents us.
I mean, think about it, man. Honestly speaking, it's like you got guys saying, "Let's get rid of high fructose corn syrup and food dyes." Artificial food dyes. And now you got people on the other side being like, "No, no, I want the high fructose corn syrup. No, I want the food dyes." Vaccinate me. Govern me harder. This is the level of hate these guys have. I thought the liberals were like the yoga people and the vegan people, the health food people. Didn't you? But now, like, Trump derangement is so strong that if you're like, "Well, let's do the yoga stuff and let's do the vegan stuff," they're like, "No, I want processed food. Spam on my plate every day and bathe it in fructose corn syrup. I'm going to drink it from a pale orange bag."
It's like, can we at least agree on this one? No. No. No. We can't. I never thought there would be a high fructose corn syrup lobby. Man, just have them make ethanol. They make the same amount of money. Just give them ethanol money. I'll put more ethanol in my gasoline.
Gh. Roart reposted the stream. Thank you, Roart. Take a look at that little PRP, huh? Yeah. Charles, how can he walk into the wolf's den, though? How's it possible for them to allow him in? Why do you think they tried to shoot Trump twice, guys? They don't want this. They don't want this at all.
What's your blood type? I am O. Nervous around vampires. Will your clinic offer gene therapy for cosmetic reasons one day? Would love to knock out myostatin with ADA myostatin inhibition. Yeah, we are looking into plasmids, but it's going to be long down the road. We have different research agendas at the moment, but through partners, we may bring some of those on through clinical trials, but it'll be beyond 2026.
Charles, maybe I just want a more compassionate, empathetic, honorable person in office. You and me both. I agree with you completely. We talk about epistemic hygiene. You know, there are some people out there that are just like warriors where they have deep, deep critical thinking, and they really take the time to understand you. They understand where you're coming from. They steelman your position. They weigh the facts, and they try to make good decisions.
And there are people out there who have great moral hygiene, and they try to see where they've been inconsistent, where they've lied, where they've had integrity issues. They admit faults, admit problems. You look at Robert Kennedy; he listens to both sides. He admitted he was a drug addict. He's admitted to having affairs. And you know what? It's not like we just burn him to the ground, but the first step is to admit that you've done wrong.
You look at the life accomplishments, and for the most part, if people did business with you, is it good or bad? Absolutely. There are massive glaring red flags on the T-man. The orange man has huge red flags. It is what it is. And he punishes people for even pointing those things out. I don't punish people when they point out that they have differences, opinions, disagreements with me. The red line that I draw is you can't accuse me of criminal conduct.
So, Lara Shin can write books to the end of the day saying I'm the worst human being in the world and I've said all these horrible things. You know, we didn't sue her when we could have. She claims I don't have a college degree. I graduated from Front Range at 18. I graduated from high school at 15. That's a verifiable thing. You know, it's just okay. I dropped out of CU Boulder. I never said I graduated from CU Boulder. I was in a joint track program where they had both bachelor's and master's, so I could take graduate classes and undergraduate classes.
I started at Metro because I wanted to be a doctor and said I don't want to do this doctor thing. So, I went over to Metro to CU Boulder to do math. There's not a lot of there there, right? And she just says all this stuff and represents it in the worst possible way. But you know what? That's her truth. And if that's how she wants to sell books, that's fine.
When you say I've broken the law and I've stolen from people, that's a very different truth. That's not a qualitative assessment about my character. That's a Boolean. Did it happen or not? Which is why the audit report is coming out, and that's why we demand apologies from the people that went down that road because it's just not true. Didn't happen. And it's verifiably not true based on public record because we have all the documents, terabytes and terabytes of things.
A lot of the distaste for Trump is that people just really hate him as a human being. But then they go a step further and try to impugn upon him some grand criminal conspiracy and some grand misconduct. He is no more out there than any real estate person in New York City or reality TV star. He's about even with his peers. And having met his kids, I've never had any issues with them. They've never lied to me. They've been very kind and gracious. I've met now three of his children: Eric, Ivanka, and Don. Multiple times for Eric and once for Don and once for Ivanka. Never had any issues with them, and they've been nothing but high integrity people around me.
So, you hate him. And you hate him because 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every single thing he's ever said and done wrong has been broadcast in the media in the worst possible light. There is no reality where you can't hate the man given those circumstances. If every single thing you do wrong, you should have wiped with three pieces of toilet paper instead of two pieces of toilet paper, this is CNN breaking news: Trump has a dirty butt.
Do I wish there were different outcomes? The whole crypto thing was not good. I was not a fan of Trumpcoin, and I thought it created problems for us getting legislation passed to say maybe just maybe we get clarity and these other things out of the way, and then you do Trumpcoin after that. Okay, not saying don't do it, just timing because it introduces unnecessary complications. It is what it is. You work your way through it. You take the good with the bad, and this is what they do. They're a force of nature.
He's been elected president twice non-consecutively. Grover Cleveland was the only other guy to do it. He did it while being tried for dozens of felonies that were all made up. By the way, you just noticed that the appeals court overturned the fraud case, and he doesn't have to pay the half billion dollars anymore. You notice that they just overturned that? Was that front page in the New York Times or any of these other things? No.
All this other stuff is going to be unwound. So when John Edwards does it, it's not a problem. When Bill Clinton does it, it's not a problem. When Gary Hart does it, it's not a problem. Donald Trump does it, we have to arrest him and charge him with 31 felonies. Okay? It's political. And when you make it political, you damage the integrity of the entire system. And now we're all surprised.
Kamala Harris lost her Secret Service detail. Well, most vice presidents do. Oh, they've raided John Bolton's house. Well, that stuff happens. You were all cheering it on when the FBI was going through Melania's underwear drawer and just waited with bated breath and glee that that was happening to Trump. And now suddenly, the shoe's on the other foot, and it's literally Hitler. It's going to destroy America. All our institutions are gone. Now give me 14 more vaccines and shut down the nation and give me leaders where I don't even get to vote for them.
You guys on the left, you're just stupid. Honestly speaking, you voted for somebody that you didn't have a choice in picking, and you have the gall to call this a democracy. Your party bosses gave you Kamala Harris with no primary, zero, zilch. And you had a dementia puppet who's dying of stage 4 cancer that we all know takes years and years and years to develop, who even admitted it in a speech in 2022, and you just gleefully voted for him because orange man bad.
You have no right to criticize anyone until you clean up your own house. Clean it up. Fire the party bosses. Demand a primary process that actually has real democracy. You could actually have had a real candidate, not a combination of Herbert the Pervert with Dementia Joe. It's literally what you got. And you let him run again. And now you want Gavin Newsom. Get your house in line. Then you earn the right to actually lead. But no, orange man bad. Kamala Harris was forced upon us.
And I'm sad to say, and people called this out loudly, you didn't because you voted for her. I'm sorry, it doesn't work that way. You don't vote, or you vote for a third-party candidate out of protest. That's what you do. But then you were told, "Well, you have to pick her because orange man bad." Stand up and have a goddamn pair of balls. I know you like cutting them off on your side of the aisle, but have a pair, okay? And just vote against her and say, "We will not tolerate this ever. Don't give any money to her and don't vote for her out of protest of not having democracy."
You don't legitimize the process, but you legitimize the process and then said you called it out loudly. You didn't call it out loudly because tens and tens of millions of you showed up and voted for her. At some point, you just take to the streets.
Do you think a new French revolution is coming in the next 10 years? Absolutely. It's called blockchain. We're taking our power back. We're taking our banking system back, our payment system back, our custody system back, our identity system back, our political systems back. Once we have control of the money, we have control of everything. And we got to give it back to the people. Full stop. And then we're getting rid of all these middlemen and kill all these guys.
Is Nike already in Bison Valley Ranch? I think they put them in there. There's a plan for a Nike crossover, but you know, these are the crossover deals that we're talking about making. So, you have all these opportunities to basically because there's now a community, there's a culture, there's an ecosystem. And guys, if you build a product on Cardano, then what you need to do is say, "Okay, well, how do I be a member of this
But your problem is you listen to alt-right conservative radio 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and what does it do? It programs you to believe things that are simply not true. I listen to Rush Limbaugh all the time. I was really entertained by him, and I enjoyed him as a person. But he said things that weren’t true about solar energy, and I know it’s not true because I have a 250-kilowatt solar field out there, and I live in Colorado and Wyoming. We have high winds and large hail. Those panels have been there for three years. I have ten panel banks, hundreds and hundreds of panels, and only two panels have been damaged in that time. There was a minor fix to replace them, and they were warrantied. On a cloudy day, we still pull 150 kilowatt-hours. Exactly. Hail is a disaster in Colorado, and those panels survive despite it.
I’m a fan of yours and a fan of Elon. I believe you guys joining forces would lead to a lot of good things in the world. I’ve tried a few times to work with Elon, but we could never get there. I’ve reached out to his people and talked to his brother personally. I’ve met him before, and he’s just not really interested. He lives in his own world, in his own bubble, and it is what it is. You just move forward. He does his things, I do my things. At some point, there will be an overlap, and if there’s a good collaboration, it’s good collaboration.
The first thing I tell people about the advantage of being in venture capital is that you get to see all the outcome space. You see the good outcomes and the bad outcomes. So when some people come to me with an idea, the very first thing I say is, “Okay, how many people are going to be required to make this happen?” They say, “Oh, it’s me and my two co-founders.” Great. Do you guys have a founders’ agreement? Almost always, they say, “What’s a founders’ agreement?” So I give them a template and I say, “Here are some best practices and principles of a founders’ agreement. Come back to me with a signed agreement.”
Now, what happens is they talk about a lot of uncomfortable things. They discuss what happens if we’re bad people, or what if we did this or that. They say, “Oh, well then I have to fire you.” I ask, “Well, how do I fire you? How do we have a non-voluntary detachment?” They talk it out. If they’re really serious about the idea, they negotiate, come to terms, and sign the agreement. But that’s the first and single most important negotiation you’ll ever make as an entrepreneur: the founders’ agreement. Only after they sign the founders’ agreement do I even take them seriously because I say, “Okay, now you’re real people. You can convince people to do stuff. You can negotiate with people. You can have difficult conversations. And also, you signed something where I understand exactly what I’m getting into.”
When you do these partnerships, like when Elon came together with Trump, they tried to pull a Caesar triumvirate, and they didn’t have a founders’ agreement. They didn’t have a linkage point. They didn’t understand the rules of the relationship they got themselves into, and the boundaries and conditions of those rules. They both needed to have an understanding of what that relationship was going to be like. When Elon didn’t get what he wanted, he freaked out. He’s like, “I’m a client for my own political party,” and of course, Trump is Trump. So he trumped out. If they had some sort of gentleman’s understanding and had listed out what they wanted in the relationship, then that never would have happened.
That’s the challenge of doing business with Elon Musk. He’s a walking Dunning-Kruger factory for all these different domains. It is not possible to be a subject matter expert in ten fields at the same time. You can pretend that way, but you lose depth as you start going down. A great example would be Neuralink. You have these wires that you put into your brain. We’ve been doing that for a long time with DBS chips and deep brain stimulation chips. They use them for the treatment of Parkinson’s, epilepsy, and diagnostic studies. They’re put in both animals and humans.
You have these things called glial cells that are inside the brain, and the brain is like Jell-O. If you take a pencil and stick it in the Jell-O, initially, the Jell-O forms around it pretty well. But then you take that bowl of Jell-O and push it around, and what happens? It starts moving in the bowl of Jell-O. What happens to that channel that the pencil is in? It gets mechanical damage from the pencil moving around. Wires do the same thing. The glial cells want to protect the brain from this. So what do they do? Because neurons are very special, they form a layer around the implant to wall it off and prevent it from damaging things around it.
Now, if you have a cellular wall that forms around something, that means you lose your electrical connectivity. A lot of people also think that these things are shocking the brain. They’re not. They create an electrical charge on the surface, which changes the action potentials of the neurons around there, making them trigger and fire. It is not electrons that the body’s electricity runs on; it’s ions. Ion channels, protons—that’s what they run on, not electricity. Electricity happens as a result of those changes in action potentials, but it requires ion channels to be opened and closed.
So, drilling holes in people’s heads and putting these wires in, the only way you can prevent bad things from happening is first you have to make the wires really small, which means you have to invent robots to install them because humans can’t because they’re too small. The second thing you have to do is make them out of biocompatible materials. You actually have to find polymers that conduct electricity, which is really hard, and they have them.
The air is another problem. When you put a wire in a human brain, that’s like putting a wire in a vat of salt water and vinegar. Over time, it will corrode the structure. That’s fine if it’s there for 15 minutes, but what if it’s there for 10 years or 20 years or 30 years? You can go talk to a neurosurgeon who does deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s and other conditions. You can talk to any of the people that make these things for a living, and they’ll tell you all these problems about that because at the end of the day, you want the ability to read. That’s what your end goal is.
So, they tell you to try to avoid directly drilling a hole in the head and putting something in the brain. Synchron, for example, was started by a neurosurgeon, an MD, PhD. He says, “Well, we know how to put stents in. We put stents in all day long as doctors. Why don’t we just put a stent in through an artery and take it into the brain and just have it sit there? It can read through the cell membrane.” You get a really good signal because it’s deep and closed, and it’s not directly in contact with that hostile, caustic environment, and the glial cells won’t do much. It turns out that that works, and they’ve already put dozens of stents in, and they do the exact same thing as the telepathy of Neuralink.
There are thousands of these things that exist, and you see it all the time. He just says things, and there’s no accountability behind what he says. He’s so good at marketing and presenting these things to the world. Because he pushes things along, you have to give him his due; truly remarkable stuff. The chopsticks, truly remarkable. The reusable rockets, truly remarkable. These are scientific and engineering marvels, and you’ve got to give the guy his due. But he takes himself too seriously, which is why he lies about his character on Path of Exile and claims he played all these hours when he bought an account.
Why? You’re already an impressive person. You’re worth half a trillion dollars. You’ve done things no human being has ever done. You’re exploring and experimenting with things. You’ve got to learn how to listen to people. They tell you it’s a bad idea, and it’s a bad idea. I wanted to do blood stem cells, and they said, “No, fat stem cells are the way to go.” I made it work. I’m filing a patent on a mechanism to extract them minimally invasively. We’re going all in on adipose because they say, “You know what? That’s the way it’s got to be. That’s what the experts tell me.” What do I know? I’m not a stem cell scientist. You’ve got to have humility in these things. You’re not a domain expert in ten different fields.
Your job, after talking to the experts, is to use your business and systems knowledge to say where the business opportunity is and what bet you’re prepared to take. The bigger the tradeoff mitigation, the riskier it is on the scientific side, the more experimental the technology happens to be. You can play it safe, or you can play it aggressively. With stem cells, you want to play it aggressively. IPSC (induced pluripotent stem cells) is aggressive. You take a skin cell, put Yamanaka factors on it, and it turns into anything you want, including a teratoma, and it creates cancer. It’s horrible. So, not so good. But it’s the thing that could potentially regenerate everything.
Mesenchymal stem cells are safe. They’re in your body, and you use them every day. Why? Because when you get cut, what heals that? Your body has to have a regeneration system. But their differentiability is not as good as IPSC, and you can’t reach all the tissue types. Now here’s a fundamental question: What makes the stem cell turn into what you want it to be? Is it DNA? Is it a chemical signal? Maybe, just maybe, it’s electrical. How about that? That’s what Michael Levin is looking at.
So who gives a damn if you vote on IPSC or MSC? Maybe, just maybe, you have the wrong modality for regeneration. The innovation may not be the cell type where one can turn into cancer and the other one doesn’t. The innovation may actually be in a fundamentally different paradigm of how these things work, and that’s what Mike is studying in his labs. So, who knows? You’ve got to sort it all out. You take a series of iterative experiments, learn a little bit along the way, and say, “What can I do? What can I treat with these things, and where do they stand? How do I build a whole pipeline so that I can always have autologous adipose-derived stem cells, and how do I get them to be used clinically again and again?”
You get data, and you generate good hypotheses from this. Let’s follow the bouncing ball. Good science follows the bouncing ball. If the goal is to get better brain signals, you have to always ask what is the least invasive, least committal way of doing that. Drilling a hole in a person’s head and inserting wires directly into the brain is a last resort situation, which is why it’s using breakthrough status stuff and right-to-try stuff. They’re doing it as a last resort for quadriplegics. It’s not a cosmetic thing.
But you see what Musk does is he creates this image that they’re going to have brain implants for everybody in ten years, Neuralace in your brain, and you’ll all have superhuman capabilities from it. We don’t even know the language. You can’t shock neurons and expect them to reliably do things. It’s like trying to play a piano with a mallet and play Beethoven’s symphony with it. You just can’t do that. It doesn’t work. You have to have a different mechanism of programming.
DARPA has a program that’s actually looking into this mechanism. We’ll show you guys right now. It’s really cool stuff. DARPA, the BETR program. The Bioelectronics for Tissue Regeneration program will develop technology aimed at speeding warfare recovery and resilience by directly intervening in wound healing. To do this, researchers are building an adaptive system that uses actuators to biochemically or bio-physically stimulate tissue sensors to track the body’s complex response to this stimulation, and adaptive learning algorithms to integrate actual sensor data and dictate intervention to the actuators. After establishing this closed-loop control over physiological processes, BETR researchers will integrate these devices into a single platform that guides the tissue in real-time along optimal growth pathways. Ultimately, through the BETR program, DARPA aims to provide medical interventions with the necessary sophistication to more quickly restore human tissues after injury. The notable effort focuses on injuries from warfare, such as blast injuries. If the program succeeds, you get a whole bunch of crazy stuff. Leonard’s doing it over at the Biological Technologies Office. Really cool stuff, right?
Well, there’s a lot more to the story about how this is actually done. It’s not just bandages that heal wounds; it’s electrical programming of your body. You have to be able to tell your regenerative system where to go. It’s electrotaxis of the cells. You have to be able to tell your cells using electrical signals through ion channels basically what to do once they’re there. You’re programming tissues. If you have that level of fidelity and control, then maybe, just maybe, you have a much better mechanism of communicating with cells and giving them instructions than electrical signals because you’re not going to shock the neurons.
That’s all Neuralink can do: charge the outer surface of the wires that go into the brain, hoping that they’ll cause these things to change. Here’s a technology that I would bet on if I wanted to do this at the Wyss Institute of Harvard. Some of the coolest things come from Mike’s lab: xenobots. You take a frog, take an embryo out of a frog, and then you basically change its growth. You shock it in all the right ways, and you can create a little robot with it, a biological robot. They can be self-replicating and intelligent in that they can be goal-directed and interface with their environment.
Xenobots could potentially be a much better medium to actually program things in the body and interface with things in the body. They teach you a lot of very cool stuff. There’s Mike, there’s Josh, there’s Doug, there’s Lindsay, and there’s Sam, and they’re all doing some really cool stuff. But boy, xenobots are really interesting. By studying xenobots, you learn a lot about how the electro inside the body works and how you can use the electrome to shape tissues.
By the way, a lot of people say amphibians, like frogs, are super regenerative, like an axolotl. You can cut off its leg, and it grows a new leg. What they’ve done with xenobots now is they’ve taken tissue from the trachea and turned it into a single-cell organism that can actually navigate its environment. That’s actually human tissue they’ve been able to gather, and they’ve turned human tissue into what looks like little amoebas floating around in water. It’s amazing what these guys can do.
If I were Musk and had those types of resources, I would have bought Synchron and said, “That’s our near-term technology.” There’s a great management team there and phenomenal people who really know what they’re doing, and we can be in the human brain within 12 months. In fact, Synchron has implanted a lot more than Neuralink has. Then I would start investigating a better communication system with neurons. How do I talk their language? The language of ions, not electrons. How do I talk that language? I want protons. Then I would go and raid all the DARPA programs. You know, BETR, the electron Galvani biosciences is one, and they’re working on these things for a different modality, but they’re still trying to figure out that language.
It’s a joint venture between Google and GSK, and I would go build up that whole thing and come up with a new paradigm of how to communicate with the brain and read from the brain, and eventually, you’ll figure out something. I think these xenobots are actually a really good first principle concept. Can we create some programmable machines that we can put into the human body and have them travel around? Before you say, “Oh, I’m not so comfortable with organisms running around my body,” what do you call your microbiome? You have more cells in your microbiome that are foreign cells than you have tissue in your own body, with all this bacteria.
We co-evolved with them, and they work together. When they work together, they create neurotransmitters, digest your foods, and if you have the wrong ones, you’re lactose intolerant. All kinds of things. You already live co-evolved with external organisms that have hitched a ride and done something. So, why can’t we just create some more and have them eat the plaque in your arteries, repair stuff, and tag cancer cells with something that can make it easier to attack them or calm cancer cells down? Cancer cells live in a network, and the cells around them have just as much to do with cancer as the cancer itself.
If you talk to the cells around them, they might be able to convince the cancer cell not to be cancer anymore. They’ve done that in the lab. It’s amazing research. Yes, they can also read signals, and if they have some sort of antenna, some sort of transmission medium, they’re wireless like Bluetooth. They can collectively form a swarm intelligence, like a mesh network, and communicate with an external sensor. You don’t have to drill into the brain or do any crazy stuff. You just get them in the right places, and they can sense their ambient environment and transmit that to you.
It’s harder; it takes 20, 30, 40 years. It’s nanotechnology, but you have something with Synchron that is good enough for the read side, and it’s going to solve the problem of being able to see, hear, and move remote stuff. Or you can just drill a hole in people’s skulls, put in sensors, figure out how to create biocompatible materials, and get every neurosurgeon on the planet on board with what you’re doing, pretending the implants are going to last a long time when they’re probably going to fall apart in 3 to 5 years because the brain is a caustic, acidic environment.
What do I know? I’m the dropout. Finally, somebody’s talking
You have loss of proteostasis, so you’re not making proteins appropriately, which can kill your body pretty quickly. Then there’s cellular senescence. Senescent cells accumulate as we age due to cellular damage and the process of cellular division, releasing inflammatory cytokines that negatively impact other cells. Cellular senescence has been linked to diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and kidney disease.
Next is altered intercellular communication. Cells use chemical signaling to communicate their current state and regulate homeostasis. As we age, our chemical signals change, further accelerating aging. There’s also deregulated nutrient sensing and epigenetic alterations. This is what David Sinclair studies all the time at Harvard.
Then you have telomere attrition. Telomeres are the little caps at the ends of the chromosomes. You also have chronic inflammation. If you smoke, drink, or engage in other harmful behaviors, inflammation can lead to osteoarthritis, atherosclerosis, and degenerative disorders.
Disabled autophagy is another factor. Autophagy is a cellular recycling process where damaged cellular organelles and unused proteins are broken down and recycled into new organelles and proteins. As we age, our bodies lose the ability to recycle these cells, which is significant. When you fast, it actually improves autophagy.
Dysbiosis in our gut, also known as the microbiome, helps protect our overall health. Aging is associated with adverse changes in the gut microbiome. When you have harmful bacteria, they can negatively impact your health. Lastly, there’s stem cell exhaustion. Stem cells in our body are crucial for regeneration and repair, particularly following injuries. As we age, stem cells become exhausted, which, combined with other cellular effects of aging, drastically reduces our ability to regenerate and repair. You can take stem cells and give them exosomes to help with this.
So, the 12 hallmarks of aging are not just one thing; they’re a combination of interlocking factors. So far, we’ve discovered 12 of them, with many subcategories in each. There are families of interventions for each of these factors that can help reduce their impact. However, you need to address all of them to live longer and have a longer health span.
We do a lot of cool work in biotech, yet we still die at 79. All this research can feel pointless sometimes. But let me tell you a story about a man who did not die at 79. He was an Italian man who lived to 110. He was the last living Italian infantry member of World War I and had one of the most dangerous jobs during that time.
Let me show you some pictures. He had a very difficult job in the Italian army. The Arditi were some of the toughest warriors in Italian history. If you’re Italian, you might know this term, but most people don’t because it’s quite old school. The Arditi fought with knives and were trained knife fighters. They would creep into enemy trenches under cover of darkness, using whatever armor they could find.
The Germans invented a special type of trench warfare called stormtroopers, who would attack under the cover of artillery fire. The stormtroopers were so effective that the Allied forces, including the Italians, British, and French, developed their own stormtrooper equivalents. The Arditi were particularly known for their bravery and tactics.
The Germans also started using chemical weapons, like mustard gas, in the trenches. The stormtroopers would fight while wearing gas masks, and despite a 90% casualty rate, they were incredibly effective. This Italian man fought alongside them and lived to be 110 years old.
When we say we still die at 79, remember that there are people who fought in those trenches filled with mustard gas and survived to tell the tale. This man could have been sitting in a restaurant with you in 2007, sharing stories about the Great War.
We have the potential to live a long time, influenced by chemical, electrical, psychological, environmental, and genetic factors. No single factor is dominant; it’s a combination of all of them. If you know how to manage that combination, you can extend your health span. It doesn’t matter if you die at 79; you want to die in your sleep at that age, having lived a vibrant life right up until the end.
As technology evolves, lifespan can increase from 79 to 89, 99, and beyond, with your health span following suit. If you don’t believe me, look at the naked mole rat; they live a good life in captivity.
Today, we learned a lot, from World War I trench fighting to Bitcoin DeFi and everything in between. This has been a lot of fun. We have 21,000 people listening right now, which is great for these Sunday AMAs. I always enjoy sharing insights with you all. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
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