Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is April 30th, 2024, and I'm making a video to talk about podcasts. By popular demand, you guys have asked about various things, and something came up on Reddit. I do check Reddit from time to time, and you can see right here: "Hoskinson on Joe Rogan Experience."
Have there been any updates on Charles getting on the Joe Rogan Experience? I think they would have a very interesting conversation about Mammoth DeFi and ranch life. I've noticed something about our Reddit; it has become unusually toxic, cynical, and pessimistic. There are a lot of not-so-helpful comments, and then there are things like this: "This was Charles being Charles, egotistical and wishful thinking."
Well, I was on the Lex Friedman podcast, and we had a direct route to Rogan. We didn't get there before FTX exploded, and very correctly, people noticed that there was SPF and all the other problems that have happened in the industry. We know a lot of similar people, and there were some open questions about whether to make a big push for it or not. I said, "You know, it's a huge platform, and there has to be stuff that's sticky for people to connect to with that platform." Otherwise, you go on, it's a lot of fun, they say, "Oh, this Charles guy is interesting, look at all the stuff he's talking about," but then it doesn't go anywhere; there's nothing to connect to.
I thought it was really important that things like Voltaire get out, and we get a little bit of meat there. Goen was a huge prerequisite as well because there needed to be a large smart contract ecosystem, and there needed to be a lot of really cool things that we built up in Cardano so we could showcase those types of things. Projects like Midnight had to be announced, especially because it’s so near and dear to my heart about privacy and the freedom of association and expression.
When you go on a mainstream podcast that has 20-plus million viewers, you have to be able to be interesting across the thread. There’s psychedelics; we share that passion, and I have a clinic with 7,200 people there. At some point, we'll start doing clinical trials for PTSD and psychedelics as soon as Wyoming will let us do that. We have the anti-aging portfolio, and our stem cell lab is under construction right now and will be finished before the end of the year.
As the clinic grows, there’s the hunting stuff where I have guided hunts on my ranch with my bison. Obviously, there are elk and other things. He’s a noted bow hunter, and there are a lot of really cool announcements about potential new hunting animals that have never existed before, but they’re not quite announced yet. As you guys know, we have the glowing plants, and there are a lot of announcements to come for that. It would be really cool to actually bring one and show one.
Then, obviously, there are other things like the Blackhawk. It’s going beyond just having a transport helicopter; it’s moving into actually building things for it. It’s a wide life and a wide spread of things, and it’s important that whenever you do that, you have channels to direct people into, whether they be Discord channels or member-based organizations to join. There’s a call to action, or otherwise, you’ve kind of wasted the footprint.
There’s a long list of podcasts that we’ll eventually get on because there’s stuff to say; it’s interesting. A long list of interviews to do, whether it be Tucker Carlson or Joe Rogan or another Lex Friedman. It’s not an access problem. To the people on Reddit, it’s not that we’re just unable to procure such podcasts and go on and talk to people; it’s just that you have to have the right things to talk about. It has to be timely; there has to be something there.
The reality is that you have to be careful about the news cycles that you come on with. For example, I’ve endorsed RFK, and we are in the most contentious presidential election of our lifetime in 2024. So you go on, and what will end up happening invariably is that most of the podcasts will descend into the politics of the day. That doesn’t do anything serviceable to Cardano or to Midnight or to other projects that are going, like our real portfolio in Africa and what we’re doing with microfinance there, or what Reflect is doing with its digital twins and the games that are coming out. There are so many things that go beyond that, and unfortunately, almost always, these podcasts, when you’re in these charged environments, turn in that particular direction or at least have the potential to turn in that direction because crypto is so political.
You talk about a voting system; you talk about an on-chain government, and then they’ll say, “Well, what do you think? Was 2020 stolen? Do you think voting is fair? What are the problems in the American system? What do you think of Joe Biden?” It just always comes up in these types of things because we’re talking about governance and voting. If I answer honestly, I’m going to turn off half the listeners. So it makes sense to get beyond all of that and reset next year.
I said Rogan after Goen, but you notice that was an open-ended commitment. We’re going to make a push to try to get on a variety of different podcasts, and that’ll probably start likely towards the end of this year because there are going to be just a ton of big media events. But 2025 will be the big year for all of that, and I think there’ll be a lot more interest, excitement, and passion in crypto as well, which will open up the invitations. We’ll just kind of go through the list.
It’s not just Joe Rogan; there are also extremely popular podcasters in Asia who you never hear about in the United States, in South America who you never hear about in the United States. They have 30 million people listening to them, Africa, etc. It’ll be a truly global setup as well, and we’ll kind of do a world tour, hitting podcast after podcast and spreading the message. The hope is to get a large collection, but I see this question come up quite a bit: “What about Joe Rogan? Rogan after Goen?” So I figured I’d make a video and just explain my thinking about it and how to bring it all out there.
There’s also a rebrand going on for Input Output, and my hope is to have the beginning of that rebrand launched in Rare Evo. I really would like the website to be refreshed, and a lot of things to be updated and modernized. A lot of our things have been running since like 2018 or 2019; they haven’t been materially changed at all. A lot of stuff has to be updated, cleaned up, and made more concise and ready for mainstream deployment because it was kind of built in a very crypto-centric way, and now things have become much wider and broader, with a lot more depth on things.
When that rebrand comes through, it makes sense to introduce that to the world, and we’ll exactly do that. I hope this answers the Rogan question. To the Reddit people, I don’t know why you’re so toxic at times. Every time I mention something on the Cardano Reddit, there are at least a few commenters that come on that are pretty harsh and really strongly dislike me. I’m not sure why. They say it’s terrible, difficult to listen to, egotistical, all this type of stuff. I don’t tend to see that in some of our other channels. I’ll see the consistent people that go from YouTube video to YouTube video and just block them, but Reddit has seemed to turn fairly sour. It also seems to have become a slight dead platform; the level of engagement on the Cardano Reddit has gone down tremendously.
If the community wants to resurrect that, I’d recommend going to Reddit and posting more often. If not, let it die. Let me know what the canonical replacement is. I’m getting a little older; I’m 36 now, and when I was growing up, Reddit was the thing. I remember Bitcoin Reddit and Bitcoin Talk; they were dual companions, and people would talk there. But it does seem overall that Reddit is losing traction and user bases. Maybe it’s the case that it’s become an echo chamber for a certain viewpoint. There also seems to be a lot of transitivity from cryptocurrency Reddit to Cardano Reddit, which is quite negative and toxic in general about Cardano.
That’s all I have to say about this. Rogan is going to be after Goen; we will eventually get there, but probably more likely than not, 2025 if we make a big push for it. There’s a whole circle of podcasts to go on prior to that, and a lot of people to talk to, a lot of different audiences. Eventually, you work up the ladder, and I kind of view that as the apex of the podcast space. The hope is to become recurring and have a lot of really interesting, cool, fun things to say that will reflect well on crypto as a whole industry, but also reflect well on the portfolio.
As a final point, whenever I go on a large medium, like I speak before Congress or I go on something like Joe Rogan, I have a policy where I try not just to talk the Cardano book. You may have noticed my congressional testimony; I didn’t even mention Cardano, I talked about cryptocurrencies and blockchains as an industry as a whole. At that level of medium, it’s not there as an advertisement for a particular token or cryptocurrency or philosophy. You’re there to talk to the general public because that’s about 8% of the American population, give or take. It’s a humongous group of people. You’re there to talk about the general public, about philosophy—why is blockchain interesting? Why is crypto interesting? What are those core things that are very important?
You can use Cardano as a case study, an example of where those ideals have been best preserved, but at the end of the day, you have to speak across the entire industry. Otherwise, you’re just shilling, and people know that. It makes you an unreliable narrator, and the source of information unreliable as well. If I were to appear on Rogan, it would be in that context. I would talk about crypto—trustless, inclusive, accountability, verifiable, reconstructability, on-chain governance. You talk about consensus in general and why it’s important. You know, talk about the use cases and the types of things that crypto solves, and how you go from “don’t be evil” to “can’t be evil.”
Some of these recurring themes, and of course, Cardano is a great case study, but it’s not the only case study. There are over 10,000 legitimate cryptocurrency projects floating around; some are small, and some are quite large, and they all have great communities in many cases. It’s important that you raise the halo a little bit. Now, of course, you push people a bit in the Cardano direction and say, “Well, that’s where it’s best to learn,” and you hope they stay, but that’s not the point of the exercise.
At a medium of that scale, it’s very important to talk about the industry as a whole. I hope this answers everybody’s question about Rogan because I’ve seen it probably a dozen or so times a month: “Everybody asks Rogan after Goen, when Rogan, when Rogan?” It’s the new “When Coinbase?” So, 2025 is my guess if we do it. Cheers!
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