Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is March 8th, 2024. We’re already eight days into March, which is already three months into the year. Time flies, especially when you’re having fun.
As you can see, I’m still fat, still got the white hair and the beard, and another day older. You know, there are good days and bad days. I had a lot of fun last night; I was on David’s Twitter space. His space went on for over six hours, and I think I was there for two or three hours. I was just about to go to bed when I saw it pop up, and I said, "I haven’t talked to David in a long time," so I joined. I ended up getting into a whole Q&A, and it was unbelievably diverse. We talked about everything from interdimensional DMT aliens to the World Wide Web, and obviously, our favorite cryptocurrency topics, as the space was a meme coin space.
They asked me what I think about memes and meme coins, memology, and I talked about Richard Dawkins' mind viruses—how ideas grow and propagate. Apparently, one of my comments has been taken by a certain group of people, and they’ve decided to amplify it. You know, there are decisions you have to make in life when you’re adulting. You can either play the victim and sit down, saying the whole world is against you, that everybody is evil, and only you are right and virtuous. Anything you hear that you don’t instantly agree with, you turn and attack, creating a lot of drama.
You know these people; you work with them. You might have a family member, an aunt or uncle, that you just can’t stand to be around. There’s always someone else to blame, and there’s always drama following them. Or, you can look at things in their broader context and say, “Sometimes people say things that I disagree with, but maybe there’s some context to it, or maybe they have an opinion that has a different route to get there.” Does that then mean you have to hate that person or disagree with that person all the time? That person’s now the enemy? No.
On-chain governance requires us all to take a step back and ask a very fundamental question: Why are we here? I just did an interview today with Real Vision, and hopefully, that comes out soon. I mentioned that in the space I did yesterday. They asked, “Why are you still here? Why do you still care?” It’s not a number-go-up thing, so why do you still invest time, effort, and money into being a member of the cryptocurrency industry?
I talk a lot about human rights, freedoms, and values, but the core of everything is that if you give power back to the people who haven’t had it ever or for a long time, you have to trust people to have wisdom and maturity. You have to trust people to make good decisions. There are a lot of cynical people out there who think that everybody else in the world is stupid but them. They think they’re smart, that everybody’s dumb, and that we can’t trust people with power because they’ll abuse it or misuse it. I’m not cynical; I don’t believe that.
I do believe there are going to be mistakes and missteps that people make, and I also believe that we’re not always going to get along. There are going to be issues from time to time, but net-net, if we have similar values and want to get to the same place in life, then people should be in charge of their own lives, their data, their money, and their economic identity. They should have the final say on where the world goes and how the world gets there, as opposed to a small group of people they’ve never met, never interacted with, and didn’t elect. They have nothing to do with it other than the fact that they have to accept the mandates and edicts pushed down upon us.
So, I made this video to talk a little bit about the meta-principle of community and community building. We’re getting to an uncomfortable but necessary state in the evolution of Cardano. The honeymoon is over, and everybody’s in the gangly teenage years, where there’s rebellion and people are going in many different directions. They say and do things that sometimes are confusing, bewildering, or just downright stupid, objectively speaking.
These things do come up. What you have to do is always return to first principles. You have to get back to the concept of why we are here, what we’re trying to accomplish, and what values mean something to us. For me, as I’ve said again and again, my only pursuit has always been to maximize your individual freedom and say in things. That has to reflect itself in the nature of the protocol. The protocol has to have the ability to protect and preserve your access to it. You should never be censored. Your transactions should never be slowed down. Some third party shouldn’t have the right to take money out of your wallet, counterfeit your money, or debase things.
In the interview I just did today, they talked about how great it is that Bitcoin is almost at the all-time high again. I said, “Son, Bitcoin’s not even close to the all-time high.” When it hit the all-time high in 2021 at whatever it was—$69,000—that was when $221 looked at inflation over the last three years. It probably has to hit, depending on how you count it, at least $75,000 to $100,000 to match where it was just a few years ago. That’s how much destruction of value has occurred for the money that’s in your pocket. I think that’s immoral and wrong.
Think about my dad. He spent his whole life as a physician, worked hard, saved, and lived modestly so that he could have a great retirement. Since he retired, because of inflation, his savings are worth half as much, or a third as much, in buying power. He spent decades of his life living modestly, doing the right thing, not going beyond his means, and saving for retirement, only to find out just a few years after he retired that he lost half his savings because of inflation. The number hasn’t changed; in fact, it might even be a little higher, but the buying power has.
When you go to the gas pump and it’s $5 a gallon, when you go to the supermarket and it’s harder and harder to fill that grocery basket, when you look at the cost of natural gas or any of the things required for life, that’s the reality many of us are facing right now across America and across the world. There’s no point in perseverating and focusing on number go up if the end result is we live in a totalitarian society, and those numbers are absolutely meaningless. Everyone in Venezuela got to enjoy being a billionaire, and everyone in Zimbabwe did too. The fine print, though, was that a billion dollars buys you a cup of coffee. That’s about it.
So, we have to grow up a bit, and we have to be self-reflective. As on-chain governance turns on, we need to ask ourselves at a very core level: Why are we here? What do we value? What’s the point of all of it? You will never in life be treated completely with respect. You will never in life meet people who 100% agree with you. Even if you’re an identical twin, you’re probably going to have a fight with your twin, and they’re literally genetically identical to you.
I don’t get treated with respect on a regular and unending basis, no matter what interview or context it is. There are at least one or two people who click the dislike button or criticize me for anything, any endeavor. Just recently, we went to Papua New Guinea last year, did some great science, put on a sea expedition, and had the courage to sail for two weeks near Manus Island to recover fragments of spheral from the ocean floor, 6,000 feet underwater. It was a brutal endeavor. We would work, go to bed, work, go to bed, every eight hours in a cycle. We had a polyphasic sleep schedule, seasickness all the time, and everybody was on each other’s nerves because it was a small boat.
But we recovered spheral that have very unique and interesting scientific properties. Just yesterday, a paper came out saying that not only did we not recover anything interesting, but there couldn’t have been a meteor there because apparently, a car may have interfered with a sensor, even though we had satellite telemetry. I guess a car is responsible for that. Someone from Johns Hopkins published that without ever seeing the samples or analyzing them. This is criticism; it’s blatantly unfair. Before that, the very same people said it was cash again before they saw the samples we spent time recovering that have unusual properties.
Now, of course, we’ll argue it out in the peer review process, but think of how little respect and civility exist in that exchange and process. These are your colleagues in a small industry, and yet for some reason, they can’t pick up the phone and talk to each other. They have to have petty feuds through papers in the peer review process that ultimately are sensationalized by the media. That’s life, and that is the reality of 95% of our interactions and jobs. You have one choice in life: you can either take it personally or not.
For whatever reason, they write papers like that, and for whatever reason, people say things that are sometimes a bit critical. A great example would be in Taos, a cryptocurrency that we helped work on. We wrote some of their technology with one of our papers that came out with Alfredo, Roman, Olov, and others. One of the people affiliated with that, John Lilick, was an incredibly harsh critic of Cardano in the early days. In fact, things that came to me from when he was working at ConsenSys told me that his opinion was Cardano was a multi-level marketing Ponzi scheme built to defraud the elderly, and that people needed to be warned about those things.
Now he’s part of a project we have an affiliation with and tweeted, “Hey, can we bury the hatchet?” I said, “Sure.” Because you know what? We’re all adults, and opinions that people may have in 2015 or 2016, however misinformed, don’t define people. Statements that they make don’t define people forever. Similarly, I’ve said a lot of boneheaded things from time to time that many of you listening may believe are a little hurtful. A great example would be Hashgraph. I said it’s centralized garbage. Why? Because the context at the time was that it was patented, and I just, by default, immediately shut down and turned off any cryptocurrency project that’s patented.
In my mind, my very principled mind, if someone has a patent, they have a monopoly to exclude anyone at any time legally from using the technology. They have the right of first refusal, a legal monopoly for a period of time. So why then would we consider that to be a decentralized ecosystem if a single entity has universal authority? But the project has evolved, and it’s open-sourced; it’s no longer in that governance structure. So, of course, it requires revision, and those statements are no longer relevant, regardless of whether you agreed with them in the beginning or not. We’ve all moved on, and there may be merit or interesting things and potentially a good partnership.
For example, just the other day, I saw John Woods, the CTO of the Algorand Foundation, with Lehman, the Hashgraph guy, and they talked about a decentralized wallet alliance. The very first thought I had was that might be something very interesting for the customers of Lace. I sent it over to Roma, our CTO, and said, “Hey, let’s see if we can collaborate or join them.” I like John, and there are some smart people over on the Hashgraph side because that’s the adult thing to do.
Just because there are grievances and people say things, especially online, it’s not reality. It’s not who we are. When you think about Twitter and Reddit, when you think about social media, the most profoundly negative thing it’s done to society is make it entirely too comfortable and easy to demonize and dehumanize and to take highly polarized and radical absolutist positions on things. In fact, you’re incentivized to do so by the algorithms. It’s cognitive hacking.
When I went to F Denver, at least one of the people I ran into there was probably a very harsh critic on E-Trader or some place online about us, but then somehow, when we’re standing in front of each other talking in person, we seem to get along. Or at the very least, there seems to be civility in the interaction. It doesn’t necessarily mean we’re friends, and it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to go to dinner together and have the best time in life, but what it does mean is we see common humanity, and we have common causes.
Perhaps, maybe just maybe, there can be places where we can collaborate where that makes sense. Every single project founder, whether you be on Cardano or in the governance of projects in another ecosystem, do realize that the people who follow you look to you. You have a tremendous moral obligation to lead well and with wisdom. Sometimes we measure up, and I’m a great case study in the times that I personally didn’t measure up. If I’ve offended you in my prior comments, I’m sorry for that; it wasn’t the intention.
Every now and then, of course, we have tongue-in-cheek statements, and that’s okay because there needs to be humor in life. We’ve gotten a bit too brittle and serious, and we’ve lost our sense of humor. We’ve lost our ability to make fun of each other and ourselves in good spirits, and we’ve descended to a society that lives in two states: absolute love and adulation or complete destruction and hatred. There’s no middle ground where we can find the absurdity and humor in all things that we do.
As project founders, you set the culture and the tone for the people that follow your projects. You ultimately have to ask yourself: Who are we, and what are we about? Why are we here, and what do we want people to think when they’re part of our group and our society? Is it a fun place to be? Is it a serious place to be? Is it a hard-ass place to be? Are you with David Goggins, staying hard, jogging every morning, carrying the boat, or are you chilling and smoking cigars? It’s ultimately your decision and your community’s decision.
For my part, every day I wake up is a reset. I look and say, “What are the first principles that guide us?” We’re making progress. We’re at the dawn of governance, and we’re seeing so many people rise up in the community, take the reins, do amazing things, and learn how to lead. We look at the technology and ask ourselves, “Are we getting closer to major breakthroughs and innovations, whether it be input endorsers, core Paris, or Hydra?” Are we making progress in getting people to work together, whether it be the merger of Rare Evo and CNFC Con or the upcoming Constitutional Convention?
Every single day, I think we are moving the chains and making progress. These are hard days; these are brutal days. There’s a lot going on, and at times it’s exhausting. But never once did I go to bed saying it wasn’t worth it. In fact, every day when I wake up, I say these were days we earned, and they’re more worth it. There’s no place in the world I’d rather be than here right now with all of you because I’m having the time of my life. I actually feel like we have a chance to make a difference and change things.
I also feel like people really do care about the philosophy and principles. As much as we criticize the number-go-up crowd, the paint ship brigade, and all the people who have strong opinions one way or the other, for every one of them, there are 10 or 20 who actually want a better world. They want their money to mean something, want to own their own identity, want to be part of something greater, and actually want to have a say in how the human race should go.
The next 20 years are going to be the toughest in human history. That’s not a small statement. We’ve had some tough years as a species, but they’re definitely going to be the toughest because they’re the years that are going to challenge what it even means to be human. Every single assumption we’ve made about who we are, our relationship to each other, our government, and our own genetics is going to come into question as we start modifying things, whether they be gene therapies, artificial wombs, designer kids, or the merger of man and machine. Cybernetics are a reality now with Neuralink, and that’s only going to accelerate. Artificial intelligence is marching on at a pace we had never anticipated.
That’s just one of several things coming down the horizon. It’s pretty remarkable, and it can build a heaven or it can build a hell. The difference between the two isn’t much; it’s you and the individual decisions each and every person makes when they wake up, how they treat each other, how they react, and the agency they take over their own lives. That’s really the decision you have to make. I’ve made mine. No one’s going to change my mind; no amount of criticism is going to dissuade me. I’m going to wake up every day and be the same person, and I’m going to keep walking down the same road.
Now it’s your turn to make yours, and the aggregate sum total of all those decisions will determine the world we live in in the 2030s and 2040s. I will never be a cynic. I believe deep down in my soul we’re all going to make the right decisions, and the world is going to be a better place tomorrow.
So, thanks for listening.
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