Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is December 19, 2022, one of the last working weeks of December. Christmas is coming, and then after that, New Year's is coming, and we just move on. It has been a very difficult year in review, let me tell you. Markets went from $2.6 trillion in value to under $800 billion. Every week it seems like we're getting hit with something—there's a scandal or an issue.
You know, there were things like Luna, Celsius, and FTX at the beginning of the year. I went to the parties, and everybody said, "These are the future. These guys have it all figured out; they know what's going on." When they asked about Cardano, they said, "Oh, that's a scam. Don't go to Cardano; don't do anything with Cardano. You're a fool if you do that." But Luna is safe; FTX is safe. Now look where we are in December. There are criminal charges, and the third one probably will be too. Things change very quickly.
Crypto went from being the darling that was going to have a huge impact on the 2022 Main Street midterm election. You all remember the red wave that was supposed to happen—kind of, sort of, not really. Apparently, a billion dollars was thrown around in this election, but it didn't do much for it. It was supposed to be the next big thing for the arts and all these other domains. Many new people flooded into the space with heightened expectations carried over from 2021, but it turned out that wasn't the case. The die-hards put their noses to the grindstone and kept building. We got Vasil out this year; we worked really hard, wrote a ton of new papers, and developed a great technical vision for Voltaire, like SIP 1694 and the MBO structure. There was a lot of discussion about the Constitution. The foundation did a phenomenal job with the summit. We had great events like Consensus and ScotFest this year, so I'm really happy about that.
I'm also pleased with the growth metrics in our community. I saw an article that said Solana went from 2,500 active developers to 75. I don't know if the article is verified or not, but there's a lot of news floating around that everybody is having a hard time with adoption and building. Even the people who had a lot of traction are scaling down a bit. It's just one of those situations where bear markets tell you who you really are. It's been stressful for everybody; it's probably been the most stressful year of my life.
I do a lot—I have a biotech company and a healthcare clinic we've been building. I raised Bison and worked on the restaurant Auto Luminescent Plants. I have a farm and some real estate stuff, and obviously, Cardano and all the other things we have going on. Running this company is like running five companies because we have Lace, Prism, Midnight, and all these other things like Crypto Bison and our academic research. Managing all of that while trying to interface with the space has been challenging.
I've noticed that social media has become increasingly polarized, toxic, and abusive. It has to be expected because people have lost money and become hyper-tribal. Honestly, the only people talking right now are the die-hards, and they don't really care about facts or understanding and collaboration. All they care about is trying to get some small moral victory to justify themselves as the ship is on fire. You have to deal with that and, at the same time, make progress and push forward.
If you look at the growth metrics of our ecosystem in particular, we've done great work. They've all grown from transaction volume to native assets to DApp volume. TVL shrunk a bit; well, value beta is down over 73 percent. You can have the exact same amount of ADA locked; it's actually grown, but the overall value shrunk. So the TVL shrinks; it's the nature of the game. It's why it's such a terrible measurement. By the way, Bitcoin has zero TVL if you really think about it. We're close to it; I guess you could count the stuff in Lightning as TVL and these other wrapped coins, but it's minuscule.
Overall, it's been an interesting year; it's been a tough one. I'm glad to finally have a little bit of time to take a break and go through calm reflection. I can't help but think of last year; it was a wild year. It was fun but really exhausting as well. I took a week off and went to this meditation retreat at the Shambhala Mountain Center. I spent a week not talking, just sitting there quietly and silently rejuvenating and recharging. It's good to do that from time to time. I haven't had the opportunity this year because we've just been so busy, so it's a little unfortunate.
I just finished a two-week fast; I spent 12 days not eating anything at all and then two days refeeding to get back to a state where I could eat. I refed over the weekend, and that was a lot of fun. I feel a lot better; I went from 242 to 225, and everything looks really good. I'm excited to roll that into a protein-sparing modified fast next year along with a pretty aggressive workout program. Throughout next year, I think I'll get a lot healthier.
I'm glad that we got through all of it together. The Cardano community has been great; they've always been vocal, interesting, and engaged in a lot of really cool stuff. It's really nifty to see a lot of the projects. There have been some disappointments, like Ardana and Orbis, for example, where they just failed due to colossal mismanagement and poor planning. I met with the founder recently, and I was not thoroughly impressed. I was extremely upset because normally, when you're failing, the people who invest in you, you go to them and say, "Is there any way we can get a bridge loan or work something out or sell more equity to try to create continuity for the project?" Waiting until you fail and then announcing it over Twitter just shows the immaturity of the venture.
That's the nature of the game; 80 to 90 percent of the time, people fail, and there will always be more failures. But all things considered, I'm pretty happy with the fact that we've made so much progress and continue moving forward. The markets as a whole and the industry as a whole are headed for some difficult times in 2023. I think we've been pushed into a political reality where one political party got caught with their hand in the cookie jar, getting a lot of money from people like SBF. Now they're overreacting and saying stupid, dangerous, and volatile statements like, "Maybe we should ban crypto." They have no intention of actually doing it, but just by saying it, it causes harm. It's insulting and patronizing to the enormous set of entrepreneurs who work so hard and have dedicated their lives to this industry.
Yet they say it because that's how politics work. You can just say whatever you want with no consequences. You can bully and harass people; you can accuse people of treason. I remember Mitt Romney tweeting that Tulsi Gabbard is guilty of treasonous acts against the United States. She's still an active-duty lieutenant colonel in the Army National Guard and has served in war a lot more than you ever did, Mittens. But apparently, you're accusing her of treason, which would be a violation of her commitment to the U.S. Army, and she'd be court-martialed for that. A sitting U.S. senator just says it and gets away with it.
It's the world we live in—a world without accountability, a world without truth, and a world where the institutions we used to rely upon are morally bankrupt. We have to do better as an ecosystem, both internally and externally. We have to do better as a society, and that's what keeps me around. That's what keeps me inspired and going: the unified belief that the systems we build here and the failures we go through will inevitably protect people from themselves.
I hope we continue that thread. CoinDesk recently wrote an article saying we have to return to crypto principles. Of course, we never got referenced because we never do. But the truth of the matter is that has been the mantra of Cardano from the very beginning, and that's why our community is so strong and gets stronger when crises happen. First principles, evidence-based research—why are you here? You're here because we want to change the world. It doesn't have anything to do with money; money doesn't matter anymore. It's just made-up pieces of paper. I keep saying it, and you're starting to realize it.
Why? Because every time you go to the grocery store, it gets more and more expensive. The price of homes has doubled, but salaries haven't gone up. Everything else is getting more expensive, and it's harder and harder to survive off what you have. The largest wealth transfer in U.S. history just happened, and no one's going to go to jail for it. Wages fell by $3.7 trillion over the last two years, whereas $3.9 trillion was transferred to the top 500 wealthiest people. How about that? Where's the Congressional inquiry into that? I'm waiting. This is going to happen maybe Tuesday? No, because they know who feeds them.
So we have to go our own way as an industry, and we have to work hard. There are some who say money matters to them, but you know what? If I took your family away from you, took your creature comforts away from you, took your purpose in life away from you, but gave you $10 million, very quickly you'd start saying, "Give me the other stuff back, or else." You don't understand what life is about.
Anyway, let's get to your questions. We might have a surprise guest every now and then.
"Why is Cardano dumping so hard?" You know the answer to that; the whole market's down, but you're going to ask it anyway, pretending as if it's the only one. Why? Because you're either a bot or troll, a member of another ecosystem, or you just apparently can't see CoinMarketCap. That's the key.
"What would you spend $100 million on?" Irving, what would your lifestyle be like, and why would it be so much better?
"What do you think about referring to side chains as code chains so those joining us don't feel like they have to bend the knee to take advantage of Cardano's offerings?" Maybe we should call them partner chains or something like that. Yeah, you know, we'll come up with better vocabulary. It's a very interesting point, and I think you're right because "sidechain" is a misnomer.
"Why do you need $1.2 million?" So I can pay for my creature comforts and lifestyle. Ah, okay. Why not just volunteer and do it? What stops you today? "I have to work; I have to do it." Well, change your lifestyle then. Everybody has these fantasies that once they hit a certain number, everything gets great. Believe me, it doesn't actually work that way.
"Adam, Charles, I love you." Well, I love you too, Adam.
"I'm the father of a disabled boy. My question is, what is crypto doing to give disabled people equal opportunity?" Crypto is a protocol, and it gives all of us equal access to society. It doesn't care that your boy is disabled; it doesn't care who I am. Every one of us has equal access; it's just that simple. You don't build systems for constituency A, constituency B, and constituency C because guess what? It's inductive. The minute you have those three, then you need D, then you need E, then you need F, and suddenly you've gone through the ABCs, and then you start labeling again A1, B1, C1, and it's infinite.
Instead, you build a universal system for everyone, regardless of whether they're disabled or not. With that equal access, you at least know that you're not going to get discriminated against. It doesn't mean that you have some new advantage, but at least it means that you have equal access to the system. That's the very first thing.
"You have no idea. I'm making ADA deflationary." If ADA is deflationary already, you're completely wrong. The maximum supply is 45 billion, exactly like Bitcoin. Every single block's supply monotonically decreases; the rate of growth monotonically decreases, and the supply is capped, so it's deflationary.
"When is the Lace wallet going to be released?" Depending on beta, it looks very likely Q1.
"Why do you attack people when they ask questions?" Because they're not asking questions. The questions have built within them very foundational things. When you ask about why Cardano is falling, unless you're living under a rock and haven't opened a book, a newspaper, or done a single Google search, even when you go to Coinbase or any basic exchange to buy ADA, you get to see the prices of other things.
It's almost impossible at this point not to be exposed to the fact that the market as a whole is collapsing. The fact that this person has enough wherewithal to be inside of my AMA means they must be following me on Twitter or subscribed to my YouTube page. So let me get this straight: they just found Cardano; they know nothing else about crypto; they don't know about the industry at all; somehow they've acquired data without any exposure to anything else, and they haven't heard any news about crypto except for Cardano? That's what you want me to believe?
No, you're going to be aware of the macro, but then you ask that, and you look at everything else, and we're falling in line, actually holding up much better than a lot of the others. Yet somehow you pretend like it's the only thing that's falling. So it's a disingenuous question; it has nothing to do with education or basics. It has everything to do with a narrative that Cardano is failing and the market's not. It's just not true.
You see, you have to stand up for these types of things. You have every right, and I have every right not to be abused, lied to, manipulated, or exposed to toxicity and radioactive behavior. You have every right to fire toxic communities and toxic people in your life. You set boundaries, and when you do that, those people lash out at you. They call you a baby or a bad person; they say these things. But at the end of the day, what value do those people provide?
If you don't agree with me 100 percent of the time, I'm going to attack you, verbally assault you, and abuse you. Imagine a friendship like that. "Where do you want to go to eat?" "I don't know; I'm thinking Chipotle." "No, I want to go to McDonald's." "Okay, well, can we compromise? Maybe we go to this restaurant down the street that has good Mexican food and good hamburgers?" "No, we're going to McDonald's, and if we don't, the friendship's over, and you're a horrible human being, worse than Hitler, and a baby."
You'd be like, "This is the worst friendship ever. Who the [ __ ] is this person? Please leave; I want no relationship." But that's basically how social media works, and that's how these people operate. They're all interconnected in that way. It's really important that we set boundaries and say, "I have no tolerance for that." If it offends you, suck it up, buttercup.
I'm willing to walk into difficult discussions and debates, but I'm not going to walk into a situation where I know for a fact that the best-case scenario is I leave frustrated but with some dignity, and the worst-case scenario is that I get drawn into a bare-knuckle brawl where we both look bad. You just remove yourself completely when the other side has no desire to communicate.
The mental picture is like playing chess with a chicken. You can put it on the board, and you might have a great opening move, but here's what the chicken's going to do: it's going to strut around the board, knock over the pieces, and [ __ ] on the board, clucking triumphantly. Who's winning the game?
"Charles, have you ever been to Napa Valley?" Not only have I been to Napa Valley, but there's a Cardano wine in Napa Valley. Look it up; if you Google "Cardano wine Napa Valley," you can click on images and see it.
"How did the cell treatment go for immortality? You look older." I feel okay. We haven't really done much outside of one round of experimental exosomes, but we're looking at peptide therapies, and we'll do something with hyperbarics and stem cells next year. There's just a [ __ ] load of work to get all this stuff off the ground.
"Don't spread false narratives." I haven't; that's a lie too. You guys just can't stop lying; that's your problem. You believe things that aren't true.
"Thoughts on the recent fusion breakthrough?" Yeah, so it's done at Lawrence Livermore. I knew Ed Moses; he was the former director. It's called the National Ignition Facility. Basically, you have this big sphere with a little target chamber in it. It's got this little gold target, and it's called a hohlraum. It's filled with deuterium, and they have this gargantuan laser battery that focuses all the lasers to hit the walls of the hohlraum. That creates a humongous amount of X-ray bombardment on the little pellet, and it gets a few hundred times denser than lead, crushing in on itself and forming a fusion reaction.
Then all these particles flow out and create something that can generate lots of electricity through heat transfer. It's a really intriguing idea. NIF, for a long time, has called that ignition. They were searching for that, and Bill Clinton was the guy who signed the bill back in the 1990s to build it. It took about 10 years to build its most advanced laser battery—63 gigawatts of lasers. The fact that they've achieved it means they can start building these plants probably in a 10 to 20-year time horizon.
You have to put a lot of these hohlraums in—maybe 60 per second or per minute; I can't remember the exact frequency. There's a lot of work you need to do to extract all that energy. They created something called LIFE, the Laser Inertial Fusion Engine, which is a hybrid reactor. Overall, it's a major breakthrough. It's a very different type of technology than what the Europeans are doing with ITER, which is a Tokamak design.
Overall, it's actually my favorite type of fusion because it's a very American way of doing things—shooting lasers at something until it gives you what you want.
"Not sure how one million TPS works." I don't know where that number came from either. You know, a million TPS is a vacuous thing. But the reason Hydra demos don't look like a million TPS—why would they
Cool. Charles, can you talk about SIP 1694? Actually, I’d like to see you guys discuss SIP 1694. One of my goals with SIP 1694, which is the only SIP I helped co-author, is to put a governance layer on top of Cardano that’s completely end-to-end on-chain. It’s our best way of balancing a tricameral model between the stake pool operators, kind of an upper house, which is the Constitutional Committee, and a delegative democracy layer.
There are already people going through the SIP, reading it section by section and posting videos. I would love for all of you to do the same within your communities. Go through the SIP itself, really read it out, and share your opinions, both pro and con. We have people on our side collecting all of it, and then we’re going to set up a workshop in March to help fast-track the approval of it with modifications based on community input. This way, we can get it implemented next year, and then a full government can turn on with Cardano.
This, plus the MBO and the Constitution, I think will position Cardano as the most evolved and advanced government any cryptocurrency has. It will allow Cardano to thrive long-term.
Oh, from Leslie Lynn: Are you looking for love, Charles? If so, I wish you all the best. I think you would be a fascinating, fun, passionate partner, and you deserve the greatest that romantic love has to offer.
I really appreciate that. I have been thinking a lot about love lately because I’ve been co-designing, with someone who shall remain nameless, a dating app. I think there are some really cool things you can do with AI to improve that process. It would be a great way to open up a social network with a blockchain component. It’s going to take quite some time before I’m ready to announce it, but this is my life—I’m always thinking of new ideas.
In fact, I just had a meeting with these guys at Arctop, and we talked about everything from how to mine cryptocurrencies with your mind by meditating. It brings a whole new meaning to mining pools—it’s mind pools now, mindscape. These topics are always fun to explore, especially the whole nature of love and intimacy.
I think the biggest problem people face is that there’s imperfect media for meeting each other, leading to relative maxima that people get stuck on. If you look at a compatibility curve over time, what happens is you reach a peak with someone who’s really cool, and you date them. You think, “This is better than a lot of the people I’ve met.” Then, every now and then, you meet someone who’s actually at a different level. You have to consider the pain of transitioning to that.
As you get older, it has to be like this before that trade makes sense. But wouldn’t it be cool if you could zoom out and see the whole graph? You would actually know where the absolute maxima is. Because you don’t know if the partner you’re with is the best or the best available. These are very different statements. What are you willing to do to get the best available?
If you have the right setup with a large enough network, you can actually get a much better connection. That, I guess, would prevent divorces and make people’s lives a lot better. So, I’ve been thinking a lot about that.
Now, we’re going to go ahead and ban Jon Snow. There we go. Ready to be arrested? See, what I’m talking about in this space is that people just kind of laugh and brush it off. But imagine that every day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it’s coming at you again and again. At what point do you punch back?
Charles, are you a 33rd degree Mason? No, I have no affiliation with the Freemasons or any other secret society. I was baptized Catholic; you can’t be a Mason if you’re Catholic. Well, I guess you can’t, but historically, those two orders haven’t gotten along since they burned Jacques de Molay in 1314.
Elon Musk's view on resignation: This is the classic example of "don't put your dick in crazy." Here's what Musk did: he was probably hanging out with Jack Dorsey and all these other guys, riding high. He’s worth 250 billion dollars; he’s the big guy. They’re doing their thing, and he’s like, "Man, it’d be cool on Twitter, completely free." Jack’s probably venting about the woke people on Twitter and the shareholders, and Musk is like, "Well, if it’s a private company, we could do anything." They’re talking, and it makes sense to them. Somewhere along the way, he thinks, "Screw it, I’m so rich; I’ll do it. I’m gonna buy Twitter." So he puts 44 billion dollars on the table.
Then, markets start going down, and everything starts falling apart. He realizes he’s not infinitely wealthy and starts looking into this Goliath of a company. He realizes, "Holy crap, this is no joke." So he tries to get out of it. This is like having a one-night stand; you start getting a lot of text messages and realize that maybe that wasn’t the best idea. That particular person might not be the healthiest person to have in your life, but you’ve already committed. Now you’re pregnant, oh no!
Okay, so there are expenses, a court case, trying to get out of it. Here’s the messed-up thing: the company is suing him. Twitter knew that if he acquired it, he’d probably destroy the company—that was their belief. Whether you believe he believes that, that’s what they believed. So you have a board and a CEO pursuing an acquisition that they know will be their end, but they have a fiduciary obligation to pursue it. He loses and is forced to buy it. He acquires it, comes in with a sink, and he’s like, "All right, this is going to be great; we’re gonna make this work." He’s just doing stuff.
He’s like, "We’re charging for check marks," and all these other things. Now, we and others tried ridiculously hard to reach out to Elon. We sent him videos, public and private, every channel possible to say, "Hey, we’ve been thinking about social networks for about 10 years, and we have a lot of stuff here—just basic stuff. If you want to solve the bots and identity, we’ve got like 40 papers on this. We really can help you." Completely tone-deaf, he didn’t listen to anything. He comes out there, and then you get this impersonation problem. It’s just a mess, and he was making rookie mistakes you’d expect to see on day one with these types of things.
He got rid of tons of people—some good people, a lot of bad people—and now the company’s in a much leaner state. Now he’s trying to find a CEO because his shareholders at Tesla, very rightfully so, have said, "We made you the world’s richest man; maybe you should actually be the CEO of our company instead of spending your entire day on Twitter." So now he’s trying to get out of it.
Here’s what he should have done if he was really smart about the process: start a company for a next-generation social media startup. Start with a rock star CEO, build an elite team of people around it, and bring them together. I would have actually invited Lex Friedman, but there are many people. Focus a lot on identity, information curation, information incentives for good information, and different advertising models. Build the perfect next-generation social network with a protocol at its core and a beautiful user interface on top. It’s like a Chia pet—just add water, just add users.
You get a really strong HR capacity and a really strong finance capacity. Then you bring in an operating officer or president who has a ton of experience with mergers and acquisitions. Then you call up Twitter and say, "I want to buy you guys." You do the acquisition; you have this other company here and Twitter. You leave them kind of separate, but then you start slowly but surely bringing them together. The M&A guy is going to sit down and gradually prepare Twitter to be absorbed into this other company from the perspective of moving the users over and abandoning that infrastructure.
Over a process of about a year, you slowly move it over. You keep the old CEO and the CFO and all those people in power for that year. You’re not rocking the boat too much, and they have golden parachutes; they can’t quit anyway. They’re going to keep doing the things they don’t want to do to avoid screwing up their golden parachutes. You don’t move quickly, so you can stay on Tesla. You’ve got this guy that reports to you every quarter, and then over time, you fill it up. Then, lo and behold, boom! You flip the switch, and everybody wakes up to a completely new experience, new monetary model, new advertising model—all of this stuff is just there.
It’s like, "Wow, this is incredible!" You probably laid off 70% of the crew as you moved them over because you now have a much leaner, better stack that’s modern and built from the ground up for this. This takes about a year to two years to get that core where it needs to be before you do the acquisition. If he was intending to do this, he should have started about 2019, and he’d be ready to do it in 2021. Now he’s got to do it while making huge payments, running all these other companies, and dealing with every journalist in the United States just pissing all over him—just one big golden shower.
The verification thing is a solved problem. Give people dibs and allow them to go through traditional KYC, and then you lock the account name and title to that. You allow an aliasing system, but they can’t change the name—that’s simple. We solve that problem; it’s not hard. There are plenty of service providers who could have done this. By the way, you could have verified tweets, so they sign every tweet when they tweet it. You have two-factor authentication with your accounts because you can use your PGP keys to sign things. There you go—easy peasy, lemon squeezy, ready to go!
You create a tiered system of check marks too. You don’t go to a person with 10 million, 20 million, or 30 million users—huge network influencers—and say, "You’ve got to pay eight dollars a month." No, you don’t do that; you don’t kill your super users because they’re the ones who drive traffic to your site. There’s a reason why people are there. Take care of those people. You have a tiered system for it. You’ve got to provide more value than just verification for that eight dollars a month.
So you give them access to a lot of other stuff as well, but you explore those money models with the new company and spend a year or two getting those kinks out. Once you have it, then you roll it over. It’s just been one big cluster. It’s sad too because when you peel back all the layers, it really is a problem. It’s a problem that 98% of the people that work for these companies are Democrats, and there’s no representation of the other voices. For them to label every other voice as hate speech but then their own—that’s a problem for society. There needs to be balanced moderation of these platforms.
There needs to be a different way of curating information. Algorithmic governance of these things has resulted because the protocols are used to maximize clicks to division, siloing, and partisanship. That’s the incentive right now; it’s nuts. We’ve thought about this for a long time, and he didn’t seek anybody’s advice. He didn’t even talk to Brendan Eich over at Brave and the BAT model, which is a really revolutionary way of handling advertising. He just went in full steam ahead and had no idea what he was doing.
Now we’re living it. Did you watch Avatar? I did. I watched Avatar 2; it was a real good movie from a visual perspective. It was a masterpiece; it’s probably the prettiest movie I’ve ever seen in my life. I saw it in IMAX 3D, and I was quite happy with it. Now, the problem is the plot was very eco-hippie, "Dances with Wolves," but this time we’re going to do it in sea. The humans were compressed down to a stereotype.
There are three things that bother me. First, when you take a modern military model after the US military and treat them as incompetent yahoos who are super machismo. If you’re a Space Force in a modern military, you’re an elite unit. I have guards; they’re Green Berets and other things. They’re quiet professionals; they’re super well-trained. In the 21st century, we’re talking about a future where they have future training. Those people are going to be exceedingly talented, and they’re going to have really good technology.
There’s one scene where they get ambushed in the forest. Well, they’ve operated in that theater for decades; they understand it very well. Why don’t they have drones? Why can’t the drones have sophisticated optics and create a perimeter around where they’re at? We have those today in the 21st century, and you can’t do that then? The military side made no sense at all—zero, zilch.
Second, the humans had no motivation other than just to be evil. They literally had whalers in the movie, trying to get this whale chemical that makes people live forever. Well, why can’t they make it in the lab? Why did it have to be that? If they do have to use the creature to make it, why are they whaling? They’ve already been able to grow Na'vi; why couldn’t they grow these whales in a lab? It sure as hell beats going into the wild. You just create accelerated aging and create millions of vats on Earth. You don’t have to ship it for 30 years to get back to the planet, for heaven’s sake.
But no, whaling is bad; we have to drive that message home. Then they say, "Well, colonization." That makes no sense. You’re going to go and colonize a planet that has a toxic atmosphere, lower gravity than Earth, in a different solar system? When you have all these satellite bodies in the solar system, if you have the capacity for interstellar travel, you have the capacity to build a Dyson Sphere, which means you have unlimited energy. So none of that made any sense.
It would have been much more sensible if you made the humans multi-dimensional, with proper military tactics and strategy. Get some consultants who aren’t stupid Hollywood writers who actually served in the military to understand how these things work. Say, "How would you react to these situations?" Help them write it so you can think through how they could defeat that. There are still plenty of things they could do to do that, or you give the Na'vi a capability to defeat something, but you have to think it through.
Second, give the humans a real motivation. Here’s an example: this unobtainium—instead of just being a resource and pillaging the poor Na'vi, maybe humans are in an interstellar conflict with another species, and the unobtainium is the only thing to power a weapon system that they need to win the war. So humans are fighting a battle for extinction. If they lose, the entire race gets destroyed; Earth gets destroyed. Suddenly, every person in Pandora is not there because they’re a capitalist greedy bastard who just wants to destroy the environment. They’re there because they literally want to save the human race.
It’s an "Us Versus Them" thing, and you can kind of see it from the human perspective. But you can also see it from the Na'vi perspective, where you’re like, "Well, if you do this to us, you’re going to destroy our world." So you’re destroying our world for your world. Then it’s a little bit more ambiguous and nuanced. No, can’t do that. We can’t even come up with anything like that; it has to be capitalism is bad. Apparently, space whalers are a thing.
You know, I read some Futurama—whalers on the moon. We’re going to colonize this planet, which, by the way, would just kill everything on it. If you change the atmosphere to oxygen, all the creatures will die on the planet because that’s the only way you can make it livable for humans. So why don’t they just nuke the whole planet from orbit? Just use very high radiation, fast half-life bombs, and radiate the entire planet, kill all the life off of it, and then just use these nanobots to rebuild the whole planet with the unobtainium to power it.
They don’t think, you know? James Cameron wanted to tell the same story again and again and again. So from a plot perspective, it’s absolutely terrible. But you don’t watch it for the plot; you watch it because it’s eye candy. You can’t get enough of it. You’ve got pretty fish coming at you; it’s so beautiful and state-of-the-art. It’s just cool, and you’re transformed into a different reality. So if you suspend disbelief, you’re not watching for a plot, and you’re okay with "Dances with Wolves" having sex with the abyss, having sex with FernGully, and creating some weird love child—then okay, we’re good.
Did you watch the first episode of 1923? I did see Harrison Ford at NFR; he was there hanging out with his co-star, but I haven’t seen 1923 yet. I’m real excited about it.
Charles, where can I stake my ADA without any hesitation? I mean millions of ADA.
Your Daedalus wallet.
Charles, do you think World War III is imminent?
Well, we’re all working really hard as societies toward it.
I guess I don’t need to see Avatar now; thanks for the spoilers.
Well, come on, man! You kind of knew the humans were coming back. You knew they were doing the whole resource thing again. I didn’t really give you any of the actual plot, but I was just giving you a high level of why I’m so disappointed about it.
I want to see this version of the movie now.
Yes, right! Because there’s tension, there are sides, there are philosophies, and they’re nuanced. It’s hard to pick one, and there are compelling characters that are multi-dimensional and have emotions. If the human race is losing things and the humans go and do something atrocious, maybe before they do that or after they do that, you see the general just sitting there watching the results of a battle—all these corpses floating in space. He knew the guy that was commanding the battleship or something, and it’s eating away at him that they’re losing. They can see them getting closer and closer to Earth.
So yeah, they messed up the Na'vi, but then look at the battleship, and you’re like, "God, what is this all about?" Maybe those aliens have a swarm intelligence, kind of like Pandora has, because Pandora appears to be a living planet. The Na'vi actually have the secret to winning the war, and that the swarm intelligence there could teach them some way of communicating with those aliens and actually having them be peaceful. Maybe that’s the key, and by becoming one with nature, you can then solve these problems that you can’t solve through force.
You see, you still tell the environmentalist message, but at least the humans are not evil; they’re rational. God damn it, tell a story!
Charles, what are your thoughts on Daniel Schmanberger?
I’ve actually had several conversations with him; he’s a super cool guy. I’d love to work with him on a project.
Do you think they were virtue signaling at all?
I haven’t watched it. Hollywood virtue signaling? I’ve never heard of such a thing.
Thoughts on Henry Cavill being cast in Warhammer 40K?
Okay, so Warhammer 40K—Games Workshop is one of my favorite cinematic universes, you know, gaming universes. It’s good to see it become a cinematic universe. It’s just such a delightful setting. It’s a grim dark future; it’s like H.P. Lovecraft meets a really depressed fiction writer meets high sci-fi. You put these things together, and then you add a dose of religious fanaticism and all kinds of crazy stuff.
It is super exciting to see that they’re going to do this. It is a world that is utterly incompatible with the woke agenda—utterly incompatible. It’s going to be really hard for Hollywood to navigate this one. You can do diverse casting and all that other stuff, but there’s no tolerance for those types of themes inside that setting, inside the world.
So if they’re actually going to do a faithful representation, they have to put in hyper-conservative religious zealotry and a regimented society where every person is like a cog in a gargantuan Galactic bureaucracy. They all have to worship the God Emperor, and the Space Marines are asexual killing supermen. It’s so cool, and you have all these amazing xenos like the Eldar, the Tau, the Tyranids, and the Orcs.
It’s going to be really fun to see what they do with that particular setting. It’s grim dark, and there’s an incredibly fanatical fan base. So you think Star Wars fans are bad? The Warhammer fans—they’ve read it all; they know it all. There’s a guy named Voldemort on YouTube who does hour-long videos about one particular thing, like a Dark Angels chaplain and how you become a chaplain. You know that whole process of getting confession from traitor marines and the black pearls that they get on their collar.
It’s crazy the depth that these guys have. Flash Kits even has these great parody videos with furries and Warhammer, like the eternal scourge of the very worlds. I highly recommend it. It’s going to be very difficult for them to make it entertaining and really capture the spirit and ethos of Warhammer because really, all it is is just total immersion in a society whose only purpose is conflict. There’s no art or culture; there’s pure war. There’s only war in the grim dark 40K universe. Any moment of temptation to do something else, they even have a chaos god named Slaanesh who tempts you, and then when you go down that road, horrible things happen.
It’s really interesting.
Hey Charles, Peter Diamandis just tweeted that longevity escape velocity will most likely
Yeah, I think they keep it that way on purpose, but it's just a crazy story. What was so crazy about it to me was that he didn’t expect to get arrested. He was just like, "Oh, well, I did nothing wrong, and I’m going to start another company." Kevin O'Leary is out there saying he’d invest in him again; the kid's brilliant. He tried to do the DK and Luna too, apparently that's allowed as long as you live in Serbia.
Alright, go ahead and pick some questions. What do we got?
Oh, do you watch Yellowstone? I don’t know if it’s going to let me highlight one, but you can’t highlight them. I don’t think I can. Maybe if I’m made into a moderator or something. Let me see what I can do here. So the layout... we said we’d do it live. I guess here we go. You’ve been invited, but you can’t highlight text. Oh, edit name, edit that. I like to put a little Chiron on. I can mute you. Check this out—you’ve been muted, and now I can unmute you.
Oh, there we go. Focused. Yeah, look at all these toys! Oh yeah, oh yeah, wow! [Laughter] Soundboard going, exactly. And there’s a green room and all these things. Upgrade to a growth or business account to access the green room and ensure your guests are ready to go live. Oh, okay, so I don’t even get a green arrow. Thank you, StreamYard.
I love when the premium version of the product is the version that isn’t nerfed. I never understood that. Discord does that too; it’s like pay to make it work as well as it can. It’s like, why is that your business model? That’s weird because you’re actually going to pay for it.
So what would you say the fast was like last week? What we went through was good. We still got your gummy worms hanging here. Did you all like that? Did you guys see that? I’ll take down the gummy worms. It’s real! Oh, it’s not—I can’t get it in the frame. Oh, there we go. It’s slightly blurred gummy worms. Yay!
I can tell you I vouch this actually happened. He actually did 14 full days; he actually did not eat one time. He was very excited about snacks, more excited than usual, which is saying something because we love snacks. I think that’s probably the tie that binds us—our mutual love of snacks: beef jerky, crackers, sodas.
When we talk about falling in love with food, it was like a fetish-like quality of food. People would bring Chick-fil-A into the office, and I would smell the bag like a creepy weirdo. I was going to bite me on kids' hair with that bag. You would also smell the bag from about 40 feet away because your senses are so sharp after not eating for 10 days. Your brain was simply in survival hunting mode; you just found that chicken from, you know, 400 meters.
They said, "Charles, turn your lights on." I think I look better this way, right? It’s dark and mysterious. The lobster is obviously iridescent. Vinishery seems to have vanished; no longer on the team.
Are you talking about Dirk and Vinishery? We’re here. Vinishery is wonderful; we just saw her in Edinburgh. I met her for the first time there. It’s crazy how information propagates and people say stuff.
Yeah, it’s a lot. There’s going to be a side chain; that’s an interesting one. Oh yeah, well, they’re more than welcome to work with us. We’d be happy to come up with a plan. Yeah, that’d be fun.
Alright, what else you got for me? Upgrade from Super Nintendo to N64. You know, I never played the N64. My mom got me a Nintendo, a Super Nintendo, and a Sega Genesis, but never bought me a PlayStation or an N64. So I literally skipped all those games and moved over to PC gaming. I feel like in hindsight this may have had a transformative effect on my childhood, and it stunted me.
Going right into the PC gaming world, you cut your teeth, you know? There’s no joke there. You’re doing Half-Life instead of just like Super Mario 64. Your childhood got stunted essentially; no more fun in games. It was all hardcore gamer from then on.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s why I’m so weird. [Laughter]
What else we got? Let’s take a look here. Oh, Dan is really asking about the Mandelbrot set. He’s asked a couple of times; I think he’s very interested in your thoughts on Mandelbrot and fractals and such.
Yeah, fractals are fine. You know, it’s a broader class of ideas called non-linear dynamics. Basically, you create these systems of partial differential equations, and you can generate all these really cool visual effects that are self-similar and have infinite detail. So when you zoom in on a Mandelbrot, you just see with more resolution the same pattern reoccur again and again.
It’s really nifty that you can create these mathematical structures for it. You think, "Well, that’s not useful for anything," but it turns out that particular math is super useful for systems theory. There are a lot of things in nature that tend to follow that. One of the big guys in space, his name is Steven Strogatz, and he’s written a lot of cool papers and books. They’ve now been applied to economics, physics, and even computing.
It’s cool to see that. Turtles all the way down! That’s what he says. Geometric generalizations for scaling—would you agree with that as a description of fractals?
No, because there’s no information. There’s no meaningful information. You can’t somehow connect that pattern in a way where you can encode infinite information. Because if you could, then you could conceivably generate something where you could put an arbitrary string, and then you’d just have a compressed representation. You’d have a perfect trade-off between computation and storage.
So I’m not aware of any way to use fractals to store stuff. Information theory is very tricky about this. There are limits to how much you can compress something, and there are limits to how you could represent something. Fractals are a low-information system.
Very interesting. Can we solve America’s voting problem? That’s a good question. Well, what do you think?
I think we need more inclusive accountability. I think zero knowledge can enable that because you don’t want to be in a situation where people can sell their vote. But I do want to know that my vote was counted in an election. If everybody can check their own vote to a certain extent, I think that could go a long way.
And you know, you used to work in DC. You want to give them a little bit about your background?
Oh yeah, so I worked in two different Senate offices on the Hill. I worked for the Senator from Kansas, Jerry Moran, and loved it. It was great. I went to a SpaceX launch, the second resupply mission, CRS-2. That was pretty awesome.
I was in the Senate during a very interesting time, like when the SOPA and PIPA regulations were coming through, and the Department of Justice was trying to break how HTTPS works. It was a very interesting time to be starting to get involved in public policy, like 2012-2013.
But yeah, I went on to work at two different law firms doing patent prosecution, and then I worked at a couple of different startup companies—a SaaS company and then I worked at an event space company, which was super fun. It’s very different doing events in DC compared to everywhere else because when you do events in DC, you’re doing dinners for senators. You’re working with all the big associations and the defense contractors.
You just kind of become this meeting point for all these different organizations to meet and discuss business. So you meet a lot of interesting people. It was a really fun job and taught me the sales process. I liked it.
Which brings up an interesting question. During your time in the Senate, floating around and seeing the legislative process work, how much was it a Senate or congressional-wide concern about election integrity or improvement of the overall federal election system? Was this something that you heard a lot about and they cared about, or was this something that was like a second-class citizen of a political issue?
It was definitely an issue in the 2010 campaign. I did some election volunteering for a member of Congress in that election, and that was the big year with all the Tea Party folks. People were definitely concerned about election integrity and being able to show residency and things like that to be able to vote in a particular election in a particular jurisdiction.
That’s now highly politicized, and you can’t really say that. But I don’t know how we’re supposed to say our elections mean anything if you can’t say that people from other districts aren’t voting in a given election. It doesn’t make any sense to me.
So I wish it weren’t so heavily politicized. I think we just need to stay focused on trying to make sure that it’s fair and that people who can vote in a particular district are. It’s been on their minds for a little bit. It wasn’t as big of an issue as it is today.
Since 2016 and these allegations of election tampering, it’s definitely elevated the concerns a little bit. But yeah, I think the seeds of it were there. For certain jurisdictions, there’s a very big incentive to have as many people vote as possible, so there are always going to be competing political interests.
It’s so cool because election integrity and the quality of elections and the overall level of participation should be a ubiquitous political issue. It’s a foundational issue, you know? It’s like plentiful food and clean drinking water. You’d think that that’s bipartisan. You don’t have political parties saying, "No, I want radium in the waters. No, we must have poison in every sandwich in America."
That’s what I desire because Congressman Smith is for clean food, and I am against clean food. Then you talk about election integrity, and depending on whether your guy wins, the side says, "Oh, we’ve never had a safer, more fair election ever." If your guy loses, they’re like, "The election is rigged! We will get to the bottom of it." You can’t have a system that way, you know?
Yeah, I think protocols are the answer there. We can do a lot more to improve how we’re recording votes. I still think about LBJ with a container full of stolen votes in the back of his pickup to win the Senate election. We haven’t gotten a lot further than that in a lot of different places. People are still counting paper ballots, and what prevents something like that from happening in any of those elections? Nothing!
You can’t control for all of that, but protocols can control for that. Let me take the kids out of it. This is an interesting question right here. It says, "Allegations? You’ve got to be kidding me."
So this particular user, I suspect, is one of the people that just believes fervently that the election was rigged. This actually brings a second topic into lens, which is what is the burden of proof to convince somebody that something is legitimate? Different people have different burdens of proof, different burdens of evidence.
Obviously, this particular person’s burden of proof has gone out the window. I’m not convinced of it, but what’s really interesting is the psychology of these things. If you take the people who feel the election has been rigged, whoever they are, whichever election it is, and then you provide them some evidence, the question is how many convert and say, "Oh, I’m now convinced it wasn’t."
I would argue that no matter how much you provide, what threshold you provide, they just think the entire institutional process is fundamentally broken. So you’re left with this really interesting question of how do you restore credibility? It can’t be, "Well, his candidate wins." That can’t be the case; you need some other system in place.
So I could also ask, "Well, blockchain systems are the way to go." The problem is, let’s say the blockchain system produces the same outcome where your candidate loses. Do you think this guy is going to be like, "Well, that blockchain system restored integrity. I checked my vote, and it was great"? No, he’ll say, "Oh no, them computer hackers sitting in the basement hacked that blockchain system and added 50,000 votes, 100,000 votes, 200,000 votes."
Because we live in this post-truth economy, right? Where people just say, "Who cares if it works or not?" This guy’s very concerned that my being on the payroll doesn’t allow for free discussion.
Thoughts?
Yeah, you are free to say whatever you want. Thank you. I also feel like I try to tell you what I think. I don’t think we always agree on everything, right? We have pretty strong debates sometimes. That’s okay, you know?
Oh yeah, we’ve had some debates. Oh sure, yeah. You know, that’s what it’s all about. He’s pretty authentic when it comes down to it; he’s not trying to control what everybody’s thinking. So we’re trying to create space to actually have these debates, not shut down debate.
Alright, what else we got? Hmm, let’s take a look here. It’s the next one. Hmm, there’s someone asking if you’ve ever thought of naming your lobster David Foster Wallace. I don’t know if you ever read "Consider the Lobster," that essay.
They don’t know it very well, but he already has a name. His name is Logan; he was named by the community. I feel like I would be breaking a social contract if we changed the name of the lobster. Besides, Logan’s a great name. That was one of the best X-Men movies ever made.
Thoughts on Kevin O’Leary going to prison?
O’Leary running? Yeah, well, we ran into him twice. We ran into him in Dubai. Where was the other place we ran into him?
In DC.
DC, that’s right. We ran into him in DC. So in Dubai, he gave his little speech, and everybody’s fawning over him. He’s like, "Shalotta great FTX, the best ever." Then we sat on this private panel together, and it was a big debate. I kind of trounced him a little bit, and he stormed out all angry. It was a lot of fun.
But I was like, "God, this guy is... I thought he’d be more on the ball." He had this book, and he talked and repeated himself multiple times from his public speech to the speech on the panel. It was very clear that he was just reading off bullet points, and he didn’t have a lot of depth in his cryptocurrency knowledge.
That’s not uncommon when people are transient and they come into our space. They find something they like, they become a paid spokesman, so I didn’t think very much of it. Then we saw him again in DC, and Rachel had dinner with him. His table was right next to our table, and again, very vacuous, very hollow.
He said, "Ah, you know, Cardano is going to fail because no VCs like it." So first, I was surprised that he had such a strong involvement in FTX. I thought a guy of his wisdom and experience, with just a lifetime of business, wouldn’t put that many eggs in the basket because there are substantial reputation concerns for being so connected to something like that.
The other thing is his statements after the scandal. I mean, it would have been very easy for Kevin to be like, "I had no idea! Goddamn FTX screwed me! I’m so upset!" Instead, he’s like, "I would invest in him again; he’s a brilliant kid." You know, CZ is responsible for it.
On behalf of CZ, go [expletive] yourself! I don’t speak for him, but I’m going to be the CZ anger translator. Just like the Obama anger translator, I’ll be the CZ anger translator. You do not go before the U.S. House of Representatives and sit there at a congressional hearing and lie like that. You just don’t!
It is so blatantly clear that this was a Ponzi scheme on a scale with Bernie Madoff. For him to say that Binance put them out of business is like saying that this building has been eaten up by a bunch of termites and it’s completely rotten from the core, and this six-year-old kid came over and just went, and the whole thing collapses down.
And you say, "It’s little Bobby! Little Bobby did it! He broke the house!" No, no! You see, it wasn’t a Tom Ice; it was little Bobby. No, I’m sorry; the foundation was gone. It all went to this Adderall junkie, you know? It happened with orgies and doing his weird [expletive] on the island.
You know why it’s the island? You notice that? Like, all these... it’s got to be the island. If I ever moved to an island, guys, it’s to get out of this. Something’s wrong, okay? JJ’s job is to keep me out of the islands.
Yeah, I can guarantee you we’ve not looked at any islands. No weird stuff. All above board, all above board.
Oh, this is a good one. This is a light one. Okay, Star Wars or Dune?
Oh God, okay. So I used to love Star Wars. I was the biggest Star Wars fan. I even know what the crystal in the lightsaber is called. You know what it’s called?
Uh, the kyber crystal?
Yeah, it’s a kyber crystal. Exactly! Okay, so I knew every aspect—using Tong, you know, the kyber crystals, the Errata, all the Sith lore, all the Sith holocrons, Darth Bane, you know, all these guys.
It was like a thing, and I loved the extent. I even read the novel "Darth Plagueis." It was a great novel; highly recommend it on Audible. So it was a great universe, great lore. There was a lot of meat and potatoes to work there.
I got excited when they had the
So my thought process was that in Act One, you bring the Paladin in, and he's now blind and a bit schizophrenic. Actually, when Terial crashes, he's kind of the person who's taking care of Terial because he knows he's Terial, but they don't reveal that. I think it was a good opener; it was very well structured, with good pace and balance. However, you need to introduce the Paladin and have some sort of sacrifice to give Tyrio his memories back. It's a good way to get the Paladin to go out.
Now, in Act Two with Belial, the Lord of Deception, literally the minute you meet the Child Emperor, you're like, "Oh, that's Belial." It's obvious. What they should have done is have the Sorceress retire, and her assassination is what brings you there because you know that Belial is involved. You attend a funeral and go through this whole thing, and then you have a character that you think is Belial. There's a lot of evidence pointing in that direction, and you work with somebody to do the investigation. You keep going and going, and then you have this awesome boss battle, and you kill them. You're like, "I won the game!" So you go back to get your reward, like you would normally in any of the Diablo acts, and the guy who was like the person you investigated suddenly changes into Belial and attacks you in town. You're like, "Oh, [expletive], you weren't preparing for that!" That would have been a lot of fun.
Now, Zoltun Kulle, I thought, was the perfect character to carry into the rest of the game, and I'll explain why in a second. When you rescue him and put him back together, he initially betrays you. You subdue him, but instead of killing him, Terial says, "We got to keep him around because he's the only person who understands how the Black Soulstone works." This is a major thing, as it's filled with all the souls of the Primevals. There's a chance to win the war forever, so Terial binds him to serve you, and he becomes a companion, like a replacement for Deckard Cain. He's like a dark Deckard Cain, basically.
Then you go to Act Three, which is the Osmodan act. You have to have something to hold back the armies of Osmodan. You have the Barbarian and the Necromancer pair up, providing comic relief while literally holding back the entire armies of Hell. This gives you the opportunity to go into the volcano and kill Osmodan. You make it look like Zoltun Kulle is planning on betraying you, but it turns out it's Adria with Leah, and they do the whole Diablo Prime thing again. You go there, and Zoltun Kulle goes with you to Heaven. You have the big fight with the Primeval, and they still have the Black Soulstone. They're like, "We got to destroy this thing; it's bad news." Zoltun Kulle says, "Well, there's only one way to destroy it: you have to go to the Hell Forge and break it down there."
Then you have this epic battle where you basically go into Hell to finish off Act Four. You have to survive long enough to prepare the Hell Forge to destroy it, and you realize that the only way to destroy it is for someone to sacrifice themselves. So Kulle actually sacrifices himself to destroy the stone, and you get the hell out. You have this nice redemption arc from the guy who made the Black Soulstone. You think he's a bad guy, but it turns out that humanity can be both evil and good; it just depends on the choices made.
Another thing that really bothered me was Imperius. You read the lore, and he's this super badass angel with a spear literally forged from a star. I mean, he's like the ultimate warrior, but every time you run into him in the game, he gets his ass kicked. You're telling me he's a badass warrior, but literally every time I see him, he's getting [expletive] up. That would give you an opportunity to help battle and actually show how powerful he is.
That's how I would have done it. That would be the sketch, and we'd work with some rewrites to clean it up and do some interesting things structurally. I think it would have flowed a lot better and been a more enjoyable game. But it was a terrible game. I didn't leave it with rage, thinking, "How dare you? You’ve ruined my childhood!"
Now, also regarding Diablo 4, I'm cautiously optimistic. But you know, modern video games—there are only a few studios like Larian and others that really make good stuff anymore. The indie guys still could do good stuff, but I'm super skeptical these days. The big studios are closer to Marvel movie constructions now; it's just experiential. It's not really story-driven or character-driven; it's just a big simulation.
You just step into a world, which is a bit like what Valheim was. I forgot that it came out during the pandemic; it's this Norse open-world thing.
There are some strong opinions about that.
Oh man, less game talk please.
Oh no, it's almost as if this is like an AMA where we can talk about anything we want.
What's the second "A" for? I forget.
Yeah, ask me anything, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Wow, good, good.
All right, let's look.
Oh, the most contentious debate we've ever had. I don't know; David's asked this like 17 times. He wants us to talk about when we're fighting. I don't remember the vigorous debate. He's very respectful and passionate about his opinions on this stuff, but he's always a gentleman.
I think it's the whole Mac versus PC thing.
Actually, yes, this is one. It's ongoing. I'm realizing that the Google Tensor 2 stuff is really next level. I'm still holding on to my iPhone, but I think it's just a matter of time. I hate to concede any ground, but if you just stop innovating and put out the same iPhone every year, I don't know.
So how's that lightning cable working out for you there, JJ?
Oh, I love buying two cords. My standard complement—I don’t even know if you know this—but I have six cables with me at all times. I have three lightning cables, three USB-C cables, and on either end, it's USB-A, USB-C, and just like a standard power brick, just in case we need one. But I can't wait to reduce my complement.
Well, show them the standard operating equipment. Show them the brick.
Yeah, yes, this is the bag—this is the mobile office.
Okay, but you got to show them the power brick.
It's on the table right behind you in one of the chargers.
All right, I'll grab one.
So after an exhaustive search for power banks across the internet, this is the best one we found. It's absolutely amazing. It's like 10,000 milliamps or something like that, and it's got a built-in plug, so you can pull out the plug.
Yep, yeah.
You can charge it in the wall; you don’t have to carry anything. It's got three cables: one’s a lightning cable, one’s a USB micro USB, which is the old USB 2 standard, and the other one’s USB-C. So literally, you can charge everything with it, and you can charge while they’re plugged in, so you can use it as a wall charger at the same time.
Now, I buy these by the hundred and give them out as gifts to people. People get it, and they’re like, "I don’t need that." Then I see them three months later, and they still have it on them. They’re like, "This is the most convenient thing I’ve ever gotten."
It’s really nice. We made friends with the people at the factory. Fiona is my gal; she took care of us. We got a good deal. Turns out if you write to these factories, they might cut your deal if you buy like literally 100 batteries at a time.
Yeah, I know. I want braided cables; I want quick charge—all this.
It charges pretty fast, though.
Yeah, and it’s got different status lights, so it goes green to blue to red to flashing red. I mean, it’s pretty functional. We were like, "Hey, can we redesign this? Get the premium model?" And they said, "This is the premium model." They were offended, like, "How dare you!"
All right, I was hoping for a braided cable.
Get out of here.
Yeah, what’s the brand of that battery called?
It’s called Luxtude. I’m actually happy to drop a link.
Yeah, go ahead and type it into the chat to get our affiliate link going.
Oh yeah, there we go. We’re gonna make some money.
We’re gonna Michael Bay this [expletive].
It's all about the money.
Here we go. All right, enjoy folks. Definitely get one of these; they’re awesome.
Yeah, where's JJ in the comments? Threw it in there.
I don’t see it yet. JJ, where’s my JJ?
I just don’t see it. I’d highlight that [expletive], but I don’t see it.
Oh well, I’m putting it in the chat again.
Yeah, put it in the chat again. Are you putting it in the private chat or the public chat?
I put it in the public chat. I just don’t know if anybody can confirm.
Luxtude portable phone charger, built-in wall plug.
Ah, there we go. There we go. There we go.
There you go, guys.
Okay, we are not paid by them; we’re not sponsored by them. We just love them.
Right? There’s about hundreds of them—they work.
We don’t realize them.
You can own a fraction of them.
Latitude Coin is coming out tomorrow.
Yeah, somebody just said, "Great, JJ going to prison for battery scam."
It’s not a scam!
It’s not a scam. Although I saw this thing floating around Facebook: they’re like, "You can make your batteries last longer if you boil them."
No, no, no!
And you can try microwaving it, like my ex-wife.
Oh no!
Oh no!
Oh no!
All right, what else we got here?
Keep going.
The R7 is the best ever. Did you watch any of the World Cup this year?
And Cristiano Ronaldo?
You know why? I saw the Argentina game. I mean, God damn!
Yeah, congrats to our Argentinian friends. I gotta be honest; they earned it. That was a hell of a game.
Yeah, and that was just real hard. Obviously, I was supporting America because that’s our team, but we’re bad at football.
There was a lot of heart there, and I think the entire country of Argentina just went on break for like a day. They were like, "Okay, nobody open."
Yeah, it’s the World Cup. They’re like, "Ah, okay, they ain’t gonna take a break."
Yeah, I’m gonna take a break.
It’s green; take a break.
Yeah, there we go. My light just died. I had a little portable light here.
Ah, that’s okay.
Hmm, best private DNA service to buy or to sell? What are we talking about? Are we engineering DNA?
Yeah, what are we doing here? Trying to figure out this whole DNA game?
You speak up, sir.
I’m going to say private DNA—we’ll say Colossal. Colossal’s doing great work, right?
Oh, okay.
It’s like I always get concerned when somebody’s like, "Hey man, I need to buy a lot of blood right now, man. There’s got to be kids’ blood—like younger the better."
Yeah, like, "Whoa, what you doing, man?"
Excuse me?
Yeah, should we plug the other product, the Anker conference system?
Oh yeah, this is the other one that we use on a regular basis. Tell them about the Anker conference system.
This is the best $100 you can spend for a little mobile office setup. Seriously, we use this all the time. He’s done hundreds of interviews on this, and it syncs on Bluetooth. Anker Power Conference—awesome piece of equipment. I literally always have it with me.
Yeah, don’t leave home without it.
A lot of people ask, "What is the mobile office that I carry?" I have an iPad, I have a Carbon X1 Gen 7, I have the Anker, obviously carry a lot of cables and batteries, I have a webcam and an external mic, and that’s pretty much it. With that, I can run a whole company, especially if you carry your YubiKey with you.
It’s amazing how much you can accomplish on the road these days.
Brilliant.
What else we got? Let’s get some good questions.
What do we got?
Is the bear so bad you have to do paid promotions again?
No paid promotions, but they could if they wanted to. Everything I have here is Anker.
Oh my gosh, no. It just—we get asked a lot because we travel for a long time and do a lot of things. These are kind of some of the behind-the-scenes logistics of how do you run a company on the road. It took me so long to find the right equipment to do this easily, and once you do, you just become very attached to it.
Will your assistant volunteer for your age experiments?
Yeah, will you, JJ? You want to tell them about the pepper?
Get the exosomes right into my eyeballs.
I don’t know about the pepper; I feel like that’s a bad example.
Okay, I’ve eaten a lot of Carolina peppers. I’ve eaten a lot of Carolina pepper salts. You know, you gotta push the limits sometimes.
We’re not gonna talk about the Reaper pepper.
Nah, that’s for another time. That’s a 2024 maybe. If I live, I’ll tell.
We’re still dealing with the side effects.
Tell me about this bromance.
Well, we were working on a ranch in Wyoming together, and, uh, no, I can’t quit you, JJ.
Pretty funny.
No, I think that the foundation of it—we started like two weeks in, and he’s like, "I really want to do a meditation thing." I’m sure you all heard about the meditation experience last year, but we did a full week of meditation—literally 10 hours a day of that.
That’s a good foundation; you can develop silence.
Yeah, some mutual respect. It really kind of deconstructed it because, like a lot of you, I was just watching the AMAs and I was in the community, and I was going to the DC Cardinal meetups. I was like, "Oh, you know, I’ve watched Charles’ stuff for years." It just kind of deconstructed it, and I think we just saw each other as people a little bit.
It’s a good foundation for mutual respect. If you ever want to do a meditation retreat, I highly recommend that. If you can do that with a coworker, that’s a really good way to create a solid foundation.
We got a little crazy with it; I stopped eating for four and a half days just to do that. Then the other thing is we’d get up early in the morning, like five-ish, and go outside and sit down in like T-shirts and shorts. This was a mountain retreat during the winter, so it’s snowing outside and cold wind, and we just silently meditate, doing that nasal breathing with the humming to create nitric oxide for about 30 minutes just to start the day before we went to do 10 hours of meditation and yoga in the hall.
But the fondest memory was that while we were driving up there, I was like, "Hey, what do you think it’s going to be like?" and you were like, "It’s going to be like The Shining with the Red Room."
So about five days in, we were sitting silently in the hall, and I wasn’t eating anything, so I was just drinking [expletive] tea. You were looking because we couldn’t look at each other. It was modest, modest, modest. We may have been in a prison camp; I don’t know.
But anyway, I just—I wasn’t looking at you; I just put my hand up, and you were trying so hard not to laugh. Everybody else couldn’t look, right? They were trying to be focused and intentional, eating and this stuff. But it was just one of those moments where the stress was building a bit.
It was hard for a week.
Yeah, it’s pretty funny. It’s a good memory.
Do you guys do shrooms?
Oh, sorry, name of the Shambhala teacher you went to?
Janet Solingens, I believe.
And there was Grace.
Yeah, she was great too. Janet was the main instructor, but yeah, very—I’m trying to think of the director—but a great group of people. Formerly Shambhala Mountain Center, now Drowa Mountain Center in the Red Feather Lake region in Colorado, just north of here. It’s a really beautiful place; I highly recommend it.
When a proper dev document? Mustafa is convinced he’s going to keep spamming the chat until we address this question.
When a proper dev document?
Well, Mustafa, if you can give me a little bit more information about what you mean by dev document, I’m more than happy to address it.
There you go.
Yeah, would you two consider AI art art?
That’s an interesting aesthetic philosophy question. What do you think?
I think that with a proper set of samples, the problem is that it oversamples from certain pieces of art. Some artists look at some of this AI-generated art and say, "That’s exactly my style," and I think they have a strong argument.
I think with maybe something like GPT-4 or future generations, it’ll be trained on even larger data sets, and there’s more of an argument that it’s actually novel. But I think sometimes it hits a little too close to an actual artist doing it by hand.
But I think some of it is really beautiful. You can’t deny that there’s some aesthetic value to it, and it’s cool.
There was
Right, because at the time, more people would be dead than alive. We all live a lot longer now, so we take a little bit more time to pursue things systematically and be very careful about life planning.
Father and son are incredibly interested in your thoughts on Elder Scrolls. I know you’re a huge Skyrim fan, but he mentioned you talked about Warhammer. What about Elder Scrolls?
Yeah, maybe ten times. It’s a very interesting question, actually. I’ll kill two birds with one stone. Speaking of Elder Scrolls, it’s very nice. I like how much... so, you know what’s magical about Elder Scrolls? By the way, Legends of Valor inspired Todd Howard to actually make Elder Scrolls, so I own the IP that inspired Elder Scrolls—just want to put that out there.
But anyway, it’s a great open game world. I think the apex of high fantasy for the game world was Morrowind, where it truly was an alien high fantasy game with maximum freedom and flexibility. You could even fly in the game. Then things started going downhill for creativity with Oblivion and Skyrim. Mods added a lot back in, but it was still built for consoles and casual gaming. There’s a schism in the community now between Morrowind and the rest of the series.
That said, it is the gold standard for large open-world fantasy RPGs. The combat system definitely improved between Morrowind and Skyrim; I think the combat system is beautiful for melee combat. The magic system, however, I really wish would be more intricate and involved. I wish they’d still let you make your own spells, and I wish that alchemy was a little bit better. There’s a lot of that stuff, but then the guys at Bethesda were like, “Well, we don’t like spreadsheet-driven gaming.” That’s what they accused Morrowind of. So it’s a mixed bag overall.
They have a tall order with Elder Scrolls VI. They’ve had 11 years since the release of Skyrim, and they’re getting dangerously close to it. It’s really hard because every time you do a game like that, everybody’s disappointed in some way. You have all these fantasies about what the game is supposed to be, and the modern community has done every permutation you can imagine. So no matter what you release, you’re going to upset somebody. You also have to tell an interesting creative story that people like.
Now, the advantage of the Elder Scrolls series is that it’s almost like a porn movie where the story isn’t really what you’re playing for; you’re playing for the open-world experience, the side quests, the ability to explore, and the ability to mod. Yeah, there’s some dragon thing where you have to save the world, and you’re the Dovahkiin and all that. But really, it’s like, “Help, I’m stuck at the washing machine.” That’s not what I’m here for.
So Elder Scrolls has always been a little bit like that. Unlike Diablo, I give Elder Scrolls a pass. Diablo had a master class in storytelling with Diablo I and II. The whole Marius arc, where they find him in the asylum, he’s following the lone wanderer, he gets to the gates of hell, and he chickens out—he’s responsible for Baal. All of that was just so well done. There was a great tone, great voice acting, and it was so engaging—unlike anything you’ve ever seen.
Whereas Elder Scrolls is like, “Ah, there’s some godhead thing, and I guess Vivek is doing that, and there’s an asteroid over there.” Whatever. Wow, that’s a floating island; that’s so cool! Let me go see what’s there. Wow, I got the latest item; that’s so cool. Oh, I’m headed to the Mage Guild.
The other thing is that the AI system sucks. Here’s a great example from Skyrim. I wish they could fix this in Elder Scrolls VI. If you can fight in the Civil War and kill Ulfric Stormcloak, you become a Legate, which is the Empire’s equivalent of a general. If you’re an enlisted soldier, just a conscript, and you see a general, you’re like, “Holy crap, a general’s coming!” You walk by as a Legate, and the soldiers just say, “Stand alone, citizen.” They treat you exactly like you’re a normal person. Come on, the reaction system makes no sense at all. Plus, you don’t have any political power. You’re a powerful Legate, so why don’t the Jarls treat you a little differently? There are too many permutations, so it’s impossible to figure all that out.
These were always my problems. It was like a wax museum. Lex Friedman and I have had this debate because his favorite game is Skyrim. He loves it. He interviewed Todd and was like, “Blink twice if Elder Scrolls VI is coming out soon.” He was really into it. I hope they produce a really good sequel. I would love to go after the Aldmeri Dominion and crush those guys because they suck.
There’s a really good question here from Cool Guy 610. He says, “Hey JJ, question for Charles. I’m a new grad front-end web developer at a Fortune 500 company. How do I ensure that I stay relevant in the coming Web 3 world?”
Well, first, don’t compare Elder Scrolls to a porn movie if you want to be a plug. In hindsight, probably wasn’t the best analogy.
Basically, what you have to do is build stuff. Learn Solidity, learn Plutus, whatever. Pick your language, master that, and build some things. Go through the top 100, top 50, top 10 really successful dApps. Read the GitHub repositories, compile them, play with the communities, and make some contributions. If you are a developer, the single biggest thing you can do for your employability is to make commits—to actually contribute to open-source projects.
All the time, we find developers because they’re writing stuff. All these people come to be like, “I’m hot stuff, man. I graduated from MIT.” Well, so did SPF. We went to Jane Street, which was the place to be. I don’t care if you’re a high school graduate or a drop-out or have seven PhDs. If you’ve gained divine enlightenment from living in Tibet with the monks, that’s cool, but it doesn’t matter to me.
What matters to me is, do you have a development portfolio? Do you actually have projects you’ve contributed to? Because not only does it show you have technical acumen, but more importantly, it shows you have passion. Every project you contribute to reveals something about what’s important to you, how you think, and how you work with people and solve problems.
So build stuff. If you’re a web developer and you have a lot of web dev stuff, go build some beautiful web experiences. Learn Dart and Polymer, and go play with Flutter. Build a beautiful interface and showcase it. Learn Elm and show that you’re curious and interested. Maybe you make an interactive 3D maze explorer that auto-generates a three-dimensional maze on the fly. If you can get something like that to work on a blockchain as a toy, your employability goes through the roof because people will see you’re not an automaton. You’re an individual with dreams and hopes, and you actually accomplish things.
I think that’s the way to go. A small, creative idea can get incorporated into a company very quickly because it shows there are creative people behind the wheel. We’re constantly looking for interesting, creative ideas to incorporate into web pages or into the Iowa website, etc. You can make an impact even with something small, and then you’re tasked with something larger later on.
Something novel is like the AI art question. We need creative people; you need good people. That’d be a great example—just do some AI art with JavaScript and try to do something with a blockchain launching NFTs.
By the way, if anybody wants to come to my ranch, you’re more than welcome to come anytime you want. Go out to the trees and just sit at the bone pile, and we’ll meet you there.
You’ll find some integrity. That demon was freaky. Were you there at the ranch when we had it? I saw it, and I said, “I don’t like that.” The craziest part about it was that I felt like I was being stalked when I was heading back to the house. I thought a mountain lion was following me, and I was just looking around. It felt like I was being stalked.
It was a Wyoming Slender Man. Skulls for the skull throne—actually, it’s a misnomer. I do not have a skull throne; I have a rib throne. It’s very hard to build a stable platform with a skull throne.
I’m just laughing because people are congratulating Derek for getting the Singularity Net question answered. Good job, Derek!
Does your ranch have sexy Latinas? You’ve never been to Wyoming? No, unfortunately, we have a lot of good-looking bison.
Have you ever been to Skinwalker Ranch? I’ve been invited. Ben has a direct connection. We gotta go; that’s gotta be a thing. That’s the only show—the only ghost hunting show—where they’ve done some stuff, some heat thermal stuff, and it actually looks pretty legit. I’m like, “This show is pretty legit.”
I don’t know about the MTV ghost hunters or whatever, but they had some pretty sophisticated technology set up. There was some weird stuff.
Oh, there’s always weird stuff.
Moneybags, it’s our anniversary today—12 years!
Oh, well, congratulations, Moneybags! Twelve years is a great amount of time, and it’s enough time to really get to know somebody. I’m glad you were on the History Channel and told us all about the Ancient Aliens, and I’m glad you finally found somebody. Happy anniversary!
Here’s an interesting question from Nissi T620: “Are you working on a generic framework for building side chains like Polkadot substrate?”
Yes, it’s something we’ll discuss a little later, but I’d like to keep it multi-technology. I’d like Cosmos, Fabric, and other platforms. Scorex would be really cool too.
Bruno Nascimento says, “True Amasia, do you like sardines? I got a sardine story. You guys want to hear it?”
Where they’re packed in and waiting to listen?
Okay, it’s the epitome of the cryptocurrency industry. There’s this guy walking down the streets of Brooklyn. He sees a truck come by, it hits a pothole, and the back opens up. A bunch of sardine cans fall out. He goes over and tries to flag down the truck, but the guy just ignores him and keeps driving by. So he picks up all the sardine cans and takes them to his garage. He doesn’t think anything of it.
About four months later, he suddenly sees on TV there’s a huge sardine shortage. Nobody has any sardines, but he’s got all these cans in his garage. He starts making some calls, wheeling and dealing, and he sells all his 13 cans. These sardine cans start floating all around New York, and they keep trading—100 for a can, 500 for a can, a thousand dollars for a can.
Eventually, a hedge fund billionaire buys a can of sardines for a hundred thousand dollars. Everybody’s calling him; they want the sardines from him. They offer him 150, they offer him 200,000. He says, “You know what? I’m a billionaire. I like sardines on my pizza. I’m going to open that can up and put those sardines on.”
So anyway, he opens up the can, puts the sardines on the pizza, takes a bite, and spits it out. They’re the most rotten, nasty sardines you’ve ever tasted in your life. He calls the guy he bought them from and says, “Hey, what the hell is going on? Those sardines you sold me are rotted.” The guy says, “Hey, you got it all wrong. Those aren’t eating sardines; those are trading sardines.”
That is the majority of the cryptocurrency space in a nutshell.
One good question—where is Cool Guy’s question? He said something about being 620. I’m having a hard time seeing the use case for NFTs. Thoughts?
Oh, there are tons of use cases. NFTs can be bound to intellectual property or to assets that are one of a kind. If you own a house, the house can be represented as an NFT, and the NFT can be the deed for that. You can follow it through a supply chain through transactions. Water rights can be NFTs, mineral rights can be NFTs.
Let’s say you have a patent; the rights to that patent and all the programmability of that patent could be represented as an NFT. For example, imagine you’re an artist and you make music. Your master copy of the music could be represented as an NFT in a smart contract, and then they can create an NFT as a license for limited use—maybe it’s time-elapsed or a certain amount of plays or just personal to you until you’re dead or something.
Basically, you can send funds to a smart contract, and like a vending machine, it vends it out. In addition to that, you can also use NFTs for other demands, like fractionalized ownership of art. The problem is that a lot of NFTs just made a copy of a copy of a copy, and it wasn’t clear what people were buying. They speculated they’d follow the money, but really anything in life that is one of a kind or non-fungible or rare or has some notion of scarcity—each item has its own notion.
For example, if you play video games, your account, your character, your Skyrim character that you spent 8,000 hours on could be represented as an NFT. Your entire journey, your entire player history, that can be yours. You can import that from game to game and get special things. As a game development company, if anybody’s played more than 8,000 hours of my game, I’ll give them the next game for free or make them an exclusive beta tester or something like that.
Or it could change the NFT itself; it could be stateful.
Yeah, you’re a little quiet now.
Sorry about that; I turned it down a little bit. I’m just going to say you could have a stateful NFT too where, you know, you played 800 hours, and it evolves.
Yeah, your egg hatches; it’s kind of cool.
Ah, this guy! I want to hear more about the Iceman and the waffle NFT for fractionalized ownership of waffle chains.
I did not have relations with that waffle; it was delicious!
Oh yes, did you supplement your sodium electrolytes during the prolonged fast?
This guy here even made me the fasting salt drinks. It was very sweet; it was hard.
Oh yeah, just like taking a big swig of salt water—nothing like that to keep you fast going, right?
Yep, yep.
So Chain Block 969 here has been asking repeatedly about what you think about short selling and whether it should be banned.
No, I think short selling is a necessary component of market dynamics. You have to have a trading signal that indicates there’s a belief in the market that some asset is overvalued. If all you can do is buy and hold or sell, that’s a problem. If somebody can come in and create pressure and a large position builds up, showing that there’s a belief among sophisticated traders that the market is overvalued, then either those guys get wiped out because they miscalculated, or the market starts responding, and something has to happen to prove them wrong.
So options, short selling, all these things—if they’re used correctly—are great agents to create stability in the market, trade volatility, and trade liquidity. For example, options give you security. If you buy a put, you know you think the price is going down, so it gives you the right to sell at a certain price point. If you buy a call, it gives you the right to buy at a certain price point. Just having those things can create floors and ceilings for how much loss or gain a person can have. That’s very reassuring.
Let’s say you’re a producer of oil; it’s very important that you augment your portfolios with things that give you hedges in the event that your portfolio goes to nothing or goes way up.
Oh, this is an interesting question: BT 625. Do you sing sea shanties in the shower? Is that like a SpongeBob SquarePants thing?
I don’t think so. It’s almost a tongue twister, though: “Do you sing sea shanties in the shower?”
Yeah, no, I don’t know what that means. I’m very scared.
Does crypto recover?
Yeah, have you ever seen this before? This cyclical thing?
Yeah, seven times. I got the scars to prove it.
Oh, are you back on solid food again, Charles? Did you celebrate with a bison steak?
Yeah, I went from water to cat food, and then maybe they’ll give me the hard food one day.
Alright, ask me one more question. Let’s end this on a good one.
Okay, best question—the best question out there. Alright, we only get one more. Only one more. Let them accumulate for a second here.
Hmm. And thanks for having me on; I appreciate it.
Oh yeah, thanks for being here. Always fun.
Oh, this one was actually pretty good. I liked this question from David; he asked this a couple of times. David 628.
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