Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from rough and rugged Wyoming. Sometimes rough, sometimes rugged, always Wyoming, at least in my heart. I was in Gillette, Wyoming, visiting my clinic because it was my dad's birthday on September 7th. I had a great time up there, celebrating the opening of the first major part of the expansion of the clinic. We had the grand opening party on July 4th, but we had a few construction delays. It wouldn't be an Input Output endeavor or a Hoskinson endeavor if it didn’t have a delay.
Anyway, I was on my way back to the ranch because I’m going to be up here with some people from NASA and other companies to talk about human performance and one of the companies I’ve invested in called Immortal. I was boarding my Blackhawk helicopter when I got a ping on my phone saying Charlie Kirk had been shot. I took a look at the video and saw him get shot in the neck and go limp. I thought, "Oh, he's dead. There’s no way they can save him." That’s a cervical spine being severed. He would have reached for his neck if he still had the ability, but he went limp, which meant he was killed instantly.
I spent the entire flight just thinking and came here to get some sleep. The challenge is that we’re not able to have a national dialogue anymore. The politics have become so remarkably toxic and filled with so much vitriol that any person who goes into the public arena, regardless of what they believe, has to be demonized by some group of people. You can walk in and say the sky is blue, and the red sky people will come and say you’re evil and you’re literally Hitler, and it’s okay to kill you because your beliefs are different from theirs.
We’ve been down this road before. There was a major change in the American character in the 1960s during the Vietnam conflict, which led to the assassination of many people: in 1963, JFK; in 1965, Malcolm X; in 1968, RFK. There were a lot of political assassinations and a lot of anger and grievances. It was also during the height of the civil rights movement when many people felt they could not achieve the change they desired through the political process.
When we look at America in 2025, especially for those of you who aren’t from America and look at us from the outside, what you see is a group of people who are deeply distrustful of institutions. The reality is people just don’t believe each other anymore. People don’t believe the FBI, the NIH, the CDC, Congress, the Senate, or the Supreme Court. You can’t find an institution that’s honest anymore. No one believes the politicians, and no one believes anyone in authority. When you don’t believe that people are legitimate and you don’t believe the democratic process works, what ends up happening is people begin to express themselves through violence.
We saw this with the "punch a Nazi" movement when people said it’s okay to punch a Nazi, it’s okay to shoot a Nazi, it’s okay to use violence against them. That’s problematic if you label every person you disagree with as a Nazi because what you’ve just said is it’s okay to kill them. It’s okay to harm them. They’re not people; they’re subhuman. Unfortunately, it’s only getting worse. The people who are responsible for deescalating these situations gain political power, money, and preserve and protect their status in society by doing quite the opposite.
The techniques that we could use to restore faith, trust, and credibility in our institutions are unfortunately not being used because people don’t even acknowledge that they need to be used. The great excesses of the CIA, for example, in the 1950s and 60s, from Operation Mockingbird to MK Ultra to Project Phoenix, came out into the sunlight during the Church Committee of the 70s, leading to significant reform in how they operated. What is the equivalent today? Well, blockchain technology is a component of it. I’ve always believed that because it forces people to be honest. It forces people to acknowledge that we can’t trust people fully and that we need to have audit oversight, transparency, and checks and balances.
Recently, there was a scandal in the Cardano ecosystem where I was accused of stealing $600 million. What made it easy to vindicate my name was the fact that all the accounting of the Cardano crowd sale was done on a blockchain with both the Bitcoin blockchain and the Cardano blockchain. This made it very easy for forensic auditors to go through the 108,000 Bitcoin that were sent to the crowd sale addresses and all the ADA that was dispersed, matching everything to the KYC records. Everybody knew that was beyond reproach because I could not change the ledger of Bitcoin or Cardano. We couldn’t just magically pretend things were different.
When we look at how our votes are counted, who holds our institutions accountable, and the people who print our money, one of the first political movements I joined was the Audit the Fed movement in 2011, shortly after being part of the Ron Paul campaign. All we asked for there was a GAO audit of the Fed. It led to many almost comical meetings with members of the House of Representatives when they said, "Well, it’s a federal agency. Of course, it goes through a GAO audit. You’re wasting our time." Only to have a staffer tell them, "Actually, congressman, they’re not subject to that." The congressman would say, "Wait a minute. We need to audit these guys," only later to change their mind after someone shadowy talked to them.
We need the disinfecting nature of sunlight, and we need a return to objective truth and reality. If we do not have these things, we cannot build institutions on top of them. If we cannot have institutions we trust, then we have no remedies when we have disagreements. The reality is the world has become very complicated. So complicated that all the things we tend to fall back on—our relationships with each other, how we communicate, even our faiths—are not measuring up to give us the answers and wisdom we need to create meaning in a meaningless world.
War has gone from something deeply personal, where people like General Kota can charge the beaches with fellow soldiers trying to fight off a clearly evil enemy, to something where people can bomb others with drones and then go to Applebee's afterward. It’s not entirely clear if those people you bomb are good or bad. You’ll never see them or meet them, and it looks a lot like a video game. All the things we do are starting to converge into a morally gray area, and even the definitions of life itself are becoming increasingly more difficult to discern.
We have zenobots now from Dr. Leven’s work. We have potentially a whole new definition of consciousness. We have genetic engineering occurring, and new species are being created, including trans-species. Everything from our genetic code to our society to our very faiths is up for change and debate. So no one feels any stability. In the absence of institutions to guide us and the absence of objective truth, people respond with fear and disgust. Fear and disgust gradually turn into violence.
We’ve been here before, not just in the 60s but in the 30s. We saw this with the rise of fascism and totalitarianism. Many people ask, how did Hitler get to power? It wasn’t because a bunch of people in Germany woke up one day and said, "You know, we like the cut of that Hitler’s jib. Let’s just vote for him." They put him in power because his entire movement was one of trying to alleviate the fear of the spread of communism in Germany. There was a very good chance that, had they not been around, Stalin would have succeeded in taking over Germany politically, as the Soviet Union had co-opted so many nations and institutions. The more conservative establishments of the country viewed Hitler as a stabilizing force that could get rid of those scary communist people.
Had the communists taken over, they would have been no better. Stalin killed actually more people than Hitler—over 20 million. Mao killed 40 million, and the totality of communism resulted in over 100 million deaths. This is the challenge. Sometimes, when fear occurs, people look for simple solutions, simple answers, and simple leaders. We stand at that precipice in the United States right now. Many people are trying to reduce things, divide people, and say, "Well, you know what? Let’s just fight for our group." That’s the wrong answer.
Each and every person, regardless of their gender, ideology, language, or preferences, has a god-given right to freedom and liberty, and they deserve to be treated as equals. It’s not healthy or productive to divide people into little groups and say, "You’re either with us or against us. You’re the enemy, or you’re my friend." Everybody should be your friend, and we have to treat everyone with some degree of empathy and understanding. It doesn’t mean we have to agree with them or sacrifice our principles and beliefs, but we should all take the time to try to understand why people feel the way they do.
The vast majority of people who are spewing anger and hate and saying reprehensible things are either victims of propaganda or victims of fear—fear of change, fear of the unknown, fear of the other. No one has really engaged with them in a meaningful way or inspired them. In the 30s, humanity decided to take the easy road, and those fascist and totalitarian leaders led us into the worst conflict in human history, crescendoing with the first use of nuclear weapons. If we go down this road again, there’s a very high probability that not only will we face an equal conflict, but it will probably be worse and result in the death of many people in a senseless way.
It doesn’t make the world a better place, and it doesn’t make your side, whatever that side is, win. It just means you get to be king of the ashes, lord of the bones—more blood for the blood god. That’s not who we should be in 2025. We live in an age of wonder. We have so many amazing things on the horizon if we choose to embrace them. From the dawn of artificial intelligence to the magic and wonder of being able to literally rewrite the code of life itself to meet our needs.
I just had a lovely time with Bob Harmon, a very famous stem cell scientist. He took the time to fly out to my clinic, and I spent hours with him talking about the state of the art of stem cell science and where it’s going. It left me believing that within the next decade, we can potentially regrow limbs, restore lost function, and cure chronic diseases that have caused so much harm to people.
When I look at those stem cells under a microscope, I have a hard time telling if they’re Democrat cells or Republican cells, if they’re black cells, Latino cells, Chinese cells, or white cells. All I can say for certain is they’re human cells. Perhaps we should gain some wisdom from that observation: that which divides us is so much less than that which brings us together.
We have the technology to restore faith and trust in our institutions. We have the technology to return to an objective reality. History has allowed us the clarity to do it again and again. It has also provided the path for our ruin and destruction. Whenever someone very prominent is assassinated or something very bad happens, it’s an opportunity for all of us to take a step back and ask a fundamental question: How do we stop this?
You don’t stop it by punishing people or using it as political leverage for whatever cause you believe in. You first stop it by having empathy for your fellow man and woman. Then you take a moment to ask yourself, what can you do? Not who can you attack and harm or label as the other, but what can you personally do to be just a little bit kinder, a little bit better, a little bit more mature, and ultimately a person that others admire? Because if you can change yourself, you can change those around you. If enough of us do that, the sickness and miasma that has descended upon our society will recede.
I know many of you listening have been very radicalized and believe that people have been so radicalized that they cease to be human. They’re the other, and they can no longer listen. But remember, all that radicalization starts from the same source: a loss of faith in institutions and fear. That’s it. So get rid of the fear. Spend some time with the other. Get to listen to them. Call that uncle that you disowned because they said something racist at the party. Go talk to that Starbucks barista with blue hair that you really don’t think you’d get along with. Maybe you’ll find something in common with them. Maybe you’ll find that you share the same hobby or watch the same television show. It doesn’t particularly matter.
What it does do is say we choose to believe that tomorrow can be better. We choose to believe that we’re going to live in a society where we don’t watch live-streamed videos of people being shot in the throat. I think the hardest part of that moment was not seeing Charlie Kirk being shot but thinking about the impact it would have left on the thousands of young students watching him. They showed up for a debate; the majority of them were politically liberal and were going to have fun mocking and demeaning and fighting. It was a spectacle, and they left with blood splattered all over them. Many of them have never seen a person die, and for the rest of their lives, that moment will be burned into their minds, hurting and traumatizing them. They’re trying to make sense of it all.
Great societies don’t inflict that upon the young. They just don’t. Great societies don’t try to encourage or perpetuate these things for political reasons. So let’s have some empathy for them. Let’s have some empathy for each other. Let’s try to find a greater harbor somewhere else and return to a place of love. That’s all I’ll say about it.
Yes, I do believe that blockchain is part of the solution. It’s necessary but not sufficient. We just have to accept that it’s going to get worse before it gets better. But all we really can control is whether we’re part of the solution or part of the problem.
Today, at 9:19 p.m. here in Wheatland, Wyoming, on September 11th, a day that certainly has burned into many of our memories, including my own, because I lived through it and watched it on CNN as a kid—planes crashing into the skyscrapers, thinking it was a television show and not reality because that just simply doesn’t happen—I choose to believe that the world can still be a better place despite the bad things that have happened. I’m going to wake up tomorrow and try to make it one. It’s your choice what you do, too. Thank you all. God bless.
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