Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is July 28th, 2023. It’s been a long month, and I haven’t talked to you guys in a while. A lot of stuff has been going on, just a slog of getting things done, and I miss you guys. I miss talking to you and doing the AMAs. I finally had a chance tonight, it’s 10:22 PM, to actually do an AMA. I apologize for being in a new office right now; I had to move homes quickly for some construction. I don’t have my microphone or other things completely set up, but I thought it would still be fun to have an AMA. It’s Friday night, and the mood is right!
So first off, a little about what’s been going on. Intersect has been announced, and people are starting to join it. We’ve had over 200 members join, and it’s just kind of a beta getting things set up. That’s the members-based organization we’ve been talking about for a while. My hope is that it continues to grow throughout the year, and I’d love to see over a thousand members. I’m going to do a whiteboard video tomorrow in the office to cover a lot of things about how code is going to move over from the IO GitHub repos to the Intersect repos and how we intend on an open-source project for growing and really becoming the thing that we’ve all wanted to love and treasure. The code is open source, and we certainly have a lot of contributors across the space that work on it, but we could do better.
If we look at Hydra, for example, there are over 40 people who show up regularly for the meetings that happen there. There are already parallel projects like Hydrazoa from M Labs and a lot of third-party contributions for the Hydra code base, along with a nice open cadence as well as everything living in Git. That’s what we should aspire to, and it’s going to be a lot of fun to move things over.
There’s been a huge amount of progress on SIP 1694. We had the workshop in Edinburgh, which was very successful as a closing workshop to finalize a candidate spec, and now Sanchonet is underway. That is a very specialized testnet specifically to give bleeding-edge features for people to test the rollout of 1694. It will connect to wallets via the SIP 95 standard, which is currently in the final stages of ratification. Node 8.2 has just been tagged and should be working its way out this week and next week, enabling Sanchonet for people to play around with it.
Throughout the next six to eight weeks, you’ll see a lot of features roll in on the Constitutional Committee concept and the D-Rep concept. There are kind of six major areas of concern for Sanchonet, and there’s a mad dash that all the developers are pushing towards to get Sanchonet to a level of functionality where people feel very comfortable playing around with it, breaking that functionality, and rolling out a lot of new concepts. For example, this is the first release where we have an end-to-end active specification for all of the ledger rules and the things that define what the Conway era is and what the Voltaire era is. We’ve been aspiring for that for over six years, and this is the first time ever that enough infrastructure has been built where it’s possible to have a dependently typed language to write a specification that permits full code extraction to Haskell along with constraint satisfaction testing.
That’s a huge leap forward for quality assurance, debugging, and testing. Hopefully, that can, through Intersect and the MBL work, make its way to all of the other eras of Cardano and have one unified set of blueprints that are implementation agnostic. What that will permit is the ability to certify third-party clients in Rust, TypeScript, and other languages to compete with and augment the Haskell client.
There’s a humongous amount of other things to say, but it’s too late at night to really go through all of it, and I’m very excited to do some whiteboard videos tomorrow. We’re going to have a lot of fun with that. But you know what? This is not about me ranting on and on. I’ve already taken five minutes of your time; it’s about your questions. So let’s get to your questions.
Okay, let’s take a look here. Talk about the Security Exchange Commission. There was a recent ruling, a mixed ruling from the judge presiding over the Ripple case, where they kind of split the baby. They said certain transactions that Ripple the company did were considered to be securities transactions, and that’s going to have to work its way through appeal. But for all intents and purposes, the secondary market really does look like a non-security transaction.
Basically, what this does is allow exchanges to re-list XRP, and I believe some have already done so. It also creates a good legal foundation to argue that things like Solana, Polygon, Cardano, and others are not securities, as we’ve believed all along. We’ve continuously analyzed this from the Howey set of things. The war is not over yet; the SEC doesn’t really agree with that ruling, and they’ll continue doing what they do. But it does certainly weaken their case and also encourages lawmakers to finally do their job and pass legislation to cover the cryptocurrency industry, giving everyone clarity and reining in people who want to legislate through enforcement.
There’s a long road ahead; there’s a lot to do, a lot of moving pieces, and a lot to think about. But you take the small wins where you can find them. We’ve been beaten down quite a bit with Luna, FTX, Celsius, and the bear market, along with unrealistic expectations. So it’s good to take a step back and realize that our best days are still ahead of us. Whenever you have a win like this, it’s a win for the industry, and it gives everybody an opportunity to take a deep breath, sigh of relief, and just enjoy the day and move forward.
You disappeared pretty quickly when ADA was named a security by the SEC. As I’ve said in many AMAs, including this one, afterwards, nothing materially has changed. It’s an open-source project; you guys run it. We participate in that ecosystem, and we don’t make decisions as an ecosystem based upon what one particular jurisdiction or regulator says. The United States doesn’t get to wake up and change the definition of PGP or TCP or any other protocol. This protocol has people from more than 120 countries, apps all around the world, and millions of users.
When we had the 1694 workshop together, over a thousand people participated in all the different workshops. People came in from Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and other places. But you know, internet trolls like to say crazy, outrageous things or create this boogeyman that’s going to come in and kill all your opponents. But your chosen coin is magical. How about we all just get along?
Hi Charles, any update on Midnight? The Midnight people will be attending three major events for Cardano this year: Rare Evo in Colorado, CNFT Con in Las Vegas in September, and the Cardano Summit in Dubai in November. At one of those events, or all of those events, there will be Midnight people there, and there’s lots to say about Midnight. It would actually be a lot of fun to make a whiteboard video about some of the things there. I definitely will talk about the sidechains framework; there’s an enormous amount of goodness that’s occurred, and we can’t wait to tell you.
Iran is the CEO of the Midnight DevCo. He’s building that up, and he’s kind of a silent figure right now, but eventually, he’ll take a more public role. There’s a lot of good work, especially on the zero-knowledge side and some of the really cool things being experimented with, with Pluto, Eris, and Kachina. It has been finally fully realized, and it’s going to be a lot of fun to roll out the DevNet because the programming language for Midnight is very similar to TypeScript. It’s going to be fun to see people build things in that language in the Kachina model and learn their way through.
Is Cardano the supporting network for AI? Well, there is one project; it’s called SingularityNET. A lot of people are thinking about it.
Thoughts on Andrew Tate? Occasionally, I get asked questions about various controversial people like Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, or Sam Harris. They represent different parts of the political and philosophical spectrum. Andrew is a guy who is apparently quite popular in certain alt-right circles, and he’s part of that red pill movement or even black pill. He has taken a very misogynistic view of the universe, where his belief is that everything has been constructed in a way where men are now persecuted and have to take their primal power back. He says a lot of profoundly distasteful things.
I’ve never viewed men and women in an adversarial sense; I think they’re complementary. This whole push for equality is kind of missing the point. When you have complementary things, you put them together, and they fit together; they’re partners and work together. There’s equality under the law and a celebration of differences in diversity. Everything in my life where things have worked well has worked well because there’s diversity and resilience in that system. Just like with Cardano, there are three million people. It would get pretty boring if all of them were from Wyoming, Florida, or California. There’s nothing wrong with people from those places, but you want to sample from everywhere because when you do that, you learn things you’ve never seen before.
The most significant part of that is the gender differences and the cultural differences. People like Tate seem to have renounced all of that and are very bitter that the world is moving in a particular direction. I can understand the bitterness; the woke cult has certainly caused a lot of problems. Everything does seem to be moving in a way that is deeply uncomfortable if it’s not moving in your favor. But that’s not an excuse to be rude or to make people feel belittled or to attack people. There’s no ethic that grows people up. At least with people like Jordan Peterson, the advice is fundamentally sound: make your bed, internal fortitude, stoicism. These are not outright racist concepts, and the people who tell you that fundamentally misunderstand them.
These are concepts that build inner resilience and character, giving you the ability to withstand adversity and grow from it, becoming greater than what you were yesterday. There’s a life ethic there, and there’s nothing wrong with life ethics that give you stoicism and the ability to be stronger and better. There’s also this concept of having self-integrity and honoring your obligations. You make promises and commitments, give people your word, and follow that. That’s a perfectly legitimate system, and it’s not exclusive; it doesn’t harm people.
I fully appreciate that certain groups feel that such people are evil or destructive. When you really listen to the arguments and language, they’re not actually talking to each other; they’re talking past each other and operating on different wavelengths. It is a perfectly legitimate thing to say that it is exceedingly damaging and dangerous to society to abandon the concepts of inclusive accountability. Your ability to self-verify the statements that people are making and completely rely upon a bureaucracy for truth—that was the basis of the Soviet Union. They basically said, “We tell you it’s Tuesday; it’s Tuesday,” but it’s Wednesday. You go to the gulag if you don’t listen to them.
That’s unfortunately where we’re at with a lot of language games where definitions change on the fly. Things that we grew up with, that we thought were objectively true and could verify through scientific processes, are now just basically decided by a bureau. In some cases, it’s criminalized, and it reminds us of the four stages of societal capture: indoctrination, institutionalization, criminalization, and finally, gulagging, where you purge the undesirable elements of society. That’s what the Communists did, and given that they killed over 50 million people in the 20th century, it’s not optional; we have to be vigilant against such people.
That’s one side of it. The other side is that people want to be treated with respect and dignity, and they want people to celebrate and cherish their self-selected identities. There’s probably some way to meet in the middle, requiring a little bit of give and compromise on both sides—not totalitarianism. There is no compromise with Andrew Tate, and unfortunately, there’s very little compromise with Jordan Peterson, for better or for worse. A person is valuable if you can extract something from what they’re saying and integrate it into yourself to find a productive outcome. I see that with people like Peterson; I don’t see that with people like Tate.
Unfortunately, ADA at 30 cents is better than three. It’s all about money with you people. You just magically believe you get to a certain price point, and then everything in life gets great. You ask yourself, what’s the point of it? This is an ecosystem that’s giving decentralized governance to the masses, a voice back to people, economic agency, and identity to people. It’s giving people a safe place where they can do business and commerce without fear of censorship and de-platforming.
When you upload something, what you see is what you get; it’s transparent. You’re going to compress that whole thing down to a number because you’re in and out, number go up, you get out, and then you think magically your life is going to be great. Would your life be great if you lived in a dictatorship? Would your life be great if at any given time your bank account could be shut down? Would your life be great if you could be fired from your job for having the wrong opinions? You live in constant fear that somebody’s going to basically gulag you.
That’s the lived reality right now for billions of people, especially the Chinese, who are now living under the People’s Bank of China rolling out the digital yuan with social credit connected to it. Tell me how magical it is to be Jack Ma right now—20-plus billion dollars, and suddenly he’s learning Dallas poetry in exile, and his whole empire is dismantled because he said the wrong things about the wrong people. It’s not about the money at its core; it’s always about your rights, your freedoms, and what it means to be human. If you can’t see that, I don’t think you understand the point of cryptocurrencies. I don’t think you’re capable of telling the truth about anything.
Okay, random internet person who’s using my picture for their profile picture. Hi Charles, have you still been in touch with John Wood since his departure to El Gran? He went over to the El Gran Foundation side. I’m on very good terms with Sylvia, McCauley, Sean Ford, Steve, and a lot of people in the Algorand ecosystem. We obviously know all the cryptographers like Craig, Country, and Tal Raven, who have been affiliated with the project and did work for the project.
The foundation’s a little prickly, and I’m not sure why. John’s a nice guy, and we interact with each other; we’re on very good terms. There are other people in leadership positions at that organization who are hyper-aggressive and adversarial, and I’m not sure what the point is. It’s not just externally; it’s also internally against other organizations in the Algorand ecosystem. I don’t know what that gains them or what approach they have.
It’s one thing to be fun and competitive, like when Solana goes down, and we post a tweet here and there—that’s just good old-fashioned competition. If there are sports teams fighting each other, if you’re a Chicago Bulls fan and the Boston Celtics are in town, of course, people are going to have fun with their team. But at the core of it, if there’s something interesting in Tezos, Solana, or Polygon, and we could find a way to work together, we’re one ecosystem—the crypto ecosystem. We learn a lot from Zcash and Halo 2, and they’re probably going to learn a lot from our work with Pluto Eris.
There’s a lot of movement here, a lot of transitivity of ideas. Algorand has a lot of cool stuff in it, like the algorithm boxes they’ve come up with and the work they’ve done with things like Falcon, the post-quantum signature scheme. Obviously, Algorand itself has a novel consensus algorithm, but they’re very brittle on the incentive side, which is why they have less than 10% participation, and they’re having a crisis that they have to resolve.
We have a whole algorithmic game theory group based in Oxford. We wrote papers about how people would work together with these types, which is why we have a 74% participation rate with staking in Cardano. The network’s been up for more than 2,100 days without failure. So why does it make sense to be adversarial? We could find ways to collaborate.
Some of the leadership there has always viewed us as an enemy to be conquered, and I don’t know why. The very creator and founder of the ecosystem doesn’t view it that way. When I go to Boston, I have dinner with Sylvia; we talk to each other on a pretty regular basis. If there’s ever anything in our ecosystem or his ecosystem where we think we could work together, we, of course, talk about it.
Even among that side, it doesn’t work. John’s a bright guy; he’s a good CTO. I’m glad he has the resources and the remit to do cool and interesting things. Their code is open source, so I hope they continue to innovate.
Thoughts on RFK Jr. wanting to back the US dollar with Bitcoin? It doesn’t make any sense to me. I was there in El Salvador; I met President Bukele. We had extensive conversations, and I passed on the deal, giving it to other people. They decided to deploy a system in the government of El Salvador, which is private and not very transparent—basically the antithesis of Bitcoin.
There’s not enough Bitcoin; there’s not enough capability for the US government to engage with that to make it a sensible decision. There’s no reality where the United States government is going to back its own money with an asset it can’t control or doesn’t own a certain amount of supply of. If you’re going to do it, build a different crypto concept. There are plenty of ways you can tokenize real-world assets and put them into an algorithmic stablecoin. The US government could probably figure something out like that, but we’re so far beyond the asset-backed, full-reserve days of the US dollar. We lost the last vestiges of that in the early 70s when Nixon took us off the gold standard.
It’s been a long time since Bretton Woods. Why are people in the United States getting poorer?
X will be the final form, and it's not our side that is creating a delay. It's just that the government has to get everything all into one bucket. We've been working closely with them; some days are easier than others, but there's not much to report. When you do these large-scale government programs that are very bureaucratic in jurisdictions growing into a digital economy, you have to be patient. It takes quite a bit of time.
What's exciting to me is that at some point, when you get to that level of maturity, you can start having realistic conversations about how to connect these users who will be 18 or 25 at some point. They will be buying homes, getting credit cards, and these types of things. How do you connect them to a digital wallet? The big challenge with connecting them to a digital wallet at this juncture is that there are still capital controls in Ethiopia, and the central bank has yet to fully embrace crypto. You could do the credentialing in an ethical and legal way to connect that to Lace or something like that, but it's still a big challenge.
However, it is the single biggest proof point of the power of the Prism framework. Having so many users in that framework and being able to understand how to go from a paper undocumented world to a documented world is phenomenal. What that does is give you the ability to support that concept in Kenya, Burundi, Ghana, Nigeria, and other places. Those economies are much more open, and they can be used for things like microfinance and remittances. All those people will become Lace users and enter the Cardano ecosystem and other ecosystems.
There's enormous value in the exercise of doing it, but a lot of frustration as well. It's been a process, but we just keep going, keep doing things. When Brave and Firefox relate, we have Brave support. We have yet to do Safari or Firefox support; at some point, we'll roll them through. My highest priority right now is multi-delegation. I believe that's coming with 1.4, the very next release in August.
As for my mushroom farm, I had two conexes related to the mushrooms I grew. Originally, there was a fire on the ranch that destroyed one of my warehouses, but the conexes were right next to the warehouse, and they got destroyed as well. I lost my hydroponics and my mushroom farm. We always wanted to build a new one, but we just haven't gotten around to it. There's a lot of earth-moving cleanup that has to be done, and I'm going to build a larger, more permanent facility.
It was a really nice conex that had four chambers: a sterilization room to clean the substrate, an inoculation room, a growth chamber, and a fruiting body chamber. It was all segregated zone by zone, making it very easy to start from one side and work your way to the other side. In a few weeks, you could get lion's mane mushrooms, Rishi, or oyster mushrooms. I started experimenting with other substrates trying to get cordyceps, but that's gone now. That's the nature of life; sometimes things burn up.
I've been thinking about building a new facility because I've learned a lot from running the conexes. Now it's time to build a proper lab that's about five to ten thousand square feet, with a lot more automation on the inoculation side as well as substrate handling. I also want a slightly larger fruiting body area and the ability to run different zones of humidity so you can actually fruit things that require different conditions. We also thought a little bit about how we could replicate high altitude versus lower altitude because different types of mushrooms grow in different locations. Some of the mountain mushrooms in Nepal, for example, are exceedingly valuable and have great medicinal properties.
If there's a job opening, it will be in one of my companies.
Do you plan on exiting and leaving these people holding the bag? I've been here for 10 years. Everybody else has exited, retired, or left. For 10 years, I've been here fighting, building, and growing in 73 countries. I'm still here. My competitors, some of them are pretty talkative—talk to Do Kwon, talk to Sam Bankman-Fried, who are trying to get out. I'm still here, still with the same principles, still saying the same thing.
You trolls on the internet, no matter how many times you say it, you can't make it true. No matter how many lies Laura Shin puts on paper or how many journalists back her hate me, you can't make it true because this is my life. It always has been and always will be. I don't care if I'm poor; I've been poor. I don't care if I'm rich; I've been rich. I keep doing the same thing: helping every single person have economic identity and agency over their life. What else would I do in life? What else is worthwhile? If you have something to help millions to billions of people and make their lives better, you'd think the meaning of life ought to be to just walk away from that and go live on a ranch on a beach and do what exactly? Watch the whole world go to hell?
You have to fight; you have to be in the arena; you have to push forward. But it's inconceivable for a person like you because you're petty, small, afraid, and hurt. You have trauma in your soul, and you cannot possibly believe that a person would be motivated by building something, helping people, and making the world a better place. It has to be a lie; it has to be a scam.
What do I do with the money I make? I build clinics in Gillette, build businesses, invest in synthetic biology research, anti-aging, build crypto, set up labs, and put $20 million into Carnegie Mellon to revolutionize mathematics and make computers understand it so problems that have vexed us for thousands of years can finally be solved. When mathematicians die, we don't lose their knowledge. That's what I do with it. What do you do with it? You just run away like a scared little child.
I can do this because I've been here for 10 years saying the same thing. One of the community members created a website to track everything I've said in these AMAs since 2018, and it's fully searchable. There's enormous consistency there. Sorry, nobody wakes up and says, "You know what? I'm going to spend the next 10 years of my life doing the same thing, saying the same thing, taking the same abuse every single day," especially when they don't have to. They could get off the train at any time and live well. They keep doing it unless they're motivated by something beyond money.
As for my thoughts on Vivek, I'm really interested to see what he says in the debates. Every presidential cycle has the young, charismatic candidate who comes in and says a lot of interesting things. In the Democrats' 2016 cycle, it was Andrew Yang; Dennis Kucinich back in 2008; and Beto O'Rourke was another cool, young guy. They usually flame out pretty quickly, but every now and then, they actually have a sustainable campaign that gains momentum and pushes forward. Herman Cain, for example, made great inroads; he was kind of like a proto-Trump and was able to almost get a few victories under his belt. We'll see what Vivek is able to do.
As for updates on a possible documentary about your expedition, there is one. Netflix is engaged and committed to making a 90-minute feature-length film on the expedition. I was interviewed for it, and I'll, of course, be interviewed again. It's being made by Jason Cohn, a great documentary filmmaker who has done work on diamonds and street violence in Brazil. I spent two weeks with them on the ship, and it will come out eventually, depending on what we discover.
To be honest, do you pee while you take a shower? Everybody does. There are only two kinds of people: those who admit it and those who lie about it.
Was Ulysses S. Grant a good president? He was an exceptional man who tried to be a good president but didn't know how, so he did his best.
This is an interesting question about Alex Jones. He's a unique guy, and there are a lot of moving pieces when you look at him as a person. Part of him has this deep, burning desire to call truth to power and expose the hidden. He's actually broken a lot of things that turned out to be true, but the media will never acknowledge it. The record stands on its own two feet.
On the other hand, Alex Jones is not a proper journalist with proper training, so he doesn't vet things to the level they ought to be. He also likes money, and he's built an empire around many dubious products, vitamins, memory programs, and other things. When you put all these three things together, you have a wildly entertaining, really interesting, and very self-contradictory person.
For the most part, that's tolerable, but every now and then, he oversteps, like in the Sandy Hook situation, and it really does create some harm. He is one of those hyper-polarizing figures, and because he's been ubiquitously deplatformed from traditional social media, he has now become a beacon for the most radicalized elements, and they certainly pull people into his orbit.
I'd like to meet him; I'd like to spend some time with him. I'd like to understand if there's a difference between the Alex Jones we see on Joe Rogan and Infowars and who he actually is as a human being. There's been some discussion about me doing a three-part interview with Tim Pool, Alex Jones, and myself, all in person, raw and unfiltered, asking any question and talking about anything—UFOs, Ayahuasca, government corruption, things I've seen personally. That would be fun, and I think in the process of doing that, I would have a much stronger opinion on who he actually is because I still have yet to completely figure that one out.
It's a great shame, though, that he's been used to discredit very real conspiracies against the public. The cover-up of COVID is a conspiracy, and it's a terrible thing that has harmed a lot of people. Many people have been brainwashed just to accept that. We, as a society, absolutely need to dig into that because a million Americans died, and we lost our freedoms for two years. It was horrific, and a lot of things were forced upon us. We should never tolerate that and should never forget until people go to prison and consequences occur, and the truth gets out.
Unfortunately, when you have this polarizing figure, you can drag legitimate inquiries into that orbit as a psyop, making it difficult for people to differentiate between one and the other.
As for DMT and aliens, any thoughts on the recent legislation on crypto passed in the House? Not yet; I have to talk to our government affairs people and think about it.
Have you ever considered donating to Huberman's Lab? Not really, as I think he plans on funding others' research and not his own anymore. The single biggest waste of money is academia. When you throw money at them without understanding the people and having tight controls, you’ll see $20 million turn into $10 million, then $5 million, then $2 million.
For example, the endowment for the CMU side of things has a tight budget; it's only about a million a year from the endowment I set up, but that's perpetual. There's a really good leader there, Jeremy Epikatz, and he's grown enormously in his role, having a huge impact with our modest resources. It would be catastrophic if the budget were $10 million or $20 million.
The problem right now is that a lot of biotech research is bloated. It's not an R&D problem; it's a clinical trial problem. Recently, a prominent researcher at Harvard, David Sinclair, published an amazing paper inspired by research from Yamanaka factors. He came up with a collection of six chemicals that, if sprinkled into a human in just the right way from cell cultures, actually reverses aging according to some metrics.
Now, it has to go through the peer review process, and people have to confirm and replicate the study. Of course, there's a lot of criticism here and there, but the point is that this is an extraordinary result. I can sprinkle some chemicals on cells and make them younger, and it could be systemic, meaning that every tissue type—your bones, your brain, your heart—could heal you.
What's the problem? The problem is that to go from that to a drug takes a minimum of 10 years and at least $250 million. Why? The limiting factor is the clinical trial, the IRB process, and the human being involved. I built a clinic in Gillette because that is the single biggest skeleton key to that. If you can vertically integrate and figure out how to do great studies, as we are figuring out right now, then your friends in all these research groups, like the Sinclairs of the world, the Buck Institutes, and the dozens of others like Calico that are working on some notion of anti-aging, can actually take that drug and figure out how to test it on people in an ethical way with a keen eye on safety.
The problem is that a scientist is not a physician. It's a very different thing to think about. A scientist doesn't touch people, doesn't treat people, and doesn't deal with the realities of medicine. They deal with cells and microbes, bizarre scientific formulas on a wall, chemistry, and receptors. They have to do the hard, heavy lifting and thinking. There are millions of them throughout the world, and they are incredibly well-funded at the moment because every billionaire wants to live forever. That's my generation's white whale; they're chasing that.
But they don't focus on the things that can actually accelerate getting that stuff to market. That's the difference between Neuralink and Synchron. Neuralink was started by a Silicon Valley billionaire, and it's been a long and brutal road to get to a clinical trial. Ultimately, what are they doing? Drilling holes in people's heads and putting things in.
Synchron, on the other hand, has been doing something much simpler. Doctors have been putting stents in forever; they just put a stent into the brain that can read brain waves. It's a super easy procedure that doesn't need a neurosurgeon; a physician can do it. Synchron has already done a clinical trial and put devices in humans who are currently able to think to text ALS patients. Why? Because they started with an MD-PhD who understands medicine and the realities of medicine and how to actually do medical research and get things through the approval process.
You have to understand those nuances and where there are inefficiencies and where people waste resources. You also have to be very realistic and reasonable about how to approach good research. You have to be intellectually honest about where you're getting strong signals and where you're not.
We have a strategy at our clinic that I think within the next 24 months will result in an extraordinary anti-aging product that requires a doctor's supervision. It's complicated, but I think it's going to be far beyond where the market is right now. It's not because we're smarter than everybody else, but because we took a first-principles approach, had a 360 view of the entire market, and took a step back.
You have two things: you have to put the body in the right condition to regenerate, which has a signaling and epigenetic notion to it, and you have to have the right ingredient that the body knows what to do with. When you combine them together, it works well. The Sinclair research is certainly attempting that, but it's a foreign substance that requires FDA approval. There's an entire invasive set of things that need to be done.
If you look at the lead author of that paper, one of them wrote a prior paper talking about the cytotoxicity of one of the substances they're injecting. So, is it real? There's a lot there; you have to deconstruct that. It's a process, and I've done science for a long time—over 10 years now, 180 papers published under my watch, running IOG, running labs, these types of things.
I know my critics like to say I'm just a big dummy who doesn't know anything and somehow magically stumbled my way to incredible success, but it was harder earned. I had to understand what was going on and make decisions in the room, managing scientists, managing the scientific process, managing academic relationships, and having those result in papers, which now have more than 10,000 citations in a peer-reviewed process.
It's probably one of the things we're pretty good at. Yes, there are clear differences in the biological world, but not as many as you'd think for the nature of academia and how these types of things work. We're pretty good at how to build good science, and that's what we do. We're also good at figuring out research transfer—how do you get science out of the lab and into the market?
If you look at Cardano, there are so many things that took a very long time, and our critics point that out. But they don't mention that there are so many things that should have taken a lot longer that we were able to get out a lot sooner because we figured out a much easier and better way to do research transfer.
Just think of it: how does a room temperature superconductor impact Cardano? The biggest impact for cryptocurrencies is that room temperature superconductors, if they exist, would be a major step forward to make quantum computers easier to manufacture and scale.
There are many other use cases. We lose like a third or more of our power just from losses on transmission lines. There are all kinds of things related to building fusion reactors that superconductors would be amazing for—energy revolution, maglev trains, you name it. It would be an incredible advancement; it would be the most significant scientific advancement in material science in our lifetime if we have room temperature superconductors.
For computing, the most significant thing is that superconductors are used in the construction of quantum computers. This would massively simplify their design and enhance the fidelity of computation. It's not just about raw qubits; as you scale qubits up in the system, you also have to scale up your error correction capabilities because the probability of a calculation failing goes up.
If you have room temperature superconductors, it's a whole new ball game for the fidelity of computation, which means that many qubit systems are now within grasp. If that's the case, you can apply quantum algorithms developed in the '90s and 2000s to start compromising the fidelity of cryptography, which would have catastrophic consequences for national security and cryptocurrencies.
If such a material existed, it moves the clock forward. It's kind of like when you're building nuclear bombs. If you don't really know how to do implosion and all you have is uranium-235, you might be able to build one, as we did with Hiroshima—the gun design with two pieces of uranium smashing into each other. But if you know how to do implosion and have access to plutonium-239, you can mass manufacture them, which is exactly why there are 70,000 nuclear weapons floating around, and they're very
A lot of people who manage knowledge, write research reports, or work as business analysts and in business intelligence have seen their jobs disappear. Imagine if you’re a securities lawyer at a law firm, and someone comes to you asking to pull every securities case that could relate to the arguments about whether crypto is a security or not. How would you go about that? You would typically do research using LexisNexis, and your paralegals would start gathering articles and conducting keyword searches.
Now, consider an AI system that can read every legal paper and opinion a judge has ever issued in the history of America. It can understand all of that and gain total knowledge. Then, it can analyze all the arguments the SEC is making in its enforcement actions regarding why something is a security, as well as all the arguments from lawyers claiming it’s not. With this comprehensive understanding of every ruling and every judge's opinion, it can produce a work product that surpasses the capabilities of the most brilliant team of paralegals. It can do this in a matter of hours.
As a mid-level securities lawyer, you could suddenly sound like the chairman of the SEC, possessing deep knowledge of securities law. You could present this to your client as a product you produced in just a few hours or a couple of days. This is the reality today. With Auto GPT, you can give it a goal, memory, and internet access, and it can start writing legislation based on current global contexts.
In three to five years, we will see AI evolve into a superhuman programmer capable of creating complex algorithms on the fly. Right now, it’s like a basic programmer with some intermediate skills, but it’s not reliable for critical systems because it tends to hallucinate when the token count increases significantly. However, as models improve with reinforcement learning from human feedback, we will reach a point where AI can match the best human programmers in creativity and problem-solving.
This advancement will have a profound impact on capitalism. Ask yourself why, with such exponential technology—comparable in significance to the invention of the nuclear bomb—our regulators are not prioritizing how to handle it on both national and international levels. Instead, we see discussions about trivial matters in the media. The people in charge may not fully understand what’s happening or how to respond, while those behind the scenes have already decided how this will unfold, pushing us toward a post-capitalist world.
Blockchain and crypto offer a solution because they give you control over your data and money. Generative AI will become so advanced that people will be able to create fake videos of anyone, making it hard to trust what you see or hear. Imagine receiving a call from someone who sounds exactly like your mother, leading you to make decisions based on that deception. Digital signatures can help, as AI cannot forge them. The question is, where do we store this information? On a blockchain, through self-sovereign identity, which ensures ownership of your data.
The cryptocurrency space is the primary driver of cryptographic enhancements. Yet, where is the government in regulating these advancements? They seem to be pushing us out of business. If politicians truly understood these technologies, they wouldn’t act against them. Instead, they are used as tools by those who want to shape a post-capitalist world, promoting the idea that “you’ll own nothing and be happy,” defining happiness on their terms.
Regarding Meld, my understanding is that they are still in the Cardano ecosystem. Whether they go multi-chain or remain with Cardano, DeFi should ideally be multi-chain to access liquidity from various sources. If it’s limited to one chain, it creates a small world. We’ve discussed transaction prioritization and other issues with the Meld team, and they have commitments to the ecosystem that they need to honor.
Now, about Hydra. Open-source software is constantly evolving. The Hydra website, hydra.family, has a user manual, use cases, core concepts, topologies, benchmarks, and API references. If you check GitHub, you can see the project’s roadmap and the latest commits. There are numerous contributors actively working on it. The features anticipated for future releases are all public, and the community is involved in defining these features.
Every week, Hydra improves, and it’s designed to integrate into as many dApps in the Cardano ecosystem as possible. This software evolves to make using Cardano better, faster, and cheaper, providing properties like instant finality. These capabilities are not years away; they are developing week by week and do not require a hard fork of Cardano to function.
Hydra is an essential long-term project that enhances Cardano's usability. It alleviates the need for high transactions per second (TPS) by optimizing application logic, resulting in lower latency and free transactions. The security guarantees ensure that what happens in one part of the system is consistent across the board.
As we move forward, Mithril and other projects will also contribute to this evolution. The Cardano community is actively engaged, and every week, we see progress. It’s not just about immediate results; it’s about a relentless process of iteration and improvement. Promises made to the community regarding determinism, predictable fees, and network liquidity must be upheld.
If you maintain these commitments, you will continue to gain users, and transaction volume will increase. The progress is transparent and open-source, and it’s about the long-term vision rather than short-term gains. The mindset should focus on evolution and iteration, ensuring that no one is left behind in this rapidly changing landscape.
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