hi this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from hot and humid miami i don't really have one for that uh hopefully you guys can uh hopefully you guys can hear me all right i'm actually broadcasting off a hot spot because unfortunately my wi-fi is not so good uh but you know i was having a nice relaxing night i just had dinner with the prime minister the former prime minister of georgia yesterday mayor suarez the mayor of miami was extremely generous and uh giving me one of his uh limited edition city of miami coins uh i attended an event with him and i ran into vitalik buterin uh at the event and very much to each other and you know i mean that's probably unfortunate but you know i hadn't seen him in years uh and then i saw the lex friedman interview come out uh today and i had a chance to watch a part of it and the part i watched i was quite taken aback and surprised i and that i vitalik i saw they're very different from the vitalik that i've known he's grown a hell of a lot matured a lot he looks physically older and he's a lot more of a leader and uh confident in the place that he's at life i think we've both grown a lot you know we met each other when we were both quite young i was in my mid-20s and he was like 19 years old it's been almost 10 years as an industry uh and throughout those years we've both learned so much and we've been to many places he aspired to learn chinese now he speaks it fluently i've been to 52 countries and in a short time i too i'm going to be on the lex friedman podcast and my hope is i get to talk about the things that i'm passionate about and i get to talk about cardano and i get to talk about the things we've done and the things we aspire to do ethereum is a closed chapter in my life and i have no desire to talk about ethereum or the people they're in however vitalik was kind enough to spend about eight minutes talking about me and cardano and he gave a very diplomatic measured and mature answer and so i figured that lex is gonna in the interview ask me so i'm making this video as a request to him i'll pre-answer the question because my hope is that instead of talking about ethereum we can talk about the space the ecosystem the technology where we're going the aspirations and these things and not the past so if you give me that dignity i'll give you at least a good answer and hopefully that's adequate for it i think ethereum is one of the greatest innovations that space has ever seen more so than bitcoin because it was the thing that gave everybody in the industry the ability to dream and that's special you know bitcoin gave people the ability to believe that we could actually have some control over monetary policy we could build a currency we could build a payment system we could build a different notion of money but it didn't do much other than actually i just pushed tokens around you couldn't do stable coins and dexes and icos and stos and defy and identity and all the things that we've come to know and love and care about and then suddenly ethereum came out much like when javascript came to the web browser and ethereum gave every single person in this industry the permission to go out there and try to go build something crazy and the odds are it wouldn't work oftentimes it didn't work uh yet they still had a platform to do that kind of innovation to be 19 years old and conceive of that in a way that could scale from nothing to a 300 billion dollar ecosystem that nation states have deployed sovereign debt on in less than 10 years is one of the greatest achievements any human being could achieve it stands for itself and the work stands for itself and i have enormous admiration respect and appreciation that someone exists who was able to do that and preserve his integrity and preserve his boyish love and charm for this as an open source ecosystem you see i'm surrounded by politicians and fortune 500 ceos regulators lawyers professionals consultants on a daily basis the nature of being a ceo of a business that has billions of dollars and as a consequence i am bombarded on a daily basis with cynicism people who say well we love the idealism and dreams but the world just doesn't simply work that way and you're gonna have to modify the things you want to do to conform with the way the world is not as the way the world ought to be it's refreshing to be in an industry with someone who is so utterly immune to such notions and instead just keeps going and doing things whether they're crazy or not we disagree very strongly about principles of how to build things and that's okay because we come from different backgrounds we have different perspectives but i don't think for once we disagree on the purpose of the things we do and what these things are going to do for humanity i just happen to believe the way we do things is a bit more mature and responsible because the way that we do things results in a better assurance that the systems we build won't fail and ultimately if these systems are being used by people and they fail those people will lose their money their privacy and as these become more ingrained in your lives potentially your lives themselves there's no greater example of that than when the control system failed on the boeing 737 max ultimately that's a software problem embedded in a more complex issue and the lack of formal methods and rigor in the processes mostly due to cost cutting was one of the key contributors to that incident that killed hundreds of people and so when you think about software especially protocols that are going to control your lives i always ask what's the rush we should instead do it right the first time because it we might end up with the worst case scenario of a system that is tragically and brutally flawed but we can't change it because it got too much adoption this has been the guiding principle of cardano evidence-based software in the peer review process and we're so fortunate to have a peer review process that runs with conferences instead of papers which means that the papers have never excuse me academic journals the the papers have never been this low point it's actually been engineering issues and we've overcome them and we've been able to get into a great efficiency but the scientists have delivered and in many cases waited more than a few years for their work to be delivered to market so the peer review process was never a bottleneck and it has resulted in us discovering countless thousands of issues and bugs and problems and guiding the protocol development in a direction that i think is ultimately sustainable now i could be wrong in that and this is why there's so much diversity of thought in the space yet we still i think have a fair shot to be able to have these ideas become the dominant ideas and ultimately build a decentralized brain and ultimately build great financial protocols that said we've learned a lot from ethereum we've studied their smart contract model and there's a lot of innovation there and we've learned a lot from ethereum too as well especially as those protocols mature and that is a net positive for the space as a whole and while it's taking quite a bit of time for ethereum two to mature and evolve and grow i have confidence that we will see a day that the protocols that vitalik and his friends and his scientists and engineers have dreamed up will reach the marketplace and they will have a significant and meaningful impact upon the market space so we'll see where everything goes but i just like to make something like this because again i think it would be a failure if an interview with lex ended up becoming a debate of charles versus ethereum in part or in whole or ended up being a reflection of things that are long ago we have many challenges ahead we have hyperinflation we have coveted that has wrecked the world economy in ways that we won't feel for a while but we'll be very pervasive we have mass hunger we have political unrest civil wars we have a lack of faith in electoral systems this industry is about the system's business that's our business it's not about whether a token goes up or down it's about how do we want the human race to live who gets to decide that and ultimately how much control do you personally have versus to someone else that you've never met and didn't elect the next 25 years all the rules of society are going to change out of necessity because the old systems just don't work anymore and technology has undone the levers of control that knock them back into collaborate calibration the point of our industry is to be part of the marketplace of ideas about where to go and what to do for this dream that we can actually go places that we've never gone before and live lives that we could only imagine and improve the condition of the totality of the human race it is worth enduring any amount of criticism suffering and even imprisonment or death because after all who would want to live in a world with no freedom or liberty and there are millions of people in the world who have reached that point where they've opted out of the legacy system and they are in the marketplace for new systems and having people like vitalik and ethereum ultimately makes my job in the industry's job easier because good ideas good software and good progress comes from that endeavor even if we disagree on principles even if we disagree on architectures or philosophical approaches upon how to get there i don't again think we have ever once disagreed on where we'd like to go and the things that we'd like to see happen and so for that i just wanted to kind of share that opinion and to lex i love your podcast that's why i agreed to be on it look forward to seeing you soon and uh it's gonna be a lot of fun and i hope that we can keep ethereum out of it and i hope we can instead talk about systems cryptocurrencies in general and we can talk about society and the human condition and the race and where are we going why are we getting there why is everybody so angry why don't we have empathy anymore i think it'd make for a far better conversation i'm seriously tired of talking about ethereum i really am guys i've been asked these questions now for 10 years comes up in every interview and there's nothing more disappointing and dismantling than going on the media spending an hour talking to a journalist and seeing the headline ethereum co-founder says i spent six months there obviously the people i worked with some of them didn't get along with me 25 year old charles hoskinson okay and i guess this is the most significant and relevant thing for 33 year old charles hoskinson who's spent countless thousands of hours with you my community and others in the space and led a company that's done all the things that we've done in a steady hand for over six and a half years it's extraordinary to me that that seems to be the way it is but it is what it is and that's that yes the world that those people live in the reason why i love these long ford podcasts is they are different they do think different the joe rogans and lex friedmans and others of the world they're not interested in headlines and sensation they're interested in conversation and they're interested in learning and listening and growing that's where we're at and that's why those are the forms that i think are going to win in the long term and ultimately help all of us become a little bit better we all have our flaws we all have our sins our victories and our losses and we're all defined in some way as a combination of these things uh and we as a society must learn to accept each other as we are not as we aspire to be or not as we destined to be but just as we are and learn a little bit of empathy and love and realize that if we listen to each other and we follow each other work with each other we can accomplish an enormous amount that's why our industry exists it was built upon the shoulders of selfless giants who wrote for decades open source software and created amazing protocols and committed themselves to inculcating the techniques and knowledge to the next generation so that a privileged few could work together to actually deploy and build these types of systems and because those few did they opened up these amazing things to the rest of the world and inspired literally an entire generation to do things differently and think differently tomorrow i'm going to the largest cryptocurrency conference in human history i believe over 50 000 people are going to be there i am interacting with politicians heads of state senators mayors in massive investors who work for softbank uh jack dorsey is here ron paul is delivering a speech at 9 a.m crazy crypto anarchists who are ogs from the space the young and the old alike this is without a doubt the most diverse conference in the history of technology there are so many colors languages genders and other things represented you wouldn't see this at a telecommunications conference you wouldn't see this at a banking conference yet you see this here and because this movement is about everybody ultimately and inspires so many people to think a little differently and do things differently that's who we are that's where we came from and i look forward to uh next week it's going to be a lot of fun and i hope for a lively conversation and i hope for one that looks to the future instead of the past thanks everyone cheers
