hi this is Charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny Colorado always warm Always Sunny sometimes Colorado today is November 5th my favorite day of the year remember remember the fifth of November it's my birthday I was born 1987. a little town in Hawaii a little hospital and I grew up Makwa and uh spent the first few years of my life in Hawaii native Hawaiian at heart and then moved Colorado and since that time I've been to more than 40 States 72 countries I've seen it all done it all twice just to make sure I didn't miss anything and uh it's just so incredible to have experienced the things that I have and been to the places I've been and I wanted to make a video to thank all of you guys for the birthday wishes I've received it's pretty surreal to get a message from celebrities and musicians um William Shatner tweet at you I wasn't like this just a few years ago and I don't think I'm ever going to quite get used to it especially given that a lot of these people were people I grew up with either my heroes or people that entertain me or people that I always imagined were special people and to be having an opportunity to interact with them see them I was just at the web Summit over in Portugal and it's one of those places I keep getting invited to and I finally bit the bullet and I said you know what let's go so I went in Lisbon in 77 000 people were there five exhibition Halls it was gargantuan a lot of crypto stuff a lot of traditional web stuff all The Usual Suspects uh Google Intel Amazon etc etc and I had a chance to meet a lot of really interesting people the queen of Jordan was there uh well Anna zelinska was there uh shaking the can for her foundation it was pretty pretty impressive uh to interact with all of them get to know them and just have some great conversations along the way and I said you know next year we gotta make sure we have presents here because there's a lot of good connections relationships and Partnerships to have with all birthdays uh you know it's a time for reflection and it's a time to see where you've been and where you're going and this has been a tough year it's been a really really tough year you know uh I've been going non-stop here for a while in fact the last three months in particular have been probably the hardest uh I've uh I've ever done I've ever endured uh basically every day 16 18 hour days traveling all around doing things uh because we have a huge amount of work we're trying to get done for cardano for my many companies I own six companies now and every one of them does different things I'm known for cryptocurrencies I'm known for cardano and ethereum and these types of things and it's the biggest part of my day but I also do work in synthetic biology and we're looking at how do you make plants glow in the dark I do work in regenerative medicine anti-aging got a clinic that's opening up here in a bit probably the next two months and that clinic is going to start 10 000 square feet and then when we do the full extension for it it'll be 50 000 square feet for those of you on Metric that's 4 500 4 500 square meters not small spec scan MRI CAT scan the new 256 slice super duper CAT scan dexa scan compounding pharmacy Hyperbaric Center glia Proof Lab full genomic sequencers we even have a clinical pathologist on staff we went pretty crazy with it and I've been building that the entire time so it's exciting to finally see that come to fruition and see all the hard work that's been put in and all the employees there at hoskinson health and wellness uh and the biotech company get it together uh so it's been uh you know a long road and it's been a tough year and one of the things I've realized is I haven't taken care of my health as much as I need to you know when I started as an entrepreneur in this space I had a lot more energy A lot more fired up and you may have noticed I've gained a little bit of weight and you may have noticed that my hair is falling out a little bit uh and there's a lot more gray in the beard than there used to and I look a lot older than 35 many ways this level of stress and this level of travel and these types of responsibilities they uh they do tend to age you and it's kind of silly to be a guy thinking about anti-aging when uh you look like you're 55 and you're 35 or at the very least 45 split the difference uh so you know next year I'm definitely going to spend a lot more time uh trying to work out and uh trying to get my health back to where it needs to be especially mental health you know this has been an incredibly tough year every single month there's been a lot going on there's been some horrifically unfair things that have really made me bitter and very angry and it's taken some time to let those things go uh like certain books that were written that were very unfair um certain criticisms that were levied that were also very unfair just the state of the markets a lot of political things as well I'm not immune to politics and a lot of things I've witnessed that have happened I think are fundamentally morally wrong there's The Intercept recently pointed out that there's been a collusion between the Department of Homeland Security and the social media giants like Facebook and Twitter and others to basically create a disinformation censorship board uh I like to believe Living in America that we have freedom of speech or at least the semblance of it and to see how that has been so thoroughly taken from us really deeply disappoints me there's some Rays of Hope here and there and there's some great Innovation here and there like recently with Elon Musk acquisition of Twitter it started the conversation when I was at web Summit CZ was there a lot of Finance people were there and I had a chance to talk to a lot of different people and there's a big buzz right now about decentralized social networks but there's going to be a big challenge moving into the next few years of how do we restore our freedom of Association our freedom of Commerce and our freedom of expression because there's a war against them there's been a lot of propaganda that's been pushed on us for geopolitical events and for Health Care events and it's made me bitter and angry because good people have been turned into surrogates to do evil things that have hurt all of us and I'm not going to get into the details because unfortunately when people are the victim of propaganda if you mention these trigger words you say the things that you think they've been propagandized over they become unable and unwilling to interact they shut off in your own day-to-day Life as we look to the Future you can probably write a list of people down that you've interacted with recently uh or in the past that when you mention one thing whatever that thing might be could be uh racial stuff abortion covet education they immediately go to a talking point that you know they didn't come up with themselves and if you contradict what they want you to say they get instantly angry at you and make you the other the enemy and start hating you we can't have conversations anymore in society that may be sad it may be really sad it's been a tough year for that and it's getting a lot worse and I think it's only going to get worse you know the age of deep fakes is soon Upon Us in the age of AI is moving at an astounding rate and I'd read all these futurist papers and these books and they tell me hey you know AI is the way to go it's all going to happen yeah yeah whatever well now they're actually right they're here and within a very short period of time the vast majority of the things that we think and believe are going to be curated by non-humans not humans and those non-humans are programmed by people with agendas and they will use it to manufacture consent for whatever agenda that they have so that depressed me it may be pretty sad and it made me a little hopeless here and there to see all the divisions that people have we have an election here in America and just a few days and Tuesday a dad is running he's running for the hospital board up in Gillette Wyoming he's been campaigning harder than I think most congressmen do my family doesn't like to lose they like to win and we wish him well and all the people running with him but it's an important election because it's one that will either reset or double down on the narratives and beliefs that have been persisting and we can either heal from it or be more divided from it you know I was on stage at the web Summit and they had some harsh critics of crypto uh and I spent 18 minutes sitting there and during these two people babbling about how Money's been lost and babbling about how everything's a security and everything we've done as a scam they don't even understand that at the end of the rainbow very foundational things are currently under debate your very freedoms your voice your vote your identity how money Works who controls money how debt Works how you interface with marketplaces what rights you have what rights you don't have and ultimately sound money at the core do you have something that every year decays eight percent ten percent twelve percent and the fruits of your labors evaporate away or do you have something that gets more valuable over time or at least stays the same understand any of that you know and they just focus on the the short term also not understanding that it's either protocols or companies and it's really depressing the hell out of me that companies control the vast majority of the things we have in life from how these packets of information leave my computer and get to you to the operating system I use to basically how we find information how information is curated and those companies the small few of them have shown to us last three years in particular they're more willing to collaborate coordinate include to form an oligarchy that prevents them effectively from having competition and they really do enjoy having total control over the truth that's a really sad thing crypto is the last mile it's the last barrier if we don't succeed as an industry those people get to run everything forever so I often get asked what motivates me you know where do I get that fire from many of you know I'm pretty wealthy these days and I don't have to work if I don't want to and how many horrific books can be written how many horrible trolls can attack me how many people can say and do terrible things every single day and attack everything from my knowledge to credentials to Integrity to my weight how many days can you take that the vitriol hate in bile that seems to be getting worse and worse and not at some point just throw on the talent say man [ __ ] it I'm done I don't need to do this anymore I'm gonna go retire and play with my bison well the answer is as long as there's something to win as long as there's Stakes at the matter as long as there's something existential I'm here and there and this is a long-haul effort when you look to the Future 2023 2024 2025 this is the real war we the crypto industry have shown up and the next five or ten years are going to be the most formative and important years in the history of humanity and they're going to decide how every government works every democracy works every dictatorship works and whether the human race is going to be able to survive the 21st century or descend into a you own nothing and will be happy eat your Grasshoppers and shut up uh chaotic terrible world I firmly believe that so I'm not going anywhere because I at least have a voice I at least have a sit at the table a seat at the table I at least have the ability to fight and I see the amazing progress that we've made with cardano and the cardano ecosystem I've seen how many things we've been able to achieve in a very short period of time you know we get so much criticism from the things we don't have people make videos and say oh cardano's broken we need this and they say well we need this particular feature and then they lie sometimes like say we have no notion of time in cardano okay and that's frustrating but the reality is that people are building things I'm building things you're building things and every day we get a little bit better a little stronger and the movement gets larger that means we're still in the game we're still fighting we're still here and we're not going anywhere that's really the point you see uh we're not going to stop writing papers and the technology continues to evolve in advance side chains are coming soon oh boy there's going to be some fun stuff to talk about at Scott Fest and at the lausanne summit for the Cardinal Summit in others all kinds of cool new things coming lots of sips coming age of Voltaire is almost upon us the final stage in the original wave and then there's the fourth generation of Chase you see there's so much more good than there is bad and that which we cannot do is just a challenge for us to overcome in the future not a barrier that will prevent us from achieving the future and I think that's the wisdom that I'd like to convey from my birthday I've been here for 35 years and now I've gotten old enough to know a few things along the way and dirt a few things along the way and I'd like to say that optimism not cynicism is the secret to a good life really is any event anything you do any place you go if you choose to you can make it hell you can find something wrong it could be at the most beautiful hotel you could be at the most incredible art gallery and then you can complain about something maybe it's a flickering fluorescent light maybe you find an insect where you shouldn't maybe they're cracking the wall or shouldn't be a crack who knows you can always find the negative dark side of things and you can always find the problems and protocols or you can optimistically look at things and say wow how incredibly beautiful is this I was in Lisbon and I went and visited the old castle that the kings of Portugal lived in it's a very old castle built 14th 13th century shortly after the Moors were conquered if walking around it it is dilapidated my God the rooms are not looking so good but you know it was incredible to see the views I posted a picture and I really love those magpies that were up on the ceilings it was great you know and there was so much wonderful history there so much Intrigue there so I focused on that not on the fact that the structure has seen better days and it's not quite as impressive as Versailles or other castles and palaces and places I've seen and I think that is the key to life if you follow that thread to focus on the good things to focus on the moments and be optimistic about stuff you see I have all the resources I need to get real healthy improve things work out every day I have all the people you know we're trying all kinds of real cool stuff at the clinic and it's going to be fully operational here in just a little bit and then we'll be Off to the Races now yes it will take a few years to get everything done but once it is it it's there we're in the game we're fighting we're doing really interesting things in healthcare you know I'm pulling dozens of papers every week and looking at them on anti-aging regenerative medicine looked at Sinclair's Mouse studies you don't even have to take it for granted you can just clone your own mice get these litter mates out there and test them see if you can replicate the research to verify things learn your own things it's so cool to have agency over these Concepts and even if you can't fully Askew them or defeat them at least can make some progress to them cardano for example we've written over 150 papers 150 there will be a day when that number is 200 and there will be a day when that number is 300. every step of the way we push the state of the art of the industry every step of the way we solve problems big and small a gift to everybody that's why maximalism is never made any sense to me at all because the longer we're around the more we build and the more we give the more we Inspire the more we solve the more advancements come out if you're a Bitcoin maximalist if you ever were curious about how to get smart contracts to come to bitcoin you should look to cardano because the extended utxo and plutus model is the best and frankly the only path that would be able to do that in a secure way ethereum people say you can't use that model to build smart contracts daps and D5 and make them useful by solving those problems in cardano it's a blueprint and a pedagogy for you to use that's one of thousands of examples of innovations that have been brought to this industry that's what optimism does you start talking about how can we partner with people how can we be better it is hard with social media and it is hard when the loudest and most obnoxious and toxic amongst communities tend to Define It For Better or For Worse and it is hard to partner with people when people in ecosystems don't say I disagree with you but they say you're a criminal and you need to be in jail and you're evil that's tough and it's been a tough thing for me to reconcile the eight years I've been in this industry as I looked at 2023 I think to myself how do we change the way we communicate and the way that we do things so that we can bypass that community and move on and do things a little bit more productively so we're gonna change the way that we do a lot of stuff still going to use Twitter but I will try to use it in slightly different ways in 2023 still going to do my amas but I'm going to upgrade the entire experience and involve some others as well to help out so we can be more effective and get to more questions and really build a better relationship going to definitely try to scale up the social channels as well and get a lot more subscribers so we can reach a larger base of people for all kinds of cool and interesting things I'm going to try to be proactive about creating lots of good timely information and obviously a lot of ecosystem improvements there and then obviously there's the members-based organization we're going to talk a lot about that at Scott Fest in Amazon and I think those things are going to help tremendously for cardano as for other projects uh we're just going to try to talk to them directly and see if we can come up with some basic principles on Smart contract standards consensus standards like for example we've been doing that with the extended utxo Alliance and other things I truly do wish that those who Steward curate and act as custodians of their ecosystems would do a better job of managing the excesses of their communities you don't have to tell them what to do but you could at least plead with them to be human beings and not say and do horrible things is what it is I'm an optimist so I believe eventually they'll learn the wisdom of that because if they don't all it does is it hurts their own projects and it limits their ability to grow and frankly makes it much more difficult for people to act together another thing I've had to learn in 35 years of being here is that people are always going to hate you because they don't hate you they hate an idea of you that they've conjured and you never ever will be able to convince them otherwise and make them like you so don't try you just have to be yourself and that's hard cognitively because there's a natural human reaction a natural human response to try to explain yourself to try to get the benefit of the doubt to try to build Bridges and get people to get on your side and like you the reality is that the way life is if you're a public figure it's just not going to be possible no matter what I say or do or accomplish there will be people many people in this industry and soon other Industries as well who believe I'm a really terrible person those books I mentioned in the beginning of the year they're turning into movies so I'm gonna have to go and watch an actor play me but play a fantasy a person who doesn't exist and convince millions of people that that's the real Charles hoskinson not the person talking before this microphone it's tough but it's liberating in a certain way because once you've divorced yourself from the need for acknowledgment credit love and you've moved on to higher Concepts and things a love of exploration a level of building a coalition of the willing that actually not a lot of things can hurt you anymore and not a lot of things can really [ __ ] your ego anymore you just move forward and every day is a little different you know in the end history will vindicate the things I've done and punish the things that I didn't do so well but I don't get to write those books and they're not even close to being written at the moment so why care so much about why people say and do what they do sometimes it's frustrating because it does actually limit our ability to do business make Partnerships build relationships for example one of the core developers of the ethereum foundation finally admitted something we all knew they refused to look and seriously consider the research of cardano because I'm the person who created the project not realizing that they actually badly harmed their own ecosystem it is what it is they decided to do that but directly admitted it over Twitter and that's sad because it hurts them it hurts the ecosystem hurts the entire state of proof of stake hurts the research of proof of stay there was so much more we could have done together rather than apart so if that continues to grow on a societal scale I think we do have a problem because we will no longer be able to address and deal with the complexity of modern society and bad things will happen as a result but on a micro scale all I can do is just be the bigger man so as I said things have to change a little bit especially on Twitter and I'm working on it for meditation or rumination more cerebral things a little bit better time management especially on the Knowledge Management Systems you know things like obsidian and so forth and I hope that we get there all the projects I set up the vast majority of them are still doing some pretty impressive things Hoskins and Center for formal math still doing formal math lean for mathematicians is almost out and they're chipping away at things and they'll be around forever the ranch is still going strong the bison are running around haven't killed me yet but they keep trying restaurant is under construction good old nessies we're getting all the blueprints done right now and we have pretty good idea of what to decorate it got the dinosaur the plesiosaur going to Scotland here going to go visit Loch Ness take a lot of pictures buy a lot of those little stuff nessies so we can have a great gift shop you know so it's fun that all those things are underway and there's a lot more to do next year is probably going to be a busier year than this year but I truly do hope it's a uh a less stressful one and that's a choice I have to make and I'm making it here so we'll find ways to really be in the moment and let that go I suppose in closing the best part about being me is that I still have a lot of time as a person to grow and to meet new people and do new things it's been really cool meeting my heroes and spending time with them it was really cool spending some time with Lex Friedman it was really cool hiring people whose papers I read my early 20s and were inspired by like Phil wadler and others like that it's been really cool to do all the things that I always wanted to do create a programming language you know the plutist language the Marlow language lead a company hire people be an entrepreneur design degree programs we did it with CMU for product management uh there's so many things there's so much diversity there and I'm not unique in that I think each and every person listening in your own way in your own circumstances can live your best life you only get one I don't know what happens afterwards but you know there's not enough information to bet on it so you might as well maximize what you have and it's a choice when you wake up every single day to ask yourself is it going to be a good day or a bad day there's been a lot of bad days this year and what it's left on me is this sense that I need to change things a bit and so today I woke up and said it's going to be a good day a nice day and I hope you do the same I had a lot of fun even with the bad days with all of you it was great going to consensus it was great going to rare Bloom it was great going to cnft con and it's going to be phenomenal going to Scotland and going to lausanne and it's going to be phenomenal for all the things that we do together and apart in 2023 and it's going to be so much fun seeing a lot of the cool Concepts and ideas that we've been talking about for almost 10 years now finally turn on and be useful to all of you there's a very long road ahead and if I'm successful with the whole anti-aging regenerative medicine thing hopefully even in Longer Road than I expect but in any event regardless of the distance it's no less meaningful so thank you all for your birthday wishes thank you all for spending some of my birthday with me and thank you all for being part of my extended family you've given me a lot of Hope and uh you really have made my life that much better it's a mixed bag there's a lot of good some bad but all things considered I wouldn't change it for anything cheers everyone
