Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is August 9th, 2024. It's hard to believe it's already August, and I am back from the jungles here in Colorado, enjoying my time to recover. It was a long trip. I went to Brazil, then to Argentina very briefly, to Montevideo in Uruguay to pick up some fuel, and then to Guatemala. I ran around for different things and different reasons.
In Brazil, I attended a great conference and met up with Rafa, the Cardano Foundation's Latin America lead. He’s a wonderful guy and has really done some amazing work bringing that community together. I met with the Cardano LATAM group, Intersect, and all the people down there. I had a chance to meet with the Central Bank of Brazil, and then went down to Argentina. I met with many members of the Malai government, including the mayor of Buenos Aires, and had a chance to speak at the ADN event, which received hundreds of attendees. I also met with the founders of Globant, one of the largest software companies in Latin America, and various other business leaders while we were there.
We were just getting things set up for the Constitutional Convention that’s going to be held in Buenos Aires in December. We finalized our relationship with the University of Buenos Aires, and they’ve been very generous to allow us to use the School of Law for the Constitutional Convention. It’s this lovely, beautiful, idyllic building that you would expect a law school to be. It’s kind of like Columbia Law School or Colombia’s libraries, with columns and marble. I think 14 of their presidents attended UBA; it’s actually one of the most prestigious law schools in all of South America. So, it’s a wonderful facility to host an event like the Constitutional Convention.
There was a lot of bureaucracy we had to work through to figure out how to get that done, and now we’re just locking in. Kudos to JJ, my chief of staff, and Alex Banker, the director of Intersect, as well as Maro, Jose, and many of the other guys who came down to work with us and help us. It was a heck of a lot of fun. Then I went up to Guatemala, and there I said, “You know, it’s time to challenge myself a little bit.” Y’all on Twitter say I’m getting fat, which is true; I’ve been eating too much good food. I still do work out, but I said, “We’re going to go with a bunch of soft guys and just get my ass kicked for a whole week.”
So, I climbed a volcano at 13,000 feet with hailing and 45-degree inclines, and all kinds of things. We climbed down in torrential rains because it’s tropical. I did some high-low casting and also some repelling, as you guys had a chance to see. I also camped out in the jungle, although a widowmaker crushed our tents, well, our hammocks, and rain scorpions fell on us. So, we decided to cut that part a little short because we didn’t have the gear to spend the night. But we did have a chance to trek around and enjoy some secondary jungle, so that was a lot of fun. We really enjoyed it and got a great workout. It’s always nice to hang out with soft guys because no matter how much you put in, they have more in the tank than you. You’re always the guy in the back of the pack pushing hard, and it’s good to get sharpened a bit.
Now, I’m back here in Colorado. I promised you guys in an AMA that I was going to do one up at the ranch, but we were having internet and microphone issues there. I’m all set up here. I’m actually doing a lot of heavy construction; I’m building a podcast studio in Gillette, building a podcast studio at my farm, building a podcast studio at my ranch, and building a podcast studio here at the office. So, I have all these amazing podcast studios being constructed. But until then, we’re still going to have to rough it with the same background and these types of things.
Okay, let’s get to your questions. Any update on the Infinity Room? Is IOG still doing any development work on Bitcoin, such as Dandelion?
For number one, the Infinity Room: Yes, we are actually in active construction of an Infinity Room for my clinic. As you know, I have a clinic in Gillette, Wyoming, Hoskinson Health, and that clinic is currently 10,000 square feet. We’re going to grow that clinic to about 70,000 square feet over the next nine months. Part of the expansion does include an Infinity Room directly adjacent to the main waiting room, so patients can actually go in and experience it. It’s actually larger than Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Room in Los Angeles, so we’re quite excited.
As for development work on Bitcoin, we still do research that’s directly relevant to Bitcoin. Cardano is actually the single greatest platform to learn how to be a UTXO developer because of the extended UTXO model. That’s where we get all those relationships from.
What are your current thoughts on the situation in the UK?
Frustration, mostly. I don’t have enough information; I don’t know exactly what’s going on, and it’s so radically partisan that it’s impossible to comment on it one way or the other. I can just react to what I see the media saying and what I see the police doing. I’m never going to be okay with people being arrested for speech. I don’t care if you are a person who believes that there’s such a thing as hate speech and other things; you punish people for actions, not words. If words lead to adverse actions and a person is connected and involved in that, then you can certainly get involved. But just the speech alone can never hurt you.
Anytime we deviate from that as a society, we create a situation where the government begins saying speech we don’t like for political reasons should be criminalized. Every totalitarian regime, the first thing they do and the most vicious thing they do, is destroy human expression and freedom of speech. That’s why our founding fathers in the 18th century realized this was so profoundly important that the First Amendment protected it. It was the very first thing, and it wasn’t to protect politically popular speech or speech that makes everybody happy; it was to protect the speech that doesn’t.
So, I’m not a big fan of any regime that has made a conscious choice to restrict that for whatever reasons they choose to believe. Maybe there’s a case where they try to extradite Elon Musk and charge him with something. I don’t know enough about it to comment on the specifics of the situation, but I’m just commenting on the interviews, videos, and statements I’ve seen from government officials there saying that you could be arrested for a Facebook post or for a tweet.
Charles, how have you been able to handle all the hate from everywhere? Any books that have helped you with dealing with all that?
The first lesson in dealing with hate is realizing that no matter what you do, you can’t win with your critics. It’s not possible. It’s a hard thing to strap yourself onto a not-so-well-maintained helicopter, go up 120 feet with a repel harness on, and go out of it. It’s hard and scary, and you can see in my face that it’s like, “Man, we’re doing this. All right, let’s figure this out.” You come up with a plan, execute it, and when you get to the ground, you say, “Goddamn, I did that.” You’re proud of yourself, and then somebody sees that and says, “You’re a piece of [expletive], and you achieved nothing.”
Now, let’s say I came out like an Olympian, like a Seal Team Six guy. I’ve done it for 25 years, and I land perfectly. There’d still be that same guy criticizing. No matter how good you are or how well you do something, there’s always going to be a critic. That critic is always going to bring you down, and if you take it personally, it eats away at you as a person; it crumbles your soul. You think to yourself, “I can’t win. I can’t have a moment where I actually did something impressive or incredible.”
I’m a self-made billionaire in my 30s, and I’ve come up with all these great ideas, built a wonderful company, and have many employees. I’ve traveled to 74 countries, and then you see Steve Erich on Forbes just published an article yesterday saying I’m a cult leader and that Cardano is an Ethereum clone. He’s the director of research for crypto at Forbes. It is what it is. You call people out when they say things that are clearly lies and slander, and you just move on. That’s all you can do.
No book is going to prepare or teach you for dealing with that because you’re working against your genetic programming as a person. Human beings are tribal, and we rely upon the opinions of others to survive. We grew up this way; it’s built into your DNA. Social media and this hyperconnected global world have dehumanized all of us, which is why everybody is so sick and suffering from some form of neurosis. The hyperconnected culture makes people unable to deal with modern society, and we’re working through that. We’re trying to figure out new coping mechanisms, and it’s really hard when you push against your biology.
Your first impulse when a person criticizes you is to say, “How do I convince them that I’m not that?” or “How do I win? How do I overcome that?” We all do it, but when you’re a public figure, you’re not allowed to do that. Every single time I punch back, I get criticized for it. If a person calls me fat or stupid, or they say I didn’t do something or that I did something, whatever it is, and it’s a factually wrong thing, and you attack them back, they suffer no consequences, and I get attacked for it.
So, you’re not allowed to defend yourself anymore; you just have to accept it. What you have to do is separate worlds and realize that this social media world that exists out there and the public commons that exists out there, you’re playing a character inside of it. That’s the best you can do; it’s like an avatar. Some people love that avatar and hate that avatar, just like they love Luke Skywalker or they don’t like Luke Skywalker. You’re a person in that persona, and then you have your private life and your personal life.
The single most valuable thing you can do is be deeply discriminating about the people around you. If you welcome toxic, destructive, cynical people into your inner circle, it will make your life miserable. If you welcome productive, optimistic, really good, effective people that are supportive of you, they push you to be better, and they tell you the truth, you’re going to be happy. That’s the real you; that’s not the avatar that’s out there.
Is it okay to leave a dead baby bear in Central Park? Why do you still support RFK Jr.?
So, you find a corpse; what do you do with it? You burn it, you bury it, you destroy it. If you put it in Central Park, what happens? People become aware that roadkill exists; they become aware that these things die. It’s better than just burning or burying it, right? You didn’t kill the bear. If you’re an environmentalist, one of the things you do is create awareness that human beings have an impact on the environment around you.
We burn the rainforest down, massacre lots of animals, and cause all kinds of environmental damage. If you do scuba diving in Australia, you can see the Great Barrier Reef, and it’s bleached now. Massive amounts of it are really inconvenient for your delicate lifestyle, isn’t it? But if it’s in your face and you see it and feel it, you start realizing that maybe we, as humans, should be good custodians of the world around us.
If we see some of the ugliness and consequences of modernity, then what that does is make you take a step back and say, “Is there perhaps a more sustainable way for people to live in the world?” If there isn’t, then we just have to accept that generations that come after us, every generation, will see less and less biodiversity and fewer and fewer species that we grew up with. The things we took for granted will no longer be on this planet; they’ll be extinct, they’ll be gone.
It’s hard to be an environmentalist because it’s uncomfortable, and you’re fighting against, in some cases, progress or at least reminding people that progress isn’t free and that true progress is lifting everybody together.
Can a decentralized social network really help consensus and truth? If so, how do we avoid traps of confirmation bias, group bias, and xenophobia?
Like attracts like, and what ends up happening is if you have a normal social network, people create echo chambers. You tend to become friends with the people who confirm your biases and believe the same things you believe, and you tend to kick people out of your social network who believe the opposite. What you want to do is create a meta-protocol that sits above the social networks and create marketplaces for truth.
Prediction markets are a great mechanism that you can use to create economic rewards for that and create consequences for misinformation. The consequences shouldn’t be deplatforming; what they should be is a reputation system and a veracity bond system. If somebody in the media lies and it’s discovered, and a marketplace for truth exists, then what can happen is the bond they’ve posted for that article can basically be taken.
Veracity bonds are a pretty magical thing because when the New York Times says, “We stand behind our words and our articles,” I’ll say, “Okay, if you are proven to be wrong about the Hunter Biden laptop or proven to be wrong about your favorite thing, are you prepared to lose a million dollars over that article you’ve just published?” No? So, you’re confident, but you’re only confident when it’s free and it’s your brand, which you, of course, will always say is awesome. But you’re not confident when there’s real money on the line.
That’s a little different. So, veracity bonds are a big deal, and having marketplaces for truth are also a big deal. But that’s only going to get you about halfway there; you actually need a cognitive framework for architecting information. I’ve been looking for one, and lo and behold, I found something that’s quite interesting.
We’re trying to reach out to these guys. Let me bring up the video for these guys: Unsupervised Learning and Daniel Misler. Let me present my screen just a moment. Here we go. He has this lovely video; I’ll post a link right here for you guys. I’m not saying this is the end-all, be-all, but what I am saying is that this is an example of a cognitive framework.
There’s a GitHub repository associated, and what this framework basically does is create a hierarchy of anything that you see. You have ideas, problems, beliefs, models, frames, solutions, information sources, people, organizations, laws, claims, votes, arguments, finding sources, lobbyists, missions, donations, goals, and these types of things. Daniel actually wrote a companion article about this, introducing Substrate, an open-source framework for understanding human meaning.
It’s hot off the press; it’s July 2024. Here are some examples: problem name, toxic drinking water in poor U.S. towns. You can put an ID on it, and then you can break it down. You can look at arguments like, “I don’t know why you recycle, man; it’s a total waste. It costs so much to recycle right now, and the programs are poorly run, so it’s not actually benefiting the environment. I’d do it if it worked, but it doesn’t.”
Then you can break the entire argument down into a dolphin diagram. It doesn’t look like they gave me a high-res visualization of that, but this is a mermaid diagram, excuse me, and it basically breaks the entire argument down. You can look through the argument step by step and try to understand it.
The claim that inflation fell 2% during the term includes arguments and sources. Now combine this with AI, and that’s the other missing piece. I think veracity bonds, prediction markets, a cognitive framework like something like Substrate, which Daniel put together, and then combine that with large language models, and I do believe you have a major meta-protocol.
You can take information, inject it into the system, frame it up, and then talk all about it. You can inject it back into whatever the source network was—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, what have you. This would work really well as a browser extension. People can see in the UX whether it’s verified or unverified, and they can put bounties up for things they want to know: “Is this generative AI?” or “Did we fact-check this?”
There are all kinds of things you can do, and actually, artificial intelligence can help tremendously in reasoning about all of this stuff. For example, here’s a little exercise we can do. Let’s go to Claude. I’ll show you guys something. Let me just grab a little meme. I’m going to dry run this real quickly just to verify it works. Sometimes Claude gets a little weird.
Fact-check this picture. Yes, okay. Let me show you guys a little something. This is an electric vehicle. To manufacture, you need 12 tons of rock for lithium, 5 tons of cobalt minerals, 3 tons of minerals for nickel, and 12 tons of copper, or you move 250 tons of soil to obtain the following things: the caterpillar, and finally, you get a zero-emissions car.
So, put it into Claude, and you can say, “Okay, fact-check this picture.” It will check the key claims made in this image. Battery composition—these indeed used exact qualities but can vary significantly. Mining requirements claim about 250 tons is a small amount of oversimplification, and the fuel consumption zero-emissions claim implies zero. It’s partially true while EVs are PR; the overall environmental impact is significant.
You see there’s an AI system, and it has a bias in it. Claude is particularly woke, so Grok is coming out with version 2.0. OpenAI is probably going to release GPT-5, I think, in the next four to six weeks. You have Llama; these are different agents, different models.
What you can do with an agentic workflow is
The network is pumping stuff out every day, and it's actually coming along. It's one of our best projects. Charles, are you coming to Dubai this year? Yes, I'm a keynote speaker at the Foundation Summit.
What inspired you to adopt a peer-reviewed approach for Cardano's development? There are two reasons. One, we thought it was really important in a world where people lie and make misleading claims about capabilities to ground your capabilities in reality. You do that with an independent, third-party, objective process. That's very important, especially for journalists, because they could say, "Okay, well, Solana is claiming this with Fire Dancer, and Vitalik is claiming this with the latest and greatest thing, while this guy over here is saying this, and this Aptos guy is saying that, and the Algorand guy is saying this, and Cardano says this." How do I know what's real? If I'm not a computer scientist with 20 years of experience and can't read the code, how do I know what's real?
Well, this peer-review process developed the protocols behind Cardano, and members of the academic community who are objective and neutral, with no financial incentive one way or the other, have made a decision that these protocols are sound. So maybe that's a good foundation upon which we can base some truth.
The more important reason is we need a decentralized brain. People build cults of personality around a founder. Vitalik is so brilliant; Satoshi is God; this person's incredible; Charles is terrible. The thing is, if you are only as smart as your founder and all your innovation comes from your founder's brain, what happens when your founder retires, dies, or gets compromised? You're out of luck.
If you have peer review, what do you do? You're creating a decentralized innovation factory. We have labs at Stanford, CMU, University of Wyoming, University of Edinburgh, University of Athens, and Tokyo Institute of Technology. Go through the list—168 people across all of it, and now more than 200 papers with over 10,000 citations. What does that mean? In 5, 10, 15 years, should the community want to continue funding that decentralized brain, it has a faceless innovation engine that is global. There's no founder; you can't compromise it, you can't manipulate it, and you can't bend it because it's across the entire world and incorporates everybody's innovation. That's the magic of that. So why would you throw it away?
Oh, because we want to be first to market? Great, first to market, first to lose your money.
All right, we're just going to go ahead and ban the user and delete their comments. How about that? It's called God mode.
Will Midnight really be interoperable with Cardano? Yes, I love these people spreading fun. Cardano is launching Midnight. Cardano is built so well you can launch a fourth-generation cryptocurrency from it. How about that? It's pretty magical.
Hey, Charles, your haircut looks good. This is the jungle cut; that's what you get with a machete. Is there any similarity between the trolley cart thought experiment and the blockchain trilemma? No. If you accept the trilemma about scalability and the trade-offs of it, you don't have to. Of course, you would have a trolley problem because you're going to go down one of the tracks and you have to pick two of the three. Ouroboros Leo pretty much resolves the blockchain trilemma in my view.
Charles, are you left-handed or just left-eyed dominant? Left-handed. Scalability, decentralization, and security, my friend.
How is Nike? Nike's good; he's a good pig.
Hey, Charles, I'm extremely bullish on Cardano. Would you mind providing any updates regarding U.S. state voting or other voting use cases in Cardano? We have the raw capabilities, and with Midnight, they go far beyond anything anybody's ever done in e-voting. The fundamental challenge of voting has two components. There's the voting component, which is the mechanics of how you run an election, presupposing that you've identified and qualified the people who are allowed to participate and how much weight they have.
In America, we have this concept of equal voting. In corporations, you have a concept of shareholder voting, where the more shares you have, the more power you have, as an example of your vote weighting. What Cardano Midnight does for you is give you the best platform you've ever seen to conduct your voting, regardless of the ballot architecture, whether it's plurality or preference ordering or whatever.
The other side of the equation is the identity side—how do you actually decide who is eligible to vote? I will not take a single state deal or RFP to build a blockchain-based voting system unless that RFP includes an opportunity to also update and modernize the state's identity system. Because if you don't do that, you're building the world's most secure system to cheat. If a non-citizen can register, or a person ineligible can register, or a dead person can register, we'll very securely and accurately count the vote of that person who shouldn't be voting, but we've solved nothing.
So you need to tackle both sides at the same time. We need DIDs and self-sovereign identity, and we need to build out that corpus. Then it becomes quite trivial to do voting systems because you just take the best available, put it in, and once people register with their DIDs, they go in, and the election gives them the voting power accordingly.
So, yeah, it's both sides of the equation, and a lot of people don't fully understand that when they talk about voting. Nor should they, because it's a hard topic and concept, but it's very intuitive once you really start racking your brain and say, "Oh, actually, that's a good point; we need to redo the identity system." They don't want to redo the identity system because that's a whole can of worms. They say, "Well, that means the government will spy on you," like the NSA doesn't. That's their argument against updating a digital identity system.
What's your opinion on the Ripple SEC case, and how does the case's outcome affect crypto in general? The judge kept the line—basically said, "Sell it one way; it's a security; sell it another way; apparently, it's not a security." It doesn't give much clarity, and Ripple's pretty much through it. There will be some appeals, but all things considered, I think they just want to move on. They spent $125 million, okay? $300 million in legal fees, probably $425 million for clarity on their part.
Healthcare question: Have you explored integration with Athena Health or Epic? Epic is the most frustrating because they don't work with clinics. We've tried to get them as our own EHR, so we use Athena at the clinic, and they're pretty gnarly to integrate with. Everything just takes time and effort, but we're getting there.
Yeah, we're absolutely interested in building a Midnight module in particular and seeing if we can combine fully homomorphic encryption with Midnight and then plug that into an EHR. So I'm still doing stuff with it, so I don't have much to say, but it's something I spend time thinking about.
Keyman risk—this guy gets it. If you believe in decentralization, no matter how much you love somebody, plan for them not to be there. You have to get rid of keyman risk, or else you're completely dependent on somebody showing up, and you can't do that for our economic, political, and social systems. Humans die; it always happens eventually, so plan for succession.
Hey, Charles, greetings from the Netherlands! Wishing you all the best. The president of Input Output, Tomar Hassen, is actually of Dutch descent. We talk about the Netherlands quite a bit. It's a wonderful place; I really do enjoy it—one of the best put-together countries I've ever been to.
Yeah, I get that, but ADA has been at 30 cents for three years. First, that's not true; you're exaggerating. Second, welcome to crypto. There's no correlation between progress and price. That's the first lesson you have to learn in crypto. Welcome to crypto; there's no correlation. If you start believing there is one, that somehow magically the price goes up when people do good things, you're going to lose a lot of money. It's random; it's stochastic.
Nike goes to $15 million. What was the utility there? What does it mean? It's a good pig; that's pretty much it. Other things—there are amazing technological marvels like Ergo, and they just languish. Why? It's crypto. There's no connection between these two.
But then you guys construct a connection, and when you do that, then you say, "Well, obviously, the people have the wrong strategy." It's extended UTXO—the wrong strategy long-term. Are we going to live in a world where the dominance is layer twos and side chains and legacy systems connecting to blockchain? Well, is Vitalik saying that in the entire Bitcoin space? They're embracing that because they can't change the underlying protocol.
Cardano is the best in the world for this paradigm because of the extended UTXO model. So with that, the wrong decision—we're creating better developer accessibility. People just lie; they say, "Oh, I can't do Haskell; it's weird, so I can't develop on Cardano." What about Aiken? What about TypeScript? Oh, well, I didn't even know you could do that. Huh, interesting.
But price down—that's the only thing that matters. That's the problem, guys. You have to slay that demon early. You're in it to either change the economic, political, and social systems of the world, or you're in it to be somebody else's fool. Those are the only options you have. We're either going to change the world, or this is the world's biggest Ponzi scheme. When we talk about cryptocurrencies in general, there's no middle ground here.
There's no point in handing the power of crypto to centralized actors and having those actors own all the money, custody it. You don't own your own wallet; you don't own your own identity; you don't own your data, and you don't have any control. Every single thing you do has to go through government compliance. There's no point to what we do. There's no difference between this and PayPal, this and Chase, and this and BlackRock. There's none—zero, zilch.
So what have we achieved? What have we built? What have we done? What was the last 15 years about? To make a rich banker a little richer? To make your wire transfer clear a little faster? To move some money around so that a few people won the lottery and got rich? Meanwhile, 99% of society is still impoverished and living in these horrible inflationary economies that rob us every day.
Maybe the point was all along decentralization and resilience—taking back our money, taking back our political systems, and taking back our social systems so that we live in freedom. What's the price of that? What's the market cap of that? You tell me how much you would be willing to trade to live in a free society where you don't have to be afraid of being arrested for making the wrong Facebook post or being deplatformed and fired if you run afoul of the wrong political structure, or your money being turned off like all the people in China are going to have to learn to live with social credit merging with their digital CBDC. That's a reality for billions of people right now.
So tell me, "Number go up" is the only thing that matters? Huh? Why are you even in crypto then? Just play the lottery.
Why was Cardano not written in Rust? Because we started in 2015, and Rust was a very primitive, immature language. Haskell was created in 1985 and has a long legacy. Second, we started with research papers. Research papers are significantly easier to translate into a purely functional language like Haskell, which kind of looks like math when you look at the syntax. We built up Haskell to be an amazing development language, and we've gotten to a point where there's a vibrant ecosystem, and we're able to use formal methods.
Well, we do use Rust in Cardano, particularly in the cryptography. Rust has replaced C++, and it's a wonderful language. There are people building Cardano nodes in Rust; Pragma is an example of that, and the entire partner chains framework of Cardano is written in Rust. So, more misinformation.
When is the alien documentary coming out? Jason Scott released it; he filmed us like what was it—a year and a half ago in Papua New Guinea? I haven't heard any updates on when it's shipping, but he'll get there. He took the money, so he's got to release the Netflix special, and I'll let you guys know when we have a release date.
Hey Charles, is it true Solana is faking TPS? Depends on who you talk to.
Why have you not been on Joe Rogan yet? Well, we'll get there. What's the rush? Joe's not going anywhere; I'm not going anywhere. We'll figure it out.
Kennedy? Sir, Kennedy is a remedy. Italy is trash; only good for food. Oh, damn, we fighting words, sir! Fighting words! Italy is one of the nicest and most beautiful places in the world.
Hey brother, seems to be Ben Bit Boy doesn't love you anymore. No, we didn't give him money, so now he's on the other side of his arc. He's gone the Rand Newer way, so he and Ran and Max Keiser, they're all going to get together, and you know they'll have a little bit of a lemon party. There will be some videos on the internet about it. Get all oiled up; there you go. Then he'll challenge me to a fight, and when we don't take the bait, he'll go find some tier-four podcaster to beat up a little bit and feel really good about it. He'll feel good about himself.
What's with the clinic and stem cell lab? Dr. Lesser—a legendary quadruple board-certified cardiologist—is a very brilliant man, one of the smartest I've ever met. We are making phenomenal progress; the stem cell lab will be operational as of September. It's been a long road, a lot of work. These guys are kicking ass.
The hyperbaric program—we're starting with monoplace chambers just to prime the pump. We have two that we're taking custody of; they're going to be shipped down here to Colorado after we have the multiplace chamber fully operational in April. Then we'll run the clinical trials in Wyoming with the multiplace chamber, and the stem cells will be made in Wyoming. We'll expand the trial once we clear the first FDA trial phase one, doing phase one and two combined. Then there will be a phase three trial that we run if the data looks good.
We're going to have to expand those cohorts, likely to Colorado, Florida, and Wyoming. We should have a power of about 600 inside the study, so we're doing very well. It's a multi-specialty practice with 9,000 patients; it's growing by leaps and bounds. The hope is to be at 15,000 by the end of 2025. I think the last time anybody was crazy enough to set up a family-owned and operated multi-specialty medical practice was Mayo Clinic. It's interesting; it was a father-son team, and the son was named Charles William Mayo. I'm Charles, and my brother's William. So history doesn't repeat, but it sure as hell rhymes, doesn't it?
I hear TR needs stem cells and needs to talk about it. You know the best part about my stem cells? This is an ethical thing for me. The stem cells that we're developing are mesenchymal stem cells—adipose-derived mesenchymal stem cells. We take the fat out, spin it, extract it, culture it in a bioreactor, and re-inject it. There's an unlimited supply; what we take is what we use and grow, and there are no ethical issues there.
There are a lot of people pushing potent stem cells that come from fetal tissue, and it just makes me deeply uncomfortable. This idea that if it takes off and becomes a big thing, the supply will not be large enough to satisfy the demand. So people are going to go out of their way to create fertilization factories to make these cells, and it's not ethical in my view and never will be.
But mesenchymal stem cells—they're from you. You take them out of your fat, your blood, your bone marrow, and it's pretty straightforward for how to do that. So I love that approach, and I think combined with hyperbarics, they're just as effective, if not more so. You don't have that tumor risk that you have with induced pluripotent stem cells, which is like the biggest thing that people are pushing right now—iPSCs. Those whole Yamanaka factors you're chasing—that's a long road, and I don't think you're going to get FDA approval for a long time for that.
How do the partner chains interact with Cardano and each other? There are bridges between the partner chain and the main chain, and the long-term goal is to make sure those bridges are recursive SNARKs, which means they're trustless and bidirectional. Ouroboros Paris is being built, so there's fast finality on both sides, making it near-instant to move a trustless transaction of value and information between both.
The hybrid application model that Midnight's pioneering, which is backported to the partner chains framework, means that you can build applications where code runs on both sides, and they call each other. Transactions go back and forth. Typically, it's a two-token model where one token is going to live on the main chain, Cardano, as a native asset, and your fuel is going to live on the partner chain. One usually has a fixed or deflationary monetary policy; the other one has floating, which gives you predictable pricing for the service on the partner chain.
The Cardano SPOs basically validate the partner chain blocks, so they get paid the inflation, which by extension goes back to the ADA holders. It's a pretty elegant, beautiful system that will allow Cardano to extend itself to the entire industry and be the biggest decentralized app provider to the industry. I'm very excited about it, and it's just one of many of our innovations that we're working on in parallel for a supposedly dead ecosystem.
I've heard that Midnight validators now require SPOs to run DB Sync. We're trying to get rid of that dependency altogether for everything. We're working really hard at cleaning a lot of this dirty laundry up, so don't worry about these things long-term.
What does your brother do? My brother is a doctor of internal medicine.
Charles, will anyone ever be held accountable for all the damage that was done in this life or the next? Karma always comes back.
Looking forward to the Cardano Summit. I am too, sir.
Charles, what's this stuff about Hydra and Ouroboros? If you want to find out, you have to come to Rare Evo.
One million Vietnamese died, 21,000 American troops died, not to mention the countless wounded. We spent $700 billion to sign the same peace deal that we had on the table in 1968. After five years, what did we learn? Are we really figuring this out? Are we ever going to hear this on mainstream media? Will we hear it on CNN, Fox News, or MSNBC? No, no, no, no, no. It's all propaganda. We don't talk about history because history is inconvenient. If a person is trying to rob you, history is inconvenient. If a person is trying to hurt you, history is inconvenient. With history, you gain wisdom, and with wisdom, you can't be taken advantage of.
It's not for the Ukrainians to decide on the border; they can live with it. It's really not, as long as they take our money, our weapons, and get our support from NATO. We have a say. If they want to fight a war completely alone, they have a say in that. That's the fact; that's how it works. It's our blood and treasure; it's our decision as a people about what we're willing to tolerate and what we're going to do. If Ukrainians don't like it, they can choose to fight without our support. That's called an alliance.
We had to make this decision during the Gulf War. We invaded, took back Kuwait, and kicked the Iraqis out. We built a coalition. The Secretary of Defense of the United States wanted to continue pushing to Baghdad and have regime change. That was Dick Cheney back then. George H.W. Bush and the Saudis, who were in the alliance, said they would not support regime change. So we said, "You know what? We'll just impose sanctions and declare mission accomplished. We'll go home." That is what an alliance means; you have gives and takes. If you take someone's support, you have to accept the borders and accept things.
The Yalta Conference was another example. In 1945, as we closed out World War II, the Soviets spent an enormous amount of blood and treasure. We had to make some decisions about how to chop up Europe. The Soviets wanted to take the whole thing, and we made some decisions there. Unfortunately, FDR was a poor negotiator because he was dying; he literally died a week or two after the conference. We gave Poland away, which we shouldn't have done. They had to live under tyranny for decades as a direct result, despite the fact that they fought really hard. Now tell me, how much of a say did Poland have on their sovereignty there? The great powers decided, and that's what happens to small countries when they get caught up in conflicts with great powers.
That's why we created the United Nations and similar organizations—to try to give some sort of sovereignty back to smaller countries. But unfortunately, in practice, things get challenging. Ukraine has been a MacGuffin in the geopolitical lexicon since the Soviet Union collapsed. There have been lots of discussions on both sides about spheres of influence. The NATOfication of Europe is another example. In 2000, there were 20 NATO countries; now there are 31, soon to be 32. What does that translate to? It translates to the U.S. and NATO getting closer and closer to Russia. Russia made a hard line, saying if you try to get Ukraine to join NATO, we will not allow U.S. nuclear weapons to be 200 miles away from Moscow, just like we wouldn't allow nuclear weapons from Russia to be in Cuba.
It is a hard line. We also need access to the Black Sea. We're not going to lose these ports; we're not going to lose this economic geopolitical influence. We said, "Well, how about you join NATO?" Then war breaks out. We just don't know where the war came from. We have no clue about it, even though they've been talking about this for over 20 years—actually since 1986, when Reagan and Gorbachev got together, discussing behind the scenes their plans to withdraw from East Germany and reunify Germany. They were hammering out the breakup of the Soviet Union because the writing was on the wall. People wanted to manage the collapse without World War III happening, as a third of the planet was going to be under new management within five years.
Think about how complicated that is—foreign policy and geopolitics are very complicated. What makes it so hard is that people don't get the truth. What they get is the surface-level propaganda discussion, laced and burdened with whoever benefits from it. War is tremendously profitable for some and horrific for many, which is why you shouldn't have them. It's why you should always sue for peace where and when it's possible. You have to be very clear about what you're willing to do.
What's the mission in Ukraine? You tell me, Robert. Is it regime change? Are we going to go kill Putin? Then who do we replace him with? Is it restoring the borders before the war broke out? The 2014 borders? The 2007 borders? The 1991 borders? What territories are going to be ceded? Is Crimea going to come back? What are we doing here? Will Russians have free entry into Ukraine like they used to? Will they be able to go on vacation again in Odessa? Are there any protections that are going to come to the territories that are re-annexed with the Eastern Ukrainians who speak Russian and collaborated with the Russian government? Or will they be ethnically cleansed? Are they going to have to go back to Russia? Are they going to be kicked out of the homes they grew up in in Ukraine because now there are radicalized people on the western side who speak Ukrainian? They feel the people in the East betrayed their country and should be executed.
It kind of reminds you of Iraq, doesn't it? With the victors' justice and the Shia when they took over and were really angry at all those Ba'ath Party Sunnis. It's really complicated now. Wow, there are a lot of moving pieces to this, isn't there? Oh no, and that's war. There are a lot of moving pieces; it's very challenging. It really is hard when people work through it. You have to look at the whole map; you have to have a vision. You have to understand what we are actually doing here. What is the mission? If you can't answer it, here's what you're doing: you're buying time with the lives of young people. Every month this goes on, tens of thousands of people die. If you get the same outcome we could have gotten in 2022 before Boris Johnson was sent to mess it all up, then all those people who died, they died just like people in World War I—for nothing. There was no regime change; there was no magical embrace of freedom. They died for nothing; the borders stayed exactly the same.
Will the politicians be punished? No, they'll get their Nobel Peace Prize. They'll get their beautiful chalet in Geneva. They'll be able to write a tell-all book. The villains will stay villains, the heroes will stay heroes, and both sides get to say that they won. That's what you get unless you're prepared to go all the way, and that includes up to and including a nuclear war. If you're prepared for that, okay, let's do it. It's World War III. Huzzah! That's where the world is at.
I listened to your Trump speech reaction video. I always avoided every piece of information about the man since 2016. I heard him for the first time, and it's incredible how deep a nation can fall. You know, the thing that bothered me so much about that speech was just the lack of information. As Trump gets older, his signal-to-noise ratio is getting worse. He's always been too verbose, and there's really not a lot of signal in the noise. In other words, there's not a lot of content; there's a boatload of fluff. Believe me, it's this word salad wrapped around kind of a thin point that's being made.
The dude walks into a blockchain conference; he had maybe five minutes of policy and talking points and 45 minutes of bluster. Inside the speech, he's talking about his uncle, who's an MIT professor, and he's talking about this and that—not relevant at all to crypto. There could have been so many wins. He could have just gone through the hits. He could have been like, "What Gary Gensler did to XRP is wrong. What Gary's doing to all you guys is wrong. We're going to end choke points; we're going to end this. DeFi is the future." It would have been great to show humility there. He could have said, "I'm an old guy; this is a young man's game, and we can't destroy the young innovators because they're the ones who run the economic engine."
He just couldn't show that, and that made me sad. You know, because it's the first time a major political party has embraced cryptocurrency. If you want to contrast, take a look at Kennedy's speech compared to Trump's speech and the specifics that Kennedy put in—from the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve to all these other things—specific policy positions. He kind of walked through it. That was what I was hoping for: that somebody would write that speech for him, and he'd come in and show it. I mean, his kids claim that they know cryptocurrencies. You've got Don Jr. saying he's going to open up a DeFi platform. If you're so sophisticated that you're capable of building a DeFi platform, doing tokenomics successfully, launching that, and making that a real product, shouldn't you have enough knowledge then to be able to articulate cryptocurrency policy?
And he's got V.V., who's a great guy, very smart, and he actually had a kind of a Bill of Rights for crypto that he came up with in his campaign. So it would have been sufficient for him to just go up there and say, "I'm going to be the crypto czar, and he's going to figure it all out. He's so good; I appoint the best people, believe me." He didn't do that. That's a bad thing. He literally said on the first day he'd fire Gary Gensler and get all giddy. Yes, and that's an example of one statement that was great. But guys, it's a long speech. Why have a long speech filled with word salad? Be concise and precise. You don't have to be there for 45 minutes; you could be there for a quick 5-10 minute speech and say, "I have another thing in Minnesota, but I love you guys, and I want to explain what's going on." You just end strong in this type of thing.
And yeah, any idiot who comes in to say, "Yeah, Gary's got to be fired," unfortunately, the president doesn't have the power to unilaterally do that. His term ends in 2026, so he can't fire him on day one. He can ask for his resignation, but he can't actually fire him on day one. That's an example of a Trumpism; he says he's going to do it, but it's a check he can't cash. Traditionally, chairmen have offered resignations for presidents, and they can choose to accept or reject it. So hopefully, Gary follows in line if Trump wins, but we have no guarantee of that. He can choose to wait it out, as Hester has done under the Biden administration, where she was appointed by Trump.
As for the DID, will it be leveraged by the Midnight or is the DeFi builders to choose the DID of their choice? DIDs are standard, so choose whatever you want. The prism framework is our preferred framework because it's the most evolved and it's built hand in glove. But it's just like Hydra on Cardano, where you can use Hydra or have an alternative approach for how you want to achieve Layer Two scalability.
Can I please ask a question here? Yes, you can, Bruno. What do you got for us? When do you think China is going to take Taiwan? Probably around 2027. That's what the Pentagon thinks. They write this report every year, and you can see China making gradual progress.
Charles, wear a mask alone in his trust. You MAGA guys. Hi, Charles. I love Cardano. Good luck. Well, thank you so much, sir. We love you too. Should we build a crypto nation? Kind of feels like we are, right? In a constitution, we just elected the IC, got the DS coming. That's pretty good, man. He said what the audience there wanted him to say, believe me.
What do you think about the 1801 vote mechanism? It's a good starting point; it's not the end point. That's why we call it minimum viable governance. I think we need multiple resource pools long-term and different ballot mechanisms long-term to build a perfect government. You start somewhere and look for integrity, efficacy, and efficiency.
Okay, so efficacy is how the decisions end up being for the system. Efficiency is how quickly you make them, and integrity is whether you protect the rights of everybody or just some people. So you use those as your rating mechanism, and it gives you a good sense of whether the governance system is working or not.
Charles, how are you doing health-wise? A little overweight, but getting there. I'm just kind of pushing through. Do not ever shave again. Oh, so you guys like the beard length right now? Is that pretty good? Is that working for you?
When is the boxing match between you and Vitalik happening? Joe Rogan can be the ref. Well, first, it would be a huge event, but no, it wouldn't be fair to Vitalik; he's not built for that. I can go between mathematician and intellectual and physical bro guy. Vitalik is not built for that.
He picked an aisle of Tesla turbines. Charles, they are viable, and I know the guy designing industrial-grade ones for cooling and energy generation. I would really be interested in Tesla turbines, especially with magnetic bearings. That'd be pretty cool.
You’re about to be on the wrong side of history, brother. You were so close. The beard looks good; one inch minimum. That's what she said. There was a paper recently on lightweight ZK proofs. Have you read it? There are probably more than 50 papers recently on lightweight ZK proofs.
Hey Charles, my girlfriend has been suffering from heavy migraines all her life. No medical observation can find a reason or cure. Any advice you can give or devices to try that may give her some peace? Try changing the diet. Talk to your nutritionist and doctor, but go over to keto for a little bit and see if that works. Sometimes there's a relationship between migraines and the microbiome and diet. If you've kind of gotten to the bottom of the barrel, they've done the brain scans, they've gone through everything, and you can't find it, roll the dice on it and see if you get where you need to go.
I knew a friend who actually had epilepsy, and he went to a keto diet, and it just worked wonders for him. There are some other people that cleaned up their microbiome, got rid of the seed oils, and all their migraines went away. Unfortunately, in some cases, you can't solve the problem.
Oh my God, Wayne's Smoke Shack! I just realized they're open. Oh yeah, all right, so after I finish all this, I'm going to Wayne's. What type of music do you listen to when you work out? If it's a hardcore workout, you got to turn on the motivation stuff. If it's less of a hardcore workout, then you know, podcasts—that's the way to go.
Oh my God, Crypto Crow is here! Great man, I like Crypto Crow. He's actually coming to Rare Evo, and we're definitely going to do an interview together at the booth and talk about his game and all the stuff he's been working on. You know, I've always enjoyed talking to him throughout all the years. There are a lot of real high-integrity good people in the Cardano ecosystem, and he's an example of one. He's always been a steady hand.
You are absolutely giving us a great afternoon. I don't do the AMAs enough; I really miss it. It's a lot of fun to be with you guys. But I'm bum bum. How often do you exercise? Right now, every day. In fact, I'm getting jungle ready, guys. I'm getting my rucksack and going to be on the treadmill, taking up the incline a little bit, and just see me melt. All this fat is going away. You'll see.
Do you still do ice baths? This is for later today. Swim trunks for the ice bath got her downstairs. Yo, when will Cardano support multiple programming languages? It already does.
Marketing, guys, I cannot wait for Intersect to actually have the budget and be able to put some money into marketing because the level of misinformation and misunderstanding of the ecosystem kills me.
Charles, when is your six-pack? Brian Johnson, anti-aging. Okay, so Brian is like a vampire, and I got a whole different thing going on than Brian. But I do know him; I have met him. He's a great guy, and I enjoy talking to him. But I'm not going to quite go and do gene therapies and raton from mini-circle and all kinds of stuff like that. We're just going to do the stem cells and the hyperbarics and a little bit of jungle warfare.
Turn on Goggins. Charles, it's funny because on my security detail, I got an A-Team Six guy, and I asked, "What do you think of Goggins?" He said, "I don't like Goggins." I don't know. I mean, if you guys are in the SEAL community, it's like Goggins is in the in-crowd; he's in the out-crowd because I heard if they send you to Ranger school as a SEAL, that's the punishment. But I had never been in that culture, so I don't know what to believe.
You know, I found that a lot of these SOF guys are just hypercritical of each other. It's like there's no purity. I got a dry float tank actually on the way; I'm very excited about it. Show you guys this; it's a really cool system.
Dry float tank? You said, "Charles, what the hell is a dry float tank? What is that about?" And I said, "Well, I'm glad that you asked about my dry float tank." Okay, it's from Starpool, and somebody from their side is going to see this video, and they're going to be like, "Oh my God, Charles is talking about us!"
Let me bring this up, share a screen. Wow, here we go. So Starpool sells these in stri-flat therapy; super warm. It's almost like a water bed. You start on the platform; it lowers you in, lowers you in, lowers you in, and eventually, you're just free-floating deep inside this incredibly warm cocoon. The cocoon is on the other side of the plastic; you don't get wet.
I tried it at Dave Asprey's Summit, the biohacking conference that he had, and God, it was fun. I really
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