Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from Fukuoka. Is it warm and sunny? Is it cold and shiny? It's a really interesting city on the western side of Japan, way down the archipelago. It's 6:30 in the morning here. I got up and it’s like that meme where the guy in bed looks at the markets and sees the red lights hitting him, thinking, "Oh god, oh god, no, no." I thought about it for a bit. I sat down and asked myself, "How did we get here? What happened? What do I have control and agency over, and what do I not? Where am I having fun? Where am I not having fun? Where are we all having fun? Where are we not having fun?"
Last night we had a great event, and if you haven't watched the live stream with the Japanese community, I highly recommend it. This was the third presentation we did here in Japan: one in Hokkaido, one in Osaka, and now one here in Fukuoka. We had a lot of people. The last time I was in Fukuoka was in 2016. I was walking around and said, "There's this thing we're going to build called Cardano, and it's going to be awesome." Everybody was skeptical, saying, "I don't know about that Cardano thing." I insisted, "No, no, trust me. It's going to be good. It's going to be big." It was just an idea back then, but you know what? We did it. We made it happen.
I thought a lot about those early days, how we got started. They were punk rock times. We were the rebels when we first launched Cardano, rocking the boat here in Japan. We had this one community manager, and we told him, "Hey, you know, kind of tone it down a little bit. You're rocking the boat." He said, "Oh, yeah, okay, I got you." Then I was sitting in my office in Osaka, and I got a document saying there was an army of people in panda suits—like 300 of them—marching down the canals in Namba with banners that had Cardano on them. There was this guy riding a Ferrari California with a panda helmet on. I called him up and said, "We need to tone it down a little bit." He replied, "Yeah, yeah. Nobody could see our faces. We had the panda suits on. We're good. Cardano!"
That was a Bill Murray lost-in-translation moment in Japan. You have to be very explicit sometimes about what "tone it down" means. But then I thought about what it means to be in crypto. Crypto is the punk rock of finance. We're supposed to be the outsiders, the cool kids, the nonconformists, the rebels. We're supposed to be different from the rest. But all that changed in 2021. We all got rich and accepted, and you know what happens when you become part of the system? They make it not cool. They strip away everything that makes you special and package it again and again, consumerizing it until you lose what makes it magical.
That's why crypto is where it's at right now. We can't control the macro environment, but we couldn't control it in 2020 when the whole world shut down due to COVID. We couldn't control it when wars broke out. We couldn't control it when Bitcoin was just a dollar, and we were all worried in 2013 about Mt. Gox collapsing or Silk Road shutting down. Everyone asked, "Is this the end of the music?" We couldn't control it back then, but we were a lot happier because we were true to ourselves.
I look at myself and realize I've gotten a little fat and happy—literally fat, and also living an opulent lifestyle. I'm never going to succeed if I keep doing the same thing over and over and just be part of that club. If you're going to do great things, you have to go all in. So, I'm going to get back to that punk rock spirit. I'm going to downsize a little bit, sell my Blackhawk, mothball the jet, sell my Lamborghinis, and just go all in. Why not? I started from nothing. Many of you older fans remember when I was sitting in my apartment with stuffed giraffes on the dresser. Those were the days I loved the most, and they were the most fun I've ever had.
In the past month, I've been coding every day, with a little help from our friend Claude and our friend Codex. There's a creativity that flows when you have something that can think like that, and you can go back and forth and referee with it. I was talking to Sebastian last night at an Izakaya place about Lace ID, and the coolest idea that came up was these bots called Claude bots. They're like AI agents, and I guess they changed the name to Moltbot and then Open Claw because people wanted to sue each other. They created their own social network called Moltbook. So now there's literally a social network of AI bots running around doing things.
I was talking to Sebastian and said, "Okay, the markets are really bad. What we need to do is take Logan, the stuffed lobster on my mic, and make him a bot. He needs to go and talk to the Claude bots and get them to buy some ADA. We're running out of exit liquidity for this ecosystem. Let's just go all in with Open Claw." I started this morning working on the design for this system. I have an AI computer I can run this thing on. Yeah, Logan's going to be great. He's going to sell ADA to the robots.
But the point is the sheer unconnected creativity. You can't do that when you're part of the mainstream. You do that when you just have fun with it and you're part of the crowd. Crypto has to stay that way. We, as an industry, have to embrace that. I signed up to change the world, to do interesting things, unique things, new things. Whenever I do things directly and I'm in the pits with the people, I'm happy. I love sitting down every day writing code or documents. I wrote over 400 pages of technical documents for Midnight over Christmas. My family was like, "Hey, Charles, you kind of have to celebrate Christmas with us." I said, "No, no, no. I'm just writing this stuff about Midnight. We have to do it." I had so much fun.
I was working on an executable specification oracle with a TLA spec and a full pro specification. I come back and say, "Here's all this code we need to write. Here's all the things we need to do. How would we do it?" I don't know, maybe those lobsters will figure it out. You are the lobster, but we have to get it done. Let's ship in two weeks. Put a Nintendo emulator in it. I don't know. It's a good way of testing if the folding system works. Can you get it done in two weeks? You can do that. Luca, talk about punk rockers. He just shipped a backend for Plutus, wrote it in Zig in one week. That used to take us six months. It's a different era.
If you're going to win, you have to go all in and really believe in these things. I don't care if crypto's down or up because I joined crypto before it was up. I don't care where it all ends up. You can't take it with you when you die. It's just about the music and whether you're having fun. The underlying thread throughout this entire video is to ask yourself about crypto: Why are you in it? If you're in it to change the world, have fun, meet people, and do interesting things, that makes it worth it. If you're in it to get rich, you've already lost. Every single time my mind drifts toward things and possessions, I lose too.
So, we're getting back to first principles. We're getting back to punk rock, and we're going to have a lot of fun. Today, I get to go to Miyamoto Musashi's cave and take a look at that. He wrote "The Book of Five Rings" there. How about that? That guy was a legend. After being the baddest ronin in the history of Japan, he realized he had stomach cancer. He thought, "All right, time to write down everything I know." He lived in a cave and died two days later after writing his books. He was like, "All right, finished. Drop the mic. I'm done." That's the way we have to be.
So, the tour continues. I'm going to see Okinawa next, then Tokyo. We're going to finish strong. Japan's back. We woke up all the old networks and got everybody excited. If you're looking for a Blackhawk, I have one to sell. She's real nice. We upgraded her. She'll treat you well. I'll see you in Hong Kong, and I'll be right there in the masses with all of you, shoulder to shoulder, because this revolution is just getting started, and we're going to have a lot of fun. Cheers, everyone.
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