Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is March 19th, 2026. How about that? I'm wearing a crazy shirt; I had it made in Vietnam. The tailor who made it used to be a nun and worked with Mother Teresa. How about that? I walked into her shop, and she had a picture of her. I asked, "What's that?" She said, "Oh, I used to be a nun, ran away." I asked for a pocket, but she didn't put one on. But come on, nuns always know what's right. It's a good day, isn't it? We're having some fun.
I want to make a video and talk a little bit about the ecosystem as a whole. I want to reassure everyone that everything's okay. The world's on fire. When you look at the world, it's on fire. It's just going up and down. You've got war in Iran, war in Ukraine, and next year, we have China likely invading Taiwan. The economy is starting to blow up a little bit. Apparently, oil prices are hitting $100 to $150 a barrel, and people are realizing that everything's connected to it. You have to move stuff around, and it gets more expensive to do so. Want to grow stuff? You use diesel to power all your farm equipment, which makes the price of food and feed go up. Everybody's a little scared right now. People are losing their jobs en masse. Dell laid off 11,000 employees, and HP is probably going to lay some people off soon. Microsoft and Facebook have also made cuts. AI is getting more advanced, and there's a little bit of hopelessness. People are scared, and the government's run by satanic pedophiles.
So, what do you do with that? You just have to choose which flavor of satanic pedophile you want—the Coke or Pepsi of them. Crypto goes up and down, but one of the stories I'd like to tell is to imagine if you were born in the late 19th century. Picture this: you were born in 1899 in a small town in Kansas. You’ve never left your town, never gone more than 25 miles, no electricity, no running water. You’re getting water from a well and riding a horse. That’s your world—a small world. George Washington would look familiar to you. Then you turn 18, and all of a sudden, you’re drafted and sent to fight in World War I. You’re shipped off to Europe to a place you’ve never been, to a language you don’t speak. You’re living in a trench, and half the people you arrive with are dead within six weeks. They use chemical weapons on you—chlorine gas, mustard gas. You get blinded for a bit from the mustard gas and suffer from trench foot. Rats try to eat you. You get through all of that and think, "Oh my God, it’s over." Then you come home to the Spanish flu, a pandemic that killed 20 million people worldwide. After that, the Dust Bowl hits—a massive drought that kills all the crops. You think, "Oh God." Plus, you’re still dealing with the aftermath of the war; your hearing is gone in your left ear from all that artillery.
You get through all that, and then you think you’re good, and the Great Depression happens. It hits hard. Kansas has no industry in the town you’re from, and you’re living through that Great Depression. You’ve got FDR on the radio every day, calling you up and saying, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself. We’re going to get through this." You think, "Okay, okay." Then, all of a sudden, communism and Nazism become things. You’re wondering, "What the hell is going on in Europe? Are we going for round two?" FDR says, "No, no. We don’t want to get involved in that crap." Then Pearl Harbor happens, and your kids get drafted to fight in round two, the deadliest war in human history. You’re just sitting there, sick to your stomach, worried about them, wishing you could help. Everybody’s rationing, and you have coupon booklets that dictate how much gas, iron, and food you can buy. Finally, that war comes to an end, and then everyone’s talking about nuclear weapons. By 1950, the communists have them, and everyone is worried about nuclear war.
Think about that. That was the lived experience of the majority of adult men by 1950 who were in their 50s. They lived through all of that and weren’t even 60 yet. Their kids lived through World War II, the Korean War, and their grandkids lived through the Vietnam conflict and the turbulent '60s. The point is, things can get bad. But on the other side of it, great things happen. Every generation faces challenges, and our current challenge is the hardest it’s ever been. It’s not a singular conflict; it’s a crisis of meaning. Everything is up for debate: the monetary system, governance systems, religions, meaning. There’s never been a more interesting time to be alive.
We’re starting to understand the nuances of consciousness, talking about biophotons and panpsychism. There’s amazing work happening in Michael Levin’s lab, understanding the emergence of intelligence. Quantum computers are about to wake up, and our understanding of the universe will grow exponentially. At the same time, AI is rising, and every person now has something to augment their brain. Imagine being born 5'2" and weak in an agricultural society. You’re not worth much. But today, you have machines. It doesn’t matter if you’re 6'8" and jacked or 5'2"; you can do the same amount of work because machines can do it for you. Now we have thinking machines with AI. Average people, if they learn how to use AI, can become exceptional and do exceptional things. They can think into the machine if they learn how.
What happens when the world is strong? You have the Industrial Revolution. What happens when the world is smart? You have an enlightenment we’ve never seen before. Yes, there’s conflict. Name one period in human history where there hasn’t been conflict. Yes, there are incompetent leaders everywhere. Name one period in human history without crazy incompetent leaders. Look at the 19th century with all the inbred royalty in Europe. It’s pretty crazy stuff. Yes, the orange man is bad. But has America ever had a bad president before? Warren Harding? Andrew Johnson? We’ve had some winners, man. We’ve had horrible presidents, far worse than what Trump has done. Our institutions are a little shaky. We’re transitioning from the baby boomers to a new generation. The new generation will come with all these tools, and we’re going to have a governance renaissance.
Will we have hard times? Of course. But this is the first time in human history where we have our eyes on the prize. If we win, we will bank the unbanked. Everyone will own their own identity, and we will, for the first time in human history, have fair markets for everyone, everywhere. The billionaires, the three-comma club, will have the same marketplace as the poorest people in the world. Name any time in human history where rich people played by the same rules as poor people. Yes, there’s a wave of cynicism, but get over yourself. You don’t know what’s going to happen. If you did, you’d be as rich as me. The biggest lie you’ve been told is that the world works a certain way, it’s always going to work that way, and you have no agency in it. Some group of people you’ve never met will decide for you.
When I got into the three-comma club at 33, I did all the things you’re supposed to do. I went to the Milken Institute, met world leaders, and expected those people would be special, with insights and knowledge that others don’t have. Here’s what I found out: they’re as stupid, petty, misinformed, and autopiloted as the rest of us. There’s nothing special about them. I’ve seen more wisdom from people I met on the streets in Japan. The people at the top have nothing on everybody else. They’re just like everyone else. They’ve either stumbled into success, gotten lucky, or built something they’re really good at. But if you keep the conversation going, you notice there are big holes in all that stuff. They get in their heads that because they have money and power, it makes them different, which makes them weak and ultimately easy to beat.
Sun Tzu wrote a manual a long time ago called The Art of War. There’s a saying in it: bad warriors go to war and then try to win. Good warriors win first and then go to war. Don’t start things unless you know you’re going to win and already know how to win before you start them. The people at the top are at the top of the legacy system, and they have no idea what’s coming. That’s why they’re making the investment decisions they make, and that’s why the world is where it’s at. If they understood what’s coming, they would be investing in different things and doing different things. It’s the young people using AI who can think like a hundred people. Their advantages are extreme, and their progress is dramatic. They’re the ones who will overtake these old people very quickly and build a new society.
I was just talking to Mike Ward, the CEO of Shielded, who is key in getting Midnight where it needs to be. We’re launching at the end of the month. Mike and I were brainstorming about how to make Midnight faster and discussing various approaches. Should we go down the Sui route and use their consensus protocol, or should we do the Raptor route, or should we build something bespoke? I said, "You know what I’m going to do? I’m just going to take all the source code of Midnight and all the source code of Sui and all the white papers we’ve written, and I’m going to build an agentic framework." I’ve been doing this for a while, and I’m pretty good at it.
Let me show you what I built. I generated a 40-page paper discussing the feasibility of adopting Sui’s Mysten protocol. It includes various options, detailed descriptions, and how all the interfaces work. It goes through the network layer and cryptographic aspects, with beautiful tables. This is about six weeks’ worth of analysis work, fact-checked with four different LLMs. I had adversarial agents check it for flaws. It breaks down into various phases and tells you how long it would take to benefit from the entire thing. Even has pretty formatting, doesn’t it? You’ve got a critical file appendix and a glossary of terms in case you forget stuff. Guess how long it took me to generate? About an hour and a half. Six weeks of work, an hour and a half. I did it while I was in some boring meetings.
I’m not an AI expert, guys. I’m 38, and I’m from the generation before me. These young engineers are rockstars. Every engineer and scientist has this capability now. We’re all converging, and our ability to build these things is growing exponentially. I was just brainstorming, and now, reading through it, I understand a lot about Sui’s architecture and what they’re doing. Impressive work, impressive scientists. The sad part is that before AI, this stuff took years. I know it takes years because I met George Denezi in Corfu, Greece, back in 2016. We talked about something that became Sui ten years later. That’s how long he was working on it. We were presenting on Ouroboros there. We built George’s RS coin. He and Sarah Micklejohn did that. Now we can read through everything and get a detailed engineering-level understanding of how these components work.
Are there hallucinations? Sure. Are there weak spots? Sure. No tool is perfect. But this is a capability the human race has never had. Think about what this does for biology, physics, chemistry, and mathematics. If you’re interested in religion, you could take the holy texts of every major religion over the last 3,000 years, analyze them, and see if there’s transitive and transcendent wisdom. In prior years, there might have been four or five enlightened people worldwide who had the privilege, access, time, and ability to do such a thing. Now, you can do this in a month or two with a small team of AI experts and distill it down to an understandable manual for everyone.
You’ve got all this pessimism, cynicism, and the belief that the world is run by a new world order of brilliant people who will use their dark powers to control us. The United States can’t even figure out that it’s a stupid idea to attack a country that’s basically Iraq and Afghanistan combined, with three times the population. They brag about how they destroyed their navy and air force and how magically we’re going to win because of that. I always ask, "How many planes and ships did the Taliban have?" We fought them for 20 years, and who’s in charge of Afghanistan? Tell us the reason we go to war with Iran is that they used weapons against our soldiers in Iraq. It’s true; they had a monopoly on the EFP thing and taught everyone how to make IEDs. So, we’re going to have boots on the ground for a 10-year protracted conflict with people who have mastered blowing us up with hidden bombs? That’s a good idea? A country with three times the population of Iraq?
We don’t have enough money to finish our border wall that Trump promised us for years. It costs $16 billion. But we do have enough money to invade Iran for $200 billion to stop them from getting a nuclear weapon, which we’ve prevented them from getting for decades by bombing them last June. How many lies have to be told before the whole system unravels and loses legitimacy? Yet somehow, these people will stay in power forever. They’re going to run out of credibility and money, and they’ll eat each other alive.
The decision is not whether we consent to and support the existing system. The decision is, what do we do when the existing system collapses? The time for choosing is whether we hand the keys to the kingdom to the Palantirs, the Cantons, the Fed chains, and these Web 2.5 companies that build new Googles, Amazons, and Facebooks. They become choke points, and you will never be allowed to have non-custodial wallets. Everything will be KYC’d, and 20 or 30 people at the top will become trillionaires while everyone else lives at their beck and call, with AI telling you what you can and can’t do. Or do we continue what we started in the United States, founded by better people, and keep pushing the cause of liberty forward?
It’s not a fantasy. Yes, we had slaves, and yes, women were not equal to men when we were founded. These are the sins of America. But everybody forgets that the people at the top were revolutionaries for their time. Instead of becoming kings and ruling over us, they gave us a chance to rule over ourselves. With that, we chose to expand the boundaries of liberty—sometimes through blood, sometimes through the ballot box, sometimes both—and give it to as many people as we can. This resulted in the overthrowing of most monarchies in the world in less than 200 years. It regresses and comes back. We have the tools to bring liberty to levels we’ve never seen before in human history, right here, right now, in this industry.
You have all these people saying that because the token price went down, crypto is dead. What the hell are you going back to? Debased money, satanic pedophiles at the top, endless wars across the world, and eventually a buildup to World War III where a billion people die in nuclear conflict? Shame on you for being so cynical that you think that’s our destiny as a race. What I’m building is a system where you have control over your money. You can never be unbanked, you can never be deplatformed, and you have God-given freedom of speech, association, and commerce. It’s yours, globally. I’m giving you one marketplace where everybody plays by the same rules.
I’m providing a layer where we can finally figure out how to solve the AI problems. I’m giving you something where we can build a completely new economy that we’ve never seen before—a post-capitalist system. Something beyond what we have, where the fruits of your labor belong to you, but everybody is connected to it. I’m giving you something where your vote counts. It can’t be stolen from you. You can check it and verify the integrity of the system. I’m giving you a system where you can vote differently for the first time in your life. No more of this team blue and team red nonsense. Here’s the news flash: they’re both bad. You know it deep down inside. Don’t tell me that one side is better than the other. For my entire adult life, I’ve been told that Coke or Pepsi is the way to go. Both give you diabetes and don’t care about you. Both lie to you.
Don’t believe for a moment that one side is more virtuous than the other. It’s a lie. And why do you tolerate it? Because they rigged the system so that only Coke or Pepsi is on the menu. So how about we build a new system where you can vote for a third option, a fourth option, a fifth option? You say, "Oh, that’s not possible." Why is it not possible? Because they told you it’s not, not because it is. But you need a system that lets you do it. What are we testing in real time with all these blockchain government systems? New constitutions, new voting systems, much better ways of deciding in a decentralized manner what you should do and how you should do it. High integrity, censorship-resistant, fraud-free. New money, new choice, new association, new economy.
When the collapse comes—and it will come—crypto is what’s going to get us out of this. You’ve got these Silicon Valley people who think they’re smart because they made so much money betting on technology. Good for them. They have great technical skills, but they choose to spend their time going to the Vatican and lecturing about the Antichrist. They spend their time constructing the foundations of a spy state. They don’t care about everyday people and are creating a techno-feudalism where there are trillionaires at the top and everyone else is a serf. They slowly buy up everyone in government. You can see it through their donations and patronage. They find bright young speakers at universities, give them large sums of money, and curate their careers to get them into politics.
There
Trump decided to buy his cabinet members shoes from a low-budget shoe manufacturer without asking for their shoe sizes. He just guessed. Marco Rubio received shoes that were a bit too big. Instead of telling people that the shoes were too large, and fearing the possibility of getting another pair, Rubio chose to wear the oversized shoes. You can Google it and see a picture of Marco Rubio wearing shoes that don’t fit. Imagine being so terrified of the boss that you can't even tell him he got you the wrong shoes and have to pretend they are the right ones. These men have no power; they are all simulacra of it. They are shadows, not real people. Therefore, they don’t have the right to rule, and thus they will lose it. What comes next is up to us, and that's what we're going to do.
I understand the markets aren't where you want them to be. It's up to you to decide what to do about that. For me, I'm just going to keep building, keep writing papers, and keep doing whiteboard sessions. I don't care. I was broke, became a billionaire, and I don't care if I go back to being broke. It doesn't matter. I've already sold the Blackhawk. It turns out during wars, it's easy to do that. I think closing that deal will happen in May or June. It's sad to see Black Betty go, but I enjoyed and loved what it was for the time I had it. I can make much better use of what she was with where we're going.
That's the nature of life. The Japanese have a saying for it: mono no aware. It captures that bittersweet joy you feel when you watch a cherry blossom and realize it's going to wilt. Everything is ephemeral. Nothing is permanent. Money isn’t, possessions aren’t, and your life isn’t. Love and enjoy where you're at, and boy, I'm loving where I'm at right now. I can make a difference. I'm in the driver's seat; I actually have some agency in the matter.
The reality is, you are too. No matter who you are or where you're at, you have just as much influence in your own special way. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. Don’t let anyone talk you out of your humanity. Know that you matter. You matter to me, you matter to us, and you have an opportunity to change the world. So go do it and stop being cynical.
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