This is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is June 8th, 2025, and I am back in the driver's seat here in Colorado. I was just in Wyoming for my brother's 40th birthday. How about that? It's always exciting to celebrate birthdays, but where has the time gone? It's truly remarkable when you think about it. I remember when I was a kid, growing up in Hawaii, homeschooled in a little town called Makawao, and now seeing my brother at 40. I'm not too far behind him; I'm actually 37 years old and will be 38 this year. I was born in '87. How about that? Although Wikipedia can't figure it out either—either '87 or '88. Not sure where the '88 came from, but it wouldn't be the first thing on the internet that's wrong.
Cardano is doing well. The ecosystem is moving its way through governments right now. There's a lot going on. A lot of people are saying, "Oh, there's so much drama, so many dramations, and all these votes and temperature checks." Here's the thing: we started with a very strong executive function as an ecosystem for many years. We had Genesis keys, and things were chugging along, and we were all unified. We had a roadmap and would say, "Okay, when Shelley, when Goguen, when Voltaire," you know, those types of things. Then in 2022, we began a pivot as an ecosystem, moving towards decentralized governance.
The first step was to build a very strong legislative and judicial function. Necessarily, this meant that we reduced the power of the executive function dramatically. So much so that now we don't have a recognized executive branch in the Cardano government. Why that's relevant is that the executive branch does things like figure out roadmaps and priorities and help create those KPIs that allow you to score and derive a budget, as well as pursue a strategy. It doesn't mean it doesn't exist; it just means it's fragmented at the moment. Many different people have many different ideas and visions. Intersect has one, the foundation has one, we have one, and the community is kind of working its way through. A lot of people are just starting to discover that maybe, just maybe, we need to start adding some executive function back in, and that's okay because it can be added in a systematic way with the consent and delegation of the legislative branch and the judicial branch.
Anyway, I'm pretty excited that we're nearly done with the 2025 budget. We'll get it done one way or the other, whether there's one vote or 39 votes. We're almost at the conclusion of that. What we're going to do at IO is sit down and try to do an after-action review. Our goal is to bring together as many people who were involved in that process as possible and have them write down what happened to the best of their recollection and discuss how we can all make the 2026 budget process better for the ecosystem as a whole. It hasn't disrupted any of Input Output's work. Input Output has been working diligently on Ouroboros and upgrades to Plutus. We've been working on Babel fees, Bitcoin DeFi, things like Ouroboros Paris, Midnight, and Lace. All things considered, as an ecosystem, we're moving forward and pushing ahead.
But it's taken a little bit of time to wrangle governance, and we are a little bit exhausted, to be honest with you. It's been a very long road the last seven months. We've gone from no constitution to a constitution and hundreds of representatives, and we have upcoming elections for the constitutional committee, which means 100% of the government of Cardano is fully elected. There are legitimate conversations about updates to the constitution itself. There are already proposals for version 1.1 to facilitate and reflect the need for certain changes to allow the system to operate.
We've also been working hard as an ecosystem to create diversification, for example, diversifying the nodes and the development processes and flows. From our part in Input Output, we've been trying as hard as we can to achieve a world of node diversity. Overall, I'm pretty happy. It's been a long time. It's hard. There's too much going on now, too many different concerns, too many different factions, and you have to get used to the fact that you can't keep everybody happy. I wish we could live in an era where I was sitting with a dresser behind me and giraffes on it, doing AMAs, and everybody agrees, and we're all having fun. But the reality is that 70/30 is phenomenal, 60/40 is great, and 50/50 plus one vote—that's enough. That's the way it is now moving forward. You just have to accept that there are going to be people and factions that disagree. I hope they can disagree without becoming disagreeable.
There has absolutely been some outrageous conduct, but that's just the times we live in. I mean, Elon Musk is fighting with Trump. Everyone has gone from "I disagree with you" to "You're pure evil, and I must destroy you in every way possible." People are becoming trained to think that debate means shouting people down.
Now, let's chat about something that kind of blindsided me. An apology for discrimination and disrespect towards the beloved Cardano Mad Bull. I had to look this one up. There's a member of the ecosystem, a Mad Bull, who claimed that my security personnel beat him up. I said, "What the hell are you talking about?" At first, I thought it was at a recent event, like Rare Evo or last year, or Token 2049 or Consensus. After looking through the comments, apparently in 2022, when Rare Evo was held at the Operand Hotel out in Colorado, there was some sort of conflict between my security detail and Mad Bull. I guess the security at Operand got involved and evicted him from the property. I don't know too many details about it, but he did file a police report. He asserts that his knee was injured and that his belongings were lost.
Now, I don't tend to get involved in these things, but I will say that my security detail operates with great professionalism. They only intervene when they perceive a threat. It's a difficult job because people mob me at every single event, and when they get real close to me, I'm quite vulnerable. We have had certain security incidents in the past, from people making death threats to mailing me certain things to actually trying to attack me. If you were injured in any way by the Operand security, as your report suggests, I do apologize for their conduct, but it was never our intent. My detail's only job is to be a barrier between me and people they perceive could be a threat. They do their job 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and now in more than 60 countries. They've gone with me everywhere, from Burundi to Singapore.
If they get it wrong from time to time or if they're overly vigilant, ultimately I'm the accountable party, even if I didn't make the call. So if you felt you were mishandled in any way, I do apologize for that. You have that man to man from me. I'm sorry that it's taken three years to get to this point, but in fact, before you mentioned it, it was the first time I ever even heard of it. I attend about a dozen events per year, and our people are under a high degree of stress and load and often very underslept. I hope that resolves that for you.
I took the time to look into it because we don't typically see that. We're much more worried about kidnapping right now because one of my good friends was actually kidnapped in France, and they chopped off one of his fingers. He runs Ledger, and it's been pretty terrible. If you saw the attempted kidnapping of the exchange's granddaughter over in France, and then in New York, there was a guy who got kidnapped. They tried to steal his crypto and went at him with a chainsaw in the shower, kind of like Tony Montana in Scarface.
I try to treat everybody with respect, and it's difficult for me actually having security. I spent so long in my life being a man of the people. I just show up alone, shake hands, take pictures with every single person, and do everything in my power to try to get to know everybody when I go to these events. It's getting harder and harder to do that these days. It's getting more dangerous. There are a lot of people out there who try to take advantage of people's generosity and accessibility. They're really not there to meet you or take pictures with you; they're there to use you in some way.
It's tough knowing that every time you get a text message or any time someone communicates with you, you're always asking in the back of your head, "Will this chat log end up on Twitter? Will an email that I send become public? Will people misrepresent a relationship that I have for financial gain, political gain, or just for clicks, subscribes, and likes?" The tendency is to reduce accessibility and make it harder to connect with people. The compromise I have is that I have a security detail. They watch out for me, take care of me, and become basically family. I know much about them; they know a lot about me. I always wish them well and do everything in my power to make it as comfortable as possible for them, and they try to make me as comfortable as possible.
It reduces a lot of friction in travel, and we do try, for the most part, to have them be invisible when I'm meeting and talking to people. It helps some of my employees because I share the security detail with them when we travel to certain places that are quite dangerous or prone to kidnapping. For example, I was in Guatemala not too long ago and, as I mentioned before, Burundi. It's still one of those things where there's no right answer. It's just the world we live in. It's also not lost on me that I'm trying to change the world. We build products and services that upset very powerful people. If Cardano is successful and we actually get hundreds of millions of users and change the world financial operating system, there are a lot of billionaires who will be on the losing end, and there are massive multi-trillion dollar companies that will no longer have their monopolies and control. These are organizations that have historically started wars over their profitability.
Just look at the Ukraine conflict and the $300 billion we've spent there. Take a look at Iraq and all the things happening geopolitically. There are usually very strong financial incentives to draw things out instead of sue for peace. If they have the capacity and ability to inflict geopolitics, if you get in the way of them making a lot of money, it's not good for you. Many people have learned that lesson the hard way. You do your best to try to balance things out and keep accessible, keep being a man of the people. On the other hand, you just have to accept that the threat profile is a lot higher these days.
When I land my jet, there are usually paparazzi there taking pictures, seeing who's coming off of it. Whenever I meet with certain people, sometimes articles are written, and it's pretty sad.
How was your meeting with our Dutch Prince Constantine? Was he able to impress you? Oh, absolutely. The prince is a very smart man, incredibly well-educated, and extremely knowledgeable, especially about biology and synthetic biology in particular. We had a very lively conversation about medicine and biotech—not as much about cryptocurrencies as I would have expected given the nature of the meeting. I was also there with Tamara Hassan, the president of Input Output, and she spent quite a bit of time with the prince as well. They talked for about two hours on a wide range of topics. He was a little grumpy about the recent political changes in the Netherlands and the US-Netherlands relationship, as well as the broader European-US relationship since Trump is reevaluating things. But all that said, he was a delightful person, and the Netherlands is lucky to have him.
It's always nice when you meet somebody who meets their station, meaning they actually take it seriously. They understand the legacy they come from and take the time to stay informed. He's extremely well-read, and it was really fun talking to him.
Let's talk about your big, bold upcoming podcast. I think it's coming up here in just a few weeks, like a week or two. It's exciting—a huge podcast, and I think people are going to really like it. They'll be like, "Oh, yeah."
Can you explain how the trustless Bitcoin-Cardano integration works without a centralized entity? What talks to both networks and coordinates transactions? Well, you do need to have some concept of a bridge. The question is, what do you rely upon the bridge to do? If you're relying on the bridge for custody and for all the facilitation of everything, meaning the trust model completely collapses to it, it's no better than wrapped Bitcoin.
The reality is you don't need to do that anymore because of Taproot. If you're prepared to spend a lot on transaction fees and you're prepared to take a long finality, then you can use Taproot-style transactions with recursive proofs, like SNARKs, to facilitate a transaction from one chain to the other. In general, you can use the asset on the other chain to represent DeFi transactions and then return with those winnings or losses based on what happened.
Now, that's not going to be acceptable for the majority of people who want to do DeFi. So, likely what you want to do is introduce the concept of an operator to deal with the intermediate periods of time and batch and bundle things. That's really what we're figuring out with Fairgate. There are a litany of things you have inside your portfolio, from MPC to multi-IG to trusted hardware, and you connect those types of things. What ends up happening is you can facilitate rapid transactions with submittal latency and very cheap transactions that bundle over time and then use an aggregate proof on the Bitcoin network.
So long-term, the security is the Bitcoin network. Short-term, it's on the operator side, and the operator observes both sides, but anybody can be an operator, potentially speaking, because you just install a full node on both sides or at least a light client on both sides with some special software. Likely what we're going to do is bundle a lot of the work we're doing with BlockFrost and Hydra and also have discussions with Adam Dean's people about combining Hydra and Lightning into something called Thundercloud. Combine that with the work we're doing with Fairgate, which is the whole stack and development experience.
Using BitVMX to go to RISC-V, RISC-V to Bitcoin script, and then all the zero-knowledge cryptography required to use the Bitcoin network to secure things in the long term. Then you let the user decide if they want 100% Bitcoin-derived security or if they want to rely on something a bit more generous for significantly faster transactions and lower transaction fees. In general, for small transactions and for most applications, that's fine. But for mass transactions, like if BlackRock is getting involved with $100 million, then you're likely to use Bitcoin for that. That's the magic of it; you kind of put the user in the driver's seat for these types of things.
RIP Joe Rogan. Did Joe Rogan die? The CF were talking to Franklin Templeton. Do I also share that contact? I had dinner with the CEO of Franklin Templeton and Dan Loeb a few years back at the Milken Institute when he had a private party at his house. It was back in 2022. We've known him for a while, and I'm very glad that the CF has picked up that contact and they're doing something that fits their remit better than ours. We'll certainly engage them on Midnight, and there's a lot we can discuss there. I think Midnight solves an enormous amount of problems with Cardano in the financial world because Cardano plus Midnight together plus Bitcoin—we call it the triumvirate. It solves all those problems.
Can you talk about the mid-air draft to clarify who will get it and how they will be involved? We have an enormous amount of content coming out. Cardano is going to get the largest distribution of any chain, even though it has a smaller market cap than Ethereum, Solana, and Bitcoin. There are going to be videos, infographics, a tokonomics paper, and a whole marketing campaign. We're getting very close to it. It's going to be launched by the TGE and the Midnight Foundation. They had to get operationalized, and we were just at Consensus and Money 2020 to introduce Fami Seed, the president of the Midnight Foundation. They're turning on this month and next month, so look for that soon. In fact, if Midnight is successful, it's the single biggest economic event in the history of Cardano.
Will StarStream compete with Plutus? No, it's going to make Plutus better because it gives co-routines to Plutus. What are your thoughts on the Bitcoin block size war? Which side was right? Well, I was on Roger Ver's side. I thought big blocks were sensible from the perspective of just letting block size grow as a parameter over time because hard drives keep getting bigger and network bandwidth keeps getting faster. If you put those two together, you know, the block size from 2009 is almost like inflation. You can look at the projection of the size you can tolerate with the same performance since Satoshi created the network, and at least you get some throughput there.
But the problem is it's not just the block size; you also need more sophisticated proof structures. You need a better accounting model, so extended UTXO over UTXO, and you also need to increase the expressiveness of Bitcoin script. If you're unwilling to do that, then it makes no sense to increase the block size. In fact, you want to do the opposite: keep it fixed so that you can push as much as possible into layer two. It was a philosophical decision—will innovation happen in layer one or layer two? The compromise was Taproot, which makes us happy and makes them happy.
Oh, the Gillette complex looks fun for entertainment. Yes, absolutely, start having conferences up there. The medical center will be open July 4th. So if any of you happen to be in Gillette, Wyoming, come on up. I'll be there, and a lot of other people will be too.
The peer-to-peer DeFi kernel is the DTC analog to Cardano's DeFi settlement layer. Well, let me show you guys a little something. Let me see if I can find it. I can bring it up. You all know about Cake. I like Cake. Let's see here. DeFi. Let's see if we can find this. It's a little DeFi group that came together called Cake. Let's see our DeFi layer group, working group. We're going to be joining this in a little bit from Frontier Research.
So, this is a Cake working group. It says Ethereum and the broader Web 3 ecosystem are moving fast towards a multi-chain future. Ethereum, having chosen a roll-up approach to scaling, already boasts more than 50 roll
So then I can go build a big decentralized ISP in Wyoming, South Dakota, and Montana. I love Mickey. I've worked with Mickey for years. He's been up to the ranch; he's a good friend and a tough negotiator. You have to be in his type of business dealing with Telos. You shake their hands and make sure your rings are still there. They're not good people. For Mickey to go in, keep his shirt, and survive, he's got to be smart and tough. I wouldn't expect it to be any other way, and you know we're kind of pushing through.
Partner chains have really come together as a framework. It's growing and evolving pretty rapidly. We have these trustless recursive SNARK bridges we're building. We're getting Jolty into a really good state. The team is doing great work operationalizing the framework and making it our own. We started with Parity Substrate, but then obviously we made a lot of enhancements to that and are getting Cardano to talk to it. That's the challenge of Midnight—Midnight launching at scale. What it does is create a launch model for your project and gives you a really good operating environment for that project because Midnight is going to put a bunch of upstream contributions into that.
To me, it makes sense for World Mobile to be a fast follow and for some custom work to be done specifically, getting a hybrid consensus model that involves not only Cardano stake pool operators but also the hardware that World Mobile is deploying. This way, both sides come together, and you actually have a huge advantage having both a hardware and a software play over normal consensus algorithms, in addition to all the other things they want to do in the network. It's a big scope of work, and a lot of things have to be decided. One infrastructure is good; they tried us, they tried Cosmos, they tried Bas. They need something bespoke, and it's about time we figure out how to do that as an ecosystem. But they're family; they've been around for a long time. People forget Mickey and friends were at the 2018 summit.
Is the Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics doing anything with Alpha Evolve? Has this or any other AI research tools affected where they do research? Not at the moment, but there's a very strong research stream from Microsoft, a very invasive stream that wants to apply AI to mathematical proof generation. This is an MSR; it's an adjacent project to the Lean project. We're aware of it, and people at CMU are aware of it. In some cases, they're contributing, but not as a formal research agenda. They're adjacent to it, which means they talk to each other and occasionally co-author papers. It will have a huge impact, probably around 2030 at the current rate of progress, but maybe a little sooner. We'll see.
Do you think Elon will ever come back for that original Bitcoin code to use Doge you offered? It would be cool if he put a team on that. I'm happy to work with him; he just seems to be going through a tough time right now. The thing is, Elon has everything. He has the potential to be anything and do anything, and he's done everything professionally. There's nothing more to do. He's had multiple successful IPOs, he's the world's richest man, he's gone to space, and all this other stuff. His big issue is that he traded his personal life for his professional success, and now he's empty, utterly unhappy, and a hollow person. He's trying to fill the void by having lots of kids and doing lots of drugs. He thought the adulation of the crowd would placate him when he became a political actor, and none of these things have solved anything for him. He continues to spiral. He needs to take a break; he needs to take two to four months off, go to rehab, find himself, and then come back. He'll be a lot more adjusted and happier. After he's done that, then he's a good business partner. But at this juncture, it's very difficult to reliably partner with Elon Musk.
You say, "Okay, look at all his co-founders at Neuralink; they're all gone. Look at OpenAI and what happened there; it's not a good outcome. Look at what's been going on at Tesla; look at the delays with Starship. Look at what happened with Doge and now the fallout with Trump." There's a pattern here, and it keeps going. It's indicative of a person who's overextended, who's doing too much, and it's not really clear what he wants in life. He says he wants humanity to be a multi-planetary species. That's great, but that's not an Elon Musk desire, then. Doesn't that mean it's supposed to be an intrinsically collaborative thing? So why can't we join an open-source project to then talk about what being a multi-planetary species means by category? Biologically, what synthetic biology do we have to invent to terraform Mars and change our own biology to be more suitable for being on Mars? Technologically, what foundational technologies need to be invented to facilitate and make that happen? Socially and culturally, what advancements do we need in governance structures?
What's frustrating to me is that he seems to criticize the government. Why doesn't he just go and use his colossal wealth to study political science and found a governance center to study a next-generation way of governing that has AI built at its very core? Can you imagine the proper application of a half billion to a billion dollars worth of research money? What type of governance utopia could be put together with this type of stuff? Especially with a man of his resources, he could get it done. He just wants to dabble in everything, but then he doesn't seem to finish the story and moves on to something else. He dabbled in politics, got burned, and now he's going back. He dabbles in cryptocurrencies; he was really serious about Doge and wanted it to be something successful. He could certainly have that conversation, and there's so much that could be done. He could make a commitment, saying if you do these things, Doge will be the de facto currency of X, and he'll use it for all transactions and tipping. He could even create an algorithmic stablecoin backed by Doge to peg the dollar, and people could pay their subscriptions in it. He would bring 550 million users to the Doge ecosystem, and everybody in Doge land would be like, "Yeah, this is our guy." But he's not really that serious; he just talks about it and then comes in and out. It's frustrating because we all want him to succeed. There's no upside to burning down somebody who says the world should have clean energy, that we should be multi-planetary, and that we should have access to space as everyday people instead of nation-states.
There's no upside to burning that person down. If Neuralink succeeds, crippled people walk again. If Neuralink succeeds, people with Parkinson's don't shake anymore. If Neuralink succeeds, blind people can see again. Why would you want to bet against that? Why would you want that to go away? He's become rather odious as of late, if not for a while. He needs to take a break; that's my professional advice as a person who also needs to take a break.
Will the partner chain framework work with forks of Cardano out of the box as well? Why are you even using Substrate as a base for Midnight instead of Cardano? We started with Cardano, actually. We took a look at it, and the problem with Cardano's codebase is that it's a monolith. It's not meant for modularization. It's not easy to remove the consensus algorithm and put another algorithm in, and it wouldn't make a lot of sense to put in a BFT protocol on top of Cardano, for example. Even OBFT was designed to look like a Satoshi-style protocol as opposed to what people do with normal BFT protocols. This was a decision of the original architects of Cardano. For better or for worse, it allowed us to have a very clean and nice way of doing things, but it also meant it's ridiculously hard to change things radically from the way we do our network stack and consensus.
It doesn't take advantage of the fact that if you're not trying to elect people or style, you could be a hundred times faster. So then we looked at Fabric, Cosmos, and Substrate as differing opinions. We tried all three of them and decided that Substrate was actually a pretty good framework as a base. What we've been doing for a long time is trying to normalize that framework in a way that works really well with Cardano. They fit hand in glove with each other. The nodes are maintained by the same set of SPOs, and there's a trustless bridge between the two. Eventually, it will puff up communication between the two, but not just Midnight and Cardano, but anyone who deploys on the partner chains framework.
Basically, you'll have batteries included for a high-speed, multi-thousand TPS low-latency partner chain framework, and then you'll have all the pallets from Substrate. You basically get those for free, and it's a quite large and robust ecosystem. You also get trustless bridging, and all the stuff that Midnight brings; you get that as well because you can talk to Midnight and use Midnight in the things that you do. What's also nice is you get the distribution model. It's a dual token model. You have a capacity unit that lives on the partner chain, and then you have a Cardano native token that lives on Cardano itself. That's where you get the liquidity and all these other things. It's actually kind of the best of both worlds. You get all this nice security, liquidity, and decentralization at launch. You can have very sophisticated governance contracts, but they all stay on Cardano. Anything that happens to your partner chain doesn't disrupt the commerce, trading, and economic value of your underlying token. Then you monetize through a capacity exchange in a capacity unit. It works really well in models like ad tech, AI, private computation like Midnight, and these types of things. If you want to talk about it, just mention JJ, and we can schedule a meeting.
Who will be the first partner of Midnight using the BTC bridge? I'm not ready to discuss the BTC bridge, but Midnight has over a hundred partners. Brave was the latest one we announced, and a lot more will be announced on a pretty much weekly basis from the Midnight Foundation. On the BTC side, there's a lot of money there. We have to pair it with yield, and when we put those two things together, we look good. Bitcoin 2025 was an art of the possible, and we showed a beautiful demo and a working bridge, with things moving back and forth from mainnet to mainnet. We're going to keep building these types of things up.
Actually, with all his points on Elon about his personal life, how does Charles feel fulfilled in his personal life? Yeah, I'm for the most part happy. There's a lot more to do. I just need time off for different reasons. Elon needs time off to clear his drug addiction and get back to normal, and then decide what life means to him. Me? I'm suffering from burnout. I've been working for more than ten years straight on a death march, pushing every day, and there's always this next thing. The fights have gotten very exhausting, and I'm not going to lie; I'm tired. There's just a lot more to do. We have to get Midnight launched, finish all this Cardano governance stuff, and get Laos on rails. Midgard is looking great; Phil's doing a phenomenal job there, and Sunday is doing great work. I'm feeling pretty good about these second-generation people coming into Cardano and building things up. It's been great to work with Seba as well. He's a brilliant kid, and we both kind of grew up together in Cardano land. It's nice to see Starcream really come into its own. We're very close; we're getting there. I really do hope that once we cross that Rubicon, that chasm, I can find about six months off, and then I'll just come back looking great. I'll look ten years younger. You know, I am getting younger, and I have an anti-aging clinic. I'm losing weight; you guys may have noticed I've lost over ten pounds. We're moving in the right direction there. I have a burst tendon in my foot, the peroneus brevis, and I'm trying to heal it with PRP and stem cells. We'll see if that happens. I want to get surgery on it. It's okay, and once I have time to take a break, then I'll feel a heck of a lot better.
Nothing is free in life at all. Everything you do, you get something; you give something up. When you're young, you don't think that way—that there's a trade-off in everything. You think it's all net gain; you have unlimited time, and you regenerate any wound. You meet so many people that you think relationships are fungible. But as you get older, you realize they're not, and that wounds don't heal as fast as they're supposed to. You don't have unlimited time, especially as you watch people you knew die. It's important to start taking some time back and invest that time in yourself and your relationships. Just try to get to a point where you're comfortable with the flow as opposed to overwhelmed.
What actually is Quantum Hoski? Can you tell us? I've already said it's a hyperdimensional game using hypervoxels. It's a simcraft game embedded in a hyperdimensional world with AI agents, enhanced and augmented by brain-computer interfaces with Dish Brain computing and quantum beacons. Right now, we're doing an enormous amount of beta testing of different ideas, and we're in the ideation phase, which will result in the art of the possible. That will yield a game design document, and then we'll get much tighter. We have several professional game developers we're working with, but we're also working with physicists, mathematicians, experimental game designers, and other people because the concepts we have have never been tried before.
It's not possible to live within a four-dimensional spatial reality, you know, so X, Y, Z, and W. You can project it. When you play a 3D video game, are you actually playing in an ambient three-dimensional space? No, it's on a two-dimensional surface, a monitor. It's a flat surface, but you're projecting a 3D space. You can project in a 3D world, a 4D space, and get a pretty good sense to navigate it, but you can't physically conceptualize or see that four-dimensional space. There's a lot to play around with and figure out what the user experience needs to look like. We've been looking at things like 4D minor and 4D golf as a base, but that alone is not a sufficient user experience or user interface to actually build a fun, playable, interesting game.
The sim crafting components have a lot I want to do, and the art of the possible there is getting much more realistic and reasonable. The good news is Trim is a super smart guy, and he has Michael Yagi from Icky Guy. We've talked to Seba and all these others throughout the months, and we've gotten a pretty good conception of what we need to do to get to a good game design document. Then we can resource it and actually start building the major components of it. I'll have a lot more for you guys at that point.
Dish Brain computing is really interesting. Is the Dish Brain just clickbait, or does it provide any benefits over normal computing? Human neurons are tremendously powerful at vision and pattern recognition. If you look at the work at Cortical Labs, they've constructed infrastructure to interface with human neurons at the organoid level better than pretty much anybody has ever done. We don't really know at this point how extensive that interface can be. What we want to do is push the art of the possible. We're going to get two CL1s and culture-expand the neurons at my clinic because we have a biotech center up there in Gillette. Once we have them running, we're going to start programming them. What Cortical's interface does is give you a programming language to talk to the Dish Brain computers. Then we'll connect them into a game world and probably start with Minecraft just to train them and see what happens. The earliest versions of them played things like Pong, but I guess they've gone a lot further than what's been publicly announced. It's going to be fun to see how far we can push it. This organic neuromorphic computing is not a new concept, and there are a lot of companies working on it. Intel did, Valve has a team, so it's a pretty competitive world.
Do you think science will ever figure out a way to reset opioid receptors to help those addicted to opioids not suffer months of pain? We have one doctor we've been talking to who might come on board the clinic. He's an expert in using naturopathic substances to help people who have been addicted to opioids get off of it and, in the process of getting off, actually not feel extreme pain. But it is a very bad problem, and my heart goes out to people, especially those who are fentanyl addicts, because it can take years for them to normalize after breaking the addiction. It's horrible, and unfortunately, not a lot of money is spent on helping those people. It's something we care a lot about, and it's a big problem in Gillette, Wyoming.
Improving Plutus dev experiences or expanding alternative languages? We're doing both, and it's moving along great. Does Laos need more research to clean up the potential disk space centralization forces depending on the throughput? No, not really. All those trade-offs will be known by probably about September, and we'll basically pick something very conservative to get started. It'll likely be at 10 or 100 times from where Cardano currently sits. As long as the community is okay with it, we'll go all in and get it done. A lot of optimization will happen along the way. What's nice is it's a framework, so you can just keep dialing up the input block level, and then you get more throughput. We never really have a TPS problem. We can hyperfocus on certain things like sharded mempool or other such things to smooth it out a little bit. A lot has to be done; a lot of work has to be put into play. The good news is the right people are working on it, and they are like a dog with a bone. They're very aggressive about this.
Are you still a big fan of Haskell? Does it have a future? Oh, yeah, of course. It's a great language. There's a lot to do; it's a great research language. We proved you can actually develop something real with it. We've spent quite a bit of time trying to improve the ecosystem around Haskell, the libraries, and also things like the formal methods stuff. We got Haskell code extraction, for example, and we do GHC core development work. I would highly recommend that you learn Rust, and then learn how dependently typed languages work after Rust. Pick up an introduction to programming language theory or something like that, and learn about either Coq or Agda. Once you learn Agda, if you want to be in the Haskell ecosystem, then Agda and Rust can fit together quite well. In fact, right now, we're working on code extraction from Agda
No, more TPS to attract more builders to fill those blocks. I think that aligns with what people are actually asking for and the problems they have in the ecosystem. But we have to figure this out because I want to stay as an entrepreneur. I love that; it’s what I’m built for. I am not a government bureaucracy.
Is Lars Brun building on Cardano? Yeah, he’s got Genius Yield's CTO there. Don’t you think Cardano’s governance needs an executive layer? Well, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. If it had an executive layer, it would be able to set up an incentive scheme and say, “If we achieve these KPIs, then we get these benefits and rewards for those KPIs.” Then you can align everybody and incentivize them accordingly.
This is one of those things that’s surprising to me. All I want is more stablecoin liquidity. To be honest, we can use the treasury at any time. There’s 1.7 billion ADA in the treasury. We could go convert a hundred million ADA or a dollar's worth of ADA into USDM. Just go do that, and then put some financial infrastructure like Waver Howard or somebody behind that and say, “Go build up the trading and market making and TVL in the Cardano ecosystem and get all the pairs in play.” We could do that and probably get 5 to 10% returns on it and purchase ADA every year with it and donate it back to the treasury.
What was surprising to me is that there were so many people beating up on Intersect and institutions, just going at them hard. I said, “Well, hang on a second. The whole reason Intersect was set up the way it was is that it actually gives you guys the freedom to do exactly those types of things. It can act as an administrator for funds on behalf of the ecosystem as a whole, not just for the disbursement of money, but for creating liquidity in these types of things if so desired.” There’s a lot of generality behind these things. If you say, “Hey, we need stablecoin liquidity,” creating 100 million of USDM and getting that out and building up the DeFi ecosystem with it, that’s definitely a good thing to do. It could also help facilitate bringing in some major VCs into the Cardano ecosystem. The price tag is usually 25 to 45 million a pop. You’re talking about a Panta or an A16Z.
If we wanted to create a fund with them or get them to pay attention to the ecosystem and start deploying capital, it could be done. You can even set up a scheme where, because they’re usually 220 on those splits on the 80, the equity that they aggregate, the returns go to the Cardano treasury. There are a lot of people who feel helpless and say, “Save us, save us, save us.” Well, I don’t have an executive function, and when we do create these treasuries, you guys say you just kind of stall them up. You want to do 39 votes. It’s like, okay, and not a single one of them is really connected to this thing here. You say, “Well, let’s get Circle. That’ll solve the problem.” Okay, but who’s going to mint $100 million worth of Circle? Who’s going to do that? And who’s going to pair that with yield products with Circle? Is that the Cardano Foundation? They could have gotten Circle here in just five minutes. They looked him straight in the face and said, “Yes, we’ll pay the fees, but more importantly, we’ll commit to minting a hundred million worth of it and putting it to work in the ecosystem.” So, they’re going to say, “Done, done deal.” And we’d have it. We’d had it two years ago.
We can’t do that. Even though they have all this money floating around, they say, “Oh, our treasury is not so big. What do we do? What do we do?” I don’t know. Talk about Georgian wine. People forward me those emails, guys. Up to now, I don’t know the difference between Intersect and the Foundation. Well, Intersect is what the Foundation was supposed to be. It’s a members-based organization. Any Cardano holder can join it. Any Cardano holder can serve on the boards. They can vote on the board. The board is becoming completely community-controlled over time. It’s working its way there. The whole point of Intersect is to be basically your sounding board to talk about the product, talk about the technology, talk about governance, and a litany of other things.
If the Foundation was set up properly, it would have already had this function, and Intersect would not exist. But it is a Swiss organization instead with a board that is self-appointed and will appoint its replacements. You cannot vote on them, you cannot replace them, and there’s no way to join the Cardano Foundation. You have no say over the treasury of the Cardano Foundation, and they’re beholden only to themselves.
Charles, is it wrong to hold crypto in the hopes of profit without being a developer? Is it wrong to hold gold in the hopes of profit without being a jeweler? Why did they handle Circle then? I don’t know, man. I do not know. I got nothing, man. I miss the old background with the paintings in the windows while I’m underground. Deep underground.
Hey, Charles, do you think Peanut the Squirrel is glad that his life was sacrificed to help get Trump into office? This is one of those examples where political derangement has gotten to such a level. You can take event XYZ, whatever it is, and then connect it to the current politician in power. Okay. All right. You ready? Ready for it? You ready for it? Charles, do you think that the guy who went and burned all those dandelions down with a flamethrower is glad that he contributed to Trump getting elected?
Now, I will give Dark Side this: the death of Peanut the Squirrel did absolutely harm the integrity of bureaucracy and institutionalists and showcased the madness of government. It probably did have some influence on Trump being elected. But I don’t think anybody involved in the Peanut the Squirrel story was thinking, “Gosh, if we murder this squirrel, we’ll get Donald Trump elected.” Or, you know, the people are like, “Oh, well, now Trump’s going to get elected because our squirrel died.” For those of you who don’t know, Peanut the Squirrel was an Instagram star. It was a squirrel owned by a guy in New York and his girlfriend. For years, the squirrel would be super cute and do all these nifty tricks. Then some soulless bureaucrat reported him, and then the Gestapo broke down the door, kind of like Anne Frank, you know, took the squirrel to a death camp, and then went ahead and murdered the squirrel for its own good. This is how Kafkaesque it was.
They said, “We have to take the squirrel for the animal's welfare, but then we have to murder the squirrel to verify the squirrel does not have rabies, even though the squirrel’s never been outside and has lived in the house with humans for years and is an Instagram star.” It’s just out there. I’ve had a lot of exotic pets in my life, and living in Wyoming, my backyard is basically filled with mountain lions and bears and all kinds of things. My mom and dad had a pronghorn antelope, and it would come to the doors named Mr. Bones. They’d feed it apple chips just like I feed Nike apple chips, and he’d hang around, and they’d pet him and be like, “Oh, who’s Mr. Bones?”
What happens when you empower these bureaucrats is they just don’t think, and they cause enormous amounts of harm and emotional damage to people. Trump runs as a person to go and burn the bureaucracy down. He loves the bureaucracy as long as he’s the one running it and that’s loyal to him. But he’s by no means Javier Milei. Milei is the chosen one. He’s the man who loves just burning the bureaucracy down, as simple as the chainsaw. He’s had a lot of fun cutting in Argentina. I wish we had those types of cuts in the United States.
This big beautiful bill, all they had to do was just say, “You know what? We’re going to commit to cutting the size of the government by 5% every year.” That’s it. Tell every agency they have 180 days to deliver a report on how they’re going to reduce their budget by 5%. We’ll create a specialized group of people to go in and work with you guys to figure out how to do that and maintain and manage your mission. Then have a meta group talk about how we’re going to merge agencies. What you do is create new agencies, move people over to the new agencies, and shut down the old agencies. Whenever you do that, when you move people over, you can lay people off and retire people, and you could probably do a staff reduction of 20-30%.
Why do we have 16 intelligence agencies? Perhaps maybe, just maybe, the National Reconnaissance Office could be merged with the NSA. Perhaps maybe, just maybe, some of our regulatory bodies in the financial regulation industry can be consolidated. Every time we do it, we can get rid of 100,000 people and a massive 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 billion dollar budget. We’ve got to start doing stuff like that. We also need to deliver to the American people: where are we wasting money? Our healthcare costs $13,000 per person in the United States on average. Our nearest neighbors cost $6,500 per person. Why do we pay twice as much and get half the product? Talk about that, and we can come up with some solutions for it. Same for education costs per pupil. It’s more than Singapore, and we get a substantially worse product than it.
We’re not actually going to have a conversation, are we? Not with the current regimes. Elon is beefing with Trump over the big beautiful bill. He’s beefing because, imagine his perspective. He puts a few hundred million dollars in. Trump’s like, “Go run Doge.” He goes in, and he’s high as [__]. He’s just sitting there, and he’s like, “Yeah, man. [__] do it.” He gets all these 25-year-old kids; they’re high as [__] too. They get unrestricted access to all the data in the federal government. They’re just walking in, plugging in the [__], and they’re like, “All right, the DOJ’s got to give us everything, and the DoD’s got to give us everything. The DOE’s got to give us everything.” They’re looking at everything, man. This guy’s watching porn, and this guy’s buying [__] on Amazon while he’s in meetings. Oh my god, we found so much [__].
He’s got it all together. The Republicans are tweeting every day. They’re like, “Yeah, he just found out that [__] Sesame Street goddamn paid $2 million to let the Iraqis play Sesame Street in Baghdad. Oh my god, US aid, it’s a big money laundering scheme.” He’s watching it in real time. He’s like, “We’re going to change all this. We’re going to change it.” Then they put the big beautiful bill together, and he’s like, “All right, we’re excited. That big beautiful bill. All them Doge cuts are coming in. We’re gonna get rid of things. We’re gonna fire people, and oh my god, we’re gonna spend an extra two and a half trillion dollars over the next 10 years.”
Why does Trump want the bill? Because it has $180 billion for border stuff. They’re going to build the wall. It’ll actually be done during this administration if this bill passes: $80 billion to DHS for it and then $80 billion for deportation. That’s his thing. He wants it. He promises people that stuff. Meanwhile, there are all these tax cuts, but no real meaningful cuts that Doge proposed. Meanwhile, Musk’s brand and reputation went, “Oh god, why? Oh no, no, why?” Tesla sales are down 30 to 70% in each European country. Nothing to help Tesla in China, where they’ve lost the market, and in the United States, it’s down between 10 to 30% depending on the state.
You know, we call that “fire your CEO” bad, which the board should do if it’s an actual board, but they won’t do it because they’re not. His brand reputation has gone down, and his popularity has decreased by more than half as a result of his participation in Doge. This is not a partisan thing; these are just the facts. It’s what’s happened to him. Okay? Privately, every single one of his friends has called him and said, “Dude, you got to turn this [__] around because you’re in freefall right now.”
So, he was like, “Well, you know what? I’m serving my nation. I’m a patriot. I am removing all this government waste, corruption, fraud, and abuse.” Then the big beautiful bill comes in, and yeah. So, what does an autistic drug adult narcissist who just got done making himself the most unpopular man in America do when he feels like he’s been had? He gets angry. And what do you do when you’re angry? You go to Twitter, and you tweet and tweet and tweet and lots and lots of tweety stuff, and it escalates and escalates. The Republicans are like, “We like this guy’s money. Come on.” And you’re like, “Stop it. We won’t be friends again.” You know, like, “Here’s a key. Go away.”
And now he’s tweeting some more. Eventually, he did the FCN tweet. It’s like, “Ah, shit.” He deleted it, but it’s hard to take that back. You know, it’s like lines you don’t cross. You’re like, “You’re a poopy face.” Oh, you’re a poopy face. And it escalates and escalates, and then it’s like, “You’re a pedophile.” Whoa. Whoa. Okay, maybe you’re not a pedophile, but you’re still a poopy face. It’s like, “Ah, come on. That’s a hard one, guys.”
So, they’re going to put him in the doghouse, and you know, they’re going to measure dicks for a while and see who’s bigger, and Musk is smaller. Then he’s got to go to rehab. That’s the way to get out of this one. He has to go to rehab and then the apology tour. In Japan, you know, there’s a lot of organized crime historically associated with sumo, and some of these sumo, like a yokozuna or yokozumo or something like that, they’ll sometimes rig a match and lose on purpose. When they get caught, they have to go on the apology tour, so they go around saying, “A thousand sorry, I brought great shame and sadness to all of sumo.”
There’s some term for it; I forget. If Dan Friedman’s in the chat, he’ll let you guys know, but it’s like a thing. You’ve got to go on the apology tour; you’ve got to cry, you’ve got to go talk to Oprah. You know, it used to be Barbara Walters. For those of you who remember, he had to go talk to Babs, and she’d be like, “Why do you think you did that?” Well, Babs, it was a difficult time, but he’s got to do it. He’s got to go do the good dude tour after two, four months of rehab, and then he’s got to, you know, he’s got out of line by a little bit. He’s got to donate some money to some charities and, you know, do some humanitarian work.
You know, he’s got the war orphans or something like that, and he just builds his way back up. There is an art to forgiveness in public relations, and there are public relations frameworks that exist for how you go through a crisis and work your way through. Eventually, you get so [__] rich and powerful that if you want to live in a delusional bubble and basically say [__] them all, I’m never going to apologize, then what ends up happening is you get caricatured as a villain, and you just exist in that villain archetype. Some people look to you as the world’s greatest monster, like people looked at George Soros or the Koch brothers or any of these other villain archetypes that exist. It used to be David Rockefeller before he died.
It is what it is, and he’s got to make some decisions. He’s rich enough that he can live in a bubble, but that’s what Howard Hughes did, and it did not work well for him. He spiraled out of control and ended up with a bunch of crazy Mormons, you know, living in, I think it was Utah, saving his pee and his nail clippings. He had a Rolls-Royce made with a helicopter in it and all this other stuff. He just went insane. Good old Herbert. Good old Howard Hughes.
So, he’s got to decide. What’s wrong with pee and nail clippings, bro? I mean, you do you, man. I’m a libertarian.
Charles, what are your thoughts on government geoengineering? See, guys, this is why I got so upset about forced vaccination. So, you on the left who are just so enamored with it, your nipples got so hard and you’re just like, “Well, what the [__] is wrong? You’re just a bad person. You don’t want to wear a mask.” Whatever. The minute that the government says, “Your life is our concern, and we can make decisions for everybody without their consent,” you have just auto-consented to all of these things. Geoengineering is one of them. They can say, “You know what? We’ve got to prevent global warming. So, you know what we’re going to do? We’re just going to change the weather on the entire planet. We don’t really know if it’s going to have a good outcome or bad outcome, but we’re just going to do it, and we’ll kill 10 million people in the process.”
Do you get a vote or say in it? No, because you’ve already checked the box saying the government can do [__] to my body and my environment without my consent. I’m sorry; there are no ifs, ands, or buts about this
And if it's a good idea, there are 150 people right now who have the same idea, 120 of whom are probably already executing it. It's like a dating app. I got this new idea for a dating app. Guess what? There's another person who has that exact same idea for a dating app. This is why I feel so confident sharing my ideas with people. The thing is, ideas are cheap, and if you actually want to go and do it, it's hard. Like Quantum Husky, I told you the whole thing: hyper voxels and hyperdimensional and brain-computer interface this and brain-computer interface that and so forth. I don't concern myself at all because the vast majority of people listening don't even pay attention. The people who actually do something about it say, "Oh, that idea is crazy; it's too hard to execute." So Charlie's got to prove that out. And that's exactly what we're doing.
And you can picture Trim sitting in his underwear at 3:00 in the morning, a picture of a horse right here on his laptop, coding away and thinking about the fourth dimension. He gets up, looks over at his whiteboard with another picture of a horse—I don't know why they're both there—and starts writing on the whiteboard furiously with an idea. It's so good that he calls up Michael and says, "Michael, I had this incredible idea about the UX for 4D." And Michael's like, "Man, I just need to sleep." Trim insists, "No, no, no. It's so fresh. We need to talk about it. Get on the live stream." So he gets on the live stream. Michael says, "Put on a shirt, man. For the love of God." He puts the shirt on, and there's another horse picture in the background. He still has his sunglasses on because he never takes them off. They're talking about it, and they're like, "That's a good idea. Well, how do we make it work?" They spend another six hours talking about that thing. Now the sun is coming up because it was 3:00 a.m., and now it's 9:00 a.m., and they're still working on it. They're still putting it in. That's execution. That's validation. And guess what? To be an entrepreneur, you have to do that every day. Six months turns into 12 months, turns into 18 months, turns into 24 months. And all along the way, everybody says you're insane. All along the way, everybody says you're stupid. All along the way, everybody tries to stop you and talk you out of it. Then you finally get to the other side, start getting some traction and validation, and then they say you're a genius. Oh my God. But then a year later, imitation comes in. People copy everything, and they say, "Ah, you're a has-been. You don't know what you're doing. You're incompetent. You're a flash in the pan. You're lucky."
I'm a self-made billionaire at the age of 33. Think about that. I have built multiple ecosystems that weren't worth just nine figures. No, no. Ten figures. No, no. Eleven figures. No, no. Twelve figures. A hundred billion dollars twice, and yet people still say I don't know what I'm doing. I'm incompetent. I can't do anything. "Ah, he's a has-been. He got lucky." All this stuff. And that's the other side of it. Even after all the execution, 15 years in the industry, 10 years at the helm as a CEO of a real company, kicking ass, chewing bubble gum, we're there. So yes, you have an idea, and you just asked me to do the hard part—99.9999999997% of the actual work of the validation and the execution of it. This is the entrepreneur equivalent of saying, "I want to have sex. Can I talk to your wife so she can sleep with me?" That's what you just basically said, man. It's what you just said. You can't get there. You have to know thyself and know when and how to put in the work. You have to make a decision: Are you prepared to go through hell to get something done? Are you prepared to be like I was, or Trim is right now, or any of these other people that actually want to execute and get things done? If you are, then you have to go do it.
And guess what? You got ChatGPT. I didn't have that. You have it. It's a lot better these days. You have incubator accelerator programs. I could have used them if I was willing to move, but there are a lot more of them today in 2025 than there were a while back. You have crypto being a legitimate thing. I didn't have crypto being a legitimate thing. Everybody I told about crypto was like, "That sounds like a way to go to prison." I mean, it was not a legit thing back when I started. Everybody assumed it was Silk Road and money laundering and drugs and things like that. So we didn't have any of that back in the day. You have all these collaboration models now. You have these DAOs and things, and fundraising has never been easier for people to aggregate and raise money if they choose to do so. But you have to ask yourself, do you have the lifestyle for it? If you had to spend the next six years, seven years, eight years building something, are you prepared to miss birthdays and funerals, get divorced over it? Are you prepared to be a troglodyte living in the basement and become so pallid white it looks like you're inside, you know, an H.G. Wells novel? Are you prepared for that? Are you prepared to have no social life whatsoever? Were you prepared to gain 50 lbs of weight as you subsist on ramen and Cheetos? Are you prepared to travel, sleep in hotels, and hear the hookers going because you bought the cheapest hotel, getting bed bugs again and again, and can't get them out of your luggage? Are you prepared for that lifestyle? Do you really want to go do that? That's what execution means in a nutshell.
I tell every entrepreneur this, and I'm sorry for the tough love, but you know what? It is the hardest job in the world. And it's the most thankless job in the world because even after you succeed, everybody then builds a career out of saying how stupid and crazy you are and how you're no longer the guy. Even after you've done all the work and you have all the money, they say you didn't earn it. You don't deserve it. Or that you should be taxed out of existence. Even though you did all this stuff and created all these things, they should take all your money now. Wealth tax, 100% capital gains tax after a certain point. Blah blah blah. Yeah, there you go. And then when you start spending it, they say, "See, he's flaunting his wealth. Oh my lord, he's arrogant, narcissistic, egotistical, a man-child. Flaunting his wealth. How dare he?" So then you have to play this whole game. A lot of rich people do this; they hide and say, "No, I'm not spending my money. Oh no, I'm not spending my money. Look at all the orphans I've saved today." That Lamborghini? It doesn't belong to me.
Oh no, it's a sore spot for me because that question comes up a lot. I'm a venture capitalist as well as a mentor. I sit on a lot of boards. I deal with a lot of young entrepreneurs. I give them the toughest possible love and tell them what the route is like. If after this whole rant you still want to do it, then go do it. And after you've done it, come back to me. We'll talk about your Lambo. As if I only had one. You may not be respected as a business leader, but I am. I'm invited on boards. People contact me all the time. Your mimicry of accents is pretty good. Maybe you can do a French accent, huh? "Salut, yes, it's nice to be French." You see, it's so simple. You just sit and say, "Life is [__] and everything is shitty." For sure, Charles, I have a super-duper idea. You [__] son of a [Music] [__].
Where's the money, Lebowski? What's your current relationship with Gavin Wood? If I ran into him at a conference or saw him on the street, I'd look at him and say, "Hey, man." And he'd say, "Hey." We'd have this awkward nod and then just walk on. It's not bad. Gavin's a smart guy. I've always had respect for his tactical acumen. Is there bad blood with Vitalik? It's one directional. I don't mind him; he seems to think I'm the worst human being alive. Is Macron's wife a dude? Probably not. Although, who the [__] knows anymore? 2025 is a weird time. Do you like cowboy hats? I do have some cowboy hats.
Charles, do you remember Yobbit? Yo, yep. If you were a Somalian pirate taking over a ship, what would you say? "Look at me, man. Look at me. I am the captain now." What's your favorite video game of all time? I'd have to say it's the Baldur's Gate series. Charles, how long is the beard getting this time? I mean, it's going full ZZ Top. We've crossed the Rubicon. You're goddamn right. That's Heisenberg. Good movie. Terrible accent. Hanks used. Who's behind the JFK assassination in your opinion? That's one of those things where I think a lot of people wanted to kill the dude, and they actually had to get together in a cabal meeting and have a discussion about it.
Alright, so this guy, during his presidency, even before his presidency, LBJ worked with the mafia, and they stuffed some ballot boxes over in Chicago. They got these wonderful connections with Kennedy's dad because he was a bootlegger back in the day. They made their money from selling alcohol. So they did some shenanigans there and kind of pushed Chicago in a certain direction. Nixon lost the election on a razor-thin margin, so the mob was always like, "Alright, well Kennedy's gonna be nice to us." Then he puts his brother, RFK, in, and his brother was a dick to the mob. He was just arresting them and doing all this stuff, and the mob's like, "What the hell, man? What's going on?" So Kennedy was a baller.
So they go to Kennedy and they're like, "We made you." Then what he did, the mob boss told him that he went and slept with the mob boss's wife because he's Kennedy; he could get away with that. He just does that kind of [__]. So obviously, the mob wanted to get rid of him. Then you got the Bay of Pigs incident in '62, and it was just a horrible black eye for the CIA, plus the Cuban missile crisis, and all these hardline people in the Pentagon and the intelligence community were like, "We got to get rid of this guy. We hate this guy."
Then Kennedy, in response, talked to Truman and all these other guys and said, "Hey, we should get rid of the CIA." Trump was like, "Yeah, if I knew what I know today about the CIA, I would have never signed the bill to authorize them. We got to get rid of them." So he's trying to get rid of the CIA. Back then, they were in maximum kill, murder, manipulate mode. This is the MK Ultra, Operation Northwoods, Mockingbird era of the CIA, where you know, kill first, ask questions later. So, the CIA is trying to kill him, right? Then LBJ, he and Kennedy are just fighting and fighting. They don't like each other at all. He's like, "I don't know about this Kennedy guy; maybe the nation would be better without him."
Then Kennedy is getting into a fight with Israel, saying, "You will not get nukes under any circumstances. No nukes." And Israel's like, "Well, now we want nukes. [__] you, man." They start talking to the French about it, so they want to get rid of him. Okay, you got all this stuff. There are probably 400 other people that want to kill Kennedy. Then Kennedy was thinking about talking to the Soviets about a merged space program and actually going to the moon together with the Soviets, suing for peace. This is like the day before Kissinger, at the height of the Cold War. He couldn't do that, so it's freaking the [__] out of everybody.
So some cabal of people came together, almost like a heist movie, and they got rid of him. They thought they had it all buttoned up and structured right, didn't know about the Zapruder film. They kind of misinterpreted that, and there were some leaks here and there, but they did a pretty good job of putting all the pieces together and getting it done. And that's just how the '60s were. They killed RFK Jr.—excuse me, RFK—and they also killed Martin Luther King Jr. and others. A lot of political assassinations. Bad time to be a change agent.
When audit results trying to say those naysayer reactions, are we still talking about that? It's underway. Expensive as hell, by the way. Will we get an apology? No. Would anybody step forward and say, "Gosh, we got it wrong. We're sorry?" No. But you know what I will commit to do as soon as that audit comes out? I'm going to do a live stream and read the whole thing. I don't give a [__] if it takes eight hours. I'm going to do it. I'll be up all night eating my [__] Wheaties.
What do you think about Andrew Tate? You know what Andrew Tate screams? "I got a one-inch penis energy." That's what Andrew Tate screams. It's like the poster child. You know, you have penis length, and you go through on the ruler. There's like an image for each person, and the one-inch is Andrew Tate right there. He faked his death and came back as Jimmy Carter.
The JFK-Jimmy Carter conspiracy. Now you listen here. Oh man. Do you believe the Bob Lazar story about the whole UFO thing in Area 51? It's hard. I mean, I do believe that there's probably extraterrestrial technology in the possession of the U.S. government, but it's hard to say. Bob Lazar, he's very convincing, but there's just not any evidence for that.
Can you do a Trump accent? Nobody does accents better than me. Nobody. Some, I assume, do, but let's be real. A very strong accent. I miss Art Bell. Yeah, I miss Art Bell too, and George Noory. So over here, we're going to do a pretty little crypto. Running beneath your screen are all the different colors we're going to use. We have phallic violet, and of course, we have Anatoli apple red. It's one of my favorite colors. Now many people say that you need a big premine, but remember there's no big premines. There's only happy liquidations.
That wasn't gay Trump; that's just happy Trump. Remember, all Trumps can be happy. And when you paint them next to some mountains, you just got to remember to beat the devil out of it. Charles, you're in the wrong profession. Jesus Christ, man. I regret not taking drawing classes when I was in college.
What's up with night? Well, if you showed up earlier, you know, like you spent two hours of your time on a Sunday listening to me, you could have come at any time and known the night is on schedule for some arbitrary point in the future. Sir, has your home gym turned into a clothes hanger? Mine has. It's like the James Genini thing in Family Guy.
I read that the Lace wallet will work with something called an NES emulator. It will. You can actually write games using NES Fab. How does this relate to crypto? So, do you know some details about it? We are working on it right now. We're getting it into the Lace wallet. It's going to be a launcher for NES games. We even have an NES game we created through a company my brother and I run called Husk Brew that will be launched with it. Then we're going to talk to the stuff guys about creating a marketplace for homebrew NES games.
When radical life extension? We're conservatives here; we don't do radical life extension. We're going to do conservative life extension. You know, three to five years at most. You'll get like four Tates. I have a Vuvian man sculpture too. Does yours have his tape showing? Yes, it's a 02 Tate. Small statue.
Have you played Claire Obscure Expedition 33 yet? No, I have not. I hear it's great. That gal who does the voice for Shadow Hearts is in it. So, you know, I have to play it because I romanced Shadow Heart like 14 times.
Baldur's Gate. Charles, is Orbor's Genesis fully implemented? It is, and it's working its way into the protocol. By the end of the year, it'll be fully turned on. It's been merged in, but there are a series of things that have to happen for it to be fully tuned on, but it's code complete. Took damn long enough. Tweak did a great job with it.
What does Lace stand for? It stands for Lace. Like, tie people up with it. Come on. You guys are all Shibari people. We know. We see your Facebook ads. Come on. It's why you got into crypto; you want an anonymous way to buy Shibari dolls.
Will you go to Mars if SpaceX makes it possible? No. When Ness, what are you going to finish the Nessies? What are you doing? You've been talking about the Nessies forever, sir. I mean, you just can't roll it out there. You just got the plesiosaur and all the whiskey and everything and all the people in Wheeling. You got to think about those people. What the hell? They just wanted a wee bit of rough and tumble on a Sunday.
What's your favorite scary movie? It was called The Securities Exchange Commission. It's very unrealistic, just a clownish monster. It was called Gary Gensler, and he was very scary. You'd call him Scary Gary. He'd haunt you every night, just show up and be like, "Spena, bitch." He'd be like, "Ah, no, no, Scary Gary. It's investor protection time."
We're actually putting Scary Gary in Quantum Husky. Every person that ever [__] with me or the cryptocurrency industry is going to be a [__] character in that game. We're gonna have fun
I don't know how they would do that in a Baldur's Gate 3 context, but it would just be out there, capturing those characters, and the Nameless One. It was one of the best-written games probably of all time. They put so much thought into it; it was a very considerate game that didn’t annihilate your expectations. Rather, it took them, amplified them, and took them in directions you couldn’t possibly imagine. This is just magical. It was an example of what happened with those '90s games. There was a golden era because they didn’t have the technology to do AAA. So, what they did was go real hardcore on the plot and went deeper and deeper.
Actually, I’ve been doing this myself. I wrote 150 pages of stuff for Legends of Valor, a video game that I bought back in the day, and I’ve been working on it for quite some time. I had to break down all the guild structures. There are over a hundred different events and guilds in the Legends of Valor world of Middle Dwarf. Unfortunately, it’s very surface level. The whole thing is very surface level. You have to go deep, but the minute you go deep, all the things connect. It’s becoming quite overwhelming to actually figure out how all the game elements connect to each other. It’s kind of like George R.R. Martin in his books; it’s too voluminous.
I’m using some techniques to pare it down and get it to a more manageable kernel of a narrative for the remaster of the game. We’re making good progress on the plot. Every day, I do a little bit of work on it when I have some time. At some point, we’re going to sit down and really see how we get it into the browser. I can’t imagine doing something of the scale and complexity of Planescape in a AAA engine context because Legends of Valor has a super simple plot. It’s just like your cousin Sven says, "Hey, come to this town. It’s an awesome town. You’ll get a lot of economic opportunity." You show up, and then you’re like, "Oh my god, the town sucks." Your cousin leaves you some notes around saying, "Well, join the guilds. That’ll solve all your problems." You join the guilds, and then it kind of steers you into summoning a demon who helps you find the old king. The game ends without even having a proper conclusion because they ran out of money. There are like nine guilds, and there’s not a lot of complexity there.
To add some complexity already grows exponentially. In Planescape: Torment, you literally wake up in a morgue as a blue dude who has died countless times. You don’t know what your name is, and every time you die, you lose your memories. You try to find out what the hell is going on, and everybody in town seems to know you. You’re in this metaplanar world called Planescape, where Sigil is this place in between the planes. It’s like the city of doors. It’s magical from a world-building exercise, but it’s also magical from a narrative exercise. One of the most precious things you can do is figure out what your name is inside the game, and it’s super hard to do. The writers there are top-notch; they’re masters of their craft. I could never match them.
Can you say propane and propane accessories? That boy ain’t right. Damn it, Bobby. Although, I really like it when he’s like, "Can you fly, Bobby?" Come on, guys. What movie was that? You guys know the movie. Can you fly, Bobby? No, it was not The Waterboy. You fail, sir. Good day, sir.
What’s the best Pink Floyd album? There’s only one answer, and it better not be Dark Side of the Moon. Can we call it a White Hawk? No, that would be smaller. Animals? No, it was Wish You Were Here. Come on, because they got rid of Syd Barrett because he had schizophrenia. Just feel the pain.
You’re definitely a Jimmy Buffett fan. Oh god, no. You watch professional boxing. Your favorite boxer of all time? Well, come on. It’s Mike Tyson. Iron Mike Tyson. He’s my boy. Although I love Manny Pacquiao as well. Little Manny. If they had a Pope Apino, Manny would be with the Pope Apino. Can you imagine that? He’d just be like the head of the Swiss Guard or something.
Charles, did you ever play Diablo II: Lords of Destruction? I shall take your proposal into consideration. Well, it appears that your terms are unacceptable. If you had to be locked in a room, would you choose Jack Dorsey or Michael Saylor? I mean, is this one of those Thunderdome things where two people enter and one person leaves? If it’s chill and hang out, it’s Jack Dorsey.
We’ve developed a whole internally consistent vocabulary in this AMA. Favorite chess player? Well, that’s Nimzowitsch. Ziggy Stardust. Spiders from Mars. Oh, hell yeah, man. That’s a blast from the past. There’s a star man. Oh man, he died too young. Had I been born earlier or if he had just lived a little longer, we would have become great friends.
That pope was a handsome fella. You see, you’re all looking at the pope now. Pope Paul V. That looks like a Captain America shield behind you. Yep. You see, the Marvels are not doing so well for Disney, so I got it wholesale. I mean, Leo the 14th has got to be 11 Tates. Come on. Powerful guy.
That’s a nice mic. Which brand? It is a Yeti. It’s a Yeti X, I think.
Thoughts on Palantir? Okay, I gotta say this is so crazy. Everybody on the right will probably end with this one because it’s just so crazy. So, let me bring up one of the stories here. I’m a libertarian, and when I read this, it just made me sick to my stomach.
The media has completely blacked this out. This is from the New York Times. Let me see if I can get this. Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay, I got to log in. Do that little login thing. Thank you, New York. No. Continue without subscribing. Okay. Stop it. No. No. No. We’re not doing that. You’re really going to do this to me right now?
So, what Palantir is doing is they’re doing the creepiest thing. We had that thing called the Patriot Act. You all remember that? It was terrible for civil liberty because what they were doing is embracing a doctrine called TIA, total information awareness. This is not a new concept. Back in 2002, there was a DARPA program called IAO, the Information Awareness Office. In fact, it was super creepy.
Let’s go on a journey together because I know a lot about this stuff. It’s one of my areas of expertise. First off, let’s bring in IAO DARPA. Anything that’s super creepy has to have a good super creepy New World Order logo. Here’s the IAO, the Information Awareness Office. You’ve got a little pyramid with an eye on it, and it’s from DARPA. They say knowledge is power.
The basic concept is the IAO was established by the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in January of 2002 to bring together several DARPA programs focused on applying surveillance and information technologies to track and monitor terrorists and other asymmetric threats to US national security by achieving what was known as total information awareness.
What the hell is that? Well, let’s look it up. Total information awareness means you have all these signals and authentication touchpoints like face and fingerprints and your gait and your iris. What you want to do is put it all together into one big mesh. The goal of IAO was to put enormous computer databases to gather and store the personal information of everyone in the United States, including personal emails, social networks, credit card records, phone calls, medical records, and numerous other sources without any requirement for a search warrant.
The information was then analyzed for suspicious activity. They had this scheme called looted link ubiquitous timeline evaluated doses. They used a lot of sophisticated graph theory, which was also connected to another program called Project Protocol. Connections between individuals and threats were also included. The program included funding for biometric surveillance technologies that could identify and track individuals using surveillance cameras and other methods.
Following public criticism, the IAO was defunded by Congress in 2003. However, several IAO projects continue to be funded under different names, as revealed by Edward Snowden during his 2013 disclosures. Guess what? Trump brought it back with his big buddy Karp here, Palantir. The Trump administration is expanding Palantir’s work with the government, spreading the company’s technology, which could easily merge data on Americans throughout agencies.
In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power. The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Trump took office, not including the $795 million contract.
If you look at what these guys are talking about, they’re trying to do this under the hood. They’re going for TIA. The government has been trying to do it for over 20 years. Every time they’ve tried, they’ve been stopped. Somebody stepped up and said, "This is a super bad idea."
Palantir looked through everything and started trying to figure out how to map all the government IT systems. They got a pretty good sense of how to build interfaces to aggregate all these things together. Palantir is one of the few companies in the world that could probably pull off TIA if they so chose to do so, and they absolutely want to do it. Trump wants it to happen, and the people around Trump want it to happen, especially Stephen Miller. They’re pushing for it.
As a civil libertarian, I think this is one of the worst things ever proposed, and I will fight it every single day because it’s wrong. It’s always been wrong and always will be wrong. It’s a violation of multiple constitutional amendments, including the Fifth Amendment, and its use will certainly infringe upon our First Amendment rights and be used against pretty much all of our amendment rights at this point.
It’s got to stop. Do look into Palantir, TIA, and IAO, and spend some time looking into the IAO effort that was there. It was the first attempt during the era of the Patriot Act and the jingoism of 9/11, where they thought they could get away with everything. Even back then, they had some reluctance because it’s very dangerous to aggregate these things together.
Unfortunately, when everyone’s paying attention to Elon Musk having a bromance breakup with Trump, and everybody’s paying attention to tariffs and the latest scandal of the week, they’re ignoring the things that really matter, like Palantir building a giant panopticonic database on every American, which is AI-enhanced and far worse than anything China has done with social credit.
They’ve wanted TIA for a long time, and if we give it to them, democracy dies. America’s over. Freedom only lasts as long as we’re prepared to fight. You can never trust people to be virtuous, nice, and honest. Systems have to have that property. Remember, always move from "don’t be evil" to "can’t be evil." Systems have to have resilience and anti-fragility at their core, and they have to preserve and protect constitutional rights always.
And that, my friends, is the rest of the story. Until next time, thank you so much for spending 2 hours and 44 minutes with me. 13,000 people watched this live. How about that? It was great. I really enjoyed it, and there’s always so much more to say. I’m going to have a lot of fun this month. I’m going on a major podcast. As I said, a lot of cool things are coming out. Clinic grand opening July 4th, so if you’re up in Gillette, please do join us. Until then, I’ll see you next time.
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