hi everybody this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado today is february 5th 2022 i am back home home is where the heart is god it's good to be home uh unfortunately i was forced to quarantine for a bit so i had to go off site uh but i finally got to be back home don't expose anybody to the to the rona i feel a lot better feeling good you know i had the omicron that's uh something everybody in the entire world is going to catch at some point it's really hard not to catch something with an o of with a r naught of seven uh it spreads like wildfire anyway so i uh decided to do a video uh title did a bit of everything because there's a few different things to talk about and i don't know how long i'll be ranting but uh it's good to uh good to talk about some things so as promised uh there was uh an event that happened in the cardano ecosystem that for some reason people keep trying to drag me into and i said i'm i have nothing to do with it so these guys are just going to have to figure this out for themselves and that was the sunday swap carts starter issue well looks like cardstarter filed a lawsuit and it's 38 pages and they have law firm and all these people and now that it's ongoing litigation there's really no point commenting about it litigation is the failure of negotiation usually go mediation try to talk out your differences see if you can come to a win-win that doesn't work you try perhaps some other form of dispute resolution when you actually go to the lawsuit phase it's a complete breakdown of the relationship to a point where you're handing over your entire fate to a judge or jury or both hoping that you can get better outcome than you could with the other party and i guess they're asking now for even more than what they were promised 250 million or something like that so uh you know the filing stands for itself and you know the alleging fraud a promissory stop situation and uh that there's some sort of implied deal so lawsuits or lawsuits uh there's a discovery process stuff can be subpoenaed there are all kinds of things that can be dragged into the process and so now that's gonna go on for a while probably be horrendously expensive there'll probably be a counter suit and all kinds of things and these things could take months to years to fully litigate it's quite unfortunate that that's where card's at and sunday's at in the relationship that apparently spending months to years to solve a problem is a better idea than trying mediation uh or uh something else but you know that's uh the prerogative of the principles there and where that relationship is at uh and it's a reminder for young entrepreneurs in general you know taking a step back and abstraction about the nature of commercial arrangements and expectation management when people are very young uh they negotiate in a very organic way uh they tend to you know just say hey how about this or how about this and you know they do it over slack or telegram or reddit or twitter i remember when i got started in this industry i negotiated a lot of stuff over bitcoin talk and private messages back and forth you know that's actually how invictus innovations got started my first company in this industry i i had a thread called project invictus and the very first person to reply to it was dan larimer under the handle bitemaster but i was trying to dream up what could make bitcoin invincible or crypto invincible so anyway uh you know uh you tend not to be so careful uh you know because you don't have any experience you don't really understand the value of legal agreements or you know the value of expectation management and the value of how negotiations are supposed to be done so there's a teachable moment for the entire cardano ecosystem for all these 230 plus dapps that are now building to take a step back and make sure that they have proper legal hygiene do you have god's eye view on all of the commercial arrangements and understandings and deals and negotiations that are signed sealed and in flight and do you have the right legal operating system to be able to handle all those for your ventures do you have founders agreements do you have the proper non-disclosure agreements does everybody understand their commercial realities have they written to confirm that have you gotten confirmation that your understanding of the deal is their understanding of the deal and that's the only part of the deal that's why an entire clause exists and also the communities that you're all building do those communities fully appreciate and understand the nature realities of the deal and the representations that have been if made can't answer that with absolute 100 yes we believe so you got work to do now no one's perfect especially young ventures but uh this is a space where unfortunately young ventures are given millions to tens of millions of dollars some cases hundreds of millions of dollars uh without a lot of adults in the room or venture capital oversight and the old people who start getting gray in their beard and i used to be one of the young people but i'm starting to feel like one of the old people we tend to remind people the value to these things and sometimes they take it and sometimes they don't uh so there's certainly a teachable moment for everybody who's building something on cardano anything that has value anything that could have value in the future could potentially be a spot for litigation or discussion never forget that and everybody you think is your friend is on the same terms as you uh they can turn very quickly when real money is at stake i recall when we started ethereum back in january 2014 uh all the ethereum founders got together in miami and we all thought we were the best of friends uh six months later we weren't because it went from hey we're all doing a cool open source project let's uh let's go chill in miami to there are you know millions of dollars at stake huge wealth transfer titles to give out kind of things like that so oral agreements and understandings of these things and they all evaporated and they went in different directions and there's plenty of books written about that history and it was pretty messy and there probably should have been litigation but you know it's water under the bridge we all did pretty well but it could have just as well gone the other direction especially if ethereum didn't deliver people forget that there was a time when ethereum only had half a million dollars left of the bank and they were precariously close to not being able to deliver the product up to the expectations of other people remember that so anyway that's that no more to comment on my side because litigation is ongoing and we're not a party to it we have no involvement in it but it's senseless to opine and comment and think about these things because uh you know stuff will come out you know and i'm as much of a spectator as you guys are and we'll see what the truth of the matter is through the discovery process and through the litigation process uh lots of things will be brought to uh to the court and we'll see what these guys do all right so that tables that don't add me to tweets anymore don't ask me to comment on any more you know at this point as much as i do there's nothing more to say let's talk about joe joe rogan now many of you know that uh i'm a big fan of the joe rogan podcast uh because of what it is uh you know there are so few media that we have that somebody makes it a point to bring somebody on and just let them discuss whatever the hell they happen to be an expert in you can be a ufo guy you could be a world famous scientist you could be a domain expert in some really cool new thing uh like anti-age or you could be a deeply controversial person like an alex jones type person or alex jones himself what was really amazing about the rogan podcast is that rogan made a policy just to let him talk and share who they are with the world now there was no great patronage here where some media empire rupert murdoch or something like that showed up and said we're going to make this guy a star it was just people talking in an age where institutions lack legitimacy and people are in desperate need for truth and for candor this was a refreshing format that led to the rise of the lex friedman podcast it led to the rise of the intellectual dark web all of these things joe made a decision to get in front of this bullet train of coven that's been going on the age of covet is not an age of truth we all know that it's not an age of uh of science it's not an age of reason it's an age where you're told to accept things that are just not materially true and we all know it but we're not really allowed to have a conversation about it because it can promote vaccine hesitancy or whatever the hell people want to throw at you the reality is that private companies are making tens of billions of dollars off of the misery and suffering of the lockdowns that are occurring johns hopkins recently released a report saying that the reduction in mortality from all this lockdown culture is about 0.2 percent we're not allowed to really think about that or talk about that a public health campaign to reduce obesity probably would be more effective than what the lockdowns have done for the reduction of mortality and we've witnessed over the last 24 months the largest wealth transfer in the history of the world between the poor to the rich that's a fact mandates especially for vaccines mean that private companies who have no risk and didn't have to pay to build the products that they build are guaranteed to make tens of billions of dollars and if we don't take them uh then we're now social pariahs so we're not allowed apparently to have a dialogue about that and if anybody tries to have a dialogue about that they're punished the statements that rogan made didn't make them yesterday they occurred over a two decade period 100 million people in the audience no one seemed to have any issue no one did any collages or things until after started commenting on things that make very powerful people tens of billions of dollars and now there's a big surge of censorship and de-platforming so people come to our industry the cryptocurrency space because there's a very real possibility that joe could be cancelled there's a very real possibility that somebody with 11 million followers who listen to them on a regular basis could suddenly wake up without a job and they say well you guys are the censorship resistant industry uh you guys are the ones who somehow find a way to get people back into the milieu of society the reality is crypto is not ready for social media there are many challenges and next week i'll probably do some whiteboard videos and take you guys through some of the things that have to be solved if crypto actually has something to say to replace twitter or facebook or be a platform for free expression and free speech and free thought uh and uh it's a not really where we're at as an industry yet there's a lot of work that needs to be done so unfortunately there's no panic here there's no silver bullet we have to offer a guy like joe when they continue to attack him and eventually get rid of him because it'll come at some point somehow scandal after scandal or the slow heat death of losing his audience because of all the controls that have to be put on now it makes me sad when you lose the ability to express yourself and think and have controversial ideas ideas can't hurt you ideas hurt the people in power ideas hurt institutions ideas hurt other ideas but ideas don't hurt you you are a free thinking person the person listening you have every ability to look at each scenario and situation in its own right and use your judgment and rationality to decide what that situation and scenario means to you and we have as a society to take a step back and realize that people are just making decisions for us arbitrarily about what we must put in our bodies what we must put in our children's bodies making decisions about the money that you work so hard for our national debt in the united states crossed over 30 trillion dollars back when i started going to college it was a little over four wasn't too long ago i'm not that old now we're 30. and we're told there's no inflation it's transitory i'll guess it's here but don't worry about it they tell you things like you'll owe nothing and be happy more people than ever before are renting because they can't afford to buy a house more people than ever before even if the husband and wife husband and husband wife and wife whatever pairing you want to put together both have jobs two jobs three jobs working full-time overtime gig economy still can't pay the bills but my grandfather got out of the korean war on my mom's side single uh working household married his sweetheart had seven kids she didn't work and he was still able to retire a millionaire off of a blue collar salary because he invested wisely that was the economy he lived in we don't live in that economy anymore now it doesn't affect me i'm part of a special class of people i'm very fortunate to have stumbled into it one born into it but now that i'm there if i just shut up and do nothing i the rest of my life can make double-digit returns uh and basically live a life of plenty i don't have a lot of economic problems anymore the way that the economy is set up people like me we don't have issues and that's at your expense because all those investments i'm allowed to invest in those giant real estate funds that are buying up all the apartment buildings and buying up all the houses and other things that they rent to you they benefit me they don't benefit you guys there is nothing more immoral and disgusting than the progression of this economy and the way the wealth transfer has happened over the last 24 months the only way we get out of this is to discuss it but now our ability to think and discuss to be rational human beings express ideas is being taken from us systematically piece by piece think about it the point of the cryptocurrency space the core of it the core of it are three things one is this idea of decentralization do you really know what that means we don't have it moxie's article is a great one the one i read off my last video to you guys because moxie's article at its core was saying you're sold a false bill of goods because some people want money but the heart of the industry decentralization has yet to be fully achieved a lot of people are working towards it and we're working for it and there's a lot of great ideas about it we're starting to figure out how to measure it but at the end of the day it's it's an elusive thing there's a lot more to do to get to true decentralization second is this concept of inclusive accountability something so simple and you know you live in a controlled society when people take it from you inclusive accountability is just your ability to verify things yourself that people tell you so in bitcoin cardano ethereum any real cryptocurrency if i send you a transaction i send you some ada you boot up your daedalus you have everything you need to check and verify that ada exists and it hasn't been double spent that can also be used for voting systems so when you vote wouldn't it be nice to be able to check and make sure your vote was actually recorded and recorded the way that you voted instead of instead of just taking somebody's word for it any society that tries to take your ability to inclusively verify something a fact an event a biological reality whatever it is to take your ability and say you don't have the right or means to check trust us there's something fundamentally wrong i posted a video from the state department where they made some allegations against russia and a journalist very rightfully stepped up and said well where's the evidence and he said well i just told you i said well no that's an allegation but where's the evidence behind it and they played a game of semantics for five minutes it's an incredible back and forth there's no inclusive accountability and an assertion and the third thing is governance your ability to decide your ability to navigate a complex issue and vote make a decision to work with others and converge to a consensus about where do we go from here this is the core of our industry decentralization inclusive accountability and decentralized governments governance and all of those things should be present in every institution we re build we talk a lot about systematic problems in institutions okay yeah there's certainly many but it's not a solution to rebuild them by building even more centralized institutions and just changing the leaders and hoping the new sets of people are going to be more virtuous than the rats rest no one is more virtuous i'm sorry if you have a virtue based government where you hope the people in charge are honest you're already because humans are pretty bad people especially when they have absolute power and limited accountability they become really bad really quickly that's why we're in the situation we're in you have to rebuild the institutions based upon foundations that are resilient and decentralized they have enduring principles you can check and verify the things that they tell you and know with certainty that they're not lying to you and that you have a guaranteed voice and vote and the protocol will run as intended now what should we build the only way we can get there is by having debates the free flow of ideas experimentation and by the way when you have the free flow of ideas and debates and experimentation you get things wrong if your standard is anytime someone says something wrong or gets something wrong that person must be destroyed canceled removed from society the only experimentation you get is safe experimentation you don't get to go to the moon you get to go climb a hill and look at the moon that's the difference if you want to go to the moon you got to break some eggs and you're going to make some mistakes and you're going to admit some people who are a little crazy a little out there that's okay because at the end of the day what are the consequences of those mistakes if they're ideas and thoughts they don't hurt you if they're words they don't hurt you it's actions it's execution it's institutionalization that's what hurts you because those are the people that get the guns those are the people that can put you in handcuffs those are the people who get to decide what's in your wallet those are the people get to decide whether you get to participate or not those are the people who get to decide your value as a human being that's the difference and i get real tired of living in a society where i'm told to live and accept contradictions and lies and told to live and accept that this is as good as it gets and it's only going to get worse from here i've been to over 70 countries i've shook hands with dictators i've shook hands with democratically elected presidents religious leaders other billionaires very powerful people i've also seen the poorest people the weakest people i've seen people who have nothing who literally live in mud huts i've seen the entire gamut and spectrum the one common thread amongst all of them is they're human beings and they have equal dignity and equal value that's the common thread amongst all of them and they deserve to all live in a world where they don't get lied to they deserve to all live in a world that gets better over time not worse and they deserve to all live in a world where their dignity as people as humans is respected i don't think that's asking too much because we want that for ourselves and if we demand it for us we must be prepared to give it to them and if our systems don't do that we all must work together to change our systems to something else it's just that simple and that's my life's mission in a nutshell that's why we build the products we build that's why we think the way we think that's why we do peer-reviewed research because it's inclusive it's slow and methodical but at the same time it leaves no one behind it's why we focus on decentralization and inclusive accountability and governance because in solving those things we don't leave anybody behind and every step of the way you can check the work every step of the way the work is permanent and doesn't regress and doesn't require an actor to keep pushing the boulder up the hill and getting it done there's always a supply of people to continue the progress that's the world i'd like to live in and it hurts me deeply when i see that the institutions we need to carry on this movement are being attacked systematically i uh i've become increasingly more philosophical and political throughout the years uh when i first started in this business i said if i focus on the technology only and the engineering and the protocol design the rest is going to figure its way out and while it's very important stuff and i do spend 40 50 60 hours a week every week for the last eight years thinking about these things the reality is that the much more important work is the why it is the philosophy because at the end of the day this technology is neutral these protocols are neutral whether they're used for great good or great evil depends upon the people using them their intent and the institutions that are built from them just like you can blend web 3 with web 2 in the worst possible ways you can blend it in the best possible ways it just depends on how you build things in the intent behind how you build them and the use behind how you build them and we are at a precipice as a society and we have to decide where we want to go i understand many of you listening have a lot of anger there are facts and circumstances in your lives and your backgrounds that probably justify thinking that everything in the world is deeply unfair and you're being lectured to by a person who has so much and it's not solace to say well suck it up we'll figure it out i can't offer you flowery pretty words and i can't offer you quick solutions to the problems in your life and the problems of society around you all i can do is say that we have to be real with each other and have a common understanding of how we got here many people will sell you a sack of they'll tell you if you just vote for me or if you just believe in this philosophy you just say these words or you're part of this group or you consent to why then suddenly it'll all just get better and everything's going to be beautiful no unfortunately we are in a position where we're going to have to rebuild everything a new world and all i can offer you is a shovel and tell you that you're going to have to build it with us and you can make the decision whether to do that or not you can make the decision whether to pursue it or not or you can cynically believe you don't have a voice and you have no say and consent to giving away what little power you actually do have to somebody else will gladly take it from you and use it to make your life even worse than it is because you'll also lose your freedom anybody who's on the side of robbing you of your ability to verify reality limiting your ability to think limiting your ability to have conversations with people or listen to other people for fear that their ideas are so damaging that the mere hearing of them is destructive to society anyone who's on that side is the enemy because what they stand for is deciding that some small group of people you've never met you will never meet most likely who are not elected and stay in power for life basically get to decide that for your life and at any time they can decide it any way fair or otherwise that's not a free society it's not a society built on liberty it's a society built on the ark of human history which for the most of human history has been totalitarian and filled with kings and dictators popes with absolute power who speak only accountable to god we've grown beyond that we don't have to live that way you don't have to live that way and if we want a better world let's be in charge of our own money want a better world let's be in charge of our own democracy we want a better world let's make sure that we can think and speak simple stuff and that's how i'm going to spend my world and my time until either we win or i too will be on the receiving end of all of this and you won't hear from me anymore because i'll just be taken down from all these platforms and there'll be none to replace them i guess i'll just go and live on my ranch with my bison try to get out of history's way choices is yours as much as it is mine i've already made it and i'm here and got to keep being here and keep fighting i've always been an optimist i don't think cynicism will get you anywhere and honestly i think we're winning because at the end of the day we have truth and justice and just the moral argument on our side who can argue against freedom who can argue against dignity who can argue against equality who can argue against humans treating each other with respect who wants to argue for fear and censorship and control and domination and all these things who wants to fight for those things only the people who benefit from them and that's becoming fewer and fewer and fewer so more and more are getting very tired with the status quo so that's the real truth and the meaning of what's happening right now with spotify and joe and what's happening right now and this whole miasma of misinformation and other things that are spreading that's the reality of it you can choose to accept it or not it's up to you always has been even though you're told it's not and that's the reality of our industry as a whole the philosophical heart of it why we do what we do and who we are and hopefully it'll sort its way out so anyway thanks for listening everybody hope this was helpful good to be home see you soon cheers