Birthday Musings and Wisdom

hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado it is my birthday i was born november 5th 9 40 a.m back in 1987 all the way in a little town in hawaii called wailuku my grandfather delivered me he was an ob gyn and i guess he liked delivering kids he delivered over 4 000 during his career and i was one of them and i've gotten now birthday wishes from over 30 countries two heads of state countless people through telegram and facebook and on twitter and other sources and it's just so humbling to see the incredible outcry the outpouring of love and good wishes and wisdom and the thing that always blows people away is that i'm 33 years old and most people think i'm in my 40s a because of the beard b because of the hair and c because my physical condition is that of a man in his 40s anyway i wanted to do a video and just kind of first thank everybody for the birthday wishes that they gave me they were so sweet and so nice before i left the office but i also wanted to share some of the wisdom that i learned throughout the years going on this incredible journey i made a lot of mistakes throughout my life and some of those mistakes actually led to great opportunities and that's kind of the story of being an entrepreneur i if you do everything right we have people we call those people doctors or professors those are safe professions and you have to really be focused for a long period of time never deviate from the course and learn all the rituals that come from the past and the people in those professions they're only able to practice in those professions because the people who came before them made a conscious choice to let them in so you have to be very political in that respect and know the status quo and what they desire when you're an entrepreneur when you're trying to do new things it's actually the exact opposite you follow these very non-linear paths you try something for a while it doesn't work out so well you try another thing for a while and it doesn't work out and nobody is inviting you in through the front door it's actually quite the opposite jack dorsey from twitter for example he didn't know if twitter was going to work out or not so while he was building twitter he also became a licensed massage therapist it kind of gives you guys a sense of the nonlinear thinking that you develop when you're a entrepreneur anyway up your mica touch we can do that a little bit better for you guys turned up the gain a bit anyway so i i spent a long time in the hinterlands and i've started three companies in the cryptocurrency space i started invictus innovations ethereum gmbh it was an llc well gmbh is the version of ethereum switzerland and the third one is input output the one that really got the job done was input output the prior two i didn't know a lot about how to run a business how to negotiate how to actually think strategically there's a lot of inspiration good technology and good ideas but there is a science to running an organization a business you have to actually understand how hr works you have to actually understand how project plans work and you have to be able to do budgets and you have to be able to negotiate contracts and somehow keep your shirt and be able to project work perhaps in years into the future as we've seen by the countless delays of this industry some of which we own that's real hard to do even in the best of times and often that's not the case so one of the things i had to learn over the last 33 years is patience and also a respect for iteration so it wasn't the case where i got it right the first time but i got it right enough to be able to get to the next step and in many ways that's the key to success in life and it's a lesson that i wish we'd teach more children unfortunately we don't really reward people if you don't get a great grade in a class there is no notion of redemption it's a moral or personal failing but in many fields of inquiry like physics or computer science or mathematics it's often the mistakes you make in the process of recovering from them and learning from them that actually gives you passion for the field and a love of it so in many ways our education system does the exact opposite of what you'd like to do to actually train people to think in ways that are maximally beneficial to society the other thing i've learned in these 33 years is just the sheer quantity of unvalidated opinionated information that exists out there there are so many people tell you how the world works this is a fact this is certain this thing will cure your cancer this thing will cure your disease this thing will solve your political problem this idea is the right idea and even if there's a hint of truth or wisdom in that the reality is there is never a case with a complex problem that there exists only one solution it's quite the opposite for anything you can do 12 things if not more and it's okay because at least half or more of those things probably will result in solving at least part of the problem you're trying to resolve oftentimes we get into fights not because we don't think solutions are right because we have different values so we're talking past each other not at each other we're not trying to have a conversation we're trying to attack the other person for not having the same values that we have i had to learn this the hard way during my time the cryptocurrency space i had very simple values like if you take money from people you need to take money in a way where you have the highest probability of giving them something in return so if you take money to build something you have to build that and even if you don't fully build it you have to build enough of it that you can with a straight face say that we did our best and at least there's something to leave behind it's not the case that our industry as a whole shares these same values rather they're completely willing to dump hundreds of millions of dollars if necessary into community management and marketing and all these other things just because of there's this belief that you have to be first mover and get as much of a population as quickly as possible but then you ask yourself into what so let's say you do get 100 million users i can give you a great company that did have 100 million users myspace how many people today are myspace users and is that an anomaly no there are literally hundreds of examples of that from pets.com to others on down where people naively chased vanity metrics and never really built anything of substance value only comes when you have built something to hold up the value that's the way life works and it's a lesson i've had to learn over and over and over again and i've witnessed it reoccurring from the ico mania to the altcoin mania before that to the d5 mania that we're currently in and having all these things explode in people's faces and guess who gets the bill you guys do not the people who create the projects they make the money so that's another life lesson is that you have to build something of substance and you have to have the right values if you're going to deliver something of substance and you have to accept that those who disagree with you perhaps have different values than you do we live in a highly political time we just had perhaps the most political election in my country's history since 1860 probably it's been tough and a lot of people are very angry right now and there's probably going to be violence it's predictable because people have spent a long time focusing on the things that divide us and no one ever took the time to start asking some basic questions of what is the definition of success one of the most valuable lessons i learned early on i read a book from stephen covey called the seven habits of highly effective people it's very old text it comes from the 1980s but it has a great piece of wisdom in it in particular it has this idea of start with the end in mind and what that means is you look to the future and you say where would you like to be in fact i think in the book it's been a long time since i read it but the example he used was your funeral so imagine you just died and all these people show up at your funeral and you ask yourself what would they say about your life there was actually a a great example of this many people know about the nobel prize and nobel prize is a very prestigious scientific award you can get it for physics or medicine you can get it for literature for peace and economics and many people consider it to be the most prestigious terminal point in an academic career so if you're a nobel laureate you've kind of won the game of being an academic very few people ask well where did it come from well alfred nobel was actually a weapons manufacturer and what happened was his brother died and people mistook his brother for him so they actually published his obituary so talk about starting with the end in mind he got to read what people actually believed about him and would say about him when he's no longer around and he said oh my god this is terrible i need to change the image of things the reality of things and so he created the nobel prize because he said well people won't remember me in a hundred years but if this becomes a big thing they will remember the prize so now instead of his name being associated with dynamite his name is associated with the highest honor you can get in physics and medicine and other places so i think that's another valuable lesson you always have to look at your own life and say well where would i like to go what is the definition of success in that one of the things i think becomes readily apparent is the interpersonal relationships we aren't islands we'd like to believe that we're all born in log cabins we built ourselves with our own hands but the reality is that we're all interconnected to each other and life exists because of the labor of others in addition to our own you can even live off the land somewhere in the middle of nowhere the skills that you got to live off the land were handed down to you by other people and the only reason you have those skills is because those other people had to learn them to teach you so in that great interconnectedness and that interdependency that you have one of the most valuable lessons i've learned is the value of relationships preserving and maintaining those relationships and the greatest people in life are the ones who understand that it's not just about recip reciprocity of i give something i take something and everything is barter everything is give and take it's also just about building rapport with people and accepting them for who they are and making them feel safe about who they are and having a relationship where you genuinely listen and communicate with each other this used to be the standard and now it's become the exception to the rule if you ever read any biographies about george h.w bush one of the things that is often mentioned was that he was a vociferous letter writer and he wrote i think well over 30 000 letters by hand throughout his entire life and it wasn't just the politicians that he would send these letters but a great example would be dana carvey he's a comedian who used to be on saturday night live would often impersonate h.w bush when he was in office and he came up with all those great impressions like wouldn't be prudent and so forth well anyway hw bush actually liked the impressions and so he invited him to the white house and he met dana and they became friends and throughout the rest of hw's life he would keep tabs and from time to time simply write a letter for dana for example dana was in the hospital one time and bush hand wrote a letter and said how you doing little stuff like that little touches like that recognizing people for who they are and what they are even if they're radically different people with radically different political philosophies radically different wakes of life and that's a lesson i think we all can take in that we need to be better at acknowledging each other seeing each other and listening to each other it's something that i had trouble with early in my days in the industry and i developed at times a reputation of being difficult to work with a because i didn't have a high tolerance for and b because i had very strong opinions about how things needed to be done and those two things together at the worst of times can turn you into a raging in the best of times it can force people to be better the difference between a raging and forcing people to be better is the emotional bank account you've constructed with people and the give and take in that respect and the more you listen and acknowledge people the easier it is to have it have a good outcome for everybody rather than a bad outcome as it did earlier in my career there's a phenomenon today that is so remarkable in that we have all this wisdom it can be stoic wisdom from aurelius and seneca it can be eastern wisdom from taoism or buddhism it can be modern wisdom from great philosophers who had a chance to think about life it could be youtube videos from philosophers who are just about to die and now are dead talking about the meaning of their lives and in all these things it's never been the case in human history where all this wisdom is fully accessible to us and it's a great tragedy that more people don't take the time to consume it and spend time with it understand it grow with it in all of our lives none of us are perfect or capable and i'd willing to wage wager the vast majority of people are unhappy about something there are very few people outside of matthew ricard who are universally happy and to achieve that nirvana is is the pursuit of a lifetime and it does certainly require a lot of effort and work but the elements of that come from thinking about the world around you and trying to find meaning and place in the world around you we don't tend to do this and there's nothing in modern society that forces us to do this which is why you have boomerang kids and why you have things like high suicide rates in developed western countries like switzerland and japan united states it's because there's a loss of meaning we used to have all the rituals and ideas of the past grow up you have a certain rite of passage have a certain religion and it kind of was a fill in the blanks paint by numbers for how life should be lived the problem is the veil has been pulled back from our eyes and we are now in a position where we understand that those narratives of the past however convenient they were for our grandfathers and grandmothers and those who came before them serve really less of a role for us today but the good news is there's now a marketplace of ideas and a great synthesis that can occur if you're really wise to take the time and invest the time to actually find meaning in your own life viktor frankl often talked about this he created a whole school of psychotherapy called logotherapy about it but it was basically man's search for meaning in your own life what's it all about why do you do what you do and what's the point if you don't have an answer for that question i'm willing to wager you're probably not happy and there are plenty of things you can do to distract yourself in fact there's a whole economy for these things from alcohol to drugs to other vices and they are great short-term indulgences but they don't ever get you where you need to go as i get older i've realized the incredible importance of meaning when you're in your 20s and your teens your peers they're young and vibrant healthy when you start getting into your 30s especially if you had slightly older peers those peers start dying or they start getting health problems or incidents happen and you realize the fragility of life and the finiteness of everything the ephemeralness of everything and you start asking well with what little time i have what would make that time life well spent and the problem is there's no clear answer to that because a it's highly personal and b it's not really clear how to answer that question from a philosophical viewpoint so the good news is that the people have thought about this in the past wrote it down what to do from earnest becker to others and not only they write it down their cohorts and adherence have digitized it turned into youtube videos there's books everywhere and so forth so it's never really been a time where we've had a universal access the ability to connect to all of that and i feel remarkably privileged that i have a lifetime worth of material to consume and read from albert camus story of sisyphus to sartre and i can work my way through all of it try to understand the absurdity of things and hopefully not descend into the cosmic core that we undoubtably will eventually become aware of another lesson that i've that i've gained is the value of having mirrors in life and what do i mean by mirrors well mirrors are basically things that show you who you actually are not who you perceive yourself to be or would aspire to be everybody can put on makeup everybody can put on their game face and pretend wear a mask and i collect masks and live in a certain way but very few people actually have the desire to look at themselves in totality now this is why we tend to not build institutions that force us to do that and the institutions that do study these things we tend to not really pay too much attention to for example you have the government accountability office how many times have you heard of that but their job is to do exactly this to look at the government and say what's working what's not working and basically write harsh reports at times the entire cryptocurrency industry is a mirror to the monetary policy of the central banks its existence is an anathema it is very deeply uncomfortable they have been telling lies for a long time and saying that they have a monopoly on how money should work and then suddenly people are showing that it can work differently and be stable and grow and that's tremendously inconvenient well here's the thing we're going to have that for every aspect of life accountability systems some ai enforced and others across all your things and they're going to let how honest you really are being with others and yourself in every dimension and aspect of your life and again these can be used for great harm to label people one way or the other or they can be used as a productive tool to make us all better a great example small one would be meditation for a long time you say how do you're meditating have all these great meditation teachers they teach you breathing techniques and so forth but super frustrating for young students because they never know if they're doing it right and when are they going to get there these expectations it takes time right then some where along the way we started building brain computer interfaces these electroencephalographs that can measure your brain waves and they know what a meditative state looks and they can give you a feedback loop things like muse for example this technology is in infancy but already it can dramatically improve the onboarding of beginners into meditation letting when you're doing it right and when you're doing it wrong deliberate practice one of the fastest ways to learn this can be applied in every respect in life and it's something that i've started to treasure a great deal as i've gotten older and then i say if you're gonna do something ask yourself how do i fail at this thing and how do i know i'm going to fail at this thing what is the indication of it and be honest enough to accept failure and joyful enough to know that failure is the road to success this is a lesson you learn as an entrepreneur and you can apply it to every dimension of your life and your relationships i when i was younger did not follow this philosophy i considered failure to be a personal failing an imperfection and i hated it i was super competitive but as i've gotten older it's something that has completely changed and i look for it in every single thing i do and i judge whether i pick on a new field or a new hobby based upon the existence of mirrors that will tell me who i really am not who i aspired to be because it's always easy to dream of yourself somewhat bigger and better i often get asked in life what's the greatest pain in life you're 33 you've lived a bit you've been to more than 50 countries you've been close to death a few times like what hurts the most lost love broken relationships injuries these things betrayal been stabbed in the back a few times by people close to me the greeks even have a saying it's translates to something you never forget the good things you do for people saying you can never forget the people you help who screw you and i think i think probably the worst feeling you can have in life is unrequited love loving someone who doesn't quite love you the way you love them it's an emotional cancer that eats away at you but that aside i'd say the other thing is extending that to a broader structure is being misunderstood the problem with being very creative in society is that you don't conform to the norms and non-conformity basically means that you're forced to live as in some way a pariah i have a friend who's a professor down the south and he asks his students he teaches history how many of you would have been an abolitionist in 1850 every single student raises their hand and says yes slavery is morally wrong and i would fight it and then he said well explain to me then why the vast majority of the american people were not were they just all evil and misguided there's a pictures that always float around the internet during a nazi rally where you'd have all these nazis giving the salute and this one guy standing with crossed arms and there's always that circle that says be that guy be the non-conformist and everybody likes to believe they're that guy they'll be the abolitionist the reality is the vast majority of people listening are the people with the nazi salute and the non-abolitionist not because you're evil but because conformity is the standard and it's how you usually get along in life it's how you keep your job it's how you keep your social networks it's how you keep your relationships it's how you feed your family it's dangerous to be a non-conformist it's dangerous to be unorthodox you can be platformed terminated in some cases imprisoned very dangerous and this is why we have so much admiration and respect for the people who pull it off the people who think differently the mandela's and the steve jobs and the others who went down a very different road and they got something done and we venerate them but here's the thing you don't hear you are no different than those people every single person who's a non-conformist they're not genetically magical they're not saints descending from the heavens with special programming they just made a conscious choice to do things a different way and sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't work out but they decided to set the fear of it not working out aside and i think that's one of the greatest lessons i ever learned in my life i come from family of three generations of doctors there was a way of doing things in my family and i was the first in my family to take the risk of doing things a bit differently and everybody thought i was crazy and for a long time i was and all of my family members they had different breaking points for my brother it was well how much money do i have if i have a lot okay it all worked out for my mom i'll never forget this her breaking point was when i was interviewed by larry king years ago at conference up in toronto prior to that you're probably going to jail cryptocurrencies are crazy your whole industry's bad but the minute that larry king interviewed me she was just like larry king he interviewed nixon he interviewed ronald reagan oh my god you must be a big guy now but if you don't care about how others perceive you and you don't really care too much about external validations of success it is the most liberating thing in the world in life and you just go and do the things you think are right maybe they work and maybe they don't work but those who really love you and really want to be part of your life even if they think you're crazy they'll still be in your camp and the ones who don't well they're not worth your time and once you're liberated that's how you change things that's how you do things differently that's how you make the world a different and better place and you have the courage to be the one with the arms crossed instead of the arms up so you always have to ask yourself where do you fall on that spectrum in your own life and for too long in my life i was not the person and then somewhere along the way i stopped caring and i became the person and i am glad i took that leap i don't particularly care where it ends up it has been an amazing ride and it continues to be an amazing ride another thing is that i think our society undervalues creativity we like to pretend that we do yeah we that we we want everybody to be special and we're all snowflakes and artists are great and these things but creativity comes in all shapes and forms it can be in the board room it can be in medicine it can be in law i hired someone recently door garbage door is a product manager for the voltaire project and one of the deciding features ironically about hiring dorr that really biased me towards hiring him was that i i read his dissertation he got a phd in a technical field and as i was scanning through it i read so many technical papers and academic papers and dissertations as i was scanning through it i noticed that he had this ascii heart that he had generated in his dissertation i said i've never seen that before in my entire life we had i think eight candidates for that particular role it was very competitive but immediately i looked at that and i said there's something very different about this guy and i want to know you just don't do this in a document like this so i got to know him and i said perfect guy perfect candidate and i think community agrees we now have the largest down in the world on cardano so that's how you actually get things done you have to feel comfortable being a little different going a little crazy i like masks so i took it to the logical extreme i have these beautiful wooden laser-cut masks in the back there they're cut layers and glued together they take a long time to make they're very hard to make but god you'll never find anything as intricate and i just love that i love the creativity and passion behind it and i love the artist and sends me emails from time to time say oh wait until you get a you see something like this i said wow that's great i want it sometimes it's no you're off the mark but that creativity is always flowing and i and the best experiences i've had in life is when i created environments to allow people to be creative if you are a parent my recommendation to you is remember that your children will decide under your watch whether creativity is a good thing or it's a bad thing and that's a lesson they'll probably carry for the rest of their lives my parents were saints they were great and they created a rich fertile environment for me and for my brother to be very creative and a lot of the things that i've done throughout my career are a direct result of that environment that they created and so i'm eternally grateful for that and that's a lesson that you need to pay forward so for my company and all the people i have i try to do that and if you have that opportunity make sure that that's something that you embrace personally and it's something that you give to your kids it can be as simple as when you take notes at a meeting do you just take linear bullet pointed notes or you take a sketch note you draw a picture it's as elegant and as complicated as writing poetry about something the sky is the limit and where you draw the line is based upon your needs as a closing point these 33 years no longer a power of two i have to wait until i'm 64 for that to happen again kind of missed being 32.