Work Life Balance and the Valley

hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado from time to time i owe pine on things i do enjoy opining and i have a little bit of time before my next meeting i figured why not opine on something that i just read today so while at lunch i found an article that was quite interesting about silicon valley he was talking about the dark side of silicon valley and i often get asked not right now because i'm kind of quarantine isolated thanks to covet here in colorado not traveling much but when i was on the road historically why is input output global not in california or in silicon valley or new york or london or any of these other major hubs why in god's name are we in cheyenne wyoming what's the point of that and aren't you worried that we somehow are losing some economic advantage by not being in one of these major hubs close to the people with capital and when i first started as an entrepreneur i thought the same thought i was 25 years old and i was saying god everybody's telling me i need to be in one of these startup hubs i need to be in one of these places where all the entrepreneurs are the vcs are the talent are or i'm going to fall behind so i actually went and i spent a whole week in silicon valley running around talking to the people going to house parties trying to get integrated into that culture in that environment and what i saw over eight years ago was a very for lack of a better term unhealthy environment there was copious drug use a lot of people were sleep deprived and there was this endless desire to be something and most of the people i met were so thoroughly fake there was just no notion of a genuine person in silicon valley everybody had these illusions there's oh well i'm gonna be great i'm gonna become this great entrepreneur and it was just more and more and more better better better everybody four hour work week tim ferriss this bio hacking that growth hacking this and just it's word salad of stuff and it was just so thoroughly unnatural for me i live here colorado i got a farm and i do have a ranch up in wyoming and tell you guys a little bit about that later i and what's so magical about that lifestyle that i have is that after my work day ends i go to my farm and a farm is the ultimate truth factory there is no when you're in agriculture stuff doesn't grow if you don't take care of it there's no buzzword or excuse you can use either you plant in good soil and you water and you watch the outcome of that labor or you don't and every year we have good harvest grow hay have raised bed gardens have lots of plants all around horses and farm animals they don't care if you're broke or you're a billionaire they on you just the same and you got to take care of them just the same even if you're sick you're not feeling so good you still have to go outside and take care of them shovel a poo feed them walk them all kinds of things you have to do and there's something so remarkably authentic about that lifestyle and that work-life balance there of keeping you balanced and humble and connected to the natural world connected to nature and i haven't noticed once that has ever once set us back i live 35 minutes from a major airport that has the ability to directly fly to tokyo and directly fly to munich i can be pretty much anywhere in the world two two flights and 30 minutes away from denver about 20 minutes away from boulder it's a really nice existence and i do try a lot of things like fasting and that's worked quite well i just recently discovered that my biological age is 28 i i'm 33 chronologically genetically and biologically right now 28 after some testing so it looks like that anti-aging stuff is actually starting to pay some dividends i do need to take better care of my diet better care of exercise that's coming i really didn't want to exercise too much of the mask on in a gym i was like ugh but we'll get there but all things considered i try cool things like photobiomodulation military's been studying that for a long time for tbis and it's been well researched as a topic there's over 2000 papers on it and no side effects and just nothing but benefits if you look at a lot of the bio hacking and health hacking that occurs in silicon valley people take amphetamines they take off-label prescription drugs the nootropics that they use are a bit extreme and it's unclear if any of these things actually provide a competitive advantage and it's very clear that they certainly can have very negative side effects and i wouldn't more than one friend died but overdose more than one friend have serious health effects for example the article in particular is written about tony i'd met him as had many others hung around the crypto space and i know a lot of these guys and they don't really have healthy lifestyles and so forth and one of the reasons we created catalyst and the decentralized vc for cardano was that i hated the concept of geographic determinism and a person's ability to raise capital it just felt so tragically unfair to say that the only way that you're going to be able to get somewhere in life is to be in the right place at the right time so if you were unfortunate enough to be born let's say in west virginia or alabama that somehow you're instantly at a disadvantage to somebody who is born in san francisco it doesn't make any sense to me whether you have access to capital or not should be connected to merits of your ideas your skills and capabilities your character and the market conditions not where you happen to be and then you actually extrapolate that across the world what about those boarded lagos what about those in addis what about those in nairobi or accra or kampala what do they do and the point of catalyst is that it's completely neutral there's no geographic determinism in it if we do our job right over time that will become a fund with billions perhaps even tens of billions of dollars available to the community to spend as they see fit to grow the ecosystem and that very model could become the predominant model for funding the development of open source infrastructure and bootstrapping entrepreneurs now that is the dream and that's where we're at and i hope we can get there and i i feel sad for those who have to live a life without authenticity i run up against this a lot in the way that i handle social media and i've made several videos on this topic but you guys will notice that i just tell people how i feel and if i think someone's an i say they're an if i want to chew someone out i chew them out usually it comes from a position of of frustration some cases i just feel it's good medicine in other cases i think it's righting wrong i and i do believe there is a great empathy deficit in the world that said i don't see any authenticity in silicon valley this is why creatures like elizabeth holmes and others are so remarkably successful and for the ones there's dozens you don't know and you have to ask yourself how can a person like that raise 700 million dollars what kind of culture can allow such a thing to occur why aren't there any checks and balances what where does ends justify the means lead to and why isn't there a healthy and natural skepticism why isn't there a desire to check things it's bizarre to me that even in our own industry my continuous demand for the production of evidence is viewed as a competitive disadvantage we go about writing all these papers over a hundred now and these papers we don't just write them and say oh here's a paper we solved all these problems we say okay where are we submitting it it always comes up when i'm in chief scientist meetings on thursdays or other things that i attend from time to time i'll always ask where are we pushing this paper where are we going to publish and which conference which journal how do we review it how do we prototype it how do we check it how do we know it's right for certain high value things we even start talking about checking the proofs using computer programs like isabelle and and these things because we have to know what's right it's just part of the culture of our organization and i've been told over and over and over again some cases by powerful vc people who are who say no that's the worst thing you can do it'll destroy your company it'll destroy your movement we won't even consider ada because they subscribe to this philosophy i say don't you guys like evidence that the claims we're making are actually true will we say provably secure wouldn't you feel a lot more comfortable knowing that outside people who don't have a financial incentive have checked that that well that's just not how business is done the wrong way is the right way as brenda nick would say recent interviews that he did i don't know i just it just feels wrong to me and i've never directly connected to it and i think that it's much more sustainable to invest and think individually and collectively on a proper work-life balance and a proper outlook that keeps you humble centered and honest about what you can and can't do and where you can and can't go and also a realistic outlook as an industry about timing our movement is about changing the world that's what we're here to do you don't change the world overnight even a revolution has a cleanup phase and then you have to lead with the new leadership as we learn from game of thrones and as satisfying as it can be tearing down the statues of the former leaders it is a very frustrating experience trying to pick up the pieces the morning after and so if our movement's about changing the world and changing everything the voting systems the payment systems changing the way that finance works changing the way that governments work don't we believe that this is a marathon it's going to take years it's going to take decades perhaps centuries some of us won't be around to see the fruits of our labors you ever drink any of that louis xiii cognac every single one of the people who make it never get to taste it because they're dead by the time the bottle's open but everybody wants that job because they understand the elite nature of it and the outcome of the labor it's the same with the things many of the things we do today the papers we write today the products we build today they will not reach full maturity until the 2030s or 2040s and 2050s now that's not saying that the things we do or pointless or come back 10 years or 20 years it requires participation today it requires a tireless relentless effort today and that's why work life is so important if you have to do something for 10 years 20 years 30 years to see an outcome the outcome desire changing the world you can only get there is if you live a healthy balanced life and you're only going to be happy at the end result if you didn't have to throw away all the good things in life and sacrifice all the good things in life to get there just that simple so i don't know it seems to me that the silicon valley mindset is just fundamentally incompatible with the mindset required for real change and building real things not to say great innovation hasn't come and great companies haven't come out of that but even the patron saints of silicon valley the steve jobs's if you actually analyze them as people they're diametrically opposite of what the actual valley looks like jobs was a very real person there wasn't a lot of fakeness to him and that was both a blessing and a curse he was first to admit that he was an a perfectionist at times manipulative and then at times ruthless often ruthless on the other hand everybody trusted him because they knew exactly the type of creature he was and they understood what he was after and he would tell everybody up front the very people who put on the black turtlenecks and try to emulate him they're not authentic because they're trying to be somebody else not themselves every day i wake up and i say how do i be the best version of charles i can be i often told i don't listen to people as much as i need to need to be a better active listener so i said hey how about i start interviewing people that'll help me listen that's a way to improve started meditating years ago god that helped much more calm needed to be more patient so started growing things started planting you have to have an enormous amount of patience to run a farm gosh that does help in charity give away do that now often times try to elevate other people up some of the wisest people i know are the ones who judge people not by what they've done for themselves by but why the success of others that they've brought up so you ask yourself who's a great ceo the man who built the company or the person who trained the person who carried on the vision of the company and the company was successful after him so i don't know it's an interesting thing but i figured i would make a video and time to time i opine on these types of things about that and why i'm not in the valley why i did loathe it and everything about it and just how i look at the world and how i look at the products that we build our company input output global is very unique we're in a position where we can run forever and as many of i am a very wealthy man and i don't intend on passing that wealth on to anybody else that's going to stay right here in this company and we're going to use it as a fund for innovation it gives me the luxury to do things that most businesses can't do i can look at long arcs i'm okay with the investment that takes five years or ten years i'm okay with producing enormous amounts of patent-free royalty-free no intellectual property content it's easy for me to do academic relationships because all outcome of all of that stuff is creative common licensed papers and no patents so almost all the complexity of a contract goes away and it's easy to collaborate with anybody because everybody knows no one's locked in and they can do whatever they will with these things it's a lifestyle it's a viewpoint the outcome and i judge the success of this endeavor by how we've enabled others the best moments of my career have been when i have witnessed someone used the things that i've built or contributed to to go and do something for themselves for example recently i had a great interview with a young kid from munich named alessandro he was able to create a product called space butts and he used cardano to do that it's going to be so fun the next year two years three years witnessing all of those types of applications come alive and become successful and enable people to live out their dreams and do cool things and become entrepreneurs become business leaders solve problems that's why i entered this space that's why i stay and that's why we run the kind of company that we run and we do the really really hard work that most people can't do because if we can do it in just the right way that becomes a foundation for the rest of people to stand upon now i'd like to do this for a very long time i'd like to do this in my 80s and my 90s if i can survive somehow so what does it mean it means i have to stay healthy keep healthy and i receive a lot of emails and letters from you guys about hey you're looking a little tired hey maybe you should lose some weight hey maybe you need to take better care of yourself and i do read them and i do appreciate them and i love the outpouring of sympathy and empathy and that respect it means the world to me and keep on sending them and thank you so much for holding me accountable to living a long time i don't think anything out of the valley is conducive to that it's a sum zero everybody for themselves get as much as possible compete as hard as you can and don't collaborate type of mentality at least from my experience maybe i'm jaded in any event and i figured i'd share some of my thoughts and how i view it and who we are and this year it's going to be a fun year and that we're rebranding iohk to iog and part of that philosophy will become much more public and much more accessible anybody who's a member of my company they feel it they live it every day and we try to live up to that promise and culture but we don't do as good of a job as we need to broadcasting it to the space as a whole about who we are what we do and how we love to collaborate with people regardless of where they come from and i would love to be a bit better at that and it's a big priority the second half of 2021.