Surprise AMA 12/26/2024

I'm sorry, but it seems there is no transcript text provided for me to edit. Please provide the text you'd like me to clean up. Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from rough and rugged Wyoming. Always rough, always rugged, sometimes Wyoming. It is December 26, the day after Christmas.

I hope everybody had a wonderful Christmas, and we're getting ready for the end of the year. I'm enjoying a lovely time up here in Gillette, Wyoming, and having a chance to take a look at my construction company, the clinic, and all the other amazing things that are going on. Honestly speaking, they're hauling ass and doing amazing stuff. It's been the privilege of a lifetime to watch a dream where you start with something a clinic and say, "Hey, let's go build something like that." Over a period of three years, it goes from just a hypothesis to having over 10,000 square feet and 11,000 patients.

We're building an additional 60,000 square feet. It's pretty crazy when you really think about it. You see all those things moving along, and July 4th is going to be a really good and fun time because that's when the expansion will be done. All the service lines will be operational, but there's going to linger an additional four to five months of construction for the biotechnology building, which will be an additional 20,000 square feet. It's currently where the UPS building is.

We bought that, had to buy a lot of land, and do a lot of these things. The area we built the clinic was really not designed for this, so the amount of dirt work we had to do, water mitigation, and grading is pretty crazy. But I'm pretty proud of it. 11,000 patients, and I think we'll be up to about 15,000 patients. We should definitely be able to turn on all those other service lines that we have.

It's a multi-specialty practice: internal medicine, cardiology, nephrology, soon to be neurology, dermatology, and all these types of things. We acquired more than 20 acres so far, and we may acquire a little bit more land for future growth and expansion. It's pretty special to watch it all come together. It's been a hell of a year, hasn't it? We're dealing with so much going on.

Governance is here; it's messy, and a lot of people are learning how to handle it. Lots of people are getting excited about serving as a DApp. A lot of people are trying to figure out what Cardano governance means for the first time in a long time. A lot of people in the industry are starting to pay attention to Cardano again and say, "Hey, I thought you guys were dead. Oh my, you're still around.

Okay, what's this governance thing about? What's this on-chain update about? Is it like Polkadot?" Obviously, we have a long road to go and a lot to do, but I'm pretty proud of the fact that a lot of people stepped up, and they're getting it done. You can't always get what you want, but what's nice is everybody's honest.

For a long time, there were a lot of people who had pent-up grievances, myself included. Now we all get to be honest. It's no dishonesty to say that there were certainly some disgruntled people who didn't really like IOG, who left and joined the foundation. They kind of silently went about their job, but now they can go to Twitter and tell Twitter what they really feel. They get to basically blame every problem in the entire world on me or somebody else.

I get to finally say things that for the last three years have deeply bothered me. That's the nature of governance. People in the ecosystem can take it as they will. Some people are excited for the drama; some people hate the drama. Some people think we should just move forward and find some productive compromise.

The good news is with on-chain governance, everything can be sorted out. People are going to come together. I posted a video not too long ago on my Twitter feed of a bunch of ants solving a problem. It blows people's minds when they see that. These little creatures, individually, are not very smart, but when they work as a collective whole, they can solve complex problems on a huge scale.

The only reason they don't run the planet is that they're very small, but there are certainly a lot more insects than there are people. When you think about the nature of swarm intelligence, when all the people come together in the Cardano ecosystem and start solving problems together and coming up with clever ideas, our best days are definitely ahead of us, and it gets me very excited. It's nice to see. It was a dream 10 years ago. I don't think people fully understand how small and weak and fledgling things were.

There was a time that if I had been hit by a bus or something happened, I don't think we would have gotten where we're at. But now that we're here, there are a lot of people running around saying we need to get rid of Charles. It's amazing, that transformation. It really is when you think about it. It's hard as a founder when you watch these things grow and change.

You make a lot of friends along the way, and you always have to figure out what's your role, place, and purpose. I have a strong distaste for dishonesty and duplicity. Nothing pisses me off more than when people lie to my face, and nothing pisses me off more when people manipulate others and use half-truths to try to get people to do what they want or convince them that something is the way it is when it's not. You see that, and it comes out at times, and it's a rage because at the end of the day, the purpose of these things is to hurt people that I love and things that I love and an ecosystem that's been the center point of my life for 10 years. It's hard because sometimes you just have to let people have their own fights, and you have to let them grow up.

It's like being a parent. You watch your kids get into things they probably shouldn't, and you say, "they've gotten to the age where they're just going to have to figure this out." We're starting to get to that, but I do believe the on-chain governance will get where it needs to go, and I do believe that our best days are ahead of us. So let's get to your questions. Best whiskey?

The best drinking whiskey around in Japan is called Hibiki Harmony. It's about 100 bucks a bottle, and I say cheap because whiskey can get up to like 10 grand. Bull cycle? Yes, sir. 2025 is going to be crazy.

We're just getting started. What style of game is your brother building for NES or Super Nintendo? I want to know so I can start designing some stuff for chips. That's going to be up to the sponsoring content. The company's name is Hosk Brew, and we have a lot of plans.

We'll make a dedicated video about it and a lot of marketing, but if you're interested, just talk to JJ, and we'll get you on the list. We can do CRPGs, standard adventure games, FPSs; there are lots of options. Does anyone keep you in check every single day? it's kind of funny. When you're in my position, you can't make a mistake, and you can't even be perceived to make a mistake.

I'll give you a great example of that. The other day, I saw a bot on Twitter, and the bot had very lifelike behavior. I was kind of curious about it. I said, "What are the limits of this type of bot?" It's criticizing Cardano; it's like this attack bot.

So I try to catch the bot in the loop, and I say, "Alright, what are your grievances?" Then it goes off to its pre-programmed stuff. I follow up with another question, trying to drill in, and I'm really trying to play with this bot because I want to understand at what point it loses its depth. Then a community member stepped in, and I said, "Hey guys, I know it's a bot. I'm playing with it.

I'm trying to figure this out." Well, the whole conversation was clipped up, and only a part of it was spread around, making it look I didn't know it was a bot and didn't care and that I'm just incompetent. It was on the front page of cryptocurrency Reddit, and one of the tweets had over a million impressions and tens of thousands of retweets about it. Obviously, it was just a personal attack. It's amazing because when we had our signing of the Constitution of Cardano, the most significant event in the history of Cardano was not on the front page of cryptocurrency Reddit, but a thread making me look bad was.

Lars Brunus has been working for two years on the Mibox idea. I invited Rudy Rucker, the inventor of the Lifebox concept, to my summit in 2019 in Miami, and he spoke there with Stephen Wolfram about the Lifebox and these other things. You'd think maybe, just maybe, that we were kind of curious about what bots can do. Reflecting on one of the companies we had in the portfolio, they were doing digital twins for over a year. We're quite interested in this, and we've been discussing internally this idea of creating digital twins of ourselves for various utilities, either to analyze things or to interact with people or help support.

So maybe, just maybe, when you see a bot, you're always curious where it came from and what capabilities it has. For example, I've been thinking in 2025 to create a Twitter bot version of myself to run my Twitter feed so I don't actually have to manage it because it's becoming diminishing returns. But apparently, we don't know any of that because the internet's not built for that; it's built for controversy. So who keeps me in check? Pretty much everybody, every day, even for things we don't do.

How long until you're back in Wolf mode? This irritates me. It's pointless to pick fights with people when we get into a fight about $600 million in community money and the future of the community's governance and who's accountable to whom. I think that's a conversation worth having, but apparently that's not Wolf mode. So what is then?

Just never get in a fight? Never stand up for anything? Never fight for anything? Just be fun and happy to every single person and agreeable to every person, even people that you feel are stealing from you or causing harm to the ecosystem and causing harm to others? So is Wolf mode being on the subway train when a Guatemalan guy walks over and douses us with gasoline and sets us on fire and doing nothing because that would be a fight and being disagreeable?

Oh no, we can't do that. What's the test? My test is pretty simple: when something affects everyone, in my view, that's pretty Wolf mode. Is this real life, not AI or anything? Well, I mean, you can't tell the difference.

It doesn't matter. Please talk about Chainlink. What are the techies talking about? In 2021, we talked about integration; they agreed to do it. For a long time, I thought they had integrated on-chain, and then I was told that they hadn't.

I don't think there's a commercial issue or a disagreement or an integration or technical issue. I think that just something got cross-wired, and an accountable party to do it is no longer around. We do care about oracles. There's Charlie 3; there's Flair that we just talked to, and we're looking at integration there. Chainlink is something that we've wanted.

I know Sergey Nazar of the Chainlink ecosystem has always been very friendly to us, so we'll circle back, and I'll find out what happened there. Peter asks, "What's your biggest learning or takeaway from the Constitutional Convention?" Well, first, thank you for your service. The biggest thing probably was the enormous amount that went into it. It was an event of the willing, and the fact that the service hasn't ended.

The delegates continue; all of them. I love the courage that they have, and I love the commitment that they have to Cardano. I know they're going to get where they need to be. There's a good possibility the Constitution will get passed on-chain, but that's just the beginning. We have to improve the governance system to be more inclusive and fair.

There's a lot more code to write, and there's a lot more protocol to explore, but at least we have people. Charles, can you get an AMA with David Schwartz, Ugo Flon, and Gavin Wood in 2025? Sure, I have no problem with that. That'd be fun. I was laughing because Charles is interacting.

Yeah, you're talking about the bot, and you just got the report of the news. Those types of things. My says, "Who, you people seem to love me." Is it possible to quantum-proof crypto? Yes, it's called post-quantum crypto.

There are many different approaches like learning with error, isogenes, and hash-based crypto. Meckler went with us down to actually the Constitutional Convention, and he was an observer. Mark's a great guy, and one of these days, we'll do a podcast together. That'd be a heck of a lot of fun. Maybe we can do it with Tucker.

Any news about Crazy Mary? For those of you who don't know, she's a beef; it's the only one I have on the ranch, half buffalo, half cow, big, mean, and crazy. Do you think the USA made mistakes leaving Afghanistan? Big respect for challenge because, when you fight a war, you have to be very clear about what the mission is, why you're fighting the war, what you're prepared to do to win that war, what's the victory condition, and what's the exit condition. Well, multi-nation efforts with big armies crashing into each other, like World War II, is this more of a legitimate element that we can put back into power?

Is it a nation-building exercise where we're going to occupy the place and construct it for a long time? I mean, look at South Korea and Japan after World War II alongside U.S. Special Forces. In the early days of the conflict, the goal was to find and kill Osama bin Laden and to disrupt the Taliban government and degrade its capabilities.

Then it scaled up to a large collapse. But the challenge with Afghanistan is it wasn't just Afghanistan; it was also Pakistan and, to a certain extent, other border nations like Iran and Azerbaijan. When you have these border nations, they can harbor terrorist elements or elements of the prior regime, as Pakistan did. The biggest issue there is that we were kind of fighting a three-sided war. You need to fight 360 degrees.

We were never able to win the hearts and minds of the people in Afghanistan, so we ended up getting into this endless loop. Year after year passed, more people died, more money was spent, and eventually, some president had to be the one who pulls the plug and leaves. In the case of Vietnam, that was Nixon. The conflict had been disastrous, and he said, "Look, you can go another 10 years, but ultimately it's going to end the same way—in defeat." So it's a great case study: don't start things unless you're prepared to finish them.

Charles, there's no way you're only 37. I am. This is what crypto does to you: you lose your hair, your beard gets white, your belly gets big. It is what it is. Is my mic still on?

Yeah, the mic is still on. Okay, there we go. Can you guys hear me now? No, it's on. The mic's on.

No sound? No sound? Hello? Yeah, there we go. It's fixed.

This is the integrated microphone. I was using my Anchor Works microphone here, and unfortunately, it didn't work because this new office I have up here in Gillette doesn't have a microphone set up yet. Yeah, you guys did lose me for 20 minutes. Come on. And there's the angry crypto show.

Good guy. Haven't heard much about Plutus recently. Yeah, just a lot of stuff under the hood. The Aken people love to say that they saved Cardano smart contracts, and they've done all these amazing things. It's kind of true that they've created something that's very usable that people really enjoy and I think now 63-70% of all Cardano smart contracts are being written.

Plutus V3 just launched with zero-knowledge capabilities, and a lot of people are utilizing those. There's a litany of other capabilities that are coming online with V4, and a lot of great ideas that have come from the community as a whole. the thing is that UPLC is kind of the place you compile to, and I don't really care if it's high-assurance Plutus AIN or TypeScript. It's kind of a choose-your-own-adventure. You want it to have a good dev experience for the developer, and that developer may come from a functional background, an object-oriented background, or might be a web developer that knows kind of HTML and doesn't have a lot of coding skills.

In all those cases, you'd like to have a choose-your-own-adventure and a path for them to get where they need to go. It's nice that we now have some beginner stuff and intermediate stuff inside the ecosystem that doesn't really require you to be a domain expert in Haskell to do well in developing applications in Cardano. It's getting easier and easier. There are still some issues with logging and concurrency, and there are all these edge cases that are challenging for people. The goal of each version of Cardano Plutus is to kind of open up a large list of capabilities, typically at the surface language and library level, so we can resolve those types of things.

Ten years, and this guy is still making excuses. What excuses? That's the internet for you. Oh, you guys just want to. I'd love for the criticism to be somewhat legitimate.

It's like, "Well, you said this thing was going to happen; it didn't happen." Okay, that's fair. But they make excuses like people write smart contracts on Cardano; they like Cardano. It works really well for lots of different things, and people build cool stuff every day. If you go to Tap Tools or Dex Hunter or whatever, you can see all the really cool, amazing things that have been built in the Cardano ecosystem and all the cool projects.

To see that they're actually doing real, interesting stuff and they're upgrading all the time—Men Swap upgraded, Sunday Swap upgraded. People are trying to keep up with all the new capabilities, and it's a very bright community filled with a lot of vibrant, young, and passionate people. That's why we're successful, and that's what keeps Cardano going and pushing Cardano through. I'm kind of sad that they never get the credit that they deserve. When people criticize, they say Cardano just doesn't exist.

Those people don't exist. Nothing exists. Nothing's been done. It's just a wallet. You say, "Have you ever actually spent a moment and used Cardano?

" "I can't do that; it's not possible." A YouTuber told me it's not possible. Yeah, okay, but let's say you're wrong.