Angels and Demons

hi this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado today is march 10th 2022 and the work continues been a long week i've been a very involved week a lot of work got done but i promised i wouldn't say anything about it so i'll let other people comment on those things but i wanted to make this video to talk a little bit about some personal things that aren't directly connected to cardano and are so recently a publication came out that shall remain nameless and it said a lot of stuff about a lot of different people what's relevant to me is there were some questions about my integrity as a person and i'm not here to address everything certainly some things are a bit bizarre like claims i jumped out of a helicopter and these types of things and other things i think are a bit unfair and semantical yes i do have a college degree yes i do have graduate credits at cu boulder and math and yes i am a dropout because i didn't by definition complete the things that i set out to do with the degree programs i was in that said it's been a long and amazing life and we've built so much over the years you guys have all seen it in a very transparent open way the work and it stands on its own merits and for itself but the problem i have is that there's an assertion that somehow any concern or issue with me is in some way connected to disintegrity of the cardinal project or the work of other people and that's not fair and unfortunately that's the world that we live in every single thing in the cardano ecosystem is the product of people spending time to write stuff or code stuff and each and every one of you can see those things and verify these things for yourself founders don't matter petty squabbles don't matter rivalries don't matter yet there seems to be this amazing human tendency to declare angels and demons for the people who support the people who built the projects these people are deities they're the smartest people the wisest people the most capable people they're never wrong they'll never let you down and for the people who hate these projects they look at the founders as demons they're always wrong there's always a lurking evil intent everyone is malicious and seeks to get you hurt you and the truth is somewhere in between humans are enormously complicated they have all kinds of things in life ups and downs and we let you down sometimes and other times we inspire you the point of the technology we build the point of these ecosystems the entire point of the labors of cardano and all these other projects has always been to take the things where we can't afford people to let us down our money our privacy our life our liberty and put them in the hands of agents who never can by design 130 plus papers 130 plus papers the most complex code you could write and everybody complains about it because it's weird 70 plus countries now heads of state pretty much every month it seems like or some fortune 500 ceo or some damn billionaire somewhere the reality is i've gotten in point my life where it's too damn surreal for fiction that's where i'm at there is no meaningful way i can sit at a bar and look at the guy to the left of me and tell him what i do who i am and what i've seen and have them believe me i own a blackhawk helicopter people i raise bison in a few years we're probably gonna bring back the willie mammoth does any of that sound real or reasonable it's a surreal time and it's a surreal world and the boundaries of all these things are crazy we have marketplaces in our industry that sell pictures of pictures nfts that are worth thirteen billion dollars it's a strange time and it's a time when honesty doesn't seem to exist in humanity everyone is lying us government is russia is every single event there's no integrity left we all feel this and we've all been demoralized by this yet we seem to somehow believe that it's going to be a property all people have all the time the point of blockchain technology has always been a different approach a different way my life story is incredible and i've done a lot of remarkable things graduated from high school when i was 15 years old think about that i was homeschooled that's why i was able to do it so quickly by the time most people go to college i already had a college degree did that no because none of these things are represented because that's not the intent it's the politics of personal destruction it's aggregate narratives nothing is fair in narratives and sometimes it's easier to compress things together and play the semantics game and that's fine if people want to do it but the real reality is what did we accomplish in life where did we go who did we go there with while we were going there did we rise people up or tear people down it's an undeniable truth that there are now millions of people in the cardano ecosystem it's also an undeniable truth that cardano has outgrown any entity that asserts dominion over it it is truly decentralized and as much yours as it is mine and anyone else in the technology we had to invent to accommodate that to grow us there that technology is revolutionary in many different categories and it's not uniquely true for us it's the same for ethereum with vitalik it's the same with dozens of other ecosystems this is the best of us in that respect what we see lately floating around the tmz politics of personal destruction it's a legacy and it's a legacy mostly perpetuated by people who are upset and angry fearful and they're just looking for an out they're looking for some meaning and reason and a world that's increasingly losing its ability to have meaning and reason now when i retire years from now i'm going to write a memoir nice beautiful book and i'll tell every story and all the things as i recall it go through all my journal entries and so forth but today right now i'm in the arena and i have a job to do i have things to do and you see here's the thing after all this noise subsides we wake up tomorrow and nothing has materially changed there's still a crisis in ukraine there's still work to do in africa there's still code to write there's still papers to write and we keep going on the dogs can bark really loud sometimes the caravan still has to move on that is the expectation and that's the only integrity i think any of us can find you get every right to like people or dislike people choose your villains choose your heroes pick your angels and demons my only recommendation to you is build your life around the things that are principled things that are transcendent of humanity things that don't change the immutable things because those are the things that when times come hard they never let you down those are the things that don't succumb to human frailties ever my life's work my accidental life's work a long time ago i thought i was going to be a doctor then i said i'll be a proper mathematician wasn't too good at that dropped out of that my life work stumbled into being in the business of integrity erotically algorithmic integrity and i'm pretty damn good at it because i brought an army of people together and inspired them to do their best work and continue to do so many of you listening are among them and the algorithmic integrity is a hell of a lot better than anything humanity will ever offer you stop looking for heroes stop looking for villains start looking for principles that's all that really matters now more things will eventually come as we make progress i can't imagine the kind of books will be written about the bioethics of the extinction i can't imagine the kinds of things that will be written about the choices that we're making today in africa and other places the leaders we choose to work with the revolutions we didn't back the civil wars that we had to pick aside or by staying neutral have an issue these are hard decisions i have to make and other people have to make in my company every single day sometimes we get it right and sometimes we get it wrong but that's just the nature of the game and we try to have guiding principles as we go through a long road ahead and damn it was a frustrating week but it was also a very liberating week because in addition to seeing the worst in people i saw the best in people i saw so many of you realize the greater truth that we got a job to do and so i'd like to say thank you to all of you i'd also like to say if i let any of you down i'm always sorry i can't carry the weight of the world on my shoulders and i am not a perfect person in any respect but i do wake up every single day and try my best there's been days when it's two hours of sleep and you just have to go there's been days where travel to eight countries in two weeks you don't even remember where you're at i remember years ago i had just come in from south korea and i was in tokyo and i went to a late night steak dinner and i hadn't slept really properly for a few days and i got the exchange rate wrong because it's a thousand to one on average in south korea it's a hundred to one in japan with yen so i bought a steak thinking i was buying a sixty dollar steak and it turned out it was a six hundred dollar steak it was a bit of a surprise when i got the bill and started doing the exchange rate these are the many many many many stories not told but often remembered over the years but i look back at all of them fondly because each and every one of these are the ones that enabled me to get to this point where we actually have a chance to make a difference in the world a lot of people call me arrogant narcissistic dominating the spotlight but it's actually the opposite i enjoy solitude i really do i enjoy being the guy in the back and not having to worry about the spotlight i oftentimes turn down events for that reason the only reason why i show up every single day and keep fighting as hard as i do is because of you guys i really do love what you've given me as a community and the things you teach me and how much i've grown as a human being as a result of that you see the best in me i get paintings people make every day hand-painted drawings people make every day they don't draw a terrible person a wicked person they draw somebody they really look up to the angel side of things and i take that seriously i look at that and i say what every day i should do a little better i should stay in the spotlight keep fighting as long as they're punching me as long as they criticize me and i'm taking the hits it gives all of you the time that you need to grow and build what you need to build i can take it it's not too bad it's here and i'll keep doing it going up to my ranch it's gonna be a lot of fun go see my bison come back on monday it's another day in the office every other day is another day in the office it's just how it is and you guys are gonna keep doing what you do and i'll never forget that trust and i'll never forget what you want which is just a better world no one is here in cardano because the great charles hoskinson and his grand reputation we started this on the back of me being kicked out of ethereum all of you are here because you look at what we're actually talking about which is that we're building something that's going to be around centuries from now we're building something that has built into it something different something unique something new sometimes scary sometimes not clear if it's a net positive but always interesting the name itself cardano was a deeply complicated man i will remind you in addition to being brilliant and a wonderful doctor in mathematician cardona was an advocate scoundrel known for degenerate gambling sword fights all kinds of chicanery this is a personal physician of the pope and excommunicated think about that and how complex of a life it is it's a reminder to us all that these labors are neutral and it's up to us to decide how we want to use them and where we want to use them so people who don't like me they're going to wake up tomorrow with the exact same opinion perhaps reinforced to the people who do like me it's business as usual but in both cases the truth of the matter is it's frankly irrelevant to what we do and what we build absolutely irrelevant my record stands you can look at it clearly of what i've built and what i've done i exist keep learning read a book every week take classes on coursera try to stay up to date with things right now taking a class on charlemagne it's pretty fun pretty interesting every now and then take a computer science class here and there it's pretty cool lifelong learner always have that involved in a lot of research all over the board just about getting into of all things hydroponics that's my life stranger than fiction so it's up to you how seriously you want to take it and it's up to you where you want to go with it i does not care i know where i'm going i know what we need to do and there's clarity in the work and i love the people we work with they're with me i'm with you so thank you all for listening i do appreciate it even the people who dislike me i love you too and maybe just maybe we can get back to the vision of the space and stop talking about the people of the space but probably not there'll be another wave of two of stuff and then again come monday tuesday maybe wednesday who knows we get back to work that's that until next time cheers