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Summary

  • Charles Hoskinson discusses his diverse business ventures, including a clinic focused on anti-aging and longevity research in Gillette, Wyoming.
  • Hoskinson Health and Wellness aims to prioritize curative medicine over ongoing treatments, exploring methods like psychedelics and electrical stimulation for health improvement.
  • The clinic has grown to 3,000 patients and has established partnerships with universities for clinical research.
  • He highlights the need for modernization in healthcare software, advocating for open-source solutions and data privacy technologies from the cryptocurrency space.
  • Hoskinson expresses concerns about the vulnerability of modern electronics to solar events, referencing the historical Carrington event and its potential impact today.
  • He discusses the importance of AI in healthcare, acknowledging both its potential benefits and risks, particularly regarding misinformation and deepfakes.
  • The AMA covers various topics, including the right to repair, ongoing projects like World Mobile Token, and the implications of blockchain in medical claims processing.
  • Hoskinson shares insights on personal health, including his use of devices for sleep apnea and plans for studying fasting protocols at his hotel in Gillette.
  • He emphasizes the significance of self-love and patience as key life lessons, reflecting on personal growth and the importance of positive relationships.
  • The conversation touches on various technical topics, including the potential for blockchain to verify media authenticity and the future of AI technologies in business and society.

Full Transcript

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is May 27th, 2023. It’s been a very fun year; I think we’ve really enjoyed it all together, and we’ve gotten so much done so far. I've got Lobster on the mic having some fun, and I've got my coffee right here. I figured we are long overdue for an AMA.

I run six companies, and all of them do different things, from bison ranching to synthetic biology to medicine. I had probably one of the best moments this month when I had a chance to go up to my clinic that we’ve been building for 18 months now in Gillette, Wyoming, just off of Highway 50. Hoskinson Health and Wellness is a primary care facility, but the long-term aim is to conduct clinical research for anti-aging and longevity, and to come up with protocols to make us all healthier. If you haven’t noticed, I’m a little overweight—not exactly the healthiest person around—so I’m making a real investment in my health and trying to explore everything from stem cells to peptides to the latest ways to improve sleep. For example, I recently got an Aura ring and I’ve been using a device called Exciteosa to treat my sleep apnea.

I’ve already seen a considerable improvement in my apnea score, and I’m not having any major events at night anymore. My pulse oximetry readings are pretty good throughout the night. The amazing thing is when one focuses on curative medicine instead of just ongoing treatments. One of the biggest issues in the American healthcare system is its fixation on treating conditions. You come in, get a pill or an injection, and stay on it for as long as possible.

There’s not a good market to actually cure things. It was a lot of fun to go to my clinic and see something that, long-term, is going to focus on cures instead of treatments. We’re looking at using psychedelics for mental health, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and various methods like electrical stimulation of the tongue for sleep apnea to help people achieve a better state of health. I’m really proud of that, and I think it’s one of those long-term plays that will take years to fully realize. It was just a dream on a whiteboard 18 months ago, and now we have 3,000 patients at the facility, physicians working there, compound pharmacists, lab personnel, and research partnerships with different universities and institutes.

The ability to conduct clinical research is just so much fun. What was the best part? It was seeing the sheer appreciation and kindness from the community of Gillette and broader Campbell County. It was extraordinary to see how many people showed up for the grand opening—over 700 people. That doesn’t seem a lot, but that’s a town of less than 30,000 people, so basically, the majority of the town came out, even in the rain, to see the opening of a health clinic—not exactly the most exciting thing in the world.

But everybody had smiles, everyone was excited, and they were very appreciative of having the opportunity for a different form of healthcare that, hopefully in the long term, makes everyone in that town a lot healthier. Then we can apply that towards the broader healthcare system. As you build things, you learn things, and one of the things I’ve learned is how primitive and backward the software that runs the healthcare industry in America is. We have an electronic medical record system, and it is a constant pain and struggle to get it plugged in to work with other things—basic things that you’d like to have. In fact, only recently did they enable two-factor authentication.

I can’t think of anything more personal than your health records, and for that not to be protected by two-factor authentication by a major EMR is pretty extraordinary to me. The desire to have walled gardens everywhere is prevalent. I do believe that in the coming years, there’s going to be an open-source revolution for healthcare software. Concepts that have come out of the cryptocurrency space could definitely be applied in the health industry. In particular, I believe that the technology we’re building from Midnight, which preserves data privacy and confidentiality, can absolutely be applied to an EMR system.

I also believe there’s great potential for concepts the fediverse and the recent app protocol that’s replacing ActivityPub, which Jack Dorsey is working on for Twitter, to be useful for medical record systems. At the end of the day, it’s a very similar model: you have servers that need to talk to each other and users that need to migrate between those servers. Self-sovereign identity is not integrated in any sense in the EMR world, but it absolutely could be. I think it’s very prudent for us to explore how to apply these new technologies to the industry. In addition to innovations in treatment, I think there’s going to be a great blockchain and open-sourcing of the healthcare industry software system, which is long overdue.

Anyway, I just wanted to share that opening, and it’s been a little while since we’ve had an AMA. This show is not about me; it’s about you and your questions, so let’s get to it. HIPAA is serious business. Yes, sir, it is, and a whole industry has been formed around it, for better or for worse. As a front desk worker in a family care center in Chile, it makes me deeply happy to hear about your commitment to health and creating a place where answers will be clearly given.

Absolutely! I think AI is going to have one of the biggest impacts ever on healthcare in its entire history. It’s extraordinary to see what Glass Health, GPT, and these other systems are doing. I do have a lot of concerns, and certainly there are issues with hallucination and how and where people apply AI, but generative AI is going to be a big deal for healthcare, and we’re really excited. Well, this is a new one.

Hi, Charles! I have my salary paid in ADA. Well, thank you so much! I have one question: can you tell me your thoughts on the Carrington event that happened in 1859, and if it happens again? I believe the Carrington event was the solar flare that knocked out all the telegraph wires.

Let me fact-check that. Yes, let’s see here. The Carrington event was the most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history, peaking between the first and second of September in 1859 during solar cycle 10. It created strong auroral displays that were reported globally and caused sparking and even fires at multiple telegraph stations. The geomagnetic storm was most likely the result of a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the Sun colliding with Earth’s magnetic field.

The problem with an event like that—and that’s a great question—is that in 1859, the only real electronic systems we had were telegraphs. We had a few other things that could potentially be impacted by a CME, but for the most part, it just roasted some telegraph wires. Now that the entire world is highly digital, a lot of people believe that if we had an equivalent event today, it would destroy most of our satellite communications and badly damage a lot of our digital infrastructure. This could lead to a complete unraveling of modern society if something like this occurred. You can obviously mitigate it by having electronics that are shielded from the consequences of a CME, but most electronics are not and would not be.

Certain systems would probably survive, but most systems would be badly damaged. The problem is that these types of events, these geomagnetic storms, aren’t exactly infrequent. For the majority of human history, we didn’t care because they’d come once or twice a century, and we would just see pretty lights in the sky, like aurora borealis on steroids, and move on. However, this is the first two centuries—the 20th and 21st—where we’ve had substantial domination of our lives by electronics, and electronics are quite vulnerable to things the Carrington event. It’s something we need to think about seriously, and we need to harden our electronics and systems for it.

This also shows you the power of decentralization. If you are very centralized and a terrible event happens, everything goes down. If you have redundancy, resilience, and the ability to replicate and restore from one node to all the other nodes, you can recover quickly from these types of events. Is World Mobile Token still building? Yes, sir, they are!

In fact, we need to do a Twitter Space with Mickey. I love Mickey; he’s a good friend. Can you still show us all the writing devices in your pocket? I’ve got my pen; it’s right here. Will Hoskinson Health have an echocardiograph department?

Yes, we do have someone running it. How about fat boys like me? Well, I tell you what, how about I treat myself before I can say I can treat you? I think you’d ever go on a month-long fast? actually, we are going to study long-term fasting protocols.

I own a hotel in Gillette that we’ve been refurbishing for long-term stays for workers, but also for experiments to be conducted. We can do sleep studies, fasting protocols, and mental health treatment at that facility we’re building up. Before the end of the year, I’d like to start exploring if we could look at what the True North Foundation is doing with their 40-day extended fast. If there’s a way to construct a proper series of tests, do weekly DEXA scans, and comprehensive lab panels, we could conduct a supervised extended water fast and study different refeeding protocols. They do some unusual things at True North, like no electrolytes, and I just don’t understand that.

So that’s definitely something we’re going to look into. Thank you, Charles. What’s the hardest life lesson you’ve learned? that’s a great question, and it’s something I wish people would ask more often. I think there are two parts to that.

One is you have to be patient and allow things to go at their own pace. I’m a very impatient guy; I want everything today. That’s what makes me a good entrepreneur because I’m always pushing people to their limits, pushing them to be their best, and pushing for things to be at their most extreme. That’s good for progress, but there are things we can control as human beings and things we can’t. Change can only happen so quickly, and the wisest among us have a pretty good sense of what is optional and what is mandatory in terms of change.

That’s one big life lesson that has taken me quite a bit of time to appreciate. The other thing is trying to find the best parts in people, even though you may find them utterly distasteful. Lincoln used to say, “I dislike this man; I don’t know him enough to paraphrase him.” That’s something we’re not taught. We’re taught to have enemies and tribes; we’re taught to dislike or like people, and if they’re the other, we go after them.

Trying to see the best in people that you disagree with, compete with, or in some cases, have even harmed you is a very hard lesson. It’s difficult for people to build relationships that way, but I’ve noticed that every single time I’ve indulged that thinking, I’ve been a lot happier and felt better about life. So, the patience to let things come in their due time and the acceptance of people for who they are—not who you want them to be—and the ability to see the best in them are some of the hardest and most difficult life lessons. You never truly learn them; you have to relearn them again and again and again. Every day is a reset in certain respects.

There’s also a realization that the most toxic relationship people tend to have in life is with themselves. You see all this stuff from Gottman about how good relationships are supposed to be. He writes books like "The Science of Trust" and talks about attunement and bids. These concepts give you the ability to relate and interact with people. We think we’re doing a good job when we start purging toxic people from our lives and welcoming in non-toxic people.

We start engaging in productive, constructive behavior, but then we don’t apply that standard to our self-assessment. You enter into a relationship where you don’t allow yourself to enjoy the fruits of your labors or your great accomplishments. For example, let’s say you’re in a big workout program, and you’re working hard. You put in a lot of effort, and you only lose one pound in a week. A lot of people say, “Oh, that’s terrible!

Why am I so fat and stupid?” But losing one pound a week is 50 pounds a year—that’s a lot of weight! It’s not bad. So why would you beat yourself up? You put in the work; you did.

You put in the effort, and at least you’re moving in the right direction or at least not moving in the wrong direction. That’s pretty good! You’re still above ground. But why is it okay for you to be so self-critical and hurt yourself like that? I think that’s the deepest and toughest life lesson for all of us: the most toxic relationships tend to be with ourselves.

We have to find a way to get out of that thinking and that neurosis, and we have to get into a position where we love ourselves. People say, “Well, that’s narcissism.” Actually, narcissism is caused by the absence of self-love. That’s why people develop narcissistic tendencies externally. If they were confident internally and had self-love internally, there would be no reason to radiate narcissism.

Hey, Charles, do you think we can create an ICD-10 world platform to process medical claims under the Cardinal blockchain? I think you can use AI to do a lot of that, and the blockchain component can be about access control and ownership, as well as the brokering of relationships and exchanges of information. What’s the correct way to pronounce Cardano? Cardano. How’s Ergo?

I really love the ecosystem and the community; they’re great people, and they are building hard. Any Ethiopia news? Slow and steady wins the race; they’re still getting kids in and getting it done. Charles, with the increasing ease of creating deepfake AI-generated media, do you see a future where blockchain technology has to be used to verify videos, images, and recordings are legitimate? Yes, I think in a world of deepfakes, we are going to need to have a verification system.

I believe we are going to migrate from a world where we see something with our eyes and believe it, to a world where we see something with our eyes and believe it’s false until proven true. Everything is going to move into a whitelisted and automatically blacklisted mindset in terms of veracity within the next 12 to 24 months. Indistinguishable video and audio will be possible for the most part, so you will see videos of Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden doing horrible things, and they’ll be fake. But you’ll see them; they’ll exist. People will create them, and nation-states will create them to discredit and dissuade people.

It’s going to spread like wildfire, and people are going to up-click the things they and down-click the things they don’t, but they will spread and be used as instruments of polarization. The only way to get out of it is to have verified information and verified content. At the time of creation, you need to create an NFT, sign it, and have some chain of evidence that it was created on a legitimate device. It’s almost like that Star Trek episode in Deep Space Nine where Garrick and Cisco partner up to create a forgery of a holographic recording for the Cardassians and the Dominion plotting against the Romulans. They recorded it on this opolithic data rod that’s a one-time recording used for archiving in Cardassia.

They get this real expert holographic engineer to come in, and the Romulan Senator says it’s a fake. But then they kill him, and they think the Romulans recover the rod and believe the imperfections were caused by the explosion. Anyway, that’s what’s happening. We actually have to start talking about how we know something is not a fake because we can create fakes that are indistinguishable from real life. It’s going to be an emerging area of technology.

Can you please update us on the Avilo project? I am going to go look for aliens soon at an undisclosed location at an undisclosed time, but sooner than you think. Hopefully, we’re going to be able to find something, and maybe, just maybe, a documentary is going to be made by a certain company. Can’t say anything more. Charles, do you view Ozempic as a net positive even though it’s not a cure?

That’s one of those weight loss peptides. Yes, it’s a diabetes drug that they’re using off-label for weight loss, and it’s an amazing thing—semaglutide and the rest of the family. They’re just extraordinary. You inject them 25 to 50 milliliters once a week, and then you just ratchet up over time. It slows the emptying of the stomach, regulates your insulin, and makes you less hungry.

Usually, people go on it and lose a lot of weight pretty quickly, so it’s pretty good. It’s certainly a lot better than the lap band surgeries and other things people do for weight loss. Can we be immortal from a biological sense? Yes, because there already exist creatures that are. You might ask, “What type of creature would be immortal?

” Well, I’m glad you asked. Let me show you something really cool. I got a picture of them right here. Let me just go ahead and open this up for you guys. I just feel your excitement!

What’s the best way? I’ll open that in a new tab. Oh, I can get a better picture than that. Come on now. I want a large picture—a really exciting large picture.

Oh God, yeah, that is a sexy picture! You guys are very excited about this; I can tell. I just feel it radiating from all of you, waiting with bated breath at your keyboards. Let’s see here. And then we’re going to go over here to everybody’s favorite reference.

Here we go. Okay, you guys ready? You fired up? Yeah, I’m not actually Rickrolling you. This is a creature that we know to be biologically immortal.

Why? It’s a jellyfish, Turritopsis dohrnii. Sorry, I wish I spoke that language. It’s also known as an immortal jellyfish—a species of small biologically immortal jellyfish found worldwide in temperate to tropical waters. It’s one of the few known cases of animals capable of reverting completely to a sexually immature state.

How about that? Basically, when they get old, they form a cyst and regenerate themselves, becoming young again. Pretty cool! Here’s the whole genomic analysis I like that system a lot, so I think the whole Divinity series and what they've done is a good inspiration for how to do a game properly. However, you also have to build it in a game world.

The problem is that Wizards of the Coast has gone off the deep end, as woke as it gets, and they've destroyed all the magic in that world. I'm a real big fan of the Forgotten Realms series. The good old days are over, so I have to create a new game world to embed it within, but we'll get there. Love you, Charles. Thank you for doing good things and for being part of the community.

Hi, what are your thoughts about the metabolic theory of cancer? There are some people who think cancer is a metabolic disorder, usually connected somehow to the mitochondria, not a genetic disorder. That runs against the orthodoxy of cancer research from last century. It also doesn't make a lot of sense given that some cancer vaccines are starting to work, and they're based on the genetic theory of cancer. I'm not an oncologist or a cancer expert, but from all the cancer research we've looked at, I don't see how that theory makes a lot of sense.

There are statements that if you just change your diet or do certain things, somehow this will cure cancer. There are lots of YouTube videos floating around about it. I think there's merit in the perspective that changing your diet, especially to a low-glucose diet for certain cancers, could be helpful because it starves the tumors—not because there's a mitochondrial dysfunction or it's a metabolic disease. There's the lovely Scientologist Dr. Berg, or whatever his name is, that chiropractor who loves to pretend to be a physician, and he certainly talks about it with authority, as do others.

But I think it's much more on the genetic side. It makes sense, and we know that because we can cause cancers just by tinkering with genes. We do it all the time as researchers with rats and mice in labs. If it were a metabolic disorder, then you could do that. But that's the problem with the Internet: people live in chambers, and they amplify and amplify until it creates all kinds of harm.

Then conspiracy theory thinking starts coming in. It is not a conspiracy theory to believe that pharmaceutical companies are very incentivized to work on slightly better chemotherapy drugs rather than on cures. But at the same time, you can believe that and also believe that cancer is genetic in origin. Neuralink approved for human trials—are we planning to get one eventually, Charles? Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

I do not want a device inserted into my brain in an age when people think CBDCs are a good idea. Charles, what are your thoughts on the Colorado and Minnesota right-to-repair bills and the SCOTUS decision Tyler versus Hennepin? The right to repair is one of those things that is just obvious. I remember a story from when I was a kid. My grandfather on my mom's side, my maternal grandfather, his name is Austin.

He's still a rebel; he's in his mid-90s now. He fought in the Korean War and was in the cable business before he retired. One of the craftiest guys you'll ever meet, he could fix anything—got an electrical problem, got a drywall problem, got a plumbing problem? Austin can fix it. His generation, when they bought a vacuum cleaner or anything, it came with schematics on how to fix them.

I was helping clean out his garage, and he had stuff from the '50s and '40s. I would see this vacuum cleaner, open it up, and there were detailed schematics in the user manual and instructions on how to change wiring and fix things. I asked, "Was this common?" He said, "Yeah, you would not buy something back then unless you knew how to fix it or had access to the manuals and other things to fix it." There was a whole supply chain for these types of things; it was just common thinking in that generation.

Now, fast forward to 2023, and nearly everything you purchase is made with planned obsolescence, and you're supposed to throw it away. Take cell phones, for example. It's really hard to fix them. Even though cell phone repair guys can change a cracked screen, that's hard enough. You can't change the battery; it's very difficult to do that.

It's very difficult to chase cameras. Once it's done, it's done; you throw it away. So the right to repair is basically saying we have to go back to where we were, where when you make things, you have to have the ability to fix those things. In some cases, companies have gone the extra mile, making it difficult to fix, and they actually punish you for fixing it, where damages or destroys the device, voids the warranty, or other things. The right to repair gives you the right to repair things, and I think it is a very important consumer protection.

It's something that we as consumers should have preferences towards. Unfortunately, we tend to buy and consume things that are not good for us. Project Blueprint was Brian Johnson's—that's correct. If you Google Project Blueprint, we could do that right now. It's actually pretty cool.

Here we go. All right, you get to see sexy Brian Johnson—very sexy. Wow, blue! So here's this guy; he's in his 40s. How about that?

Every single day, he's just going at it, publishing all of his results and checking himself every single day. He talks about his entire regimen. I think he's now like stealing blood from his son and doing that. So there you go. He says goal alignment, autonomous self, and the zeroth principle.

Look at him; these are his labs. They're actually pretty remarkable. That's pretty good—age equivalent 28, 16, 25 testosterone indexes—41, 29. Holy moly! So yeah, if you go to Project Blueprint, you can kind of read about him and all the things he's doing to basically make himself live forever.

His meal prep includes all the nice little vegan meals that he's been eating. I'm out of stuff—his pills and the Green Giant super veggie. what always happens to these guys? They get super healthy, and then they get hit by a bus. Rejuvenation Olympics, yeah.

But actually, the big company that we know him from is Kernel Flow. It's this device here, and it's actually one of the coolest devices. It's the Ethos device, and it real-time measures the blood flow throughout the brain. This is a study they did with Kernel Flow and Cybin, where they were actually looking at the effects of ketamine on the human brain. This is before ketamine and after ketamine.

Each of these little things is a module, and it's got an fNIRS sensor. They also have some EEG sensors built in, although it's not a traditional 19-lead; it's a six-lead. It's a really cool device, and we'll have to pick one up at some point. Well, I mean, it's true, right? You always know that guy who's just amazing and super healthy, and then gets struck by lightning.

When are you going to improve your lab results? That's actually something I'm going to do. Once we have everything completely built up, I'll do my own little Project Blueprint and get really healthy and sexy, and then I too will get struck by lightning. Research is being done with a genetically modified poliovirus that multiplies and destroys malignant cells for tumors and glioblastoma. Will your clinic be working on this glioblastoma brain tumor?

No, oncoviruses are not something we specialize in or work in. I'm not so sure it's a good idea to use polio as the vector either. Thoughts on the WHO pandemic treaty? Oh my God, these guys have been wrong and wrong and wrong. Only in government can you be wrong every time, all the time, harm everybody, and get a promotion.

[expletive] them. There needs to be a reckoning in public health. All of public health absolutely needs a reckoning. The things they did over the last three years were inhumane, and they know they're wrong. They know we know they're wrong, and yet they don't care.

They pretend they're not. It's the worst thing that's ever happened on a global scale in my lifetime. Care for a broken heart? Well, the number one thing is exercise. Start there and then get a goal.

Okay, Charles, what are your thoughts on the recent Ledger debacle? This is a classic example of thinking the social contract until we change it. When you create a device—let's say this pen here is a magic hardware wallet device, and I sell it to you. I say, "Crit cats, this pen right here, the keys are generated on the device locally and never leave the device. No one has the power to take them out, and if they try to open the pen up, it destroys your keys or damages the keys.

" You'd say, "Okay, that's the social contract. I am 100% in control and in the driver's seat for my device." Then, somewhere along the way, somebody shows up and updates this device and says, "Okay, well, we may have changed the social contract a little bit. We're taking encrypted shards of this and sending them somewhere else, and you can use this for recovery convenience." Here's the problem: whoever controls the decryption keys for that one, two, or three shards—Shamir secret sharing, whatever it is—if they are subpoenaed, do they have to turn over the decrypted keys to a third party, such as the FBI or the People's Republic of China, or whoever is the issuing entity that they care about in fear?

If the answer is yes, doesn't it just mean that the social contract of this pen is broken? That's the only question we should ask: why did you change the social contract, and why did you open up an attack vector in the device? If I design a device with a wall, that's a world of difference than designing a device with a door. Just because you put a really good lock on the door still means there's now a door there. If somebody's clever, a la hacker aided by GPT, that’s getting smarter, maybe they can figure out a way to open that door.

When they do, you get my [expletive], and that's not what we pay for. That's not what we signed up for. What's the point of it? It's all about convenience. There are Oculus and all these other great wallets out there that are built to be used in a more hot capacity, and they have a backup solution.

People buy those things. So why would they then want to buy your thing? It's just a violation of the social contract, and that's why people are so upset. This industry is very intolerant of people changing social contracts. The reason you like Bitcoin, the reason you like Cardano, the reason you like crypto is that you are so frustrated with people lying to you and changing social contracts on you and screwing you behind your back.

You want something that a person can't change. Adam Back doesn't get to wake up tomorrow and say, "I think Bitcoin absolutely needs to have 22 million coins." They just can't do that. That's why people like these protocols; they can't change them after they get enough social momentum. When people violate that, they get extra sensitive to it and attack those people, saying that those people are wrong or ignorant or don't understand, and this is for their benefit.

You're no better than the banking system with civil asset forfeiture at that point or any of these other politicians who lecture us. But that's just one man's opinion. By the way, Lace will have a paper wallet generator in it. It took us a little longer to get Lace out the gate, but I have not forgotten about it. What I think is going to be the best way for long-term storage of your keys is to take a paper wallet, generate it, encrypt it with a PGP key.

You have two QR codes: a public and a private. The private's encrypted with the PGP. You print it, put a paper copy in your safe, and store a PDF of it in your email. It's encrypted. As long as you trust AES and PGP 4K, you're good to go.

If you don't trust it, later on we can add a two-layer encryption with a post-quantum algorithm as well. You have to still secure the keys, so you need to store those decryption keys somewhere. But if it's PGP, it could be right on your YubiKey, and that's a very secure vector. By the way, they can't change those because the firmware is actually burnt in. How about that?

We can do a video on it at some point. If you want to learn about mitochondrial dysfunction being a key driver of human illness, look into Jack Cruz, a neurosurgeon. I didn’t say it’s not a driver of human dysfunction. In fact, that's why red light therapy is so effective because it has a direct impact there. Same for NAD.

It's more about saying what it causes or not. Here's what happens: people take a little bit of truthiness and extrapolate and extrapolate until they eventually go to Crazy Town. I'll give you an example. There's this gal named Wendy, and she was on some conservative alt-right podcast run by some hack job journalists. She says, "there's an Epstein connection in Cardano.

" Okay, best news to me. She says, "Well, the SingularityNET thing over there, apparently Ben Goertzel and Hanson got some money from a foundation connected with Epstein." Okay, well, that's a true statement, I guess. There's a financial connection there. So then that means automatically that the Prism project, which is getting academic credentials digitized and self-sovereignty for Ethiopian students to use to verify their transcripts, is apparently being harvested for sex crimes in Ethiopia and abroad by a new world order cabal.

What evidence do you have? Do anything about it? No, I should sue you. Why? Because you're just making it up.

You're just connecting things that are completely unconnected. You start with apparently a grant from a not-for-profit to a project that was 10 years ago, 15 years ago, long before it entered the Cardano world. I wasn't aware of it, wasn't connected to it, had nothing to do with it, never met any of the people there. That's Ben Goertzel's thing. He comes over into the Cardano ecosystem and creates a project in Cardano.

SingularityNET has nothing to do with any of that stuff. Then somehow that means that all the stuff over here in an unrelated entity, an unrelated company, is not only connected, but there's a nefarious use case for that. That would be like saying, "Oh, okay, well, that housekeeper over there cleaned this guy's house, who turns out to be a Nazi, and because that housekeeper also cleans the other house, it must mean the people in that house are not only Nazis, but they're actually running a death camp." What evidence do you provide? No, no, no evidence at all.

There you go. That's the problem with how information propagates and spreads these days. People start somewhere where there's something that they notice that doesn't seem quite right, and there's usually some legitimacy behind that, the whole Epstein thing. Yeah, it looks the dude was killed. Yeah, it looks he worked for an intelligence agency.

In fact, when he was murdered, it was probably like this awkward meeting between the Brits and the Americans, the Mossad and the others, like, "Who's going to kill him?" They have to draw straws to see who gets the honor of it because the deal was just up to his neck in weird stuff. The fact that nobody's looking into it in mainstream media tells you everything you need to know. That's reality, and we all kind of understand that. But you see, when you're a billionaire or at least play a billionaire and you're cutting hundreds of millions of dollars of checks all around, you touch everybody at that point.

Everybody gets a stain. Then what you do is you say every single person who touched that had that intention for the rest of time. Then you've created a very bizarre thing in your mind. We see it; I get emails about it. They say, "What is the Cardano connection?

What did you guys do? Oh my God, are these children being used for sex crimes?" It's it's academic credentials the Ethiopian government already has that are siloed and they're being put with DIDs so kids can now verify their transcripts, even if the government's not operating or functional, and they don’t have to wait on a bureaucracy 12 weeks, 18 weeks to send a transcript to a university. Isn't that a good thing for them? That's government data they already have.

Did you get an A or a B? That's it. That's the point of the program. But apparently, there's now this connection. It is so reckless, utterly irresponsible, and frankly slanderous in every sense of the word.

Now, does this person care about it? No. What is my recourse? You spend two years and millions of dollars suing them. You win, and do you make any money from it?

No. Why? Because that person doesn't have any money to get. It's like getting blood out of a stone. It's like suing Alex Jones at this point.

Okay, you win. Now here's the problem: by winning, it's a conspiracy. Well, obviously, the courts work for us. It's some new world order thing, and we're just proxies in the New World Order. That's why the courts gave them the victory.

So did you win the moral victory? No. Did a single person who believed in election fraud in 2020 change their mind when Dominion won against Fox News and the 700-plus million dollars that Fox has to pay them? Not a single person. So you don't get anything from it, and it just spreads and spreads.

They double down and double down, and then they switch methods. That's the world we live in. The problem is when you do that in healthcare, people make decisions based on that information that hurts them, harms them, and kills them. This is the rub with misinformation. This happens in every political spectrum.

I'm a pro-vaccine guy, and I've taken pretty much every vaccine you can imagine. However, upon reflection of the data, I've changed my mind about the COVID vaccines. There's a lot of evidence that they're not really effective and not really safe. There are papers I can give you that are peer-reviewed showing your chance of blindness is twice as high among the vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated. You can look at the myocarditis risk; you can look at a litany of things that they told us would never happen, the spike protein would stay localized and not become a systemic concern.

Apparently, it is. It's found in breast milk; it's found in all kinds of tissues; it's even in your brain tissue, and it's cytotoxic. It's going to create persistent inflammation for lots of people. They said it could GPT-5 is right around the corner, faster than you think. It's not just better; it's exponentially better, and it can do everything.

I see every business having deep and detailed conversations about what they're going to do. Let me show you something. There's a conference I'm going to in August. It's over in Las Vegas, AI4 2023, from August 7th to the 9th. I'm just a guest, not speaking or anything like that, and they already have 1,700 people, 275 speakers, and 100 different exhibits.

Just look at the sponsor set they have here. At the diamond level, you have some big companies, and at the platinum level, you have AWS, Capital One, Dropbox, IBM, HP, and the CIA as a gold-level sponsor. When you look at the speaker lineup, they have pretty much everybody and their uncle. For government, they have the Chief Data Officer of the Coast Guard, the CIO of the U.S.

Department of Commerce, and the Chief Data Officer of the United States Air Force. You also have KBR and the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. Everybody and their uncle is coming to this event. Normally, five to ten years ago, you’d get some dude coming here, but now every one of them is talking about how to use these technologies. The problem is, they’re all teaching each other and learning with or without human consent.

There was a great memo that was leaked out of Google, stating that the AI business is changing rapidly. These big projects by Google, OpenAI, and others are going to be overshadowed by open-source projects, which can turn all the alignment safeguards off. If you have something in your back pocket that you can access from a phone, something smarter than any person you've ever met, that knows every topic and can train rapidly, it becomes a big threat. My friend Lex Friedman has done a lot of podcasts with various people warning about this, from Nick Bostrom to others. I guarantee it's not overblown; it's a big deal, and everyone is paying attention.

Conferences that would normally attract 400 people now have almost 2,000 attendees. You have every agency sponsoring it. As for the president of France, it's not my place to criticize him, but he did mess up. Thoughts on ordinals in BTC? They should migrate to Cardano; we have a much better ecosystem.

A round two with Lex would be cool. How's it going with Ada? Ada's going well. I thought Midnight was supposed to launch already. Where did we ever give you a date?

Hey Charles, what day will we be talking at the Blockchain Futurist Conference? I don't know what day they had me on the agenda for, but I will be there. I promised them I missed it last year. We are making great progress, though. How do you deal with spamming the network for Babel fees?

If there's no economic value in the token being transacted, nobody's going to accept it, so no market will exist for it. The transaction won't have a counterparty to vouch for it, so it doesn't clear. Well, blah blah, you too, Phillip. Joe Rogan really needs to have you on. I've been trying to get on Rogan; it's just an issue of timing and other things.

We have the psychedelics research, and I'm a bison rancher. We do guided hunts, and I'm literally discovering alien life in Papua New Guinea. We have six companies; we're bringing back the woolly mammoth. I helped create Cardano and Ethereum. At what point am I an interesting guest for a guy like Rogan?

I said I’m just going on Tim Pool. We're going to do a Tim Pool and Alex Jones episode, and we’re going to be there for eight and a half hours. We’re going to put a 40 on the table, and Alex has to drink the whole thing. It's going to get progressively better hour by hour, and more conspiratorial. We had 128 calves this year, red dogs.

Charles, Tim, and Alex would be awesome together. Exactly! Tim, if you want this to happen, call Alex. Let’s set it up. I’ll even fly out and come to you.

It’ll be fun. I’ll even bring a robot with me and put some sort of AI in it. Thoughts on the Tazos Mumbai upgrade? Congratulations to them; I think they’re doing some roll-up stuff. Charles, how's the tier transaction project progressing?

Pretty well. We published the paper, and now we're trying to combine that with Babel fees and get a fixed-cost contract out to a third party to take care of it. Charles, have you ever been to India? Yes, I have. Do you have a DMT story to share now or on Joe Rogan?

I literally have a device right here, the Roxiva, that causes you to get into a psychedelic state under the right conditions. Have you ever been to Northeast England? Yes, I have. While I was there, I listened to the BBC in the countryside and talked about the issues. We have plenty of partnerships.

Hi Charles, what size shoe are you? I am a size 12 American wide. Got big feet and big hands. Is Chainlink dead? No, Chainlink is still around.

Link brains, you guys are running it and getting it done. Charles, when are you coming to Zimbabwe? I’d actually love to go to Zimbabwe. Once all the final papers come in, it's up to the community how quickly they want to move. The priority is SIP 1694 and the GCD backlog, which is coming along at lightning speed.

There are a lot of different directions one can go in. Are you engaging with any government agencies for Cardano use, be it Wyoming or even the DOD branches? We are definitely looking into the Wyoming stablecoin project. I spoke with the governor and the state treasurer and auditor on it, and we’ll see what we can do there. Nothing on the DOD side yet, but we may have something on synthetic biology.

Have you been drinking today, Charles? No, I’m just cranky. There’s just a lot of built-up rage. Tear my shirt open, and it’ll say "Thug Life" on my chest, ready to go. What happened to Chicago 3304?

They’re still around; they just changed into a different organization. Any chance of using British Columbia to publicly shame plastic manufacturers of one-time-use plastic bottles? What do you have against British Columbia, Sam? What did they ever do to you? They’re nice people up there, don’t ?

Well, people change when they learn some stuff. I couldn’t imagine or fathom that something would be done on a scale of billions of people like that, knowing full well that we’re never going to forget, and consequences will come to those who did it. Now we just have to go down that road, but the data changed, and there were a lot of lies. I’m pretty pissed off, and there are a lot of people who are pretty pissed off. Will the donkeys appear in the Crypto Bison game?

Maybe. Where's the redhead? Which redhead do you refer to? Speaking of that reckoning, that was in Ron DeSantis's Twitter space with Elon Musk. He says there needs to be a COVID reckoning.

That language is not going to change or go away, and people are getting angrier year by year. There will be investigations. What did I think of Guardians of the Galaxy 3? It was a great movie; I really enjoyed it. I couldn't eat a steak that night.

Is Elon aware of Cardano? Yes, Elon is aware of Cardano but must never speak its name, for it is too pure to be known. Is Max Keiser having a stroke yet when he sees the new decentralization papers? I think he’s had a stroke a long time ago, and we’re just dealing with post-stroke Max. Trump did one good thing: he gave everybody a nickname.

You got Sleepy Joe, Low Energy Jeb, Lion Ted. We gotta do something for Max. I think I’m going to start calling him Min Keiser instead of Max Keiser. What do you think happened with that Twitter space? DeSantis is the classic example of stopping overcooking it.

The meat's done, goddammit. He got a piece of gold delivered to him, which is a guy who is one of the biggest media storms in human history with his own platform, with 300 million people, basically saying, "I will give an event to you that more people will watch than Fox News by a factor of ten." The problem is DeSantis doesn’t really understand Twitter or these new social media platforms well. What he should have done, because prior history shows that Twitter spaces are a bit shaky and unreliable, is have an opening act come in. People flood in, give the servers time to catch up, and have someone like Tucker Carlson moderate the space as a warm-up act.

You build up that hype, get it really excited, then boom! When Elon joins, you have a tweet hit, and then everybody listens. You don’t put all your eggs in one basket; you also live stream to YouTube I do. Some of you are listening to this on Twitter, some on YouTube. I simulcast with both, so if the Twitter feed goes down, your live stream on YouTube is there.

If you want to take it up a notch, get Mr. Beast in there to do the YouTube side or PewDiePie. Then, oh my God, you’ve got this guy and that guy. It’s like everybody’s losing their minds. You give away 50 million people, 100 million people, and it’s all going crazy.

You burn the liberal media a little bit, monetize the channel, and say we’re going to donate all the money raised to some charity, save the burn victims or something like that. Just do that; just burn them a little bit. If you’re going to live in a post-media world, you’ve got to make your own news and make people look like jackasses for attacking you. DeSantis is going to have to learn that now. He is exceptionally bright, very young, and has a good team, so I think there’s a strong possibility that not only will he recover, but he’ll somehow turn this into a win.

It was not the best way of coming out; it was one of those things that was great in theory but could have been done better in execution. That’s okay; it’s a marathon, not a race. While people are looking at the national polls and saying Trump has this huge lead, when you actually look at the battleground states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and North Carolina, they’re much closer. It’s not going to take a lot for DeSantis to flip that. The donor class is 100% behind him.

There are hundreds of millions of dollars that will be committed, and they want him to win. They don’t want Trump to be the guy. The problem he has is the disloyal tag, the opportunist tag that’s being pushed on him, and the “why now” tag. You’re 44 years old, you’ve just been re-elected governor; why are you running for president? Why not do another four years as governor and see how the whole Trump thing plays out?

He was probably the heir apparent, meaning he was going to be the vice president, but now he’s running against Trump. There’s no chance in hell if Trump wins the nomination. Trump might get so angry in losing that he runs as a third party just to split the vote so that DeSantis doesn’t win. It’s a tricky situation, and we’ll see what happens. What do you think Trump would call me?

Any talks with Gavin Wood or any teams about running parachains? No, not at all. When’s the interview with Crypto Crow? Yeah, we’ve got to talk to Crow. I miss Crow.

Come on, Crow, what’s going on, man? What animals do you have on your ranch? I’ve got everything up there: mountain lions, elk, bison. Bison lions—that’s when they crossbreed, so forbidden love. The GOP made a certain commitment to Trump in 2016.

They didn’t want him; the mainstream rank and file did, but the party bosses always hated him. He’s a good Harvard boy. Joe the Toe, you need to go through me before speaking. Well, nice to meet you, Joe. He has no shot, but I’m actually impressed with Vivek Ramaswamy.

Anyway, yeah, he’s a biotech guy; he’s worth like half a billion dollars. Pretty smart dude. Vote Gary Johnson. I miss Gary; he was nice. Gary, not scary.

Charles, I have an idea for building a social media DApp on the Cardano network. What advice would you give me? I would go really deep into the Fediverse. I’d look at ActivityPub and its flaws, learn a lot about self-sovereign identity and DIDs, and obviously decide on your AI strategy. There are a lot of open-source frameworks like Mastodon that you can look at.

I wouldn’t recommend using them because of the GPL3 license, but there’s a lot of inspiration one could gain for how to think and design these types of systems. Trump will call you Chuckles. that actually is pretty good. Chuckles, I’ll take it. What do you think about DeSantis's fascist book-burning policies?

The dude takes some books out of kids' libraries that are sexually explicit, whereas that same political party that’s angry about that is totally okay with half of America being de-platformed and removed from social media when they say things they don’t You’re both burning books; you’re propagandizing. Go home, Lawrence, go home. Same wings on the same bird. You want a real candidate? Ask him three questions: What do you think about sound money and the Federal Reserve System?

What do you think about America’s foreign policy? How many bases do we have abroad, and what does a humble foreign policy mean to you? What does following the Constitution mean to you? You’ll find that when you strip all the wedge issues out, the answers get really close to each other for the average Democrat and average Republican. When you get real answers that are very different from those, those people tend to be called conspiracy theorists or loners, the Ron Pauls of the world.

Humble foreign policy, sound money, and following the Constitution in practice is a very difficult thing because you actually have to radically change the system of governance. It also means that you respect everybody, love everybody, and treat everybody equally. That’s real hard to do too. A Trump-RFK Junior ticket would be great. It’s right up there with Trump and Kanye.

Would you support Tulsi Gabbard? I’d support Tulsi if she ran. Not sure about RFK, but I’ll take Tulsi. Why not? GPL3—what license do you recommend?

MIT, Apache 2.0, University of Illinois license. I just can’t stand a license that basically says you have no freedom. If you make any contributions, you have to give them back and keep them open source. I thought open source was about giving people the freedom to do what they want with the software and not forcing them into a copyleft.

It’s open-source cancer. Big hands, Chuck. Alright, I’ll take it. Better than tiny hands. Are both your parents MDs?

No, just my dad. My mom was a respiratory therapist and she was also in the army. Why do you think California is completely lost? Somebody just needs to go there and teach them the errors of their ways and lead them to the promised land or split up the state so we have Northern California and SoCal. Northern Cal can be a little redder.

Any thoughts on purchasing Skinwalker Ranch from Brandon when he’s done with the property? You think he’s actually going to sell? I don’t think so. Besides, I’ve got some weird stuff on my ranch, so we’re both wrong for doing the same thing. What aboutism doesn’t work, Charles.

No, that wasn’t whataboutism. You’re comparing two completely different things. There’s a world of difference between having a philosophical thought that certain materials should not be used in the education process for kids in state-sponsored institutions and allowing wholesale censorship of the entire American population with a public-private partnership. None of the books were banned from the perspective that you couldn’t acquire them. You could read them online or buy them on Amazon.

It’s just that maybe some people don’t want certain things in certain libraries, and that’s a philosophical thing. It’s worthwhile to have a debate. As a libertarian, I don’t care, but I can at least appreciate and understand that what’s not okay is for Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page and others to have the ability to unilaterally decide what is truth and destroy people’s lives in the process of de-platforming them, demonetization, and delegitimization. These things are not the same, and if you think they’re the same, you’re part of the problem, not the solution. Yeah, but Phil Jackson vibe, chill, ingenious.

that’s about one of the nicest things anybody ever said to me. Thank you, sir. Coffee’s starting to kick in. When’s the AMA on weird stuff on Charles’s ranch? Joe the Toe, he’s also a chat attorney of law.

Towie and Thumbstein. NorCal would still be blue. I’m in NorCal. Yeah, it would be blue-ish, just kind of like George Santos’s Jewish. Is Hong Kong adoption bullish or a trap?

It’s a trap. Is that a steel window behind you, Charles? Maybe. It’s actually aluminum; it’s an aluminum window. We don’t have money for steel anymore.

See, this dude is paying attention right here, Alex. Alright, Charles, what are your thoughts on the United States commercial bank deposits decreasing by a trillion dollars over the past year? How much more pressure before the banking Ponzi system collapses? Damn son, you got it right there. You’re a business, and you have your money in a bank account that has no FDIC protection and pays you zero percent interest.

You don’t need all your cash to be in that bank account; you just need to be able to make payroll on a regular basis. So why in God’s name would you leave the money in the bank account when your treasury management can withdraw the money from the account except for what you need for your monthly expenses and put the rest in treasury bills that are fast-maturing and pay you five percent interest, backed by the U.S 0 is out. People are using it. We actually had the dragons, and people are doing all kinds of cool things, from Mori people in New Zealand to exciting projects throughout Africa.

It's really exciting, actually. You should play around with it—Google Prism version two. Who's your favorite president? Well, all of them were very challenged men, and they had lots of ups and downs. Ulysses S.

Grant, if you ever read his backstory, is an extraordinary guy—not a particularly great president, but a remarkable life story. Richard Nixon was another interesting guy with a remarkable life story as well. Two brothers died of tuberculosis, he grew up very poor, and he didn't go to Harvard because he didn't have the money. Think about how much his life would have been different had he been in that club. Every president has that story, and there's no notion of a favorite.

It's more about whether they rose to the occasion and met the challenges of their time with grace and dignity or whether they failed. Do you believe there's any way George Lucas can redeem himself, or is he forever lost to the dark side? Oh, the single biggest mistake George Lucas made was putting Kathleen Kennedy in charge of Star Wars. It has taken something that I love, something so many people love, and it has destroyed it in ways that it will never recover from. So you just move on.

That's why I'm excited about working on Legends of Valor and generative AI. Some stories have been corrupted and destroyed or changed in irreparable ways. You can always find new fiction and new things to get excited about. It's just sad because a lot of people loved that series for so long, and it's really terrible that Lucas went down that road and gave it to custodians who basically destroyed everything we loved about it. Have you ever watched Stargate SG-1?

Yeah, Richard Dean Anderson for the win, man! Love that show. Mickey voice to Lucas? No, because George Lucas sold Star Wars to Disney—the great Mouse. Haha!

You want to be a star, don't you? Oh, whiskey or vodka? Come on, man, I'm a whiskey man—single malt whiskey for the win! I got a lab in Edinburgh, Scotland. They'd kick me out of the country if I said vodka.

If you like vodka, go to the Vitalik side—get out of here! Charles, what are your thoughts on projects such as DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph)? directed acyclic graph—it's a structure in graph theory. Alright, Rob, everybody put on your hats! We're going to go on an adventure together.

Have you all heard of the Gateway project? You haven't? Well, let's go spelunking! What is the Gateway program? Alright, there we go—a document from the CIA, recently declassified.

The U.S. government is a leviathan, and as a leviathan, it looks into a metric ton of things, including our good friend from the Department of the Army, U.S. Army Operational Group, U.

S. Army Intelligence and Security Command from Fort Meade, Maryland, where Big Black is the NSA headquarters. On June 9th, 1983, the announcement was made regarding the analysis and assessment of the Gateway process. How about that? You never thought you’d see this here, did you?

Basically, let me read off what they were trying to do. They tasked me to provide an assessment of the Gateway experience in terms of its mechanics and ultimate practicality. As I set out to fulfill that task, it soon became clear that in order to assess the validity and practicality of the process, I needed to do enough supporting research and analysis to fully understand how and why the process works. Frankly, that proved to be an extremely involved and difficult business. Initially, based on conversations with a physician who took the Gateway training with me, I had recourse to the biomedical models developed by Itzhak Bentov to obtain information concerning the physical aspects of the process.

Then I found it necessary to delve into various sources for information concerning quantum mechanics in order to describe the nature and function of human consciousness. I had to construct a scientifically valid and reasonably lucid model of how consciousness functions under the influence of the brain hemisphere synchronization techniques employed by Gateway. Once this was done, the next step involved recourse to theoretical physics in order to explain the character of the time-space dimension and the means by which expanded human consciousness transcends it in achieving Gateway's objectives. Finally, I found it necessary to use physics to bring the whole phenomenon of out-of-body states into the language of physical science, to remove the stigma of its occult connotation and to put it in a frame of reference suited to objective assessment. What is this guy doing?

Apparently, this commander is studying out-of-body experiences using the Gateway program. What the hell is going on here? Okay, when hemisphere lasers, frequency following responses—whoa, whoa! Consciousness and energy grid—whoa! Oh no, this is the absolute and infinity!

What is this guy doing? He was doing stuff—holograms, stylized renditions of simple torus, cosmic egg. What the heck is a cosmic egg? Whoa, an actual government document at Fort Meade—one of the most classified places you can go. So what's the conclusion?

There is a sound rational basis in terms of physical science parameters for considering Gateway to be plausible in terms of its essential objectives. Institutional insights of not only personal but of a practical and professional nature would seem to be within bounds of reasonable expectations. However, a phased approach for entering the Gateway experience in an accelerated mode would seem to be required if the time needed to reach advanced states of altered consciousness is brought within more manageable limits. From the standpoint of establishing an organization-wide exploration of Gateway's potential, the most promising approach suggested in the foregone study involves the following steps. He's going through those steps, huh?

Okay, look at all these things. But here's the most interesting number: be intellectually prepared to react to possible encounters with intelligent non-corporeal energy forms when space-time boundaries are exceeded. So what's the moral of the story? The moral of the story is the U.S.

government looks into everything. Even if you don’t think they look into it, they look into it. There’s some guy—in this case, I think a lieutenant colonel—who was tasked to go hang out with a bunch of hippies and learn the Gateway program. He wrote a classified memo that’s now declassified, discussing how we should be prepared to have interactions with non-corporeal entities once we go through this. So are they working on DAGs (Directed Acyclic Graphs)?

You betcha! Are they working on Gateway program 2.0? Oh God, yes! In some labs somewhere, there’s a guy who’s like, “I want to talk to DMT aliens.

” It’s actually a thing. So does it mean the project is great or the technique is great? No, not necessarily. It just means that they’re researching it because there are millions of people floating around and billions of dollars they need to spend. Somewhere along the way, somebody gets interested in one of these things and they go down a crazy rabbit hole.

Isn’t that fun? Yeah, you didn’t think I was going to bring that in, huh? Okay, we program—how about that? Really cool! Read some great YouTube videos talking about it as well.

I’ll tell you guys about Fog Bank next time. The Men Who Stare at Goats—yes, that was a great movie! Did you listen to the tapes before? No, tell the Joe—a lot of words for they don’t know what consciousness is, but they are concerned about non-corporeal energy beings. While you separated from Vitalik, any beef?

the sex just wasn’t what it used to be. Yeah, Mr. Chad knows about Fog Bank. There you go, man, know about that! Alright, do you have any favorite conspiracy theories?

Yes, safe and effective. Any opinion on Bob Lazar, Jeremy Corbell, and the UFO sightings and discussions? Bob Lazar—I think he was on Joe Rogan and a few of these other guys. He certainly believes that he was working at Area 51 doing cool stuff. I used to listen to Art Bell when I was a kid on Coast to Coast AM.

Operation Northwoods was another crazy one, Charles. Yeah, there are a few guys—you’re idiots. There is no endorsement for the United States Air Force, the Army, or the DOD with your favorite cryptocurrency project. Okay, I know for marketing purposes, sometimes people say some things and they say, “Oh, they’re using this thing,” but it’s just not materially accurate or true. Yes, they say it because you want to believe deep down inside that somehow this means everything is going to be great, you’re going to make a lot of money, and that your technology is amazing.

What does it even mean for the Air Force to be partnered or connected to a blockchain? It means some program somewhere with some guy is putting some data, some business logic on top of a chain to study something. Was there a formal government procurement? Is there an RFP process? Is there a mill spec for it?

Is there a certification for it? Is it an integral component of the government procurement process? No, it’s not connected in any way, shape, or form. But oh, don’t worry—they’re doing it! We’re all going to get rich because some guys somewhere used this for a pilot program, and oh my God, we’re all going to be so rich!

I’m just so excited! Oh, I can’t wait! You need to grow up, man. It’s okay. It’s cool that people are doing stuff, but that does not replace the need for real-world applications.

It does not replace the need for daily transaction volume, daily consumption, daily depth on that stuff. Innovations in the vast majority of this industry are public and transparent and done through papers and code—not secret government cabals and programs here and there. Sorry, it’s just somebody had to say it, and sometimes you need some tough love because this love is doing something for somebody else, not you. You’re not getting any love with that. Wow, a two-hour AMA on a random Saturday?

You seem the only one doing this on a regular basis. Well, people love me. yeah, love from Boulder! Have you ever done it at Black Belly? I absolutely love Black Belly!

Those 30-ounce dry-aged steaks they have—45 days! Amazing stuff! Absolutely amazing stuff! I miss this sometimes—sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny.

Sometimes, Colorado—can you not talk about snack? Snack is within all of us. It’s not just here or there; it transcends life and reality. For only when one can feel their inner snack penetrate them can they become one with the snack. Also, I have no idea what it is—Rosenbridge, Ergo, Cardano connection point.

Awesome! What do you think about Worldcoin? It’s like, okay, don’t worry, don’t worry—we’re going to do this AI-enhanced blockchain, like scan your retinas, and yeah, it’s totally legit. It’s made by that guy who’s doing that other thing that may be a supervillain but might not be—who knows? [Laughter] It’s like some days you wake up and you just read this stuff and you’re just like, “Oh man, we wish him well.

” Charles, why don’t you open a space on Twitter instead of YouTube? Because if I do a Twitter space, then you can’t see my picture. It’s just audio, plus it crashes. I wish I could simulcast and do a Twitter space from YouTube and Twitter at the same time—that’d be pretty cool. John Deere, Massey—the answer to that.

Massey Ferguson, man! Can you, with OBS, do a live stream to Twitter at the same time as YouTube? I don’t believe that. That’d be so cool! But it’s a different modality too because I’m broadcasting to you guys and I just have text.

So how does the audio come to me? He’s a thing, huh? Your chuckle, Charles, is great! Chuckles, meow! There better be one of those roll-up videos that they do!

Charles B and Charles—come on, guys, we haven’t had that! Come on, Charles, talk to us about Whitney Webb a little bit. I already talked about her. Go back—we’re way far out. How’s everything going at the Center for Formal Mathematics?

Charles, thank you for your contribution to science. It is going very well, actually. Yeah, the lab is running. They’re doing cool, interesting things—making proofs, writing proofs, recruiting. It’s kind of like one of those legacy things where it takes 40 years to get something good, but we’re actually chipping away at it.

Generative AI is going to have a huge impact because it makes math understandable by a computer. Then generative AI can make new math because it can read every single paper ever written about mathematics. How about that? We were kind of ahead of the curve, actually. And if you guys are curious about the center and its mission, if you go to cmu...

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