Saturday Night Thoughts

hi this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado today is august 21st just about to be 22nd i 2021 just about to go to bed but i was going through my emails and messages checking out twitter looking at reddit and i'm seeing some crazy things these days especially on cryptocurrency reddit in other places people tell me i should read these things but i do especially just to get a sense of where people thoughts are at and it's a weird time in the project's history there's a lot of irrational exuberance and irrational hate that's flowing through there's a state of disbelief in certain circles in the cryptocurrency space first whether we're even gonna launch smart contracts or all they're on schedule like september 12th good luck everybody it's it's a done deal so far everything's looking great everything's looking green and we're having fun moving towards it there's certainly a huge amount of work to do but that work's getting done and we're really moving into conference things the summit thing september 25th to 26th there's a lot of people coming the last report i got over 20 000 people are registered and we have a lot of fun presentations and a lot of things to discuss and talk about and yet despite all that usual things are persisting ghost chain no commercial adoption immediate collapse it's a cult nothing can work i i had some developer today say how can you do access control in utxo it's it's out of this world this is a weird space we spent as a project so many years telling everybody exactly what we're going to do and exactly how we're going to do it and we did it we said we're gonna go do first principles research so we went and did first principles of research we were all these papers as a company the gkl model and or boris and network stuff and so forth and then a new way of doing networking in our industry invented a new way of doing accounting with extended utxo created dsls like plutus and marlow borrowed from a 30 year old development ecosystem and brought up all those advancements in the functional programming space into our space first to market with approvally secure proof of stake protocol that didn't require bonding and has a pass to bootstrap from genesis and has all these cool modules and upgrades i said we did all these things and all along the way we said here's what's going to happen and yeah sure there were some delays like for example when we had to rewrite all the code because the original code base wasn't so good god that took a long time and we just kept getting bad reports about how long things would be three months turned to six months turned to nine months turned to 12 months it was hell but we never gave up and we kept pushing and we kept building and right around 2019 was a big inflection point in the project in 2020 it was a big inflection point where suddenly things started gelling and fitting together and we were able to release things on time and we saw the light at the end of the tunnel byron reboot shelley and everything's just on track and gogan coming down and we said there's going to be three stops for that got to get metadata in got to get assets in need of multi-asset and then finally alonzo for smart contracts number one for github commence all these things keep writing the papers keep building up and then we said we got to go train a bunch of developers because it's a new development paradigm we have extended utxo and plutus and so we go and do that 3 000 developers none of these things matter to the critics of the project because they've already made up their mind about cardona they've already decided it's not real to them it's a scam it's a cult they've already made up their mind no matter what we accomplish what adoption we get no matter what's constructed on cardona what you guys the community build boy there's a lot of you building right now excited as hell fired up ready to go what we do this year next year the year after we get ethiopia to go do something heaven's sake that wasn't easy at all oh that's just an easy deal they probably bought that deal or something like that oh my god there were so many layers of bureaucracy doing checks and balances just to make sure that they could cross the t's and dot the eyes but they didn't know anything about that four years to get there but that's just astroturf doesn't matter the critics of this project for some reason have decided it's a bad project and that's okay it's honestly okay as we march closer and closer to the most significant milestone in this project's history i always wonder i take a step back and ask who are we doing this for are we doing this for the cryptocurrency space and the industry and accolades to get the love of coindesk and coin telegraph and be able to go to the cocktail parties and everybody pat you on the back and say good work you did it or are we doing this for the world everybody else see the cryptocurrency industry small it's petty it's filled with a lot of small petty people who got really rich really quickly and because they did they think they're smart even though they don't realize that they're actually just lucky and if you put them in any other industry they lack the basic business skills or abilities to actually succeed if you actually take that industry out the leader is the so-called leaders in that industry and you go on to the world as a whole it's complicated it's nuanced you got supply chains you got medical records you got you voting you got payment and settlement just basic things like how do you cash in and out the atm side of thing or whatever that entry exit point is going to be the identity components of these things the software life cycles of these things the procurement how these things connect in to economies databases all of these moving parts so much more complicated trillions of dollars of value decades of history that is the point of the labors and that's not an industry that changes every week every month every year that's an ongoing concern that takes decades to kind of work its way through the whole world is upgrading its systems because of globalization because of the internet because of economic calamity because people are better educated now because people have cell phones now everything is changing from when we were born when we were kids even if you're born in the 80s i was or earlier even the 1990s the world is totally different now everything is different now and our industry just so happens to be the caretakers of a new type of technology this concept of blockchain technology concepts of smart contracts concepts of self-sovereign identity and decentralization and all these things and our industry is stumbling its way through the world changing its entire systems we started this company io global to take a step back and say okay how are we going to change the world what do we think is a good way of doing things science should be done by scientists not by people pretending to be scientists so go hire real scientists go work with real institutions go do the hard not so sexy work and spend the years if not decades required to write papers go through the scientific process go through the peer review process this should be not controversial at all this should be something we all agree is probably a pretty good idea given the complexity of the underlying protocols given the interdisciplinary nature of the research given the fact that mistakes can cost billions of dollars but now that's super controversial how dare you slow yourself down but you can't compete then oh my god you won't have your network effect your market effect the same for engineering we should probably write code correctly maybe we should use design by contract and property-based testing and formal methods no you can't do that because it'll slow everything down you won't be first to market you won't get that network effect even though when you screw up other people lose 600 million dollars and your customer has to pay and their relationships are forever broken and burnt and they're angry with you it's so crazy the things i hear and see on a day in day out basis and i just don't understand our industry at times i really don't i understand the people in it i don't understand the approach they take it's the worst of all worlds we can't get along with the government we have to overthrow all of them but if we're making money let's let's not rock the boat too much we we want to do cryptography and we want to do all this crazy great stuff but then we can't afford to implement anything correctly we can't cross the tees and dot the eyes or hire people that actually understand how these things work because that's too slow and you have to be first to market we have a network effect with 80 000 people in a few applications than a few million users here and there and the other guys who have billions of people and 25 million developers they don't matter the fortune 500 doesn't matter governments don't matter those are just astro turf deals it's just crazy it's absolutely crazy and i'm just left just at a loss sometimes in this industry absolutely at a loss in this industry these insane valuations we had a media organization crypto grape that said i said that eight is going to be 150 what their source was a youtube impersonation video of me they just took the title of the video it was one of those giveaway scams and they published the whole [ __ ] article on it and this is what counts for journalism in our industry the most satisfying moment of my career is going to be when we collectively as a group transcend all of this and retire all of this madness the homer pepe's and the nfts that sell for millions of dollars the dogecoins all of these memes that have somehow become living organisms parodies of things and have taken over everything when we transcend all of that and we return to the entire point of where it began which is how do we improve the systems of the world to make the systems better for everyone everywhere pretty simple and it doesn't matter the system it can be the system your identity is connected too so we don't have 50 billion dollars a year of identity theft and we don't have data breaches the opm hack or the yahoo breach or the recent t-mobile breach or the equifax where our identity gets stolen again and again and again and we get the bill how do we build sound money so crazy politicians don't go and print trillions of dollars for their own political ends to pay for war machines and giveaways and other things so they can continue getting elected and by debasing the currency in that process harm the poorest amongst us and make everything more expensive so expensive people can't even afford to fill their gas tank how do we make the voting systems better so that we actually believe that our vote counts and we can verify that and we can vote online from a click of a phone and not be lectured by some academic at mit about how that's never going to be secure and paper is a great idea not understanding that by embracing that you can't really have elections on a regular basis you can't do polling every day you can't have a direct relationship with your people you can't talk to your people and by it being too expensive to conduct elections you can create the monopoly of the two-party system or a small group of privileged actors can decide who's on the ballot it's all about improving the systems of the world had a great conversation stewart kaufman the other day and he says hey 20 years we're probably going to destroy the biome of the planet and set it on an irreversible course to extinction the human race is just gonna be so self-destructive wipe its way out and we think god why is that well because the parameterization of global capitalism is wrong it values too much the short term there's too many people and because of that you're going to end up burning all the resources out too quickly every model we make shows that this is not good so change capitalism change the parameters and tuning of the system but how would you do that you need a new system you need new parameters how do you get there you need some system that's competitive and superior to the old system and can replace it these are the things and dozens and dozens and dozens more of the problems that we worry about and think about on a daily basis we discuss with world leaders we discuss with academics we discuss with engineers and we keep asking our community let's work together even if we can do small things better voting system for your club idea scale catalyst these things they grow and you wake up in five years and they've grown to enormous things the key is not to regress the key is to always be moving in the right direction that's the point of the movement we constructed with cardano start from first principles and gradually and slowly and systematically work your way up into a very strong foundation and build an amazing community around that foundation that's inspired and actually believes we can change things in the world and guess what if you get a few million you can which is basically where we're at now but all of that doesn't matter apparently in our industry because we don't have crypto kitties or uniswap yet or these types of things even though next month will have such things but then that won't matter because the metrics don't look as good to something else or it's all about transaction fees or transaction throughput or whatever the vanity metric happens to be it's just crazy to me sometimes it really is the only thing that gives me solace and comfort is the fact that the cardano community gets it you guys really do it's amazing there are so many amazing people that wake up every single day in the cardano community and they read books they think about the world they think about life they think about foundational concepts like what is right what is wrong what type of world should we live in what rights do i have as a human being what rights do i earn through merit how should my neighbor and i get along and communicate with each other what type of economic system is truly fair how do we improve the environment how do we ensure people have clean drinking water how do i ensure that there's equality amongst us at least of outcome excuse me of opportunity these basic things that we go about our day-to-day lives and we don't think about we don't we go to work we work we come home turn on the television watch reality tv eat dinner drink a beer go to bed wake up repeat repeat repeat just a 9 inch nails song every day is exactly the same that's the way society is supposed to work we've been programmed for it to work then suddenly we have this thing that inspires people to look at the world differently and believe because it's true and aggregate that collectively if we decide just change the way the world works we just change the way money works we can just change the way property rights work we can just change the way we work with each other and the relationships there and if we don't the exact thing we can change that thing we can just build another thing this great evolution of society and systems that's what gives me hope not reddit not telegram not this insanity and this madness that our industry has become but the fact that there is a community within this industry that seems to really give a [ __ ] in care that we can do things differently why do we care about the peer review process above and beyond it creates something that's right more often than it's wrong we care about it because there's no ego in it there's no culture in it there's no language in it it's global one day there'll be a hundred universities then a thousand then ten thousand the skin color of the authors don't matter the languages and names of the authors don't matter the genders of the authors don't matter because at the end of the day they're all stripped off the paper it's just a title in the work you create a culture where that's the standard then we start not believing in some grand leader or figure to think his way out of how will we get the next invention instead it's how do we get more institutions in and more people in to think about the problems we care about that's why we care about peer review because it's the only damn way that i know of to create a decentralized culturally neutral global brain for all of this ecosystem to benefit from and that's what we've done if you really think about it look at the papers in the library and the diversity of the author said the geographic desert diversity of the author said how it keeps growing and growing and growing imagine where that's going to be in 10 years or 20 years or 30 years and tell me do i need to be around for that to work no now that that's getting set research centers are being built different funding streams are coming in that's the status quo and the expectation of the entire community you make a claim you validate a claim with evidence independent checks and balances in audit and oversight novel concept completely missing for the most part in silicon valley see where theranos came from and completely missing for the most part in large chunks of our industry with some notable exceptions that's an example and there's dozens of other examples why do we do all the government contracting because if i look at you with a straight face and say hey we want to change the world well you kind of need to have a nation state at some point in there and work with them at some point in there on something and have them embrace the technology you're building so that people can use that technology to change their lives so you give economic identity to millions of kids they'll become not kids in a little bit they'll become adults what do adults do they borrow money they spend money they earn money they conduct congress they start businesses if this is where they grow up and their digital natives their crypto natives doesn't stand to reason that the first loan that they're going to get is through a peer-to-peer lending marketplace doesn't it stand to reason that the first payment that they make it's not gonna be cash it's gonna be a digital payment with a cryptocurrency or something like that so if you have a gateway to embed that early on in the evolution of a person when you take it especially if you can do it on scale of millions of people tens of millions of people and so forth we spend so much time complaining about 87 year old senators who don't know their heads from their ass and probably have difficulty getting dressed without help that we ignore the fact that there are literally billions of people right now who are globalizing and they currently have no preferences not microsoft not google not any of these things about how they should spend their money use their money earn their money what their identity should look like what their credit should look like these types of things so go and get them in and collectively you get a few billion people in what that's called that's called changing the entire fabric of human society especially if the system they're in happens to produce more value than the legacy system over time they become richer they become more competitive and the only way the legacy system can compete is to become the new system adapt or die it's the one truth of business and of life so i'm proud of the movement we have because a lot of the people in it seem to get it it's not about today it's about the horizon it's about the slow methodical march towards something better it's about the desire to improve a little bit every single day it's about the desire to build it's about the desire to share it's about the desire to learn it's about the humility to admit that we don't have all the answers and that we only will divine some of them by listening to each other valuing each other understanding that these are complicated problems in the world and little by little we make progress on complicated problems frustrating at times because progress is slow it always is especially if your goal is not to leave people behind and what we've done with the slow way is we've demonstrated it's the fast way and i'd argue the only way to really change the world while everybody else was squabbling in the space we were the first to mark with a privately secure proof of state the response is either no you weren't because this other guy did something or proof of stake is fake and it doesn't exist and all the work you've done is trivial meanwhile it's there it exists and it continues to evolve and grow and i'd argue it's the best in the space certainly the most valuable and the same will be done with smart contracts the same will be done with side chains the same will be done with governance and five years from now we'll gonna be here and ten years from now we're gonna be here and fifteen years from now we're going to be here as a movement the difference only will be the size of it it's going to be larger and why wouldn't it be it's fun it's interesting there's great people to me there's great experiences to have people here dream and they love what they do and apparently no amount of toxicity dissuades them in any step or way of the way as for the industry as a whole who knows i don't honestly know where it's going i see things at times that just blow my mind and really drag me down and just grade the hell out of me you can't win in any respect we're number one for development activity well those are just github commits they don't count anybody can game them okay well then show me the commits that are bad show me the progress that's bad tell me how our software development process is broken demonstrate that to me because you have all the evidence there it's all in github no we won't actually have that conversation why because they can't they just hear it they parrot it because they want to sound smart or they want to find some confirmation of a bias that they already have okay why feel so passionate about these things if cardano's not your cup of tea if the things we built is is not great well then just ignore it go about your life and do something else but instead no it has to be a scam it has to be a cult the movement has to be wrong people in the movement have to be wrong they're evil they're misled they're misguided every single thing we've done all the papers we've written all the code we've written all the progress we've made the countries we've entered the infrastructure built the 154 ventures funded or projects funded or ideas funded from catalyst every single one of those must somehow be corrupted because well i've decided that cardano is bad and at the end of the day the mission is the same improve the systems of the world make the world a better place make it better for everyone everywhere especially the poorest amongst us find ways to get it there is it easy no but why do we do it because it's not easy we do these things because they're hard we do these things because they're the right thing to do and because it's the first time ever in human history where we've actually collectively had the opportunity to work on something like this when my dad was a kid one of the formative moments of his life was the moon landing born in the 50s and he was in its teens when moon landing happened and that was the collective effort of more than a million people cardano as an ecosystem has more people than the apollo project has that's one ecosystem the space as a whole if we work together would have at least 10 million good people around the world and the resources to basically do anything that we want to but we squabble and we fight and we're tribal everybody that we disagree with must be evil everybody that we disagree with must be tainted and corrupt and somehow out to get us all it's amazing to me it really is to what end and what do you gain by it we need to grow up all of us i i'm accused of many things lack of humility narcissism sure i'm kind of an arrogant god fully admitted sure i have plenary flaws in my life but at least i'm self-aware enough to know that for me to be successful i have to work with other people and i have to get along with other people we have to find ways even if we dislike each other of making it work for the greater good if not my company than the products we work on if not just because the world deserves such a thing so set the ego aside and get it done i said el salvador as a great example of this this delegation of bitcoiners goes down there and says our goal is to protect this country from the [ __ ] coins amongst many other statements made many other things made i don't know just damn depressing i just sat because if all these people could work together all these people could set aside the grievances and the differences and just grow up as human beings i see all the things that could be created i see all the things that could be accomplished and i'm just sad that that's not going to happen on the other hand it is refreshing that at least in our own community the cardano community and a lot of the people that we work with the al goranzas and the ergos and others we do see that cooperation and collaboration occurring so my hypothesis is that if we can just keep investing and growing these types of things that somehow some way over three years five years 10 years 15 years that that will become stronger and better than this industry as it is today and we'll just outgrow and overcome it and we'll move into the systems business not the crypto business and move into the digital transformation business and start transforming everything we touch from the individual's life getting him into self-sovereign identity and being their own bank to the organization getting rid of the leaders at the top there don't need to be ceos in this type of structure to governments themselves where they're actually held to immutable rules they can't change because they're politically inconvenient and they have to embrace sound money and actually make sure that they have real consent of the government and that can't be changed or manipulated i see that happening i really do and i see the kernels of these things here and i think over time more and more will enter that tent more things will happen but it's saturday night and i'm tired we're all tired here at i o global it's been a very long year for us we didn't stop working we didn't stop coding we didn't stop thinking we didn't stop traveling we didn't start negotiating we shook a lot of hands we went to a lot of places a lot of contracts a lot of stuff a lot of thoughts a lot of papers a lot of very complicated problems to work through but never once did anybody complain and say oh it wasn't worth it because they understood what was at stake it's not about cardano it's about the world it's about making it a better place it's about improving things and that unifying message allowed people to work through the fatigue it allowed people to sacrifice it allowed people to spend just another hour getting something done especially myself and we'll see a small bit of that next month with the launch of smart contracts and the summit and as we move beyond that we'll see more and more as you the community turn things on the dreams and hopes that you've bottled up the projects that you've bottled up for the past few months and few years depending upon when you got on board to the movement maybe even a decade and we'll see those projects turn on many will fail some will succeed the ones that will succeed it's like planting a forest more seeds will come down more will succeed and we look at the long term three years five years ten years it'll be something quite extraordinary and magical and will be built with the same foundations and philosophy that we built cardano with the same desire for evidence the same pursuit of greatness makes me pretty happy and it makes everything that we've invested in sacrifice for worth it that said i think one of the things that i aspire at least next year is we do need to figure out as a human race a different way of communicating with each other it's just getting worse and it shouldn't it's getting more toxic it's getting more personal it's getting more dehumanizing the empathy just continues to drain out the pettiness of it continues to increase it's sad it truly is we deserve better as a species we really do we deserve to treat each other as human beings but these communication mediums they just don't do that anymore so this is i think the ultimate challenge if we're going to get out of this we're going to close the wisdom gap and solve the existential technologies and improve these systems of the world the system that needs the most improvement is the most basic and the oldest which is that of human communication somewhere along the way the advent of the internet and social media and cell phones and all these other pieces of technology have made it all right for us to treat every single person that we don't like or disagree with as evil horrible human beings that must be destroyed and for a society to be free and open and have controversial ideas and the notion that people can fail or not be completely right but still produce value this is antithetical to all of those things it has always been so somewhere buried in the brilliance of our community somewhere buried within the brilliance of the technologies that this industry as a whole works on and the human race as a whole there has to be a better way a better solution than what we have right now because the systems we're building right now are very powerful and they're neutral they're not built with our goals and desires and hopes and dreams in mind and respect for humanity in mind they're algorithms they're protocols they're not conscious they don't have ethics and values any more so than gravity has ethics and values the laws of thermal dynamics have ethics and values they're things that we imbue and construct and then behave on autopilot in that respect so as we build these new things and we propose them to change our lives to change our organizations and to change our governments we have to figure out how do we make sure that we don't lose the plot along the way and that we're able to communicate with each other well enough that we can reach good consensus and we feel valued and respected and we understand each other and we have empathy for each other even if we disagree with each other we at least understand where we stand where we sit as human beings this is going to be i think the hardest thing because we have to undo what has been done and then we have to evolve beyond that it's incredibly hard because we have to overcome ourselves and accept that we're finite and we have biases we have misconceptions holes in our knowledge we're not perfect our opinions may not be completely based upon facts and reality seldom are they actually we might be programmed with bad code bad face bad experiences traumas neuroses bitterness pettiness weaknesses that we don't want to admit or care to admit and the only way we're going to communicate well is to somehow set all of that aside admit it and move beyond it or embrace systems that expose these things and force us to not embrace the demons of our nature but rather the better angels of them that i think on the saturday night musing is perhaps the big thing that we have to work on in the next few decades if we hope to get out of all of this we see it strongest in the cryptocurrency space because that's the furthest along terms of social evolution and it's basically a vision to a potential future if we do nothing we're like children who have discovered alien technology and we're trying to figure out how it works and how to use it wisely but we didn't invent it we don't understand where it comes from or the consequences of it so of course we can't accomplish that mission and if this percolates its way into the normal business world if this percolates its way into institutions that we rely upon for life to be okay we're in for a lot of trouble so we need to figure a way out of it all the tools are there a lot of ideas in the periphery are there and this is going to be a big pursuit of ours in 2022 we're gonna have to figure it out we're already working in that direction with catalyst 33 000 unique wallets thousands of unique conversations on a weekly basis a lot of controversy people ask for too much money people make unrealistic demands people think a venture only getting funded a few thousand dollars should have the same audit and control processes of a fortune 500 company people bike shed people yell at people there's all kinds of disputes but yet somehow always it seems to converge to making good decisions or at least decent decisions and somehow we don't have too much controversy yet and it continues to grow and grow and grow maybe there's something there there's certainly a lot more infrastructure that we need to put in but that's a good microcosm of the macro and i hope the industry as a whole actually starts looking at that because maybe they can learn from that maybe they can grow from that i don't know it's an interesting thing anyway i'm here always going to be and we have the resources to be here for as long as i draw breath at this point so we're always going to be writing papers we're always going to be writing code it's kind of like my introduction warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado well it's the same here always coding always writing sometimes papers sometimes code but we're always here in that respect and you the community will always be here now and you're the community let's work together let's figure this out how do we get beyond all of this hate and noise and distraction and bad things and how do we transcend and evolve that create proper structures the biggest challenge for cardano is not technological that's easy it's just getting a bunch of smart people to sit down and do things the right way and get them disciplined and funded and motivated enough to keep doing it until it gets done it takes a year takes a year takes five years takes five years takes ten years takes ten years it's not adoption adoption is easy if facebook can get three billion users i think we're going to be okay it's something that we can continue working on and growing and figuring that out it's the communication part somehow is skewing fake news somehow not believing everything you read somehow being able to critically analyze things somehow to understand the underlying complaint and biases and these things and to somehow resist the urge to propagate things that aren't verified it's taking the time to actually drill down and figure out truth from fiction and how we're going to work together and get along with each other and make hard decisions where it's not about the facts but the values that the different the differentiators are that's the hard part there's no science that we can draw from there there's no code we can borrow there there's no perfect government i can go and take from olympus and say this is the way because we haven't figured it out as a human species we haven't it doesn't exist there's no harmony and actually it's the anti-pattern we're getting worse as we see in this industry and in other places day by day it's getting worse so if we accomplish anything it can't be the technology and it can't be the community we've won those things and we'll continue winning it has to be we have to figure out how do we solve that problem one way or the other and then how do we convince the people who don't like us that it's in their best interest to use that same technique and adopt it and grow even if they don't give us credit for it because it's the right thing to do and if they do then we can all work together and then collectively the 10 plus million in the industry can go and do something 10 times larger than the apollo mission that's the key that's what we have to figure out and if we can do that i know for a fact that all the proclamations about how we're going to improve the systems of the world and how crypto is going to change everything that will be the case we will actually change everything we will actually get it done people will flock to this new movement because there's no negativity there's no toxicity people feel valued people feel listened to imagine you all experience this how many people do in your social network or when you talk to them they just sit there waiting for you to shut up so they can say something completely ignoring everything you said every single one of us knows that person probably dozens of them might be married to one might be the child of one you might be one if you're honest and how incredible is it to talk to somebody who really listens to you active listening actually cares about the words coming out of your mouth opens up the conversation is in the conversation with you to treat you as an equal and maybe learn something from you or think about the world differently because of the conversation you've had with them imagine how cool it would be if that micro experience now is the whole world if we could somehow figure out a way to communicate that way collectively and imagine how cool it would be if all this magical stuff we've invented artificial intelligence and this blockchain technology can look at the signals coming out of each other's mouths and actually give us a view into the veracity of them fact check them help us sort things out identify perhaps if we have a cognitive bias or not so that collectively we can see such things and there was an incentive scheme where the stuff that's not so good sinks and the stuff that is good that's really novel and interesting organically rises up not through central coordination but somehow in swarm intelligence that would be really cool i'd like to live in a world like that that is the challenge cardano's gonna change a lot over the next five years a lot of new technology a lot of new ideas a lot of controversial ideas new things have to be added to improve the growth of the system to make it more egalitarian to make it more decentralized there's going to be winners and losers in those process because whatever system we launch it's somewhat imperfect so when you try to make it better you might end up having people clinging to the past because they realize that their rent seeking behavior gets punished look at for example the transition from proof of work the proof of stake in ethereum mining coalitions coming together now trying to co-opt the system to keep it in the past because they don't want to be fired not in anybody's best interest but theirs and they have the power to try to preserve that coalition so if we want to change we have to figure out a way to communicate if we could do it here i know we can do it there and if we can do it there people are going to want to live there because they're treated with respect and dignity and they don't have to live in drama and toxicity and negativity and a world that's always hopeless you live in a world of possible that's what we got to figure out how to do and if we do right it doesn't matter then right twitter doesn't matter telegram doesn't matter all of these trolls and these people they don't matter anymore we've transcended them we changed the game they exist but nobody pays attention to them they just become vacuous and empty and we live somewhere else for my part it has been a privilege and continues to be a privilege being here and working with all of you thinking with all of you it is beyond any wild dream i had at any juncture in my life that i'd have the opportunity to be right here right now at the ground floor of something very special every single person in this movement even the ones who don't like me i love all of you and i value all of you and i think you guys have really changed my perspective on how the world works and my hope for the world i was a pretty pessimistic kid when i was younger i was surrounded by this belief that the world couldn't be changed and it is what it is the best you can do is try to carve out a small place to hide from the badness and insulate yourself from women and after being part of this working with you talking to you learning from you it changed my entire perspective to say anything is possible we have an army we can do anything just the other day i was talking to my brother he's on my ranch right now building some things up and i said how about we do a geothermal power plant on the ranch he said charles we had a geologist up there there's there's no geothermal resources in the ranch and i said well that shouldn't stop us the earth is the earth is a giant battery the core is super hot it's nuclear powered so tons of heat radiates through there's a geothermal gradient surely there's got to be somebody somewhere in the world who figured out how to just drill out and build some sort of conduction system kind of like how a heat pump works with geothermal and sure enough we found a company based in alberta brand new only been around for a few years already built their proof of concept and lo and behold they've done it they've built a demonstration plan now they're going around building dozens of these plants so we call them up have a lovely conversation with them we live in an age where anything is literally possible before i die we'll have hypersonic travel human lifespans will be massively enhanced we'll probably grow organs in a pan neural links will be commonplace where we can hear each other thoughts will be resurrecting long dead animals like willie manus that's coming artificial intelligence will grow to the point where it'll be indistinguishable from normal humans we'll have conversations with them marry them relationships with them they'll resurrect the dead in a certain respect always want to be in einstein it will exist this is the future if you want it it's there it's scary and wondrous and we all have to kind of grow up a bit and accept that that future requires a different kind of human a different kind of thought process a different kind of world and all these different companies whether they're in biology or doing rel in physics or great engineering work they are all contributing their own parts what our industry does is it's aspiring may not even know this but it's aspiring to be the connecting tissue to put all of these things together in kind of a new way and regulate them in a new way and install some rules and laws and other things into these things in a new way that are divorced from the particular vanities of humanity as it exists today and transcend them to things that are untouchable artificial laws of physics in that respect it's amazing to be part of that there's so much hope being part of that every time i read a book on the fourth industrial revolution or some crazy hair prank idea where i talk to someone everything is now possible the only limiting factor it's not even money anymore it's time it's the only limiting factor so eventually we'll have a community where we can just take those limiting factors of time and just hand it to somebody else look at the catalyst challenge problems 18 of them now community selecting the majority of them well we can just hand it to them for example the lobster experiment small thing but big thing put a lobster on my microphone a stuffed lobster and i say to the community name the lobster do how many names i've gotten so far i summed them up today 197 names 197 names from the community there's some really cool ones really interesting ones clawdano krusty the crustacean mic on mike ralph the lobster big red it goes on and on and on i said okay next step let's go ahead and raise the annie a bit anybody who's a graphic novelist if you're interested in creating a graphic novel and creating a real-life backstory for this lobster on my microphone go ahead and send me an email with the subject line lobster art so i can filter them out okay guess how many emails i got over a hundred and like what 48 hours a 100 emails from various people in the community sending me exhaustive paragraphs of their history their resume pictures books that they made japan south africa ghana vietnam australia new zealand russia china all throughout europe united states alabama north carolina louisiana california so forth over a hundred so i i gotta figure out like who are we gonna work with for the lobster art and we do that we create that what will happen is the lobster will become a folk hero in the ecosystem create a life of its own people make video games on it create nfts on it it'll be a damn mascot at some point if we follow it through it's just time not resources not can't be done it's just time we know such a thing can exist that's a small thing so you ask yourself how am i different from you i'm not and if i have this ecosystem at my disposal you do too so what's your lobster what's your stuffed animal you're going to put on the microphone and turn it into something grand and great and glorious for somebody in the future to be inspired by or do something interesting with you can do it it's nothing that makes me special and that's the power that we now have at our disposal if you think about it we're all connected we can all work together and if we trust each other we work with you we communicate with each other we empathize with each other we give each other goodness and positivity and believe we can that we can and it'll just exist you don't the money in your pocket make a new one you don't like your job invent anyone you don't the way a movie ended just rewrite the movie why not at some point we can reutilize all these graphic novels rewrite the last two seasons of game of thrones and make the damn thing great and at some point deep fakes will be used 20 years in the future to actually give us the ending we deserve why not it's the world if possible now that's where we're at if you want that world all we have to do is just figure out a better way to communicate with each other get along with each other have empathy for each other and use the systems that we're evolving to get us there it's all we have to do if you want to save the world make an environmentally friendly place we just retune capitalism to make that happen you want that to happen get that retuned capitalism installed and make it a better system than the one it's replacing that everybody agrees they said but the entrenched interests they won't let us do that we'll just find a way to make them more money in the new system than the old system stop complaining stop being so [ __ ] cynical stop believing there's a new world order that keeps us all down and decides that we're all nothing and anybody who wants to make change either gets co-opted or killed or demonized why be so hopeless even if that's true why then consent to living in such a world be the crazy don quixote go chase the windmills change the system opt out of it what else are you going to do with your life come on honestly we have achieved something as a human species we really have we have achieved the freedom from ourselves if we desire to escape the evolutionary programming we've been given in the social structures we built to protect ourselves from war famine and disease to become something better what is it well we don't know because it's not defined by me or you it's defined by us by we the collection of all of us some emergence who the hell knows what the emergence is but we're ant hiving this [ __ ] all the way down if you think about it and yeah i still get affected by the vanity and i still get affected by some of the commentary here and there but then i wake up a bit and realize that's the old way of thinking and i look at the new way of thinking the new way of thinking that says we can look at a hundred years into the future we could look at 200 years in the future we don't have to be around for these things to still be worthwhile there's a famous greek proverb great services great societies are created by old men who plant trees whose shade they shall never know and we can do that if we want to cardano is a reflection of this concept if we did it right it's going to be here in a century and why shouldn't it be why would everybody just leave where would they go the belief that everybody is here just to speculate so then tell me why were they here when it was three cents and everything looks so grim and glom and that's two dollars fifty cents if it went to a dollar if it went to ten cents if it went to one sense suddenly everybody just disappeared the dream would die the movement would die the utility would go away the use of the platform would go away the protocol would just fall apart no the fair weathers would disappear sure but okay they're fair weather the core will stay and the core is here to change the world the core is here to work together and figure out how to get this technology in the hands of everybody and then that's organic growth and when those people that are in why would they leave it's a better world it's a positive world it's a world of yes it's a world of lobsters on microphones can develop a personality it becomes special and magical and amazing that's a good world to live in god damn it much better than the world we live in right now wear a mask everywhere the media tells us we're all going to die from the latest variant of this that and the other every politicians lying afghanistan's in flames what are we really holding on to there honestly inflation eating away at us field costs going up price of timber doubled institutional faith at an all-time low everybody walking around aimlessly no meeting and purpose boomerang children living with their parents into their 30s and 40s people can't even make rent have to have five people in an apartment with two bedrooms is this the world we should hold on to cling to and hope to god that somehow we can make just enough money to escape that world and go live in a small chunk of it even though everything keeps decaying and the people we care about still have to be there you can't completely divorce yourself from it meanwhile in the other world all possible all the dreams they're there and all we have to do to get it is just believe and collectively come together and just start working on it start doing it symbols matter i want to do agi so i went with the craziest agi guy in the world not the established scientists the stuart russells or the peter norvigs or the sebastian thrones the crazy dude that always wears the weird hat who graduated at 21 with a phd in math and wrote 300 papers and just wanders throughout the world like some sort of crazy ai nomad it actually has a pretty cool and interesting plan so i said all right let's [ __ ] do it why not go put a project manager on it get p-cubed those guys are good put them on that and [ __ ] let's do in africa why not because why why would we want to do it in oregon or seattle or colorado let's go do it someplace interesting maybe ghana or rwanda or uganda right and how do we know it works well why don't we just find an agi hard problem that only an ai could solve or solve easily in a reasonable period of time let's just go ahead and do that so i said what should it be well how about like machine to machine language the language translation with with minimal linguistic input see thousands of languages in africa and very few of them are catalog to work for language and language translation okay that seems an interesting agi hard problem let's go do that and how do i know it works well let's have some fun with it i just bought the lost and space robot and the robbie the robot they're completely rebuilding and retrofitting these things and connecting them to that backpack so if you guys come to the summit wyoming you'll see the robots there and little by little week by week month by month i'll talk to the robots and they'll be able to talk back at some point because they're connected to this thing that we're building and who cares if it takes a year who cares if it takes a decade who cares if i don't live to see a dot the belief that it can be done means that someone somewhere along the way we'll get it done it isn't that good enough isn't that good enough it has to be if you take away anything from this hour-long rant from a very tired worn out stressed person who's been working very hard for a very long time to build this technology it's this things are going to change faster than we'd all like to admit and more dramatically than any of us are comfortable with the only thing we can decide is not how do we stop the change it's whether you want to be part of it or let it happen to you without your consent so as you look to your own lives and your own future and where we're going to go that's all you have to decide you want to be part of it or not if you want to be part of it this is one of the core industries that's going to do it it's not the only one there's a few dozen floating around that really will change everything but this is definitely one of them it has one of the lowest barriers to entry and it's front and center for everything and it doesn't matter if you're an artist you're a writer you're a philosopher you're a technologist you're a scientist you're a businessman you're [Music] a garbageman doesn't matter where you live in that spectrum there's something that touches what you do and if even it doesn't touch what you do right now there's somebody you will meet in this industry somebody that you can interact with and have a relationship with and value and treasure and listen to that just by that connection and that collaboration emergently you can figure out what you're going to change and be part of that change that is the lesson i think i've learned over the last 10 years of being this industry more than anything else that is the lesson every great thing i've done and everything i've regretted not doing was the consequence of collaboration or the lack thereof and the ability to listen and connect to people or the lack thereof so next month is going to be a fun month it is putting gasoline on the fire of these collaborations and these listenings but by no means is at the end it's just the beginning it means so many more people get to come in and have the conversation and so many more people get to come in and build and change things and i firmly believe good things will come of that and i firmly believe new challenges will come of that and we're going to overcome all of them and you too will have a lobster on your microphone till next time bye everybody see you soon get some sleep