Surprise AMA 01/07/2023

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is January 7th, 2023. I've been a little under the weather this weekend; my throat's a little sore, but I figured I'd spend some time with you guys, and you can hear my raspy Clint Eastwood voice. Make my day.

It's been a good year; it's been a long year already. A whole week has already gone by in 2023. Can you believe it? It's pretty amazing. I've tried to upgrade the internet a little bit and finally got one of those 5G routers.

One of these days, I'll be able to get microwave out here on the farm. We'll see. It's been an interesting year. A lot of little things have happened. For example, the right-click scandal—that's interesting.

For those of you who don't know what happened there, this is an example of an AstroTurf scandal. I don't think anybody's actually upset about it unless they're just really uninformed. There was a cool NFT that I saw on Twitter, and I went and used it as a profile picture on Facebook and Twitter. It was a way to create some notoriety for the artist and the buyers, and it immediately sold for ten thousand Adas. So obviously, it worked pretty well for the creator of the NFT.

Well, anyway, then a bunch of people started writing articles, and it even appeared on cryptocurrency Reddit, saying that I've done something wrong by right-clicking, saving, and posting an NFT. I created a video where I pointed out that you don't actually own any intellectual property, and you have no rights to that picture when you own the NFT unless it's explicitly stated in the NFT. I didn't actually think it was a real scandal; I thought it was just made up and that people were just pulling my leg. But there are apparently some people floating around who care the most about this. I said, "All right, well, good on you.

" Of course, cryptocurrency Reddit has always been hostile. Anytime anything is mentioned about me, they can't help but attack me, but it is what it is. Overall, the space is chugging along. We have a Speaker of the House now, McCarthy. Same poop, different scoop.

So probably not much will change. That said, maybe they will pass something this year. I was pretty certain last year that we’d get some legislation for cryptocurrencies, but that was before the whole FTX scandal. FTX has caused a lot of harm and a lot of perception changes, and the industry is going through some hard times. Uncle Barry, Barry Silbert, and DCG are getting hit, so that’s going to be interesting.

Let's see what comes of Genesis, DCG, and the rest of that empire. People will begin looking into entities like CoinDesk, perhaps CoinTelegraph and others, and we’ll see if they have completely objective journalism or not. Some of us suspect they don’t, but we’ll see. It’ll be fun and interesting. A clean bill of health is good for us all, but the technology continues.

SIP 1694 is out there; people are talking about it. Input endorsers are doing a really heavy lift. We're adding tier pricing and all kinds of cool stuff. Hopefully, the Ouroboros Leos paper for input endorsers will be out in the May timeframe. It keeps getting pushed a little bit because it's such a complicated thing, but that’ll be a good thing for the future of Cardano.

Plutus continues to evolve, and there are lots of great conversations about data availability and these other things. We're getting it done little by little. It’s a process, and this space has always been lots of inches followed by a mile. So 2021 was a mile, and 2022 was lots of inches. It looks like 2023 is probably going to be another year of lots of inches, meaning that you have to make small movements all the way through, and little by little, things will get where they need to go.

What’s up with the voice? Hope you’re feeling well. A little raspy; I had the flu. I get it from time to time. Almost fully recovered.

Do another Lex Friedman podcast, please? I would love to; it’d be a lot of fun to be on Alex’s show again. Just have to wait for the maximum density of interesting things to say. What’s actually behind Tate’s arrest? I don’t know; it’s impossible to actually get any news that’s objective.

Basically, people start with what they want to print and work their way backward to a fact pattern to justify it, so it’s hard to know anything. Tate seems to be a little abrasive as a person. I know very little about him and have never interacted with him. The media certainly hates him, and they want him to be burned to the ground. Your response to Josephine’s accusations?

I don’t know who this Josephine is. I think it’s a Twitter account that just seems to be conspiratorial. It’s not about changing parameters; the system is stable at the moment. It’d be nice to get all the parameters and tune them on a regular basis, but that’s the entire point of 1694. You guys should be doing that.

If you want to sign up and have a custodian sit down and think about how to tune the system every month to promote some outcome, I think that’s not the point of Cardano. The point of Cardano is that the Cardano community self-regulates Cardano. What we did is we got the system to a stable state. With that stable state, it’s able to survive and thrive. The next step is to get the community to take that stable state and create a government on top of it.

So if you want to change the system parameters, then go ahead and get something like 1694 in. Obviously, there’ll be some fine-tuning throughout this year. There are some final things to do as peer-to-peer gets fully implemented and Genesis gets fully implemented. But it defeats the entire purpose of decentralization to have a tuning committee that’s federated. I don’t really appreciate when people say that we’re power-hungry or these types of things.

The language that was used makes no sense to me. We’re not power-hungry. The whole point of 1694, the whole point of the MBO, is literally to ensure every person in Cardano has a voice and the ability to influence the system. It might be the case that certain people will not get their way, and they don’t have scapegoats anymore. Maybe that’s why they don’t want those systems in, but I’m getting tired of it.

We need to work together, and we need to get the MBO up. We need to get 1694 or something it done and in the code so that you guys can run that for you. Charles, can you talk about the current work Bruno Paley is doing for IOHK? Any chance of doing a fireside chat with Bruno or Duncan? Bruno is no longer with IO.

Duncan’s still floating around. It’d be nice to do a fireside chat with him, especially when we have War Horse layoffs. Most of the JED work these days is being done by Cody and John Frederick, the other author on JED. What are one of your minor goals or resolutions this year, not necessarily related to Cardano but personally? Well, I’m going to write all of them this weekend.

That’s one of my resolutions. [Laughter] But, I want to lose some weight, get healthy, practice the piano, and get back into that. I haven’t done it in years. I’ve got a giant pile of books here. I’m going to start growing cactuses.

As I grow mushrooms, and I got this lovely book on cacti and succulents. How about that? so I can learn a little bit about all the different succulents of the world. I mean, look at these things! What kind of mother wouldn’t love a succulent like that?

That’s sexy. So just a lot of agriculture. Keep building up the ranch. The ranch is coming along; more cabins are coming in, a lot of cleanup. Eight miles of roads are being built, burying a bunch of power lines, putting in three-phase power, and burying that eight and a half miles of trenching.

For those of you in metric land, I think that’s about 14 kilometers—something crazy like that. It’s going to be a long year of construction on a variety of projects. The clinic is nearly done, actually. We got it opening in February. The first phase of it has taken 18 months of construction.

We put geothermal in the parking lot; I think it’s the only place in Wyoming where the snow melts in the parking lot. We trenched out there, took it from four thousand to ten thousand square feet, and the first part will be primary care. Later on, other service lines will come online: the lab, the compound pharmacy, etc. Hyperbaric medicine is another big priority, so that’s going to be a huge lift to get Hoskinson Health and Wellness running correctly. A lot of skills I’d like to pick up.

I’m very interested in productivity—the whole building is a second brain. Diego Forte, a Brazilian guy who writes these surprisingly concise books, has some great insights. I would like to really get deep into Obsidian and second brain productivity hacks and tools. I’ve got to build some form of headset. It’d be really cool to do something that puts photobiomodulation together with EEG and pulsed electromagnetic fields.

In fact, if you’re an electrical engineer and have some experience working with microcontrollers and hardware design, I’d love to talk to you because I really want to build a headset. I’ve used everyone on the market, and I’m not super happy with all of them. I think a lot more good work could be done. So a lot of professional stuff, a lot of personal stuff. Always searching for more meaning in life, always searching for more purpose in life.

I’m going to write all that stuff down this weekend. Charles, any plans to attend CNFT Con 2023 in Vegas? You were the deciding factor for many of us last year. Oh, absolutely! I’m going to go back; I just don’t know when it is, but I suspect it’s in the second half of the year.

Nice work getting the bison out of the gate there. Oh, tell me about it! A boatload gets into the cattle guard and gets stuck. You can’t get the son of a [expletive] out. You have to put a strap around them and lift them straight up with a tractor.

If you get lucky, they just stay still. If you get unlucky, they start wiggling out while you lift them, and they break their legs. But we got lucky on that one. Woolly mammoth update? Colossal is doing great; they’re tearing it up.

Lots of cool work is happening. I visited their lab in December in Dallas, and they’re working on multiple animal lines outside of the woolly mammoth. Hopefully, they’ll be able to announce something soon, but I can’t mention any more than that because I have insider info, and I have to keep it secret. You’re looking good, Charles. How’s the workouts going?

Pretty good, just a raspy voice. Will Cardano ever be able to scale to serve a billion people? I think Leos is a massive step in that direction, combined with Mithril, side chains, and Hydra. Alongside the evolution of those technologies, I think we’ll get there. How can I get in contact about a nice painting for your new clinic?

Just go to hoskinsonhealth.com and send us an email. Charles, any plans to sit down with Crypto Crow? Yep, absolutely! I love Crow; it’d be a lot of fun to spend some time with him.

Did you see Avatar 2? I did. I really enjoyed the visuals; I thought the plot was garbage, but it was a fun movie and worth the money. Thoughts on the tiered pricing model or any scheme to enable pay for transaction priority? Yeah, not just avoiding front-running but also congestion control.

We’re going to write two SIPs: one bundled with the Leos SIPs and then one as a standalone for the Genesis era. I think the Genesis era has a better chance of getting through quickly because it’s not a major change, but it’s necessary to get that in. Babel fees are just two low-hanging fruits that really need to get done. Any thoughts on Algorand? You made a tweet about their latest achievement.

I the Algorand team. I’ve always enjoyed Silvio, and John Woods used to work for me. He’s over there. There are a lot of good people there. I’ve been following Dan Bonnet and his students.

Craig Gentry went over there; Tal Rabin went over there. It’s a very good team, a very solid team. There’s a lot of good thought, and there’s a lot of opportunity for cross-blockchain interoperability. They have some ideas that would be useful to the Cardano side, so I really do believe it’s going to be a good collaboration if we can figure out a way to get there. Do you think Lace will be in Q1?

Yeah, I do. The beta is going along really well. The team’s working hard. Almost everybody’s back to work. Productivity goes to hell during Christmas, and everybody’s really back in the game around January 15th.

So next week, they’re kind of back in the game mentally. They’re getting there, but then they’ll be fully there the week after, and then we can start killing it. Charles, can your foreign legislative work you were doing in D.C. get put on pause after the SPF scandal?

For the most part, yeah. It’s the most depressing thing. I just sat there as I watched all that come collapsing down. Not only did it create a big financial hit for everybody in the industry and limit our opportunities and create cascade failures, but I knew it would have regulatory implications, and bad policy would come from it. This kid just keeps screwing us again and again.

I feel like Kavanaugh, saying they’re pissing on us. Vic Mackey’s pissing on us. How does it taste to have piss in your mouth? That’s what SBF did to us. It’s just sad, but that’s who he is.

Who knows, maybe he’ll get away with it, but we’ll just keep moving on. Shade man, hey, I miss you. Well, I miss you too, shade man. Charles, why did Alamo Cardano kill himself? Well, because he wanted his prediction of his death to be true.

How do you manage all this stuff—Cardano, your clinic, the space? With a good time management system. I have multiple EAs and independent staff that deal with these types of things. Good operating officers, wonderful people like Chair Maroney, JJ Seiler, and Tom Hassan. That helps a lot, but I do need a better organization system to manage all of it because it’s starting to grow.

Where’s JJ? He’s floating around somewhere. Stay off caramel massage. No, that’s a really bad idea. Chocolate massage?

Caramel massage? Very bad. Thank you, Charles. That was Cardano decentralized with one percent of wallets holding a majority of the coins. That’s just not true; it’s a lie.

Go ahead and lie. Okay, any chance of appearing on Tim Pool’s show in 2023? Well, if Tim invites me, I’d be happy to go on. Hey, Charles, are you pissed off right now? No, not really.

I feel pretty good, just a little sick. Why do you have two pencils? They’re pens, not pencils. Why do you have two pens in your shirt? In case one of them runs out of ink.

Will you ever accept the Huskies? No, because they’re worthless by design. They get value; you’ve missed the whole point. How old are you? 35.

I’m not pissed; I’m happy. It’s the children who are wrong. Dear Charles, will you eventually go bald like Jeff Bezos? Is that okay with you? Absolutely.

If it goes back even a little further, I’ll probably just shave the damn thing and look like, what’s his name, Bryan Cranston or something like that. Any thoughts on the Gavin Woods debacle? I’m not aware of a debacle with Gavin Woods. Hey guys, have you lifted any weights this year? Yeah, the trainer is actually coming next week.

Any advice for building a business while also having a dating life? Don’t go build; get the foundations laid a little bit, and then go do your dating life. It’s real hard to reconcile the two together. It’s a bit too much. Something’s going to suffer.

You can be in a relationship, but you won’t actually be there in the relationship. Why not grow new hair at your clinic? Easier said than done. It’d be cool to grow a sheet of tissue and have that tissue have hair from areas of the head that don’t lose it, and then transplant it from the tissue to the head. Currently, when they do hair transplants, they take a little strip from the back of the head, or they kind of evenly take hair from the back of the head and transplant it up front.

That’s why when you see people who’ve had hair transplants, like Elon Musk, you’ll see this crescent moon scar on the back of their head. So if you look really closely at some of the pictures, you’ll see that. It’s how it’s typically done. If you can grow skin in a pan and it actually has proper hair in it, then you could take the grafts and put them up front. If you combine that with stem cells and red light therapy and good supplements, they usually can hold.

The problem is we can’t grow the skin and get the hair quite yet, but I think that’s coming in about five to ten years with how tissue engineering is progressing. Then it’ll be great because you can grow as much hair as you want. Hair goes up, and it’s viable. Who cares if some of it falls out? You can keep crafting it until you get it done.

But the other effort, there’s only so much you can take from the back. Oh look, it’s Cry Baby Hoskinson. Give it up, guys. Where are your plague doctor toys? I got a few of them in here, actually.

Glad you asked about it. Did you not lose weight fasting for 11 days? I did! [Laughter] 14 pounds, and it was actually 14 days, by the way—12 days nothing and two days refeeding. This The vast majority of men will probably get something like prostate cancer or lung cancer.

The vast majority of women will also face similar issues, and that's just life. It's sad because I really do wish we had better solutions for it. I've lost good friends to cancer, and it hits people in unpredictable ways, destroying their quality of life. You're absolutely right that there's a misalignment of financial priorities in the pharmaceutical industry. They have strong incentives to look into new variants of chemotherapy that do not necessarily provide a curative outcome.

This means that while a treatment might increase survivability—say, from six months to eight months—your quality of life could remain the same or even worsen. They make hundreds of thousands of dollars from that, which is a racket. It's a very bad business that ultimately does not improve people's quality of life. In many cases, you watch them die. I had someone live with me who had colon cancer, and I watched her suffer.

The chemotherapy she received in her last rounds was so harsh that her nails turned black and fell off. It was absolutely horrible, and that's just the nature of the disease. There are a lot of next-generation, cutting-edge treatments coming out. Immunotherapies are really exciting because they replicate a lot and can hide from the immune system. If you take that hiding away, it can be effective.

There are targeted chemotherapies that are inactive in normal cells but become active in cancer cells when paired with something else. I read a paper the other day about tiny microbubbles that can be absorbed by cancerous tumors, which are then exploded using ultrasound technology—like little smart bombs inside tumors. There's an incredible amount of creativity in this field. As for the mRNA technology, setting COVID aside, it seems pretty toxic these days. I don’t think anyone is fond of those vaccines anymore.

The original intent of BioNTech and Moderna was to create personalized cancer vaccines using mRNA, and I still believe there are great opportunities there. They are very well-funded operations. It’s a complicated topic, and if you want to understand more about it, I recommend reading "The Emperor of All Maladies." Did you read James Nestor's book on breathing? I’m reading it right now.

I think we’re in a situation where it’s incredibly difficult to know what’s true anymore. It’s clear that the media has taken a position; they don’t particularly care if that position is accurate. Their view is that vaccines have no risk at all, and anyone who says otherwise should be de-platformed and is being irresponsible. They claim that vaccines work perfectly 100% of the time, and if they don’t, it’s your fault. For instance, only three percent of Haiti is vaccinated, and the other 97% are not.

There’s no pandemic there. The same goes for Uganda. The WHO says we need to vaccinate them—that’s the response we should have. Then you have in China, where XP B15 is spreading like wildfire, and they say that 10 million people could die from it, but they have a 92% vaccination rate. Something just doesn’t make sense.

If the vaccines are preventing the spread and behaving like proper vaccines, there’s more to the story. It’s nearly impossible to get good information because everyone is terrified to comment or publish. They’re afraid they’ll lose their funding or their medical license. In California, they passed a law that basically says if you don’t agree with the orthodoxy, whatever it is, you’ll be stripped of your right to practice medicine. It’s not informed consent; it’s a violation of fundamental medical ethics when you prevent a patient from knowing the potential downsides and risks of a treatment.

When an orthopedic surgeon says, "I’m going to do this spinal surgery," he has to inform the patient about the risks involved. If you remove that from medicine and say there’s only upside with no downside, it’s unethical and wrong. It really makes me sad. You have documentaries like "Died Suddenly," interviewing morticians and showing these spider clots, discussing the incidences of myocarditis. Who knows?

It’s impossible to know, and if you take a position, there’s a lot of anger. All the institutions have lost faith and credibility. There needs to be two major investigations: one into the origins of COVID and another into the entire creation and distribution of the current vaccines, with a thorough analysis of the data. The problem is that trust is so broken that no matter what happens, a large group of people will not believe what they’re told because everything is so conspiratorial now. Now, about Paul Oakenfold: it’s pretty simple.

He wanted to do an album, and his manager said, "Give us a million bucks to do it." I said, "No, I’m more than happy to collaborate, and we can make money together off of it." I don’t pay to play. I didn’t pay anything with Snoop Dogg or Champ. He’s just a cool dude who showed up at the ranch and said, "Let’s go shoot a music video.

" It’s an unpaid relationship because we’re friends, and there’s all kinds of cool business we could do together in the future. Celebrities find out quickly who I am because they’ll say, "Oh, we want to do something," and I say, "Great." Then they mention payment, and I say, "Well, Solana’s over there, Polly’s over there, and Polkadot’s there. Best of luck; let’s see which one we’ll buy." In my neck of the woods, we work together because there’s merit and mutual benefit in that.

I’ve never paid for an interview, never paid to speak at a conference, and never paid for a celebrity endorsement. You sound sick. Yeah, a little under the weather. Thoughts on Jordan Peterson and the Canadian re-education camp? it’s so crazy.

This is the Rorschach test of whether something is acceptable or not. If you’re liberal, just take a ride with me. Let’s say a physician criticizes Donald Trump in 2019, saying Trump is a bad guy, and the Texas State Medical Board says this is inappropriate, unprofessional conduct, and you must attend six months of training or lose your medical license. Would you be okay with that? You’d say that’s America’s free speech.

There’s no patient involved; there’s no misconduct regarding care. Let’s be honest. Now, Jordan Peterson criticizes Justin Trudeau and others on social media, and a board says, "Despite the fact that this has nothing to do with patient care, you must go through six months of re-education or lose your ability to practice as a psychologist." At the end of the day, those comments were politically disagreeable. Why is a professional committee deciding which political speech is appropriate among professionals?

Now, in Canada, you must have a certain political persuasion to become a psychologist. It’s no longer your knowledge, capacity, skill, or empathy as a therapist that determines your ability to be effective; it’s also your politics. If you don’t have the prescribed government-approved politics, sorry, you can’t practice. I don’t want to live in a world where professional boards do this with lawyers, accountants, doctors, psychologists, or anyone else. I’d like to live in a world where people practicing these professions are free to have diverse political opinions, whether they be conservative, liberal, communist, fascist, or anything in between.

We have every freedom to disagree with them, disassociate from them, or think they’re quacks or bad actors. But it’s incredibly dangerous to politicize a professional body that’s supposed to ensure that practitioners adhere to the standards of care for patients. Saying that standards of care now include no criticism of political regimes we agree with is problematic. Taking Peterson completely out of this, half the people who hate him don’t think that’s a valid argument. I think it’s totally fine to criticize him, but they miss the broader point of how dangerous it is to politicize a professional body.

Whether it’s done by a conservative government, a liberal government, or anything in between, it’s never appropriate. What happens when the pendulum swings to the other side? Exactly. The pendulum does swing, and the more radical you let one side be, the more radical the other side becomes. Regarding hardware requirements for stake pool operators, it’s a very good question, and it’s something we’re looking into with a lot of simulation and modeling.

By May, I think we’ll have a pretty good answer for that. Do you meditate? Yes, I’m extremely interested in meditation. It’s one of the guiding principles of my life at this point. Have you seen "Ancient Apocalypse," and what are your thoughts on advanced Ice Age civilizations?

There’s pretty good evidence that some sort of catastrophic event happened around 11,000 years ago. We were likely hit by a celestial body, an asteroid or a comet, which badly damaged an advanced civilization. The problem is that ten thousand years can erase pretty much anything except for plastic. There are scattered pieces of evidence, and certainly some interesting things you can connect. People do shows about it, but I’m not an archaeologist, and I don’t study these things for a living.

It’s fun to talk about and think about, but it’s difficult to know what’s real and true. I don’t think anyone, regardless of their credentials or background, knows for certain because it was just too long ago. There are certainly monuments like Göbekli Tepe in Turkey and other findings that are super Paleolithic, over 10,000 years old, which indicate a more sophisticated society. Do you think the situation where you create a rush could lead to World War III? It certainly could create it.

There are plenty of things that can trigger that. The situation in Taiwan could be another. It doesn’t take much to start a world war when people lose professionalism. Has the 3x plus 1 problem been solved? I think you’re referring to the Syracuse problem or the Collatz conjecture, and the answer is no.

Can we find a way to get rid of plastic? Honestly, I think what’s going to happen is that someone will genetically engineer bacteria to eat plastic. It’s already happened in certain cases, and it’ll get out into the environment, leading to our plastic decaying. Do you think we will be forced to use CBDCs? Yes, 100%.

I think cash will be banned, and CBDCs will be tied to social credit. A small group of people will have complete control over your money. If you don’t it, use crypto and vote against any politicians supporting CBDCs. It’s hard to do that when you live in a two-party system. Isn’t it dystopian?

I mean, they’re just saying it. We went from two weeks to slow the spread to "show me your papers" to go to McDonald's. Think about how pernicious that is. We went from completely unrestricted free speech on the internet to socially acceptable de-platforming of anyone we politically disagree with. Do you think governments aren’t going to connect money to speech and de-platform people?

Read about Operation Choke Point. Were you surprised by the Twitter files? No one is surprised by it. You notice how the media doesn’t cover it at all—zero, zilch. How do you stay so positive with all that goes on?

Is there a trick to dealing with it? I’m not going to lie; it gets hard. It really does get hard not to become negative and cynical, especially when you see people behave in ways that are just insane. After you’ve received some training and spent time thinking deeply about the consequences of propaganda, it’s really not hard to see when people have been propagandized. You can look for the symptoms of it.

Mention a polarizing subject, and a person will immediately develop a strong emotional reaction to it—positively or negatively—and have strong opinions that aren’t their own. They didn’t come up with them; they’ve been installed in them. When you try to show them contrary facts or evidence, no amount of proof can dissuade them. For example, there could be a video of someone committing a crime, but if it’s a deep fake, that’s propaganda in a nutshell. We all suffer from it in some way.

Mass media is constructed to do that because it gives people power. As long as we hate each other, we can’t pay attention to the people running things. All these wedge issues divide people. At the end of the day, we don’t talk about energy, money, education, sustainability, or the consequences of globalization. We don’t talk about fundamental human rights or the preservation of traditions that have carried humanity for thousands of years.

We tend to ignore these things because we’re distracted by issues like "orange man bad" or "Biden is demented." There are other people who think about these issues and have well-thought-out opinions about what to do and where to go. They get to make decisions because we let them, as we’re so distracted by other things. Mainstream media has no point in informing you. CNN, Fox News, Bloomberg, and the Wall Street Journal don’t exist as journalistic organizations.

There’s no such thing as investigative journalism or objective truth in journalism. They read all these books about history. Movies are coming out next year about the history of Ethereum. Do you think that’s a true thing? It’s just narrative, made up for a purpose.

These people get paid money, fame, success, and power from being in these circumstances. It’s hard to stay positive because you see all the people caught up in it, absorbed by the propaganda. You can mock them; they sit in their cars alone with masks on, worried to death that some disease will kill them after three years of it. They don’t listen to anyone saying anything contrary and get super angry about various things. You can’t convince them otherwise.

They believe Trump won the election, and everything else is a lie, no matter the contrary evidence presented. So what do you do? You just have empathy for them. There needs to be a great deprogramming that happens organically. People subconsciously feel the tension between the perception of truth and the reality of truth.

They feel it and taste it, but they don’t necessarily know how to vocalize it. There’s always an unease, they’re standing on quicksand. In that gap is the opportunity for truth to grow. Counter-philosophy is required to inoculate people from the mind viruses we’re given regularly. It makes me sad more than anything else.

I try to stay positive, but I’m just sad because we could do so much better if we all just got along and worked together. With the technology we have, we could deliver a utopia to the world, but we still hate each other. We gain nothing from hating each other. Did you meet Fabian? Yeah, he’s great.

I think he created the ERC20 token standard. He’s been around in the space for a long time. I’m sure he’d say terrible things about me because he’s part of the Ethereum crew, but I’ve never had any problems with him. He seems to be a really nice and smart fellow. How do we get Dorsey and Block to collaborate using Cardano instead of Lightning?

They won’t for Bitcoin Maxis. What do you think about transhumanism? It’s unavoidable. Humans always want an edge and optimization. People use red light therapy on their balls; they sell these little cups at the gym to put on your balls to increase testosterone.

Just think about how far people are willing to go for a one or two percent gain. If you come and say, "Hey, I put this cybernetic implant in you, or I modify your genes, or I give you this drug," that’s Dave Asprey’s entire career. People will always pursue it. There’s a strong incentive to pursue transhumanism. The question is not if, but when.

Is red light therapy borderline crazy? No, not at all. It actually works quite well. There are over a thousand studies on it. It’s very common in Asia and is starting to work its way into America.

Is that a Waterhouse? Well, you recognized it. The other one is from Gustav Klimt. Charles, is that a Hellraiser lament configuration puzzle cube back there? Yes, and if you play with it, these guys show up and have interesting things to show you.

Have you ever had issues with pens leaking in your shirt pocket? I definitely have. Thank you for being real. Speaking of the truth, that’s very rare these days. Would you prefer a Kriss Vector or an AR-15?

By far, but let’s be honest here: you’ve got to get a Henry 1873.