Live from Warm Sunny Colorado

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny—sometimes Colorado. Today is March 19th, 2026. How about that? I'm wearing a crazy shirt I had made in Vietnam.

The tailor who made it used to be a nun and worked with Mother Teresa. How about that? In her shop, she's got a picture of her. I asked, "What's that?" She said, "Oh, I used to be a nun, ran away.

" I asked for a pocket, but she didn't put one on. Come on, nuns always know what's right. It's a good day, isn't it? We're having some fun. I want to make a video to talk a little bit about the ecosystem as a whole and reassure everybody that everything's okay.

the world's on fire. When you look at the world, it's on fire. It's just going up and down. You've got war in Iran, war in Ukraine, and next year, we might see China invading Taiwan. The economy is starting to blow up a little bit.

Apparently, we’re looking at a hundred to a hundred fifty dollar barrel of oil, and people are realizing that everything's connected to it. You want to move stuff around? It gets more expensive. You want to grow stuff? How do you grow stuff?

You use diesel to power all your farm equipment, which makes the price of food go up and the price of feed go up. Everybody's a little scared right now. People are losing their jobs en masse—Dell with 11,000 layoffs, HP probably going to lay off some people soon, Microsoft has, Facebook has. AI is getting more and more advanced, and there's a little bit of hopelessness. People are scared, and the government's run by satanic pedophiles.

So what do you do with that? You just have to choose which flavor of satanic pedophile you want—the Coke or Pepsi of them. Crypto goes up, goes down. But one of the stories I'd like to tell is to imagine if you were born in the late 19th century. Okay, so imagine that you were born in the year 1899 in America, in a small town in Kansas.

You'd never left your town, never gone more than 25 miles. No electricity, no running water—you’re getting it from a well. You're riding a horse. That's your world—a small world. George Washington would look familiar to you.

Then you turn 18, and all of a sudden, you've just been drafted. You go and fight in World War I. You're shipped off to Europe to a place you've never been, to a language you don't speak. Sure as hell, you don’t speak it. You're living in a trench, half the people you arrive with are dead within six weeks, and they use chemical weapons on you—chlorine gas, mustard gas.

You get blinded for a bit from the mustard gas, you get trench foot, and rats try to eat you. So you get through all of that, and you're like, "Oh my God, it's over." Then you come home to the Spanish flu, a pandemic that killed 20 million people worldwide. Then after that's all said and done, the Dust Bowl hits—a big drought, all the crops die. You're like, "Oh God.

" Plus, you’ve got all the stuff from the war you're still dealing with; your hearing's gone in your left ear from all that damn artillery. So you get through all that, and then you think you're good, and the Great Depression happens. And boy, does it hit hard. Kansas ain't got no industry in the town you're from, and you're living through that Great Depression. You've got FDR on the radio every day, calling you up and saying, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself.

We're going to get through this." And you're like, "Okay, okay." Then all of a sudden, communism becomes a thing, and Nazism becomes a thing. You're like, "What the heck is going on in Europe? Are we going for round two?

" We said, "No, no, we don't want to get involved in that crap." Then Pearl Harbor happens, and your kids get drafted. They have to go fight in round two, the deadliest war in human history. You're just sitting there, sick to your stomach, worried about them, wishing you were there to help them out. Everybody's rationing; you've got these coupon booklets for how much gas you can buy, how much iron you can buy, how much food you can buy—all completely dependent upon those booklets.

Finally, that war comes to an end, and then all of a sudden, everybody's talking about nuclear weapons. By 1950, the commies have them, and everybody's worried about nuclear weapons being used and the whole world coming to an end. Meanwhile, you grew up in a small town with no water, no electricity, riding a horse. Now you've got planes, urbanization, empires, and nuclear weapons, and it's just 1950. You're in your 50s.

Think about that. That was the lived experience of the majority of adult men by 1950 who were in their 50s. They lived through all of that. They’re not even 60 yet, and their kids lived through World War II, the Korean War, and their kids lived through the Vietnam conflict in the turbulent '60s. Their kids lived through the oil shocks and Watergate and all that other stuff in the 1970s.

So the point is, things can get bad. But on the other side of it, great things happen every generation, every place we come through. The reality is that there's a challenge that comes up, and our challenge is the hardest it's ever been because it's not a singular conflict. It's not we have to go kill some Nazis, and then magically it’s all over and we win. We have a crisis of meaning, and we have something we haven't seen in the human race in a long time since the rise of democracies and republics.

We see something where everything is going up for debate—the monetary system, the governance systems, the religions, meaning. And there's never been a more interesting time to be alive. We're starting to understand the nuances of consciousness, talking about biophotons and panpsychism. You've got amazing work happening with Michael Levin's lab and understanding the emergence of intelligence. Quantum computers are about to wake up, and our understanding of the universe will grow exponentially.

At the same time, you have the rise of AI, and every single person now has something to augment their brain. Imagine being born five foot two and weak in an agricultural society; you're not really worth very much. But today, you have machines. It doesn't matter if you're six foot eight and jocked as hell or five foot two; you can do the same amount of work because machines can do it for you. Now we have thinking machines with AI.

Average people, if they learn how to use AI, can become exceptional and do exceptional things because they can think into the machine if they learn how. What happens when the world is strong? You have the Industrial Revolution. What happens when the world is smart? You have an Enlightenment we've never seen before.

Yes, there's conflict. Name one period in human history where there hasn't been conflict. And yes, there are incompetent leaders as far as the eyes can see. Name one period in human history where we didn't have crazy incompetent leaders. Look at the 19th century with all the inbred royalty in Europe—jaws extending out because they’re like 14 cousins marrying each other, and they’re all messed up.

It's pretty crazy stuff. Hey, yeah, the orange man is bad. Okay, America's never had a bad president before—Warren Harding, Andrew Johnson. We've had some winners, man. We've had horrible presidents, far worse than what Trump has done.

And yeah, our institutions are a little shaky. We're transitioning from the baby boomers to a new generation, and new generations can come and have all these tools. We have a governance renaissance. Will we have hard times? Of course, we will have hard times.

But this is the first time in human history where we have our eyes on the prize. If we win, we will bank the unbanked. Everybody will own their own identity, and we will, for the first time in human history, have fair markets for everyone, everywhere. The billionaires, the three comma club, get the same marketplace as the poorest people in the world. Name any time in human history where rich people played by the same rules as poor people.

This wave of cynicism? Yes, but yes, but yes, but yes, but get over yourself. You don't know what's going to happen. If you did, you'd be as rich as me. Get over yourself.

The biggest lie you’ve been told is that the world works a certain way, that it's always going to work that way. You have no agency in it, and some group of people you've never met is going to decide for you. When I got into the three comma club at 33, I did all the things you're supposed to do. I went to the Milken Institute, met all the world leaders, met all the big people. I talked to them, expecting that those people would be special, that they'd have insights and knowledge that other people don't have, that they would have capabilities and it would be a privilege to get to know them.

Here's what I found out: they're as stupid, petty, and misinformed as the rest of us. There's nothing special about them. I've seen more wisdom from people I met on the streets in Japan. The people at the top have nothing on everybody else; they're just like everybody else. They’ve either stumbled into it, got lucky, or built something and are really good at one thing or maybe two or three things.

But you keep the conversation going, and you notice something—there are big holes in all that stuff. They get in their heads that because they have money and power, it makes them different, and that makes them weak and ultimately easy to beat. Sun Tzu wrote a manual a long time ago called "The Art of War." There's a saying in it: bad warriors go to war and then try to win. It's what Trump’s doing in Iran.

Good warriors win first and then go to war. Don't start things unless you're going to win and already know how to win before you start them. The people at the top are at the top of the legacy system, and they have no idea what is coming. That's why they're making the investment decisions they make, and that's why the world is where it's at. If they actually understood what's coming, they would be investing in different things and doing different things.

It's the young people using AI that can now think as a hundred people. Their advantages are so extreme, and their progress is so dramatic. They're the ones who are going to overtake these old people very quickly, and they're going to build a new society from it. I was just talking to Mike Ward. Mike is a great guy; he's the CEO of Shielded and one of the key people in getting Midnight where it needs to be.

We're launching at the end of the month. Mike and I were just brainstorming about what we could do to make Midnight faster and various approaches. Should we go down the Sui route and use their consensus protocol, or should we do the Raptor route, or should we build something bespoke? Let me show you something. We were talking about it, and I said, "what?

I'm going to take all the source code of Midnight and all the source code of Sui and all the white papers we've written, and I'm going to build an agentic framework." Because I've been doing this for a while, I'm pretty good at it. Here's what I built. Let me show you. There you go.

I generated on the fly a 40-page paper talking about the feasibility of adapting Sui's Mista Seti protocol. You go down, and there are various options. It gives a detailed description of all these things, talks about how all the interfaces work, goes through the network layer, the cryptographic stuff, and built all these beautiful tables. Look at all this. This is about six weeks' worth of analysis work.

I fact-checked it with four different LLMs, and I ragged in all the papers. I had adversarial agents go and see if they could break it and find flaws or other things inside of it. It breaks it down into various phases, tells you how long that would take, and the benefit from the entire thing. It even has pretty formatting, doesn’t it? Look at all this stuff.

You’ve got yourself a little critical file appendix with various sources. That's extraordinary, isn't it? You even have a little glossary of terms in case you forget stuff. I can generate that. Guess how long it took me to generate?

About an hour and a half. Six weeks of work in an hour and a half. I did it while I was in some boring meetings. And I'm not an AI expert, guys. I'm 38, and the generation before me, these guys are rock stars.

Think about that. Every engineer has this; every scientist has this. We're all converging, and our ability to build these things is growing exponentially. And it's just a brainstorm; we're shooting the shit now. Reading through it, I understand an enormous amount about Sui's architecture now and some of the things they're doing—impressive work, impressive scientists.

The sad part was, before AI, this stuff took them years. why I know it takes years? Because I met George Denizis in Corfu, Greece, back in 2016, and we talked about something that became Sui ten years later. That's how long he was working on it. How long have we been working on our Boris?

We were working on and presenting on our Boris there. We built George's RS Coin; he and Sarah Micklejohn did that. Now we can just read through everything and get a detailed engineering-level understanding and actually understand how these components work. Now, are there hallucinations? Sure.

Are there sore spots, weak spots? Sure. No tool is perfect. But this is a capability that the human race has never had. So think about what this does for biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, and society as a whole.

If you're interested in religion, you could take the holy texts of every major religion over the last 3,000 years, and you can rag them all in and build an agentic swarm and have them all duke it out. Basically, see if there is transitive and transcendent wisdom. In prior years, there'd be maybe four or five enlightened people worldwide who had the privilege, access, time, and ability to do such a thing. You can now do this in a month or two with a small team of AI experts and then distill it all down to an understandable manual that you can give to everybody. So you've got all this pessimism, cynicism, and this fetishism that the world is run by a new world order of brilliant people, and they will use their evil dark powers to control us.

The United States can't even figure out that it's a stupid idea to attack a country that's basically Iraq and Afghanistan, but with three times the population. They go and brag to us how they destroyed their navy and air force and how magically we're going to win because of that. I always ask, "Well, how many planes and ships did the Taliban have?" Because we fought them for 20 years, and who's in charge of Afghanistan? And by the way, tell us the reason we go to war with Iran is because they used all these weapons on our soldiers in Iraq.

It's true; they kind of had a monopoly on the whole EFP thing and taught everybody how to make IEDs. So we're going to have boots on the ground for a ten-year protracted conflict with the people that have mastered blowing us up with hidden bombs. Yeah, that's a good idea—a country with three times the population of Iraq. We don't have enough money to finish our border wall that Trump promised us for years and years and years. Sixteen billion is what it cost, but we do have enough money for 200 billion dollars to go invade Iran to stop them from getting a nuclear weapon, which we prevented them from getting for decades by bombing them in June of last year.

How many lies have to be told before the whole system unravels and loses legitimacy? Yet somehow, these people will stay in power forever. They're going to run out of credibility and money, and they're going to eat each other alive. So the decision is not whether we consent to and support the existing thing. The decision is: what do we do when the existing thing comes to a collapse?

The time for choosing is whether we hand the keys to the kingdom to the Palantirs, the Cantons, the Fetty Chains, to these Web 2.5 companies that basically build new Googles, Amazons, and Facebooks. They become choke points, and you will never be allowed to have non-custodial wallets, and everything is KYC. Twenty or thirty people at the top become trillionaires, and everybody else basically lives at their beck and call, and AI tells you what you can and can't do. Or do we continue what we started in the United States when we were founded by better people and keep pushing the cause of liberty forward?

It's not a fantasy. Yes, we had slaves, and yes, women were not equal to men when we founded. These are the sins of America. But everybody forgets that also the people at the top were revolutionaries for their time. Instead of becoming kings and ruling over us, they actually gave us a chance to rule over ourselves.

With that, we chose to expand the boundaries of liberty—sometimes through blood, sometimes through the ballot box, sometimes both—and give it to as many people as we can. This resulted in the overthrowing of most of the monarchies of the world in less than 200 years. It regresses and comes back, and we have the tools to bring liberty to levels we've never seen before in human history, right here, right now, in this industry. You've got all these people running around saying because the token price went down, crypto's dead. What the hell are you going back to?

Debased money, satanic pedophiles at the top, endless wars across the world, and eventually a buildup to World War III where a billion people die in nuclear conflict? Shame on you. Shame on you for being so cynical that you think that’s our destiny as a race. What I'm building up to is a system where you have control over your money. You can never be unbanked; you can never be deplatformed.

You have god-given freedom of speech, association, and commerce, and it's yours globally, giving you one marketplace where everybody plays by the same rules. I'm giving you a layer where we can finally figure out how to solve the AI problems. I'm giving you something where we can build a completely new economy that we've never seen before—a post-cap That's too big. Imagine being so terrified of the boss that you can't even tell him he got you the wrong shoes, and you have to wear them and pretend they are the right ones. These men have no power; they're all simulacra of it.

They're shadows; they're not people. So they don't have the right to rule, and thus they will lose it. What comes next is up to us, and that's what we're going to do. I understand the markets aren't where you want them to be. It's up to you to decide what to do about that.

For me, I'm just going to keep on building, keep on writing papers, and keep on doing whiteboard sessions. I don't care. I was broke, became a billionaire, and I don't care if I go back to broke. It doesn't matter. I already sold the Black Hawk.

Turns out, during wars, it's easy to do that. Closing that deal comes, I think, in May or June. It's sad to see Black Betty go, but what? I enjoyed and loved what it was for the time I had it, and I can make much better use of what she was with where we're going and more to come. That's the nature of life.

The Japanese have a saying for it: it's called "mono no aware." It's kind of like that bittersweet joy you get when you watch a cherry blossom and realize it's going to wilt. Everything is ephemeral. Nothing is permanent—money isn't, possessions aren't, your life isn't. Love and enjoy where you're at, and boy, I'm loving where I'm at right now.

I can make a difference. I'm in the driver's seat. I actually have some agency in the matter. And the reality is, you are too. No matter who you are or where you're at, you have just as much influence in your own special way.

Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. Don't let anybody talk you out of your humanity. Know that you matter. You matter to me.