Surprise AMA 04/02/2023

I knew that was bad on the color. Hello, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado—always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. I'm here with a special guest star who’s in town for executive meetings. Hello, I am Tamara Hassan, president of IO, and today is Sunday, April 2nd, 2023. A lot of cool things have been happening recently.

We are right in the thick of things with moving Cardano along. SIP 1694 is really starting to shape up. There are a lot of community workshops getting started. We just had our first community Zoom call, and I think more than 50 or 60 people showed up for that, in addition to the original participants from the workshop we had here in Colorado. Many community workshops are going to be held in person across the world throughout the coming months.

In July, in Edinburgh, we’ll have the other side of the bookshelf—the finalizing workshop to get the remaining parameters in and a lot of great development work as well. Version A of the node is under construction. There’s about an eight-month backlog that Sergey, Vitalik, and others have been gradually working through, and with any luck, that should be pushed to pre-prod soon. We’re really excited about that because that’s going to be the foundation upon which 1694 will get implemented for testing, so people can actually see what it means to be a DRep, similar to the experience we had with the incentivized testnet. I’m really excited about that.

We’re starting to put some tiger teams together to look at some very specific issues. This will be led by the newest VP of delivery here, Billy Ballet, who we love and admire. He’s from Kentucky, a good kid, and really smart. He’s got a great team with him, and we’re going to look at some areas that people have been complaining about for quite some time, whether it be DP sync, the node interface, or perhaps accelerating certain things like tiered pricing, for example. We’re just triaging and going down the list, so we’re excited to see this new approach.

A lot of other cool, interesting things are happening. Hydra finally reached mainnet, and people have been playing around with it. We launched Hydra on mainnet, and the first thing that you guys drew with Hydra on mainnet was a penis. Thank you very much; that was exciting. Nothing like 15 months of hardcore engineering work to get a dick drawn pixel by pixel.

By the way, every pixel was a transaction, so that is a high-transaction penis. We learned a lot about that. Now, as AMAs aren’t just about Cardano; they’re about my life and the things that I’m interested in. When I have special guest stars, it’s about their lives and the things they’re interested in, so nothing is off-limits. This is the coolest device I think I’ve ever purchased.

This right here is a Roxiva unit. They are not cheap; they’re about five thousand dollars because it’s a medical device, not a little play device. It’s actually for audio and visual entrainment. Tim and I were just using it, and we’ve been testing it for the past week. So how would you describe it?

It depends on what setting it’s on. It’s supposed to simulate—there’s a setting for DMT, which I’ve never done—so it can simulate a DMT trip or an LSD trip. It kind of feels a kaleidoscope on your face, and it puts you in another world. You have headphones on when you’re doing it, and you see tracers and patterns—many, many patterns. The one we just did was for anxiety.

It has maybe about 200 programs. It kind of puts you in a new state of mind, sort of like meditation but with light therapy and patterns. It re-toggles your mind and the chemicals and neurons in your mind. We haven’t actually dug deep into the safety protocols yet, so we’re only doing six minutes right now. Everybody’s just doing six minutes.

We did it on our legal team this week as well, and they really loved it. This is a powerful medicine that requires powerful respect. This is a powerful device, and you have to be careful with it. Audio and visual entrainment have been studied in cognitive neuroscience for a very long time, and there are lots of really cool things you can do. Basically, the device is held about this far from the face.

You close your eyes, sit back, relax, put on some headphones, and it flashes. If people are observing you, it looks it’s just flashing white light, but you’re seeing patterns, geometry, and colors, and you go on a journey. There are two different directions that this device is intended for: one is more in the anti-anxiety focus and performance enhancement realm, which we term the meditative area. The other is actually for therapy and entertainment. It can knock you, if you use it long enough with the right settings, into a kind of pseudo-psychedelic state similar to what a DMT trip would be.

The difference between chemicals and this device is that it has an on-and-off switch, so after you finish the routine, you come back, and so far it seems to be pretty instant. Now, that said, it’s one of those things where you just have to study it. What if you have epilepsy? What if you have neurological problems or schizophrenia? We’re not exactly sure.

I’ve sent this research thread up to my clinic in Wyoming, and we’re going to spend some time playing around with it. Throughout the coming months, we’ll learn more about it. What’s really interesting is that I do believe it has a profound impact on your brain waves. One of the first things we’re going to do when we start playing around with this is take a look at EEG. We’re going to do an EEG pre, during, and post, and measure it for several people to get a sense of what’s happening with their brain waves.

Another thing we’re probably going to do is look at cognitive scoring and things that are intended to enhance. We can do a pre and post with the unit and see what effects it has on people. Very exciting, but I wouldn’t recommend using it at the moment because we haven’t really dug deep into the safety protocols and gotten a full understanding of how it works under the hood. There’s a lot of great science; visual and audio entrainment has been around for quite some time. It’s really been a hidden gem, and the Roxiva is the first pseudo-consumer device at the five thousand dollar price point that I’ve seen.

The power of having a clinic is that you have all these physicians and scientists floating around, making it straightforward and easy for us to take these devices and test them over time. We’ll be able to test them at a significant level, like with a spec scan, and look at blood flow through the brain with an MRI, in addition to EEG studies and qualitative and quantitative assessments. It’s also supposed to be used like psychedelics to help with conditions like OCD, right? Yeah, people with OCD. You have to be careful with using words like "cure," though.

Right, not cure, but... Even with transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is one of the gold standards as an alternative for SSRI therapy, the FDA-approved curative rate is about a third. I wouldn’t expect this device to have a high curative rate, but it could mirror what we’ve seen with ecstasy and the MDMA trials, which were quite breakthrough. MDMA is the first one to go through an actual placebo-controlled double-blind clinical trial. I don’t believe peyote has gone through the same level of rigor, but there’s a common belief that it does.

Psilocybin has also gone through significant trials at Johns Hopkins under Roland Griffiths. If you’re planning on attending MAPS, which is the big psychedelic conference for research and psychedelics, I will be there towards the end of June here in Denver, Colorado. Roxiva has a booth, so we’re definitely going to play around with their latest technology, and that’s going to be a lot of fun. Okay, so first question: sign me up! How do you spell it?

It is Roxiva, and I will actually give you guys a link to the website here if you’re interested. By the way, I have no commercial relationship with Roxiva; I’m not paid by them. I bought this with my own money; it’s just a cool, interesting device. here we go. Have you seen the recent Lex interviews with Sam and Eliza?

I’d love to get your take on AGI and how we can make it safe. Is its distinction almost a certainty at this point? Actually, I just watched the Sam interview—Sam Harris? No, Sam Altman. Thank you!

There’s a lot of controversy related to how Sam is proceeding. I watched the beginning of Eliza’s interview. He’s a very smart guy, but also very hostile. how Lex always does the thing where you have to change it and say it from the other person’s perspective? What does he call that?

Not straw manning, but steel manning. Yeah, steel manning. He refused to steel man something with Lex. He was like, “I think you will do that incorrectly; nobody can understand what I think.” It was the first time I’ve ever seen somebody challenge Lex on steel manning, which was very funny, and Lex took it a champ.

So, Sam... I don’t know. My intuition with Sam is that I think he means well right now. That’s the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I think he thinks he’s doing the right thing, but I feel he’s slowly going to not be doing the right thing.

I think he’s going to take it a little bit too far. It’s not really open anymore, so he should probably change it to "closed." I think even Eliza or somebody else mentioned that. It is kind of closed now; they’re not sharing any of the backend or the details about that, so it’s effectively not an open AI. I think he should be a little bit more honest about that.

So yeah, I think he meant well, but I think it’s transitioning into something that might be a little bit more dangerous. I do agree with the letter that has been written. That’s the follow-up question, actually. What do you think of the CEOs' letters? Yeah, so Imad is somebody I’ve been following.

I’m not exactly sure how to pronounce his last name. I’ve watched a couple of videos now. I don’t think it was on Lex, or maybe he was on Lex, but I kind of like his approach and how he thinks about it. I trust his being slow and deliberate about the advancement of AI. He thinks about AI on a country level, so his long-term vision is that each country will even have its own dataset.

As well as the Diffusion AI guy, I think it’s... I don’t think it’s about Diffusion AI, but I can’t remember the name of his company. Yeah, that’s Stability. Stability, that’s it. There’s some diffusion in there.

Yeah, he’s great. For some reason, when I watched him a while ago, I was just a lot more comfortable with his perspective than what Sam is sort of proceeding with right now. So yeah, I fully support the letter. I think, in anything—and I’ve been saying this with blockchain as well because you have to relate everything to blockchain—all these really advanced technologies where you don’t know what could happen, especially as they affect humanity as a whole, I’ve been a big advocate since the beginning of slowing down to speed up and actually thinking around the problem. I don’t agree with opening AI all the way, just like with any open-source software.

I believe there are degrees in which you eventually completely open-source it. I do agree that it’s a little bit too complicated to completely open-source it to the world, but I do agree that they should slow down and actually think about the implications of what they’re building. Now, considering GPT-4 is this powerful, the thing I keep hearing, even from Eliza and everybody, is just how astounded they are with how advanced it already is. Nobody could have predicted that, or they did not predict that. They all seem a little bit...

like nobody predicted that. When you don’t predict something like that, you do have to slow down and actually think about it. Plus, it was meant to be run by OpenAI, which was supposed to be a foundation, not for profit. Yeah, they like money. That’s ridiculous, though.

You give money to a not-for-profit, as Elon did and others, and then they all of a sudden turn it into... it’s not even open-core; it’s really a commercial entity. Right, that’s not traditional. Well, there are some open-source components that are still there. Yeah, and I was with you over at the Milken Institute last year at Eric Schmidt’s house for his birthday party.

We had a lovely lunch, and I talked to Eric. I said, “Eric, what’s going to be the big thing in the next five years?” He said, “Large language models. AI is going to be a huge deal.” We keep saying it, but this is going to be the decade where it gets really good.

Actually, I just saw a paper this morning that I have to read. The paper talks about using GPT to train GPT. It turns out that even with no new model, no new training model, you could use GPT to train GPT, and you can get great results from it. The problem is that recursive optimization means there’s a very good chance that GPT-4 can make GPT-4.5 and GPT-4...

With a new model, GPT-5 will see exponential improvement in its capabilities. Right now, GPT-4 is a pretty good junior programmer, not such a good average programmer, and a terrible expert-level programmer. GPT-5 will be an exceptional entry-level programmer, a pretty good average programmer, and a poor good programmer. GPT-6 will reach an exceptional level, becoming the best developer you've ever met in your entire career for every programming language at the same time. I believe there’s going to be a tremendous Centaur effect where pairing people with GPT will exponentially increase their productivity.

I’ve already experienced this in my own personal life. Now, Charles, I know you’re involved in several ventures, including healthcare. My question for you is whether any of your non-crypto ventures use blockchain in any way. Well, one of my companies is a construction company. I set it up because the cost of construction is incredibly high.

We have a master carpenter, an HVAC guy, a concrete foreman, a Class A contractor, and an architect. We’ve pulled all these trades together to internally manage construction because the cost per square foot is so high these days. One of the things we’ve been looking at is more sustainable materials and stronger, better environmentally friendly materials to replace older ones. For example, Portland cement is a key ingredient in concrete, but it turns out you can use geopolymers. The guy who discovered this was trying to figure out how they built the pyramids, thinking maybe they had a clever way of making concrete and poured the blocks instead of cutting and moving them, which makes much more sense.

He stumbled upon a recipe for a much better type of concrete using slag from steel production, sand, and fly ash. We decided to use GPT-4 to create a list of natural or environmentally friendly alternatives for each building category, such as drywall, framing, and insulation, and rate them in order of cost, strength, and accessibility. GPT-4, working with my executive assistant, was able to do this in 20 minutes, creating a beautiful table with 26 different items. We looked at magnesium oxide drywall, which is super strong, and aircrete as an insulating spray foam. Now I can take that and put it into Ask Wonder to get a more specific directed research report, which I can then feed back into GPT-4 and repeat the cycle.

In just a week or two, you can conduct Gartner-level research and sample the entire market space. That’s a remarkable capability. Once you identify the material you you probably need to figure out the supply chain for it and the specialized training to use it. For instance, if we’re using aircrete spray foam insulation, we need to buy a machine, source the materials, and train people on how to use it. You can get answers to these basic questions almost instantly, which normally would take weeks or months of research or subject matter expertise.

You can assign an untrained person, and within a very short time, they can accomplish this. Now, regarding the question of whether we’re using blockchain in my other ventures, absolutely. In the medical world, one of the things we’re looking at is private information and data. At some point, I would like our electronic health record system to find a way to mine and monetize that data because we’re collecting enormous amounts of information. We have genomic data and large population chronic care groups coming together.

It will be interesting to see if we can anonymize it using technologies like Midnight and create a system where people can query it, similar to a bat-style model. Another venture I have involves bioluminescent plants. We’re exploring whether we can engineer plants with deep fibrous root systems that absorb significant amounts of carbon, similar to bamboo, which stores 40% of its carbon underground. If that’s the case, then every time someone plants one of these glow-in-the-dark plants, they’re also generating carbon credits. The trading system, tracking system, and representation of carbon would be exciting to put on the blockchain.

However, I still haven’t solved how to get the carbon analysis from it, whether it’s bamboo or anything else, onto the blockchain in a verifiable way. There are two components to this. One is that an average plant, over its growth cycle, will produce a measurable amount of carbon stored. You can measure that and assume it when you ship it. However, you also need a supply chain to track whether they’re still alive and in circulation since these are genetically modified organisms.

It’s essential to have a robust supply chain system to know where every one of these organisms is and if they’re still alive. This is necessary for retrospectives with environmental protection agencies worldwide to verify that these species are not interacting negatively with the environment. The supply chain component needs to be fraud-free and auditable, as does the carbon credit component. In both cases, I believe there’s definitely a blockchain layer that can be added, but it’s a bit premature at the moment. I’d estimate that this endeavor will be around 2025 to 2027 since there are many things that need to be figured out first.

That said, you can do a lot of IoT work. There are nano technologies the size of a grain of rice that you can put into the seeds of the plant. When the plant grows, it becomes NFC-enabled. You can audit and periodically check things using drones, which can solve many supply chain problems. There’s a lot of exciting stuff with nano sensors in the IoT space.

Cardano isn’t quite ready to enter the IoT side of the world, but I believe as we close out the decade, that will be a fun area to explore. I always try to find a way to dig into and determine if there’s a sensible blockchain component. It usually comes down to transparency, trust, trust brokering, auditability, the desire for time-stamping, and fidelity. Blockchain accounting is another area I’d love for all of our books to be blockchain-verified, especially as I continue to incorporate more businesses. I’ll have a situation similar to Samsung, which has 14 sets of books because every subsidiary has its own.

It would be great to have triple-entry accounting with real-time continuous auditing. In the medical world, it’s similar to the financial industry with open banking. Banking is one of the most closed, non-transparent, high-security industries regarding your data, and they’re finally opening up to allow open banking, though not yet with blockchain. In the medical field, how do you think they will deal with this? Who will be the first to open up?

Everything is held under HIPAA, so how do you approach someone to say, “Okay, your data is going to be secure, and it’s going to go into this bank without releasing any personal information?” This data should be open source to all doctors and research medical institutions so they can develop more advanced treatments. There’s an economic agency to consider. It’s like stealing money from people. They had to spend money to aggregate it, and saying they have to give it away for free is like saying you have to give away all your work for free.

I think there needs to be economic agency for it, creating marketplaces. By having a marketplace, it will create far more access. If you give it away for free, then it becomes a public good, and nobody wants to format it properly. The good news is that the vast majority of medical data is starting to aggregate among the collection of EHRs. Athena, Epic, and a few others have a monopoly in this area, while there’s a long tail of smaller EHRs that are usually outpatient.

We have many doctors reaching out to us, saying they want to work for us, but they want to sell us an EHR instead. For the most part, it’s Athena, Epic, and these other large providers. Open Vista was one used by the military, but I guess they’re pivoting off that. Once you’ve integrated, it’s as simple as clicking a box to liberate the medical data. However, there are still many issues with coding medical records and sorting all that out.

Unfortunately, even though there are standard formats to translate between these different EHRs, migrating from one to another is a substantial task. They do this on purpose because they don’t want to make it easy to leave and migrate. In some cases, you have to manually create profiles. If we were to leave Athena and go to Epic, or vice versa, we’d have to migrate thousands of patients, which would take months. This situation hinders good data mining and the ability to ask policy-directed questions.

For example, if the Department of Health wants to know how many people over the age of 50 with asthma and polycystic ovarian disease who are taking hormone replacement had a bad outcome with COVID, answering that question is still quite difficult because the datasets aren’t interoperable between these companies. They’ve made enormous progress in the last ten years, but it’s still a challenging problem because nobody has a strong incentive to work with each other. It’s similar to open banking in the banking world. They’re trying hard to pull things together, but it’s still not quite there. It usually takes 10 to 20 years to see significant changes.

What is an actual good personal DNA service with actual privacy? How about that? But do we really want to feed the carbon fear hysteria? Whether you it or not, it exists, and I’m a capitalist. If it’s there, I’m going to make money from it.

The answer, Charles, is copying VeChain. No, we’re inspired by VeChain. VeChain is a well-known supply chain cryptocurrency with a very active community. Regarding the mouse study, they were disrupting the epigenome, and one of the disruptions caused damage to the mouse, leading to accelerated aging. It wasn’t natural aging; it was a result of the disruption.

Who is this woman? I am Tam. My background is quite varied. I started as a political scientist, always questioning systems. I did a specialist degree in political science, but I realized the political system was a little too corrupt for me.

I worked for the government for one day and was upset that they told me I was working too hard and needed to slow down because it was making them look bad. That was the moment I decided to pivot and went into acting. I moved to New York, studied theater, and recommend acting to folks. It’s like therapy; it turns you inside out, and you learn a lot about yourself. Then I became an audio engineer and worked in the Middle East, helping to build an architecture firm.

After that, I went to law school and got into crypto early on, where I met Charles before Ethereum even launched. I remember using a Bitcoin ATM with my phone and wallet, which was one of the first wallets. I put in $20 and got my first Bitcoin. At that moment, I saw the future of where it was all going. What do I do for IO?

I am the President of IO. It’s a glorified role; I’m the mini CEO. Charles tells people what to do, and I implement those directives. I started as the culture officer because company culture is essential and touches all aspects of the business. Then I moved into HR to help grow our company on the people side.

After that, I became the chief of staff, which is a fantastic job. We were undergoing a significant company transformation, and the consultants recommended I transition to president. Now, all the executives report to me, and I report to Charles. I work with the CEO and run the day-to-day business of IO, which allows me to work on six companies simultaneously. I take a more strategic role and only occasionally get involved in execution operations when it makes sense.

I’m still heavily involved in the Cardano side and new product development, like Midnight. Many ongoing concerns can be handled through the normal C-suite, allowing for beautiful delegation within the system. It’s starting to work really well, although there are still bugs and kinks we’re learning to navigate. I’m trying to build one of the most amazing companies in the world that is agile, focused on ecosystem product development, and has culture at its heart. We actively foster culture in various ways.

This year is about finishing many of our products. A lot of people don’t realize how many products we have that we’re working on daily. As many of we’re also spinning out companies, and I’m responsible for ensuring they have the right management and leadership while inheriting the right DNA from the parent company. It’s a hub-and-spoke model, and I see the constellation of IO as a hub with its subsidiaries as an ecosystem. We’re continuously improving all related entities.

The bioluminescent plant is a joint venture between us and the Colossal team. I love thinking about governance, especially in a corporate system. It’s crucial to consider incentives and how to encourage different companies to work together. You can’t impose anything; you have to incentivize productive behavior. I’m working with Charles on corporate strategy and love building companies.

I went to law school, and my parents were sad I didn’t become a lawyer, but this is way more fun. I still deal with corporate law, employment law, and regulatory law, which keeps it interesting. Charles and I work well together. He’s more of the strategist on product and visionary aspects, while I focus on execution and implementation. We have to be able to delegate effectively, especially with 700 people in over 70 countries dealing with multiple business domains.

Speaking of effective people, with the recent ChatGPT and Wolfram integration, there’s potential in combining Cardano with Wolfram. Stephen Wolfram sent me an email about ChatGPT, and we wrote a 112-page booklet in a month discussing it. I’m interested in potential integrations, particularly with ChatGPT and Marlow for developing Marlow code for NFTs. We have a small skunkworks project that Omer is spinning up, which will be part of the next PI planning. This will be our first professional foray into GPT as a company.

I’ve always viewed Wolfram as a superior oracle compared to Chainlink because it has unlimited computable information and a beautiful interface that even Google uses. If you could take that and make it more decentralized in terms of access, you’d effectively have the oracle layer for the entire multiverse of blockchains. Wolfram has a great blockchain group, and we’ve had many discussions over the years, including an NFT drop with them. I think this is the right intersection point for potential collaboration. I need to talk to Steve about this, and I’ll certainly read his book to find some time for that.

He’s a brilliant guy, and it’s always fun to talk to him. Business is all about timing, right? There are so many people we meet along the journey, and it’s about when we can actually do something with them. Some interesting questions here. Craig Wright is an inflammatory guest that often creates drama in crypto media and podcasts.

They bring on guests who will create controversy, and it becomes a cycle of drama. I haven’t talked about Craig in a long time. He always says I’m a scammer, but he calls everyone a scammer. I tweeted back that I don’t care, which seems to qualify as a feud in crypto these days. The best-case scenario is that nobody cares; the worst-case scenario is he sues me, which he does to everyone.

It’s a nuisance dealing with him. It’s like fighting someone made of molten tar; even if you win, you still get tarred. It doesn’t add any value to anyone watching. Engaging with someone who refuses to acknowledge your existence or give you the benefit of the doubt is unproductive. We’ve accomplished so much, like creating Marlow, the Orboros consensus model, NEPA Pals, and pioneering the usage of formal methods in cryptocurrency development.

We wrote one of the first detailed attack papers on peer-to-peer networking, and we weren’t affected by a recent huge hack on peer-to-peer with many Bitcoin derivative coins because we have a custom network stack that’s significantly better. You can think our tokenomics are wrong or that we’re scammers, but you can’t deny the scientific innovation. Craig doesn’t understand it, and that’s just simple. Why give him the time of day? He has a cult following, and you don’t engage with people like that; you just move on.

As for the Edinburgh Decentralization Index update, there’s a lab at the University of Edinburgh with its own leadership, graduate students, and engineers working on it. They will publish decentralization results for Bitcoin, and it’s completely independent of IO. I don’t manage it, and I’m not in charge of it, so I don’t get daily reports. It works on academic cycles, so if there’s going to be an output, it will likely be on a semester basis or targeted towards a conference. I’d expect the first EDI measurement to be out during the summer.

Once it stabilizes and gains traction, it will expand, similar to the Cambridge energy index. Once it’s stabilized, I’d like to get a standards body involved, like ANSI or ISO, or my personal favorite, NIST. We even talked to NIST about this last year. It’s an interesting academic question of how to measure decentralization, and I believe it will be beneficial for the entire industry. I promise one day they’ll write nice things about us or at least something neutral.

Our first question from Lynette: “You’re a [__] artist.” Which one, me or you? They never really tell you what the [__] is. Thank you, Lynette. That’s very constructive.

My dog has more valid education than you. Thank you! I’m glad to hear that. At least I have smart contracts. Our smart contracts always need work and are continuously improving.

Thank you so much; that was cute. This is how I spend my Sundays. Are you guys hiring any community management people? I’m always looking for good community managers. The biggest role we’re hiring for right now in a community-type role is a Dev Relations lead, a pretty senior role that can manage all of our DevRel.

Lynette’s comments about our smart contracts highlight the need for someone to build our smart contract environments and improve documentation. We’re always looking for great community managers. The membership-based organization will have its own community management aspects. Ecosystem growth is the future, and it’s a great career path. Anything related to ecosystems, including open banking, is trying to figure out how to build ecosystems.

It’s a hard-to-find role, so if you’re interested, just apply on our website. Are you working on some surprise products we’re not aware of? Oh, yeah, we have some next-level products in the works. What about IOG ambassadors? I would love to launch something like that in the future.

What do you think about the Citibank report on crypto? I thought it was amazing. They’re talking about a multi-trillion dollar ecosystem by 2030. They were spot on about CBDCs being big and Wow, you have that many? Yeah, they're all Ranch trucks.

There's a lot floating around. What do you think about Toyota? Charles, Lexuses are great; I'm not going to complain. GMC has a beautiful front. The fronts are actually quite nice.

Toyota, they are the ones who invented the assembly line. They got very creative very early. Well, the assembly line was about it by Ford, but they optimized some part of the Kanban system, the Toyota Production System. They took it to the next level, right? They made it affordable, and they entered the West as well.

The first spec for that, it's hard to run a business, right? It is. They can't rely on anything really that has been even mildly successful because running a business is hard; most fail. From Jonathan Santos, rebuilt Ford. I don't know what that means.

I've seen rebuilt Dodge Fords. Exactly, he rebuilt it and still doesn't work. Ford stands for "found on road dead." Actually, my first car was a Ford Taurus. There you go; the truth shall set you free.

I had a Ford Fusion, and the family still has Fords. Dad has a Ford F-350. what? You offended your own father; it is found on road dead a lot. My first car was a Pontiac Sunfire.

It's purple. I will not fault Ford for some of the work that they've done, but I will say what they've done with the Mustang is a crime against humanity. The hatchback electric Mustang—what have you done? It just sounds a bad idea. This guy right here, the Taurus SHO was legit.

That's what I had: a 1998 black Ford Taurus SHO. At least it was black. Here, run for president as a Republican. No, what would you run as then? Four-door two?

An independent. I'm not running at all. I mean, but it's a thought experiment. If you were going to run... I'm not going to run; I don't want to be a politician.

God, I hate them. You hate politicians? Every one of them. You're trying to be... well, you like Ron Paul.

Well, he's not a politician. He was. He's not really. Actually, he's a doctor. Oh, he's not really?

Yeah, hell yeah, he's the anti-politician; he's my boy. Let's see here, Ford Fiesta. Will CeCe make it? Yes, he's going to pay lots of fines and move on with life because that's how these things work. I hope so.

Tulsi Gabbard, she's great as well. Actually, she's an excellent strong leader and switched sides out of fundamental principles. I tell you what, she's a real person. If I was DeSantis and I won the nomination, I would pick Tulsi as a VP. Could you imagine her debating Kamala Harris round two?

Yeah, Tulsi would win that battle. That'd be a lot of fun. Why is the extended UTXO model better than the accounts model for blockchain? It comes down to parallelism, concurrency, and your ability to process off-chain transactions. When you're in the account-style model, the whole system has to constantly update itself and keep track.

It's almost a global variable of what is going on for the system state. When you're in a UTXO-style model, there is this notion of keeping track of the current UTXO, but you as the user don't have to know it. You just have to know your shard of it, the things relevant to your particular wallet. Because of that, you start having this beautiful nature where things that happen on-chain and off-chain are isomorphic to each other. In other words, things can go off for a while, lots of transactions can happen, and when they come back, you're not surprised by something changing on you that you didn't think was going to change without your permission or knowledge.

So you can make strong guarantees in the proofs, the math, and the engineering. That's relevant for Roll-Ups, really relevant when you talk about payment state channels, and really relevant when you talk about side chain transactions. When we were designing Cardano's accounting model, we said we wanted something that is going to be very straightforward to shard, go parallel, and be highly concurrent. It was the model that we had to invent. Now, the downside is it's kind of like when you go from single-core processors to multi-core processors.

The way that you write code to take advantage of these capabilities is fundamentally different. You can emulate an account-style model in extended UTXO, but if you do it in a very naive way, you get to that one transaction per block situation that we ran into when Alonzo came out. Since that time, it's been resolved. People have figured out how to write code properly, and they've really started to get wonderful output. What's also really cool is you can do many things in one transaction.

In an account-style model, you do one thing per transaction. So with an account-style model, you think in TPS, while with an extended UTXO model, you think of TPT—transactions per transaction. To just show you guys real quickly, it's an important distinction. There's actually a lovely website—let's make sure they're up. Oh yeah, they are.

I'm still going to share my screen. You guys ready for this? Whoa, there we go, infinite. All right, extendedutxo.org.

I love that. This is actually directly connected to the Cardano blockchain. It'll come online here in just a second. Basically, this shows real-time blocks in the Cardano network. Each of those little blocks is actually a transaction, and all those outputs are different things that are happening at the same time.

If I highlight one of these, you see that that's a script for Plutus, and these are NFTs, and that's Ada being moved. That's a single transaction, and look at all the different events that have occurred instead of that transaction. This is a real-time view of the Cardano network. Sandstone, congratulations! You made this block, and this block had a big fat script in it.

That right there is Charlie three; that's an oracle transaction. Apparently, somebody moved an NFT, and then you got some Ada that moved around here. This one was 16 NFTs being dropped at the same time, and that's one transaction. Great visuals! Whoever did this, wonderful.

Kudos to our guys. He said this is impossible to do in the accounts model; they don't have a representation like this. What ends up happening is that you eventually develop capabilities to do more and more outputs. At Ergo, for example, they've experimented with 5,000 outputs, and then each output can have dozens of events inside of it. Lots of interesting things are happening.

So one transaction could be 5,000 transactions. When you talk about Roll-Ups, you can start talking about taking all of these things and instead of having them individually be Ada movements or NFT movements, you potentially could have all of these things be special purpose ribs and have tons of Roll-Ups off-chain. So recursively, what ends up happening is the system gets enormous scale—tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of actual transaction-style events per minute. HV Ada H3 men, absolutely. It makes it easier because Roll-Ups essentially bundle transactions to be validated back on-chain.

Why is this? Because they're already bundled in such a way. You could take all of these things, take the output, and roll it up into a single output, right? So all of this stuff here would be just one script. Oh, I see what you're saying.

Each of these could be a script. Oh, that's amazing. I see exactly what you're saying. Yeah, that's the cool thing about extended UTXO. The visual is awesome.

It's so awesome, and you can't do this with accounts; it's just not possible. Why did they decide to go with the accounts model? Steelman this one: why did they decide? Because the development model is significantly simpler, and that's fine. UTXO programming is a lot harder to do.

It's kind of like functional programming versus imperative programming. We're functional programming guys, so we're really used to this type of thinking. Bitcoin also does this as well, by the way; this is the only way Bitcoin could do smart contracts. But we've never once innovated, I guess. So yeah, I think it's just a great model, and it's built hand in glove for Hydra.

It's built hand in glove for side chain transactions, Roll-Ups, off-chain stuff, and it's very clear how you over time optimize the UTXO model. Ergo's done some great work; we continue to do great work, and with every version of Plutus and update of the UTXO, it'll get more efficient. So you can horizontally scale, and you can do physically more transactions in a block; that's what input endorsers are about. Then you can vertically scale, where you actually use the transactions more efficiently. Then you can do off-chain scaling, where you can represent something on-chain that's a proof of many things that happen off-chain, and that's kind of what a Roll-Up Hydro-style thing is doing.

Then you can have completely different models, which is what side chains are about. So those three things together—the horizontal, the vertical, off-chain, and side chains—these types of things are what really make the secret sauce great. It's just inevitable over time; you'll just get more and more speed, more and more capabilities. We've already gone from a very difficult development model when Alonzo came out to actually a pretty functional model and a pretty functional ecosystem in about half the time it took Ethereum. So if you give us another year or two, it's just going to be exponentially better, and there's going to be so much more capability inside the system.

And it's a good follow-up question: how much will Hydra improve TPS? That's really not the right question. The right question is how do you use Hydra's middleware in your application so that you can do a lot of your expensive stuff off-chain? Then when it comes back to chain, you use fewer resources on-chain. There are two directions you can go: you can either do it all on-chain, which makes a very bloated chain and requires a lot of computing power, or you can try to find a way to do a lot off-chain in an intelligent system and then batch it and bring it on-chain, which is where everybody's kind of going.

That's what Hydra is doing; it's middleware to provide that capability. Yes, he describes it as a state channel; now it's middleware. Then he also described it as a DApp, I think, in one of his blog posts. Yeah, and you build it a DApp, and it's very easy to integrate and talks to everything. All right, David, I'm about a third of the way through the "Understanding Cardano" book.

Write down your thoughts, positive and negative. We are going to make this book better and better every year because this is the Bible. I can always tell Charles's mood by his commentary when screen sharing. Wow, all right. Would you ever go on the Lex Friedman podcast again?

Of course! That's our boy. Yeah, she was actually with me when I went on. Oh my gosh, there was a crew of us. We sat there for five hours.

Five hours! He would not take a bathroom break, and poor Lex really had to go to the bathroom, and so did we. I had to go too, but I know you were just testing us. All right, Alex is amazing; you should go back on for sure. Yeah, Lex is one of the most amazing people in the world.

He's emotionally intelligent; that's why I like him. He doesn't get emotional about issues—well, a little bit—but he can actually look at both sides of a debate and present it very intelligently. I love him. This is an interesting question: you forgot to mention nuclear fusion in your five pillars of the 21st century. No, I don’t think I did.

It's important to understand that we don't have an energy crisis. We just don't. If you look at just the coal reserves that we have and our capability to make coal work for the world, there's enough energy in coal for over a thousand years across the entire world. I've heard that coal is the worst possible thing we could do. Well, it depends.

If you take a look at coal going to fly ash, you take a look at modern coal technology and our ability to sequester it, it's not a heavy lift to get to a point where coal would be a relatively acceptable energy source. Fly ash can be put into geopolymer concrete, and you get a 90% reduction in the carbon product output of concrete manufacturing because you can completely replace Portland cement with fly ash, and you get tons of fly ash from coal power plants. That's just one energy source, and there's a path to make that energy source incredibly environmentally friendly. Where you have an abundance of geothermal and hydroelectric, you can put carbon air capture there because you have such a large abundance, and you can offset all of the stuff that comes from coal. These other things they claim, like radioactive substances coming from coal, well, it depends on your source of coal, how you treat the coal, and the technology that you use.

But it's no more so than bricks; you have bricks in your wall. That's just one example. Then you have natural gas, and you actually have next-generation geothermals called EGS that exist. None of these are nuclear, and they all produce enormous amounts of energy. You can also do other things that potentially could become baseload, you could create solar facilities in the desert and tidal power where and when that makes sense.

You can create a biofuel cycle that also works pretty well. So I don't think we have an energy problem at all; I think we have policy problems where people are for some reason destroying our power grid. They're replacing a baseload, efficient, optimized power grid with an intermittent power grid and a very expensive energy storage situation, which we have yet to solve. Then they said, "Well, don't worry; we'll have fusion at some point." There actually has been incredible progress with nuclear fusion.

We have laser fusion at the National Ignition Facility, and they've reached ignition. They've gotten to a point where they're energy positive, and that technology will continue to grow. There's a really cool tech you can build there. We're starting to see real progress with the ITER project in France, and also accelerators in Germany are getting very promising results. So in the 2030s, 2040s, and 2050s, we're going to have an energy revolution where nuclear fusion is definitely going to transform things.

That's great, and you can also use fourth-generation nuclear power with this as well because they're meltdown-proof, and they do some amazing things. They also produce a lot. But ask yourself this: does the existence of excess energy production fundamentally transform the human race? No, all it does is make what we have more sustainable, better, faster, cheaper, and allow us potentially to be cleaner and live better lives. But it's not the case that the existence of this technology is now going to allow you to change the color of your skin just by thinking about it or interface with the computer and learn a book in five seconds.

Extra energy is required when you become an interstellar species, and you're doing really interesting big things. We have energy demands that we have to meet, but it's not the case that nuclear fusion is in that same category. When you look at the Four Horsemen—nanotechnology, synthetic biology, quantum computing, and AI—you’re literally talking about technologies that, when they're put together, fundamentally transform our environment and what it means to be human. For example, one of the things we're doing here is something called "attune," and I’d love for Tim to talk about it in just a second. It's basically a communication technique for people to better understand each other, have more empathy, and be aware of why people are saying the things they say, connecting with them at a deeper level.

So we don't have to deal with toxicity in the workplace, and we feel we can build better relationships and connections with people. Now, you could spend the next 30 years deeply thinking about these communication topics to the extent that you move into John Gottman's bedroom, and you go to bed every night with him, tuck him in, and help him co-author the sequel to "The Science of Trust." Oh, you get real good at it! Now, as good as you can get, if you have the ability to have an implant that gives you the ability to real-time feel the emotions and empathy of the people around you, there's no way you can have a technique compared to that. That's really what synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and AI are effectively doing—they're pushing us in a direction where you get new senses, new capabilities, and new ways of thinking—higher-order thinking, long-time horizon thinking.

Imagine if you could put yourself in a state where real-time passing is maybe just a few minutes or a few hours, but it's like Captain Picard in "The Inner Light," where he lived an entire lifetime in 23 minutes or whatever. You potentially could do that with this technology. So if you want to understand the lived experience of an African-American in the Deep South in the 1950s, you could just hallucinate for 20 minutes and be that person, live their life start to finish for 60 years in 23 minutes. I mean, literally, this is what this technology can do in its highest order. So what does that translate to?

It's like, well, as much as you can do empathy training, the fact that you have that capability is going to be so radically transformative to the human race. It's going to put us on a very different footing, a very different level, and these are just primitive examples. I can't give you the real good stuff because I can’t conceive of the real good stuff, whereas the existence of this will give that to you. Something I was watching in an interview with Elon—maybe he did it in the past three or four days—somebody asked why he’s so obsessed with off-planet stuff and AI and all of this. He explained like "Hitchhiker's Guide," and the whole notion of what is the meaning of life and 42.

His point is, and these technologies combine these four or five—even blockchain—but you're saying for the Four Horsemen, it's exactly you just said. We don’t even know what questions to ask, so that's going to expand our question set. We're going to have new notions of even the questions that we’re supposed to ask or the things we’re supposed to value. That's why it's so fundamentally life-changing, right? I agree with you, and I see where you’re going with it.

But I still think techniques like attune—and I can’t name all the acronyms—part of it is understanding and empathy. It's basically just being attuned with somebody, and how you communicate with From Nick Bostrom, that talks about the wisdom gap. Okay, let's keep going. Charles, are you familiar with over-unity technology? Numerous patents have been submitted over the decades, but they get bought and shelved.

That's called conspiracy theory. In this podcast, we follow the laws of thermodynamics. Every time I see an over-unity device, like Orpo, which was a really fun one from Storm, they put it in a mall. You call up these guys and say, "We'd like to conduct an experiment to see if they work or not." Oh no, they say, "We can't do that because the government will get in the way.

" But where does the mystical energy, the void energy, come from? They never answer it. I see them; I hear them. People bring them to me all the time, but never once have I seen a single person with an over-unity device willing to do something very simple: turn the device over to an independent lab to have it verified that it's generating electricity. Almost always, what they do is put a battery inside, and then it's running.

What you're really doing is slowly discharging the battery in the device. I would love to see an over-unity device with no battery generating electricity. Then we could put it in a vacuum chamber, control for everything, and it should be able to charge something if it's generating more electricity than is being put into the system and not be a parasitic load. But they never do it. Why?

Because the government—oh, they're coming for you. You can get patents for anything; that doesn't mean it works. The patent office doesn't look at whether it violates the laws of physics; they'll just give you the patent. There are way too many of those patents. So, sorry, salt batteries are a game changer.

Those magnesium-antimony batteries that LMMC is making are just incredible. Charles, how do I work for your hospital? You're not going to answer that? Email Woolly. I don't think you should get rid of them.

Fly ash is slightly radioactive. Again, bricks are radioactive. No one complains about bricks. Look it up—are clay bricks radioactive? If you live in a brick house, you actually have a small amount of radiation hitting you every day.

That's what Alex tells me. Is hybridized proof of work and proof of stake being actively developed, or did it stop with the Minotaur paper? It is being actively developed, sir. This far, no further, and it will be implemented, right? Yeah, it will be eventually—maybe next year, one of these days soon.

Okay, that's a good one for Tam and for me. So, favorite cigar? Favorite Japanese whiskey? Oh, favorite cigar? I don't really have a favorite cigar.

Something light and skinny, I mean, Romeo y Julieta, I guess. I don't really have a favorite cigar, though—just nothing really harsh and dark. Japanese whiskey is easy; that's an easy one. I love Hibiki whiskey. I love it.

I don't drink a lot of it, but when I do, I drink Hibiki. I don't always drink my cookies, yes. Harmony is just the best; it's so smooth. The Fluente for the Hemingway short stories are the best cigars because they're just so easy to smoke in a single setting. Yeah, more importantly, though, how do you like your eggs?

Good eggs tonight. How'd you make them? I actually boiled them—hard-boiled eggs. I hard-boiled them because I was putting them in a salad, believe it or not. There you have it, kids; she is a hard-boiled.

I like mine over medium, though, and scrambled and over easy—always. It's all good. Oh, that's not true at all; the carnivore diet is nothing new. Look it up in the old book by Dr. Atkins, also known as the keto diet.

That is not true. Carnivore is to keto as vegan is to vegetarian. That's probably true. It's the most extreme form of keto. They don't eat any fiber; they don't eat any vegetables at all; they don't eat any of that stuff.

If you're on a keto diet like Atkins, you still have some carbs, usually slow carbs that have a low glycemic index—under 30 grams, I think, a day. Yeah, under 30 or 20, it depends on the composition. Not all carbs are created equally, so if you're eating refined sugars versus eating a bunch of vegetables, it's going to have a different impact. Carnivores just eat meat straight up. Yeah, and so there you go.

Now they have a Greta problem. How dare you, sir? I did like her comment, though, to what's his name—that crazy toxic masculine guy. Oh, Andrew Tate. Yeah, her commentary on Tate was good, though; I will give her that.

I don't think that was her comment, though, because she took a day to respond, so I think it was her team, but it was still good. It's funny. Cheers, Charles. How's off-chain secure if it's used with on-chain, and they work together with cryptography? You can make it quite secure.

Signatures are off-chain. When you cite a transaction, you do it off-chain and submit it. So it's a combination of crypto and proper application of blockchain. Pasta curves—I just like saying pasta curves. Hey, yeah, they're pretty cool curves, man.

They're stick curves. Yeah, I thought I was named after the pasta, but it's not. Favorite steak? How about you? I like prime rib.

Yeah, I like all kinds of steak. So there's the cut of meat, and there's what you do to the meat, and there's the animal that the meat came from. So, wagyu—very good, medium rare—is absolutely amazing. You can't have too much of it because it's so fatty. You want a big thick steak.

I really do like something cut a porterhouse style, 30-ounce or 34-ounce slice, dry-aged for about 35 to 45 days. It's quite good, and you dip it in salt—that pops the flavor. I ruined a steak with Bernays. Well, that's why you have—I don't know. Yeah, everybody has to try to quietly ask for it.

I love the Bernays pork wine reduction. You can do all kinds of crazy things. Yeah, but you go wild with it. Your favorite steak is a favorite steak for you. That's true; he eats wagyu with your hard-earned cash.

Yes, that's exactly right. Every time I eat wagyu, what I do is go to my live streams with the 750 people listening right now, and I take 10 cents out of all their pockets. They don't notice it, but I'm there a ninja, man. I have the Green Beret of money stealing. I sneak in, like, "Let's get in there," and take that dime out of your pocket.

Who are these people? Bless you. Any news on the New Balance partnership? Well, that concluded a long time ago; that's the oldies. Yeah, we did a pilot program with their Innovations vision, and we shipped the Tangent cart with Cardano in the Kawhi Leonard shoe.

Yeah, Kawhi Leonard shoes—that was cool. I was when you won it for us in Toronto. Yeah, you did. Not here, guys; it was very cool. It was a good year, and then he got traded away.

I wanted to expand it, but unfortunately, we weren't able to get that done. In fact, I think the people who were running it on the New Balance side spun out their own company. They tried to go and do supply chain stuff, but then crypto fell apart for a while. Then it came back, and we weren't able to ride the second wave on it. But I love that deal; that was so cool.

It's a very good deal, actually. Yeah, we went to the opening of the shoe line at the store in Los Angeles, and we got to hand out shoes. It had the Tangent card, and there was a tripartite deal—it was IO, Tangent, and New Balance. Our team did a good job; we built an analytics framework for them as well to sort of track. And that's the argument we made to them.

It was a good little experiment. Trump indictment—this one's attack. Is he getting arraigned today? Tuesday? Oh, well, today's Sunday.

Right, so they're all blending the days. He's flying out to New York on Tuesday. Yeah, he's going to show up at 11 o'clock in the morning. They're going to take him in, fingerprint him, and take a mug shot. Apparently, he's not going to get handcuffed; the Secret Service negotiated hard with them in New York.

So here's what happened: he got a guy—he's the prosecutor in New York City—who decided to take a case that the Federal Elections Commission and the federal government both passed on. That's a misdemeanor, and he upgraded it to a felony and went from civil to criminal. Well, it went from criminal to misdemeanor, but the statute of limitations already applied, so they had to upgrade it to a felony so they could still charge him, which was passed on by federal prosecutors. They put it before a grand jury, which, 80 percent of the people in New York City are Democrats and hate Trump's guts. I'd imagine 96 percent hate him because he lived there—because he's kind of a piece of work.

And they got him indicted. Now, okay, so here's what's going to happen: it's a super weak case—these 34 counts, whatever they are. He's going to go in, and he's now being politically persecuted. That's what it looks like. Now, whether you love him or hate him, what this does is actually make him more powerful.

He is today more likely to win the Republican nomination and is today more likely to win the presidency as a result of this indictment than less, which is what they're saying. Really messed up. So if your end goal is to get him out of politics or out of the White House, you're moving in the opposite direction. So why is the prosecutor doing this? Because whether he wins or loses, he's using it to bolster a political career to eventually be a senator or governor when Chuck Schumer retires or when there's a vacancy in the governor's mansion in New York.

It is never a good idea to arrest former presidents who happen to be running for re-election when the opposition party is in power. It's never a good idea. It is horrific. Before you say, "Well, equal justice for everybody," we don't have equal justice. We've never had equal justice in this nation.

It's just a fantasy. You don't the guy, so you're okay with it, but then when your guy does something wrong, you're totally okay with no charges being filed. The former president Obama murdered a U.S. citizen; his name was Anwar al-Awlaki.

Look it up. He was sitting at a barbecue with his son when a drone flew by and dropped a bomb and killed them. No court was involved; it was no military operation. There was no active shooter issue here; it was just an ideologue. He was sitting there, and they dropped a bomb.

No one talks about it; we just turn the page. Presidents do horrible things all the time on our behalf or without our knowledge or consent. If we're going to get into a game of looking for a crime a president's done and arresting that president and throwing them into jail because we don't like them politically or we want to curtail their political career, we have a term for that: it's called a dictatorship. It's a banana republic. And what?

It's never going to stop. Now every single president from here on Ford will get indicted when they leave office, when the opposition party is in power. They'll be Biden with the Hunter Biden stuff; they'll find some dirt on him. If you're on the left, you'll say it's all made up. If you're on the right, you'll say it's about time.

It'll be Bill Clinton with the whole Epstein connection; they'll find something there. Or maybe the 500 things he's had with sex crimes throughout the 40 years he was in office; they'll find something there—a payoff. So it's okay to pay $500,000 for settling a sex allegation, and that's not an influence on elections? They're literally using the same construction here for Trump. they tried with John Edwards.

By the way, it's the very guy who's the special prosecutor to put Trump into prison—Jack Smith. He was the guy who tried John Edwards and failed for the exact same crime, but I guess it's okay now. It's just—and this is the reason why the federal prosecutors passed on it, because they understood that this is not a case that you're going to win, and it's going to make it look the Justice Department is being used as a political tool to harm somebody. Now, this in no way says Trump is a good guy. This in no way says that you should vote for him.

It in no way says that the things he said and did were legitimized and justified, and the 1,600 lawsuits that he’s had against him are somehow vindicated or something like that. No, it’s entirely possible to dislike a scumbag but then also agree that you shouldn’t use the judicial branch of the U.S. government to politically persecute a scumbag and to further legitimize his conspiracies. It’s just no good for anybody, and it’s just going to hurt the nation and drag us down.

Trump is The Simpsons' billboard episode, Treehouse of Horror, where they said, "How do we defeat all these advertisements?" They had the little jingle, and they said, "Just don’t look." Just don’t look. All you’ve got to do to kill Trump is stop paying attention to him. If you pay attention to him, he gets more powerful.

If you engage with him, like Craig Wright or these other things, they get more powerful; they get more relevant. This is going to be the story now for the next two years. We’re going to put so much energy into it. They’re even saying his mug shot is going to replace Che Guevara, and he’s going to be put on—it’s going to be released by his administration, and it’s going to become the symbol of the right. At the end of the day, did you get anything?

You say, "I just want equal justice." There is no justice. What’s good for the nation is not necessarily what’s good for a prosecutor, right? It actually highlights how much prosecutorial misconduct happens in this nation. Fifty-four percent of the felonies in New York City have been downgraded to misdemeanors—violent felonies, rapes, burglaries, assaults.

It’s now catch and release for more than half the criminals there. So we say we have equal justice; we have to start applying justice to the bad things that are happening that are making the city really hard to live in. We’re not going to prosecute that, but then crimes that happened in 2016 that have no bearing or relevance to anyone’s life or property or liberty, we’re going to drag them out years later and have the biggest political theater in U.S. history for a court case and distract everything.

Do you understand the resources prosecuting this case is going to take? Dozens of people from his office are going to have to fight tooth and nail 24/7 because Trump’s a billionaire, and he has the entire Republican Party unified to the extent that the Florida governor even refuses the extradition, so he has to voluntarily surrender. They can’t actually send marshals down to grab him. So what does that mean? It means that all those people are going to be locked onto this case for two years, and they’re not prosecuting burglaries and murderers and rapists.

Is it really worth it to get a loss? Is your politics so messed up that you just want to see the mug shots so bad because you hate the guy? Here’s what you do: the worst pain in the world for Trump is irrelevance. All you have to do is just not pay attention to him. Any narcissist doesn’t exist, and that’s ten times worse than narcissism 101.

Actually, stop paying attention. Yes, stop giving them fuel for them—100 percent. just stop paying attention. That’s the worst crime, the worst fate for him. And nobody—by attending his rallies, nobody giving him money—they’re going to attend his rallies, they’re going to give him money, and he’s going to get more powerful as a result of this indictment, not less powerful.

And it hurts the nation, but that’s just the world we live in now. We arrest ex-presidents. Okay, by the way, did we arrest George W. Bush for Iraq? There were people who actually thought about trying him for war crimes with the ICC.

Are we going to have a special prosecutor now look into that? What about Biden with the drone strike in Afghanistan that killed all those children when we pulled out? That’s a war crime. Are we going to prosecute him for that? Are we going to look into all the money flows into Ukraine or the Nord Stream pipeline, where the U.

S. government says they sort of didn’t do it but perhaps did it, but it’s a good thing that they did it? One of the largest environmental catastrophes in European history caused by U.S. special forces working with the Scandinavians to blow up a Russian pipeline.

Are we going to try him for that? That’s destruction of private property; it’s sabotage of a pipeline—a massive environmental catastrophe. So are they going to charge him for that? No, but organ fan bad, so we should just do that and pervert the entire justice system. Here’s the thing: also, if Trump gets back into power, do you understand the consequences of giving the people in power the ability to do this?

There will be a purge in the U.S. government on a scale you’ve never seen before. The FBI, the intelligence agencies, the Department of Justice will be weaponized, and every single person on the left, every single journalist on the left, will be punished. Every prosecutor at the state level in red states will feel empowered to go after Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and everybody else.

Why not? It’s open season now, right? We have no political norms. Do you feel that the people who make decisions on the left are so blameless and they’ve never done anything wrong? FTX is a great example—yeah, a billion dollars in donations, mostly to the left.

Let’s follow that. Maybe the BLM riots—let’s look into that, see what happened there. There are going to be a lot of stones that, when you turn them over, are very uncomfortable and inconvenient. We let them go because they’re political, and now apparently political crimes are crimes, so it’s open season. That’s what you want?

That’s the America you want? That’s how you get a civil war; that’s how you get irreparable damage.