Surprise AMA 11/02/2024

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is November 2nd, 2024, and it's Saturday—the last day in the office before I take a few days off. I figured I’d do a surprise AMA; I haven't done one in a long time, and I miss these AMAs. I really enjoy them a lot and love talking to all of you. There's a lot going on in Cardano right now.

We're in the middle of Chang Plus One; it's on the testnet, and we're working our way towards that, soon to be on the mainnet. This means we have all these decentralized solutions that will be in Constitution season and budget season. Already, lots of people are coming and sharing their opinions. Some are pretty good opinions, while others are not so good, and there's a lot of Dunning-Kruger floating around as well. Having run a business for nine years at IO and being in cryptocurrency for longer, while dealing with hundreds of vendors throughout the world, I want to remind people that there's no reality where you can get credible, good vendors and have them come in and pay them month-to-month for long-term projects.

You just can’t do it. Imagine a construction project where you say, "Hey, I want the best architects, the best engineers, and the best construction people, and I want them to be totally devoted to my particular job site, using the best materials." But by the way, I'm only going to pay you month-to-month, and I’m going to give you no certainty. People with no experience in construction, who have no idea how to build a building, will judge the quality of your work, and at any moment, they can just pull the plug if they think you’re overcharging. Oh, and by the way, a construction company over there, with no experience at all and never having done any of this before, is underbidding you by 30% or 40%.

So, the people with no experience in construction are going to go over and grab that company and say, "Well, why can’t you match their price?" I said, "Well, I have the best people in the world." That’s literally what’s happening right now with some of the comments floating around. It's going to be a bit of education and a bit of a fight. I’ve always been a big proponent of an annual budget that goes to an entity that everyone binds to.

A coalition comes together to do stuff, and then you take a look at the quality of the work on a monthly or quarterly basis. If the members of the coalition don’t do the right thing, you kick them out. So, you still have oversight, but you segregate your oversight from the people doing things. You do this on an annual basis. If you do it on a monthly basis and pay out, you’re just not going to get any good people.

There are no high-quality people available under that model. I don’t think there’s any path forward for IO to participate under that model. How do I make payroll? How do I make long-term commitments? For example, the Stanford laboratory I set up for Cardano is a $4.

5 million, three-year commitment. How do I sign a deal like that with Stanford if we’re only paid on a month-to-month basis? After two months, because I pissed somebody off on Twitter, you guys cancel the funding. But I’m left with a three-year commitment with Stanford. I can’t sign that deal.

You cannot do anything unless you have some form of annualized or beyond that basis if it’s long-term work that requires a lot of effort. So, it’s an education, and there are going to be a lot of moving pieces to it. Hopefully, over time, people can understand why certain things are being discussed in certain ways. Ultimately, the decentralized solutions get to vote, and the Constitutional committee gets to vote, and they get to decide what to do with the budget process. It’s also a really terrible idea to allow people to surgically go into the budget retroactively and just because they don’t like somebody, shut that person’s money off.

It becomes a popularity game and a race to the bottom. You just won’t get high-quality work over a long arc of time. This is what’s happened with NASA and other agencies; political priorities and preferences change for these long-term programs. When a new president comes in, they cut the budget or change the budget. You can’t get anything done without some certainty and stability.

It also takes time to build up skill sets. Where are you going to hire top formal methods engineers? Where are you going to hire some of the finest scientists in the world? How do you incentivize them to train and learn how your technology works if there’s absolutely no certainty in the payout of money for them? It doesn’t make any sense at all to me.

It feels good, ? It really does. You go to Twitter and say, "Oh yeah, month-to-month, let’s do that. Let’s have mob rule over every payment and just pull the money anytime." Or let’s have a race to the bottom or an RFP competition for every little dynamic thing inside the system.

That race to the bottom is what destroyed Boeing. They used to be one of the most elite engineering organizations in the entire world. In their effort to cut costs at any cost, they handed the keys to the kingdom to people making $15 an hour who had no experience at all in aircraft software. Then suddenly, the Boeing 737s crash out of the air, and the doors fall off. People on drugs in the East Coast factories were being forced to work 12-hour shifts, 16-hour shifts with limited training.

They built some great airplanes, didn’t they? How’s Starliner doing? You get what you pay for. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens with that entire debate. I think the Cardano community is really smart, and there are a lot of really good people in it.

There are people who are very skilled and experienced, and Twitter is not reality. We’ll see what happens with it, but it’s going to be a big debate and a big fight. If we can get to an annualized basis and a stable structure, then we can actually make real, meaningful change. If we can’t do that, it’ll just be chaos, a race to the bottom, and it’ll be impossible to maintain Cardano in any meaningful way. The treasury will have been a failed experiment in my view.

So, we’ll see what happens with it. All right, let’s get to your questions. Hey Charles, back to AMA mode! Thank you. Yeah, it’s good to be in AMAs.

I like AMAs. I’m going to do more AMAs. We’re really going to focus on building my podcast studio up so I actually have an appropriate location to do the AMAs from. It’s going to take a little bit of time to do that. How the hell can you accomplish anything in such a shortsighted paradigm?

I agree. It feels good, and it’s a very populist thing, but you never get anywhere, and high-quality people don’t even want to participate. You get what you pay for, and you have to give certainty to the best people because the best people don’t have to work for you. They can go anywhere in the world and work for anybody. Only the average people or the sub-average people have to stay because they can’t work anywhere else.

Don’t sign anything with Stanford? Sure, okay, then we lose Dan Bonet, we lose David Shei, Benedict Buns, we lose John Mitchell, we lose all these brilliant minds who are doing incredible work. I guess some kids with no experience in cryptography can match the decades of experience of the world’s top experts. Bring back the old Charles! Stop being so offensive.

We need the liquidity, Charles. Yeah, I agree, we do. There are many ways we can do that. Charles, have you been a fan of motor racing? Not only am I a fan, but I actually enjoy doing it myself.

Do you think you’d be this motivated if you were born in Gen Z? No, unfortunately not. Hey Charles, hope all is well. I’m guessing you heard the news about Peanut. I tweeted about it and said they’re going to murder the squirrel.

This was before they euthanized it because that’s what they always do—they take your animals and then they kill them. Then somebody tweeted, "You’ve lost the plot, Charles." And then today it comes out on TMZ that they killed the squirrel and the raccoon. Just think of the thought process about this: a guy rescues a squirrel that was going to die, gives it a seven-year wonderful life in his house, trains it, does all these cool tricks. People have had squirrel pets throughout the years; it’s never been an issue.

An anonymous complaint comes in from some busybody, then the government gets a warrant. Four government agencies with 12 officers raid his home, spending five hours searching the home he’s a drug lord. They take the squirrel and the raccoon for the safety and welfare of them, and then kill them. Does that make any sense at all to you? First off, there are murderers, rapists, and burglars—all kinds of bad things happening in New York.

But apparently, they have the time to go after the influencer squirrel with a million TikTok followers, who’s been living in this dude’s house for seven years and is the poster child of an animal rights organization. They take the squirrel and murder it. They have time for that, get a warrant for that, but they don’t have time for the murderers, rapists, and burglars. Sorry, we’re just so busy, we’re so under-resourced, but we have to kill the squirrel. Peanut has become the poster child for what the modern American government has become and why people are so angry.

Yet people will still vote for that—go figure. Will we see real-world assets and tokenization on Cardano? Absolutely! When Midnight comes, you can build hybrid applications. I’m a big believer in that, and I think we can get that done.

Stop pissing people off! Stay focused. You have to give us more credit than you do. We don’t need you to focus on non-essential things in policy. What am I supposed to focus on?

I have no official role or function in Cardano. I’m a human being; I have political opinions. We are going to be debating the budget process right now. You guys get to decide what role I have and what function I have, if any, in Cardano through the decentralized solutions in the Constitutional committee. If your decentralized solutions basically say we’re going to structure a budget function in a way where it’s physically impossible for a larger company to participate, a global modus creator or an IO, then I have no role at all in Cardano.

Yeah, it’s your decision, guys, what you want. I will probably, after the elections are over, get a little bit more tame, but it’s been a long road this election in particular, and I’m pretty disgusted with a lot of things that have happened. I am angry—very angry—about what the SEC has done, and I’m very angry about what the US government has done. I want it to stop, and it’s not stopping. I don’t believe the reelection of the party that’s been in control for 12 of the last 16 years will solve that problem.

I believe it’ll actually exacerbate it and make it worse for everybody. It’s probably going to make me a little bit more disgruntled. If we get a relief valve and we stop the madness, and they stop murdering Peanut the squirrel, maybe I won’t be as angry. We’ll see. The GOP will also not solve your problems.

Yeah, that’s probably true; at least they won’t make them worse. I honestly believe that. Say what you will about Trump; we tend not to go to war under him, and the economy did pretty good. Charles, when is Genesis? Q1 of next year.

Code is done; it’s ready to go. The wisdom of the TSC was to strip it out of the release for Chang Plus One to simplify the release and risk it, but it doesn’t require a hard fork, so it’ll work its way in. Looks good. Hey Charles, will you ever go into politics? We’d love to see you there to improve the system.

No, absolutely not. Are we still in a bear market? We’re in a bear market that is bull curious, wants to identify as a bull, but it’s not quite sure yet if it wants to do that. So, after this election, we’ll see everyone listening to this waffle while decentralized solutions are talking to actual builders. So why exactly am I disqualified as a builder?

Is Jed not an application? Is Lace not an application? Aren’t these real things that are on the Cardano chain? Actually, they’re going multi-chain. Midnight’s not a real ecosystem that we’re building right now.

Cardano itself is not real; it doesn’t exist. None of the people listening exist; all the projects on Cardano are fake. These types of things—why the [expletive] are you here? R, why are you here? What are you doing here?

Go to DAP Central. Go on, you’re banned! There we go, ban user, delete their comments. You’re gone—dead to me. You can go to DAP Central and rub one out for him.

Pleased to see you again; it’s always good to see you too, Charles. Will the Cardano Summit ever be in Switzerland again? If I had my choice, I would have put it in Argentina. The foundation runs that, and so they’re going to do their thing. I guess they’re for paying people month-to-month too.

Is it legal to have synthetic versions of gold, silver, Tesla, and Amazon on Cardano? Schrodinger’s cat of legality—yes and no. It’s legal in certain jurisdictions and illegal in others; that’s the problem with these things. What to do with bots? One of the things I am going to discuss in 2025 is how to put in AI curation and other things into the comment section so we can actually do AMAs a little differently.

It’ll be fun to live stream to different platforms other than the big three. Ready for Rick and Morty season 8? Wubba lubba dub dub! I am very ready for it, sir. Cardano doesn’t scale, but why?

I’ll give you one shot, Bitcoin curious. Tell me the technical reason why Cardano cannot scale. Go ahead and tell me; you have the floor. You can tell all the people here; you can let them know. You tell me, give your best shot, your best argument.

We’re waiting for it. You said Cardano cannot scale; it does not scale. Why? What is the technical reason Cardano cannot scale? Everybody’s waiting.

We’ve got 3,119 people now, 20, now 22, 25—they’re waiting on you, sir. You have the floor. We’re all with bated breath waiting for you to type that reply. Give it to us. Tell us why Hydra doesn’t work.

Tell us why L2s don’t work on Cardano. Tell us why all our optimizations won’t work. What is wrong with Ouroboros? Just waiting. Were you there?

Yeah, John said it best—crickets. Where’s the dude? Huh? Just said something but didn’t have any evidence behind it. I’m shocked!

I didn’t know people did that over the internet—say things and didn’t have any evidence. That’s crazy. Oh well, Charles, can you comment on the Bitcoin OS integration? Now, this is a very exciting one. For many years, I was in the group of people believing that Bitcoin had technologically stopped innovating.

They got Taproot in, and it looks like through some clever application of zero-knowledge tech and Taproot, they are able to validate a zero-knowledge proof using Bitcoin on the Bitcoin mainnet. If that’s the case, you hypothetically may be able to construct a trustless bridge between Bitcoin and another chain like Cardano. If that’s the case, then you could construct hybrid applications where you could have a wallet with a DApp store, which we’re building, and add Bitcoin support to that wallet. A Bitcoin user, assuming we have babble fees, would then be able to select a Cardano DeFi application, interface with it, pay transaction fees in Bitcoin as if it was on the Bitcoin mainnet, and if we build it in the right way, hide the latency consideration. Then, they can play around with that, whether it be a DEX or whatever, get their yields, get their stuff, and feel they live in the Bitcoin network.

However, they’re actually using Cardano under the hood through a wrapped asset that comes over through a trustless bridge. If we can get there and do that, it’s a revolution because there’s $1. $3 trillion worth of Bitcoin, and billions of those are going to want to come take a visit as tourists to Cardano, spending their hard-earned Bitcoin to do cool and interesting things, make money, lose money, and all kinds of stuff like that. Being a UTXO system, Bitcoin will integrate with Cardano seamlessly, and the applications will be quite easy to develop. So, there's Boss Bitcoin OS and there's Maestro.

Obviously, we're going to be doing a lot of research. The first thing I want to do is work with the Bitcoin OS team to formalize how they've implemented the zero-knowledge proof that's being integrated into Bitcoin. Then, I want to understand the user experience between these two sides. If one were to construct a seamless bridge and put these components together, how do you create a user experience where you pick something in a catalog, click a button, and you're using it? We can then demonstrate how one can use Bitcoin as TVL in Cardano projects and applications.

We already have the Babel fee SIP written; I think it's SIP 118, called nested transactions. It will be the foundation we need to implement a feature like this, so that can get out next year with the next hard fork. All this connective tissue and infrastructure is a super high priority, so we're going to fast-track the proofs with Bitcoin OS and understand how close they’ve gotten to that. I think they’ve solved it, but we have to verify it. Then, there's the latency consideration.

There also needs to be a pub-sub channel, probably something like MQTT, that connects both chains so that you can have information flow seamlessly to wallets on the Bitcoin side and wallets on the Cardano side. It's a big deal; a lot of money and work need to be done for it. Will Bitcoin integration raise liquidity on Cardano? Yes, there is more liquidity in Bitcoin than Solana and Ethereum combined, times two. Heard anything from CZ lately?

He’s doing well. We have no miners, but we could add them back with Midnight or with Minur. Thoughts on Ron Paul joining the Doge cabinet? It made me happy. Guys, talk about that Unity party ticket: you’ve got Trump, RFK, Tulsi, Elon, and now we’ve got Ron Paul.

They’re all coming together right there. Wouldn’t it be prudent not to vote for them? It’s a Unity party. How about that? Any release date for Leo?

Step one is to prototype it; that’s what we’re doing. By the way, this is a multi-month effort involving lots of highly specialized people coming together. But if we’re running month-to-month on the budget, I can’t give you any dates. I can’t tell you anything. I don’t know if we’re going to get paid next month.

Everybody’s updating their resumes. Who wants to work at a job when Microsoft is trying to hire them at $500,000 a year and Facebook’s trying to hire them at $600,000 a year? Every other blockchain entity is trying to hire them, paying a million dollars a year plus tokens. Well, I’m sorry. Working for Cardano, you only get paid month to month.

We have no idea if you’re going to be funded for the next month, and some guy over the Internet might not a tweet you sent, so you lose your job. Okay, that’s very sustainable. Very sustainable. When are you starting the carnivore diet? I’m not going to do the carnivore diet.

Any native token listings on the big exchanges? Not yet, but it’s going to happen with Midnight, and Midnight will lead the way. Unfortunately, we’ll have to spend millions of dollars getting custodians and others to support it because there’s very little CEX support on this side. It’s almost as if an entity in the Cardano ecosystem responsible for the ecosystem should be funding that. Maybe.

I don’t know. Maybe sort of. Oh well, I guess I have to pay for it. Is DeFi Turbo ready? We’ve got something better.

We’ll have a blog post on it pretty soon. Do you think that a centralized government can really work when our main medium of information is a rage algorithm like X? We need to decentralize. I could not agree more. We need the ability to have adult conversations with each other, with facts and evidence, and take the emotions down to calm everybody down.

We have to stop judging people instantly based upon one thing that we heard that one time at band camp. Thanks, man. I like your videos better when you talk to your supporters. The trolls don’t talk to them. Well, we like making fun of them.

Some people watch just because they really like that. By the way, I’m still waiting for an answer about why Cardano cannot scale. I’m looking for it; I really am. He’s been totally silent. Dr.

Lesser, what are you and Malay going to talk about? I did talk to Malay briefly, and we’ll continue the engagement and discussions. The challenge in Argentina right now is I don’t even think the Malay government fully knows what it wants to do with blockchain, so there’s this philosophical tension pulling on how things are operating there. On one hand, you have a true libertarian in Mula, the chainsaw man. He’s cutting the government; he’s destroying everything in the government.

On the other hand, they’re trying to run a government. We’re coming in on the government side and saying blockchain should be the spine of the government. You run your government services on it; you plug things in, and you allow a free market to form there, but the government maintains the spine and is accountable for that. The libertarian side says the free market should just do everything and get rid of the government altogether. I think where these things are going to form a synthesis is between your thesis and your antithesis, your Hegelian dialectic.

That dialectical synthesis is probably going to kill the central bank and allow private money to compete, but essential government services need a spine, and that spine will be a blockchain spine. What I advocated for, and I mentioned this to three different newspapers when I was down there and members of the Argentinian government, is that you need to write a Digital Argentina 2030 document. Talk about not just blockchain but AI and data, IoT, and cell phones. Discuss how you expect a person living in Argentina’s digital life to interface with government services and how the free market comes in from that. You can extract RFPs that lead to meaningful work, which is bipartisan.

It’s on all sides, actually, of the system. It’s quad-partisan, I guess, because there are four major political parties down there. My big concern is if the Peronists come in, they just tear out everything that Mula did, so you really don’t make any meaningful progress. A government project that’s signed doesn’t mean a lot because there’s no notion of stability there. This is the government that just fired their IRS AFIP, for example.

Whereas if you have a doctrine that clearly articulates your goals, you can get a lot of private companies to come in and build upon it. I believe we can definitely get something done there. We know the people; we know the relationships. Certainly, there are large blockchains coming in promising the entire world and offering to pay God knows what to get a vanity deal so they can broadcast to all their followers about all the amazing progress they made. These people are deeply inexperienced with government contracting and have absolutely no real partners in the jurisdiction to get these things done.

They think they can just come in as Americans or Europeans and somehow run all of Argentina. You don’t do that. You form a coalition of public and private interests, bring local companies in Argentina together with government agencies, and start from a doctrine of a goal that everyone can wrap their hands around and understand. We’ll give a crack at trying to put that coalition together and try to write that document down. I do believe philosophically that Mula is closest to something like Cardano than Solana or Ethereum or these other things.

He could also adopt Bitcoin. The problem is it’s not programmable, but it is with Cardano and Boss. So, there could be a possibility that Bitcoin and Cardano could come together and actually be the spine of Argentina, and that would be really exciting and probably a good political compromise. Where are the mammoths before the end of the decade? So, I’ve been told.

Charles, why don’t you run a Mastodon instance as an X alternative? I am going to start slowly moving from X into a different medium with a different form of curation. I just haven’t figured out how to do it yet. I’m going to figure it out, and it’s going to become a priority. My first thing I’m doing is taking a reset, going to this 40 Years of Zen, and having some fun there.

But absolutely, when I come back with clear eyes and a little bit less stress, I’m definitely going to pivot and try a different social media approach because this one’s not working for me, and I’m just getting frustrated with it. What’s behind the hate for Cardano? It does not make sense. They hate me. The Unity party would like to execute Liz Cheney.

This is an example of how propaganda spreads. I listened to the minute-and-a-half clip where Trump said that. What he was talking about is Liz Cheney wants to send people to war. She should go out there and actually experience war firsthand and understand how horrible it is before she commits us to war after war after war and killing all these young kids. She’s bloodthirsty; that is basically what Trump said.

The liberal media took that and said Trump said kill Liz Cheney. These are not the same statements. One is saying before some politician in their 50s, 60s, and 70s who’s never fought in a war, never been in a war zone, and never had to sacrifice for the nation commits our young children to go and die in wars that we shouldn’t fight, maybe they should have a taste and experience of it to understand what they’re committing our young people to do. It’s a different statement from “kill Liz Cheney.” These are different statements.

I listened to it; it’s there. The problem is we now live in two parallel realities where you see the same thing I see. We can write all the words out in sentences; we can do deductive logic on it; we can break them down sentence by sentence, and yet there are radically different interpretations because there’s this aura of distortion and derangement and hate that’s so strong it’s impossible to interpret a statement from somebody in good faith. It’s a derangement, and you can’t understand what the person’s saying. You choose an interpretation that’s as bad as humanly possible.

The vast majority of Americans would agree that over the last 20 years, in particular, America has been too hawkish. We’ve invaded too many countries, killed so many people with drones, and built this giant intelligence apparatus that’s been revealed, among others. We’ve done a lot of really horrible things, and our veterans are coming home with PTSD. We have the highest suicide rate of any army in the entire world—22 soldiers a day. We’re losing battalions to suicide.

When you scale these things up, we lost Afghanistan. We literally handed it back to the people that we invaded; the Taliban is in charge again. Yet, there are all these hawkish politicians saying, “Let’s go for another round.” They’re paying for it with your children’s blood. Maybe that’s a bad deal, and maybe the people who do that should not be rewarded with power.

Maybe, just maybe. But you’re so deranged; your mind is so warped by the propaganda that it’s impossible for you to get there because you just hate the man so much that even when he makes a good point, it can’t be a good point. It has to be calling for the execution of somebody. That’s where we’re at in 2024. I want my tax money back.

Yeah, that’s why we put it on a blockchain, so you can see where it goes. Wildly disappointing. Okay, I’d like to travel to the U.S. with my family.

What are the most impressive areas you would recommend? we have some amazing national parks in the United States, and I’d highly recommend you check them out. Yosemite is really pretty; Yellowstone National Park is amazing. I’m a little biased, and Maui is a tremendous amount of fun. It really depends on how much time you have to spend and what your preferences are.

Do you like mountains? Do you like deserts? Do you the sea? Do you like large countryside? Do you want highly urbanized areas or low population density?

I prefer low population density and beautiful nature, so I have a bias there. But even in cities, there’s lots of cool stuff. What a lot of Europeans do, or people from different places, is go to New York and L.A. I’ve seen the United States; I went to Los Angeles and New York.

I know everything there is to know about the U.S. What about everything in the middle? I just assume it’s kind of the same. No, it’s like 26 countries in one, so there’s an adventure everywhere.

But you’ve got to give me a little bit more. Lex Freeman just went to see the Redwoods. Yeah, some of them are over a thousand years old. Would you ever go elk hunting? Now, I sell guided hunts for bison on my ranch, and I have huge herds of elk on my ranch—hundreds of them.

But I personally don’t hunt; I just couldn’t bring myself to shoot an animal. It’s the great contradiction of my life. How is the level of decentralization measured? Check out the Edinburgh Decentralization Index. No one hates Charles; he just doesn’t create enough or the right buzz.

Oh no, no, I’m hated. Go to cryptocurrency Reddit; I assure you my name is a sin there. Can’t even talk about it. I got the lobster hookup in D.C.

What you got for me in D.C.? D.C. lobster hookup?

That’s talking a big game, man. There’s a lot of good lobster down there. D.C. is literally all I do—go to D.

C. lobster. Who’s your favorite philosopher and why? That’s a deep question. It depends on the flavor of the week.

When you look at people like Bertrand Russell, he’s probably the most rigorous of the rigorous philosophers. He created this amazing deductive construct to walk his way through dissecting an argument, dissecting a belief, and trying to turn it into as much of a repeatable, objective conversation as possible. The whole field of analytic philosophy—when you look at people like Wittgenstein, there’s this absolutely amazing deconstruction of language. Nietzsche talked a lot about the human condition. There are three schools of Viennese philosophy: the will to power, the will to meaning, and the will to pleasure.

Freud is the pleasure side, Viktor Frankl is the meaning side, and Nietzsche is power and man’s pursuit and search for that. in Schopenhauer, he’s tremendously cynical about the human condition; others are very optimistic about it. You can walk your way through philosophy, and as you do that, all these different philosophers have hints of brilliance and hints of things that are absurd and insane—whether it be extreme misogyny or their brain being eaten away by syphilis, so they’re obviously going a little crazy in certain dimensions or in an inability to communicate clearly. Dan Dennett, I really like because he puts so much emphasis and time on trying to clearly articulate what he’s saying for everybody, as opposed to a lot of these people, especially the postmodernists, the Foucault people, who made an art form out of obfuscating what they’re actually saying because I think they were saying nothing. The more I think about it, I love the absurdist, Albert Camus, who is one of my favorite philosophers.

His whole book that he wrote on the absurd is a great example of life and how to think about life and the love of the system as opposed to the love of the destination. Stoic philosophy has really recently become vogue, and people are dragging Aurelius and Seneca and others out of the grave, saying, “Okay, guys, we need you again. We’re going to have a return to stoicism.” I think that’s the Jordan Peterson effect, where he came in and opened up a whole can of worms of a tree of philosophy, and young men that get into that trap start exploring the branches of that tree and bringing it together. There are some good life lessons there.

Different boats for different floats, but really philosophy is about two things: you either have a set of problems that you want to work your way through and solve, or you have a destination you’re trying to figure out to go to—self-meaning of your life or understanding why things have happened or how to resolve things that are happening inside your life. There is definitely a philosophical component there, and any good philosopher has to have a statement about the nature of suffering, the need for sacrifice, and how to reconcile the fact that evil exists and bad things exist, and to forgive people. What does that process look like? Regressive, terrible philosophies, the woke stuff, for example, are regressive and terrible because they have no doctrine of forgiveness. Once a person’s been labeled problematic, you have to hate them for the rest of time.

It’s a holy war between you and them. All the good stuff tends to have some rites of passage or rituals you can go through to cleanse your sins and basically be healed of these things. Mark and Drayson actually have this great thing where he breaks down wokeism and puts it into a religious context. He shows how it’s becoming a religion, but it’s a religion an Old Testament religion—lots of rules and no mercy. God is very angry; it’s the old God.

Also, philosophers should ignite curiosity. They should dance around and explore and understand problems in a way that when you read it, it doesn’t necessarily provide you clarity on the solution, but it at the very least gives you some love of the pursuit of the answer to that problem. For example, when you think about whether humans are intrinsically evil or not, Peter Singer is an example of that. The denial of death is another example of that philosopher who wrote that; I forget his name, and it’ll come to me in a little bit. But there are dozens of these things that exist that give a lens into something.

You read it, and if it’s good philosophy, it invites you to carry that with you as an open question that you’ll have for a long time. I’ve been reading a lot of transhumanist philosophy as well.