#215 Charles Hoskinson - Cardano Founder on the Secret DARPA AI Project That Became Siri

It's good to be here, Sean. How you been?

Right. There's a lot there. Well, I appreciate it. You're one of the OGs. This is an amazing studio with some artifacts.

Right. You get enough money, you just do whatever you want. I just did everything and I don't know if I can keep this up. There are too many pots in the fire.

One of the biggest challenges is that cryptocurrencies are designed to be adversarial and zero-sum. For Bitcoin to win, Ethereum must fail, and vice versa. That's not how the world works. We need cooperative equilibria where if I win, you win. Cryptocurrencies have grown from nothing to 550 million users, but they're still divorced from the legacy financial world. The next 5-10 years is about building bridges and resetting incentives. Stable coins are a great example—they've grown to $243 billion and are just tokenized treasuries. They provide stability in volatile markets. For Cardano, we designed it to be upgradable and to have an angle for regulated businesses. Our technology Midnight provides rational privacy. The network has never gone down in 8 years. We focus on interoperability and bringing real-world assets into the space. Cardano now works with other chains, and their success should be our success.

The chains are independent infrastructure. Interoperability means moving users and assets between systems, like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. For Cardano, it's about getting the system to talk to all other systems. That creates a massive flow of transactions and users. For example, Brave browser has 86 million users. We can help them with their ad model and privacy, and their users become our users. That's a cooperative equilibrium.

No, it'll merge. Like online media and legacy media became just media. TradFi and DeFi will merge into Fi. The legacy world wants automated compliance and global liquidity; crypto wants their capital. When they merge, it becomes harder to distinguish. For example, if the Genius Act passes, Microsoft could issue a stable coin and put a wallet in Windows, onboarding billions into crypto without them even knowing. The temptation for the Magnificent 7 is strong. Facebook tried with Libra. Once they come in, it just feels like a better PayPal.

Thank you, sir. My pleasure.

For many years, I wanted to do a synthetic biology company. I met Ben Lamb, a genius who started Colossal, which brought back the direwolf. We talked about glow-in-the-dark plants, and with George Church's expertise, we started a company. We're working on more than just bioluminescence—engineering plants for specific environments, like reclaiming deserts or sequestering carbon. Bioluminescence is magical because you can see it. It's a platform for other use cases. We also have sentinel plants that detect methane in coal mines, glowing red when there's danger. This technology can be used for military, industrial, and environmental applications. It gets people excited because it's tangible.

Yes. I have a construction company. We can use synthetic biology to create fast-growing, thorny bushes that are bioluminescent and tuned to the environment. You can even blend them with your branding. By the 2030s, with AI in bioinformatics, you'll have a CAD for organisms. You can design bespoke landscaping that is both functional and aesthetic, like European cities with unique architectural fingerprints.

About two years. The first step was building the science team. It's like cryptocurrencies—cryptography has been around for decades, but you have to wait for the science to mature. Now we're in the second generation. If we're successful, imitators will come, but we have the right business model. Steve Jobs did this with AI—he watched DARPA's Kao program and then bought Siri.

Wow. When do you think the plant company will come out?

When do you think that will come out?

All right. It's like in Inglourious Basterds—they're going to chew me out.

No. Quantum computing is an augmentation of classical computing, not a replacement. It's like finding a book in a library: classical computing flips through books sequentially or in parallel; quantum computing uses superposition and entanglement to narrow down the location, but you still have to open the book. It doesn't break cryptography in the way people fear.

So that's quantum computing in a nutshell. And if you look at a lot of things that we do, you are trying in computing to stumble upon the right answer like flight scheduling. You're like, well, how do I figure out this flight so that I can have a layover of this property in Atlanta and this and this? But there's all these other things going on and it turns out it's like an NP problem. It's super hard to actually schedule a flight. But if you have a quantum computer, it can kind of look at all the art of the possible and at least give you a sense of where a probabilistic minimum is. So minimize the layover time or whatever your objective is. Or in the case of large language models like ChatGPT or any of these AI things, what you'll do is you'll say okay well there's outputs that come out of these models. Well, which one of the outputs is the right output? You'll ask it a question and you'll be like, uh, you know, I need to know, I'm going to be in DC for the weekend, uh, and here are all my parameters, and I'm looking for a good restaurant, uh, and which one's a good one. And so they'll have, let me maybe 50 recommendations that come through. And some are obviously wrong, like one's in Virginia, or one's in Maryland or something, and one's really in DC, but it's too expensive, or something like that. So ordinarily, what you'd have to do is you'd have to create some sort of system that's intelligent to look through all those different things. And a human being has to write that program or you personally have to look at the outputs and say oh that's wrong and that's wrong. With a quantum computer you basically get to look at all the outputs just like all the books at the same time and then it can show you which one of those answers is right. Remember it could be millions of them. It's the qubit range. And so, you know, once you start getting up in qubits, you can do arbitrarily many and so what this does is it gives you the ability to have a large language model that's exponentially better than a large language model that we have today. Um, and it gets really crazy when you start stacking modalities like Microsoft has a technology called MatterGen and it's a simulation framework. It's almost like reality builder where you just tell it what properties you want. Like I want a battery and I want these properties. Then it basically gives you a recipe for how to make that molecularly. But the problem is that the simulation breaks down after you start modeling maybe 20, 30 electrons. Uh so with a quantum computer, it doesn't have that limitation. You can look at many many many different bonding paths and things. So it literally can print out how to make that material that's magical. And so you could start talking about like let's say I want a Blackhawk helicopter and I want the skin to have what's called a negative refractive index material so it can go invisible and I want it to be light but super strong and I want it to be self-healing so if I run an electrical current the stress fractures heal themselves so I don't have to replace the airframe. And then also I want it to be non-Newtonian so that it's soft but when it gets hit by a bullet it gets super hard like a football helmet or something like that. And it'll tell you literally the recipe for how to make that strange exotic alloy, you know, with all these different properties. You can't do that with a classical computer because there's too many possibilities and it's like a library with more books than the time in the universe to look at. But with a quantum computer, it can look at all of them at the same time. So, it'll tell you the path to get to that in the specific recipe. Because right now, how we figure it out is just math and trial and error. You go to a lab and you kind of do some stuff and you think, I think it's over here. And then you do a bunch of experiments until you stumble across the material. And everything works this way. Like this microphone, what would give it the best sound? Or like a battery, you know, I want it to have a high energy density and I want it to be very light and I want it to charge really fast and I want it to be recyclable and be made out of non-rare earth materials because China owns all those and they're screwing us. Like I want to be able to make it domestically in America. That's a very rare intersection point of trade-offs. And so, what material would you need to be able to do something like that? So, when you blend these two things together, it's just going to create a golden age. We're going to be able to do things that are incredible.

Well, yeah. And sorry, I was on a tangent there, but you asked a specific question like will that kill the cryptocurrency industry? So in addition to these magical things that quantum computers can do, the defense issue is that most of the cryptography, public key cryptography that we use has two parts to it. A public part and a private part. And the public part you give to everybody. And the private part you have. So in cryptocurrencies you have private key and a public key. Public key is where I pay you. And the private key is you know what I use to authorize a payment. So the challenge is that all the math that's behind it in the classical sense it only works as long as you don't have a quantum computer. If you have a quantum computer, you have things like Grover's algorithm and Shor's algorithm and these things. And these gigabrains at MIT were basically able to show how to use this librarian book trick to find your private key inside the system because you can't find it normally. It'd be like looking for that phone number and going through book after book after book. So the question is, are we done? No. because it turns out that there's algorithms that are not susceptible to this. They're called post-quantum cryptography. Um so the challenge in why the cryptocurrency industry has not adopted them is kind of twofold. One is that they're new and highly inefficient. So in many cases to use a post-quantum algorithm the key sizes are 10 to 100 times greater and it's much more computationally intensive. And also because they're new, they have not been mathematically rigorously tested as well as they need to be. RSA, which is the backbone of the security of the internet, was invented in the 70s and we still use it today. So there's like 50 years of asset tests and hardcore analysis that's been done. Uh elliptic curve cryptography came out in the 80s by a friend of mine Neil Koblitz and he wrote this lovely paper called the Serpentine Path of Elliptic Curve Crypto where even though he invented it in the 80s it didn't take off until the 2000s because it took him more than 15 years to convince people that it was secure and he had to do all this work and all this lobbying and these types of things. So cryptographers tend to be professionally paranoid by design and so they very very slowly roll out these things and the other side is standardization. So even if you have a brilliant idea, you never want to implement a non-standard piece of cryptography because you'll get screwed by the hardware manufacturers. So when you look at your phone or your computer, the chips inside of them actually have specialized circuitry for crypto that the Department of Commerce through NIST standardizes. So AES and RSA and certain elliptic curves and these things, there's actual acceleration in hardware and it'll run 100 times faster. So if you pick a non-standard thing and you're just running on software, you're 100 times slower than your competition that picks a standard thing. So you have to wait for NIST to standardize something. And the good news is they did. We worked with them alongside dozens of other cryptographic groups because we have one of the largest research groups for cryptography. We have 168 scientists we work with and labs at Stanford and CMU and University of Edinburgh and so forth. And they wrote FIPS 203, 204, 205 and 206 which are standards for post-quantum crypto both on the hash and lattice side. And now that we have them, the hardware manufacturers are going to create specialized circuits for those to accelerate them. And now that they're there, we can upgrade crypto to have those capabilities. And what's really exciting is in many cases, these are going to actually add not just security, but in many cases acceleration because in particular the lattice stuff can be accelerated on graphics cards. So everything that people are doing for AI to make AI faster can be used to make crypto faster. So it's going to be a golden age actually. We'll be able to take a lot of these sequential algorithms and make them very parallel in the design. But cryptography is always a game of cat and mouse. If you ever go to England, you can go to Bletchley Park and it's a lovely tour. It's where the first computer was built, the bomb by Alan Turing. And the Nazis, they had this thing called the Enigma machine and it was basically this little black box with a keypad on it and they put a wheel in it and they'd have a setting for the day and they could use it to encrypt messages and then they would transmit it and then somebody would have that setting and Enigma machine on the other side and then they would decrypt the message. Well, what the Allies did is they figured out how to use computers to basically break those codes. And so if you go to Bletchley Park, you can actually see a reconstructed bomb and they tell you the story of how Alan Turing and these other guys figured it out. Well, now that they had computers, people use computers to make better cryptography and then they use computers to break that cryptography. And so it's always 10, 20 years there's like a thing and then the next thing and then a thing and then the next thing. It's just like warfare in general. You know, if you invent a plane, well, somebody creates a countermeasure to the plane and then they create a plane that avoids that countermeasure, you know, and you never stop. You just keep getting more advanced with it.

Well, the problem with quantum computing is the paradigm is not set. Um, there are many different approaches you can take to build a quantum computer. You know, it's ion trap and quantum topological quantum computers. That's Majorana, what Microsoft did, which is so crazy. My favorite's optical quantum computers, Xanadu and these other guys work on it. So there's a lot of great companies, but they're fundamentally different. Like some use the photon as their unit of computation. Some use the electron and you know, some use subatomic particles called Majorana fermions. All these different things, somebody's going to crack it. And the hard part is not the compute side, it's the error correction. The problem with quantum computing is that state of superposition and entanglement is extremely delicate and so delicate that any perturbation of it can create a cascading failure in the compute. So most of these things have to run close to absolute zero. You have to cool them super super super cool and then you have to keep all the ambient environment as free of interference as possible. And then even still the computation falls apart. So the biggest challenge in quantum computing is not scale like getting more qubits more raw compute power. It's error correction. So how do you avoid errors from exponentially increasing and destroying the calculation and basically disentangling. So, that's been the big focus and whether it be Google with Willow or what Microsoft just announced with Majorana, we're seeing very systematic progress in every respect. There's a big national security issue though because while we can change cryptography, we and our adversaries do archive all the data. So, Bluffdale, Utah, the NSA has this gigantic facility and it's like yottabytes of storage and they just basically packet replicate the internet. They take all the encrypted traffic from China and Russia and other places and they just store it there because if you develop a quantum computer because that was encrypted with classical compute you can decrypt it. So security is also how long do you need to keep the secret for you know so battle plans in World War II are probably great for historians but they have no national security implication because it's so long ago. But from something in GWOT, it's still probably relevant today because that's probably still being used today in the battlefield and those systems are still around. So cryptography has to last a shelf life beyond just being broken today. It has to be maybe 30 years or 40 years and then it's no longer relevant. So the United States is getting more paranoid about this which is why NIST has done this and the Suite A and B protocol suites for both NSA and then the open one Department of Commerce are now recommending post-quantum. So there's already a transition that's occurring to post-quantum and we're seeing post-quantum algorithms in the commercial side with like WireGuard getting post-quantum support. So if I had to guess I'd say probably the 2030s is when we'll start seeing quantum-like devices work their way into compute. And by the 2040s, I think there's a very strong possibility that we'll crack it. Now, this is a controversial viewpoint. There are some people who think quantum computers are still impossible and they can't work for a variety of deep theoretical reasons. And there's other people think they will crack it, but it's like 2050 or 2060 or 2070. But it's the same in AI. You know, you talk to AI researchers and some are like, 'Oh, well, 2027 and you know, we'll have AGI and the computers will kill us all in terminators forever.' And there's other people like Yann LeCun are like, 'Oh, the fundamental model is wrong. We need a world model. We're still a long way off from that. So maybe the 2030s or 2040s and there's other people say it's never going to happen like Federico Faggin or any of these other guys who invented the microprocessor because he says cognition is fundamentally different than how we do architecture computing. So it just lives in a different world. So any expert you'll always find like 45 opinions on these things but I always look as an entrepreneur at who's investing how much money are they putting in how many alternative approaches are we following and ultimately what's the payoff of success. If your payoff of success is you have like a reality machine with MatterGen where you can just enter in what you want and it produces that thing well yeah a lot of people are going to chase that and it's much the same with AI you know you could say well we need to slow down for alignment but you're like guys the first person to solve this problem, it's probably going to be a trillionaire. You're going to get every company in the world chasing that and investing in that. And if even if one of them voluntarily steps off the thing, there's too much competition. It's an inevitability behind it. It was just like the Manhattan Project. They actually had not one but two different designs for the nuclear bomb. You know, the Little Boy and Fat Man or whatever they were. And one was an implosion sphere, another was like a gun where it shoot something and hit. And they did this to de-risk the program because they didn't know which one was going to work. And it turned out both of them did. So the one in Nagasaki was the implosion device and the other was Hiroshima. But when you really want something to happen, you'll just throw lots of money, lots of people, and you have lots of approaches. So quantum computing is exactly the same way. There's a dozen or so different paradigms that you could follow. And there's many billions of dollars and many many companies that are chasing this thing. So the odds of at least one of them turning out to actually work the way we think it's going to work is pretty high. And the payoff is so large that people will continue to do this until they crack it.

We have a huge advantage in that we have a lot of the brains and people um and even if we don't, we tend to buy them and bring them into the United States. Like Xanadu, for example, is the world leader in photonic quantum computing and they're based in Canada, but you know, if they actually solve this problem, they're probably going to end up as an American company. You know, somebody's going to give them an offer they can't refuse. Um, you know, the other thing is that all the technologies that go into quantum computing, they are mostly areas where America excels. We're like super good at the science stuff, cooling things and super good at the very subtle environments that quantum computers require. So, we have a lead and it's a very strong lead, but by no means is China sitting back and by no means are the Europeans sitting back. You know, everybody's chasing this in their own way. And a lead means you have maybe 6 months to 2 years. But look at the iPhone. It comes out, it's magical and amazing. But does it really feel magical and amazing anymore? Especially when you compare it to all the other competitors out there. It's unbelievable how fast that happened. And you know, this is something where the payoff is exponentially higher.

I grew up in Hawaii of all places. Like it's an odd place to be. So my dad grew up in Montana and my mom grew up in Florida. She was in Winter Haven and my dad was out Miles City and Big Timber. And my dad's father, my grandfather, he became a doctor and he was kind of an outdoor guy and he just loved the outdoors, but he hated the cold. And so when he was in residency, they said, 'Hey, would you like to do a residency down in Panama?' And so he said, 'Oh, that sounds like a lot of fun.' So he went down for a few years to the Panama Canal Zone and did OB/GYN residency down there and delivered tons of kids, but he got addicted to the tropical living. And so when he went back to Montana, he's like, 'God, this cold thing sucks. I don't want to do this anymore.' So he said, 'You know what I'm going to do is I'm going to buy a practice in Hawaii. That's what I'm going to do.' So in the '70s, a practice came up for sale and he picked it up, moved to Maui and my dad ended up going to high school in Maui and we have very strong roots then in Hawaii. So my father then went to college in Montana and then went back to Hawaii for medical school at University of Hawaii. So when he went to residency, he was in residency in Colorado and St. Joseph's and that's where he met my mom. She was a respiratory therapist. So he when he finished residency decided to go start a private practice in Hawaii. So my brother was born in Colorado but then I ended up being born in Maui. My grandfather ironically delivered me. So yeah, awkward. But anyway, yeah, I grew up there until I was about 8 years old. And then my mother got tired of living in Hawaii. And she told my dad, 'I'm going to move back to Colorado, and you can stay in Hawaii and be a single doctor or you can move to Colorado and be a married doctor.' So, you know, take your choice. My dad said, 'I like being married.' So we moved to Colorado. And my mom's whole family is in Colorado. They my mother's father was in the cable business and he kind of followed the evolution of the cable business from the '50s. He was a Marine and fought in the Korean War. So he signed up in '48 and got out in '52. And when he got out, he got a job as a lineman. And right around that time period, the cable business was getting started. So he just kept going from place to place as they were laying cable. And Colorado became kind of like the nexus that linked the United States together. So in the '70s all the cable guys started coming out this way. And so my grandfather lived in Denver. So my mother grew up in all those different places but then kind of settled in Colorado and that's where she met my dad. So anyway they moved out to Hawaii and then I moved back from Hawaii to Colorado and then I grew up in Colorado and then I became kind of a nomad and travel the world.

Well, I was really isolated as a kid. You know, the problem with Hawaii is that especially at the time and place I grew up in Hawaii, it's not easy to be a non-tourist white guy in Hawaii. You know, they call you haole and you know, and so my parents didn't want me to attend public education. So, I ended up being homeschooled, which was like a double-edged sword. It was great because I could graduate high school much faster and you know I could I was a voracious reader and I love knowledge and these things but also it meant I was a little half-baked on the socialization side. You know it's just my brother and I and that's it. And so we didn't really socialize with very many people. But what was nice is then instead of doing the school stuff where you'd go through traditional K through 12, we did the nature stuff. So an enormous amount of my time was going to the beach and going to the jungles and Iao Valley and all these other places on Maui and seeing the sea life and so forth and it developed a strong love of the natural world and you know that's why a plant company now right you know it's like or a ranch you know I loved animals and I love plants and I love that whole experience of seeing things. You know the other thing is it gave me a slightly different age demographic you know because I didn't get exposed to the K through 12, I kind of skipped the late '80s and '90s and I inherited my mom and dad's generation. So the early '80s, the '70s and the late '60s and so I listened to Boston and I listened to Journey and you know I listen to all these things like Bread and you know what was his name? Um, did Operator and Time in a Bottle, Jim Croce, you know, all these guys and all the television was from that time too, you know. So I watch Lost in Space and you know I watch Gunsmoke and all these shows and so I'm always like one generation behind actually my cohort. So you know it's easier in some cases for me to talk to people in their 40s and 50s than it is to talk to people in their early 30s and 20s because I have that cultural frame of reference which is quite strange. Um the other nice thing about Hawaii is it's like frozen in time. You know outside of the fire in Lahaina nothing changes at all ever. So you go there and it's like the same store that I went to when I was eight years old is still there and it's probably the same guy working at the same store. He's just a lot fatter and older. He's got the man boobs now and the comb over, but he's still going to the beach like three times a week, right? And you talk to this guy and you say, 'God, do you have any ambition in life? You know, do you want to do more?' No, no, no. I am content. You know, and that's the problem with Island Fever. That's why my mom got tired of it. She's like, you know, it's a paradise for a year. You get island fever within 3 years if you have any ambition at all. There's no progress. There's no growth. You're just static. You stay stuck in time. Um and then the tourism thing too is like you live in a place where the population literally doubles or triples every year. And so you go boom bust boom bust. So during tourist season, traffic jams everywhere, all these tourists running around causing chicanery and havoc. And then offseason like everything's nice. So that gets old after a while, you know, and tough after a while. So you know, I didn't want to leave. I was 8 years old. I liked Hawaii. I walk around with like no shoes on or the flip-flops and these things. Had the long blonde hair that turned black over time. It was great. But then as I got older, I realized it was a really good decision to kind of go to Colorado.

Well, you know, after so, you know, kind of following into Colorado, um, you know, I was homeschooled and I graduated from high school at 15 and, uh, then I started at a community college because I, my parents said, it's probably too much to go to a 4-year university. Like, you never went to high school. You're homeschooled your whole life. So, I did Front Range and uh, that was kind of my high school. So, you know, between 15 to 18, I was there and I graduated. Uh, so I was like 18 with a college degree, which was cool. And I transferred then to Metro State and then I transferred to CU Boulder. And originally I want to be a doctor, you know, because my dad's a doctor, my brother ended up as a doctor, my grandfather was a doctor, my uncle's a doctor. There's a lot of doctors in the family. I got to be a surgeon. This is going to be great. And I was very precocious and arrogant as hell and I thought I knew everything and I was the center of the universe and all these things. God helped me. And the problem is I was pretty charismatic and pretty smart so I could get away with it, you know, for these things. So, um, I did the medicine thing for a little while and, you know, took EMT training and became a certified pharmacy tech and took all the biology and all the chemistry classes you're supposed to do and it was never a challenge. But then I started learning the dark side of medicine as I kind of went through that. So, you have this like view of medicine from ER and House or, you know, from watching my dad practice where you're like you help people, you take care of people. But if you talk to any doctor, the vast majority of their time is not helping people in curing people and solving diseases or things. It's either managing chronic ailments or paperwork, you know, and it's gotten so bad in primary care, you might see 20 to 30 patients per day and have less than 15 minutes of actual time with each person. And then after you see the person, lots of paperwork and the ICD10 coding, right? You have to put all your codes in and they got to bill and they got to chase your RVUs and all this other stuff. So as I started volunteering hospital to actually working in that infrastructure and talking to physicians they every physician that I met said you're too smart for medicine don't go into it don't go into it you know it's they were burnt out and they said and it's a bad thing when the people who are good at the field are telling you don't go into the field you know it's not your way so the other thing I was really good at was mathematics and uh and I really loved mathematics you know math is it's an infinite well no matter how brilliant you are you reach a stopping point that you can't go any deeper but yet the ocean is deeper. So I loved that about the field. It was like a personal challenge like I solve something and then I get the next thing and I solve that thing and then I get to the next thing and even math itself is like unsolvable. There's like these boundaries like Gödel's incompleteness theorem or other things that say like you can't win. The game is unwinnable. So I love studying mathematics and you know I got quite good at it and that's actually why I transferred from Metro to CU Boulder because they had this nice combined master's undergraduate program so you could take graduate classes and undergraduate classes and I just took a ton of math classes and I went through and it's a research university so I interact with like true mathematicians and then what I discovered was like it was such a dreary field to actually be a professional in because while it was super intellectually interesting to get tenure and to climb that chain. You had to do a ton of really boring stuff and highly political stuff and then in your 40s or 50s you get to the other side and then you just do whatever the fuck you want to do. But then you make no money. No one cares about what you do. No one understands what you do and you end up becoming like turbo autistic. You're just in your office looking at a whiteboard. It's like why doesn't this work? And then you discover something like a man I just discovered this new thing about cohomology. So like oh okay that's cool. So I got really lost in that but I was fortuitous that there were a lot of good cryptographers there and there were a lot of good computer scientists there. So as I was studying math I was also inadvertently learning all these really cool things about all the underpinnings which became cryptocurrencies. Like if you're a mathematician you study cryptography it's quite easy then to understand like how does a cryptocurrency work under the hood because you know how a public key system works. It's like, 'Oh, it's RSA.' Well, it's Euler's theorem. Oh, okay. I get that. Or the discrete logarithm problem. Oh, yeah. I understand that. I understand how that works. That's great. You can read the papers. And so coming from that side, it was uh I didn't know at the time, but it was one of the most valuable things for me. But I just got so tired of it. I said, 'I'm wasting time, and I don't really have a path to a career.' So, uh I dropped out. And then I took some time off to just kind of go and travel and meet people and uh see the world a little bit. And I did that and that was fun, you know, and uh and I got to see a lot of different things. And I also did some political stuff. I worked on the Ron Paul campaign.

Yeah, that was a lot of fun, you know.

Well, I was 21 when the Ron Paul campaign was first and because he did twice. It was 2007 and 2012 and then also there was the intermediate campaign which was Rand Paul in 2010. So everybody contributed their own way and again you just you don't know at the time that you're going to learn a skill and then that skill becomes valuable. But on the Ron Paul we learned about like online fundraising. We kind of invented it. We had the money bombs. You know Howard Dean was very successful in 2004 with online fundraising and Obama was pretty good too. But on the Republican side nobody had really cracked that nut and we were the first to do that. And the whole Republican party is like oh my god you just like do a money bomb and one day you get $5 million or $10 million? like how how do you do this? And you get calls from the national guys and they'd be like, 'Can you teach us your secrets?' We're like, 'Yeah, okay. It's real simple. Um you have to vote the same way for 30 years. Yeah. You have to have message discipline for 30 years and uh you can't you have to have integrity.' They're like, 'Ah, yeah. Can we like do it without those things?' We're like no no it doesn't work that way. You know it's that's why you know people give money that that way. But um distributed fundraising is like the ICO in the cryptocurrency space. Now of course we didn't know that at the time we invented that later on in the industry but that was a great thing. Also that message discipline people like rules of three like Ron Paul he said you know three things and three things only like choose liberty. So follow the constitution if it's in the constitution we follow it. If it's not in the constitution we don't do it. Pretty simple humble foreign policy. It's like we just don't want to go to war with all these people. I remember in 2007 he told us we were going to lose in Afghanistan. And he said Afghanistan's going to go back to the Taliban. He told us that. He said it in his speeches. He'd say it privately. He'd say like, you know, it's going to be just like Vietnam. You know, he was right. And then uh he said, 'Sound money.' You know, if you don't have good money, you don't have liberty because all the things you do, all the things you're promised disappear. Imagine working hard your whole life, 40 years, you save up, you have a good retirement ready to go and then inflation eats away at all that stuff and within 10-15 years all your savings are gone. You have no choice but to become a socialist and become a ward to the state because your money's gone now. They destroyed the quality of the money. So you have to go to the government and say please give me some bread cuz you're like 70. You can't work. You don't have the training or the economic output or anything like that. So you have bad money, you have socialism. You have bad money, you have a destroyed society, you have sound money, you have agency, you have control over your life. These types of things. And the other cool thing is that it could expose me to all these economics that I took economics, macro and microeconomics. And I think Paul Krugman, for God's sakes, wrote the book in macroeconomics that I took and it was all like Keynesian shit. And so I thought, oh, that's economics. But then I joined the Ron Paul movement and they're like, Ludwig von Mises and Austrian economics and all these things. Oh my god, this is amazing. There's like a completely parallel economic school of thought that's totally different than what the mainstream has. Like the Austrian economists were saying deflationary money is the money you want. When you do Keynesian economics, they're like it has to be inflationary. If it's deflationary, you have the deflationary spiral. The whole economy will fall apart and die. Well, what's Bitcoin? It's a deflationary monetary policy. So all the classical trained economists when they looked at Bitcoin when it first came out, they said it's not possible for it to succeed. It'll die. There's going to be a deflationary spiral. There's no way for this to work. But if you're an Austrian economist, you say, well, that's the natural way of money. So this will organically get more valuable over time. So you know, 2007, Bitcoin wasn't even out. And so I'm reading these books and these papers and everything. And it was preparing me for that cryptocurrency career. It was preparing me to kind of like when I read the white paper from Satoshi, it was like this makes sense. Yeah. Of course, this system is going to work. It's like gravity. It's just going to happen, you know. And the other thing was this power of the decentralized networking, you know, the Ron Paul movement was like a terrorist cell, you know. They had people everywhere, you know, and you didn't know where they're at and they're like a secret club and, you know, they we were so adept at rapidly coming together and talking to each other and figuring things out. So it scaled from just a few hundred volunteers to a nationwide Tea Party movement very quickly. But how quickly a movement could be co-opted. You know, when we were doing at the Ron Paul days in '07, there was just as many Democrats as there were Republicans. It was such weird bedfellows. You know, you'd have the blue-haired gal with the tongue ring who's kind of out there hanging out with like a 55 year old guy who buys golden guns and they're in the same rally and we're like, I don't know how this works, you know, but then a few years later because Paul's not a very good organizer, the movement got co-opted and suddenly Breitbart came in and all these other guys came in and it stopped being like a unifying thing with those three core things of choose liberty, sound money, and humble foreign policy. Cuz remember the blue-haired girls were against the Iraq war, you know, and also sound money. Like, who could be against that? And choose liberty is like, well, that's liberty for everybody, not just you or me, but for everybody. And it became like we're now anti-abortion and now we're anti-gay and we're this and this and this. And the Tea Party went in very strange directions. And we lost that political momentum and that political movement. So it was fortuitous because a lot of the people that were still true core libertarians who had been indoctrinated into digital money and were quite went to sound money who were quite young when the cryptocurrency movement came around they're like oh that's our home cuz blockchains are like a constitution at their core. When you look at a blockchain what's written in it can't be violated. If it says this is the monetary policy that's the monetary policy. If this is your right as a user of the system, the operator of the system or you know some power like the United States or China can't come in and change it cuz reasons it is what it is. So if you believe in sound money, so deflationary monetary policy and you believe in choose liberty, meaning to follow the constitution, it's directly compatible with the blockchain. And the other thing is that it's non-aggression principle, non-violence, the humble foreign policy. Everybody in the world is treated equally. So it doesn't matter what language you speak. It doesn't matter where you're born. It doesn't matter where you come from. You have the same rights as the founders of the system, you know, and that's just not the case in the legacy world. If you're Bill Gates or me and you use a bank, they kiss your ass. You know, your private client, they'll do anything. You have numbers you can call and just say, 'I need this and this. Oh, of course.' You know, we'll drop off a pallet of cash in front of your house. And they'll do that. You can't do that as a poor farmer in Senegal or things like that. You might not even have a bank account. But in a cryptocurrency, my use is identical to that farmer in Senegal's use. So it was in many ways a spiritual successor to the concepts of that liberty movement and people wanting to have something that was divorced from the corruption and the nepotism and had some principles behind it that were almost like the laws of physics. They're immutable. They're invariable. You can't change them.

So, you know, first off, all social systems are imaginary. You know, every economic, political, or social system, they're not real. Like, where do you go to find the dollar? It's like I can print a dollar and I can hand you a dollar, but that's like a certificate that says this represents this concept of a dollar. Or like where does your vote live? You can vote, but you I guess you have a ballot, but the concept of voting, the concept of democratic legitimacy stand for corporations like where does Microsoft live exactly? You know, where does Google live? You know, it's like why there's a registration, there's shareholders, but it's an abstraction, you know, on the internet. So crypto is just an abstraction. It's a set of consensus rules and it uses a blend of social processes and mathematics and distributed computing and cryptography to basically create something that then acts as this trust layer. It has three core properties. It's immutable, it's timestamped, and it's irreversible. Everything you put in, you can't change it. You know when you put it in, and everybody can see it. It's auditable. And it doesn't seem like that's valuable, but it actually turns out it's one of the most valuable things in the world. Trust is one of the most valuable things in the world. And you know it when you're missing it. And the example I like giving people is let's say you're a rancher and you want to buy some of your neighbor's land. There's two ways that can go down. One way you're great friends with that neighbor. You're drinking buddies with them. So you go out there and you say, 'Hey, Bill, uh, you know, I that 50 acres over there, I want my cattle to graze on that place. Uh, I'd like to buy it from you.' And Bill's like, 'Well, you know, Charles, uh, great. What price?' And you haggle over drinks and you come to a term, you shake hands. Now, let's say that you discover a problem with the transaction a month into it. You go back to him, you say, 'Hey, Bill, we got this problem and it's an issue. Can we solve it?' You drink it out, you haggle it out, shake hands, deal closes, you get the land. The other way it can go down. Let's say you hate your neighbor. You don't trust each other, but you really need the land. So, you go to the neighbor and you say, 'I want to buy your land.' He says, 'Well, all right. Talk to my lawyer.' So your lawyer is talking to his lawyer. Complex negotiation. That issue comes up. Now you're in litigation. You're suing each other. Two years passed. All this money. You win. Got the land. The outcome is exactly the same in both cases. A, you get the land. B, you get the land. What's the difference? The difference was you solved it over alcohol and handshakes and hanging out with your buddy versus you had to litigate and spend an enormous amount of money. What was the difference between those two transactions? One thing, just one thing, trust. That's it. In the first scenario, you like and trust each other. In the second scenario, you don't. So then everything else, it's

It's like a butterfly effect that cascades from there. At the micro scale that's it, but at the macro scale it's the same way. Russia has every incentive to work with Europe and the United States because China is eating them alive. But you can't get there with trust. So despite their incentive to work with us, they can't. Corporations also have incentives to work together, like Apple and Samsung: Apple needs Samsung's chips but doesn't want its iPhone design stolen. If they can cooperatively use a common space with trust at the core, they can create tens to hundreds of trillions of dollars of wealth. I'm not even talking about tokens or cryptocurrency, just the abstraction of blockchain — a trust layer.

Well, that comes into what type of world you want to live in. Do you want your trust infrastructure to be owned by a federated oligarchy or decentralized? Without a token, it's controlled by an oligarchy. Somebody has to maintain the infrastructure — people aren't going to volunteer for trillions of dollars of infrastructure. The token pays for its own bills. Bitcoin created its own token, and we went from mining on a laptop to gigantic mining fields. There was no central coordination — people through self-interest built that mesh. The token creates the resource and the decentralization to maintain it. If you trust Microsoft, Google, Amazon, or the US government, you don't need it. But then they own what goes in the ledger. They have a monopoly on trust and truth. We saw that with social media: they decide what's legitimate, deplatform people. With decentralization, no one has censorship. In a multipolar, tribal world, we need something everyone agrees on as a universal good.

So that's what blockchain is basically selling — this idea of objective reality, a synthetic objective truth you can build an economic system from. If you have faith in the mathematics and decentralization, you start trusting the outputs. When I send you a transaction, you can check the ledger. Voting is another thing: Trump lost in 2020, Al Gore lost in 2000 — every election is 'rigged.' Wouldn't it be nice to have a voting system where you can check your vote and the integrity of the system? It's the same problem as decentralized money, social networks, medical records — all doable with blockchain. My life's goal is to make it secure, decentralized, resilient. The token prices create a reward to break the system. Every day, vicious hackers try to steal money — North Korea does it as national policy. That learning makes systems stronger. Eventually they can run social-scale infrastructure like national elections. That's crypto in a nutshell. And the smart cow effect: if you're a rancher, there's one smart cow that figures out how to open the fence, and all the others follow. In an open decentralized sense, whatever idea you have becomes everyone's idea. Zero-knowledge proofs were invented at MIT in the 80s, but the crypto space accelerated them from a few papers to thousands, millions of lines of code, billions of dollars in just five years. That's the magic of the smart cow effect. Voting innovation too: we have terrible choices because the ballot architecture is wrong. It should be preference order — you rank your top five, never throw your vote away. Democrats and Republicans together prevent third parties. In crypto, you have to create on-chain governance, so you build voting systems — quadratic voting, liquid democracy. You get to test entire economic and political systems at scale, adversarially. The good systems get stolen and become standards. The regular world eventually adopts them, but the only way to truly work is to go from federated to decentralized. Big middlemen will evaporate, like old media when the internet came.

Exactly. These things have existed in political science but never get adopted because government change takes decades or centuries. In crypto, you have 1.4 million cryptocurrencies since 2010, many with on-chain governance. We test systems at scale, and if there's a bug, it gets exploited and collapses. The good systems become standards. The regular world adopts them, but to work together you need decentralization, federated won't cut it.

Sure.

Okay. If you think about a vote, it's like a token. How many votes you get is how many tokens you have, and where you send the token is who you're voting for. If you can vote for multiple people, you split your tokens. That's exactly how Bitcoin works. For an election, first you need a secure voter registration process — a digital identity system. If that's not secure, you're just building a secure way to count dead people. Then you decide the mechanics: one person one vote or weighted votes? Anonymous or transparent? Auditability? Some systems don't allow you to prove how you voted to prevent vote selling; others do for verifiability. You can have rank choice, quadratic voting. You graft these onto a cryptocurrency as an application. Blockchain is immutable, timestamped, auditable — you can verify your own vote and the system's integrity as a whole. That's inclusive accountability. We lack this now: your bank balance is just trust me bro. With inclusive accountability, any user can reconstruct the entire history and verify the state is correct. For Cardano, you can start from the genesis block and verify everything. It's expensive but gives self-integrity. Then there's the user experience: voting via phone or app. Many want hybrid systems — paper and digital simultaneously, with a one-to-one correspondence. That makes it much harder to hack. Every election has properties like frequency, cost, ballot access. Stalin said it doesn't matter who votes, it matters who counts and what you vote on. If only one candidate on ballot, you get Kim Jong Un. Blockchain can handle any ballot architecture at no cost on the digital side. It can replace mail-in ballots, which are insecure — no chain of custody, easy to sell votes, bundling at old folks' homes. With strong digital ID and blockchain, 95% of integrity issues disappear. And the smart cow effect: once someone designs a secure voting system, it's free for everyone. In crypto, voting on protocol changes is tested by hackers who have financial incentives to break it. If it stands the test of time, it's reliable. Then you can plop it down. You can also do digital-only preference polls for things like parade dates. You can have liquid democracy, recall elections based on approval ratings. This sounds amazing — are any governments close to implementing it? Liquid feedback was used by the Pirate Party in Sweden. Many countries do rank choice voting. But nation-state social infrastructure evolves slowly, typically after invasion, collapse, or scandal. Often it benefits an oligarchy to keep it unchanged — like India's 1% crypto tax that protects remittance middlemen. The US has a unique opportunity with Trump wanting to change voting and embrace blockchain, but you have to fix the digital infrastructure first. Identity is key: it's composed of facts and opinions. Facts are objective, opinions are referential to the holder. We need a trust system where both are first-class citizens. The W3C created the decentralized identifier (DID) standard — a web address for you, with a document containing metadata, built on public-private keys. It's non-repudiable, can be used for access control, financial transactions, and zero-knowledge proofs — like proving your age without revealing it. This is self-sovereign identity (SSI) — you own it, not Microsoft or Google. It's censorship-resistant. If your passport is revoked, you still have your credential. Digital identity ties into compliance — you need KYC for large transactions. There's a book, 'Treasury's War,' about how the financial war on terror created pervasive monitoring but removed privacy. With zero-knowledge proofs, you can have safety and anonymity — prove you're a US citizen without revealing who you are. A great example: people with top-secret clearances still get molested by TSA because there's no interoperability between trust systems. With a unified trust system, you can prove you're in a trusted category without revealing why.

You can split. That's rank choice or linear preference. You can also have quadratic voting where the more you vote for one thing, the less power you have — a dampening effect. All these can be built into a cryptocurrency application. The blockchain provides immutability, timestamping, and auditability. Immutable means once counted, it can't be changed. Timestamped means the vote occurred within the legitimate election period. Auditable means everyone can see the records and verify. That's inclusive accountability. You can verify your own vote and the integrity of the whole system. We lack this in most infrastructure.

You could, but it's disenfranchising because it's easier to fill in a circle than to spell a long name. Candidates would give stamps. In the 19th century, they had pre-filled ballots handed out at polling places — called down tickets. They also bribed people with beer. At least having a digital side to replace mail-in ballots makes sense. Mail-in ballots are horribly insecure — no chain of custody, easy to sell, can bundle at nursing homes. With blockchain and strong digital ID, most integrity issues go away.

for different personas. So you can have one DID for an alias. Maybe you're doing, you know, tradecraft and you have that. You have another DID for your military life. You have another DID for your personal life and for your professional life, etc., etc., like your LinkedIn profile as they did here. And then there's various public fields and all these things. And there's provability with all these things. And then you can at any time pick up that you own all of them, but they're unlinkable. So you don't necessarily have to combine them and say, 'Well, this is also the same person as Sean Ryan.' It's an unlinkable identity, and you're in control of all of that. And then you have the ability to at any time prove properties at your discretion for these types of things. So that's the other side that the cryptocurrency industry has been really thinking about because it's so pivotal to everything we do. It is if it's an engine of trust, where does trust come from? Well, some of it's objective by the structure of the system, but then some of it's subjective like who are the members of the system. And so if you minute you step into who are the people, you have to have a representation of identity. And once you have that representation of identity, you can then use that to prove all kinds of things that you want. And eventually you can reconstruct reality because you say, 'Okay, now we can build a credit system.' And instead of it being decided by, you know, these four credit agencies and they give you a number and who the [__] knows where this number comes from. Like for example, I'm a billionaire, but somehow my credit score is lower than some of my family members. I just can't for the life of me understand that. I'm just like, guys, it's just like I'm like, 'Guys, you understand this is like like I'm beyond your notion of credit, but yet somehow my credit score is lower than my secretaries. It's like it's it just bothers me. She makes fun of me for it.' Um, and I just don't understand it. Uh so so so obviously that credit system doesn't seem to make sense and and it's weaponized in many cases against a lot of people who got into some bad situations. So we should probably have marketplaces for those things and more decentralization for those things otherwise you those actors can basically decide who gets to win who gets to lose in society. So yeah that's what crypto is really about at its core. It's like is that trust? And then you start looking at fundamental objects like money, voice and political opinion, social influence, identity, and you say, can I represent these things mathematically as something as an object that lives out there in the cloud? And then can I make them programmable? And then can I build an economy around them? And then can I have them compete in an all you can eat buffet of different ideas and have those ideas run in parallel and and introduce adversarial thinking. So people come in and try to break them and destroy them. And if they do, they get a reward. They get millions of dollars or billions of dollars and run away. Yay. But if they can't break them, then the system becomes stronger and then it becomes the system and takes over.

Yeah. And the first step is

Yeah. Yeah. I Well, the first step is standardization. So, you know, just like that postquantum discussion, you don't want to run too far off the reservation. You you want to say, well, the government's not going to procure something unless they have standardization for that thing. So, NIST is highly involved in these types of things, but the Department of Commerce is highly involved. And before the DoD thinks about it or some secretary of state in some states thinks about it, you really need to reference something like what is the statutory definition or the standard RC for what is blockchain and for this and for that and this. You have to build all those components up as a house of abstractions and codes and numbers like uh if you want to secure something and use it in the military maybe you need FIPS 190-2 or something like there's some processor standard they point to that or milspec is another you point to it you say that's that thing then once you have it you say okay now we can have a conversation about writing an RFP and building something so what's happened is we've had kind of a lot of chaos because it's hard and it's complicated and the people making the decisions are pretty divorced from the realities of the technology. So they want to do it and they understand philosophically there's a there there but they don't have the vocabulary and they don't have the bureaucracy necessary to be able to get into this world, you know. And so the thing we've been working on is saying don't pick winners and losers right now. Don't even talk about winners and losers right now. Focus on instead a taxonomy. Get the words right. Get the language right. Get the standards right. Have a notion of what is decentralization. You hear it all the time. The crypto, we're decentralized. We're what the [__] does decentralization mean? I asked this question. We've written 240 papers, academic papers at my company, over 10,000 citations. So, we said, you know, we should write an academic paper. We thought, oh, you know, that'd be really easy. We'll just like have paper in two months and like six years. And then we created a standards group at University of Edinburgh and we created something called the decentralization, the Edinburgh decentralization index. And it turns out there's eight different lenses you could look at for decentralization. everything from the token distribution to the consensus algorithm to how the code is written, all this stuff. And it's a trade-off matrix. It's not like one number that you can get to and say this is the only number that matters. It's more like what do you value? Do you value operational resilience or do you value a large distribution of the money? You can have a fully decentralized system, but one guy owns all the tokens.

Doesn't really make sense, right? Okay, you have a system where a lot of people own all the tokens, but only three people run that ledger and it's federated forever and you can't get rid of them. doesn't really make any sense. So it seems like there's some combination of these things. So we just started measuring these things a few years ago. The next step is to take that model to NIST and other standards bodies and say how do you integrate this and then start creating some infrastructure. So then the government can use this tool to measure this from a qualitative and quantitative way when they're assessing technology cuz you know the military probably doesn't want to go and adopt a blockchain technology that has a back door in it or has an operator that that China can coerce and then suddenly the whole thing comes down and it's the same for a voting system. You don't want to adopt a voting system that's fundamentally insecure or has some sort of hidden vector of attack inside of it. So the standards get you to a point where you can have that conversation. Then the RFP process then allows the government to start experimenting with it. Now that said, there have been plenty of pilots that have been run and you know, DARPA's done stuff and DoD's done stuff and various states are doing things like the state of Wyoming's passed over 30 cryptocurrency related laws and created all kinds of cool and innovative structures. So there's a lot of stuff that's happening at the state county level and some in the federal level. And thanks to Trump embracing cryptocurrency, there's an all of government mandate now to say, hey, we should actually consider blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies as a first-class citizen. And in solving future problems, we actually think that there's a there there for these these types of things. The challenge again though is that the bureaucracy it runs at a different clock speed than we do as an industry. So we think if it doesn't happen in like 5 days, it didn't happen. the government if it doesn't happen in like five months we're no that that's actually pretty good you know may come back in a few years maybe we'll have something for you you know it's it's a different clock speed

I think El Salvador that was bouquet I I actually went down there after he did it um so El Salvador was like living on a different planet. I got some stories for you. So, so this is back in 2021. Um, El Salvador Boule, if you ever meet him, he's like in his early 40s and he is a super charismatic guy. He was like a nightclub manager for a bit and then a mayor of something. Now he's the president of the country, right? And and he's just he's just got this this style that's just magical. So, um, El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as their national standard and then he he he said it, but they had really no plan for how they were actually going to adopt and bring Bitcoin into their country. And so, they had these guys that were local and they were just terrible. And so, Bouquet is like, I need some help. So, we knew one of his guys. There was this cod CIA guy. His name was Marty. Uh, and he was friends with this other guy named Damian who is like the political adviser to Phuket. And so, I was friends with Marty. And Marty's like, 'You got to talk to Damian.' So I talked to Damian. He's like, 'You should really meet Bouquet. Meet the president.' I'm like, 'Okay, I guess I can go to El Salvador. I've heard interesting things about that country.' So, so we first had a phone call with him and I was like, 'Am I really talking to the president of El Salvador? Like, can we verify is this guy real?' So the next time we had a video call and he looked official, there's flags behind him and everything and he looked like Boule. We're like, 'Okay, I think we're talking to Bouay.' So then eventually we planned a trip and we went down to Sense Salvador and it was the wildest week in my life. I uh we landed there and uh you know, we go and first we have dinner with Boui and we end up spend like 4 hours at the presidential palace and it was like this long nonsecutous conversation about various things. He was like like Latin American Gaddafi was just it was crazy. And uh and I was like okay well how are you going to actually implement it? We're just going to do it. we're just gonna figure it out and we have six months. Let's do it, you know. Okay. So, then we had a group of people we brought in and we started talking to all the different government agencies. We talked to the central bank and we said, okay, well, like what are the compliance guidelines for adopting cryptocurrency here? It's like, well, we don't have any of many. I said, well, where are you getting your business requirements? And they said, Facebook. What? It's like, yeah, the president does all of his speeches on Facebook, so we just listen to the president's speeches and then we'll adopt, you know, whatever he says over the speeches. were like, 'Okay, that's uh that's great.' But the trippiest thing is they wanted to do like this Bitcoin mine uh you know, was using geothermal cuz I guess they got volcanoes there. And so they had this hairbrain scheme that they were going to build this big Bitcoin valley with like big geothermal power and they'll have all the Bitcoin miners come because now it's like Bitcoin utopia. So we were talking to the Minister of Energy there and it was like a Doctor Strange love scene. It was it was so crazy that he looked like um you know Dr. octopus from the Spider-Man 2 and he talked like this. Hello Charles, the power of magma will be the destiny of El Salvador. And we had these Guatemalan guys in the meeting for no particular reason. And they were smoking inside the ministry and they're just like, 'Yeah, [__] magma, man. We're going to get this stuff.' And it's just one meeting after another meeting of all this stuff. Then we're like, 'Okay, okay. The US government's got to know what's going on, so let's go talk to the State Department.' And of course Biden, you know, he never found something he couldn't [__] up. So the prior ambassador was this great guy that Boule really liked. They had a wonderful relationship together. They'd hang out like watch movies together until 1:00 in the morning. So the first thing Biden did is fire that ambassador and put a new person in and say the policy of the US is now regime change. So Bali went from hey, we like the US and we're friends and I get to hang out with the ambassador to the ambassador wants to kill me. Okay. For no particular reason. Um it's like Forest Gump for no particular reason. and they shot that man. Um, so, so anyway, we meet the US ambassador there or the attach, wherever the hell she was, and uh, we was like, 'Okay, well, we've seen all this insane stuff going on. Like, surely you guys must know what's going on.' It's like, 'No, we thought you knew.' So, it was just chaos. It was absolute chaos. They had no real plan on how to adopt Bitcoin. They had no real plan for how to use it. And they passed the legislation for optics. And they wanted to attract a lot of direct foreign investment in, but they didn't really understand our industry. So what they ended up doing in El Salvador is they adopted a centralized solution. So they said there's Bitcoin but then they had this thing called the Shiva wallet and then people would deposit and they would get a representation of it and they could spend it amongst each other with the wallet there in El Salvador. Um but there wasn't in our view appropriate controls to audit and verify there was a onetoone correspondence between actual Bitcoin and the the currency that they were trading. The other issue is we went to the Treasury Department, the State Department. We met with all these guys in DC and we tried to say, 'Hey, you know, is there any way we could work together on this because there's millions of El Salvadorans and like 25% of the population is in the US. They're kind of under your jurisdiction and there's all like half their economy relies on remittances from the United States. So whatever they do in El Salvador, the United States is going to have to have an opinion on that. We have to get the regulation to work. Like Bouquet, for example, wanted to do an airdrop to everybody in El Salvador. And we're like, okay, but MS-13 is on an OFAC list. And so if we give Bitcoin to all these people, we're facilitating a transfer of value to a terrorist organization. That's no bueno. You know, we can't make that work. So Justice Department has to give a clearance and understand what the rules are and everything. We just couldn't get there. So we passed on the deal after a week. But it was just wild walking through all that cuz it was like the whole country was like a startup. The the other thing is they were running everything on WhatsApp. So all the ministers were like in WhatsApp groups and just talking to each other and that was their official form of communication and and there's layers and layers of other things I can tell you off the record and especially with some of the interpersonal dynamics there. Um, but what it did do was because El Salvador is a real country, it actually made Bitcoin the official currency and it forced the IMF and it forced all the transnational bodies to actually start recognizing Bitcoin as a currency and start talking about cryptocurrencies from a different lens and perspective. They looked at it as kind of a shadowy speculative asset that weird autistic nerds trade online and who knows too. Well, if a nation state's using it, technically speaking, it is a currency and and there there's something there. And so at that moment, it was a sea change and it created cracks in the foundation. And when El Salvador didn't collapse, but rather they got a lot of direct foreign investment and all the Bitcoiners came there, Bouay's gambit actually worked. It said it's okay as a nation state to adopt cryptocurrencies. You're not going to get retaliation. you're not going to get crushed by the IMF or these other people, these big transnational bodies that came in, you know, and because the IMF was always a boogeyman. I remember meeting uh the prime minister of Georgia. It's a country in Eastern Europe and uh we talked about like the digital lorry as a as a stable coin and he said, 'Well, we tried, but the IMF came in and said, 'We'll pull all your funding and all your loans and just burn your country to the ground if you go and do this.' So, they were always the boogeyman. And when El Salvador had the balls to say, 'Fuck it. we'll just go and do it because Boule's Bouquet. Um, and they didn't get destroyed. It it it was a very pivotal moment. So, what is the IMF?

It's like a transnational body that basically oversees the loans to countries and litany of other things. So, after World War II concluded, um, the United States won and we were in charge of everything and, um, you know, and there was two systems, the Soviet system and our system. And so, we set up the world financial order. It's called the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944. And that plus the Marshall Plan plus things that happened in the 50s and 60s, they created a world order. And we established these big transnational bodies like the World Bank and the World Trade Organization and the IMF and Swift and so forth. And basically what they did is they created a management layer for the entire financial system of the world. Any place the dollar touched, any place America touched, you adopted not just America stuff, our blue jeans and music, but you got our banking system and you got wired into it. So how America projects soft power is we don't have to invade you. We can just blacklist you from the world financial system. So like FATIF is a great example of that. It's a uh controlling body that does all the compliance and regulation. Well, if you had on a fat if blacklist, it's like really hard for your regulated financial vehicles to have correspondent bank relationships with the rest of the world. So, effectively, you become a financial island and money can't get in, money can't get out, and all your rich people are no longer rich because their money doesn't do anything. So, we don't have to invade you. We just put you on a blacklist and then you're done. So, these transial bodies, they've grown so powerful that they literally can influence foreign policy and also domestic policy. So you can go in and use them and say, 'Hey, you know, uh, you know, you got to treat this ethnic group a little better, or this group of people should be allowed to vote, or you need to change this law, or something. If you don't change that law, you know, you're just not going to get credit anymore. You can't borrow money. So, sorry.' Or, you know, all your debt, we're just going to collapse it and uh, nobody will buy that debt. Or, you know, actually, you just can't travel anymore. Just cut your passports off or these types of things. And it's uh, it's it's especially for smaller countries, it's not a small concern. You're literally told what to do as the president of the country for these types of things.

Yeah. Well, Brexit was a component of that because that that was the European system in the UK and you know it's still a mixed bag. We have a lab in Scotland for a long time and so we kind of hear both sides of the politics, the proxit and the anti-rexit people. But that populist uprising did have that same sentiment. Why is it that I as a voter in the UK can say my opinion, but then some European bureaucrat can override my opinion that I can't vote for and I have no control over. Is this a democracy or not? And so when you look at transnational body that comes in and they have some say or control over your country, no matter who you vote for the president, no matter what you do, they basically you're not in charge. It's like Bane like do you feel in charge? It's like that's that's these transnational bodies. They do these types of things. Um, now of course in America we don't mind because we run these bodies. It's one of our our batteries included on the American Empire. It gives us the ability to project force and for the most part it it does create stability inside the world because you get standardization and you know your money works everywhere and contract law and also somebody gets kidnapped or ransomed or something then maybe just maybe like we'll have international coordination on law enforcement and these other things. It's a way to kind of solve problems without having to go to war all the time or having to send spies and kill people or these types of things. Uh but on the other hand, it's a system that's ripe for abuse because if you can take over those those anchors of power, you can use those to benefit the people that put you there. You see, so it creates a shadow system of transnational governance across the world as a whole. uh and then also it creates very strong incentives for people try to opt out which is why you have competing systems like the BRICS system that Russia and China and these others are trying to push and you know propagate through so these guys will say oh well you know the American system is terrible and look how bad it is and to a certain extent you know it's you can see the anger like in Switzerland after 2022 when the Russians invaded Ukraine the US government went to Switzerland said the Russians are persona on grata get rid of all those Russian accounts and all that Russian money. So the Swiss complied and like 50 billion plus dollars left Switzerland. Very expensive for a small country. So then the Swiss government says, 'Okay, we were good kids, so what do we get?' And we're like, 'Go [__] yourself.' They give them nothing for that, you know? And so then the Swiss remember that. They can't do anything about it right now. But they remember it. And then the next time China comes and says, you know, is it really worth your time being like so friendly and nice with the United States? And in some cases, the country doesn't comply. Like I remember I was in Abu Dhabi. I'll never forget this. I was in Abu Dhabi and I was sitting eating dinner and then suddenly I saw fighter jets fly overhead and they were painting the Russian flag in the sky. And I said, 'What the hell is going on?' And it turned out Vladimir Putin was visiting Abu Dhabi that day and they gave him a hero's triumph. He comes in like a like a Roman general returning with the purple robes on, you know, for a triumph. Because what happened was that just a few weeks before the Treasury Secretary was there, the prior Treasury Secretary and they were threatening Abu Dhabi with sanctions and all these things about its blacklist over having Russian money in Abu Dhabi. And the king was very offended. And so he upgraded Putin's reception from hey, you're a foreign head of state to welcome hero of the people just to [__] with the Americans thing, you know, and you can still find it on uh Twitter. You can see the because it was all big news item of Putin coming to Abu Dhabi and these types of things because you know they did the calculation and they they told the Treasury Secretary this they say if I had a China, Russia, Middle East and Africa that's twice the size of Europe and United States in terms of GDP and if you look at the GDP growth of that block versus the GDP growth of America and Europe, it's growing much faster. So if we're going to pick a side, we're going to pick that side. You understand that? and uh and then they realize they overplayed their hand. So that's the other danger of these transnational bodies. If you abuse them and overuse them, the resentment builds and you create a coalition of anger and then over time that forms into another economic block and then eventually people opt out of the system and then you lose the whole system as a whole. So that's another reason why cryptocurrencies are so appealing because it's a reset.

Well, it depends on a variety of factors. If a world war happens, it's a reset. and whoever wins gets the new system. Um, so China, US, if that breaks out, you know, throughidities trap, we're, you know, we'll figure it out. Um, if the dollar collapses, we lose the system. We're at 37 trillion in national debt right now. That's the stuff on the books. But then when you look at the long-term liabilities, it's well over 50 trillion to 100 trillion depending on how you count it. And at some point, the interest on that's untenable. In fact, at the current rate of interest, we spend more on the interest on the debt than the entire US military. Just gives a sense of that. And if we continue spending the way we do within 1015 years we'll spend more than the US military, Medicare, Social Security, and education combined on interest on the debt. It's a very bad situation to be in. And the thing is that we don't feel real interest rates on our junk debt because we're the world reserve currency. And so we project that into the other countries first. They get first hit, then we get second hit because of our status. It creates a very strong incentive for them to ddollarize and get off the dollar. And it's a gradual thing little by whittle. And we see this belt road in China with the the digital yuan. They are slowly moving through and they don't just give you money, they give you an economic system. So you adopt social credit, you adopt the digital yuan, you adopt the Chinese companies, you adopt the Chinese infrastructure, and you ddollarize in the process of doing that. So they have a 50-year plan, and they just go country by country, and they've taken all of Central Asia. They're taking big chunks of Africa like Zambia and other things like that. Uh so as long as that continues there's an inevitability of of a ddollarization of the world and then we have to pay real interest rates on the debt. The money collapses and then then that provokes a huge issue you know for us. So if left of the own devices nothing else changes then uh probably around the 2030s you'd be looking at that collapse. Now that said, never bet against America you know because every time people said we're going to be dead in the water then [__] changes. some new leader comes in, some new policy comes in, some new innovation comes in, and really all it would take for us to get out of it is just five and five. 5% GDP growth rate and 5% reduction in the budget of the US government. Run that for 10 to 15 years. You cut the budget in half, you double the economy, and we can pay down all of our debt. It's not really a long time if you think about it. When Bill Clinton left office, we were only at 4 and a half trillion in debt. Now we're at 37 trillion in debt. that wasn't a long time ago, you know, when you think about that. And and so things can change very quickly in a very negative direction or in a very positive direction. Um, but you have to have an adult conversation about things. And the reason why people aren't willing to have an adult conversation, it goes back to what blockchain is for, which is trust. You can't have an adult conversation if you don't trust the person sitting across from you. If you think that that person doesn't have your best interest at heart, if you think that person's intrinsically corrupt and whatever they're proposing is through a lens of something to steal something from you, even if they have the best idea in the world, you're not going to say yes to that idea because you just you can't get there on the trust side of things. So the real reset is the trust reset. How do you get to social systems where whether you're a Democrat or Republican, left or right, you're one political persuasion or the other, you trust that system. You say that system is okay. That is the space you can negotiate and then you can bring problems into the debate. And objectively speaking, is it sensible that we have 37 trillion in national debt? No. Is it sensible that when we fight wars, we lose them now even though we spend more money than any country in the world on the military and we have the best warriors in the history of the world? No. It's not sensible. Is it sensible that we spend two to four times as much money on healthcare as our peers, but we have a lower quality for that? No. Is it sensible that you know social security is basically a Ponzi scheme? You're going to pay in it your whole life. You're not going to get anywhere near what you paid into it back if you just invested it. And there's a strong possibility when they means test it a lot of people will just be dropped out. So they never get anything even though they paid into it. Probably not. No. Okay. So we start getting some consensus that these are not sensible things. Notice we didn't say universal health care or complete free market or this thing or that thing. We just get an agreement that these are problems. then you can negotiate and start talking around that. And because you have a negotiation from a position of trust, everybody's working in the same direction because they're trying to solve the same problem and it's just a matter of compromises. So that's the only way to solve it. And and until that's done, there's an inevitability of collapse. And typically what happens is the collapsing empire tries to provoke a conflict to to restore itself. And so that's what begins with a world war, you know, against emerging powers. uh so we'll see what happens but you know it's a difficult time. The other thing that really causes some complication is that we have too many exponential technologies. So the 20th century was the introduction of an exponential technology. It's multiple ones. The the nuclear weapons were the first example of that. Bombs were linear before that. You know more explosive bigger blast linear scale with nukes like a little bit. Wow it's big. A little bit more. Oh my god it's exponentially larger. And and so the first atomic bomb was in the kilotons and within just a decade we were in the megat tons thousands of times more destructive. Look at Zarbomba it was 50 megat tons. Hiroshima was like 30 or 40 kilotons you know of destructive power. So exponential growth meant that we had invented something for the first time in human history that could actually wipe out the entire species. And we actually came ridiculously close once in 1962. And it was literally a a first officer in a sub who decided not to turn his key. And then again in the 80s and it was a lieutenant colonel who was running a nuclear silo in Moscow and it was a computer software bug and it was telling him that we had launched weapons at Russia and and the he was instructed to launch nuclear weapons at us and he wouldn't do it because he didn't want to end the world. So like literally like two people were prevented the world from nuclear Armageddon just by themselves. And in both cases they were harshly punished by the Soviet system which is just ironic. But anyway exponential technologies are very dangerous. And then when you look at it now we have multiple exponential technologies sneaking their way through. You have synthetic biology we talked about a little earlier. It can be used for many things. We saw like some people think CO was made in a lab. Well, whether you believe it or not, it's undeniably true that people are using gain of function research to build diseases that have a 50% mortality rate or 60% mortality rate. And they just blindly pretend like that's a good idea. You've made something that if it ever got loose would kill three billion people. It's just it's so foundationally unethical, but it's exponential because it's not a billion people working on that. It's 10 guys in a lab working on something that has a consequence at the scale of three billion, you know. And it's the same when you look at artificial intelligence. Is it 500 million people working all together? No. It's like OpenAI has a few thousand employees and Enthropic has a few thousand employees and Google's AI group has a few thousand people and Microsoft's a group is a few thousand people. There's 800 million users for OpenAI. So a few thousand people translate to a scale of 800 million. So our governance systems were not designed for this and the world order was not designed for this. This idea of such a profound asymmetry. You can't have a few thousand people just do something and then somehow now that impacts a billion people. Nobody consented to that asymmetrical relationship cuz it's always easy to go Jim Jones and have a few thousand crazy people and then suddenly those few thousand crazy people get to inflict upon the world their whole philosophy and their ideas because of that consequence. We have no governing system for exponential technology. This is the blockchain is probably the only layer that can do it because it's born of that. Uh, but you need a regulating system for these and and it has to be global in nature and everybody has to get along for it to work. Well, if they can't trust each other and they can't get along, how do they make a decision? You want to solve climate change or whatever. If you believe it, you don't believe it, how do you sign a treaty if China is not going to be part of it, India is not going to be part of it, Russia is not going to be part of it. It's one global commons and that's one problem. But then there's another problem like AI, that's another problem. Then there's synthetic biology, that's another problem. Quantum computing, that's another problem. There's all these things you can use. They're very dangerous if they're misused. Uh so global governance has to solve that as well. And um one way of doing it is create a transnational order, one world government. They run everything and they just control people in dystopian clauswab way. Another way is to try to decentralize and and try to push these things into the commons and and have them jointly controlled by as many people as possible because you can even for example AI. You can build a decentralized AI with blockchain. You can have the inference like Bitcoin is held up as a supercomputer, right? Well, you could build a different kind of computer with graphics cards and create a distributed computer that's more powerful than Microsoft Azure or or Amazon Web Services or any of these things, but that's not owned by a company. It's a digital commons. And then you can put those rules in for the alignment of the system and the inference of the system. And it's the very same rules that would guard a money system or a supply chain system or a voting system or something like that. So you could just have all that stuff in there and that's the magic of uh of what we do. Uh so it's fun because just like when I was studying Ron Paul's stuff and the early days I didn't know that that knowledge base would be relevant for cryptocurrencies. I didn't realize that what we were learning in the blockchain cryptocurrency space is just as applicable for how would you regulate and control an exponential technology or create a global governance system or you know these types of things. It turns out it's an emergent property. It's something that you actually have to solve. How

Well, you know, that's a red herring. You know, people, oh, it's so volatile. It's like, yeah, but gold is volatile, and we've had it as a money system or a value system for 5,000 years. Volatility is not a problem. What's a problem is the lack of financial markets to deal with the volatility. You know, you always in volatility, you're gonna have winners and losers. And if your preference as a merchant or a holder is stability, what you want to do is have a market that allows you to trade your upside to protect you from the downside. Mhm. Okay. So I keep my buying power at this level and then you will take the upside and accept the downside. So for example, for a stock you can buy options on both sides. You can buy a caller, you can have a put and you can have a call option. So if it goes to the moon you have a exit strategy uh and if it goes to falls you have an ex and you you stay within that bound. So your losses and gains are are basically bounded. Now there has to be a counterparty who accepts that risk and there's counterparty risk for these types of things. So really it's a question of how deep are the markets? How do you ensure things? How do you manage counterparty risks? Why cryptocurrencies had such a hard go of things is they were not born of Wall Street. So, Wall Street is the ninja master of trading these things. If you have a racehorse and you give it to a Wall Street guy, he's going to take the dick, the testicles, the teeth, and turn them into structured financial products and sell it to some guy in Saudi Arabia. Okay, this is just the the thing Wall Street people do. They're they're addicted to it. It's they they just securitize and and quantify and qualify as much as you can imagine. because it wasn't born of Wall Street. There were no guys in the room who had the ability to do that or the regulatory remitt to do that or markets to trade these types of things on. This is why it's so important that the trady and DeFi sides come together because they do different things. The DeFi side does the trust thing like I was just talking about, but the TRFI thing does let's build markets, let's build liquidity, let's market make, let's trade risk, let's ensure, let's move capital around, let's build structure upon structure upon structure to deal with these things. And the end consequences as an interface to that marketplace, you're in the driver's seat to basically make a decision of what to do. And so you can say, okay, well, I'm not really comfortable with downside risk above this amount. So, if it falls this far, this other guy will take it from me. And I'll make a deal with him that, you know, I pay him x amount of dollars for that downside risk. And uh, you know, maybe he wins, maybe he loses, but that's not my [__] problem. It's his problem. And then if it goes way up, great, man. Make good returns. Um, we do this all the time. Like, um, every time you step on a plane, it's insured. And the aerospace uh you know the airline companies they buy fuel with futures contracts so they can lock in the price because they need predictability. They can't run a business if the price of jet fuel goes way up. Like what if a war breaks out like then suddenly United and Delta and all these other guys they go from profitable companies to you know in the red all the time. So they need to lock in that price of fuel for as long as they can. So that's what a futures market does. It gives you the ability to lock things in and uh and take delivery. So uh these are the things that you do and you know these are the mechanisms but more broadly it's it it's different boats for different floats for small businesses to midsize businesses even the big businesses what crypto is doing for them is it's giving them more markets more liquidity and more optionality on the value that they have. So, let's say you're a pharmaceutical company and you're doing drug development. You're doing some state-of-the-art amazing things, but they're not valuable yet. You have the patents, you have all these other things. So, what's your option for liquidity? Because you got payroll. You got to pay your scientists. You got to pay for the clinical trials. You got to pay for all this stuff. Now, if you get it right, you're now a multi-billion dollar company. Fizer buys you tomorrow. Congratulations. But you have to wait 10 years to get it right. So, you have to go to a venture capitalist and they're like, 'Yeah, all right. Well, I'll give you some money. Yeah, give me 30% of your company and uh you know this and this and this and this and you see see all of a sudden you just get like predatory userous rates and that's their lived experience. Well, what if I could tokenize my intellectual property and I could sell it almost like a micro IPO. Now all of a sudden a larger group of people can participate. I get a better deal. So maybe instead of selling 30% of my company, I sell 15% of the upside on the patent portfolio or something like that. So larger market, more investors, more fair transactions. Same for micro finance. If you do like smallcale loans in Africa or other places like we do loans in Kenya, Uganda and uh some of these markets are so predatory like 85% interest for loans that are 85% interest for loans that are 90 days. So you'll go and borrow like 100 bucks, have to pay 30 days, you know, 185 back. It's just it's so userous. And why? because they're very thin markets and there's tons of middlemen and there's forex risk because the local currency is is always going up and down and all these other things. Well, you make it decentralized, you bring a lot of people in, then suddenly it falls from 85% to 18%. And your default rates go down. You know, in those jurisdictions, the NPL rate can be the non-performing loan rate could be as high as 40%. So, we did a product that we did out there, the interest rate fell to 18% and the non-performing loan rate fell to 2%. So it was still a great return but it's life-changing for the people there. And the delta was liquidity. So basically a larger market, more eyeballs, more people that are involved in these types of things, syndication. So that's really how you solve volatility is that you create markets for it. And uh and then you say for the people on that side, it's all about I want more markets. I want more liquidity. I want more connection points, more people. And then once you have it, it's like the free market takes over. Like people are going to figure it out. You know, um certain music star that I'm associated with that, you know, shall remain nameless. He bought a record label um that it was deeply personal to him because of his life history. And uh he's thinking around how does he tokenized intellectual property there, all of the

IP behind those records because it's really hard in practice to get liquidity on music IP. You have five or six big companies that control all the IP and they're like cartels, setting the market and prices. But what if you can sell part of it to your fans? They like you, you have a direct relationship. Maybe you get five or 10x over that. It's like an IPO of you as a person. The minute you do that, the cartel breaks up, middlemen get disintermediated, and every other artist can do it. Taylor Swift, Garth Brooks can sell their IP. So the artist monetizes the direct relationship. That's the same concept as running a smart contract on Cardano or an election. It's the same infrastructure. That's why tokens are so valuable—they're universal, a financial stem cell.

That one was tough. People ask me all the time. I run a venture capital firm and advise young entrepreneurs. I say there are three rules from Ethereum. First, you can't have eight founders. We had eight from different walks of life: a Romanian, an Israeli, a Canadian, a Wall Street guy, Vitalik, and me. We all wanted programmability with a blockchain—like JavaScript to the web browser. Bitcoin has no programmability; you just move bitcoins. With programmability, you can create exchanges, voting systems. We agreed on that, but as months went on, we had radically different visions for safety, scalability, governance. Vitalik chose the nonprofit route: Ethereum Foundation. Those who wanted for-profit were pushed out. Joe Lubin created ConsenSys, Amir Chetrit left, Anthony Di Iorio left, I created Input Output. Even among the remaining technologists, they couldn't agree. Gavin Wood left to make Polkadot. So only Vitalik remains. He built a $300 billion ecosystem. We built Cardano to a $20 billion ecosystem. You need philosophical agreement, a chain of command, and good founders agreements because people have a shelf life. Larry Page is a great example: he started Google, brought in Eric Schmidt, then took back the CEO role, and later created Alphabet. Ethereum was stressful; we were young and knew it was big but didn't know what to do. It was like discovering alien technology. I was kicked out early, which was best for everyone.

It's like JavaScript to the web browser. It's a blockchain like Bitcoin, but with programmable transactions. You can encode any terms and conditions, turning it into a voting system, a financial stem cell. I categorize cryptocurrencies by generations. Bitcoin is first generation: decentralization, simple. Ethereum is second: generality, multi-asset programmable ledger. It was a revolution—crypto isn't just speculative. But it doesn't scale, isn't interoperable, and is hard to govern. Who decides the next version? Ethereum Foundation? That's not decentralized. So third generation brings scalability, interoperability, governance. Fourth generation adds privacy and identity for regulated industries. Each generation includes the features of the prior. That's where zero-knowledge proofs come in.

I wanted to do it myself, so I started Input Output about six months after getting booted. I went to Japan, to Osaka—a wild experience. I raised $72 million in Japan, the largest ICO at the time. I built a company from scratch in my 20s with no experience. Crypto was colorful then; John McAfee was around. We did things differently: we introduced peer review at scale. Everyone thought it would set us back, but I said others would fly close to the sun and crash. EOS, Luna—they worked until they didn't, with billions lost. So we built Cardano to run forever. We've been running 24/7 for eight years, never hacked, never down. We used Haskell and invented new technology. We developed a reputation for being something that exists but nobody understands. Now I'm trying to normalize it. I've traveled to 75 countries; I get recognized everywhere, even by a camel herder in the Gobi Desert who held ADA.

So it was a pretty wild ride. Crypto circa 2015 had larger-than-life people and shady industries. I lived in Osaka and bounced between Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea. What we did was peer review at scale. People said it would set us back years, but I said they'd crash. And they did. So we ignored the world and built Cardano. We've been running eight years without incident. We used obscure tools and invented our own. Now I'm trying to bring that into the mainstream. It's been surreal—I've visited 75 countries and get recognized even in the Gobi Desert. But there are asymmetries: when markets are up, it's positive; when down, negative. You have to be careful.

Oh, the alien stuff.

So I watched Avi Loeb on Joe Rogan talking about Oumuamua, a cigar-shaped object. I reached out to him. He mentioned a meteorite that hit Earth in 2014, possibly from another solar system. We organized a sea salvage operation off Papua New Guinea. It was like a heist movie. We had a team including an 87-year-old Navy captain and a submarine diver. I put in the money, and a Netflix crew filmed. We designed a magnetic sled to drag the seafloor. After two weeks of grueling work, we recovered fragments. Analysis at Harvard showed they contain 5,000 times the concentration of beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium—likely from a planet that broke open and traveled through space. We wrote a paper. They want to go back for bigger pieces. It's the first exosolar material recovered from the seafloor. I even designed a sluice box for the sled, but it didn't work because the seabed was different. We had a touchdown protocol in case we found something truly alien.

It's hard to know what's true. It could be a false flag or legitimate UAPs. The tapes are compelling; the maneuvers aren't possible with conventional propulsion. If aliens are real, they'd send robots and hide them in the sea. The government might not disclose because the truth is horrifying, or they don't know, or it's a distraction. Look at the Bin Laden raid—they could have killed him with a drone but chose a dramatic raid. Maybe there are secret labs with advanced physics. We've frozen light, have time crystals, quantum teleportation that seems faster than light. If they've been working on this for decades, they'd have things that look like magic. So maybe those drones in New Jersey are something else. What matters is actual recovered material we can analyze.

Who knows? It's tradecraft—pay attention to the left hand while the right hand is in your pocket. Governments do things to distract. The Bin Laden raid was timed to coincide with the White House correspondents dinner. There's a lot of weird topshelf physics being discovered. If we have secret labs with advanced tech, they might invent an alien narrative to cover it up. Or maybe it's all real. We need physical evidence, like the fragments we found.

It's crazy. They use crystals to freeze light for memory modules in optical quantum computers. There are time crystals and other wild physics. We're discovering things that bend our conception of reality, like quantum teleportation, which moves information without a medium, faster than light.

It's moving information from one point to another without going through a medium, using quantum entanglement. It seems faster than light. If you have a PhD in physics, you still get the concept wrong. We're not even 90% of the way there with these new physics. If secret labs have been working on this for 50 years, they'd have things like anti-gravity. So maybe they test them and invent alien stories to cover it up.

Consciousness is interesting. There's integrated information theory and panpsychism. If consciousness is like an antenna, then psychedelics let you retune it. That explains telepathy and remote viewing. Dr. Jeffrey Trant did studies with non-verbal autistic kids who had a telepathic bond with caregivers. They could type numbers the caregiver was looking at. That makes no sense if consciousness is just an emergent property of the brain. Roger Penrose's theory of microtubules as quantum computers could explain it. If we can entangle consciousnesses, then telepathy is possible. But it's hard to prove because quantum entanglement doesn't leave a signal. It was a scientific taboo, but now people are exploring it.

People are re-evaluating things and asking what would be possible. I invested in a company called Immortal that builds multimodal chambers with pulsed electromagnetic fields, red light, viroacoustic, and molecular hydrogen. The founders are into out-there ideas including remote viewing. I thought about partnering with the Monroe Institute, which did CIA work on Project Stargate. I have an 11,000-acre ranch, so why not bury caches and run people through remote viewing training to see if it works? The reason I bring up Immortal is that they are thinking about using those modalities to induce altered states of consciousness, potentially creating endogenous DMT.

Immortal. It's a lifestyle device now, but it has medical use cases for recovery with red light therapy and viroacoustics. It's cool to see what you can do with this technology. Maybe we could use it for remote viewing. Who knows if it works.

Oh, of course. Of course.

They're selling them to everyone. Professional sports teams buy them. I bought three: one for my clinic, one for my office, and I gave one as a Christmas gift.

I took ketamine last year. I'd always been fascinated with psychedelics but came from a traditional medical family. I saw friends heal from trauma with psychedelics, so I read Michael Pollan's book and got into mycology. I was always busy and didn't want to radically change, but Dave Asprey convinced me to try his 40 Years of Zen program with ketamine. I spent five days in Washington. They hooked me up to an EEG, gave me injections, and I disassociated. The first time was like a roller coaster. By the third day, I embodied a wolf running in a forest. It was surreal. After coming out, I felt tremendous release from stress and founderitis. I looked ten years younger and regained a sense of joy.

With more agency, I could influence the journey. Intentionality is key. Ketamine is a safe entry point. I'm integrating it into our health clinic for depression treatment. There's also salvia, which has time expansion properties. You can experience hours or days in a few minutes. One person lived another life in Alaska and woke up as someone else in Texas with a family. This fascinates me because I want to understand the mechanism. Time expansion has practical uses for special operations or first responders. Perception of time can slow down in crisis. There's a lot to explore.

It was a straight adventure. I wanted to see what would happen biochemically. I meditate with EEG, so I can see my brain waves. Ketamine is FDA-approved and safe. That experience made me think about disassociation and ego. If you give up exclusive self, you think of the 'we'. Disassociation can be a shortcut to understanding the soul. Darkness retreats also cause disassociation. Tibetans do 40-day darkness retreats to simulate death and achieve enlightenment. It's scary but liberating.

It's a clock speed. The brain can run simulations faster. Evolutionarily, fight-or-flight gives you that focus, but it's energy-intensive. We might be able to control it. Psychedelics show it's possible.

Disassociation deludes the ego. It makes you think not just 'I' but 'we'. If you could wake up in a different body, it would change society. Disassociation is a psychedelic shortcut to that understanding. I've been a billionaire and lost it three times. I know I can be happy in a small apartment. The dissolution of self helps accept impermanence. Buddhists worship impermanence with sand mandalas. They build beautiful art and then destroy it to show that joy is in the doing, not preserving.

The more meaningful question is whether it matters. It's like obsessing over chapter two while you're still in chapter one. You can't know until you get there. Even if you live perfectly, you could be hit by a stray bullet. A healthy friend died in a car accident. So why waste the moment? I compare it to Gödel's incompleteness theorem: death is outside our formal system. No matter how many axioms you add, you can't prove what happens. So I focus on living a life of curiosity and leaving something behind.

For everyone else, if I build great systems, they'll be accessible to everyone. Immortality and the afterlife don't mean anything; what matters is discovering meaning in the moment and perpetuating it. If you take meaning from a man, he collapses. The meaningful question is how to find and preserve meaning in a way that helps society, not what happens after death.

Yes. Was that before the direwolf?

I didn't. I did the trip in November and found out about the direwolf in January.

I never did. You know,

Well, it could be a connection to my Norwegian ancestry or a premonition of the direwolf. I have five dogs and wolves on the ranch, so who knows?

Yes, sir.

In 2021 I met Ben and invested in Colossal early. They're using a direwolf genome to create a chimera by moving genes from a direwolf into a greywolf. The test is morphological: if it looks and acts like a direwolf, it is one. They also created a woolly mouse to demonstrate gene function. The ultimate goal is to use synthetic biology to adapt organisms to new environments, like engineering coral to survive warmer oceans, or creating organisms that eat microplastics. We broke the world; we can fix it.

Yes, bacteria that eat plastics exist. They've also developed a fungal STD for mosquitoes to control malaria. Synthetic biology gives us a toolkit, but we need an adult conversation about how to use it responsibly, with proper governance frameworks like those for nuclear weapons or the internet.

Well, imagine a dual monetary system where you need both today money and future money. That would change capitalism to incentivize long-term thinking. We need to have these conversations about what we should do with these tools, not the same 15 [ __ ] conversations over and over.

No, imagine it as a concept. Then we wouldn't have short-term problems like global warming. The incentive system is set up for short-term gains; we need to tune it for long-term decisions. Colossal shows the art of the possible and forces us to discuss regulation, like with gain-of-function research. The real tragedy of Wuhan was that it didn't start a global conversation about lab safety.

Yes, we have DARPA programs too. Everyone wants a super soldier. It's like the Nazis using meth. The problem is incentives. If the objective is to win at any cost, you'll take shortcuts. That's why we need regulation, like building inspectors. We got it right with the internet—global governance without a central authority. But with gain-of-function research, a small group can kill more people than nuclear weapons, and there's almost no global regulatory regime. We need to have a fact-based conversation.

What was that?

The bullet ant ritual is the perfect rite of passage. It's terrifying but survivable and unifying. I spent a year training with nail boards and autohypnosis. We went to the Amazon, collected the ants, endured the stings, and the neural toxin caused rolling fire for 24 hours. The next day no pain. Afterward, we joked about making it even more extreme with cold plunges, darkness, and snakes. It was a huge sense of accomplishment.

The PJ checked our vitals. It took 6 hours to peak and 24 hours total to wear off.

The next day, no pain, just the black ink for two weeks.

March or April of this year. I was in the Amazon for 9 days.

And I immediately had to go to a conference afterwards. So I was at a conference and I'm like, 'Hey guys, I got to go. I got to go to the Amazon and do a thing.' Then I went down to the Amazon. Then as soon as I was done, I came back and I was at another conference speaking and I was like, 'All right, I got to do a thing.' I think I went to Consensus after that and I was moderating a panel with Eric Trump. It's like, 'So where were you at?' 'Oh, I was just in the Amazon doing a thing. Don't worry about it.'

Yes, sir.

Well, you know, as I mentioned, I have the medicine tradition in the family and 70 years of medicine. So I didn't become a doctor, but I always wanted to do a medical thing. And why I didn't become a doctor was that I hated that medicine had two big issues. One, as a practitioner, it's a person-by-person game and I like systems. I like treating millions of people or tens of millions of people at the same time because I want to maximize impact. The second thing I hated was that the system had become stuck in an economic state where it's basically treatments and not cures. So you go see your doctor. 'Hey, I have this thing.' 'Well, here's this pill.' 'Is it going to cure me, doctor?' 'No, no, no, no. But it'll manage the decline. It'll get a little worse every day, but slightly less worse every day.' But I'm coming to you, doctor. Like, fix me. Fix me for God's sakes. And I'm sorry, we don't do fixes here. You know, we haven't cured things in a long time in medicine, so just take that pill and best of luck. So a great example would be, let's say you're an 11 Bravo or something and you serve in Afghanistan, have a really heavy rucksack [__] up your back. What are they going to do? They're going to tell you to get back surgery, they're going to tell you to take painkillers, or you can go and do yoga and pilates and fix your back. And a lot of people after they do it, the pain completely goes away. So you go to a doctor, they tell you to do the yoga and pilates and the physical therapy and these other things. No, they give you the pills and if that doesn't work, they give you the surgery and then that never works for these people. So that's medicine in a nutshell in 2025. It's really [__] up. So what you'd want to do instead is say let's build a medical institution that is a bastion of good health care, integrated health care. So lifestyle medicine with allopathic traditional medicine. Put those two things together for a community, in this case Gillette, Wyoming. So there's 13,000 patients and a population of 35,000 people and we have 40 providers. We have all the specialties, you know, we have internal medicine, we have nephrology and cardiology and neurology and soon to have pulmonology and dermatology, etc., etc. So we have really top-notch physicians. But if you have that and you have a vertically integrated system, meaning you own the radiology and you own the lab and you own all the diagnostic equipment and you have your own pharmacy with a compounding pharmacy, you have a perfect vertical to do medical experiments. So then you build a biotechnology company on the other side and you start looking at a lot of stuff that is regenerative in nature, not cure, not treatments, but cures. So what you do is you say, 'What can I do to get the body to heal itself? And what can I do to give you something that fixes your problem permanently?' So I'll give you some examples. We're right now getting ready for an FDA trial because everything we do is rigorous. So we do FDA trials and we're going to take fat from people, adipose-derived mesenchymal stem cells. Your stem cells, your adult stem cells that are in your fat. You have three primary sources of them as adults: blood, bone, and fat. You get them from other places, but those are the big ones. And we take your fat with liposuction. Then we culture expand it, we grow them, and then we reinject them. And we're going to run it for a year, three or four injections, and we're going to pair it with hyperbarics. Hyperbarics are these pressure chambers. You go inside of them, pure oxygen, high pressure. Why hyperbarics? Because when you go into a hyperbaric environment, for some reason epigenetically over 900 genes are silenced or activated and your body enters a hyper regenerative state. So it tells your body to dump all the stem cells into your blood and start fixing [__]. Programs all of them. So Jay Leno is a big classic car guy. He was working on his car, exploded in his face and he turned into Two-Face. It burned off half his face. So they treated him. He went to a hyperbaric chamber and now he's almost fully healed. So you can see those before and after pictures of Jay Leno. So there's amazing regenerative capabilities with hyperbarics, but the mechanism of action is stem cells and programming those stem cells to be really regenerative for you. So our hypothesis is if we pair hyperbarics with exogenous stem cells, it's like adding gasoline to a fire. It dramatically accelerates the healing effect of these types of things. But also inadvertently what we're doing is we're creating a platform to learn and think about navigating the stem cell space. And what's nice is autologous adult-derived mesenchymal stem cells. They're yours. There's no chance of rejection. They're ethically sourced. There's no babies coming out of your belly. I hope not. You know, it's just fat. We got a lot of it. I got a lot of it. We're okay. We can sacrifice some of that. And it's infinite. Once you have them, you can culture expand them for the rest of the life of the patient. So you have a platform to work with the patient. And then over time you can do all kinds of things: hit them with yellow light to accelerate their metabolism, or maybe use umbilical cord blood exosomes to help culture expand to make them become younger and actually more vibrant. Mess with the electro inside the cells because every cell has an electrical signature and there's some stuff you can do to make them differentiate to different tissue types. Or co-administer them with peptides. There's hundreds of things that you can do with these cells. But once you have that baseline, then you can start growing from that baseline and you can start targeting organ systems. For example, we can look at peripheral neuropathies. Those are things that tend to come up after cancer. You get cancer, you do chemotherapy. Maybe the chemo cures you, but you're jacked up. You know, you got the tingly toes and fingers and anything that's hot or cold now is just so unbearably painful. And you go to your cancer doctor and they're like, 'Oncologist, what do I do?' And I said, 'You're cancer-free.' He's like, 'Yeah, but what about the neuropathy?' 'You're cancer-free. Get the hell out. We don't want to talk to you anymore. We solved your primary complaint.' What if I can use stem cells and hyperbarics to actually regenerate those nerves and actually fix those problems? Now you don't have the neuropathy anymore. Or what about TBIs, which are just a persistent issue. Well, one of the things we can do with these stem cells because we have such a powerful MRI. We have a three Tesla MRI with AI upscaling is we can use spot tagging and that means the super paramagnetic oxide. So you put these tiny nanoparticles of iron inside the stem cells. Then you inject them and when you take an MRI they light up like a Christmas tree. What does that tell you? It tells you where they go. So if I inject them here, do they end up here or here or here? You know where they go? Are they just in the lungs? And what if now that I can find out where they go, I can co-administer them with certain chemicals. And maybe by doing that I can steer the direction of where the stem cells go. Maybe I can get them to cross the blood-brain barrier and get into your brain because it'll light up like a Christmas tree there, or maybe your liver because you have cirrhosis from something, or maybe your knees, who knows. So that's kind of the next stage of the platform: programmability. Can we program them chemically or electrically to go to certain areas and then we have the equipment to track them. So yeah, it'll be years of research but we have the patient population. We have a ton of people that have cancer. We have a ton of people that have COPD and their lungs are jacked up. We have a ton of people that have TBIs. Look at the rodeo stars. They go bull riding and they fall off their bull, they get 40 concussions, and they can't remember their own damn name at 50. It's tragic when you see all these things. There's an unlimited depth of people that are broken and they want to be fixed. And this idea that I can take your stem cells and culture expand them and modify and do things to them and then use that as a basis to regenerate you and actually get you to a younger state or get you to a healthier state and expand your health span. It's so cool to be able to pursue that and to be able to do that under FDA supervision, meaning that it's not like mad scientist [__]. It's actually structured experiments and you go through phase one, two, and three and you take people along the entire journey. That's why we built the clinic. And it's very conservative. There's a lot of people in anti-aging that are doing much more aggressive things like induced pluripotent stem cells using Yamanaka factors or David Sinclair at Harvard who's literally reprogramming the epigenome and he's taking mice that are twins and making one old and one young and vice versa. It's crazy stuff, but that's really difficult stuff. And the thing is, you are you because these cells made you that way. Mhm.

No [__]. Yeah. There's [__] in nature. There's even this crazy guy named Shin Kubota who's over in Kyoto, Kyoto University, and they call him the jellyfish man. And he's spent his whole career, he's even gotten divorced over it, studying jellyfish and dressing up as jellyfish because he's obsessed with this immortal jellyfish and he wants to understand why it's immortal. What is it doing to be immortal? And he's chasing that immortality call. So to me, it's so cool that these things exist. And if there's something in nature that already does it, well then human beings can discover this. And there's plenty of super regenerative animals like axolotls, for example. They run around. You chop off their arm, they grow another arm. Lizards chop off their tail, they grow another tail. They're in nature. It's not a hypothetical. It's here. It's there. Genetically, they're not too different from us. So get a stem cell, figure out how to program that, how to work with that as a platform, and then bring the AI in, and then bring the science in. And then year by year by year, you gain a better and more mechanistic understanding. And then what you can do is a whole class of diseases can be corrected because you can now regenerate things. That's stage one. Then stage two is to get really good at the electro and get really good at the stem cells. And then you can do tissue engineering and you can actually start growing organs and other things like that. So you can have a bioreactor and you can grow skin, or a bioreactor and you can grow a gallbladder, or grow a heart, or grow a kidney or liver or something like that. You can just grow these things and you can transplant them in. So when you have a bad heart, you don't have to be on an organ replacement list and hope to God that you have a compatible donor. You just grow a new one and put it in the person.

Well, that's the hard part because the issue is DNA contains the information of what you are, but it doesn't have spatial information of how to make it like your leg goes here and your hand goes here, these types of things. So there are different processes and you can't just take stem cells and make them differentiate into an organoid and say okay well this is a heart cell or this is a brain. You can do that but it doesn't turn into a brain. It doesn't turn into a heart. So it's an open question right now in organ growth of how do you grow an organ to replicate an adult organ with the same size and shape and function of that. But it doesn't take a heck of a lot of time if you're doing the right growth factors. It's a matter of weeks to months to grow something like this in a bioreactor. And that's one approach. The other approach are called xenografts where they take pigs and they genetically engineer them because they're very close to humans. In fact, we used to use pigs for insulin before we genetically engineered E. coli to do that. And they actually make a pig have your kidneys or a pig have your heart or something and they can take the kidneys out of the pig and put it into a human because they've been genetically engineered to not be rejected by humans. It's called a xenotransplant. So these things exist, but I like the bioreactor more because I don't think we should have kidney pigs. I mean, I like pigs. They're nice. But anyway, so that's stage two: can you grow tissue? And then once you have that, then I can fix your broken parts or regrow limbs or other things like that. And then stage three is the gene engineering. And there the lowest floor is called a plasmid. And there's a company called Minicircle down in Roatan that does this a lot. And you could actually use plasmids to make pretty much anything. They're like little molecular factories. So I suffer from gout and 344 million people do. It's a genetic disorder and it means my body doesn't process uric acid properly. And so what ends up happening is the uric acid over time if I don't get it out of the system through some means like allopurinol, it'll accumulate in the joints and you have gout attacks and they flare up with crystals and it's super [__] painful. They just stab you when you're walking around. It's one of the most painful conditions you can have and if you don't treat it, it gets progressive. So it starts from the big toe to the joint to the knee to the hip and then eventually your hands and the whole body. So you got to solve it. Well, there's a chemical called an enzyme called uricase and humans don't make it but it exists in nature and it digests uric acid and converts it to a water soluble kind of like vitamin C where you just pee it out. So what if I made a plasmid that made uricase? Then I could inject it into a person who has gout. And now you have a natural way of processing the uric acid. So you never have gout. It's basically a cure. It's pretty cool. And so there's all classes of diseases where your genetics don't allow you to make something because you lost the lottery and they're slowly killing you. And so gene therapies are coming online. And what's really cool is within 5 to 10 years we'll actually start having those treatments available. And then you can also use it for therapeutic interventions like Minicircle is using it for follistatin 344 which is a chemical that basically allows you to build muscle. It turns off muscle inhibition. So if you see pigs with it or cows, you can Google 'muscle pig' and you see this picture of a [__] jacked up pig. It looks like a damn beast. So that's their first product: the muscle pig plasmid. They inject a person with follistatin and they just start building muscle like crazy. And what's cool is the plasmids only last like a year or two and you can turn them off using antibiotics. So they take it and it kills the plasmid.

Yeah. It's just crazy stuff. Well, the next thing they're looking at is TRT, testosterone replacement. And they're looking at HGH, human growth hormone, as another option. So maybe that's a better way than dosing or these types of things because the next step with the plasmid is can you create an internal regulation system. So like insulin regulation with your pancreas: it makes it when you need it and then it turns it off when you don't need it so you get a constant level instead of having to inject yourself. So once you have the platform you kind of build your way up there, but the foundation of the platform is lifestyle. You have to eat right, you have to exercise, you have to sleep right, you have to have good mental health. If you don't, you're dead. And then the next level up is regenerative intervention: hyperbarics and stem cells. And then as you move up, there's replacement parts. And as you move up, gene therapies. But you can kind of walk the stack. Every step of the way, though, you get longer health span, longer lifespan, and more comfortable life throughout. So it's not to make you immortal, but to say, hey, in your 80s, you're not a frail person scrunched over and you can't move. In your 80s, you're walking around, you're having fun. This is how Peter Attia thinks about life. He says, 'Hey, you should think about the proximal decade of your life, the last 10 years.' And you should say, 'Okay, what do you want to do in the last 10 years of your life? Do you want to be able to walk by yourself without a walker? Do you want to be able to swim for half a mile? Do you want to be able to feed yourself and clothe yourself? Do you want to be able to take showers unassisted?' You write those things down and there's a formula and you have to crank up and say, 'Okay, how much muscle do you have to enter your 50s and your 60s in?' Because it's really hard to build muscle after your 60s. What type of foods do you need to eat? What type of sleep do you need to have? What type of other interventions do you need to do? And then that'll tell you basically what you need to do every day to be able to get to that point in the proximal decade. Well, I think of it that way, but I say, 'Well, maybe I'll give you a little bit of help because not everybody's Ned Flanders and they're going to [__] do everything right.' Sometimes we like our hard whiskey and fast women and bad stressful situations. The best ex-wife I never had, right? Sometimes we like that stuff. So the stem cell part is about correcting the problems that we had and hyperbarics is about correcting the problems we have. And what's really magical about it is the AI is helping tremendously. We're able to do literature review, especially from the Chinese papers, because the Chinese have so many of these guys working on this and they just trained more scientists than we did, but you can't read the papers because they're in Chinese or even when they're in English, they're very inaccessible. So we were able to take pretty much every paper ever written in China and every paper written in other jurisdictions and run it through AI models and say, well, who's working on this thing and what were their experimental results? And it gives you some indication of what's working and what's not working. It's already paid huge dividends in the research that we've done. I'd say just the last two years in particular we've probably done five or ten years worth of desk work for this. And I have a lot of MD PhDs that work for me so they do the translational medicine. They're able to take the basic science and then translate it and say this is what would be required for a human trial and here's how many patients you need and here's how the FDA is going to get happy. So it's super exciting to be able to start that. And that's going to be probably my legacy company. It's a very slow burner. Crypto's fast and exciting and chaotic and crazy. And the mathematics stuff which we kind of talked about, but I didn't mention the Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics. That's a big passion of mine. But the medicine thing is like the family business. This is what my grandpa did, what my dad does, what my brother does. And I really want to see, 100 years from now, 200 years from now, say this was the nexus of a new paradigm of medicine where we pulled a lot of different ideas together and we pivoted medicine back from treatments to cures. We got people thinking how do I fix your problem instead of how do I manage your problem and create an economic system where that's profitable.

Well, I'd say there's two parts to that. One is how do you make more energy and time, and how do you better manage and organize your life and your time so that you can do these things? And then the other thing is you have to have an ethos that guides you. So everything organically kind of clicks together and fits together into one comprehensive framework. So things are natural extensions of these. Like when you look at Elon Musk, he seems insane and chaotic from the outside. But when you integrate things together, you start realizing there's a cohesive picture behind all of his startups. Like why does he have the Boring Company? That doesn't make any sense. He's drilling all these tunnels underground. Why would he do that? Well, if he wants to go to Mars, humans aren't going to live on the surface of Mars. They're going to live underground. So you're going to have to build massive tunnel complexes underground to be able to go through. Well, why does he have a solar company? Why does that make any sense? Well, he's going to have to be pretty good at building power plants, right? So why don't you build large solar fields? Because there's no real estate problems on Mars, so you can build a five mile solar field on Mars if you wanted to. Why is he building a robotics company? Why does he have all these Tesla bots? Well, he has all those Tesla bots because where's your workforce? If you're on Mars, you're not going to have 5 million humans show up overnight, but you can ship millions of robots ahead of time and use them as your labor force to help build up everything. And they don't need atmosphere or any of these other things. Why does he have an AI company? Well, you need some sort of intelligence to coordinate and run and terraform the planet and do all these things. Why does he need a battery powered car company? Because you're not going to be running internal combustion engines. There's no fossil fuels to consume on Mars. So you need battery power cars to drive them around. So it's actually coherent when you see that entire framework. He probably wrote it all down while high and drunk at Burning Man or something and he's like, 'This makes so much sense. I'm so smart.' And he's just got this pure force of will. So he's just doing it and having fun doing it. But if you look at it from the outside, everything looks chaotic and crazy. Like why are we doing all these things? Then when you look at the energy, where do you make more time? The single most valuable thing you can invest in if you're young is a second brain. PKM, a personal knowledge management system. You have to be very good at note-taking and making. And you have to be very good at organizing what you know and learning how to learn. You have to be exceedingly good at saying, okay, there's software for this like Obsidian or Notion or Evernote or OneNote. It doesn't matter the particular note system. You have to be really good at saying, 'How do I put my knowledge somewhere, the things that I know, and link them so that I can find them again with context?' It's not good enough to write something down because what if you find a handwritten note from 25 years ago? You look at it, who the hell is Seth, and what was he doing with that donkey? What the [__] is this note about? You don't know. It's not meaningful. But if you have linked knowledge, then that name would be linked to a person and that's linked to another thing and that donkey is linked to another thing and oh, Tijana, okay now I know what was going on. So you have your linked knowledge. Knowledge linking is so powerful and it's how your brain thinks. If you look at how memory formation works, it's a three-stage process. First is the encoding when you read something, do you encode it properly and that's the linkage of that to other things that you know. Then the next stage is getting proper sleep because while you sleep memory formation is happening. And the third phase is recall, so how do you pull it out of the system. So your PKM has to mirror how your brain works as a human being. And we do the exact opposite with note-taking in knowledge systems. We put them in wikis and we put big deep hierarchies. Just for a moment, if you smell something, do you go to your folder of smells and navigate down through a bunch of characteristics of the smell? Maybe if you're a sommelier, I don't [__] know. But no, that smell is linked to a place and a location and a time. That's linked knowledge. So it has to be a bottom-up knowledge system. It has to mirror how the human brain cognates and how memory formation works. And then you have to have a metadata system around it, whether it's LATCH or something else, that allows you to find things with context. Now, if you have that, what ends up happening is you've made time for yourself because you can deal with basically infinite complexity. You just have rooms in your second brain. So I'm in clinic mode, so here's my clinic room. I'm in synthetic biology mode, so here's my synthetic biology room. I'm in cryptocurrency land, so here's my cryptocurrency thing. And those rooms are linked to each other. So maybe there's this thing in medicine that's linked to cryptocurrency, private medical records. So fourth generation cryptocurrency, privacy and identity. Okay. So how do I connect that to this? And how do I use a blockchain to sell my medical record system thing here? Well, now they're cross-linked. They're there. And if at the time of the note-making you link that, it's there forever inside your second brain and you never forget it. You can come back 25 years later and recover knowledge. So there's a whole system for this called Zettelkasten which was Luhmann's system and there's a lovely book 'How to Take Smart Notes' that talks about it. But there's thousands of prophets in this personal productivity world. Nick Milo is one and there's Guy Zultz who's a weird Bulgarian guy. But it's all the same roads to the same destination: you create a second brain and you think into that. Then recharge and rejuvenate. You can't just go go go. You have to have hard and soft, hard and soft. You have to get into a cadence in life where you're able to give yourself the space to recharge. And in many cases that means doing nothing.

You know, you're literally just going to sit down and [__] veg out. And the problem with a type A personality is you think that's like a mortal sin, like you're sending orphans on fire or something like that, a Viking raider boarding up the church. But it's okay. You've done all these amazing things in life. You didn't get there by just killing yourself every day. You have to take a step back and let it drift and let yourself veg out and then rejuvenate and recharge. And then there's a habitualization of rejuvenation. That's why I have the ranch. I take the Blackhawk up to the ranch. We land. I'm there. I veg out for the weekend and I'm just driving around in my ATV and I see my bison. They're walking around. I look at them. They look at me and I say, 'You're going to kill me today.' And they say, 'No.' And I say, 'All right.' And I just keep driving around. Maybe I see a mountain lion. Only did it once. Just hanging out on the road. They look at me. I look at them and I'm like, 'Come on, guys. You're supposed to be ferocious.' And they slowly walk away and like, 'Oh, [__] you, too.' But that's recharge. And if I wrote down on a piece of paper, what did I accomplish today? It's like nothing. Absolutely nothing. But that then enables me to get back into the other mode, which is the hyper ferocious and we're gone, going, gone. And when paired with a second brain, you have that, you're good. But none of that means anything if you don't have motivation. And you only have motivation if you have an overarching threat of your life. So Musk has one. And that's why no matter what the hell he gets hit with, he just keeps going. And that's why he keeps building rockets and all this other stuff because he set an impossible goal and he's trying to make it possible. So I set a goal saying I want to change the economic, political, and social systems of the world. I think that I have a real shot of doing it using cryptocurrency technologies. So if I build enough technology and I get enough people to drink the Kool-Aid and get into this paradigm, they'll say, 'Yeah, actually there's a there there. We should go and do that.' So then every day I wake up, I'm always going back to that and I'm asking how did I move the chains a little bit. So the other most important thing and I tell young people to do this all the time: journaling is the most powerful thing. You don't think it is but god it's so powerful. It's a dialogue with yourself. Just go out there. You don't have to be goal directed. Just write stuff down. It could be a sentence, it could be a paragraph, it could be a [__] novel. Congratulations, you're going to be a novelist, doesn't matter. What matters is the dialogue on a daily basis because it's a check-in with you. You're saying, 'How do I feel? Where did I fail? What am I doing well? What am I not doing? What am I afraid of? What am I not afraid of?' And it's so therapeutic. Every research study that's ever done by psychologists and psychiatrists shows that when people journal, their mental health is measurably better than when they don't journal, especially over a protracted period of time, 5 years, 10 years, 15 years. And it helps you start building that muscle up to help you understand an overarching narrative because you can read all your journals especially with AI and you can say the last 10 years or 15 years. What's the theme? You know the spaces in my life: oh that's the cryptocurrency phase of your life or this phase or this phase. Like Reagan was a brilliant guy and he wrote tons of letters but he also journaled a lot and he had phases in his life and you could clearly see it in his writing. Like he's the radio broadcaster phase, and this is the actor phase, and this is the Screen Actors Guild phase, and this is the GE spokesman phase, and this is the political Reagan phase at the governor level, and then the political Reagan phase at the president level, and this is the Reagan phase post-presidency dealing with Alzheimer's. And every step of the way you could see the transformation of the person and his cognition and you could see him grow as a human being along the way, what he talked about, his perceptions. And what's nice about that is it shows how much you can accomplish as a human being in a decade. We overestimate what we can do in a year. We vastly underestimate what we can do in a decade. I was broke 10 years ago. I'm a billionaire today and nobody knew who the hell I was 10 years ago. Now I'm a pretty well-known guy. Million Twitter followers and a lot of people listen to me for better or for worse. But there was no one moment where everything just magically changed and I instantly got famous. It was just a gradual thing and the resolution is too low for any one moment, but if you look at the totality of all the writing you can get there. And that is how you derive meaning. Once you look at these things, you can take the time during those veg out states to just consider it. But once you have the meaning, you're fanatic and then you have infinite energy because no matter how weak you get, you can go back to that. It's just like if you do something extreme like how do you survive buds or an ultramarathon or whatever the hell it is. It's not how strong physically you are. You could have been an Olympic swimmer or an Olympic champion and you have all these amazing skills. You're still going to ring the bell. You have to have some why that's connecting there that burns within you that's transcendent of just pure ego like 'I'm a badass.' Because they do everything in their power to destroy that image of you as a badass. And if they think that you still have that image, they'll make you a sugar cookie. They'll just break you one. And that's what they're supposed to do. So even after the image of you as a badass is gone, there's got to be something that's left over that's a screaming burning why within you. And if you have meaning in your life, you have that. So then you can do anything at that point. And it's just a question, who are you doing it for? Are you doing it for yourself or are you doing it for the world as a whole? That's the difference between a good person and a bad person. I talked to a philosopher once and he said, 'Charles, you know what is the ultimate question in reality?' I said, 'What is it?' 'Will mankind on average return the shopping cart?' And I was like, 'What the [__] are you talking about?' He said, 'Well, think about it. You're at Walmart, you're going out to your car, you can just leave that shopping cart in the parking space right next to your car, and there's no consequences to it if you do. It's kind of a shitty thing to do to the basket guy, but not really. It's kind of his job. If you return it, nobody thanks you. You don't really get any brownie points for it. So a virtuous society is a society where all the baskets are returned. And an evil, immoral society is a society where none of them are returned.' And one of these days I'm going to fund a study where we're just going to use drones and go to Walmart after Walmart and go to all the broken neighborhoods and all the happy Pleasantville neighborhoods and I'm going to see the ratio of shopping carts that have been returned versus not returned because it's an interesting thing. But I think there's some truth to all of that. It's those daily personal grind that you come back to and those little victories: did you go to the gym today, did you like Jordan Peterson, did you make your bed today, did you come to lobster? Those little wins that you do that accumulate over a lifetime and that excellence then permeates and it becomes part of it. And then the directionality of the winds, the meaning, is like who are you doing those things for?

Oh, that's a good question. Well, you got to have Ben Lamb on. Come on. He's Mr. Direwolf. And I'll call him and be like, why you got on Sean Ryan. Come on. Have you ever interviewed Avi Loeb?

Okay.

Okay, good. So you know the whole Avi Loeb experience. He's a great guy.

Oh, he's so good. He's so good. Spend two weeks on a ship with him. You'll know everything about him. Shipmates are great. Let's see. Avi would be really, really cool. If you ever want to go deep science, Terry Tao would be a lot of fun. Terry Tao.

Yeah, he's the smartest mathematician in the world. He's like probably the smartest human being alive right now. There's smart people and then there's people that just have infinite depth. I'm always fascinated like how does he decide what problem to work on? Imagine if you have this curse where you can solve anything but not everything and you know the clock is ticking and you have finite time and you're going to lose your ability to do that. So what would you do? Terry is one of those few human beings where he is legitimately in that position. He's so insanely brilliant. He graduated from high school at 12. He got his PhD at Princeton at 21. He won the Nobel Prize of math, the Fields Medal at 28. He's just so insanely brilliant. Like literally any problem he can solve. He can't solve them all. So how does he spend his time? How does he make that decision? What is elegant to him? What's amazing to him? I love looking at the extremes in people. Roger Penrose would be another and Federico Faggin. Roger in particular because he's at the twilight of his life and as one of the most brilliant physicists ever to live, he's chosen to spend his time on consciousness and in particular quantum consciousness like this entanglement thing that we talked about earlier. He's a phenomenal speaker and there's a depth of thought and elegance of his thought that is tremendously refreshing. I tend to be enamored with people who have clean thinking and are very original thinking and they're iconic in that they just don't give a [__] at all about the social consequences of what they say or do. They're totally divorced from it. Like one mathematician I always wanted to meet was Gregory Perelman. He did the thing that no one has ever dreamed to do. He solved the Poincaré conjecture which was this very hard math problem and he got the Nobel Prize in math for it. Normally you go and show up, get a million dollars and get this beautiful gold medal and then you tell all your friends how smart you are and special. He turned it down and he left math. He's just like I did what I wanted to do and now he's just in St. Petersburg riding the subway and chopping wood. Completely out of the field. It's just inconceivable to me that somebody like that at that level would do that. He doesn't take any interviews, he doesn't talk to any journalist. He's just on a different reality. Matthieu Ricard is another really cool guy. There's a book written about him and they call him the happiest man in the world. He's this Buddhist monk who was a scientist and then he decided to leave science and went into the monastery and he just meditated so much he found a way to put himself in a state of bliss. And because he was a scientist, he agreed to go through brain scans and everything. His brain waves work totally different than any normal human being. He's just a joyful guy. So the world's filled with these people. My recommendation to you is just find the people that are the extremes of things, whether it be mathematical brilliance or meditation or these things, and just try to say well why did you spend the time? Because all these people are products of a constant vigilance and doubt. Why did you choose those problems to solve over any other problem? Roger Penrose could have worked on black holes or quantum computers but instead consciousness. That's not something normally a physicist spends a lot of time on, right? But then he chose that for some reason. But why did you spend the time for that?

Thank you so much. This was a lot of fun.

Cheers.