"First, they ignore you, and then they mock you, then they fight you." - Says Charles Hoskinson

I had the pleasure of meeting up with Charles Hoskinson in Las Vegas during RareEvo to talk shop. Charles was one of the co-founders of Ethereum and the CEO and Founder of Input Output Global, the company behind the Cardano blockchain platform. So, how's Vegas? What have you been up to this last week? I never get to enjoy Vegas when I come because it's always for an event. And, I guess I'm the bride at the wedding, so I have to meet everybody, shake every hand, kiss every baby. It's been a lot of fun. You know, it's been great to see a lot of old friends and some new friends, and also just orchestrating all the communication. I, you know, I've given a few keynotes, a lot of interviews, a lot of podcasts. We get to showcase some great products like the Hydro vending machine with DripDrops, and, you know, we get to showcase my gaming company, HoskBrew, the Dish Brain Computers with Corporal Labs. A lot of people love that stuff. It's a little wild and out there. Very proud of where Midnight is at. You know, it's remarkable to see that the Glacier Drop is off to a good start. You know, strong participation across the cryptocurrency space as a whole. Already 800,000,000 Night has been redeemed, and about 35,000 people, and that's gonna swell - on its way to be the largest airdrop of all time for the space. So, things are moving along. You know? And it's like we make the plans. The plans get executed, and they're within the tolerances and alphas that we thought that they would be. It's just you gotta live. You know? You gotta actually do it. So, we're in the grinding mode right now, and it's very tiring. For people who come to Las Vegas with more free time than you do, what are some of the recommendations for where to go, where to eat, and where do you like to eat when you go to Vegas? Well, Vegas is one of the culinary capitals in the United States. It tracks many different restaurants from all around. And it just really depends on your age and, you know, what you're trying to accomplish. You know, the challenge with any city like Vegas is the noise level. And so, I value any dining experience where you could have private rooms or quiet accommodations. Because every place I go, it's just like they dial it up to eleven. And the problem is, if you're working an eight or twelve-hour day in a large conference with lots of people, you really don't relish the idea of going to a noisy restaurant to shout at people for another two hours. So, I just ate, for example, last night at the Golden Steer. It's a restaurant opened in 1958, and it is a pivotal component of the history of Las Vegas. It was actually run by the Mafia, and they have, like, the monster rooms and these things in the backroom. And it's just a phenomenal steakhouse, and it's got this great history. Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack were there. John Wayne used to eat there. Elvis used to eat there. And they just have great steak and, wonderful tableside Caesar. So, if you're like old school Vegas and quiet, laid back, wise guy style accommodations, that's the place to be. There's a lot of modern new restaurants like Scotch Prime, and their Wagyu flight is absolutely extraordinary. On the Asian side, Mott 32 and The Venetians, quite good. But, you know, that's the high end, and there's a lot of nice mid-level stuff. Like, it's just at a Yakiniku place. You know? You know, like Yakiniku or 888 or something like that. And then it's, like, $20 a person. It's all you can eat meat and cook it on a grill. So, you know, it's Vegas has everything. Yeah. Just don't do it on The Strip if you wanna, if you wanna save money. So, right now in Vegas, it's sizzling hot. What's summer like in Wyoming? Is it just as hot? So, Wyoming is a very different world. We have a few summer months, and they could be hot. And we have brutal, brutal winters. You know? And the challenge with Wyoming is not only does it get cold, it gets windy. So, you get that just cold wind that hits you, and that wind chill is brutal. And there's a reason why Wyoming is the least populated United States state. And, there's a reason why many people like the Oregon Trail and other places; they try to get out of Wyoming. You know? So, for the people who stay behind, they really love the ruggedness and the harshness of the environment, and they really do enjoy the challenge of living there. So I do. And, you know, I kind of love that frontier living, and I love the wildlife, and I love the natural beauty, but you have to earn it. It's not like California, where it's just beautiful and sunny. You go lay on a beach. You have to earn that wildlife in Wyoming. And if you take the time for it, it's worth the investment. Vegas is, you know, an artificial construct. We kinda taught Dubai how to do it. You know? This was a desert, and there's a reason. And in the forties and fifties, the government decided that testing nuclear weapons out here was a good idea because there, simply put, was nothing here in Nevada. It's a desolate wasteland, a huge chunk of the state. 60% of the state belongs to the federal government. Nobody cares. And they just built an oasis in the middle of damn nowhere, and they turned it into kind of a fantasy city. So, as long as you realize it's make-believe and as long as you realize that this is an ephemeral thing, you come here for a few days, it's great. If you get caught up in the illusion of it, you become make-believe, too. I heard you say this on the Empire podcast when you were on there. Is it true your bison ranch uses blockchain tech? Is that true? Yeah. So, part of agtech and part of integrating into agtech is having one foot in the past and one foot in the future. So, the past is that ranching and farming - these are very old human professions. And there's traditions and customs, like branding, for example, and other things that you should do, to preserve and protect those customs. But sustainability and profitability, profitability, these are things you have to really think about. And when you put a foot in the future, you know, every single input into the ranching process deals with a finite resource. And when it was the frontier a hundred and fifty years ago and the population of America was one eighth what it is today, those resources seemed to be unlimited, but they're not unlimited anymore. The water resources are not unlimited. Fuel is not unlimited for diesel, the power of the tractors, and the heavy equipment. It's not unlimited. The markets - they're global now. And so as a result, you have to always be thinking, how do you produce more with less, and how do you conserve? And a big component of that is accurate numbers. And so blockchain technology is really interesting because you can do farm to fork. You can follow the life of the animal. You can follow the life of the food, whether it be weed or an apple, whatever the heck it is, from when it was grown, how it was grown, what was put in, if it's agricultural, like, what herbicides were used, these types of things. If it's a cattle, how was it slaughtered? How was it finished? Where was it slaughtered? What was it fed? Was it grass-fed or corn fed? You know, there's, there's thousands of permutations there. And what I want is to live in a world where the consumer at the supermarket has a QR code on the package of meat or on the fruit. They can scan it with their phone, and they can follow that story, the provenance of the animal or follow that story. And they can understand all these things, and then you can start talking around. Does the journey of this food align with the values that people have? You know, Robert Kennedy is now the HHS, and one of the good things about him in that role is that for the first time in my life, we have a Secretary of Health and Human Services who really cares about the story. And he doesn't want, like, food dyes and or high fructose corn syrup and or pesticides, or other things. In fact, he made a career out of suing some of these companies, and he really does care about food quality. The Europeans care about food quality, and they seem to be all healthy, you know, thin and, like, not have as much cancer as us and diabetes as us. You know, I also own a health care clinic, and so I see both sides of it. I see the production side - with the agriculture. I see the consequence side with the health care clinic. We have so many obese patients who come in with neurodegenerative disorders, or they come in with diabetes or heart disease, and a big chunk of what caused that was lifestyle. And a big chunk of lifestyle is the food. So, blockchain isn't a universal answer. It's part of a dense web of solutions, like AI and IoT and material science innovation and fertilizer tech innovation, and energy innovation, that are required to modernize and update agriculture in the United States. But once you do it, it can be significantly more ethical. You know, the other side of it, too, is that you can really start developing a good sense of what are the long-term consequences of agriculture on the land. Because when you take this frontier, and we think forever we've been farming it and ranching it, but the reality is that the vast majority of ranches in Wyoming were not ranched until about 1860 to 1870. So, humans have really only been there manipulating that land and doing things for about a hundred and fifty years, give or take, against the totality of all the time of Wyoming. So, we don't fully understand the long-term consequences of what we've done. And already, looking at some of my assets, I see exhausted soil from, you know, bad fertilizer and growth patterns, a lot of environmental contaminants and problems. Like, one of our properties has an old dump on it, and we had to fix that up. Little stuff like that. So, when you have blockchain technology, you create an immutable record, and nothing is lost. A big problem with ranching is tons of things get lost. All the handshake agreements, all those common understandings, those seasonal decisions you make, they're not memorialized or documented. They're oral traditions. And if you dump something somewhere, nobody talks about it. So, part of buying a ranch is rediscovering the history of the ranch. It takes about three to five years to know enough to even know your head from your ass in that thing. And that's like a 10,000-acre ranch. If it's much larger, like a 100,000 or a million, it could take a lifetime to uncover all the provenance. And when you die, it's all lost. But if you put it on a blockchain, none of it's lost. It's there forever, and you start getting good data, and you can start asking policy decisions on a governmental level of, okay - Well, what are the consequences of these agricultural practices across all of the ag tech in the state and eventually the nation? So, I'm very keen to merge these types of things together with partners. And what's really cool is we actually have a lab at the University of Wyoming, the blockchain technology lab led by Professor Steve Lupin. And Steve is an AgTech guy, and, and he's doing a lot of great work with us. And we get to talk about everything from conservation credits to carbon credit systems to new ways of fertilizing the land, and so forth, and then applying blockchain technology for it. Do you think other ranchers and farmers will use the same technology in the near future, in the next five, ten, or fifteen years? Yeah. Because it'll increase profitability. I mean, there's two buckets you have to satisfy. One is to make me more money, and the other bucket is to reduce my expenditures. And reduction of expenditures is less water, less fuel, less labor. You know, you have to - it's not rocket science. Either cutting one down or building one up. If you get better packaging and better story, you can charge higher prices. There's plenty of Wagyu beef cows floating around the world, but there's only one Kobe beef. You know, these brands matter, and there's no greater example of that than wine in Georgia. So, Georgia is a country, beautiful country if you ever go to Eastern Europe, and they invented wine. You know, the Armenians and Georgians always fight over it, but the Georgians probably were gonna win that fight. There's 5,000 vineyards in Georgia. Small country, 5,000 vineyards. And you go there, and it's some of the best wine you've ever had in your life. You go to the wines stores, you know, liquor store, and you have a French bottle and an Italian bottle, and a bottle from Napa Valley, like, you know, Camas or something. And then you have this Georgian wine. And people are like, what the hell is that Georgian wine? And this is a $100, and this is a $150, and this is $200, and the Georgia wine - $20. It's a brand thing. And so anything you can do to tell a better story about the product, like fashion or luxury, it allows you to charge higher margins. Otherwise, it's a race to the bottom with these types of things. So, that's how you get adoption. It's not about, oh god, we love blockchain technology, and we were reading them their Satoshi paper, and we like that privacy and that decentralization. No. It's more about these are the kinds of things you can do to build a different kind of relationship with your customer. The other thing is that you put a face on the faceless. When you buy that bottle of wine, you have no idea who picked the grapes. When you buy that meat in the packet, you have no idea of the rancher who took care of that. When you have that providence that goes with the QR code all the way back, and you see that, then you know who actually picked the grapes. You can tip them. You can actually have a financial relationship with them. You can actually say, I really like when Bob does this. Yeah. He's very good. That's Bob's mean. I wanna buy some of that. And, thus, it creates a new customer service and revenue stream for them. So, absolutely, it's something that can be expanded out, but you learn by doing. And, I have big ambitions and a lot of land, so I have to I have to take care of that side of the house first. And, at some point, we'll productize it either directly or indirectly through partners. And now, there's your health care clinic. Does that also use blockchain tech? Yeah. We're getting there. And the big - the use case there is electronic health record systems. And this is another great example of where blockchain technology serves a very easy-to-understand role. You have the clinic. You have the hospital. And you have the patient, and the patient's moving between all these different centers of care. And they're like fiefdoms, and they contain your medical data. And it's hard at times to move a medical record from one to another, especially incompatible systems. And, that interoperability issue is also compounded by access control issues, like, under what circumstances does somebody have the right to pull your data and do something with your data? And, the problem is the EHRs don't have strong incentives to work together. So there's this oligarchy of monopolies, and there's five different companies that control about 95% of all the medical records in America, whether it be CERN or Epic, or Athena. And, they just don't work well together. They don't play nice. So, when you have blockchain, the blockchain brokers the access control. The blockchain brokers the economic agency of the data. So you can take self-sovereign identity and DIGS on one hand, and you combine that with data protection, data privacy, like what Midnight is doing. You put these two things together, and then suddenly you have a system where you have the ubiquitous flow of records. You can prove properties of the records. You can handle the access control, but then you can begin mining the data for very interesting patterns that are monetizable, like who's qualified for a clinical trial, or, you know, how many people over the age of 50 in Gillette, Wyoming, develop cancer after getting COVID or something like that. You can ask those types of questions. Well, you can't really ask them if they're sitting locked away in these vaults all in paper or kind of sort of digital, but they don't talk to each other. But here, you can. And the value of that data is in the tens of billions of dollars. And then what you can do is you cut the doctors in and actually make them, make a profit for sharing these types of things. You cut the patient in and have them make a profit. We've already shown this in the cryptocurrency space with Brave and BAT. You know? The BATs token cuts you into the advertising revenue - about your data, and it could be done in a very private way, and preserve and protect that. But you can't trust companies. And, also, even if it's a great idea, you can't give a company a monopoly. That's why it has to be blockchain, because it - I would never feel comfortable with Google or Microsoft or pick your arbitrary big company getting dominion over this and then deciding to sculpt the market. Because then what that means for me with my clinic is they'll tell me the price, and I can't say no because it's an indispensable thing. And so, if they say it's a $100,000, it's a $100,000. They say it's half a million dollars and half a million dollars. It's just a monopoly. You have no freedom or ability to do that. So, things as fundamental as your data, your health, and the people who get to be involved in that conversation, it has to be patient-centered. It has to be owned by the edges, and it has to be built in a way where it's pro-competition. And there's a diverse marketplace of people that don't get shut out. So, we're very excited to kinda build up that house of things, and we're working our way to it. We'll probably start by building an open-source EHR, electronic health record system, merging it with one of our projects. We have Hyperledger Adentists in pulling that in, which is our DIP and identity product. And then, we'll probably work with partners like the Braves of the World and the Midnights of the world to figure out how to do those privacy-enhancing technologies. There's also another interesting parallel. It's called the Fediverse, and it actually was invented for decentralized social networking. So, when you see Gab and Mastodon and all these other guys that are floating around, or Jack Dorsey when he was talking about the app protocol in Bluesky. You have these servers, and they're kind of fiefdoms, but you wanna move users and data between them. Very similar to medical records, actually. So, I think all the work that's been done in the Fediverse and the app protocol and what Jack Dorsey and others have done, that can be dragged into the cryptocurrency space and actually be a useful component in sorting out and solving these things. Because it's not fully decentralized. Your medical records belong to a facility and a physician and a care group, and a care system. They're not, like, in the global commons everywhere. But yet they have to be portable so that, let's say, you break your leg skiing in Aspen, the physicians there can tap into that and pull it on your behalf. And let's say you've lost consciousness. So, they have to be able to do that in a way where even if you're incapacitated, they still can get your medical records because it can be a life or death concern, especially if you have a bizarre medical problem or something that requires very specific treatment and dosing. So, these are things that, you know, we're thinking about, and the cool part is, like, it's one of those batteries not included, but 85% of it's already done, and it's sitting in boxes, and you just have to figure out how to assemble it type of problems. So, you've been in this game for a long time. It was back in 2013, I believe, when you started the Bitcoin Education Project. What was that about? What can you tell us about that? Well, if you don't know anybody and you don't have any business skills and you're not particularly good at anything, teach people. Those who do not know, teach. Yeah. That's the old saying. You learn by doing. Right? So I started the Bitcoin Education Project for two reasons. One was to educate myself and build a community of people that were interested in educating themselves. And two, I really wanted to meet all of the leadership of the cryptocurrency space. And it certainly sounded like and felt like a good beacon for that. And mission accomplished, I got to meet Roger Verne, Andreas Antonopoulos, and Eric Voorhees, and Peter Vicenis, and all these big guys that were kind of the movers and shakers in the blockchain space. I ended up getting 70,000 students with the Bitcoin education project. So, I met everybody through that, including some VC people that funded my first company. So, it was a, it was a good time. We learned a lot. And, it really, the core point of it was to talk about why is cryptocurrency special, what makes it unique and interesting, and where could it go if people adopted it? And this was at $4 Bitcoin. So, things changed a little bit, you know, throughout the years. And I even had a slide in one of my lectures that talked about what would be required to make Bitcoin $10,000, and it would seem like inconceivable. You know? But we got there. And, mission accomplished. I became the founding chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation's Education Committee. Through that, I met Anthony Diorio at the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada, who was the person who brought me into the Ethereum project, and it really bootstrapped my career. The other thing is just by answering the questions of the students, I learned so much. I got over 5,000 emails from those 70,000 students, and every single one of them I replied back to. So, I learned something every time they'd ask me a question. Well, why did Satoshi do a base 58 system? Well, that's a good question. Let's take a look. Why did they do this? Well, I don't know. Let's take a look. And why did they do this? And you learn a lot along the way, and so you kind of get to know where the bodies have been buried. And, also, you get to know, like, where people's mindsets were at because I got all that customer feedback. It made me believe very firmly that smart contracts were a necessary thing because everybody kept coming to me and saying, I love Bitcoin, but I wanna do x, y, z with it. I love Bitcoin, but I wanna do a, b, and c with it. And we're like, well, you can't. It's not a programmable system. So, we're like, man, if we had a programming language, we could do all this stuff. So, it's like that kind of formed this idea that we should do smart contracts. So, it's been twelve years since then. How have you seen the crypto/Web3 landscape change and evolve since then? We won. You know? We went from a 100,000 people to 550,000,000 with the US government holding our stuff and passing laws to embrace it. So, you know, it's that, you know, first they ignore you and then they mock you, then they fight you. That was the Biden era, and then you win. We won. You know? And crypto will be over a billion people by 2030. Stablecoin market alone will be a trillion dollars, you know, and $10,000,000,000,000 markets will eclipse gold as the most valuable, commoditized asset. So, in victory, there's a question of what do you do with your victory? You know, just because you won the election doesn't mean you're a good president. So, what you need to do is you actually have to transform society. And so the next question is, how do you leverage the technology and people, and momentum to change the economic, political, and social systems of the world? And on the economic side, we have to reintroduce the concept of sound money. If you take a look at a graph, the M1 graph of the money supply of the United States, it's like 1912, and it goes and goes and goes. And for the most part, it's kinda flat. It's kinda flat. It's kinda flat. And then when you get to, like, 2010ish, it's so crazy. It's one of the craziest graphs of all time. And they just circle that, and you say, this is because crypto. Why crypto? You know, this is why crypto exists, because you gotta pay that back. You can't go flat money supply and exponential growth and expect that you haven't destroyed your money. So, the dollar is living on borrowed time, and we have to reintroduce the concept of sound money and reset the economy. And we're doing that in real time. On the political systems, there are Democrats and Republicans, and they don't agree on many things, but they're unified in their distrust of institutions. They just don't trust the same institutions. So, if you're, you know, a Republican, you may really hate the institution. And if you're a Democrat, you hate the institution. But they're unified in the fact that there's at least one governing institution that they think is morally bankrupt and corrupt. And in many cases, actually, it's just on who's in charge. And so, you know, when Biden is president and you're a Democrat, health and human services is the bastion of truth, and the CDC is a great organization, and NIH can be trusted. Now, Trump is elected - even though 99% of the staff is exactly the same. Anything they say is absolutely evil and wrong and bad, and it's vice versa. You know? Talk about the DOJ and the FBI. You know? Biden is in. It's a crooked organization, and Trump is in. Oh, they're restoring faith and integrity in the American people. You can't run a government this way. You can't live in a world where people base their faith in something on who won the election when it's supposed to be an objective, neutral institution that's bipartisan in its nature. So, another big chunk of blockchain technology is a restoration of faith in institutions. And a very simple but poignant example of that would be voting systems. So, I'm pretty pissed off as an American that I can't check my vote, and I can't check the integrity of the system. I live in this perpetual trust me, bro. I drop my mail-in ballot into the mailbox, and I just, on faith, hope that it arrives and it's counted, but there's no QR code I could scan or app I could bring up to check that. I just hope to God that it didn't get lost or the mailbox got flooded or the, you know, the mail carrier said, well, this is a conservative neighborhood, so I'm gonna shred the ballots. Or this is a liberal neighborhood. I'm gonna shred the ballots. So, why can't my cell phone just check it? Well, blockchain can. There's no difference between counting Bitcoin and counting votes at the end of the day. And with privacy-enhancing technologies, you can have an anonymous ballot, but provable ballot, and selective disclosure. So, you can disclose to me that my vote was counted. You can disclose to me who I voted for, but not the world. And you could disclose to me that the system had no more votes than registered voters, and everybody registered was indeed a registered voter. That's the foundation of all political systems is how do we decide who deletes us? And you could build up the ladder, and each rung of the ladder restores faith and integrity, like real-time continuous auditing of the books. I don't think the Pentagon has passed an audit in my entire lifetime. And they always say, like, next year will be different. Trust us. It's like, sorry, guys. It's like trusting Dracula to run the blood bank. You know, it's just not gonna happen. I'm sorry. And so, we need an external force to inflict upon them trust, faith, and credibility. And, you don't do it like DOGE, where you come in with a sledgehammer and just beat everybody up. It's not productive. You have to put new systems and processes, and procedures in. Blockchain-based real-time continuous auditing can give you the ability to balance the books in real time every day, every minute. Every time a bullet is fired, you know about it. It's tracked inside that system. Well, if you have balanced books and you have transparency over the books, then you start asking questions like, why am I in god's name wasting all this money over here and all this money over here and all this money over here? Let's just get rid of that and consolidate that. So, the reason you waste the money is because it was hiding. And when people hide, they can waste money. So, you build your way up the ladder in the political system, and every rung of the way, if it's built the right way, it doesn't matter if there's a Republican in office or a Democrat in office. You still have faith and trust in it. It's just like you do physics. It's not like when Trump got elected, suddenly gravity doesn't apply anymore. You know, mountaineers are like, alright. It's our time. Let's go climb Devil's Tower. No consequences. Gravity still applies, you know? And so, we all agreed to that. Why can't we have a synthetic law of physics for political systems where there's equal application of those principles regardless of who's in charge, and everybody's held equally accountable for it? And on the social side, we're falling apart as people. And, you know, Gen Z and Gen Alpha in particular, they're very bipolar in that they live in two worlds at the same time. And interacting now with a lot of Gen Alpha and Gen Z people, it's a little hard for me because I'll meet them online, and they're incredibly abrasive and very bold and extremely aggressive, and they just say incredibly offensive things. But then you meet them in person, and they're very timid, and they don't like conflict, and they don't even look at you in the eye, and everything. It's just like, son, you just said a bunch of shit to get your ass kicked. And they're like, yeah. But that's my online persona. So, like, they're two people, you know, in one. And you can't live as two people in one. And as the gap grows and grows and grows and it gets bigger and bigger, at some point, it destroys your psychology, which is why so many people have become horrendously neurotic. So, we need to put society back together, and we need to restore faith in the social processes. And, you know, like journalism, I often talk about this. Why is journalism so bad? Because the incentives are wrong. If your incentive is eyeballs and clicks, you will always live in a world of outrage, and you will always live in a world of scandal. You'll never live in a positive, happy world like, how many clicks are you gonna get on an article saying like, everything's running well today? The weather's good. It's sunny outside. People are happy. You know, society is decently good. And actually, our leaders aren't so bad. It's like, alright, I got four views on my blog post about that. You know, you wanna run like, senator so and so was caught with a donkey and, and a Tijuana weirdo. He's like, Oh, wow. Yeah. I gotta click on that article. I'm ready to go. Poor donkey. He made an ass of himself. So, you know that's where journalism is at. So, if you can change the economic incentives - and that's what we're starting to see with these long-form interviews like Shawn Ryan's show or Joe Rogan or Lex Friedman, where the incentive model has changed. And then suddenly, the communication medium changed, and we got an entirely different dimension of people. You know? And there's a great contrast - Trump versus Harris with Joe Rogan. You know? And Harris thought it was a liability to go into a three-hour conversation. It's just inconceivable for people like me. I, like, I'd say, wow. You're gonna give me three hours to talk to somebody who has a distribution of 25,000,000 people, where I can engineer a way to make myself look really good? And her is like, well, I'm very polished, and my media campaign is built for thirty-second sound bites and a very disciplined thing. And if I go talk for three hours, we're gonna go off script. And we go off script, that's, it's too risky. It's too dangerous. Well, Trump's entire career is off script. You know? There's no script. He just threw the script away. So, it's just very compatible with that. Just by going on Joe Rogan, he probably got another four or 5,000,000 votes. And by her not going on Joe Rogan, it cost her probably those types of votes. And it didn't allow people to humanize her. And, she could've talked about her days as a prosecutor and kind of provided clarity on why she became one, you know, what she accomplished. It could allow people to understand more about her relationship with her husband and, you know, her triumphs and tribulations and these things, and exit that interview as a human being, not as a political figurehead that's polished with these types of things. So, there's a desire in the social systems for true authenticity. There's a desire in these systems for really understanding who people are and connecting with them at a very deep level, so much so that you feel like they're a friend. And the reason we don't do that at scale is the incentives are wrong, and that's what blockchain technology solves. At the end of the day, it's all about trusting those you don't trust, incentivizing the things differently, and being a permanent record of accounts, mutable, time-stamped, and auditable. So, on the media side, veracity bonds are a great example. Let's say you publish an article. You can put money down on that article, and if you get it wrong, you lose the money. Pretty simple concept. Right? But then journalists can begin demanding that and say, well, if the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post truly is a bastion of credibility, and you guys are saying your brand reputation is worth so much money. Why don't we put $10,000,000 in bond behind all of our articles? And if any one of them is wrong, we'd lose $10,000,000. That's a good bounty. Right? And as a journalist, I'd love to, you know, write articles like that and be in that kind of environment. You know, I was like, yeah. My paper stands behind me. If I, you know, if I fuck up, you know, they have to pay $10,000,000. So, they're really gonna work hard to make sure we're publishing objective reality in these types of things. And blockchain can do that trivially. Veracity bonds are easy. Prediction markets are easy to put together for truth marketplaces. And when you combine that with AI, you can really deeply understand the biases that people have. So, I'm very excited about blockchain technology in these types of mediums of social interactions, the communication systems, and the veracity of communication systems. Because this neurosis, this dual personality I was talking about, is only gonna get worse if it's generative AI. You can't trust anything you see anymore. We're almost at that inflection point where every picture and video, and audio, it's just, it's indistinguishable. You have no idea if it's AI-generated or not. So, everything will be AI-generated. I think that's why they're waiting for the Epstein client list. They're just waiting for AI to get good enough, and then they're like, oh, yeah. There's a client list now, and all the videos come out. Oh, that's AI-generated. It's the Shaggy defense. It wasn't me. It's, it's AI AI-generated video. And I said, there you go. You know? So, when you live in a world like that, you lose yourself because you have no anchor. There's no trust or truth, and there's no commonality, and everything becomes choose your own adventure. Like, imagine Pizzagate. If we had all the AI technology of today back in 2016, it wouldn't just be people saying Hillary Clinton and these people went to some pizzeria, and they're, like, murdering children and stealing their adrenal chrome; they would be showing it on very convincing videos and audio, and pictures. And then people choose to believe what they wanna believe. They'll just be like, I don't like that person, and thus, that thing I'm seeing is real. Or I like that person, and thus, that thing I'm seeing is fake. Well, have you done any work to verify it? No. The blockchain component comes in, and then you start getting an expectation that I only believe things that have veracity bonds behind them, or I only believe things where there's reputation at stake that can be lost in the event that thing turns out to be fake or not true. And then, you can create sharing systems in social networks where your stake in the social network goes down if you push misinformation. It's how you get rid of bots and these types of things. So, we're very interested in that side too of the blockchain system. And, we think there's an enormous amount of room for growth there. And it's an increasingly necessary thing, or else society is gonna fall apart. Now, I wanted to ask you about Input Output. What is it? What do you guys work on? So, how does that fit into what you were saying? So Input Output is a venture studio, and what we do is we look at we have a concept of a decade’s thesis. And so, we kind of ask, where is the world gonna go in the next ten years? And we work our way backwards, then to what exponential or transformative technologies are gonna have the most impact in getting us there. So, exponential technologies are anti-intuitive. They're not things humans intrinsically understand. We understand linear systems. Okay? So you put a little bit of a push, and you get a little bit of a movement. You put a little bit more push, you get a little bit more movement. Exponential, you give a little push, there's a little movement. A little bit more push, goes really fast. Right? Falls down the hill. So, the very first exponential technology that mankind invented were nuclear weapons. You know, so you have this small disc of uranium, big bomb. Slightly larger disc of uranium, gigantic bomb. Slightly larger disc, like world-ending bomb. And we've never had anything like that before. So, it was hard for us to quantify how a small bomb could destroy an entire city. It was just an inconceivable thing for us. But then we started saying, well, what else can this exponential? And so, when you look at the rise of the Internet, software companies, the SaaS model, they're starting to look exponential. OpenAI is not a terribly big company when you look at the employee count, yet they service 800,000,000 people, and they're building this superintelligence that will be pervasive across every place you look. So, blockchain is also an exponential technology. Most blockchain firms are under a thousand people, but they service 550,000,000 people in a multitrillion-dollar economy, and they're growing exponentially. So, we look at technology classes like that in artificial intelligence and blockchain, and synthetic biology, where we can have a group of maybe a few 100 people, and they can build something with a billion customers. And that billion customers can influence the trajectory of the human race. And we try to break it down to economic, political, and social systems. We try to say, can we improve those systems for everyone everywhere? You know, can we make the economic systems more intrinsically fair? And can we distribute wealth in a better way? One of the reasons why so many people love me at this conference is I built things that they have equity in. You know? And when they were successful, they made millions of dollars, you know? And they were just like a bro sitting at 7/11, and they decided to get in early, and then suddenly they're a millionaire. And they're like, yeah, this Charles guy is really smart. And so, when you give people ownership over it, it's a very powerful thing. And the same for political and social systems. We're a huge governance shop. We build voting systems. You know, we build governing systems like constitutions. We had a constitutional convention last year. We created DAOs, new business structures like DUNAs, in the state of Wyoming. So, our venture studio conceives of these things, and then we package them, build a company, and spit it out. Like, Shield is a great example of that from Midnight. You see Eran Barak up on stage, and he's talking about the power of privacy. Well, that was one of our companies in our portfolio. Quantum Hosky is another example of that, where we're doing a lot of really crazy things. We're taking hypervoxels’ dimensional space and combining it with AI and dish brain computers and putting it in this weird quantum Minecraft-like world. Get it right - It'll be a super popular massive online multiplayer game, you know, with millions of people. And that'll be a big play in the NFT, meme coin, and GameFi space. So, we look at all those things. Well, why - what the thread that unifies all of them is that we think we can bring millions to billions of people together. It's exponential in nature, and in some way, it improves an economic, political, or social system. And some cases, it just gives people the freedom to dream again. You know, a lot of things we love doing are augmenting creativity or enhancing wisdom, and getting people to be more contemplative and reflective in society as a whole. There's this learned helplessness that modern society has inflicted where everybody has become a pathological complainer, but they have no capacity to do. So, they just sit on Twitter all day long and just shitpost and shitpost, and everything's shit. Everything's bad. We're like, yeah. Okay. But what have you done to fix it? You know, what have you done to actually make it better? Like, I complain about healthcare. Everybody does. But I put $200,000,000 and built a clinic, and I got 15,000 patients and 40 doctors. And, you know, we're actively inventing a new medical system. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't work. But at least I'm in the room, and I'm doing something. And I appreciate that not everybody can do that at scale. But if we built our technology right, everybody could find a seat at the table of the solution table, small or large. So, all the systems that we build, we try very hard to to put those in a way where people can be part of building that system with us and feel like they have a role in a place. And actually, the success of the system will make things dramatically better for everybody. And now, Midnight, the talk of the town, talk of the week, what can you tell us about the Midnight Network? So, Midnight is a fourth-generation cryptocurrency, and I'd argue it's the last generation that really matters. So, the first generation was just Bitcoin pushing value around, super revolutionary for its time. But the minute you have Bitcoin, it's disappointing because you want something bigger than Bitcoin. You want programmability, which was the second generation, and that was smart contracts. The minute you have smart contracts, you want smart contracts to be at scale. So, you want millions to billions of people to use them, and you want them to work everywhere. So, you need scalability and interoperability. And because they're so complicated, how do you upgrade the systems? You need governance. So, that was the third generation that came out. Fourth generation is the last mile because it's about privacy and identity at its core, selective disclosure, and privacy. So, everything in real-world business has a private side and public side. Don't matter if you're running a McDonald's or a multinational company. The money in the cash register, you know, Bobby touching Sally in the HR complaint, all that stuff, that's private. Nobody gets to know that, right, except for the requisite parties that need to be disclosed to. Multinational corporation, you know, major, trade finance deal, and, you know, acquisition of a company, secret talks with the government about a concessions deal, whatever the hell. That's private. So, the blockchain space does the public side super well. It's all auditable, transparent, timestamp. But the minute you try to bring a private artifact into the blockchain space, you know what happens? You centralize the network because somebody has to hold the data. Somebody has to hold the secret. And because you need both sides for it to work, whoever holds it is the kingmaker. They become the gatekeeper for that system. So, have we achieved anything? We have this huge security theater and all this decentralization over here. Trust me, bro. Keep it honest. And then over here, on the private side, is like one guy. The greatest example is that Simpsons clip where Mr. Burns decides to turn the power off for Springfield. And he and Smithers, they go through this elaborate series of tunnels and rooms and secret quarters to get to the heart of the plant, and it's super secure. And then when they get there, there's, like, this rickety door, and there's a dog inside. That is where the blockchain space is at. We'd spent so much time building these elaborate mazes and beautiful things on the public side that we forgot there's a back door, and it's called privacy. So, you need to bring privacy into the blockchain space, which means it not only has to be programmable, meaning it's like a smart contract, but it also has to be embeddable with identity. Because the minute you have privacy, you start asking questions like, okay. Who gets to know? And under what terms and conditions? The auditor, the regulator, you. You have to disclose to yourself how much of this token do I own. That's a disclosure. It's disclosure of one. And then, you can start talking about, like, ethical CBDCs. You could talk about private stablecoins with integrity. You can talk about royalty management systems where you don't disclose what the royalties are. You could talk about supply chains where you don't reveal to your competitors what you're buying in the supply chain, private medical records. You could start talking about governance, where you have secret ballots and secret votes, or people working for a DAO - their salaries aren't public. You know, you can talk about so many of these applications, real-world assets, the whole securities market, all these equities. There's broker-dealer relationships, compliance requirements, proxy requirements. Well, how the hell do you handle all that without a private side? And then there's statutory requirements, GDPR, BSA, HIPAA. How do you comply? Be HIPAA compliant or Bank Secrecy Act compliant, or GDPR compliant? You need privacy for all these things. We take it for granted in the legacy world. And so, this legacy world, they're all hot and heavy. They got the Clarity Act coming out. You know, BlackRock's coming on in. They're like, alright. Give us some crypto. And then their lawyers and compliance officers come in and be like, whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Hold, hold on now. It's like we can't fully embrace it. You know? We'll do it over here, but we can't do it over here. And so, what Midnight does is it's the bridge between those two worlds, the TradFi world and the Web3 world. And therein lies the key architectural innovation of Midnight, which is cooperative economics. Can you build a tokenomics in a hybrid application structure where you don't particularly care, the blockchain or the infrastructure you're talking to? I don't care if it's Ethereum. I don't care if it's Solana. I don't care if it's Bitcoin. You can pay in Sol. You can pay in Bitcoin. You can pay in Ether. You can pay in ADA. And you just use it the way you wanna use it. It does the privacy and selective disclosure. Your fees are in that. And hybrid applications mean that you're always talking about Midnight in Ethereum, Midnight in Bitcoin, Midnight in Cardano. The app lives in multiple places at the same time. Or in the legacy world, Midnight in BlackRock, Midnight in Goldman Sachs, Midnight in Morgan Stanley. So, it's like no one ever got fired for buying an IBM, no one ever got fired for picking Midnight because it's the non-choice choice. If you pick Midnight, you can then grow into any ecosystem you want, and they can change over time. But your compliance officer's happy, your lawyer's happy, your regulator's happy, because you can decide what your regime is on how you share information and how you do automated compliance for AML KYC, and, ultimately, it restores integrity to the consumer. Because I don't wanna live with a stablecoin where everything I've ever bought with a stablecoin is remembered publicly by everyone everywhere forever. That's nuts. Do you want your Amazon shopping cart history to be open forever? Do you want your Google searches to be open forever? It's an absurd notion. But that's literally Tether and Circle right now, the $243,000,000,000 of stable points that are, you know, deployed, issued. They're living in a panopticon at the moment. Maybe, just maybe, we should have some privacy there. The same for exchange withdrawals. When you put money into Binance and pull money out of Binance, why the hell is that anybody's business? I mean, when you call E-Trade, wire transfer money to E-Trade, and be like: Hey, I wanna send you guys some money. Do you, like, go to your neighbors and be like, dude, I just sent a wire transfer to E-Trade. You know, here's all my financial data, but that's what you're doing in the blockchain space right now. But what if the inbound and outbound were done on a private ledger? No one gets to see it. But it's travel rule compliant because there's selective disclosure. So, it's the best of both worlds for people, and only Midnight can do this. And only Midnight can do this for everyone everywhere. That's what we think about cooperative economics. So, the Glacier Drop is the epitome of that. You know? No VCs. No, you know, insider people. No early token sale. That is nonsense. We just give it away. Just distribute it. You know? The 33,400,000 people in eight different ecosystems, seven blockchains. Just give it away, and let them redeem it. We've already had 37,000 redemptions, for a total of almost 800,000,000 a night. It's 3.4% of supply. We're only a few days into this game. So, my leaps and bounds are probably the most successful airdrop of all time, and it creates that initial distribution to get people to care about it and then the people to build with it, and then it'll become the backbone of all these private transactions and restore that across everybody in the space. And then why I call it the last generation - we have everything else. We have scalability. It's almost here. We have interoperability. It's almost here. We have governance. You know, it's growing by leaps and bounds. We have smart contracts. We have decentralization. You know, the prior generations gave that to us. And once you have the selective disclosure of privacy, you have everything you need to get rid of TradFi and DeFi, and for it just to become FI. It's the next generation of finance. It's there. And then you have everything you need to rewrite society. You can rewrite all the economic, political, and social systems with it. I have one more question. It was a quote that you said about yourself, again, on the Empire Podcast. You called yourself the jackass that didn't retire. We talked about a lot of your projects right now, and I wanted to ask you why. Why keep going? Why, you know, you're already in the history books. You've already accomplished so much. Well, you know, I wouldn't keep going if it was just about making money, you know, because it's diminishing returns. It's like giving a loaf of bread to a guy that owns a bakery. It's like, I'm okay. I'll be okay. There's no lifestyle difference for the rest of time. So, it can't be avarice. It can't be, let's go make some money to keep on going. I keep going because I'm in the game. I'm solving hard problems. I get to look at health care and solve a hard problem. I get to look at synthetic biology and be on the pioneering frontier there. On the blockchain side, we're almost done with blockchain. We almost have that last generation done. And once we do, it's like it's gonna get it done. Whether I'm in the room or not, it'll get done. So, there's a lot of unfinished projects, and there's a lot of new things that are deeply fascinating to me. And what keeps me young is that I get to work with the next generation. You know, there's a lot of people in the room now. They're in their twenties, and they were like me ten years ago. They're fired up. They haven't made their money. They're ready to go. And it's exciting to inherit their passion and their fire and see what we've built can do for them. You know? It's one of the most incredible experiences to go and build a building and then watch people move into it and do cool things inside that building. So, it does keep me going. You know, the other side of it, too, is that there's a fire when you're an entrepreneur, that's hard to put out. And you just really love the art of the possible, and you really love new things, and you really love trying to keep that engine roaring. And, you know, becoming a venture studio, what's nice about it is I get to get the party started, but I don't have to host the party, and I don't have to live with the cleanup of the party. You know? So, being a venture studio, you build those things. You hire a CEO. You kinda kick him out of the nest, and he said, Alright. You go, you go do that thing. So, I always get the fun part. You know? I get the ideation. I get the creative components of it. I get the staffing. You know? We get to do some of the most essential and transformative work, but then, I don't have to spend the next ten years babysitting something and living through the lawsuits and the HR issues and, you know, this, that, and the other. It's like there's a CEO for that. They're properly incentivized for that. So, given that model, it's a wonderful place to be. And also, you go parallel. Yeah. I'm in the game business now. I'm in the, you know, I'm in the dish brain business now. Fuck is dish brain? I mean that, you know, and I'm in the Nintendo business now, you know. There's many different businesses I get to be, and I get to kinda play, like the Holiday Inn Express, you know. I play a doctor on TV, you know. I get to do all these things, and it keeps me young, and it allows me to kinda gain a deeper appreciation for the world as it is. You know, the other thing is you get to meet a lot of people along the way, and you kind of like them. And there's a thousand people across the entire IO empire, and I want them to stay employed. You know? I want them to actually have great, meaningful careers, and I want them to reach the highlight of their success. And so, I'm trying to find where and when I can, good outcomes for all those people because they've walked this journey with me. If I can't do that, then, you know, time to retire. And everybody has to know when to quit. You know, Tom Brady is the greatest example of that. He won the Super Bowl at Tampa Bay. He has his beautiful wife, great family life. He's the greatest quarterback in history. Stayed a little too long, got divorced because of it. Doesn't get to see his kids anymore, and he had a terrible season. Just if you'd retired one season earlier. Right? You know? So, that's always the challenge when you're entrepreneurs. Sometimes, you think you're smarter than you actually are, more capable than you actually are. So, it's not good enough just to stay in the game, but you have to build a system that is intellectually honest about where you're at, what you can't do, and how you can contribute, the level of depth that you have. And you have to be very self-reflective with all these things. And I'd like to believe in the last ten years, I've become tremendously more self-reflective about kind of my role and place and what I can do well, what I can't do well, what do I enjoy, what do I not enjoy. And, you know, I'm almost fully regulated there. I would like to get rid of Twitter. You know, I'd like to get rid of social media. It's a necessary evil, but it's become so remarkably toxic as a medium of exchange. It's the one thing that really does chip away at my desire to be around. It's hard when everything is automatically bad faith. Even the glacier drop is the most successful of all time. It's on the road for that. Ledger's support is a little shaky in the beginning. Okay. Well, there's no difference between redeeming today and two weeks from now. You know, it's the same redemption rights for the next sixty days. But because it's not available on day one, it automatically means the glacier drops a failure. We're incompetent. Everybody's stupid. Midnight's a failed product. It's bad faith all around. And it's the thing that, you know, if you have all the upside, that's the downside. It's the thing that does pull the desire out. And it means that, you know, we all have to figure out how to engage differently with it. And we all have to figure out how to change our attitude and our mindset. And that's one thing that this year I've spent a great deal of time kinda considering and calibrating and, you know, do I keep doing the AMAs? And that made me famous. And, you know, how do you engage with the media? And do you work through proxies, or do you do it directly? And do I still keep coming to the events and talking to people at events, or these things? Like, every time I post a picture of one of my pets, within thirty minutes, it's a meme coin. You know? And they, and every time somebody sends something to the office, it's no longer a gift because they like me. They want me to talk about the gift to advertise their project for free advertising. So, the transactional nature of things is also very challenging, you know, where people don't wanna talk to Charles Hoskinson, the person. People wanna talk to Charles Hoskinson, the brand and reputation, and business magnet, to enhance their lifestyle or in their business or something. So, the risk is for people to become hollowed out. And because they view me as transactional, I view them as transactional. So, that's the other challenge, and it eats away at one's desire to stay. So, you have to invest in good family and good relationships, and, you know, you have to figure out different ways to reset those relationships. And at some point, unfortunately, you have to introduce gatekeepers as well, so you become more mercurial and a little bit higher on the ivory tower and less accessible overall. But I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world, because, at the end of the day, when you net, you look at all of it, I have a chance to change the way the world works and leave it for the better. And how many people can say that? You know, how many people can legitimately, look in the mirror and say, I'm one of a few dozen people or a few 100 people that, for whatever reason, has been given this incredible privilege and have a real shot at doing something very significant, not just in one industry, but multiple industries at the same time, like Musk has done, that's an extraordinary thing. And that's what keeps me going, and that's what keeps me motivated. I attended RareEvo as a guest of Input Output Global. While they were kind enough to cover my travel and accommodation, they did not influence the questions asked during this interview. I attended RareEvo as a guest of Input Output Global. While they were kind enough to cover my travel and accommodation, they did not influence the questions asked during this interview. This interview has been edited for clarity. This interview has been edited for clarity.