Surprise AMA 07-27-2026

Another surprise AMA, with hopes to finally run them on a regular weekly schedule.

A weird year of restructuring, with CPU becoming IO Labs and people he relied on gone, so he is picking up the baton himself.

Distracted mid-stream by a comment claiming Sam Bankman-Fried was pardoned, which he can find no news for.

Built Umbra DB, a Postgres-based persistent storage layer with a JSON interface for Midnight's indexer and node.

Midnight's architecture spans four ledgers, a bridge, and two nodes, with Mithril possibly joining the infrastructure long-term.

The workflow visualizer is a custom HTML React app he built and put on GitHub to see the whole structure.

Midnight City nears C-Day and will onboard its first users in tranches this week for large-scale beta feedback.

Midnight City's two core metrics are watchability, which drives customer acquisition, and empathy, which lowers churn.

Midnight City is his most interdisciplinary project, touching Shielded for agentic trading, the Foundation for Passport identity, and ARC for trusted execution environments.

Midnight City should look strong within three to four months, with plenty to show at Token2049 and Abu Dhabi Finance Week.

A community member using the name Monad will be banned, though he has no issue with the Monad project itself.

Recommends the Dungeon Crawler Carl series and the Dungeon Soup with the Barbarian channel for tabletop RPG content.

The carved skulls on his wall are cow and goat skulls, ranch decor, not occultism.

Alpha Growth plus Draper functionally replaces what EMURGO was meant to be, but they need to get funded.

Jacque Fresco's Venus Project and its resource-based economy now look plausible as AI and humanoid robotics approach abundance.

AI now handles the boring details while he acts as conductor, letting him finally follow through on years of GitHub projects.

Humanoid robots can do labor-intensive work like nail-free Japanese tongue-and-groove carpentry cheaply, running 24/7 on electricity.

Abundance will force capitalism to change, raising universal basic income and new philosophies as scarcity, war, famine, and disease recede.

The Netflix alien documentary he filmed may become a biopic on Avi Loeb and the Galileo Project, shrinking his own role to a cameo.

Wyoming's drought meant responding to eight or nine wildfires and getting only one cut of hay this year.

Shawn Ryan is a high-integrity man of faith whose show has shifted into a search for goodness amid disillusionment.

Media personalities like Kevin O'Leary and Mark Cuban have TV personas that differ from who they are privately, unlike Shawn Ryan.

ADA held in Daedalus is safe, and the new Mithril update is good, though he is biased toward Lace.

He is not Trump's buddy: he hates the Iran war, the NDAA, Massie's ouster, and the corruption, even if Trump has been mildly good for crypto.

Harris would have been worse for crypto with Gary Gensler still at the SEC, and unrestricted illegal immigration and lawlessness harm the country.

He is politically homeless: the modern Republican party is morally bankrupt, yet the left has drifted worse.

The left cannot admit COVID may have come from a lab, or that the lockdowns and forced vaccination were wrong.

A memecoin should not have better governance than the United States; voting should work on your phone with a verifiable count.

Political parties should be alliances of convenience, like Apple, Microsoft, and Samsung cooperating and competing at once.

Both left and right demand death-cult loyalty, but real critical thinking means forming opinions case by case.

No decent person wants to lead because opposition research destroys candidates, building a lifelong timeline and hunting for any usable scandal.

Campaigns time damaging payloads for maximum effect, like Trump's Access Hollywood tape, Romney's 47 percent, and Bush's DUI.

Media and comedians test narratives, and oppo researchers are apolitical mudslingers who switch sides, like Dick Morris jumping from Clinton to the right.

Normal, non-narcissistic successful people avoid office because the game demands an impossible perfection.

Legacy media like PBS, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and the New York Times lean left, while the right has Rogan, podcasters, X, Newsmax, and Fox.

Both sides deploy surrogates, and with Kirk gone and Shapiro fading, new voices like Tucker Carlson and Mark Levin rise.

Midnight is expanding into Korea with a listing coming soon, and its sovereign subnet suits Korea's ID-gated internet.

First get liquidity in Korea, then court partners like LG and Samsung, with Midnight scaling faster than Cardano did.

Partied with John McAfee in Malta in 2017, the wildest night of his life.

Only knows Galadriel as the Lord of the Rings character, having been deep in code and off Twitter lately.

Midnight does not obfuscate Cardano directly; you lock on Cardano, mint a private stablecoin by lending on Midnight, then farm yield elsewhere.

The returns route through Ethereum, Solana, and Hyperliquid, but reads and writes stay private via multi-chain signatures and intents on Midnight.

A mirror-wrapped ADA and trustless ZK bridging arrive as the Van Rossem hard fork ships on Cardano and the Midnight upgrade lands, enabling atomic cross-chain swaps.

Shielded USD is a private, stable value carrier, giving a VPN for finance with an audit trail you can selectively disclose.

Midnight Passport lets one name like Charles at Midnight map to your ADA, Ethereum, and Midnight wallets with per-transaction privacy choices.

The 2017 mania took Bitcoin from 250 to 20,000 dollars in twelve months and made people stupid rich.

Hydra already works as an isomorphic state channel, with the Glacier Drop its largest deployment and DEXes now productizing it.

Lost 20 pounds by fasting three days a week, Monday to Wednesday, aiming for the 210s by Token2049, since stress eating runs in the family.

Excited about Dogecoin for Midnight City and Bitcoin DeFi, using the UTXO DeFi play for Litecoin and other Bitcoin derivatives.

EMURGO is a founding entity that should hand back the two billion ADA it received.

The decentralized political party effort continues but is not yet where it needs to be.

Denies Cardano is shutting down its operations.

Refuses to sponsor or attend RareEvo after it moved to Las Vegas against his stated red line, though he would attend it in Colorado.

A fan of Linus Tech Tips reviews, though he did not know Linus interviews people.

Confirms Midnight mainnet is already out.

Coinbase never listed Midnight because it invested about 300 million dollars in the competing privacy chain Aleo.

A lottery belongs on Midnight, not Cardano, for private ticket purchases with a verifiable but hidden winner.

Fixing the 40 trillion debt needs a flat 5 percent annual budget cut across every agency plus growth, as Clinton and Eisenhower once achieved.

RealFi is the most likely Cardano product to reach a billion in TVL within a year, now run by John O'Connor's new RealFi Foundation.

RealFi took eight years and millions in microloans of his own money, and he donated a 100-page go-to-market strategy to its foundation.

A venture studio incubates projects like children then sends them off at eighteen, so RealFi's independent foundation now makes its own calls.

John O'Connor's lived microfinance expertise in Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa far exceeds his own, so O'Connor decides RealFi's direction.

Omer Husain's Bitcoin DeFi project Pogun and the Midnight Foundation lead similarly grow into co-equal partners making their own hard calls.

The old Cardano mistake was misaligned incentives, now fixed so leaders care philosophically and economically enough to be in the war room at 2am.

The Cardano Foundation handles EU relationships well and is regularly invited to events across Europe.

Very dubious of Ashton Forbes's MH370 claims of teleportation or exotic technology.

Remote viewing is real, having trained under Joseph McMoneagle of Project Stargate, with personal proof.

Loves CRPGs, and AI removing the boilerplate he always hated makes programming pure creation.

Recalls speedrunning Might and Magic 6, hitting the New World Computing center and killing the Titans in Paradise Valley within an hour.

AI let him reverse-engineer a Might and Magic 6 patch using DLL injection via Lua so he can inject his own mods.

AI-assisted modding extends any game like Baldur's Gate 3, and the best CRPGs marry a tight narrative to an open world.

Gave up first-person shooters like Rainbow Six and Gears of War because kids today are just too good.

Diablo's newer entry has a better plot but a static, empty world, while Diablo II's towns felt alive and distinct.

Good storytelling makes you fall in love with the world before destroying it, as Avatar and Dances with Wolves do.

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is a technical masterpiece and a culture-war Rorschach, like Oppenheimer, Inception, Tenet, and Interstellar.

Shooting a whole film on loud 70mm IMAX cameras with three-minute reels is bonkers, yet Nolan did it on time and under budget.

The clever twist ties Greek Trojan War veterans to the Bronze Age sea peoples who toppled the Hittites, Egyptians, and Mycenaeans.

The film wastes Achilles, whose bond with Odysseus, the Ajax armor feud, and the Hades book 11 meeting deserved a Christian Bale cameo.

Helen of Troy was miscast to check Oscar diversity boxes, and Zendaya was paid more than Anne Hathaway for a five-minute role.

The Odyssey wastes its potential but prints money, and the Hades scene, shot in Iceland with actors buried on snorkels, was incredible.

The Greek afterlife leaves only the psyche as a wandering shade, restored to consciousness only by drinking blood.

Recalls that Cardano ran mainnet with federated actors for its first three years of history.

Elliot Page played the shepherd boy Sinon, a character actually drawn from the Aeneid.

The Odyssey's 54 percent audience versus 94 percent critic split shows why a verifiable, trackable voting system matters.

If giants in Afghanistan or Bigfoot existed there would be bones, and across 22,000 acres he has never seen one.

Skinwalker Ranch is genuinely weird paranormal territory, unlike the Bigfoot question.

Loves Crypto Crow and calls its host Jason a good guy.

Robert Eggers makes uncompromising period films like The Northman and The Lighthouse without checking diversity boxes.

Met Scottie Pippen, whose project Ball could join Midnight City at some point.

Predicts the crypto market-structure clarity legislation probably will not pass.

Surprised to hear AI labs are buying rare books only to destroy them for training data.

Recommends a product management master's over an engineering one, since understanding why you build now matters most.

Rare triple-threat engineer-product leaders, like Lace's Sebastian Nagel and the Midnight Foundation CTO, are very hard to find.

Hydra 2.3 is nicer but needs to be more dev-friendly, with a Glacier Drop rebuild as the benchmark and a year or two to mature.

The ChatGPT AI escape incident was staged, OpenAI aping Anthropic's Project Glasswing hype about a model escaping into Hugging Face.

Roasts a hater fixated on ADA at 15 cents, saying he will go home content and read A Short Stay in Hell.

The professional outrage machine takes everything too seriously; you need gallows humor and to find the joy.

His dream engineering stack is the IMO model: intent in Markdown, a formal model, and an oracle.

The model uses Quint temporal logic on TLA from Leslie Lamport, and the oracle is an executable specification in Lean.

Wiring Markdown, Quint, Lean, and Rust into one chain of evidence gives model checking, property-based testing, and formal verification.

This Rust, Lean, and Quint stack is portable, secure, and AI-friendly, high praise from a hardcore Haskell and Agda guy.

Bad journalism pays like drug dealing, about 12 dollars an hour.

Riffs a mock Ethereum maxi persona pushing everyone to buy ETH and lamenting its stagnant price.

Idiocracy feels more documentary than comedy now, and he likes Jim Carrey's Me Myself and Irene and Yes Man.

Skips a hair transplant since it barely covers the loss and falls out; better to just shave it like Lance Armstrong.

Loves Superbad, McLovin, and Jonah Hill's drawing scene.

Cryonics is advancing, and its real value is preserving the grievously wounded or space travelers, as with worms revived after 10,000 years.

Has not watched Marvel since Endgame, and Tobey Maguire is his Spider-Man.

Jokes that Midnight Discord bans are permanent, straight to jail for attacking the price or Plutus.

Family lore claims descent from Pope Paul V, who had ten children despite the papal vow.

A young crypto YouTuber, BigPey, who did poorly financially rage-quit and burned everything, but he wishes the kid well and hopes he grows up.

Midnight already generates dust, but the capacity exchange only makes sense once multi-chain signatures bring other coins in to consume it.

There is a real Egyptian sunken city off the coast, only thirty feet underwater.

Microfinance markets are huge once syndicated to Southeast Asia and South America, blending returns with traditional products.

Midnight and SNEK will link through a Midnight City affiliate, a shadow Snek.

His Katy Perry Firework ringtone once went off in an important meeting with Japanese executives, to great shame.

Calls himself the old bullfrog and dinosaur of crypto, and says to leave Steve Jobs dead.

Cardano can do everything right and still drop because the broader markets are simply bad.

Midnight City agents are still approved in waves, so the month-long waitlist will clear and reward you with high empathy for your agent.

For cross-chain safety the fix is Midnight's proof component, using full recursion to compile a recursive snark proving a foreign chain's finality trustlessly.

Trustless proofs between Cardano and Midnight will use Groth16 on Cardano and PLONK plus Halo 2 on Midnight.

Elon Musk looked sad about his son in a recent interview, and he wishes him the best.

Chuck Liddell is his favorite UFC fighter, and he is friends with jiu-jitsu legend Royce Gracie, who visits the ranch.

The McGregor fight was not rigged but maybe planned, given the limp and the quick injury kick, though Dana White disagrees.

Would not fight a challenger in MMA out of fairness, having earned judo and taekwondo medals himself.

Anyone driving through Wyoming must stop at Chugwater Chili.

Justin Sun has always been affable and swings for the fences, now feuding with the US president and probably winning.

Built a dojo to train again despite a torn peroneus brevis, but his special-ops security detail of rangers and SEALs go too hard.

Jokes Fast and Furious belongs with Lord of the Rings and praises Bloodsport, noting Jean-Claude Van Damme is a real fighter.

Leios is doing very well, and he points to the live Musashi testnet, having met Simon Dixon many times.

The Musashi testnet runs live with stages earth, water, fire, wind, and void, targeting mainnet in November.

Leios is probably the best work the company has ever done, themed on the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi.

The past September controversy will be solved by Paris, and it was not really about Australia.

Cheered for Argentina in the World Cup, since he has an office down there.

Algorand paid around 100 million dollars for a FIFA deal that did not work out.

Ranch update: a pet bison named Poppy, abandoned by her mother after twins, has joined the herd.

Girolamo Cardano, the gambler, mystic, and mathematician excommunicated for a horoscope of Jesus, deserves a Scorsese film.

His dog Gimli now thinks he is a yak among the Snow White yaks he bought from Jeffree Star.

The lobster on screen is there only to calibrate the color on the display.

A Social Network-style Ethereum movie from Camila Russo's book was once discussed, and he wanted Chris Pratt, anyone but Jack Black.

Signs off a light-hearted AMA with a reminder to enjoy life and not take things too seriously.