Surprise AMA 02/19/2024

Opens on President's Day February 19th 2024 from the office, drinking a meal replacement and recounting a 3-minute-34-second cold plunge at 35 degrees.

Gives a Cardano update: the SoRVaR progress report, an Intersect workshop in the UK led by Tam with the Civics committee, product functions now at Intersect, and budget, constitution, and SanchoNet discussions.

Highlights technical progress: Ouroboros Peras and Leios as the fast-finality and scalability work, plus Hydra, zero-knowledge, side chains, and Plutus V3 with new bitwise primitives flowing from CIPs.

Midnight is on schedule with an open devnet coming soon so everyday people can build on it.

Reports his clinic is past 6,200 patients across 10,000 square feet, expanding into ophthalmology, pharmacy, lab, and MRI and CAT imaging, with anti-aging trials of adipose stem cells and hyperbarics going through the FDA.

The ranch has 600 bison, and recommends Susanna Soberg's contrast-therapy protocol for anyone starting cold plunging.

The quant trading models he once promised are no longer relevant and were outsourced to Wave Financial, whose proprietary models IO does not own.

Confirms plans to combine a full node with Mithril, and thanks the 2,000 people who signed up for the invitation-only Midnight devnet.

On Navalny's death, says Putin is a dictator and Russia has always had dictators, and that opposing a dictator usually gets you killed.

Prigozhin and others who crossed Putin met the same fate, and questions why the US involves itself in every dictatorship worldwide.

Calls the American two-party duopoly a kind of soft dictatorship over big-ticket items, and introduces Democracy 4.0, a term Aggelos coined for better decision and representation systems.

Distinguishes efficacy from efficiency, calling physics effective but not efficient and emergency medicine efficient but often not effective.

Cardano's current decision resource is stake, a good bootstrap but flawed like proof of work and proof of stake, so Democracy 4.0 seeks additional counterbalancing resources.

On gout, says you manage it with allopurinol, diet, and fasting but cannot cure the genetic condition, and that he is more into hyperbarics and stem cells than therapeutic peptides.

He still wants to do The Joe Rogan Experience after Goguen, and would happily return to the Lex Fridman podcast, calling Lex one of his favorite people.

Plans to return to Cape Town and Africa despite the roughness, and to visit Japan, Singapore, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi in 2024, having just gotten back from Scotland.

Clarifies that a whale delegating to a DRep and then losing its keys does not lock that stake with the DRep forever.

On Neuralink, frames it as merging humanity and technology, since the brain is sealed and senses the world only through evolved interfaces like eyes and ears.

Cites synesthesia and the book Wednesday Is Indigo Blue to show that linking sensory dimensions boosts memory and creativity, noting many memory champions are synesthetes.

Imagines new senses like infrared vision, telepathy, or remote touch, calling Neuralink the first mechanical foray into what the Gateway project and remote sensing long claimed.

Neuralink faces monumental engineering: a corrosive brain environment demanding new materials, leads so thin a surgical robot must install them, plus power, battery safety, AI, and FDA hurdles after gruesome monkey and pig trials.

Neuralink cannot be ignored because its endpoint is concept transmission, receiving a mathematician's whole conceptual framework of topology or algebra without 10,000 hours of study, like the Matrix I-know-kung-fu moment.

Suggests Neuralink explore diamond batteries over lithium and worries about cancer risk from Bluetooth transmissions touching the brain directly around the clock.

He prefers Synchron, which threads a stent through arteries into the brain for read-write capability without Neuralink's far more invasive surgery.

Calls the XRP community's attack a relentless campaign based on a lie, and wishes Brad Garlinghouse and David Schwartz would say so, insisting he never denied ETHgate but called it immaterial.

The grand conspiracy is the claim that someone bribed the SEC to target XRP while giving Ethereum a free pass, granting the Ethereum free pass is possible but the XRP-targeting bribe has no evidence.

Years on, no one has produced evidence that the government was bribed to target XRP, and doubts released early-Ethereum calls will show any XRP discussion.

Distinguishes Ethereum steering a favorable regulatory interpretation, which most entities do, from someone paying a regulator to go after XRP.

Argues the free-pass logic is self-defeating: claiming Ethereum bribed its way out implies it should be a security, which weakens XRP's own not-a-security case; mentions Joe Lubin.

On Ethereum Classic, recalls building the Mantis client twice and pushing for a treasury like Zcash's, since the pre-mine and ICO funds all went to the Ethereum Foundation.

The ETC treasury they proposed paid time and materials with no upside or vesting, so no rational actor would take all the downside to innovate, leaving it a dead ecosystem.

He holds no animus toward XRP or Ethereum Classic, and gave the 500,000-follower ETC Twitter account to Ergo because he saw something innovative and real there.

Answers the when-commercial-use question by noting Book.io, World Mobile, DeFi, and NFT projects already count, and dismisses the idea that only physical production is real.

Cardano is a real new economy worth over 20 billion dollars with weekly turnover, and that its TVL climbed from 31st to 11th as young smart contracts near their three-year maturity curve.

The Charli3 oracle team an election tracker would be a cool feed, and defends DeFi as a real-world use case versus predatory centralized exchanges.

Contrasts a DEX with a centralized exchange that can steal funds, delist you, and seize the votes and staking rights of your tokens, while a DEX is permissionless.

Markets are multi-trillion-dollar artifacts, from security tokens to intellectual-property trading, where Wall Street, the New York Stock Exchange, and Nasdaq live.

The story of Logan the red lobster, named via a collective smart contract in the early Cardano smart-contract era and kept on the microphone ever since.

Midnight fixes the fundamental problem that blockchains cannot keep a secret, since a blockchain is by design a globally transparent trusted bulletin board.

Almost every commercial, government, and medical transaction has a private and a public part, like a bank legally required to keep your ATM withdrawal secret.

Decentralizing that requires a new primitive, the programmable private smart contract, giving both private and public state with scoped disclosure.

You can assign a programmatic auditor as an unchangeable cryptographic commitment, getting privacy plus auditability, and that blockchains are super connectors joining parties who do not trust each other.

Introduces ACE applications for freedom of Association, Commerce, and Expression, giving the example of university faculty afraid to voice opinions for fear of career destruction.

A selective-disclosure system can prove you are a faculty member without revealing your identity, so a poll could show 70 percent oppose something without exposing which 70 percent.

Current systems force trust in a centralized institution, citing the 2020 election that half of America called fraud and no outside party could independently audit.

A blockchain election by design cannot lie, so anyone can verify it was fair without revealing how Charles or Bob voted, which is exactly what Midnight was built for.

Calls Midnight the single biggest evolution after governance, and notes Cardano gets both the governance and the privacy improvements, putting it light years ahead.

Argues scalability is a commoditized differentiator anyone can copy within 18 to 24 months, so real differentiators are things you cannot copy-paste, like a government versus a constitution.

Freedom-preservation systems, good governance, and strong institutions are non-replicable competitive capabilities, which is why the two biggest research areas are Midnight and the Voltaire governance house.

Names the two big differentiators as on-chain governance, which Ethereum will not and Bitcoin cannot touch, and Midnight's privacy approach.

Private smart contracts are already running on the Midnight testnet, one of the fastest-moving teams IO has ever assembled.

Names Lace as the best wallet for newcomers to Cardano, admitting his bias.

He is done with centralized social networks, that Elon Musk's free-speech commitment is not sustainable, and cites Meta and YouTube censorship anchored to trusted institutions.

Warns AI alignment now censors political conversations you disagree with, since 95 percent of the people building these models lean one political direction, creating an echo chamber.

The industry has a blueprint for a good decentralized social network built on governance, identity via Prism, and privacy via Midnight, to be pursued through a partner chain.

Plans papers on a decentralized LLM and social network combined, since Musk merging Grok and Twitter made sense, tying it to personal knowledge management tools like Obsidian.

Predicts 2024 will be the most brutal election of his lifetime, with deepfakes already targeting him and an unbelievable October surprise coming.

There is a nonzero chance a candidate wins from a prison cell, since Trump is likely to be convicted of felonies and cannot get a fair trial in Washington DC or New York.

Argues you do not arrest political opponents, noting that having the opinion COVID leaked from a lab was banned on Facebook in 2020 and the FBI now says it is likely true.

Electing Trump will not heal anything, and that the fix is to de-escalate, stop deplatforming and arresting people, and start listening.

Calls decentralized LLMs and decentralized social networks a national priority, or they will be weaponized in the conflict and escalate it further.

The Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics at Carnegie Mellon, led by Jeremy Avigad at the intersection of computer science, mathematics, and philosophy.

Mathematics is shaky at the top because a proof's only check is another human's thumbs up, so formal mathematics runs proofs on a computer as a thinking agent, an idea from the QED Manifesto and 1970's Automath.

He put 20 million dollars into the center, that the Lean proof language is gaining traction, and that problems like Riemann and Goldbach are unassailable only because they are too big for one mathematician.

Credits Trump's record with the Abraham Accords, having personally seen an Israeli flag in Dubai, plus productive North Korea and Russia talks and a needed US-China reset.

Credits the Trump tax cut with repatriating trillions via a 12 percent minimum on offshore subsidiaries, a change Bezos, Amazon, and Microsoft fought.

Trump refined US-versus-them politics into a reality-TV football game that is now the American standard, though he did not create the trend.

He can have dinner with Senator Wyden or Senator Lummis despite deep political differences, because politics should not define a person.

Argues presidents held to normal judicial standards would be imprisoned, citing the Anwar al-Awlaki drone strike on an American citizen and that an activist prosecutor could go after Obama.

The state has a monopoly on violence and can torture through enhanced interrogation or SERE training, so the president as the face of the state cannot be judged like a normal person.

The only way to replace a failed government short of war is a constitutional convention, which is all he cares about, and why single-issue voters like Ryan Selkis back Trump against a hostile administration.

Asks why people cannot talk to each other, defending Tucker Carlson's Putin interview as valuable for understanding an adversary rather than a useful-idiot scandal.

Proposes electoral reform where each state elects a delegate funded federally, running a playoff-style bracket that guarantees representation and political diversity, with the runner-up as vice president.

Term limits, a balanced-budget amendment, and constitutional language to rein in the bureaucracy as a fourth branch of government.

The Deep State employs over 10 percent of Americans and never contracts, so cutting 5 percent a year would balance the budget, but only a constitutional change can force it.

He would endorse and campaign for RFK Jr if he picks Tulsi Gabbard, noting RFK is denied Secret Service despite polling 10 to 15 percent while his father was assassinated running for president.

Negative views of him do not affect ADA and he will never self-censor, since you cannot keep people happy, like the endless goalpost-moving over his cold plunge.

A book written by now-competitors about 10-year-old events is not a fair accounting of history, so it should not influence Cardano's growth.

The real goal is a government where people participate despite him being unlikable, so you should be able to love Cardano and hate Charles.

Criticizes America's build-up-and-bring-down celebrity culture, citing Kanye West's brilliance in freestyling a Super Bowl ad on his phone that made 19 million dollars.

Says if he were the villain critics imagine he would be in prison like Sam Bankman-Fried, yet after a decade of building across 70-plus countries there is no scandal.

Delays happen, like Windows Vista or the Boeing 787, but with no major scandal, so the evil-mastermind narrative is pure fantasy.

An 18-month-old whiteboard idea is now genetically engineered plants glowing in the lab, and that his 70-million-dollar clinic runs real anti-aging trials while Balaji only talks about it.

The clinic was built on the old Skyline Grill site, complete with hidden stripper cages, and is now the top primary-care clinic in Campbell County, Wyoming.

Humans are pathologically incapable of being fair or seeing their cognitive biases, which is exactly why blockchain exists to provide rules, auditors, and checks and balances.

He loves peer review, distributed systems, and the public accountability of AMAs, and that Shelley, Goguen, Basho, and Voltaire all arrived as promised.

Points to leaving a 900-million-dollar sovereign wealth fund for the community to control as the indisputable track record.

It takes courage as a self-described fat person to take his shirt off and jump into a cold plunge, doing it to inspire others in the same situation.

Reflects that he got no public credit for becoming a billionaire at 33, so you do these things for the challenge, not the accolades.

Making money let him invest in anti-aging, synthetic biology, agriculture, political and charity work, and creating the Hoskinson Center.

The Davos story from 2020 with the Cardano Foundation's Nathan Kaiser, struck by the badge-color classism ranking your access to Klaus Schwab.

Helicopters and hundreds of private jets while preaching about carbon, and prostitutes descending on Davos for their biggest week of the year.

The WEF exists to preserve hierarchies, opaque governance, and a war-based global order, dressed up as you-will-own-nothing and the Great Reset.

Recalls government officials at Davos asking how to put a backdoor in a blockchain and control it, revealing they do not truly work for the people.

He was never invited to the Bilderberg Group and declined a Bohemian Grove invitation, uneasy about the effigy burning.

He has spoken with Brian Johnson, and chases anti-aging because its market will grow from a trillion dollars to 15 trillion by 2030 as treatments converge.

He believes Putin only wants Ukraine for seaport access and will not invade a NATO country, and that Ukraine was about to join NATO.

He has about six major ventures, and that his Legends of Valor game is on ice, since embedding it in Forgotten Realms would mean buying and de-wokifying Wizards of the Coast.

Analyzes why Baldur's Gate 3 succeeded: it started from beloved, deeply understood IP in Forgotten Realms and paid homage without insulting the fanbase like Rings of Power did.

Baldur's Gate 3 nailed gameplay with a faithful 5th-edition Dungeons and Dragons translation and high replayability, plus genuinely good writing and characters.

Cites Top Gun Maverick and Avatar 2 as billion-dollar successes that honored fan expectations while adding new candy.

Legends of Valor lacks compelling IP, unlike Todd Howard's Elder Scrolls, so he must either borrow a world like Pathfinder or Faerun or build one from scratch as BioWare did with Dragon Age Origins.

Larian Studios' signature gods-and-mortals divinity theme, and that CRPGs split into turn-based like Baldur's Gate or real-time like Skyrim, each attracting different players.

Baldur's Gate 3 inherited Wizards of the Coast and Forgotten Realms and used a strong early-access model, still taking six years to build.

His own game would be a half-decade project aiming to be a legendary all-time title that launches a new world and could spawn an MMO like Elder Scrolls Online, with characters worth cosplaying like Kratos.

Companies good at game development tend to be good at storytelling and other things, and calls Baldur's Gate 2 the best game ever made for its time.

Recalls playing Legends of Valor on the Atari ST, and rules out bariatric surgery he would rather die than have, though he notes drugs like tirzepatide and Ozempic replicate the effect.

You cannot back ADA with gold or real estate because someone must hold it, but the Cardano treasury could be managed like a sovereign wealth fund.

The 900-million-dollar treasury would be around 4.5 billion at the all-time high, and that sovereign-wealth returns of 8 to 13 percent could yield roughly 500 million a year to reinvest.

The protocol could acquire tangible and intangible assets like IP, gold, and real estate, but that needs legal innovation to recognize a blockchain's agency; confirms the clinic offers the Grail cancer test.

Cites the Cayman Star Trust for perpetual trusts, and says asset managers like Goldman Sachs would be incentivized to keep Cardano around.

Anyone wanting to become a DRep to join Intersect and go to sancho.network for the information.

Recounts playing EVE Online by CCP, running macro ice mining with AutoHotkey.

RealFi in Africa is going very well under John O'Connor, having already lent out a few million dollars.

On Verkle trees and vector commitments in a Merkle tree for Ethereum, says the best structures are hyperproofs, created by the Ergo community and Alex Chepurnoy.

Recommends aspiring blockchain developers study functional data structures, Jonathan Katz's Intro to Cryptography, and Andrew Miller's authenticated data structures paper.

Says if he lost everything he would rebuild, having already been kicked out of Ethereum, since wealth is a state of mind, like Arnold Schwarzenegger who would build himself back up.

Stem cells combined with hyperbarics are the closest thing to a backup tank, and that ADA's delisting by a few exchanges after inaccurate agency statements did not materially hurt.

The Cardano Foundation manages exchange relationships and liquidity is fine, but the real question is getting Cardano native tokens equal listing consideration with ADA; notes eToro delisted ADA only in the US.

Closes on Big Joe the Don from the Cardano Stoners Club becoming king of SanchoNet, joking they need governance overhauls and to beware regicide.