Little Bit of Everything

Opens December 31st 2021 on the last day of the year, recapping a hell of a year that took him from El Salvador to Africa.

It was the first year he stayed silent for a full week at a meditation retreat, and that 120,000 people attended the Cardano Summit.

Mourns Betty White dying at 99 just before her 100th birthday, recalling Golden Girls and Mary Tyler Moore reruns growing up in a time-warped Hawaii.

Laments Robert Malone, who created the mRNA vaccine, being banned from Twitter for alleged misinformation, and cites a truth book by John Burgess of Princeton on how truth is a hard concept.

Arbitrary fact-checkers decide legitimacy while being hypocritical, and that crypto is scapegoated though most financial crime uses the dollar, not the people charging 85 percent interest or laundering for drug lords.

2022 may not grow like 2021 for the 2.5-trillion-dollar industry, which will digest becoming so big so quickly, needing education, tools, and consumer experiences.

Predicts DeFi regulatory events in 2022 to 2023 like the post-ICO-mania crackdown, plus a likely Ripple win, and a red-wave election creating gridlock until 2024.

People are waking up and opting out of legacy institutions that lost legitimacy, with CNN and Fox ratings falling every year.

A huge uptick in the intellectual dark web from the Weinsteins to Rogan, Fridman, and Harris, plus Jordan Peterson and singularity content, as people construct the metaverse.

He will attend CES January 5th to 8th to see the 2100 exhibitors of VR, AR, and AI, all aimed at something beyond today's dissatisfying reality.

He is tired of the cynicism that things cannot change, questioning why people accept the government and mask mandates without thinking them through.

Mocks a Longmont restaurant where you mask for a 10-foot walk to your seat then take it off, questioning what science that public-health theater is based on.

Anytime you change the rules everything is up for grabs, from theocracy to plutocracy to communism, including the meaning of money and life itself.

Haters cannot acknowledge Cardano's progress, paradoxically calling him both a brilliant charismatic cult leader and an incompetent who cannot run a taco stand.

He is called a cult leader just for showing up weekly to share what he notices about propaganda in society.

Mourns the Marshall Fire, an electrical fire that burned 580 buildings near Broomfield, Superior, and Louisville where he grew up, five days after Christmas.

His thoughts-and-prayers tweet drew political attacks about not tweeting California wildfires, showing how everything has become us-versus-them political.

Asks where all the rage comes from and whether people's angry ideologies were self-derived or implanted by mass media and doctrinaire education.

Critiques Silicon Valley's move-fast-and-break-things mantra, contrasting a social app where failure means waiting 30 seconds with financial protocols where failure means you die.

The move-fast mentality caused 10.5 billion dollars of DeFi losses in 2021 per The Block, which hinders adoption when people lose their life savings.

Challenges the philosophy of rushing to market to pump a token price and sell at the top, calling it incompatible with true decentralization.

Silicon Valley thinking is why Novogratz has 20 good men telling him Cardano is nothing and why VCs do not understand Cardano has a community, thinking it is just him behind a microphone.

Finds hope in designing a clinic with his dad and brother, calling working with family on a productive project magical and invigorating.

The future of wellness: improving the microbiome, neural performance via photobiomodulation and hyperbaric therapies, sequencing a genome for a thousand dollars, and Viome giving personalized probiotics from a stool sample plus continuous glucose monitors for a concierge model that subsidizes care for the poor.

Laments that a 34-year-old non-doctor can design a system an order of magnitude better than a US medical system broken by cynicism, nepotism, and corruption.

Introduces his HHPG framework for the year, Health, Happiness, Performance, and Growth, arguing people set resolutions without asking foundational questions.

Shares Jon Kabat-Zinn's long definition of meditation as systematically regulating attention and energy to transform the quality of one's experience.

Defines health via the clinic as preventing root causes before chronic conditions develop rather than just managing them allopathically, admitting he is overweight himself.

Defines happiness as meaning plus awareness and acceptance so purpose lets you endure anything like a doctor enduring residency, then covers performance psychology, goal-setting, and growth like learning to fly the Blackhawk he owns or hitting company KPIs.

Asks whether your goals serve your community and nation or just you and your family, distinguishing collectivistic from individualistic societies.

He feels a moral obligation to Wheatland, the 3500-person town near his ranch, planning four restaurants, a taxidermy processing place, and hydroponics to create jobs.

Cynicism about how things are exists partly because of people's own consent, since they complain about a dirty park but rarely clean it themselves.

Reflects on his leadership failures over almost 10 years as a CEO, first depicted in the movie The Infinite Machine, especially putting people in roles without adequate training.

Asks what training the people who govern society have gone through, tying it back to the root causes of society's problems.

The industry is as political and philosophical as economic, and that pumping tokens distracts from the core mission of redefining wealth for the next 20 to 30 years.

Warns that new is not automatically better and traditions can keep you out of trouble, illustrated by an island parable where newcomers dismiss a wise elder's warning about radiation caves.

New institution ideas range from more power to no power, like China's social-credit trust-the-state model, and that people who lack wisdom and self-governance converge toward that.

2022 will harshly examine every belief and society must be honest, like admitting that printing trillions caused inflation despite economists like Krugman claiming no one saw it coming, which he compares to a seven-pack-a-day smoker surprised by lung cancer.

Predicts the Joe Rogan podcast will eventually be deplatformed and speech criminalized, with a thought-police camp at worst, which is the point of immutability and decentralization since you cannot trust people.

Every institution is fallible, but exceptional ones like airplanes work 99.9999 percent of the time, a track record few human endeavors match.

The technology extracts human cognitive, political, and religious biases from judgment into a structure that cannot lie, like the laws of physics applying regardless of your feelings.

A token is a necessary evil to bootstrap and decentralize a network into many hands, not the purpose itself, just as gasoline is not the purpose of a car.

Says the more complex life gets the more sophisticated institutions must be, tracing medicine from the shaman and heroic era to the allopathic doctor to the complex hospital, and warns that faith in such institutions is fragile since a single event can destroy a government's legitimacy.

The people who dare to say wake up and do things differently get called crazy or cult leaders but are the only sane ones, and that changing yourself must come before changing others like the oxygen-mask rule, recovering the beginner's mind of a four-year-old asking basic why questions.

Cardano is in incredible hands with a beautiful roadmap and a gradual transition to a permanent open-source project like Linux, with more people working on it by the end of 2022.

The 127 dapps on Cardano should open their code and each commit a developer to the protocol, a small demand that would advance the system enormously, with a Plutus feedback loop and dcSpark's side-chain work already helping.

His personal goal from the 2014 TED Talk finally happens in 2022, the high point of his life, comparing it to Andrew Wiles solving Fermat's Last Theorem with both beauty and sadness.

The model will bring three billion excluded people into the ecosystem not from humanitarianism but profit, like fast-food chains locating by the math, so demonstrating profitable developing-world onboarding attracts an army of entrepreneurs.

Recalls a Consensus NFT seminar at the Wyoming hackathon years early with five attendees, now a four-billion-dollar-a-month space with everyone having an NFT fund, driven by the economic signal.

All the pieces are finally there for the RealFi circle: the peer-to-peer Djed stablecoin, Prism identity for credit scoring, Goguen smart contracts, and a large community.

Cardano is now defined more by what the community does than by the founders, and in 2022 he hopes to fade into a footnote, since great projects forget their founders like people forgetting Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn built the internet.

Announces he bought the office building and will refurbish a downstairs suite into a professional studio like Joe Rogan's, moving beyond a solo AMA to more structured interviews.

Pilots like People of IOG interviewed employees Michaela, Denal, and Dan Friedman, and he wants to bring on more IOG people, community members, and figures like Stephen Wolfram, plus a Stack Exchange for questions.

He is frustrated by fragmented social media and is hiring seven marketers, mostly for social media, to tell Cardano's story with fact-based evidence rather than leaving it to podcasters and competitors.

Critics dismiss the number-one GitHub commits and claim you cannot build on Cardano, which is false with two million assets issued, and that nothing changes the narrative like the success of dozens of audited certified dapps now being built by the 127 projects.

The 127 projects must communicate why the expensive certified approach is worth it, since 10.5 billion dollars lost is 10 percent of the industry, like an engineer whose 10 percent of planes crash.

The open-source project will have a marketing pillar with accountable people funded perpetually by Catalyst after everyone is dead and buried.

Stays carefully optimistic that 2022 will be challenging but one of the best years, as long as they work together and resist bitterness, division, and cynicism, wishing he had a cult leader's charisma to propagate empathy and compassion.

Mourns Betty White and Desmond Tutu dying, closing that two bad years can become three or people can wake up and change themselves, wishing everyone a happy new year full of meaning and purpose.