Transcription
Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from I don't even know what to call it. Fukuoka. Is it warm and sunny? Is it cold and shiny? It's a really interesting city. Western side of Japan, way down the archipelago. Woo. 6:30 in the morning here. Got up. It's like that meme. You know, the guy in bed, he's got his phone. He looks at the markets and the red lights hitting him and he's like, "Oh god, oh god, no, no."
And I thought about it for a little bit. You know, I sat down. I said, "Gosh, you know, how did we get here?" You know, what happened? And what do I have control and agency over and what do I not where am I having fun? Where am I not having fun? Where are we all having fun? Where are we not having fun?
Last night we had a great event and if you haven't watched the uh the live stream from it uh with the Japanese community highly recommend you watch it. Third presentation that we did uh here in Japan. So we did one in Hokkaido, one in Osaka and now one here in Fukuoka. And uh we had a lot of people. Last time I was in Fukuoka was 2016. And I was walking around. I said there's this thing we're going to build. It's called Cardono and it's going to be awesome. And everybody's like, I don't know about that. I don't know about that Cardono thing. I said, "No, no, trust me. It's going to be good. It's going to be big. It was just an idea back then." But you know what? We did it. We made it happen.
And I thought a lot about those olden days, you know, uh how we got started. It they were punk rock times. We were the rebels, you know, when we first started launching Cardano. kind of rock the boat here in Japan. And we had this one community manager and we told him, "Hey, you know, kind of tone it down a little bit. You know, it's rocking the boat a little bit." He's like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. I I got you." And I'm just sitting in my office in uh in Osaka in Homachi and get a document and there's an army of people in panda suits like 300 of them marching down the canals in Namba was banners that have Cardano and uh there's this guy riding a Ferrari California with a panda helmet on just be like this. I call him up and I said I said we need to tone it down a little bit. And he said, "Yeah, yeah. Nobody could see our faces. We had the panda suit on. We're good. Cardanado." So this that's that Bill Murray lost in translation with Japan situation. You have to uh you have to be very explicit sometimes of what tone in town means.
But then I thought about, you know, uh, what does it mean to be in crypto? Crypto is the punk rock of finance. We're supposed to be the outsiders. We're supposed to be the cool kids. We're supposed to be the nonconformists. We're supposed to be the rebels. We're supposed to be different from the rest. And what happened is that all that changed in 2021. We all got rich and we all got accepted. And you know uh you we all just basically became part of the system. And you know what the system does when you become part of it? They make it not cool. They take the life out of it. They strip you of all the things that make you special and they take what you've done and they package it again and again and again and consumerize it again. And you lose what makes it magical and special. And that's why crypto is where it's at right now.
Yeah, we can't control the macro, but we couldn't control the macro in 2020 when the whole world shut down and we got into COVID. We couldn't control the macro when wars broke out. We couldn't control the macro when it was just dollar Bitcoin and we were all worried in 2013 about Mount Gaus collapsing or Silk Road collapsing and everybody said, "Is this the end of the music?" Couldn't control it back then. But we were a lot happier because we were true to ourselves.
So then I look at myself and I say, you know, I've gotten a little fat and happy, literally fat, and also a opulent lifestyle. And I'm never going to succeed if we keep doing the same thing again and again and just be part of that club, hedge a little bit. If you're going to do great things, you have to go all in. So, you know what I'm going to do is get back to that punk rock group. You know, downsize a little bit. So, I'm going sell my Blackhawk, mothball the jet, sell my Lamborghinis, just go all in. Why not? I started from nothing. Many of you older fans, you remember when I was sitting in my apartment and I had the stuffed giraffes back on the uh dresser and those were the days I love more than any other. And those were the most fun I've ever had.
And the past month, you know, I've been coding every day. A little bit of help from our friend Claude, a little bit of help from our friend Codex. And you know, just a creativity that can flow when you have something that can think like that and you can go back and forth and referee with it and all these young people around like Pi uh and uh talking to Sebastian last night. We're at an Isakaya place and we're just talking about Lace ID and you know the coolest idea that came up there's these bots called Claude bots. you know, they're like AI agents uh and uh I guess they changed the name Moltbot and then Open Claw because people want to sue each other and they created their own social network called Moltbook. So there's literally now like a social network of AI bots running around doing things. And I was talking to Sebastian and I was like, "Okay, the markets are really bad. What we need to do is take Logan, the stuffed lobster on my mic. We need to make him a bot. We need to have him go and talk to the cloud bots and get them to buy some ADA and Knight. You know, we're running out of exit liquidity for this ecosystem. Let's just go all in with the open claw. And I just started this morning working on the design for this system. And I'm like, I got I got an AI computer I can run this thing on. Yeah, Logan's going to be great. He's go sell ADA to the uh to the robots. But that's the point is the sheer un connected creativity, you know, and you can't do that when you're part of the mainstream. You do that when you just have fun with it and you're part of the people. You're in the crowd with everybody. You're not apart from the crowd. Crypto's got to stay that way.
And um we as an industry have to embrace that. I signed up to change the world. I signed up to do interesting things, unique things, new things. And whenever I do things directly, and I'm in the pits with the people, I'm happy. I love sitting down every day writing some code or writing some documents. I wrote over 400 pages of technical documents for midnight over Christmas. The family was like, "Hey, Charles, uh, you know, you kind of kind of have to like celebrate Christmas with us." And I said, "No, no, no, no. I I'm just I'm writing this stuff about midnight. We got to do it. And I just had so much fun. I was really enjoying it. An executable specification oracle with a TLA spec and uh a full pro specification. And I come back and I say, "Here's all this code we got to write. Here's all the things we got to do. How would we do it?" I don't know. Maybe those [ __ ] lobsters will figure it out. You are the lobster, but we got to get it done. Let's ship in two weeks. put a Nintendo emulator in it. I don't know. It's a good way of testing if the folding system works. Can you get it done in two weeks? Like we can't do that. You can do that. Luca, you know, talk about punk rockers. Dude just shipped a backend for Plutus. Wrote it in Zigg one week time. That [ __ ] used to take us six months. It's a different era. And uh if you're going to win, you have to go all in and you have to really believe in these things.
I don't care if crypto's down or up because I joined crypto before crypto was up. And I don't care where it all ends up. Can't take it with you when you die. Just about the music and it's about are you having fun? I guess the underlying thread throughout this entire video is you got to ask yourself about crypto. Why are you in it? And if you're in it to change the world and have fun, meet people, and do interesting things, that makes it worth it. If you're in it to get rich, you've already lost. And every single time my mind drifted in that way of things and possessions, I lose two. So, we're getting back to first principles. We're getting back to punk rock. And we're going to have a lot of fun.
You know, today I get to go to Miamoto Mousashi's cave. Have a chance to take a look at that. He wrote the Dakota there and the five rings there. How about that? That guy was a baller. After being the baddest ass Ronin in the history of Japan, he realized he had stomach cancer. And he's like, "All right, time to write down everything I knew. Went lived in a cave, died two days later after he wrote his books." He's like, "All right, finished. Drop the mic. I'm done." That's the way we got to be. So, the tour continues. I'm going to go see Okinawa next, then Tokyo. We're going to finish super [ __ ] strong. Japan's back. We woke up all the old networks. We got everybody excited. You're looking for a Blackhawk. I got one to sell. She's real nice. We upgraded her. She'll treat you like a lady. And I'll see you in Hong Kong. And I'll be right there in the masses with all of you shoulder-to-shoulder because this revolution is just getting started and we're gonna have a lot of fun. Cheers everyone.