Charles Hoskinson: Cardano | Lex Fridman Podcast #192

The following is a conversation with Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano, co-founder of Ethereum, and a mathematician who's one of the most well-read and knowledgeable people on the technical side of cryptocurrency that I've ever spoken to. Quick mention of our sponsors: Gala Games, Allform, Indeed, ExpressVPN, and Eight Sleep. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that Charles is not just a mathematician or cryptocurrency innovator, but also a Colorado-based farmer of bison and mushrooms, a gamer, a fisherman, and a world traveler. When I asked him if he has a nice professional picture of himself, he sent me a picture of him in Mongolia with a hawk on his shoulder, meeting the Mongolian president. That, to me, pretty much says it all, speaking to the humor and the intelligence of a man who's bold, innovative, and does not shy away from a bit of fun and a bit of controversy, which makes him a fascinating human being to explore ideas with. I do want to say, in terms of ideas, that, at least to me, cryptocurrency is much bigger than just a way for a few Americans to make a quick buck through meme-driven speculation. It is technology that enables freedom from oppression, from suffering in the world, because money is power. Mongolia, for example, was a reminder of that for me. Next day, after talking with Charles, I spoke with Yeonmi Park, who's a North Korean defector and who spent time in Mongolia as many defectors do in her and their escape from North Korea. Her story, the story of North Korea, the story of atrocities throughout the 20th century committed by Hitler, Stalin, and others, is a reminder that the world is full of darkness, but it is also full of beauty and love, and it is a world worth fighting for in every way we know how. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Charles Hoskinson. Let's start with a fun question. If we're living in a simulation, what programming language do you think it's written in? And, uh, maybe from a software engineering perspective, what do you think are some of the design principles that it operates under?

You know, there are a lot of really lovely papers, like, uh, one came out of MSR, the autodidactic universe. Did you have a chance to see that?

No.

Oh, you gotta read it. It's, like, April of 27- uh, '21. It's just brand new. But basically, the idea is that the universe is like some sort of giant self-learning system that can self-evolve, almost like nomic. And then you got Wolfram running around saying, "Hey, we can come up with these, like, very simple rules and we can reconstruct all of reality at, uh, some arbitrary point." Uh, so I have absolutely no idea what's right. You know, I- I look at it kind of like a formal system, and I say, well, if you're stuck within the system, it's hard to actually understand that you're inside the system. You know, it's kind of like a, u- um, an object language to a meta-language. Uh, you know, there's this thing that is outside of it, but because you're constrained and limited by the simulation, you can't really understand the nature of the thing that's outside of it. Uh, it's almost like Minecraft. You can build these redstone computers within Minecraft and simulate and emulate things within it, but you really can't go outside of that, uh, that environment.