Post-Election Recap

Hi, everyone. This is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. It's been an interesting week. It's been an interesting day.

The last 48 hours have been pretty crazy for the United States of America. For our international viewers, welcome to American politics and the arcane, crazy nature of them. Every four years, we have a presidential election. Every four years, we hear the same rhetoric. It's the most important election of our lifetime.

And every four years, there's tens, if not 50 plus million people who are disappointed with the outcome. And this is no different. So I was up until about 1030 last night. I was actually on Tone Vase's show with 11 other people, and we were kind of live casting the results as they came in. They were looking a lot like 2016.

In fact, when I went to bed, most of the betting markets and most of the people floating around had Trump at negative 480. It says put 480 bucks on the table to make 100. That was a really aggressive pro-Trump betting line. I woke up in the morning and everything had flipped, and there's a greater than 75% probability at the moment that Biden wins. So at the moment, it's gone down to two states, Pennsylvania and appears to be Nevada.

If Nevada and Pennsylvania both go red, Trump is the president. If any one of them goes blue, Biden's the president. So we don't know. Everything else is going to be contested. Lots of lawsuits, lawsuits in Wisconsin, recounts in Wisconsin, lawsuits in Pennsylvania, lawsuits in Michigan, lawsuits in probably any other state they can find, maybe Georgia, maybe North Carolina.

But it's really going to come down to that one state. Nevada is going to be the kingmaker, it looks and I think Pennsylvania has a strong possibility going red. Now, some people think Arizona is still in play. It was curiously called very early, and a lot of the areas that are still counting ballots are from fairly red districts. But there's a pretty big spread there of, I think, currently 100,000 votes.

But it's going to be interesting to see what happens. That said, the Senate held Republican. So I don't think my taxes, regardless of the outcome, are going to go up to 62%. So that makes me happy. And hopefully, with divided government, if Biden wins, we can somehow reach a compromise and return to sanity.

And if Trump wins, well, this is not a mandate. It's a call for unity. But anyway, interesting nonetheless. And my key takeaway is, regardless of where you sit politically, I think we can all agree on something. Our voting system sucks.

Absolutely sucks. Every dimension and aspect of the system is pretty fucked up. From how we count votes to how we issue votes, the fact that we knew we were walking into legal challenges months ago, and it was completely unavoidable, it just makes me sad. Absolutely sad. And no one should believe in a democratic republic that their electoral system is broken.

Because the legitimacy of the government stems from the people. And if the people feel their votes aren't counted, if they feel their votes are tampered with for whatever political purposes, then there is no legitimacy to the government. And it's very clear we've lost that. Second, if you look at the third party candidates, all of them together got less than 2% of the national vote. We don't have candidate diversity.

And this is because the system is rigged against a two-party system. And we're told year after year, you're not allowed to vote for third parties, because it's equivalent to throwing your vote away. Why? Because no one wants to learn about alternative voting systems, like preference voting, for example, ranked order voting. So that's where you say, okay, instead of voting for one candidate for one race, what you do is you order them.

What's your most favorite? What's your second most favorite? Your third most favorite? And so forth. This one change would dramatically increase the level of ballot participation and quantity of third party candidates getting meaningful percentages of votes in races in the House and the Senate.

And it's something that I'm going to personally push over the next four years, starting the state of Wyoming, and we're going to work our way throughout. But it's going to become a big project for my company. We build great blockchain-based voting software, and we can do things like end-to-end verifiability, where you can verify that your vote has actually been counted, and that it's on the rolls. You can see it on a blockchain and verify that that's there. We can guarantee that the people who are voting are eligible to vote, so proper authentication of the identities, and also voting online.

I think these are incredibly important things, and I think this is something that we as a nation have to move towards. It's about time we move beyond all of this, and the systems we build are far, far more secure than the legacy voting systems that exist, which could be tampered with by foreign powers. So it's going to be something that we get aggressive about. We already get a lot of inquiries abroad, but it's about time in the United States that we change things, and we move towards preference voting, and we move towards blockchain-based voting, and we move towards e-voting. I want to get to a reality where people can vote on their cell phone some way, somehow.

Then we'll get universal participation. the other thing is that we have to change the way that we elect our president in the United States. You see a lot of people running around and saying national vote, national vote. I think that's the wrong way of looking at it. Rather, what we need to do is we need to run our elections in a series of elections as opposed to one gigantic event.

My preference would be that once we have preference voting in place, every state elects a delegate, and then we have a series of runoff elections similar to a playoff system until eventually you winnow your way down to two or a small set of candidates, and then we run the national election from that respect. This would guarantee that every single state has national representation, whether you're Alaska all the way on down to Wisconsin. Each and every one of them would have a national delegate. There would be 50 of them, and those national delegates would be given a national platform, federal funding for their election efforts, and a common website we could put all of them on, and they would have a space to broadcast their agenda. Because preference voting would allow you to have voting diversity, there's a good shot that at least a small minority of those delegates would be represented from third parties, not from the Republican or Democrat parties.

We'd actually get new ideas floating about, floating around. With ranked choice voting, it means that you'll actually have a situation where people are willing to vote for more than just one political party. They'll include other parties, and over time, you'll see significantly more diversity in the candidates we have. As I mentioned in my speech at the Independent National Convention, this, one of the reasons why we don't have better candidates, we ask why do we have a 78-year-old man who's showing signs of dementia running against a 74-year-old guy who a lot of people think is one of the worst human beings alive? Why did we have that in a country that has such great entrepreneurs, in a country that has such great scientists, in a country that has remarkable people from astronauts to humanitarians?

Well, simply put, we have this because the political process demands it. The reality is that you either have to be a puppet to special interests who will then prevent the world from knowing who you really are, or you have to be so blatantly shameless about your conduct and personality that you simply don't care of the consequences of personal destruction. the reality is that if you actually peel Trump back under the hood, probably not much worse than Bill Clinton or any of these other people. And one of the reasons why he was able to get elected and be effective was because he didn't care about the personal attacks against him. And that's a shame because people who do care, normal functioning, non-sociopath, non-narcissistic people will say, look, I don't want my family life destroyed.

I don't want my half of the United States for the rest of my life to hate me and think I'm a monster, a war criminal, a puppet to the new world order, whatever. And the reality is that's what our political process does. So in addition to changing our voting system, we really have to ask ourselves as a nation moving forward, should we reward the politics of personal destruction? Should we succumb to the temptations of allowing those who throw mud to make that an effective technique in choosing our leaders? And I believe the answer to that has to be no, if we desire better candidates, if the answer is yes, we will continue to get puppets and demagogues, and we will continue to get sociopaths and narcissists, and the quality will continue to spiral lower and lower.

In addition, the divisions will continue. One of the things that made me sadder than I think anything else in this election, as I saw thousands of posts on Facebook, Telegram, Reddit, and Twitter that said things like, if you voted for Trump, unfriend me, I never want to talk to you again. Or if you voted for Biden, I never want to talk to you again. People, in some cases, family members, disown their grandparents, their parents because of political differences. We don't do this in a well-functioning democratic republic.

We do this with cults. When people say, hey, we're not so sure about that leader who has you come to the camp and wants you to drink the Kool-Aid, maybe you should talk your way out of it. You say, I can't talk to you anymore because the leader doesn't want me to. We all know that that's a bad deal. Why are we succumbing to that in political reality?

I'm sorry. If a person disagrees with you, that doesn't necessarily make that person a racist, sexist, homophobe who wants to physically harm you or take your rights away from you. And if you believe that, then you're the problem because you've been propagandized. At the base level, we're human beings. At the next level, we're Americans.

And frankly, we're all in this together. And while we may disagree with our neighbors, there is no reason to hate our neighbors. And unfortunately, the last four years, in particular, have really emphasized this problem in American discourse and politics. At the end of the day, whether Trump can pull out a miracle in Nevada or not and hold on to Pennsylvania and the other victories, there's going to be someone come January who is the president of the United States of America. And they are not the president of the red states or the president of the blue states.

They're the president of this entire country. And they have an enormous amount of influence over the businesses in this country, the lives of billions of people outside of this country. And for us to say that the only goal is the preservation of power using the politics of division and demonization and those who don't follow the dear leader must be punished. These are the techniques and tools of total Toleranism and dictators, not free society. And in this political environment, there is no opportunity for evolution or growth.

There is no opportunity for us to entertain new ideas because they're offensive to those who are in power and desire to preserve and keep their power. So regardless of who ends up winning, wherever these legal challenges take us in the next month, which is going to be Rocky takes us, whoever wins must govern. And for them to govern, they must make a fundamental decision. Do they govern for some of us or do they govern for all of us? And we, the American people have to also make a decision.

Do we live in a society with some of us or do we live in a society for all of us? At the end of the day, people's political beliefs were often not, are one of the least interesting things about your neighbors and the people around you and your friends and family. They're interesting for the moment of an election when propaganda is high, but their character, their profession, how they live their lives, how they treat the people around them is what really matters. And if you make decisions of who to include or exclude based upon something as narrow as a political ideology, you are no better than a member of a cult who makes decisions of who to talk to and not talk to based upon the doctrine of their religion, as perverse as it may be. So 2024 is going to be an interesting election.

It's going to be a referendum on change. The reality is both candidates are too old to be able to carry this baton much further. Biden will be 83 at that election. Trump can't run again and he'll be in his late 70s. That means new blood is coming.

And with new blood, it is a great opportunity for the United States to do things differently, to look at the world differently, to ask itself, how should it represent itself? And what type of relationship should it have with the other nation states? How should we trade with people? Should it be fair trade or should it be laissez-faire open trade? Should it be trade connected to certain agendas, such as carbon reduction or sustainability?

We should look to our immigration policy. We should look to our foreign policy and ask ourselves, is it okay that we commit more drone strikes than any other country in the world by a factor of 10 and deploy special forces to more than 50 countries every week? Is this a good policy? Should this continue? The 21st century is a very different one, very different leaders.

In the 20th, we dealt with Russia. Now this is China's century and they're rapidly emerging. And there's a very strong possibility that we could succumb to the Thucydides trap. I don't want that to happen. I don't think the world wants that to happen.

The decisions that are made over the next four years and perhaps eight will put us either on a path to peace or an inevitable path to war, internally and externally. And the decisions that we make as a people over the next four years will also do the same. Are we on a path to reconciliation and understanding and removing this hysteria of division? Or are we on a path towards civil war? We're at a breaking point as a nation and we can no longer stand this level of division being accelerated by social media.

We all have to take a step back, chill out a little bit, and look to our own lives and ask, how can we all be a little bit better? For my part, I am a technology entrepreneur and all that I can do is build tools and make the case that these tools will lead, if adopted, to better outcomes. But like leading a horse to water, you can't make him drink. It's ultimately going to be the choice of the American people whether to adopt them or not. And we have to ask ourselves, are we happy with the last four years?

And do we honestly believe we're going to be happy with the next four years given where we're at? And if we want something different, then we cannot embrace the politics of division, we cannot continue with the electoral systems that we have, and we have to have honest conversations about what is our long-term vision for this country, where it needs to be, where it needs to go, and its role in the world, and if we are committed to war or if we are committed to peace. It was a long night for everybody and a wild night for everybody. Some elections are. In fact, many have been in recent memory.

But I hope that the conclusion of wherever we go with this is that we can have a great reset within the United States and a great conversation about how we avoid going down this road again. As I said, I have my small part to play, but you have your parts to play as well. Some may involve forgiveness, some may involve being bigger and repairing broken relationships, and others may involve just thinking for yourselves and trying to escape the filter. One thing, and I think it's a very positive thing, that Trump did expose over the last four years is the base corruption of institutions in the United States, from the intelligence community to the media to Silicon Valley. These institutions operate with very little oversight.

They operate with a strong opinion on how things ought to be done and no transparency behind where their motives came from. These institutions have enormous control over our day-to-day lives, the facts and information we perceive to be true, and ultimately what we perceive to be legitimate and illegitimate. We now live in an age of surveillance capitalism and we live in an age of deplatforming. Whether we like to admit this or not, or if it's politically convenient for the moment for us or not, we will see attempts to not only expand this progress, but also criminalize speech in the next four years. Anyone who has divergent ideas from those in power will be ostracized, excommunicated, and perhaps even jailed.

Again, these are the tools of total Tolerian dictatorships. These are not the tools of freedom. So as we look to the next four years, part of that national conversation as we reset and recover has to be, what do we do about those who weren't elected but have more power than those who were? And what type of society would allow so few to have so much power over so many? These are going to be the great questions of our time, and if we don't answer them in the right way, we may find ourselves in a situation where voting doesn't matter anymore.

Perhaps it doesn't, even today. So I look forward to being in these conversations with all of you. The old gypsy woman always said, may you live in interesting times, and we certainly do. And here's to 2021. I hope it's a better year than this one has been.

It's been a pretty lousy year, and I hope that we can all get back to the business of doing business and hopefully heal some deep scars and old wounds. And regardless of who wins coming, I think it is a great opportunity for us to somehow let all of this go and look at things with greener pastures ahead. Thank you all for listening, and good luck.