Free Thought

hey this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado today is august 10th 2022 just about to leave the office but i figured i'd make a video about my prior video that i made we're sitting in the bob ross shirt and talking about my opinions of the recent raid that happened and it's of course as expected a tremendously polarizing thing so for example here let me share my screen real quick share screen okay and you see over here from froggy walnuts for example it's not very fun getting calls from my loyal ada clients complaining about charles's anti-trump rant our country is literally on the brink of civil war and charles just poured gas on it does input output of hong kong really believe this sort of politics is good for cardano and not to belabor the point i could spend two hours reading everything that's been said and it just as expected shows you the consequences of propaganda and where people are at a game has been played for a long time and it's a very effective game at breaking people into two teams that have been taught to hate each other to the extent where people are unable to think through scenarios on a case-by-case basis without regressing back to what team red and team orange are saying to each other and it's actually amazing that this type of thinking has been now derived in the cryptocurrency space for example bitcoin next week i'm going to crypto and at crypto with our chief scientist and other people we're unveiling a phenomenal new paper called ophthalmos and it's basically a useful proof of work paper when i joined the cryptocurrency space we were told that proof-of-work could never be useful that's not the point you don't do it that way because the first thought i had when i read about proof-of-work and bitcoin was well doesn't it make sense to try to find a way to make the puzzles useful for something so then basically we're not just wasting electricity we can create a marketplace for decentralized computation the conventional wisdom in team orange the bitcoin space was this is impossible so we have written a paper and the paper was accepted to crypto the most prestigious cryptography conference in the world it's actually in santa barbara over here so if you guys happen to be at university of california santa barbara we're going to be presenting and here's actually the paper itself ophelimos combinatorial optimization via proof of useful work approvally secure blockchain protocol so we wrote this and it was a very very hard paper to think and conceive and write it uses walk set a lot of things and i'd highly encourage you guys to take a look at it team orange represents the same things we see in team red and team blue in that the people are propagandized and indoctrinated and when you try to push a new idea into their head what ends up happening is it just won't fit so proof of work only works one way every other way is wrong here's this new paper that could make bitcoin infinitely more valuable and useful and help ameliorate the energy concerns that people have it won't fit in the head it's not part of doctrine so we can't talk about it it's a scam even though it's an academic paper at a major conference and it's a phenomenal piece of work won't fit so when you look at politics today it's an exact copy of that and we're starting to see that happen in consumer products and in business relationships and so forth my video was multifaceted because i was talking about a collection of things first it's a very dangerous thing when a current head of state's regime decides to start a process to attempt to imprison the former head of state who's from an opposing political party because the problem is that regardless if there's legitimate grounds or not there will be an overwhelming perception among some faction of the population that it's a political witch hunt and if that party gets back in power that party will use its power to undo your investigation and the end result so you're going to spend a lot of time drama effort and money to convict arrest and put somebody in in jail who eventually will be released before their term expires and then you have diminished and damaged and politicized what are supposed to be neutral institutions so you should only do this in extremely specific circumstances that are beyond reproach for example if the politician shoots somebody in the face in live television or they're caught in a criminal conspiracy trying to start a war or something like that i and maybe trump's conduct is so profoundly egregious that we've now crossed that rubicon but then if that's the case one has to ask why is there no buy-in at all from the leadership of the party that he's in when they have strong incentives to try to get rid of them if anything to clear up the candidate field for 2024 that's one nuance in the conversation another nuance of the conversation is why should we endow an individual with so much power that they can no longer be a private citizen when they leave office that's the reality of the presidency the dark truth of the presidency is that the president of the united states does things that are illegal every single day as a result of being in the office of the presidency they suspend hapus corpus they assassinate people they authorize torture clandestine operations that are not authorized by congress they negotiate deals that potentially they don't have the right to do every president of the modern era in the united states does not have expressed constitution constitutional authority to do a large amount of the things they do that we as american citizens expect them to do to be a quote-unquote good leader and we have an understanding that when the president leaves office we're not going to dig into that conduct now that we are for this particular circumstance every future president if they so choose can direct their people through the department of justice the fbi and others to because they actually do control these organizations they're not technically neutral to basically dredge up conduct during that time period and arrest their predecessor if they so desire that is an option and it is precedent and tradition that protects the predecessor not some form of blanket immunity that you're granted a police officer with with their immunity so you have to understand the consequences of these things and the question i asked which is the free thinking component is why do we have a system of governance that centralizes so much power into one individual that they have to do these types of things without oversight checks and balances and we have to rely on precedence and the faith in institutions in order to sort it all out it's a very simple question and isn't it the case that a decentralized governance system would be intrinsically superior to this just think about your thinking for a moment what if the presidency was a committee of seven instead of one individual how would you perceive that institution how would you go about your criticism of that institution what would materially change there you oh you hate trouble what is he's just one of seven in that institution is the entire institution wrong and corrupted now is the fact that you dislike one of the board members an invalidation for the entire board what if there's checks and balances no one person has unilateral authority now to overcome the entire system and now suddenly now you see centralized to federated and so the entire point of the dialogue in the video was to say we really do need to take a step back and have a real conversation about how do we rebuild governance in general so that we no longer have these issues but you see because people are so propagandized into team red or team orange or team blue they are not capable of understanding those nuances they say oh well this is an anti-trump rant i have every reason to dislike joe biden and donald trump they're both artifacts of an era of america that i don't respect or and they both come from different wakes of life and in both cases they're latent with evidence of profound corruption and misconduct that's beyond debate and if you don't believe it you're propagandized this has nothing to do with a particular media being vicious to somebody or not vicious to another person there is objective reality and truth in the fact that these are not honest nice people the problem with the presidency is to become the president of the united states you don't get brownie points for being an honest nice person you get brownie points for being a charlatan a vicious person that's what you have to do to get to the highest levels you're fake as a person that's what we've created with this particular system it's theater it's not leadership we don't go around and on a merit basis try to find the most qualified person and encourage that person to lead and invite them to lead we create a circus of carnival carnival barking we invite people to go and play a role pretend to be a character and argue as a society of who looks more handsome who did better on camera who spoke more eloquently without really thinking it through what is their knowledge and qualification for doing these types of things many people look at trump as a folk hero who tried to overcome the deep state and the deep state certainly did try to get rid of him a an infection or a splinter and the immune system formed around it but just because somebody fights an enemy that we all can acknowledge is a problem doesn't necessarily mean that person has a philosophy on the other side of it and if you argue that there is one there then you have to ask yourself a simple question what is it what is it what is the philosophy i have one i talk about decentralization and inclusive accountability and transparency i don't import my philosophy from team orange or blue or red or from any other source i sat down for a long time read a lot of books talked to a lot of people and came up with something that i felt was fair i have a feeling that we are all equal and thus i need to build systems that enforce that because human beings are bad at it i have a feeling that people lie and that people will not be perfect every single day so we try to build systems that hold people accountable even if it's inconvenient to them because it builds a better stronger society i have a feeling that maybe you should be able to verify the claims that people make whether they're a doctor or not whether your vote was counted or not and i believe that the balance of power the checks and balances the emphasis on decentralization matters and that is reflected in the products that i have participated in building throughout my career if you might not agree with that philosophy you might think certain parts are valid and other parts are invalid that's your prerogative you have a right free thinking person to do that so when we looked at people like biden or trump they have no political philosophy they're opportunists of a different nature but cut from the same cloth they have been on every side of every issue throughout their entire life and you can look at the interviews the quotes the actions the donations the conduct if you really care to invest the time but you don't because it's too expensive to do it that's the other side of democracy that people don't seem to get rational ignorance is how you are controlled you can be given power a vote a voice but in order to use that power appropriately you have to be informed but then they give you no incentive to be informed because no matter how informed you become your voice and your vote counts exactly the same as the least informed person in the country so if you actually did the research and looked into people's backgrounds and character and their political philosophy and ask yourself if you were in that position what would your philosophy be what would be your health care policy what would be your education policy you read hundreds of books and got the education and spent the time looked at other nation states and said who's doing it well what's the best in the world all of that investment equals the same outcome than if you made a decision based upon a tweet or something you heard on cnn or the fact that you think one person sounds better than another person or one person's a better person have a beer with and that's how you're controlled divide people make people irrationally react and hate things and i tell everybody there's a very simple test to know if you've been propagandized or you're beholden to a philosophy here it is and do it yourself even on its own video if you have an immediate visceral negative reaction to something you hear or see or a person you encounter and you just oppose that person and really want to burn that person down but paradoxically you actually when you really think about it don't know a lot about that idea that person whatever that might be you've been propagandized it's that simple so you really have to be intellectually honest now most humans can't be we have cognitive fallacies and biases we have things you study cognitive neural science you really think about the psychology of these things that are manipulated all the time dopamine engineering and interface design to make you scroll just a little longer and click just the next video to keep you going you have things like attention traps and video games gamification all these kinds of things that manipulate the way your brain works for you to either over consume or think in a particular way and marketing is effectively this way to make you believe that you want something that you yesterday didn't even know existed so much that you feel that your life is incomplete without it those same techniques can be reused for propaganda and once you succumb to it you're a slave to an ideology that actually does nothing for you the next 20 years in american in global history are going to be the most transformative years that we've ever encountered these are the years where brain computer interfaces are going to come online nanotechnology is going to come online genetic engineering is going to come online to the extent we have designer organisms and babies these are the years where it's going to be quite common for people to be cybernetically augmented these are the years where artificial intelligence will become indistinguishable from humans and eventually surpass us these are the years where new models of computation are going to exist which will rapidly and radically accelerate research specifically quantum computing and all the derivations of that these are the years where humanity will likely become a multi-planetary species and start actually doing things on mars and space technology will grow exponentially these are the years where new weapon systems are going to come online we've never seen before like orbital kinetic bombardment look up rods from god and thousands of other things that are direct derivations of all these new technologies we're inventing including automated warfare autonomous warfare which is horrific these are the years where gain of function is going to advance thanks to all these technologies and you could see things like aerosolized rabies you could see all kinds of new diseases that will come the next 20 years that is a certainty the technology is expanding exponentially so you have to look in the mirror and ask yourself is the wisdom growing at the same rate no the wisdom gap is growing and growing and growing and growing how should we responsibly use these things for the greatest good for all we're not asking those questions instead we've been ideologically pushed into bins and made to hate each other and not cooperate with each other and made to believe that the leaders of the bins are so handsome and powerful and capable that they will protect us meanwhile when they get to office you ask yourself do they really have the depth to understand the magnitude of what's before us do they really have the appreciation to understand that we've gone from a century where we had just one existential technology nuclear weapons to a century where we'll probably have five to ten more in addition to nuclear weapons we twice publicly almost came to nuclear armageddon once during the cuban missile crisis and once during the 1980s it was a single individual in both cases that made the judgment call not to end the entire human race both cases against orders and against the military institutions they belong to we got so lucky as a species in the 20th century so lucky and now we have 10 more of these things in addition to the other thing we actually are flirting with the potential of nuclear war in 2022 and a single individual in russia gets to make that decision who has potentially no incentive not to make it correctly why because he's probably old and dying of cancer and who cares if he's out why not we all go out we don't know it's a real possibility and to ignore it is to ignore the tremendous wisdom overhead that this technology carries and if we're having difficulty with the technology of the 20th century do you think the leadership we have today will give us what we need for the 21st century so how do you get out of it through decentralization through thinking free thought dialogue it's not a coincidence that certain movements the woke movement and other things happen to be robbing us robbing us of our ability to communicate with each other we can't even have free speech anymore free speech is a sin now apparently the risk of offending people overrides the social value of dialogue that is a humongous problem because we have to have dialogue in order to survive the things that we are right now today as a society constructing so think it through take a moment and really understand what's happening really understand that you are living through history at the moment textbooks history books will be written about this era and collectively we get to decide what they're going to say we get to decide whether they say this was the moment that we did things differently and we changed the course of history just the founding of the united states of america there the way things were done were with kings and we decided to do things very differently and we recreated this constitutional republic the first of its kind in the modern era and it gave us 200 plus years of transformation in the way the world order should work and we have to do this again we have to embrace basic concepts that slow some things down regulate other things and allow the wisdom to catch up with the technological progress and we have to prevent small groups of people individuals or federations from having so much power that they can unilaterally end the entire human race it's not hyperbole it's true it's there it's staring us in the face and every futurist every person that studies these things will tell you this we'll understand this ai and the problem of control all the books written on the dangers of gain of function all the documents about the grey goo problem of nanotechnology they're there and dictators are using these technologies to dominate and control their people at scales we've never seen that the statsy would have dreamed of for example xi with what he's doing with social credit and the end to end control of the entire chinese people look at the zero coven policy and what's happened there how brutal that's been that's a sample of what the capabilities are of these new technologies and again what constrains them what controls them and what you're doing when you succumb to team red or team blue you align yourself with an ideology and allow yourself to succumb to propaganda is you're recusing yourself from being an author of that history book that's being written and you're reading it instead and there's no guarantee it's going to have a good ending it's that simple this is why i'm in the cryptocurrency space this is why i'm a blockchain entrepreneur because i refuse to believe that i have no ability to influence the outcome i'd like to believe in my own small part with your help we can do something about this and end this madness we can build better governance systems we can disintermediate centralized authorities and power brokers and replace them with things that are more sensible and refined we can call out propaganda when we see it in our own community and in the global commons and we can rise above the tides come together and build something new and different and better that will allow us to finally have something that is apparently an incredibly scarce supply wisdom that's all i ask and that's why i make these videos if you tell me to stay in my lane you're the problem and you've missed the entire point of why this industry exists and why it still is worth over a trillion dollars and why it gives people so much hope thanks for listening