On the Nature of the Propagandized and Damage to the Mind

Broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado—always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is December 2, 2023, and I want to make a video to talk about a topic that is near and dear to my heart. It's something that impacts every single person, and it’s really hard to work through. Unfortunately, it’s causing an enormous amount of damage in the United States. Let me share my screen real quickly.

There’s a tweet I saw that prompted me to think about this. This is from Gary Golden, one of the Cardano members in the community. He’s a good guy, and he says, “Cardano’s number one risk is Charles feeling the need to comment on messy politics. He is not Cardano, but to non-crypto leaders, he is Cardano. Regardless of how neutral or principled he might be or thinks he is, comments get remixed.

We don’t need to hear your voice on everything.” This is in response to the video I made about the dangers of the Colorado Supreme Court deciding to invent, out of thin air, a removal of due process to restrict people from having access to the ballot. It brings up a broader point about what happens in a political environment, a cult, or in any social system where one is repeatedly exposed to propaganda, fake news, misinformation, or any notion that is folded and constructed in a way to create an emotional response in people. It actually changes your brain. There are studies that show that if you’re exposed to misinformation or propaganda—things that are intended to make you angry repeatedly, over and over again through many different mediums—it starts impacting your neurobiology and your neural chemistry.

It makes you more susceptible to having a visceral negative reaction when you’re exposed to things that you’ve been trained to hate. In the United States, politics have become so divisive and weaponized that people are starting to reach a point where it’s actually impossible to be objective, or exceedingly difficult to be objective. No one is completely immune to this—no one, myself included. Take the topic of Trump. The people who hate him hate him so much that there is no reality in which anything he touches, says, or anything that happens to him can be viewed in a positive light, even if you have deep-seated principles and firmly believe in the rule of law and the equal application of these standards.

Now, propaganda is used on all sides. A great example is Hillary Clinton. For many Americans on the right, it’s really difficult for them to say anything nice about her in any context. They view her basically as the devil, and that’s by design. It’s how politics have become weaponized.

The challenge for us is that this doesn’t stop with presidential candidates; it extends into all public discourse. It’s extending itself as a tool and tactic that’s used again and again, amplified by social media, to impact every single person. It’s affecting academic institutions, political philosophies, social philosophies, and religious philosophies, causing people to become far more radicalized. If this continues to persist, you cannot exist in a deliberative model where people negotiate and compromise with each other. If you believe the person on the other side is nonhuman, is evil, and that everything they do is wrong, how could you possibly negotiate or compromise with that person?

How can you split the difference and give them 40% of what they want? That’s 40% of harming your children, 40% of harming you, or 40% of taking your house or misleading you. The old saying is, “Don’t compromise with evil,” and that’s where we’re at. It’s pervasive in every element of society. It shouldn’t be controversial to say that perhaps we should follow the Fifth Amendment and have due process for every American, regardless of how distasteful those Americans happen to be.

Ted Kaczynski mailed bombs to people; the Oklahoma City bomber killed many Americans in a heinous act; the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 involved serial killers who committed monstrous acts. Yet we still give them due process as a standard in the rule of law. Apparently, we don’t have to do that now for political opponents, and there’s nothing wrong with political opponents being arrested. Why? Because we’re so propagandized that we can’t see past certain things.

It has to be that anything that happens to the evil enemy is good, regardless of the long-term social consequences of those actions and how detrimental this can be for the integrity of a nation as a whole. We don’t seem to understand that when you enable and empower tools and techniques that break social norms, you will endure those being used on you at some point in the future because it’s now okay. There’s no rule that says it’s only ever going to be used just this one time on just this one person. That’s the danger of empowering bureaucracy with the ability to destroy liberty. I speak out on these things because I think they’re very important teachable moments.

But I’m fully aware and cognizant that we are getting to a point in society where if you seem to take someone’s side on principle, they automatically assume you are on the enemy’s side. You agree with everything they’ve ever said and done, and you are now the enemy as well. It’s pretty sad, but that’s unfortunately where we’re at. People are cognitively impaired. You don’t get angry about these things, but you understand the neuroscience.

It’s not the person who’s angry at you for that fault; their brains are physically damaged by repeated exposure to propaganda again and again. It’s an actual disability. Just like these phones have profound neurological consequences, they’re re-engineering our brains and hacking our dopamine in such a way that it’s systematically destroying our attention spans and our ability to learn and retain information. It’s truly extraordinary. These devices were supposed to usher in a golden age where we have a supercomputer in our pocket that can do everything.

But because we’ve become addicted to stimulation, our ability to do deep work is greatly diminished, and our ability to form and retain the things we read is greatly diminished. That’s why year after year, academic performance is starting to decline in K-12 and higher education. People are starting to consume information from long-form books and podcasts to shorter and shorter snippets. My generation grew up with YouTube, and on average, people watch 8 to 10 videos per hour. The next generation has grown up with YouTube Shorts and TikTok, consuming 40 to 60 pieces of information in an hour.

Think about this: what does that mean for how information is presented and your ability to comprehend something that requires a long-form attention span? It’s not there. This dopamine-addicted culture, which tends toward extremes and outrage, combined with impairments from propaganda wearing away at our ability to critically analyze things, has created a perfect storm for the radicalization of people. Now, it’s not going to change my behavior. What’s right is right, and when I see things that I think are catastrophically damaging or harmful to society, I’m going to make a video and talk about it—not because I support a particular individual, but because I understand the consequences of damaging the integrity of institutions and systems.

At the end of the day, I’m not a particularly political person. I don’t wake up and say, “Gosh, my guy has to win.” I used to have dinner with Democrat senators; I have a letter right over here from one of them and congressmen. I talk to them all the time. I’ve had numerous conversations with people from Governor Polis’s office.

It’s not a left or right issue. It just so happens that right now, the leadership of the Democrat Party seems to be enamored with Elizabeth Warren, and the Treasury Department has empowered individuals to attempt to destroy the cryptocurrency industry. It’s hard not to be political when one political party is trying to pass bills that would make Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other things illegal through an overreach of the broker definition. It’s hard not to be political when one political party has enabled a regulatory agency to say that every single thing but Bitcoin and Ethereum is a security. Facts and circumstances don’t particularly matter, and if we can’t win lawsuits against layer ones, we’re going to outsourcethe exchanges and then go after DeFi, and maybe we’ll go after non-custodial wallets next.

It’s hard not to be political when Operation Choke Point 2.0 is underway, and systematically, people are being unbanked. Even state-chartered banks, like Caitlin Long’s bank over in Wyoming, the Speedy Bank Custodia, can’t get a master account with the Federal Reserve and has to go into litigation with them when they have a constitutional and federal obligation to give an account to a lawful state bank. This is not a situation of us disagreeing with the politics and policies of someone else; this is a situation where someone has weaponized the federal government to attack an entire industry. The only option is to try to figure out how to work within that framework, and if the opposition party supports undoing these disastrous policies, of course, we support them.

But that’s out of necessity, not out of desire. One tries to stay somewhat neutral in these things because there’s no reason to wade into the swamp. On the other hand, when I see the world crumbling around me, I have to speak out about it. I’m deeply concerned about Gen Z. I’m deeply concerned about society in general.

growing up, there was a movie I saw—a Christmas movie, since Christmas is coming up here in a few days—called Home Alone. There’s a shopping scene where he goes and buys some stuff at the grocery store. The cost of those groceries was around $19 and some change. If you purchased the same things in the basket today at King Soopers, it would be over $70. This wasn’t a movie too long ago; this is not A Christmas Carol or something like that.

This is not a John Wayne movie from the 60s. I’m not that old, and if the cost of something so basic is so much higher today, it shows you how badly damaged our money is. The downstream implications of that are that it’s getting harder for everyday people to survive, to buy a home, to buy a car, to thrive in society, to better themselves, to start a business, and ultimately to live the American dream. This is not just an American phenomenon; it’s the same in Europe and most of the rest of the world. It’s why things are starting to become more and more chaotic.

We’re getting closer to a global monetary collapse. There’s over $30 trillion in national debt. When I started college, we were at $4.5 trillion in national debt. It’s really extraordinary to see how far we’ve gone in such a short period of time.

Instead of having a national conversation about how to get out of this, it’s now a game of division and the politics of personal destruction and hate. The only industry that seems to care about this is our industry. We’re actually trying to solve the problem. We’ve begged for decades for sound money. We’ve begged for decades to have transparency and high credibility institutions to be in charge of our own identity, our own property, our data, and to be able to audit and verify that the things we’re told are true—consent, identity, and assets.

Just that simple. Instead of that happening, year by year it gets worse. So we say, “we’re not going to have a revolution; we’re not going to have a civil war; we’re not going to have an insurrection. We’re just going to create our own money. We’re just going to create our own voting systems.

We’re just going to create our own property systems, our own registers of truth.” Because we can no longer rely upon or trust those that the governments are giving us, as they’re starting to fall apart. Then, lo and behold, as we begin to become successful—despite the fact that for now 14 years there has been a brutal assault by the media and the intellectual class, like Paul Krugman and others who think Bitcoin has been declared dead over a hundred times—the minute we start getting successful, suddenly Elizabeth Warren and the government decide to come together and attack crypto with asinine statements that somehow this is benefiting Hamas or helping terrorists. I don’t think people living in tunnels in a war zone are so worried right now about mining Bitcoin. I think they have slightly different concerns at the moment, and I don’t think LocalBitcoins is serving Gaza right now.

Yet that straw man excuse is being used to justify one of the largest government overreaches in our lifetime to destroy the tools of liberty. That’s just where we’re at. Make no mistake, it will happen—if not with this administration, then with a future one. If we don’t stay politically aware and fight for our rights every single day, we have to keep writing code, keep recruiting people, and keep growing the ecosystem. Because if we let this slow down, we will find ourselves on the other side of a monetary collapse and totalitarianism everywhere you look.

That’s a guarantee—100%. It doesn’t do us any good to succumb to the propaganda, and it doesn’t do us any good to allow the tools around us to distract us to the point where we’re unable to truly comprehend what matters. Donald Trump is a man; Joe Biden is a man. They’re both very old, and in a very short period of time, they’ll die of old age, if not a chronic ailment or dementia. That’s just what’s going to happen.

We witnessed it happen to Ronald Reagan; we witnessed it happen to Gerald Ford. It’s going to happen—that’s just how life works, that’s how humans are. If our totality of political beliefs is that one is good and one is evil, and nothing else matters, and we have no duty in a constitutional republic to be informed and to fight to preserve and protect our basic god-given liberties, then we deserve everything that comes our way. This society only lasts as long as people defend it, and the number one thing you can do right now has nothing to do with your political support for a political party, whether it be Republican or Democrat. It is to invest in, build, and grow the tools of liberty.

That’s the number one thing you can do. The number one set of tools of liberty is blockchain technology. When you think about it, this is the most foundational thing. These are the tools of voting, of your identity, of all your data and your assets, and ultimately the very definition of objective truth in reality. It doesn’t matter if it’s Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Cardano.

We obviously have personal differences and technological differences in the industry, but if it’s a true blockchain, at the end of the day, it’s a trusted bulletin board. It is a ledger that is immutable, timestamped, and auditable, and it can be used to preserve and protect your assets if used appropriately. That’s a fundamental truth and right. The openness of these systems, your ability to use them without permission, without compliance, without having a third party come in and tell you what you’re allowed to do with it, is how much liberty you have. Every single time someone comes in and takes a bit of that from you, they might as well be taking part of your body.

Maybe it’s your pinky finger today, maybe your index finger later, maybe it’s your thumb, maybe it’s your left eye or your right eye, maybe it’s one of your ears. That’s what they’re doing; they’re chipping away at the body of liberty. This is a very pivotal moment in human history. Max Tegmark calls it the “whole life 3.0.

” We’re starting to invent tools, technologies, and techniques on such a scale that things that were unimaginable 20 years ago will become reality within the next 10 years. One of the companies I work with is literally resurrecting the woolly mammoth. It’s not going to stop there. Other companies are figuring out ways to extend the human lifespan. Other companies are creating artificial intelligence that will not only match human cognitive capabilities but surpass them at superhuman levels and make them available to scale everywhere.

Tesla will likely construct robots that can replicate human labor within five to ten years at their current rate of progress with the Tesla Bots. These are just a small set of things. All of these things are neutral; they’re neither good nor bad. But if we allow the few who do not have the best interest of society at heart to have these things, they will use them to preserve, protect, and empower themselves. They will do this by dividing us, making us hate each other, and fight each other while they entrench themselves.

When we wake up, it’s too late. The only way to prevent that from happening is to be our own bank, to have self-sovereign identity, to own our own money, and to take the means of production away from all of these government institutions. From the election systems to how the governance systems work to what audits the institutions, we need to bring as many as possible into decentralized systems that are outside of government control and are run by and for the people. That’s the only way we can prevent that. Because with those systems, we can collectively decide how best to use exponential technology to benefit humanity.

Otherwise, by default, those things go to the same group of people that are totally okay with all of these wars, with a monetary collapse, with you having absolutely no liberty, with CBDCs being paired with social credit, and them deciding what you’re allowed to buy, when you’re allowed to buy it, how much of it you’re allowed to buy, how much you should make, what you’re allowed to start in terms of a business, what you’re allowed to learn, what’s truth and what’s not truth. These are not academic questions anymore. We all just lived through COVID, and our personal freedoms were radically restricted. Some of you had to stay in your homes; some of you weren’t allowed to go to a restaurant without showing papers and documents. You couldn’t freely travel; some of you lost your jobs because you philosophically disagreed with a mandate.

The whole world saw how quickly that could happen, and that was just a small thing—a pandemic that had a low case fatality rate, all things considered. Imagine how pervasive such government overreach will be if our money collapses or a large global conflict breaks out, like between the United States and China, which could happen before the end of the decade, or if an existential threat occurs, a rogue AGI. These are not academic things. We have to, as a society, take a break, take a timeout, step away from the propaganda, and realize that each and every one of us is damaged by mass media, by the way the internet works, and by the way cell phones work.