More on Conspiracies (QFS Voting Conspiracy)

Hey everyone, Charles Hoskinson here, broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Not so sunny right now, it's almost midnight. Just about to head off to bed, but I was reviewing the comments on my QFS conspiracy video that I made earlier this morning, and gosh, internet gonna internet. It's pretty crazy to read some of the things, and actually look at some of that stuff that's floating through. critical thinking is a skill that requires effort, and we live in an age of misinformation, disinformation, siloed thinking, confirmation bias, and conspiratorial thinking.

Usually what happens is people start with a reality they want to be true, and then what they do is they work their way backwards to any supporting evidence they can find to justify that reality that they want to be true. Magic exists, spirits exist, some metaphysical principle, their particular god. This particular person didn't die, like Tupac, for example, no, he faked his death. Okay. Then you find a particular fact pattern, and you say, all right, well that fact pattern justifies what I want to believe.

And then what you do is you ignore and you throw out anything that is a counterexample, or it's something that's an inconvenient truth to what you want to believe. So I read some of the comments like, oh, well, the Department of Homeland Security prints the ballots, or is directly involved in the ballot printing process. Do we know if that's true? Where's the requisition? Where's the contract?

How many companies print the ballot paper? Is there one? Is there 10? Is there 50? How many of you actually know with absolute certainty that number?

Where would you go to look that up and verify if it's correct or not? Who is in charge of the security standards? Is it the state? Is it the federal government? Is it a collaboration between the two?

Do you honestly know where you would go to look up that information and actually make sure that that information is real and legitimate? I was bombarded by people who said, well, poll watchers were not allowed to observe the counting of ballots. Okay. Were you there? And of the people who were there, how many complaints are actually legitimate?

Do we actually have a number? Five, 10, 15, 20, 5,000, 10,000. And how would you go about verifying their claims? If someone was kicked out of poll watching, how do that that particular person wasn't being belligerent or harassing the people counting the votes? we have all the time, these videos on YouTube of people claiming the police are attacking me, they're oppressing me.

And then when you actually watch their evidence, they're harassing the police officer for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and eventually the officer loses his or her cool. And what they do is they compress it down to a 30 second clip and they say, see, this is the evidence. We saw this a lot in videos all this year when people are talking about their disputes with the police. But apparently in this situation, it can only go in one particular direction. Okay.

Then they said there's millions of dead people who voted. Okay. Which ones? If they're dead and they're voted, give me the names. Tell me.

Where's the list? What is the data set for these things? And where did it come from? Did you go and take a look at some database and you found a way to look at every single dead person the last 25, 35, 45 years in each state that mattered, put it all together, and then compared it to the voter registration data of confirmed voters? Do you have any evidence of that?

Did anybody take the time to do it? But I saw a tweet. Okay. Which one? I read a credible tweet.

How do it's not a fake? How do it's real news? Did you personally verify it? Why do you trust that piece of data? Because it confirms a narrative.

You see, just because you accept reality as it is or an event as it happened does not necessarily mean that you like that event, you endorse that event, that that event is a good thing. It could be a bad thing. It could be something you don't support. It could be something that you're quite angry about. But the minute that you start indulging conspiratorial thinking, the burden's on you, the conspiracy person, the person believing that there's some grand scheme to actually provide real evidence and to address counterexamples.

And you have to dig deep, really, really, really, really deep. In my original video, I was trying to demonstrate that, the absurdity of this claim that, first off, somebody had the ability to introduce hundreds of thousands of ballots into the counting process, that level of access across many states without anybody knowing about it. It's all, but it's a deep state. Okay. The deep state.

What the hell does that even mean? Is that the CIA with DHS? Is that the CIA, DHS, and the FBI? Is it a rogue subgroup within that organization? Oh, but you never get the answer.

Why don't you get the answer? Because the people who levy the conspiracies demand that the people who they're levying the conspiracies at provide proofs that they're not this way. Imagine if you live in a world where someone comes up to you and says, you're a rapist. And you say, I'm not. And they say, prove that you're not.

How do you prove that? And similarly, this is the burden that the conspiracy theorist comes and says. You cheated in the election. We didn't. Prove that you didn't.

Okay. Here's the system as it is. And it's very intricate and diverse. And there are 50 states and 50 different standards. And there's all kinds of checks and balances.

And you better believe that big agencies wake up every day thinking carefully about how do we create a reasonable workable system? Is it perfect? No. Do certain people get too many ballots? Yeah, of course these things happen.

Does fraud occur on the small scale? Absolutely. You betcha. There's been more than one husband has filled out his wife's mail-in ballot. She didn't know about it.

Sent it in on her behalf and then said it was lost in the mail. Been many, many examples of little things like that working on both sides. But then people levy blanket claims. They say millions of votes happened that didn't exist. Great.

Where did you get the evidence for that? If you're going to say it, you have to prove it. And who among you is an expert in this, honestly? This is the death of expertise, a distrust in expertise. There are people who dedicate their lives to studying these things and thinking about these things.

And we live in an age where they just don't matter anymore. We live in an age where people just want to believe what they want to believe and they discard anything else and they latch on to whatever seems convenient and true and just go for that. I dealt with it for years with the Russian conspiracy theories that were pushed by the left and we rightfully knew that this was a pretty absurd thing. Vladimir Putin had been turned into this ubiquitous boogeyman and all the ills of American society were blamed on him. Everything was Russian misinformation.

Bernie Sanders is working for Vladimir Putin. This entity is working for Vladimir Putin. Any Twitter poster is a Russian bot or a Russian troll if they opposed the narrative. It was a collective delusion. And very rightfully so, the people who didn't get caught up in that laughed at the people.

And now there is a danger in the conservative elements of America to legitimately look at this election as distasteful as it can be to them and then say, the only reason we lost is because millions of dead people voted. No evidence provided, but let's just say it. The only reason we lost is because in the middle of the night, hundreds of thousands of fraudulent ballots arrived. Again, where's the evidence for it? Are the databases compromised?

Oh, there's a software glitch. How often do you experience software glitches every single day? And what is this meaning? What evidence do you have is systemic? Do anything at all about the audit and oversight mechanisms that exist?

They just assume there are none. So every single secretary of state of the 12 states in question are corrupt, including the Republican ones who apparently are in on the conspiracy. And that's the other problem with conspiratorial thinking, is that it forces you to expand the conspiracy when you get inconvenient facts. You say, well, what about this actor in this check and balance? They must be in on it.

What about this actor in this check and balance? They must be in on it. What about this actor in this check and balance? They must be in on it. There is no greater example of this than the Flat Earth Society.

Everybody is in on it. NASA, Elon Musk and SpaceX. Because anybody who's ever achieved any semblance of scientific acumen and actually understands the world is not flat, their knowledge must be either a lie or their knowledge must be part of a grand conspiracy to keep us all in the dark for nefarious reasons which we cannot explain. When we look at this allegation of mass voting fraud, okay, then you say, okay, we as a society have to ask ourselves, how do we get to a reasonable burden of proof? This is my other umbrage that I have with this type of conspiratorial thinking.

With COVID, I asked very legitimate questions. Wasn't conspiracy theory, it was very legitimate questions such as, what is our threshold? We know we're going to live with this virus probably for the rest of human history. It's true that treatments will get better and over time herd immunity will form, but it's going to be here to stay and it is not a reasonable public policy program to say the whole world must be vaccinated because by the time we do it, we'll have the next version of it floating around. So what is the threshold that we have to put in the ground and say we now get to go back to work and it's business as usual?

What is that threshold? And the fact that our politicians cannot provide that to us is problematic. It's not conspiratorial thinking that's asking for goalposts, okay? When you look at vote fraud, you say, okay, I don't believe the system is credible. All right, give specific reasons why it's not and they can't be my guy lost.

Four years ago, we ran into this exact same issue. Half of my country went fucking crazy for a long time and they're still a little crazy over it saying that Russians took over the entire election system and changed the outcome so their candidate lost and we said, okay, what did they do? What did they hack? What voting machine did they get access to? What ballots did they change?

What changes to the system would you promote? And they couldn't answer that question except for saying we need to take over the social media platforms and de-platform conservative speech. So no, no, it had nothing to do with Russian interference, it had to do with we can only allow our narrative to broadcast and any other narrative has to be de-platformed. And we're starting to see that today on Twitter and Facebook and so I guess they got what they wanted. So now I ask the right, the very same question.

If you believe this election is fraudulent, what is your burden of proof? If you believe the dead are voting, you tell me where did the evidence come from and you tell me how we catch that. Should be easy enough. Dead people can't sign mail-in ballots. So are you asserting that in certain places people didn't check signatures?

If so, which ones? Who? People give names, places. Which places failed? You say, oh, well, people weren't allowed to observe.

Which places were people not allowed to observe? Provide names. Have those people then go under sworn testimony. They were not. There's lawsuits being filed, what's happening is judges are throwing out the lawsuits saying it's hearsay upon hearsay.

And you'll see a lot of that over the next two, three weeks. You can sue anybody in the United States with or without cause. It doesn't mean the lawsuit's going to stick. So let's take a look at the next two to four weeks and let's take a look at where these lawsuits are. And by the way, five or 10 or 15 or 20 anecdotal cases is not indicative of a mass conspiracy.

And if you're going to assert a mass conspiracy, then you have to put all the dots together and explain how it hasn't been detected. We have a government with a spy apparatus so sophisticated that it was able in the middle of the night to send black helicopters to Abbottabad in 2011 and have Navy SEALs drop out of them and shoot our enemy in the face, Osama bin Laden. This is our government. They're so sophisticated they can find anyone, anywhere, anytime. Our NSA monitors every single signal coming in and out of our country and you better believe they have domestic surveillance.

So let me get this straight. Despite the fact that the intelligence agencies can see and hear damn near pretty much anything, people can put together a massive conspiracy to steal the entire U.S. election and none of that is detected. we're conspirators.

We have to extend the conspiracy. They are the deep state. The intelligence community must be in on it. But what about all the Trump people who were appointed, who lead those agencies? It must be hidden from them.

okay. That means every single person in that conspiracy has to make a political calculation that it's better for their career to go along with this conspiracy than to betray the conspiracy for power and political gain that they'll get by saving the incumbent president, okay? So you tell me, does that work in practice? Did it work with the Italian mafia when Rico came and they say you have to snitch on your people or else there are consequences? Did it work?

No. Not at all. There were thousands of snitches despite the Omerda Code. Did it work in any conspiracy of people or criminal enterprise? No.

Every single day people are police informants. Time and again. Edward Snowden leaked tons of information about the American spy apparatus and in exchange for doing that was basically had to exile himself from the United States and now lives in Russia. There are thousands of cases of whistleblowers from the Pentagon papers on down. Do you honestly believe that you have these vast agencies, 16 of them, and they would be in a position to intercept signals of people planning a massive conspiracy to steal a U.

S. election and not a single one of them would escalate that up the chain and those recordings would find their way into the right hands to prevent this? But no, we can't admit that because it's inconvenient to the conspiracy. Then what would the FBI and the DOJ do if there's credible real evidence that somebody was doing this and there was a real sting operation? Then why isn't there a giant press conference now with Bill Barr and the FBI director and the intelligence agencies coming up and showing the evidence to the American people of this sting water stamp program that they went ahead and put on ballots and showing the non-stamped and stamped ones and all the evidence they collected in the sting.

Where is it? Why doesn't that happen? They do it for every other sting. Oh, but this is treason and insurrection. Okay.

So that's the thing. Broaden the conspiracy. Broaden the conspiracy. Maybe the Department of Justice is in on it. The FBI is in on it and so forth.

But apparently everybody's an expert. They know what the paper looks They know what the watermark looks like. Have you ever seen yourself in person a QFS watermark? Do you even know what it looks like? What's in it?

And let's say it's printed on the ballot before you send the ballot to the people. What does that mean then? It's a certificate of authenticity for the ballot, but it doesn't prevent fraud because what's to stop me from grabbing that ballot and filling it in? I can fill it in on your behalf. We can just print an extra 500 of them.

What? The printing is so sophisticated they only print exactly as many ballots as there are registered voters. What if a ballot gets lost? What if a ballot gets destroyed? What if there's a printing mistake?

How is that handled? They're fungible until they're bundled with the envelope and sent to people. So it's not going to be printed at the time that it's delivered by some mystical federal agency. But people can't connect that. Why?

Because they don't want to connect that. Because their guy lost. And they want to believe in a magical conspiracy that will somehow make him not lose the election. And whether it be through the Supreme Court or some other thing, it's got to happen that way. Guys, we will never survive what is coming if this is the way we as a society think.

You all want to complain about Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and these other guys censoring you and deplatforming people and introducing fact checkers. But you have to have it one way or the other way. Either you let them do that or you're capable of sorting out fact from fiction and dealing with conspiratorial thinking. Because guess what? In 10 years, deepfakes are going to get so good it will be impossible for people to determine a deepfake from a regular piece of news.

And what do we do as a society when any public figure can be in a movie raping a dog or a child? Any public figure can say something that they didn't say, whether it be a racially charged statement or there's a video of him beating up his wife or something like that. Now it's all made up. Computers will generate it. But if we're unable to deal with this information, which is clearly absurd, what will society do when we converge to that?

And what justification do we have that these platforms should not be in charge of curating the information if we can't curate it ourselves? It's an honest question. It really is. and it's getting worse. The anti-vaxxer movement is going to be vicious in 2021.

You will see millions of people and many people watching this live stream today will basically say this COVID vaccine is dangerous. It's part of a New World Order conspiracy. It's going to put microchips in people's body. Bill Gates is behind it. It's part of a depopulation play.

And again, you ask, what evidence do you have? Here's this video. Here's this thing. Here's this thing. All the pharmaceutical companies are lying.

All the scientists are lying. They know. All the doctors giving it. They're either useful idiots or they're lying. They know that this stuff is bad.

There are three different vaccine platforms from the traditional stuff to mRNA, the protein subunit stuff. All of them apparently are just here to depopulate the world. Okay. And none of them are safe and effective. And they're going to kill all of you.

This virus has killed over a million people. Love it or hate it, it is what it is. And what? It's going to keep killing people because it's a novel virus. We have something to get us back to work.

These conspiratorial people will come in and provide very little evidence, very little evidence, and then convince a meaningful percentage of the world not to take the vaccine, of which some subset of them will die. Okay. That's the consequence of this. And maybe for COVID, it won't result in that much more death because the mortality rate isn't too bad. The composite's about 0.

3%. Certain groups of the population can be as high as 5%. But what about the next virus that's 10 times worse or 15 times worse? What about children not getting vaccinated? Because their parents are just absolutely convinced it's a depopulation play and mercury's in there.

It's going to go ahead and give them autism and these other things. And these diseases start reappearing like measles and mumps and rubella and chicken pox and these things that traditionally would kill lots of kids in the 19th century and 18th century. And now they're back because of conspiratorial thinking. Guys, as a society, we have to take a step back. And we really, really, really, really have to challenge our own beliefs and really think it through.

There's not a gigantic organized silent boogeyman here to control and dominate your life. The world is nuanced. It's complicated. There's winners and losers all the time, surprises all the time. The global economy is super complex.

There is no small cabal that wakes up every day pulling puppet strings and running everybody. Yes, there's absolutely power groups. Yes, there's absolutely groups of corporate interests that sure as hell do fuck us every day. And you're damn right, the central banks are unified in the way that they think. So yeah, there's certainly global concerns and interest and American hegemony and the petro dollar does indeed exist.

And we know that. It's out in the open. We see it. We feel it. It's why when the United States says something, people follow and listen to it.

And when they don't, we see the consequences of that in Libya and Iraq and in North Korea and other places, especially with the sanctions. OK, that's a world order. But to extrapolate from that, that there's a secret cabal of people that want to kill billions of humans and they're doing it through things that help us like vaccines and other such things is just absurd. The problem is the very same thinking that does that now delegitimizes the U.S.

election. I will tell you the enemies of this country, of the United States, they do spread information like this. HIV is a great example of that. There was a conspiracy theory that was pushed that HIV was actually a government designed virus to kill black people. It was manufactured by Russian propagandists years ago, believe it or not, 1980s or 1990s and spread through.

It took a little while to take root. But there are still a lot of people floating around who believe that. And what does it do? It creates distrust, dissension, division. It's a low cost asymmetrical warfare to harm people.

These things do exist and they're spread like wildfire. Sometimes they're done by state actors. Sometimes they're done by shit posters on 4chan. Sometimes they're done by corporations. Sometimes they're done by politicians to discredit people the Steele dossier that was done by the Clinton campaign to attack Trump.

They created something that's obviously a fabrication and it seemed true. It seemed plausible. And then the media ran with it and carried it even though it was completely made up. This is what happens. These memes, these collections of information, they only work if you, the listener, are vulnerable to them.

In our entire industry, the cryptocurrency industry, it only works if the people in the industry are capable of thinking for themselves, are capable of discerning fact from fiction, have a skeptical attitude, are not easily swayed one thing to another thing. We see it all the time. When I make a video, there's a good chance that somebody's going to take it, put it in a frame, and create a giveaway scam for it. When I make a video, there's a good chance that somebody's going to hack someone's channel on YouTube and then embed that video in that channel on YouTube. And then basically the people who were followers of that channel, some of them can't discern fact from fiction.

They can't think for themselves and they come to my channels in the comments section, sometimes in German, sometimes in Slovenian, sometimes in Serbian, and they call me a horrible human being and a hacker and they say, why did you steal this guy's channel? Not understanding it's a giveaway scam. This industry is entrusting you to have full, unadulterated, no backseas control over your money, your identity, your property, and if you fuck it up, there's no reset switch. There's no third party that's going to come in and bail you out. You can't email me and get your ADA back if you stupidly give it to a giveaway scam.

And you think to yourself, I will never do that. I'm so smart, I know what's going on. But then you have to ask yourself, well, the same things that prevent you from falling into conspiratorial thinking prevent you from getting scammed. Have you built that muscle up? Have you built those skill sets up?

Are you able to really discern fact from fiction? Scammers are incredibly talented. They build social capital all the time. You talk to any InfoSec expert, you ask them, what is the single most effective way to breach into an organization? It's not zero day exploits, it's social engineering, one-on-one stuff in information security.

That's the first lesson you learn as you start embarking on that tired field. You build up confidence, you mislead people, you convince them of things that are not true. The world is being socially engineered right now in these social media echo chambers. Diff's information is propagating through, and people are susceptible to it. They soak it on up.

I'm no different. I can be convinced of things that aren't true and feel an idiot afterwards after I find out. I'm a little bit more skeptical than your average bear because I've just been around for so damn long and dealt with so much, but we're all vulnerable to this. I keep telling you, our industry only works if we can find a way out of it. This voting thing is just another example of it, the QFS conspiracy.

In two to four weeks, all you guys that are saying, Charles, you're wrong, well, what are you going to say? What are you going to say when all the court cases are thrown out? You'll have to broaden the conspiracy. The courts are in on it. The Supreme Court's in on it.

Even though Trump appointed three out of nine of the Supreme Court justices, they're now in on it. They're compromised. There must be some evidence against them or something like that, and that's why they decided to do that. That's the other problem. We live in a society where people don't want to admit they're wrong.

I was wrong the other day on election night. I looked at the data, looked at all the early voting. I said, Trump's won. Woke up the next morning and looked at everything. I said, boy, those early ballots that came in that are finally getting counted, they were really blue.

It makes sense, fits the narrative. I guess Trump lost. I was wrong. It's okay for me to admit that, but you have to honestly look at yourself in the mirror and say, when's the last time that you admitted you were wrong about anything, any belief, any conspiracy, any of these things? Maybe you did.

Maybe you don't. I don't know. Really, that's a question you ask yourself, and I do every single day. The road to wisdom is admitting what you don't know, and the road to wisdom is admitting that the world is nuanced, and it's really complex, and there are many dimensions about it. We now have choices to make in the 21st century.

There are those, and it's no conspiracy about it because they tell you who they are, Silicon Valley billionaires in the social media space, people the Chinese Communist Party and how they structure their society, a lot of the elites in the media and the Democratic Party who have a very cynical, skeptical, dim, elitist view on people, and they believe people are too stupid to take care of themselves and manage their own lives. They use conspiratorial thinking and all of the stuff that has happened in society as an example of why that's the case. They build structures to basically accommodate for human stupidity. It can be the warning signs on the doors to basically depowering you and avoiding you actually being able to make decisions about your life, your health, and I don't want those people to win because the tools of control and oppression are getting so incredibly good and algorithmically guided that there's going to come to a point where we have zero freedom in society. We won't even know why.

Certain people are considered to be good people and certain people are considered to be bad people. We'll just know by a number, which is an aggregation of many different things, and if you hang out with the high score number people, the people with lots of social credit, you're a good citizen. If you hang out with the people who are low social credit, you get bad social credit yourself, and we create a digital AI-enforced untouchables class. That's happening in China with social credit, and there are many elite people who think that's a good way of running the world and pushing the human race along because so many people are too stupid to handle their own lives. Then us libertarians, we wake up every day and we believe in the best in people.

We're optimistic about people, and we admit that, well, people have their flaws and we make mistakes. At the end of the day, people can be redeemed and people over the long run will do the right thing and succeed, and that people's freedom should be maximized and no institutions should be constructed that elevate one group of people above another group of people institutionally. We are all equal. We are going to have to make that choice in the next 25 years, 30 years. I'll be in my mid-50s, early 60s, and the society I live in either chose maximizing freedom or maximizing control.

This is not a decision I make. It's a collective decision based upon how we deal with what's coming, how we deal with the fact that information is doubling every 24 months to 36 months, dealing with the fact that AI can now make misinformation at scales and levels we've never seen before, dealing with the fact that everyone is hyperconnected in news spreads like wildfire, and there are economic and political incentives to spread misinformation. If we as a society can't handle that, then our freedoms will be taken from us to prevent us from becoming violent and destructive in that reality. If we as a society find a way socially to handle that ourselves, then we have the right to preserve our freedoms. These little things the voter issue that I brought up, or it could be the coronavirus or anything else, they all live in those macrocosms and microcosms, respectively.

And it's a big test. And based upon the results of that test, that'll determine the world I live in when I'm 60, if I'm still around for it. And for you, if you're still around for it, the world you live in too. I would like to live in a world that's as free or freer than the world I live in today. It's a pretty good one.

But I'm not optimistic about that unless we wake up every time and work really, really hard to kind of get ourselves out of this. That's why I keep saying, think for yourself. And when you see claims, no matter who they come from, me, anyone else, be skeptical. Ask probing questions. Go deeper and deeper, deeper.

Why? What? Who? How? Are you certain?

Where's the evidence? What's the data? My cryptocurrency I built, the whole foundations of it weren't trust me. They were first principle science. Here's our model.

Here's what we can build from that model. Here are the mathematical proofs that show you why it works. Then we take that to domain experts and here's third party validation that those proofs were done correctly and that that mathematical model has merit. And then here is a real life simulation. Then here is a real life implementation.

And then here's a real life implementation with hundreds of thousands of users demonstrating the stability of it. That is a layered composition of iterative proof, one after another in different forms and formats. Are we done? No. That's just the beginning.

And the burden is on us to continue to double down and add and add and add and at any time a skeptical person can come in and find that one question we didn't ask and unravel the whole thing because there's a hidden flaw. We accept that as scientists and we accept that as people trying to change things. All I ask is you apply that same discipline to things that are very important, whether it be the legitimacy of your nation's elections or your health. And if you can't do that, then we have to, as a society, have serious questions of who's going to do that for you, or what are the consequences of a society where you cannot believe anything you see, anything you hear, or any person you're around, and we just descend into cultish behavior. We've lived through that before.

It was called the Dark Ages, where reason was set aside for dogma. And if you violated the dogma, you would be set on fire at the stake. The human race, I'd like to believe, has moved beyond that. I really want to believe that. And I think we have a golden opportunity to prove that in the next stage of our evolution.

But maybe I'm wrong. Anyway, just wanted to capstone the QFS video. I'm sure I'm going to get tons of crazy comments despite all that because I probably tripped up on someone's favorite conspiracy theory. And what? I just don't care.

I care about the bigger thing of thinking for yourself, and I care about the bigger thing of how do we as a society get beyond all of this. And it's going to be tricky. Good night, everybody.