hey everybody charles hoskins here live from warm sunny colorado it's a beautiful day outside 90 degrees yesterday snow today cold and gloomy although i think the tomatoes are going to make it anyway the web scraper picked up an interesting video uh yesterday and it was three hours long so i apologize i did not have the time to go through the entire video but i did kind of scroll through different areas and came from a state pool operator uh whose name uh cardinopolis uh and a really interesting guy so it was a direct response to my tweet about the black lives matter movement for those of you who don't know brad garlinghouse did one of the things that annoys me more than anything else he kind of got on the corporate bandwagon and just hashtagged something without fully understanding or appreciating the movement or anything else and so i just said you know why don't you do something productive and go ahead and advocate for a specific policy change instead of just giving blanket power to a raw movement right now so anyway this uh drew some immediate reaction so i did a follow-up video about it and this particular stake pull operator he went ahead and spent three hours analyzing the video and talking about his personal perspective and thoughts on the matter you know this is a great moment for me because i made all these videos about propaganda and thinking for yourself and this concept of disagree without being disagreeable and uh this is a great demonstration of that you see uh it wasn't a fan video nor was it an attack video it was a reasonable well-thought-out person giving a stream of consciousness about personal experiences and beliefs to counter ideas that i had and experiences that i have that's a dialogue and we both learned something in that process and it shows me just the quality of the community that we have in the cardinal ecosystem where people see things that are highly emotionally charged and they get ah and they're most people would just attack you and go into attack mode but instead our community members they resist that urge they take a step back and they say all right well i'm gonna tell you what i really think and the best part of that video uh was this realization that he had to say charles is not cardano cardano's as much mine as it is his and even where i disagree with him can't stop me from participating be part of it run my steak pool and be just as passionate today as i was yesterday and that's a really amazing thing that shows you true decentralization that shows you uh the true character of where we're going and how big this thing is going to get where you can have many different viewpoints in one place and it's stable and people are unified in a common thread race is a difficult topic and i approach it from two different perspectives one uh i've had interesting life experiences uh unlike many people in america who are white i've been and lived in places where i was the minority for example when i grew up in hawaii during the 1980s 1990s uh all the time locals would say things like how we go home it's a it's a derogatory term for white people in some cases throw stuff at us i remember more than once where people just skip in front of me in line or other things and cashier let them do it because i was white i remember in japan living in different places not being allowed to eat at certain restaurants they'd say things like japanese only because they didn't want to serve me not being allowed to go to certain places i remember in africa living there where my personal safety was at times threatened because there was sectarian violence against whites in these areas and so it does give me a bit of perspective of how unfair it feels to be treated differently just because of the color of your skin and how terrible society can be when it indulges these vices uh none of those situations did those people know me none of those situations those people know anything about me or who i am they just judge me based on the category i happen to be in uh and that should never happen but it often does because human beings do this to each other and it's a fact of life we've lived with for a very long time because it's hardwired into our culture our genetics and it's this um evolutionary pressure that makes us suspicious of the other and it served us well a hundred thousand years ago 200 000 years ago when we lived in tribes and we're a forager culture and when we want to live in a modern society that embraces the enlightenment and treat people equally it works against us you know the other side is i've been part of co-opted movements and i remember the tea party when i joined the tea party it had three pillars to it back in 2007 2008 right when it was getting started choose liberty so follow the constitution pretty simple idea uh humble foreign policy means let's stop invading other countries okay and uh sound money okay that that seems pretty universal i think many people get behind that we have a lot of democrats and we had a lot of very liberal people inside the tea party because they agreed with these pillars then what happened was the movement got co-opted by people like michelle bachmann and breitbart and others they showed up so yeah we're tea party but now let's talk about how we're gonna take gay rights away now let's talk about how we're gonna get rid of abortion i said wait a minute that had nothing to do with what we were talking about i didn't sign up for any of this stuff what the hell is going on and little by little the movement got co-opted the rage and anger stayed and we made a choice as a nation to embrace the worst instincts of that rage and anger and we voted in a guy like trump who is a simulacrum of some of those core ideas he doesn't tend to start wars but he also is an indulgent of our worst instincts as a nation the black community had this same situation a certain extent the 1960s they had power and i'd argue that this movement that's going on right now is the first time they've had power again the 1960s there was a groundswell of support and they had to choose between people like martin luther king and people like malcolm x both were saying true things and both of them had legitimate grievances one was a revolutionary change the other was an iterative long hard brutal change that it would take a lot of time and effort to get through and the reality was that people followed that path were signing up for waiting for people to die they could change active racism to passive racism but they couldn't get rid of it and they were signing up for those races to eventually get so old that they'd no longer have power or positions and their children hopefully would be redeemable and that's what happened one of the most meaningful things i saw in 2016 was a old woman she was 106 years old at that time now 111 years old her name is virginia mclaren and i'd highly encourage anyone to go to youtube and and watch this video but she's probably like four foot five four foot ten real short gal and she was invited the white house and she's um a black woman who grew up in south carolina 1909 the jim crow south at the core of all of that and at the height of power of the klu klux klan and and all of these things it was not improbable but it was impossible for a black president to have existed back then there was just no reality or path for that to happen and you could see her at 106 years old two canes barely able to walk barely able to see and she said a black president with a black wife in the white house in tears just so much joy on her face the book end of her life the other side of it is that there was this sense of the arc of how much change had actually happened that didn't happen in 2016 or 2008 that happened in 1964 and it took that long for the changes that were made then to be reflected and give her that moment change is very hard and you don't get it easily but if you're committed to it focus to it goal oriented and you look at things as small victories you get there eventually and you give that moment to the people who thought it was impossible or inconceivable as a person who was part of a co-opted movement i am fully aware that there's a difference between black lives matter the people in the streets who are very angry and have legitimate grievances and i understand and actually agree with many of those grievances tamir rice should have never happened that broke me but there's a difference between the raw anger and a small group of people who own the trademark and are doing the negotiations and will be the recipients of a lot of power if that crystallizes who are marxists by their own words by their statements by the actions the places they've been the places they've gone it's that simple you know i don't call a person a marxist unless they tell me they're a marxist and they actually say it's a good idea and they praise marxist leaders now i understand some people got offended when i said hey look they're using the same logo as the soviet union you know i've been throughout eastern europe and the soviet bloc many people in the united states don't understand this but soviet uh symbology is deeply offensive to some people in the former soviet bloc because they lived through the horrors of that institution i have people work for me who have family members who were gulagged one of which was an artist and what happened he had banned literature a book that he wasn't supposed to have and he spent 20 years in a camp coming back missing his tongue blinded his left eye and a broken crippled back from 20 years of hard labor for possessing a book this institution i will remind people killed 100 million people during the 20th century from china to russia either through four starvation or death camps it's not okay to embrace their symbology and philosophy and anywhere i see any group or institution regardless of what they're fighting for touching that advocating that or attempting to take advantage of legitimate grievances and by the way this is what communists always do batista was a horrible human being and did terrible things in cuba chica vara and castro took advantage of that and utilized the legitimate grievances to push a very particular philosophy there were legitimate grievances in the tea party and the same demagogue showed up on the right and tried to take those grievances for political power and to oppress people and to push a dark philosophy which has now turned into what's happened with trump so we have to separate these two things and power is finite in ephemeral and you can spend it like a currency we could have back in 2008 had we hung together and kept the philosophy spent that power to stop the wars to have a balanced budget amendment sound monetary policy to have a smaller government a better america instead we chose to spend that power enabling the worst amongst us and it's cashed in and a reflection of where we have leadership today so the people behind blm who are marching in the streets they have to ask themselves do they want a revolution or do they want an iteration it's not satisfying when you talk about an iteration but you get to experience what virginia experienced at the end of her life a revolution often is a failure and you lose everything and when it's successful what do you get like when you say we want economic justice and political justice and social justice how do you actually do that if you really think it through and you say who will make sure this happens how powerful does an institution have to be to tell an employer how to act a religion how to act an educational institution how to act if they get the final say that means ultimately they're in charge of all of the means of production every single time the human race has handed so much power to so few we have ended up in dictatorship and we have ended up with an institution whose purpose is not to protect us to empower us but rather with an institution that's purpose is to protect itself at any cost even if it has to gulag people so i understand the anger i really do from what meager perception i have and i understand the nature of power in this respect and at being part of a co-opted movement i see the same things happening to this movement and i'm deeply concerned and worried whether it succeeds or fails both outcomes will be counterproductive now in my particular tweet i said how about you end the war on drugs why because that's a very goal-oriented thing and it's one of the last pillars of institutional racism that remains in american law people who architected that did so to harm minorities and the evidence for this is clear on tapes with helderman and nixon and other people during the 1960s and 70s this is what they were talking about this was the common notion we can't control them this way so let's control them this way and that institution which has spent a trillion dollars imprisoned millions of americans one percent of our population and turned entire communities into wastelands of non-violent criminals has to go and if you believe you want less militarized police you want no more no knock raids you want a fundamental change in the relationship and policing in the community this would be one of the greatest achievements to that end it's just that simple and that's a specific goal and a symbol that things can be different and we can achieve things second police unions have to go and the culture has to change you know a lot of these departments that are accused of institutional racism they're led by black men and women so what they wake up and say well i happen to be part of this group but let's go oppress them no the problem is that the institutions have no ability to correct themselves why because bad actors are either protected or because of police unions it's impossible to fire them and even if when they get fired it's easy for them to go to somewhere else and get rehired it's no coincidence that the people who are continually committing acts of violence against a lot of different people not just one particular group happen to have a record of repeatedly doing that a record of repeated allegations where they were all swept under the rug so you stop those things and you make progress is this satisfying no because it doesn't make the dead come back to life it you don't get an apology or i'm sorry the government never apologizes but what it does do is the same thing that happened with the civil rights act 1964 is it fundamentally changes the conversation and it puts it along a more productive road that was my point go focus on tangible real things don't go tear down history and hold everybody to contemporary standards and say that everything needs to be thrown out everything is unfair everybody is is bad white people are the enemy this is what some people are saying or at least it's the perception of that you know what happens when that dialogue is pushed that becomes the image of the movement it's used by those who don't want these legitimate changes to happen to disable and make the movement fail michelle bachmann did not speak for 99 when she showed up of the tea party but the media made her speak for it because they believe by doing so it would disarm the movement and prevent the federal reserve from being audited prevent a sound money prevent a humble foreign policy that's the truth of the matter so they have to set the emotions aside and ask what do you want to achieve and how do you want to achieve it and is it a long road or a short road and it may feel really good to get some vengeance and feel really good to tear some things down and beat some people down who have historically been not such good people but it doesn't actually get you to a moment where real change has happened that's my entire point now that's my opinion as a rich white guy here in colorado who had the privilege to go all around the world and experience different things and i fully accept and appreciate that that reality and opinion may be very different for other people the point of this and the point of this response to his video is that we can coexist without agreeing completely and that's the final thing we have to think about how you build great societies how you build great institutions is that people feel free to express themselves without fear of the consequences of expressing themselves this is one of the reasons why i hate marxism so much the core tenet of that state cult is silencing opposition and the ends justify the means you're either with us or against us and if you express the opinions we don't agree with you're the enemy and must be destroyed and silenced by any means necessary there are no counter examples after a marxist government's taken root you can't find one go look at stephen cotkin been studying communism for his entire professional career as a princeton professor listen to his lectures about stalin the guy is very sanguine in these things so when we build a community an ecosystem where people can express themselves and have opinions and not fear that there's going to be blowback or attacks you know what happens is ideas flow and then we all realize that our personal view and our personal opinions may not be completely right we might be missing something we might be thinking about something in a way that has some fundamentally flawed assumptions or we're missing context that we need to actually get to a better opinion and both sides many sides they all learn that over time you see the only way cryptocurrencies ever work is that people are capable of thinking for themselves at the end of the day the governments don't want to tell you this but they're not opposed to cryptocurrencies and blockchains this technology because they believe it empowers criminals and drug dealers and terrorists and blah these are surface vanity concerns that are easy for them to say they're deeply concerned because they don't have faith in you at the end of the day the people in charge of the world the big companies they have a very negative view of humanity and everyday people they think they're smart and capable and they think you're dumb gullible and you cannot be in charge of your own life you're incapable of critical thinking unless you have shown that you've gone to the hallowed wonderful institutions the harvards of the world you you've come from the right families you should not be trusted with power because if you have power you're gonna burn the world to the ground so they take over institutions whether it be media or anything else and they use that to try to prevent people from critically thinking it's why long-form media keeps getting attacked independent journalism keeps getting attacked it's why people who have divergent ideas from the mainstream are criticized and ostracized instead of embraced because any counter example to this narrative is dangerous because once people realize they can think for themselves they start questioning every single thing in society the things they're told the axioms the leaders push upon everybody the institutions that rule us and they start asking why is there a better way is there something we can do differently cryptocurrencies are the ultimate example of that cryptocurrencies have baked in that you can be your own bank you can host your own government you can build your own governing process you can have control over your own vote making sure it's counted properly your identity you own not a company not a government and we can just decide who has a good reputation or bad reputation without the media or government or some institution telling us that that's generation one where does that go in five years or ten years or fifteen years but here's the thing those elites they're right if people are incapable of thinking for themselves they succumb to propaganda and they don't feel empowered to have their own opinions and justify those opinions and learn how to listen to each other and engage in dialogue with each other what we have just demonstrated as a community in a small example is that we as a community seem to be a counter example to their beliefs and their opinions i have an opinion and a strong bully pulpit someone else has an opinion and you know what today they're equal they're all equal and it's a dialogue and i'm going to learn something from it and he'll learn something from it and if we can do that with one of the most politically charged and toxic topics that every media director every single pr person will tell you stay away from this is the third rail you can't possibly expect to touch that not come out covered in molten tar and on fire burning to death if we can do that here in this small example then what can't we do who can't we be who can't we welcome into this movement and become that's the amazing thing here and this is uh why i made this video it gave me a lot of hope i have very strong opinions as you all know and i i had to make a decision a long time ago whether i hide them or i share them and i decided you know as bad as it could be to share them it's worth just it's worse to stay silent because all of you know who i am you know where i stand you know what i believe and you might not agree with it but at least you know me as a person and you know how i think as a person and what i do as a person and that gives you the clarity to decide whether you want to engage disengage go somewhere else be part of it but at least it gives you clarity we have an honesty deficit in society right now everybody's passive aggressive everybody's shallow you don't know who people are there's political speech this is what 1984 was all about change the language to a point where the language can only produce a particular outcome we now have that in society there's the real opinion the real thoughts and then there's what we say and do over 60 percent of americans have views that they're afraid to share publicly that is going to increase to 90 percent over time and i just won't stop speaking out and i understand that it may alienate some people and make some people angry but the power of it is that if people really take us seriously and think for a moment they ask questions why did they say that why does he believe that maybe there's some truth to it let's dig into it and they start making three-hour videos that is the most dangerous thing in the world to those in power because if that catches on we're going to wake up and millions of people are going to do it and then how do these central governments control us how do they guide the narrative how do they control the narrative they can't so they have to pivot and actually talk about solving real problems they have actually talked about goal posts and where we're going to go what we're going to do it's a bizarre thing for hundreds of years businesses are held accountable to goals a mission kpis and every quarter they have to report these things our governments don't have those obligations they talk in superlatives and qualitative statements and flowery language but at the end of the day they never actually tell you what are the goal posts and what are we going to do even when we're talking about a global pandemic they're not accountable for that what are the goal posts and what are we going to do and we have a chance to change that and govern a different way and take the best of everything as a culture and as a movement that's responsible for being held accountable for i should say uh progress we define it so anyway i just wanted to make a quick video about these things and uh you know these are topics i do encounter and i try to expose myself to lots of different viewpoints i a big fan of thomas soule read a lot of his work and i'm a big fan of uh many people who write history books like ron chernow and others because it gives me some perspective what was going on 100 years ago or 50 years ago and so forth uh and they don't give you a full picture of everything but they do give you a snapshot of kind of the content character of these things and then what i like to share them and then what happens is other people show up who have different perspectives and i learn a lot i didn't when i was in my early 20s despise the marxist as much as i despise them today it was only after i actually visited the places that they ruled and physically saw the consequences of their leadership and met the people who had been personally impacted by it and the physical and psychological the emotional cultural trauma that was inflicted on them as a consequence of that leadership that i really developed a strong distaste for them and i think it's not marxist as a particular person like a stalin or a kim jong-il or something it's marxism as a philosophy the hyper-centralization of power always results in the destruction of society because the people in power build society around keeping them in power rather than using the power to help the people even if you have a beneficent beautiful dictator in the beginning everybody gets corrupted there are no exceptions in human history to that the point of cryptocurrencies is saying that we can manage a lot of the dimensions of society without building central institutions but get the same outcome as if they existed which means we have checks and balances which means that no one person can co-opt the system and take it over and whether that's a small system or a large system it has the same rules they scale and everybody is treated equally as the founder of cardano i'm treated exactly the same as the new person who shows up tomorrow to cardano that's a very powerful thing and we don't have that in society today you know we are hardwired by years of evolution in culture to think certain ways and we can put very sophisticated cognitive and cultural and social constructs on top of ourselves to try to resist the temptations of genetics and prior culture but at the end of the day it's a band-aid because we just can't change that computers don't have that protocols don't have that in essence they show us who we are on our best days and on our worst days so i don't know the solutions to everything i really don't i seldom have solutions to anything but i do know the direction where the solutions live and how you get to the solutions and i'd much rather get there with a movement that values people allows people to have an opinion and be a free thinker then get there with a movement that embraces a great leader and we hope that the great leader is so wise and so capable that that person will lead us to somewhere else and take us where we need to go i get instantly skeptical when i see these things and every time i've seen it happen there's always a poor outcome in that respect so i'll keep making these videos some of you hate them some of you love them i just don't care because my voice matters as much as your does and we all need to share it and i am glad to see community members stepping up and saying things sometimes uncomfortable sometimes comfortable i'm glad to see it glad to see the community roadmap and i'm glad to see the dialogue and i'm glad to see the appreciation that cardano is as much theirs as is mine and we all have equals footing and rights here it gives me hope that my doctrine of optimism and my belief in the best in people and my belief that people are capable of thinking for themselves and reaching independent conclusions regardless of what's been pushed upon them is right and ultimately is the path we need to go on again none of this works if people can't do that if you believe that people can't do the sell all your cryptocurrency all cryptocurrencies get out of the movement these systems cannot succeed unless you believe human beings are capable of being in charge of themselves and believe in true decentralization otherwise they're just rube goldberg machines take wealth away from the retail and transfer it to the few just like many institutions in society so that's all i have to say thank you guys so much for listening i sometimes make these videos sometimes your technical videos take the good bad and the ugly cheers everybody
