hi this is Charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny Colorado always warm Always Sunny sometimes Colorado today is December 6 2022. I have recently returned from NFR had a lovely time in Las Vegas go every year with the family and go to the rodeo and usually stay at The Phoenician sometimes Caesars and I get to see all the sights and sounds and enjoy how bad Vegas has gotten and how expensive Vegas has gotten I ordered uh some steak empanadas for an appetizer they were this small and 25 for just two of them so I think Vegas has gotten too expensive so anyway I want to make a video before I went to bed because this is a topic that's really important to me and um it's one of those topics where at times I take a somewhat contrarian view to what people would expect a Libertarian mindset uh or they would expect me to believe because I'm in the cryptocurrency space I often get asked because he's now on the conference circuit and occasionally goes to conferences I go to if I telepresence what I think of Edward Snowden and overall what I think of the whole affair for many years I've been a staunch libertarian and preached the virtue of privacy and restricting the ability of the government the U.S government from intruding upon our personal Liberties I firmly believe we have freedom of Association Commerce and expression and I see things like the government colluding with social media I see things like the hate speech movement and these other things as basically just attempts to gain control over thought and expression and politicize it so that anything that's inconvenient to those who are in power is defined as the enemy and gets the platformed now I'm also surrounded by uh as a result was hiring lots of veterans and having veterans in the family a lot of people sworn oath to the US Constitution and were entrusted with the secrets of our nation and entrusted with the defense of our nation it's not a light oath millions of Americans have taken it we'll continue to take it and a lot of people have died in the pursuit of it or suffered terribly and in many cases were treated very unfairly now everybody who holds the security clearance will tell you you will see if you get hired off the food chain you spend long enough in many things that make you sick and are profound injustices and yet you're expected to keep them Secret now a student is no different than that he took the oath multiple times one at the CIA one at the NSA and one I believe he was in the army and each time it is mine he had a version of the Constitution that does not fall into the mainstream of the American public why not because the mainstream the American public elected the presidents the Senators the congressmen and these other Representatives they didn't just appear out of The Ether they were elected now his version of it he said well I'm going to make a moral stance and I'm going to tell the world what's really happening with the U.S intelligence agencies okay and that's what he did now there are plenty of Martyrs in the world massive amounts of them religious Martyrs political Martyrs uh there are people right now protesting in Iran there are people right now protesting even in China there are people protesting in Russia and there's plenty of political prisoners knowing full well that when they protest to call truth to power they will be arrested probably tortured and spend a considerable part of their life in a jail cell now if they ever get out they'll be social prize as long as those power structures exist or they might even become Exiles some of them will be murdered some have already been murdered some have been disappeared never to speak again in our own country if you look at the history of all the social movements you have things like Civil Rights Movement when people march they were marching against the law knowing full well that not everybody was going to come home some people were going to be beaten dogs were going to be sick on them some people would be murdered and the people who murdered them would get away with it because the jury of their peers would be selected in a way to acquit them of the murders that they did that's just the reality of social change and the reason why we look up to people like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King the reason why we look up to Medal of Honor recipients the reason why we look up to people like that is because they do extraordinary things not really caring so much whether it hurts them personally they're willing to forego their personal safety they're willing to forego their freedoms and they're willing to accept that they may die in the process of calling truth the power whether you support student or not the first thing he did after leaking our nation's Secrets was he fled to China then he fled to Russia then he became a political Refugee in Russia and now as a citizen of the country swearing allegiance to it if he really truly aspired to be a political martyr then why didn't he just reveal the secrets and go to DC and get arrested and become a political prisoner you say oh that's an unreasonably High burden why then do we demand that for all the other people who crawl truth to power whether they're fighting repressive African regimes whether they're fighting repressive Middle Eastern regimes whether they're fighting Putin in Russia whether they're fighting XI in China we seem to have this double standard where we demand that they stay you look at zielinski he was offered a ride from Ukraine to Switzerland to flee the country and fight the war in absence and he was told that if he stayed there's a high probability he'd be dead in a week and there were already death squads in Kiev looking for him that's just a fact he stayed that's why we say he was Brave for that whether you agree with him or not you can at least say that he was committed to his cause and my umbrage is there's a great hypocrisy that exists within the libertarian Freedom Movement the Privacy Movement we all say we want privacy and let me show you what privacy in America looks like hey Google Okay Google phone turns on it activates you say Alexa turns on activates billions of people use tick tock Facebook YouTube every single day you carry a microphone a tracking device that is owned by a private company everywhere you go and all that information is controlled by private organizations that are not bound and constrained by the Constitution of the United States of America and what do they do they sell that data they give that data they transfer it to others with or without your consent through creative legal structures yet every year the new iPhone knows how every year the new Samsung Galaxy comes out every year the new watch comes out how many of you say I'm not going to buy that on grounds of freedom how many of you are like Richard stallman with free software in the free software Foundation saying I will only use open source truly open source it's real hard to get in contact with that guy you have to talk to him over email with the server he runs himself a software he wrote himself that's the problem with being a purist we want to have our cake and eat it too we want to tell people how bad things are yet we cling to safety we say well we we we want a little bit and how do we know this half of America was willing to succumb to wearing masks vaccine mandates and passports for Public Safety trust the science trust these things and even when things weren't as rosy as they made them out to be or the science wasn't as clear as they made it out to be they said well it is what it is we'll still do it these are nuanced complicated issues and if you're going to be a martyr you have to bask in the Simplicity and purity of going all in you can't go half in because what you end up doing is you damage the very thing that you're fighting for now all the people that say Snowden half of America gets to say if not more well he's a traitor by definition he swore allegiance to An Enemy of the State which by the way has secret police which by the way poisons its political opponents starts Wars of aggression which by the way has no comprehension of freedom of the press just ask all the murdered journalists that are there it actually runs an even more pervasive spy State than we do but somehow that's a desirable alternative to live in and then we get a reason well you know uh I was just stuck there trying to go somewhere else oh okay meanwhile go on the conference circuit write books have movies be a celebrity whistleblower hero just doesn't sit right with me because there are real Martyrs and I've met them read about them I've been inspired by them I've seen them they're few and far between and they really are extraordinary people because they don't care what happens to them they don't care the consequences they stand to remind us of our common humanity and the absence of it and the consequences of the absence of it it's what makes them so special and so unique the Privacy movement has a long road ahead because the technology has got too good we're surrounded by microphones and cameras and a pervasiveness that would make George Orwell blush and there's not a lot of Regulation or control over these things to protect your privacy one of the reasons why I'm so deeply embedded in the blockchain industry is because it's the only regulating function that can actually give you a guarantee that what's on the label is actually what's in the can if you're promised something with a blockchain you get at least a basic guarantee that that's probably true there's nothing in life anymore like that we can't trust our institutions anymore we just can't they've become morally bankrupt we can't trust our leaders anymore we can't trust the process upon which the leaders are accepted anymore that's why our industry exists in a nutshell that's why we do what we do it's why I work on things like midnight because I say what could actually give you some semblance of privacy back with some reasonable guard rails and boundaries so that you can actually live your life but you have to do your part if you truly believe in these things nothing the NSA or the federal government has done will ever compare to the amount of information that Google knows about you or Facebook knows about you nothing because it's their business and they've hired hundreds of thousands of Engineers data scientists researchers to wake up every single day they've built the world's most sophisticated artificial intelligences to wake up every single day and understand just a little bit more about you because they have a financial incentive to do so and no one controls it that's the dirty reality and truth of the world that we live in it's getting so bad you don't even own anything anymore there are BMWs being sold right now or you have to pay a subscription to have heated seats and if you don't they get turned off when you buy content now movies songs these types of things you used to have physical media physical disks you don't have that anymore guess what they're now basically part of a platform if you get deep platform you lose access to all of your subscriptions book is inconvenient it's on Kindle to wake up one day the book is gone this is why the motto you'll own nothing and be happy is repeated gleefully again and again by the way fights running around why because there's truth to it people are walking towards a world where you can't even repair stuff the right to repair look it up you want to know why I don't like John Deere anymore well it's very simple it's really hard to repair this stuff you can't just swap parts doesn't work anymore software prevents you from doing that it's the world we're heading towards a world where you control less and less more and more decisions are made for you not even by people but by algorithms it's an incestuous relationship between the Private Industry and the governments of the world and in many cases many of the smaller governments no longer even have the power to say no they're told by a large Global Order what to do that's the problem and that's why the blockchain industry exists why people are fighting hard every day writing software every day and deifying certain people who aren't Martyrs who benefit financially and haven't made huge sacrifices doesn't accomplish anything it diminishes the movement we don't have to have Martyrs anymore because we are all living the consequences of this we've all felt this whole world got shut down for two years and no one owes us an explanation for it every day more and more freedoms are taken from us and no one owns an explanation for it and we're told to sit down and shut up and any person who tries to make it a little bit better is instantly villainized and burnt to the ground that's where we're headed towards okay it's not very pleasant so I stay optimistic and I stay optimistic because I believe that there's enough people in the world who are tired of this that they don't want to see this anymore they don't want to endure this anymore they're tired of believing that tomorrow will be worse than today I don't want to go down that road I don't think you do so what you have to do is return to First principles and you have to fight for the things that you believe in and accept that every day there are going to be some sacrifices and every day there's going to be some ups and downs and losses nothing is free in life you have to take your hard knocks and you have to accept that there are going to be internal hypocrisies in all of us people always say what they want but what they do is far more important because that tells you what they truly want we have to be honest about that you know what there was a group I belong to in the cryptocurrency industry it's a big exclusive group with lots of CEOs in it it's a WhatsApp group and when there were some privacy issues with WhatsApp they said you know what we should move the whole thing to Signal these are all crypto people you know they they fight for privacy they believe really strongly and and these types of things so I guess what happened no one moved the signal because it was too inconvenient relative to WhatsApp that's amongst the elite find this a lot too with pgp if all these cryptographers running around I very rarely had a cryptographer email me with pgp for the ones who write the protocols because convenience usually wins out so we need to think it through complicated thing there's a lot of moving pieces to it there are dangers in the world people have to deal with them people have to regulate them I'm scared shitless of gain of function I think it's probably going to end up killing the entire human race if we don't do anything about it 25 to 30 years because a small group of people basically can pull off an Extinction event if you've learned anything from the age of covet it's that how quickly things can spread and if we get so unlucky that something is a bit more lethal or done where is the great lesson the great regulation nuclear age my grandfather dealt with this after Hiroshima Nagasaki the world woke up and realized how incredibly dangerous nuclear weapons were created a tight regulatory structure even then he almost wiped out the whole human race and only by the actions of two individuals on two separate times one in 1962 and one in the 1980s did the human race not come to an end single person in both cases not a president not a king not a grand scientist or an exalted person both cases a mid-grade military officer who said man maybe we shouldn't end the human race who was acting against orders in the chain of command and that's with a tightly regulated existential technology we're entering an age where there's going to be more than a dozen of them in the 21st century so yeah there exists threats we have to work our way through them and we do that by listening to each other we do that by engaging in dialogue with each other we do that by admitting that we're full of contradictions and hypocrisies and letting the grandstanding go away and we do that by recognizing we don't have all the answers today right now right here and what matters more first principles and processes that help us converge to the right answers that help us get to where we need to go that's the truth of the matter if we want to have all this technology if you want to have the age of iot we want to live in an age where nothing is ever forgotten and benefit from that we have to accept that we will lose privacy it's just that simple now we can regress and get rid of these things and return to an age that my grandfather and grandmother lived in or we have to find a compromise and it's the same with freedom of expression and commerce and all of these other things we have to work our way through it what a blockchain is at least give us some guarantees that governments can't violate and individuals can't violate so everybody plays by the same rules isn't that the equality that everybody's fighting for but that's not enough requires us to fill in the wisdom Gap you invent the safety belt after you invent the car because somebody got hurt and they realized they needed something more and similarly with all this new technology we have to take a moment and ask yourself what are the safety builds for it and if we don't we will eventually learn them we will eventually deal with the consequences them but we're already feeling it social media for example has allowed us all to know everybody else's business but it has divided Us in ways that Society still cannot handle it's made people hate people they know nothing about they've never met and never will meet but yet they have such a strong opinion it's like the next door neighbor that ran over your dog think of that and that's just the beginning there's so many more things that are coming we gleefully look at neural link and we say wow look at that monkey controlling things on the screen flip the page 10 years from now 15 years from now BCI will evolve to a point and AI will evolve to a point where computers can easily understand your intentions motives and thoughts or at least enough about them to infer whether you're going along with something or not which you feel so comfortable if the government knew everything you thought I wouldn't so what regulates that what controls that what if it's controlled by Private Industry all this hate speech stuff well you're tweeting with aggression we can't let you tweet yeah you can promote violence you can cite violence in people all that'll never happen well I didn't think I'd have to show a piece of paper to go to Starbucks in the United States of America that happened things happen quickly very very quickly never forget that ever so as with everything in life I'm just one person and you're just one person but together for a lot of people we have to make some decisions and that's the point I think of the work we do to let you know what the options are and for you to be realistic reasonable and wise about where we go I sometimes take very unpopular views I just don't care if people like him or not one person can like this video and everybody else can hate it but what I do have to do is because it doesn't feel right any other way is be true to people realistic to people and honest to people and tell people how I really feel in the thought process behind why I feel the way I feel it's great to have myths and stories and legends and heroes because they help us navigate a very complicated world and they make complicated things simple and we still do need them and if Snowden is a hero of yours and you gain great inspiration from what he's done okay then the myth maybe is more valuable to you than the man just don't conflate the two my only point is that I think we're moving beyond the age of Heroes and we're moving towards something very different we're moving to the age of you where each and every one of us has to gather enough agency in Collective personal accountability and responsibility to really decide what we want in life and what we're willing to take and what we're not willing to take because right now too many things are being decided for us by others we've never met and can't influence or control and at some point we will lose all options and be forced to accept whatever is given to us and I don't want to live in that world I really don't because those people don't really care about individuals care about numbers metrics they care about things like profit whatever they view sustainability as whatever the hell that means and your enjoyment happiness my enjoyment happiness doesn't really mean whole much about it it's not a good route to go down the only way you get out of it is take your agency back invest in technology and build technology that preserves and promotes and protects your agency and create political systems that account for the individuals as much as they do the collective and don't reward people who take these things from you with more power anyway I figured I'd make a video and uh hope uh hope you guys gain some insight from that good night
