Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is April 4th, 2024. It just dawned on me that I didn’t make a video on April 1st; I should have done that. The crypto media works in strange and mysterious ways.
Anyway, I wanted to make a video because I get asked a lot about the 2024 election and who I am supporting or what I believe. Recently, I was at Ethereum Denver and had a chance to talk to RFK's people while I was there. I'm trying to set up a dinner with RFK, and I get asked a lot about what I think of RFK Jr. and his campaign in the current state of affairs in 2024.
It's a challenging time to be an American right now because the system has been structured and rigged in a way where what we really want, we don’t get. We’re told to accept a situation that is not very good. It’s really a choice between dementia and demented, as I like to say. You have two candidates, both of whom have been president for four years, running against each other, both very old, with controversial track records. They are remarkably polarizing and have invested a huge amount of their time into dividing people.
When we look at America, there are over 300 million people living in the United States. We have some of the best, brightest, and most talented individuals, yet for some reason, the system is built to prevent those people from actually running for president. Every now and then, you see them run, and either they’re delegitimized or excluded.
RFK is part of American royalty. There’s a lovely book called "The Real RFK Jr." that talks about his history. He’s overcome a lot; he was born into a very prominent family. His uncle was the president of the United States, and his father was probably going to be president—both were assassinated. His other uncle was a very prominent senator who also ran for president. The Kennedy family has been involved in American politics long before I was born and even when my dad was a little kid.
When you come from a legacy like that, you have a deep and mature understanding of America as it was and as it is today. Ordinarily, when a person with his life story and legacy runs, they’re a legitimate candidate and should be given an opportunity to participate in debates and the political process. However, he was excluded from that process, much like Bernie Sanders was in 2016 on the other side of the aisle.
The Republican Party has been co-opted and belongs to a single person, for better or for worse, who is unpredictable. While he has done some interesting and good things, like the Abraham Accords, he has also done puzzling and counterproductive things. I’d like something different; I’d like some choice in the matter.
Every election cycle, I’m told to hold my nose and vote for the lesser of two evils, and this is by design. There is one thing in the United States where there is universal bipartisan agreement: only Republicans and only Democrats can hold higher office. Everyone else is not legitimate and can’t participate. You’re going to be reminded of this if you are an American come November by both political parties. They’re going to demonize and try to destroy RFK and everything about him. His own family has joined the Biden White House, forming a task force to attack him. We’ll see some of the most vicious personal attacks ever levied in the next six months, not because they hate him or particularly disagree with him, but because he’s a threat to power.
I’d like to believe that it’s time we start considering people whose campaign is to heal instead of harm. I believe the United States of America can do better than recycling the same candidates and having us all accept another four years of anger, hate, and division.
Here’s the reality: no matter who wins, Biden or Trump, there’s a strong possibility—almost a certainty—that one of those two will win. The other side will say it is the worst thing that has ever happened in American history. There will be protests in the streets, anger, denial of election integrity, and a belief that the United States is going to die and be destroyed. The entire point of the opposition party will be to destroy whatever is done by the party in power.
Does that make any sense to you? Is that good governance? Is that sustainable? If every election cycle, fewer people participate and less legitimacy is achieved, we live in a reality where people basically hate each other and don’t even understand the issues. We don’t even understand what we believe; we don’t have missions anymore. When we look at our foreign policy, we don’t know why we intervene or what outcome we want to achieve. There’s no coherence to it. People who were friends are now enemies, and people who are enemies are now friends. It can change on a moment’s notice, and we’re just all expected to fall in line.
When we look at our national debt—over 34 trillion dollars—people are preparing us for a reality that within a few decades, it could be over 100 trillion dollars, with no plan in sight to reduce it and no sacrifice on the federal government side. The proposed budget was 7.3 trillion dollars. Does anyone honestly believe that if we elect the other party, they’ll somehow make it better when they were also contributors to this massive debt? It has increased under every administration of my life, with the brief exception of a small window during the Clinton Administration. The last time we truly made meaningful progress on reducing the national debt was during the Eisenhower Administration in the 1950s.
That tells you how little they think about these things. When you look at your daily experience—your ability to buy things at the gas pump, the grocery store, your rent—everything keeps going up, and your standard of living keeps going down. In terms of chronic ailments and mental illness, when JFK took office in 1961, 6% of the American population suffered from a chronic ailment or mental illness. Today, it’s over 60%, depending on how you count it—a tenfold increase. Did we suddenly develop new genes? Did a bomb go off and give us all some sort of weird virus? No, it’s lifestyle that has changed.
The very same people who push that are the Fortune 500 companies that lead and control the U.S. government. They tell us every election cycle that anyone who denies them their power is illegitimate, a conspiracy theorist, and a bad actor. We deal with the consequences at my clinic when we see people die before their time. We have over 7,000 patients, and we see so many people on more than a dozen prescription drugs, on oxygen tanks, with diabetes and other chronic ailments, suffering profoundly. They don’t have a good quality of life, and they’re good people. They played by the rules; they just did what they were told to do, and those things converted into maladies that they now suffer from for the rest of their lives.
It should be a national priority to have a conversation about why we do what we do, whether that be our education system, our healthcare system, how we spend money, or how the federal bureaucracy works. Instead, it’s "vote for me because the other person is so evil and destructive that you have to prevent them from having power." Don’t care about what I say and actually do; don’t care about the outcome; don’t measure anything. If you do measure it, it’s wrong and biased because the evil people on the other side influenced it. I’ll lead you to paradise. That’s not a choice; that’s not a constitutional republic; that’s not democratic consent; that’s basically a fiction.
For being the most powerful and wealthiest nation, the nation that created the internet and has brought so much good to the entire world, it’s about time each and every one of us takes a moment, wakes up a bit, and asks ourselves: why can’t we be different? We shouldn’t ask for perfection in people. We shouldn’t expect that we agree with every single thing a person says and does. What we should ask for is some basic stuff, like the ability to change your mind, compromise, integrity, and the ability to think freely and creatively. We should hold people accountable for when they do bad things.
If you look at the career of RFK, this is precisely who he is and what he’s done. By no means is he the same; he’s had many challenges, made a lot of mistakes in his early days, but he’s a fighter. He turned a lot of things around, held people accountable, and made some good decisions. He realized that the current immigration policy in the United States is not sustainable or reasonable and took a more nuanced view. He also looked into the troubling relationship between the FDA and the current pharmaceutical industry and how it really is hurting every single American at our core. He’s trying to hold them accountable and has written a lot of books about it, made many statements, some of which you might agree with and some of which you might implicitly say are anti-science or conspiracy theories, mostly because the media told you that—not because you actually looked into his arguments and statements.
This certainly may have some flaws, but at the very least, it invites a conversation, especially about informed consent, which is the bedrock of medical ethics. We have an obligation to always challenge and question because, at the end of the day, people’s health is at stake.
When we look at his VP selection, Nicole Shanahan, we have some personal connections. She works with Stanford through David Xi and his lab in the computer science department. We have a lot of respect for Codex, a lab at the Stanford School of Law that thinks about computational law, something that is directly connected to smart contracts and regulation in our industry. She’s part of that; she’s also involved in AI policy and many next-generation ideas, many of which are completely unrepresented in our conversation in government.
Think for a moment about how ill-prepared the current people who govern us are for the problems of the 21st century. No one in the Biden Administration or the old Trump Administration, and perhaps even the new Trump Administration, truly understands AI, has worked with AI, or knows where this is going. This is the single most transformative technology for our entire economy, our lifestyle, and how all of our children will be educated. We’re recusing ourselves as a governing body and allowing a small group of unelected people to do basically whatever they want and monopolize their control over the technology. There is no national conversation happening on the most consequential technology of my lifetime.
This is the first VP selected who actually did work in that area. She used to be married to Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, and through that exposure, she had an enormous amount of influence. In her own personal life story, her work at Stanford, and her startups, she was connected to that. That shows good judgment and an understanding of what is coming.
Where are we going as a society? It’s the same for crypto. This is an industry that went from nothing to a multi-trillion dollar industry in 15 years. We don’t see that in business, and this indeed is the future. It’s one of the exponential technologies that will change the world. His candidacy is the only one that actually respected our industry enough to show up at our events, talk, and directly engage with us. That meant something, even if we disagree on certain things. At least there’s a person willing to hear and listen, someone we can negotiate with as an industry to figure out a path forward.
I don’t see that in the major parties. They tell us what we have to accept and say, "Get used to it." That’s not what America was founded on. I thought this was a trust in the notion for us, the American people, the beneficiaries to enjoy. It’s not the state that’s in charge of our lives. If you want to reset and get back to what we should have been, you need a government that listens, engages, and understands who is helping the nation move forward.
Our industry as a whole, while it has made mistakes like all industries, has done pretty well in the last 15 years. Look at the oil and gas industry under Standard Oil in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. Refineries were exploding all the time, dumping gasoline—waste material at the time—into rivers. They treated their employees terribly, leading to deaths. Don’t believe for a moment that any industry during its founding is clean. You can’t find a single one. The automobile industry, the aerospace industry—look at how many test pilots died during that time period.
Net-net, in 15 years, crypto is doing pretty well, and the good has outweighed the harm by orders of magnitude. We should be listened to as an industry because we have new ideas and ways of fixing old institutions to restore trust and credibility. There wasn’t a Trump booth there; there wasn’t a Biden booth there, but there was an RFK booth. That meant something to me and to a lot of people in our industry.
I believe there’s a strong possibility that this election will be like 1992, where third-party candidates will have an outsized influence. I don’t believe it will be enough for him to win, but that’s okay because it can form a movement. It can inspire a lot of people who say, "We’ve had enough; we want to heal instead of harm." It’s about time we change the system and the rules of the system.
My firm belief is that the only way we’re going to be able to get out of all of this is through a constitutional convention because the federal government and the bureaucracy accompanying it are designed to preserve themselves and their own power and destroy anything that’s a threat to it. If anybody comes close, they will be destroyed.
It’s time to remind the American people of one truth we were founded on: we are in charge, not the government. It works for us. There have been too many election cycles, too many actions, and too many bureaucratic overreaches that have moved in the opposite direction, saying, "You are not in charge." The resounding mantra of our industry is to restore that basic principle on a global basis to everyone, whether it be a self-sovereign identity argument, being your own bank, or restoring integrity to institutions like the ability to vote fairly and freely, with auditability ensuring that you know the system was fair.
These are basic human principles and prerequisites to a free society, a society that cares about liberty. We can no longer endorse systems that perpetually move in the opposite direction. I’m not going to vote for the lesser of two evils. I’m just not going to do it anymore. I’m not part of that system.
So today, April 4th, 2024, I’m going to vote for somebody who I believe could actually make a difference, regardless of whether he wins. I’m endorsing and supporting RFK. He’s the horse to ride in November. I wish him well; I wish his campaign well, and I hope a lot of people get inspired. Win or lose, I hope people take from this election a strong civic sense that we do need to change things. We do need to move forward, and it’s time we heal ourselves in every dimension.
I hope that everybody listening understands that we can always make things better, no matter how bad it seems or how bad it gets. We, as people, can make a heaven or a hell, and the difference is the intent, will, and time. We can fix everything; it just requires the will and commitment over a protracted period to get there.
Thank you all for listening, and I hope we get through this election cycle. It’s the hardest one since 1876. Cheers!
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