and broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado so questions come up recently and we get asked it from time to time and it's the question of whether we would participate or build or enable this concept of vaccine passports and this is something that has come up blockchain space because several people in the space are actively working on these documents and there's a lot of concerns about them so it's a complicated topic like many things are and there already are a notion of vaccine passports vaccine booklets i se i travel africa all the time and a lot of countries i go to require yellow fever vaccines for example a lot of family in the healthcare industry they need to be vaccinated for the flu hepatitis and other such things and these are usually occupationally required the big concern behind vaccine passports is that they're being extended significantly beyond the initial scope and concern so normally vaccine passports in the legacy sense are used for entry into a country or they're used for working within a specific domain uh for example in a hospital setting or a clinical setting the concern now is that there are many nations discussing using vaccine passports as a criteria for public life going to a restaurant going to a nightclub going to a coffee shop attending a concert any public gathering citing public health concerns and well in the short term there may be some perhaps small to moderate health benefits for such things my deep concern is that such infrastructure if it is used to restrict the freedom of movement and be a denial mechanism will inevitably be reused by those who have more totalitarian thoughts for other purposes for example perhaps if you don't pay your taxes you're no longer allowed to have entry perhaps if your credit score is too low like in china with the social credit scheme that you're no longer allowed to have entry or be part of public life or maybe they can come up with all kinds of other exotic tests if you don't uh you haven't taken certain sensitivity or cultural training uh you're not allowed to enter uh and as crazy as that seems there are some physicians within the united states who feel that racism is apparently a bigger threat than the pandemic which is why there was a letter of over a thousand physicians signed saying that the blm protests even though they could spread coven should not be stopped whereas other co protests should be stopped because the threat of racism was apparently greater so why wouldn't they advocate then for critical race theory training as a condition for entry into buildings or not if you're arguing a public health demand or a public safety demand you can begin reusing that infrastructure for any purpose we call this the infrastructure of tyranny it is very difficult to predict how people 5 years 10 years 20 years 30 years are going to use the system and so you have to understand if those systems are constrained by some process like constitutional law or federal law or are they constrained by the whims and wills of the leaders that stand behind those systems for example in the country of afghanistan there's a huge crisis that's ongoing where people who thought the taliban had been defeated were starting to live the life of moderation so instead of wearing beards and covering their faces and showing themselves to be nothing but pious they were showing themselves to be like us going out and enjoying a sunny day going to the pool drinking having fun with friends and taking pictures of that recording that putting it up on social media now 20 years later the unthinkables happened the taliban is back in control of afghanistan and the very same social networks the very same digital activities that they took for granted believing that these were safe are now being used against them to decide who is should be punished up into execution it's a horrible reality that millions of people now suffer and face so we as a company are very careful about the systems we construct the values behind those systems and we always ask what constrains them one of the things that's completely missed by paulson and uh by krugman and many of these uh former legacy system people who criticize bitcoin in the cryptocurrency industry is the social immutability behind the terms and conditions of cryptocurrencies whether you like them or not or they're useful to you or not or they're negative or positive for your particular business or lifestyle the terms and conditions and rules of their operation and use of their operation are known up front and they will not be changed because they're inconvenient to a particular actor or regime we don't have that in any sense of the word for a vaccine passport system and it is my belief that should these systems become propagated they will be misused and mishandled well beyond their original intent to slow down or stop a pandemic and start being used for whatever the political pep project of the particular regime happens to be and every few years they'll radically change in one direction or the other direction because it's simply too tempting to have complete control over the freedom of movement of the citizens of the country and be able to connect that to desired social outcomes so we as a company will not work on these systems uh until unless and until we feel that the systems are constrained with the same social immutability and clarity of purpose that cryptocurrencies are and nothing i have seen on the market would indicate that they couldn't be misused for tyranny and that's a deep concern of mine so i just wanted to make a quick video to kind of put a flag in the ground about where we stand our values as a company we really do want to change the world for the better we care very deeply about public health and we care very deeply about uh ensuring that people are safe and we also care very deeply about your rights your privacy uh your systems that you live in and to us it matters a lot that things you are promised are not misused and mishandled we tend to be lied to a lot these days by many institutions the media especially so we tend to be told one thing and that it turns out that that thing wasn't true i remember growing up as a teenager i was told again and again that iraq had weapons of mass destruction that was a lie it was a known lie within the u.s intelligence community and the us military and they eventually admitted it and were found they were sizable or significant no one went to jail for that trillions of dollars were spent probably a half million or more people were killed or injured and a lot of bad happened as a consequence of that lie yet for some reason we just moved on that's not the only lie that's been told from time to time or bait and switch that's happened the patriot act was for example pushed out as a temporary measure to ensure america's safety and security in this war on terrorism two decades later we have more intelligence agencies the biggest spy state humanities ever constructed and no end in sight to these temporary provisions if we are as a society to admit an artifact that severely restricts our travel and our entry into businesses we used to have the freedom of movement into without any clear understanding of who's in control and under what conditions can they do that then there's no reason why such things would not be abused just as we have witnessed in the past two decades abuse and abuse and abuse and abuse and abuse the world is a dangerous place just by living we all take risks every single day and we accept those risks it's just the reality of being human uh if you go out in a rainstorm a thunderstorm there's a small risk of being struck by lightning you get in a car there's a small risk of an accident while driving to work today there was a rather severe accident on the road that i drove by had i left home five minutes earlier a pretty good chance i would have been involved in it these things happen every time we get on a plane or a helicopter every time that we do anything anytime you shake someone's hand there's always a risk associated with that part of life is having the ability to quantify risk and understand it and understand what is significant and what isn't we rely for the most part upon institutions to assist us in that we rely for the most part upon some deliberative body that thinks about these things for example every day most of you get up pour yourself a cup of water and you drink water either out of bottle or out of the faucet out of your refrigerator how do you know the water that you drink is safe the people in flint michigan they trusted an institution that let them down live here in colorado and so far it's okay some of you don't trust the institutions which is why you have atmospheric water generators reverse osmosis filters because you say i don't think these people are credible and certainly every time i travel to africa i bring with me filter bottles a uv filter bottle and a reverse osmosis bottle because i can't trust those institutions because historically they've proven to be unreliable and unaccountable it is unfortunate that we live in a world where we can't quite get to honesty yet the best we can do is be honest with each other and set our principles out there and accept the consequences that sometimes it's not optimal and i don't know about you but i'm getting real tired of every dimension and element of our lives being controlled by a single disease the human race has endured this before look at the history of europe and the black death or the plague of justinian or what marcus aurelius had to live through which led to the decline ultimately the destruction of the roman empire it's been a fact of human reality that disease goes hand in hand with human experience there's a apex and then eventually we recover and move on united states we dealt with the spanish flu for example right on the back of world war one we have great tools great medicine great people and heroes in healthcare who every single day fight hard we for some reason think now that stepping to the precipice that instituting a device that restricts our ability to go to the coffee shop go to the restaurant is somehow the only way out of something that we don't have to we can naturally get out of it through vaccinations and infections eventually we'll get there this disease is no different in that respect and it's a big policy decision all i can do is warn people about the consequences of it being misused and at least ask for some checks and balances and controls to be put in and as a company refused to work on these systems until such a time that reasonable checks and balances are put into place and oversight is put into place and people are held accountable especially if these systems are mishandled and misused now i'm not an anti-vaxxer many of you know that early in the pandemic i was able to get the pfizer vaccine and perhaps at some point i'll get a booster shot but maybe i probably already got the delta variant i get exposed to so many people and the reality is statistics clearly show the vast majority of people who are vaccinated do not get hospitalized or die from covid and if i'm exposed to delta for the most part in my age group and health category i wouldn't even notice it or if i did it would be a weak affair at most it's not true for everyone but that's the public health reality that i face boosters will inevitably be here and likely will be mixed in at some point with the influenza vaccine and become a fact of life and those who are vulnerable will get vaccinated on a yearly basis covet will never go away this is why i'm very concerned about infrastructure to fight covet because it's not like some sort of bacterial infection that we can somehow like the black death treat this is a respiratory virus humans have never defeated respiratory viruses ever in the history of medicine coronaviruses have been floating around for a long time influenza has been flooding around for a long time they're not going away it's going to continue to mutate and eventually variants will become strains and they will break through general vaccine immunity now we can keep making vaccines and we will but to say that now as a condition of freedom this particular disease is so serious that you can't enter places then we beg why don't we demand this of tuberculosis or other conditions which are certainly threatening and communicable i just don't think free society should live this way or think this way and it deeply concerns me and i think we've reached the point where the crisis is averted yes icus are still being fulfilled occasionally that happens during flu pandemics as well and yes there are certain groups that are having difficulty but let's be exceedingly clear here amongst the vaccinated for the most part covet is no longer a significant threat including the variants that have come if you doubt me go take a look at the breakthrough cases that the cdc archives and the numbers clearly demonstrate that and we're ahead of most of these things with booster shots and other such things and other treatments this is not january of 2020 anymore we're on the other side of it and now it's more of a situation of the developing world and the lack of access to vaccines vaccine equality in this particular respect and there's been numerous policy decisions which could have been far more meaningful than a vaccine passport program in slowing the spread for example it still is inconceivable to me that nofavx is not on market it's also inconceivable to me that when governments the largest purchasers of these things they didn't use collective marketing power to force a buy one get one free program for every developed world vaccine to also purchase a developing world vaccine just the purchases of canada the united states the european union alone could have guaranteed access to over three billion doses for africa south america and southeast asia as these vaccines were paid for by the taxpayers as these vaccines were developed through taxpayer money and as these vaccines are given sovereign immunity the immunity to being sued it seems entirely reasonable to put such a demand for humanitarian reasons and if a pharmaceutical company is unwilling to do that then then to publicly shame them for taking advantage of the suffering of others this was not done yet the very same leaders who've decided not to do this which would have had a much more meaningful and significant slowdown on the pandemic especially the emergence of variants are now telling us that we need to institute a system that restricts our freedom of access and movement and try to make that system as global as possible and not tell us what the terms and conditions are on it that makes me very skeptical and very concerned and this is a turning point in humanity whether we continue to become more free and open or if we regress to total tellurianism and choice is ours we accept what we don't accept and we can't be afraid to speak our minds because if we are that's an indication that we're already on the other side of the rainbow and i don't want to live there so thank you so much for listening and until next time take care
