 Luke welcome to the podcast. Well thank you for having me. I've got a bit of a funny question for you first up. What's the funniest name of a Wi-Fi that you've ever seen? Oh nothing that I can say on the internet unfortunately. Trying to think of one that's YouTube appropriate I don't know. I mean I always make my Wi-Fi names like very obscure jokes so I don't know. Nothing I can say on YouTube. I'll just say that. Nice. The best one I've ever seen is maybe not the funniest one but I actually call my Wi-Fi that my hotspot and it's called trojan.exe you know. Oh yeah well I've seen a lot of FBI surveillance vans stuff like that you know just these cute little things but so yeah I mean the thing when I was in college we would change our Wi-Fi to just like crazy things just to see how other people in our dorms would react and you know I don't know well anyway so that's another story. So let's jump into the real stuff. So globalism, elitism take us back to the time of inception takes back to the beginning. So where does it go again? Well you know I'm a big fan now and a lot of people in Monero of course understandably they're kind of libertarian leaning people and so there's a tendency to look back at the early days of the Enlightenment as a time of like genuine progress right. But you know freedom is you know a lot of personal and individual freedoms you know this is when you really hear people start talking about this kind of stuff like personal autonomy but at the same time it's it's kind of like a poison pill and I think the appropriate way to look at it is like especially after Newton right so when you think of Newton you know he had this grand synthesis of like science where all of the matter moving on earth and the movement of the stars they're all related in the law of gravity and how a lot of people started looking at humankind in the Enlightenment is well humans can be like that too like they if humans humans are driven by impulses they're you know rational economic agents they have sexual impulses they have certain desires and how a lot of people this is really it's not just the beginning of liberalism but kind of the next step is well if people can be free to follow their own devices we can also predict how they're going to act and we can also get in front of that like we can engineer them in different ways you know so you know one of the one of the specific ideologies that originated at this time period was of course you know utilitarianism this idea that and it sounds great on paper right I mean it's almost like a truism like you know society should be arranged in such a way that it causes the greatest good for the greatest number of people right who doesn't agree with that but that really created this this mindset where intellectuals began asking questions they never asked before like before people would say how does society work they started asking you these questions like well how can we design society how should it work like how can we control human behavior and so you know the irony you know Jeremy Bentham who's one of the biggest utilitarians on one hand he was you know all four personal freedom you know libertarians even look back at him as being a positive figure well at the same time he also created famously the the idea of the panopticon right so this is like this prison that where the warden is in the middle and no one can see who he's looking at and he can see everyone in the prison and it was this great social scheme to uh well not just prisons but you know schools and other kind of things so um I think this is when this first starts like on one hand you know there's the the you know people have a positive view of oh well we have more freedom in the times of the enlightenment but the first thing that intellectuals start doing is start saying well how how can we use this to our own benefit you know how what what is the society that we want to have what what does that actually look like so that I say is the beginning and the rest is kind of uh it's history like in in the modern term you know people on the internet nowadays you'll hear people talking about you know Klaus Schwab and all these mean people um but even in the earliest earlier 20th century right one of the big names was you know B. F. Skinner um who was a behaviorist and behaviorists it was an overwhelming majority of people who did psychological research and the entire idea there uh Skinner actually wrote a book called Beyond Freedom and Dignity where his whole idea is bending the human will through conditioning um not not just to force people to do something this is an authoritarianism this is something even more pernicious it's like controlling people's soul by you know more or less uh incentivizing them to do what you want right so this is this is kind of the beginning and this is how ultimately you know elites nowadays look at us when they write their books they look at uh you know our specific desires as being something that has to be fixed and replaced with something that they want so you know that that's what I would say to give a long answer to that question so when does that start so you mentioned all these people like roughly when was that oh I mean this is like your 16 1700s maybe maybe a little bit before I mean you can you can debate who is like the first figure to do this but it's really just a change in mindset that people had um you know as I said like in so if you study economics one of the first things you learn is that you know you can do descriptive economics where you describe things that are happening in the world or you could do normative economics where you say what should be the way things are right that's something you you learn in econ 101 it's a distinction and allegedly we're only supposed to do you know positive or descriptive economics we're just supposed to describe things but this this is a big intellectual change where people stop thinking in positive or in you know descriptive terms and they start talking about well how can we design society and this is something we totally take for granted right because you go to a school you go to an elementary school and every an elementary school student gets this you know gets prompts in their assignments where they're asked well how would you design the world if you were king of the world what would you do these kind of questions right um and before I guess the late middle ages and on like people didn't really think like this when you look at I don't know let's say stoic philosophers they weren't necessarily interested in this utopian social engineering they were more thinking about how can the individual cope with the world as it is how how can you interact with it um and so the end result you know obviously is uh you know when when you're a social engineer and this is whatever kind of philosophy you have doesn't matter if it's utilitarianism or Marxism or whatever um eventually you're going to run into a a synchrony like a a disjunct between your theory and how people actually work and the the weird thing about modernity is that we have a tendency to say well actually it's if those two are in disagreement it's the people who are wrong right um and this is you know obviously where we get to things like transhumanism and this whole idea of remaking the the entire essence of mankind which is I don't know kind of what we're slowly moving to you know starting with behavioral engineering going further on to that so so just spitballing how much do you think this has to do especially obviously in Europe how much do you think this has to do with the houses of nobility and um yeah kings queens etc um well depends on what you mean by that I think if anything you know monarchy if you want to say um represents I guess I guess an antiquated mode of political systems at this point because you know a monarchy has its political power vested in few people um and ultimately it's something hereditary or passed down from one person to another and the human attention you know the attention span of a monarch is only so wide so it's it's less likely for him to do these kind of engineering schemes but you know as as we are in America right now we of course don't just have a monarchy or it's not that we have a monarchy we have a very distributed power system and that sounds like a good thing like checks and balances um but that also means that our political system has so much momentum behind it because there's it's not just like a bad king is going to die right you have this entire academic system this political system uh and it's a kind of self perpetuating system that um is all kind of on the same page ideologically and working to a common goal um it's not necessarily put in paper it's not like an active conspiracy it's more like a conspiracy a decentralized conspiracy of ideology and and worldview and because this is how people look at the world this engineering mindset it encourages lots of technologies that ultimately use people as pawns right um so if the only sense of which I would say that it's related to monarchy and and houses of royalty is that um really the countervailing and well this is true of the Enlightenment of course like because the Enlightenment not only is about you know personal freedom quote unquote um it was also very much about getting rid of these countervailing traditional powers by virtue of them being irrational so monarchs we got to get rid of them religion we got to get rid of that and what you have left is ultimately just a man following his own felt desires right um and that again makes makes people a little bit more predictable and that is more conducive for social engineering so where did it all go wrong man obviously like thousands of years ago we had stoicism we had a lot of ancient greek philosophy somewhere along the line this has died out in society right so today there's there are some people who know about stoicism and think deeply about life but by and large most people don't you know most people go to work they come home they they fear food they watch their fear tv shows and they are generally speaking supporters of things like utilitarianism for example so where do you think the knowledge has been lost along the track and gone from a place of individual freedom to a place of let's call utilitarianism where they just think that their opinions are being forced on everybody um i don't think there's there are probably multiple things you could say or this is the one moment things that went wrong where things went wrong um but i really think it's more of i mean it's an appealing ideology frankly um the idea like elevating yourself above other people you know saying that you have the right to tell others uh you know you have this specific knowledge that makes you fit to plan how society works i mean when i when i was in economics uh as a academic discipline um this is very i mean you you have this idea that oh all the world should be economists right we should be making we should be plotting all this kind of stuff out and that you really do start to look at people i mean again skinner who wrote this book beyond freedom and dignity uh it's a very good example because on paper i mean beyond freedom and dignity it sounds bad but in skinner's idea is that people do have freedom they are going to have freedom in the system and they're doing exactly what they want the entire game is just a range to make what they want what i want um or you know more skinner his passe he's he's a tainted um tainted title tainted uh name since his post chomsky days you know after you had the dispute with dome chomsky um but nowadays we have people who are endorsing exactly the same stuff so we have you know the nudge the the nudge a way of thinking popularized by cast sunstein and richard taylor uh who worked actually in the obama administration these are powerful people who are writing books they're highly influential and they are coming from this perspective of behavioral economics where they are basically saying well here are all these irrationalities and the way that men look at the world and here's how we need to change them um and i think given a superficial reading of some of the data you might reach those conclusions i'm a big fan of you know what's called ecological rationality i recommend actually people a lot of the time so there's a book by gird gigarins are very good on this called rationality for mortals has a chapter that focuses on this where you know there's this tendency for the social engineers to look at supposed human irrationality as being some kind of mistake like if their models don't match human behavior it must be the human behavior that needs fixing um ecological rationality takes the other the the other approach basically saying well if there's something that humans have been doing for a long time and they have a reaction built into them that seems irrational it's probably because your model hasn't looked at the full picture and you actually see a lot of these irrationalities are to avoid uh greater threats um either way this is an appealing ideology this is this is how this you know to kind of answer your question i can't give you a specific time i mean that kind of that can be your own personal uh preference where that began but it's such an appealing ideology for people because it justifies i guess a kind of arrogance where when looking at other human affairs because it allows you to to say what you want and uh do this have this really strong will to power uh over other people um and again like other other societies other countries you know if you look at china and russia i mean china in particular has a lot of kind of weird stuff going on but in general even they look at this the western style of social engineering is being kind of creepy um the nice thing about china is that they're very open about what they're doing they will just say we have a social credit score and we you know we want you to avoid this and do this and stuff like that um i think the twisted thing about the western way of looking at things is they genuinely want you to believe that this is what you want it's it's more about it's more in your brain it's it's kind of freaky in a way so so you touched on the digital penopticon before um you just touched on social credit scores so moving into the future i mean my personal view of the future is well i think the trend's pretty clear um i think we're moving towards less personal freedoms i think we're moving towards increased technocracy um so with that said like cbdc social credit scores digital ids how do you think these are going to fit into society and what threats do you think they have do if even at all maybe you think they're a good thing um i think people in crypto especially like to talk about cbd cbdc's uh a lot i think that the threat i mean here here's my take on it a lot of these threats are threats they're only threats if you voluntarily take them you know what i mean i think um a lot of the dangers that exist in the world you can actually very easily opt out of them um even when it comes to privacy violating technology and stuff like this um i think the problem for governments that are going to do cbdc i always have trouble with that acronym i do a digital car is the central bank digital currencies the problem that they're going to run into very quickly is that they need backwards compatibility with all the previous ways of doing things i mean just a i mean the irs in the united states just as an example they still communicate via fax machine like if you if you have to send them something you fax it to them or vice versa um so that's so in order it'd be hard to force something like this on people because there are a lot frankly a lot of people in this country it might be hard for us to realize they're not really on the internet or if they are they just have a cell phone and there's a lot of things they can't do um so uh having a government run digital currency uh i think is not a big threat because i don't think there's a good way for them to force it on us right now um now china is doing some interesting stuff or has some interesting ideas you may have heard this is a kensan dream uh you know they have something like they can give you credits that expire so you have to send spin them on something um so there are some things that i think our government i mean to put it this way that would be useful for them but also they can just inflate the currency and therefore incentivize you to to spend more right it's it's equivalent it's kind of similar uh similar things so when it comes to a lot of this stuff i will just say i'm not super worried about it because most people are in a position where they can opt out and um whether you think you might think that this is just an inevitability i frankly don't think it is i am even resistant to using cell phones uh and i encourage people to always not use cell phones for things because that's actually going to be the next thing that's going to be all this digital id cvdc all this kind of stuff the real next thing they're going to enforce is cell phone usage for more and more mundane things for filling out your taxes you have to have an app for this that and the other because that actually is a great biometric uh machine that is attached to you that you can tie to an identity and people are doing it voluntarily that that actually is the thing that people need to worry about i think it's less worrisome talking about oh what kind of currency scheme is the government going to come up with because frankly i mean they're probably their delusion owner it's probably going to fail it's not going to work the way they expect and again they need backwards compatibility with all the people who don't know how to use uh they can't make it mandatory for income taxes because a lot of people aren't going to do income taxes you know what i mean that that's i think the issue so i think you have more i think you have less faith in them than i do um like what why do you think people can opt out of them like i personally think you know with this digital id uh for example you just said people have phones that are tied to them it's i see it is all going to be one right so even in australia now they're rolling out a digital id program it's very easy just to link say a cbdc to that it's very easy to implement regulations that the shop down the street can't accept cash they can't accept crypto and as we saw you know with covid 90 of people will just like ice they'll melt under pressure and then they'll take the path of the release resistance so why why do you think that they won't be able to implement a social sorry a cbdc um in that scenario i mean if they were to do something like that it would have to be very gradual i don't think that um i do think that people can be like the proverbial frog in the boiling water um i think that's case in fact that's that's where we are right now the reason we are where we are now is because um the temperature has been gradually going up and people aren't making fuss about it but i just say like within the immediate life you know within a couple years i just find that really um it's i'm looking at it from their perspective and i just see it as if man this would just be a logistics nightmare to enforce this on people even if most people are complying um there are a lot of people who are going to fall through the cracks it's not going to work like people are going to juke the system they're going to be able to use other people's ids for things they're going to there are ways of skirting around it that i think complicate it in ways that we might not even realize um so uh and it becomes one of those things where if you force draconian regulations on people too quickly they will suddenly even law abiding people will say uh you know what i don't feel that bad just not doing this um and that's often how it is so if it does happen i think it's going to be something that happens a little slower and a little in the future and again my stance is you gotta again when it comes to cell phones i think there's something that's right in front of us that people aren't paying enough attention to a lot of other things on the internet uh are as well um that's something that i think people should be putting their foot on the brakes about and it's much easier to to do that than in other cases so you know that's my statement there and social credit scores we're obviously seeing them as you mentioned play out in china at the moment do you have like a i suppose a thesis on when they'll be implemented whether that will be implemented at all well in the united states and in europe um again china when they do things they do things in the open okay they're very honest about the system they have functionally speaking in the united states we have a social credit score it's not a literal number that you can look up um but i think people are very much aware of the fact that things that they say and they do and they're you know this isn't just like political beliefs but even other things like there is this you you are judged in a way by your employer uh and other systems i mean banks already have this kind of stuff right you might not know it or not but every bank um you know basically has a social credit score for you like their own scoring of what kind of person you are um and a lot of other organizations have that as well so i think that will happen in the united states and in europe and other places in australia in fact it's really already happening but it's not going to be as honest as the chinese system where they come out and say that this is what's going to happen um i i view that as just being very unlikely um so i think it's going to be more kind of a soft totalitarianism kind of a private um mostly enforced by corporations and and uh public hysteria and stuff like that yeah i love your take on that um do you think uh even like a carbon credit score we've seen i think it was visa or mastercard came out and started rating purchases now do you think that's more likely the scenario yeah i think that's a good example of the boiling water slowly you know getting hotter under the frog where we're gonna see me i mean we already see stuff like this i mean this credit card companies uh have for years of course done individual business relationships with small businesses to you know get deals and stuff like that and it's not too difficult to imagine governments to come in and say things about carbon credits and things like that and that actually is a fantastic example of kind of the the cat sunstein and richard thaler kind of social engineering where you don't even have laws being passed you just have very soft power from the government and corporations that is slowly molding behaviors in such a way that they want um and i think of the the carbon credit scene this is just all i mean i would love to get audio audits of some of these organizations behind it but i'm sure they're entirely fraudulent this is like really a religious hysteria for a lot of the elites um and it has such an importance to them and very little importance to anyone else um uh but either way i think that that is how things are going to slowly happen they're just going to slowly integrate things into technologies you already use and you're used to and then when it's crazy you're going to be like ah what am i going to do cancel my credit cards that's hard that's how it happens so um how does crypto fit into all of this so what's your thesis on crypto firstly do you i know you're uh into bitcoin into monero do you think defy plays a role in this too um and i suppose how does this all of the crypto scene fit into everything we just spoke about well it's a way of doing the things that the demonic orwellian technology can do without an intermediary okay that's the purpose um now i'm not a big fan of fan i love fancy technology because it's so cool um but when you do need to transact digitally um you have the choice now of using some evil corporation that is doing social engineering or if they're not they can easily be pressured to do that or you can use a permissionless system that you are the custodians of the funds of and so that's the choice like that is a that is the purpose of cryptocurrency and it is actually when it comes to other technology cryptocurrency is like a unique problem because obviously currency has to be scarce and digital scarcity is something like a really weird like you have to do all this weird proof of work um basically creating your own like game theoretic gerbil wheel um to make digital scarcity work and bitcoin of course is the original example of that it's doing something that it should i mean obviously the technology is still very much in development there's a lot of mess with it um but it's really the only weapon we have against this kind of digital monetary surveillance state um because no matter what even if you're using cash or using old school banks you're not using any of this fancy stuff even like even if you just have stuff in a credit union to be able to transact online without free software is literally just impossible uh unless you have bitcoin monero something like that um now as it comes to defy um a lot of times people say defying they mean ethereum uh but either way uh you know defy i think is a good example it like it's a theoretical thing right now i don't think there's any really fancy financial instruments that we can speak of that are trustworthy in cryptocurrency right now uh it is something that can happen in the future um as especially as privacy is added to these you know core technologies i think that that's something that we can see right now it's just stabs in the dark it's people doing uh it often sometimes very worrisome things uh because of course blockchains in general unless they have specific zero knowledge technology or ring signatures or something like that they are their public information and actually they can be an even worse alternative um than a centralized system in some cases but if we do things right in cryptocurrency that is the the role of it is serving as an opt-out system for this domain that otherwise would be totally monopoly monopolized by central banks and and you know PayPal and things like this so i don't know how to frame the question that i'm thinking of in my head but i think the crux of the question is bitcoin or monero and why or both uh well i get a lot to say about both um right now if you want to transact value you just have to use monero um you can kind of get away with bitcoin now bitcoin was totally unusable a couple months ago when lots of people were using the network and you'd have to pay like five dollars to send two dollars to someone else you know what i mean um right now transaction fees are in bitcoin are pretty low so it's not a big problem they've always been low in monero uh so it's not an issue and more importantly of course with monero you don't have to worry about your you know privacy footprint because they're basic they're basically is none um so i think it'd be irresponsible to say to tell anyone to use anything other than monero right now um that said bitcoin i i don't you know i'm not against bitcoin i think that technologies can be built on top of it to make it better and that's kind of the strategy that bitcoin maximalists will take the fact is right now it's just not a very usable thing um for a i mean really the people who are using bitcoin are people who just want to use bitcoin and it's not very useful in itself and it comes with so many issues specifically in privacy and again network usage and stuff like that that make it very hard to use so um but again i'm not against it i'm not against it per se um and in fact a lot of times when people get into crypto i mean my recommended portfolio for a lot of people this is not financial advice by the way um but usually my recommended portfolio is something like start with 90 percent bitcoin and 10 percent monero um now that sounds weird when i'm saying something that monero is indisputably better and i think it is but the reality is bitcoin just has like a lot of momentum behind it because it's big and people know about it and monero um i think is still uh it might be the better choice but like it's one of those things where technological standard doesn't just naturally win just because it's the better choice uh so that's what i would say look thanks so much for coming on yep yeah no problem