Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
How Technology Could Transform Our Failed Economic Models with Victor Vernissage rom Humanode
What if blockchain technology could emancipate us rather than just enrich speculators? In this wide-ranging conversation with Victor Vernissage, researcher, economist, and founder of Humanode.io, we explore how emerging technologies might transform our economic systems if deployed with democratic values rather than purely capitalist structures.
"Crypto is mostly about speculation. It's the main use case right now," Victor explains, cutting through the hype to address fundamental issues with current blockchain implementations. He argues that most systems remain "purely plutocratic, oligarchic, capitalistic structures where the more money you have, the more power you have," despite revolutionary potential for something entirely different. The discussion challenges widespread economic illiteracy underlying many blockchain projects, with Victor boldly stating that "neoclassical economics is complete bullshit" that fails to model real-world complexity.
We venture into fascinating territory when discussing how blockchain and AI technologies intersect. Victor outlines four major possibilities: decentralized AI computation keeping conversations private rather than corporate-controlled; autonomous AI agents that can trade independently; governance systems for artificial intelligence; and new economic structures for a world where AI displaces human workers. Humanode specifically focuses on creating "one human, one vote" governance systems using biometrics to verify unique identities without compromising privacy.
Perhaps most revolutionary is the potential for wealth redistribution through technology. Victor describes how AI agents conducting transactions generate fees, which typically flow to wealthy validators. However, with systems like Humanode, these fees could instead be distributed equally among participants, creating "not money for nothing, but money for something" – a new economic model beyond traditional UBI concepts.
The conversation ultimately reveals that our technological future isn't predetermined. While current implementations often reinforce existing power structures, these technologies could create more democratic, equitable systems if implemented differently. The question isn't whether technology will transform society, but whether we'll allow that transformation to serve humanity or exploit it.
Ready to rethink everything you thought you knew about economics and technology? Listen now, then join the conversation about building a more democratic digital future.
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Hello and welcome to VARblog, and today I'm here with Victor, who is a researcher, economist and founder of several blockchain projects, including Humanodeio. We're here to talk about the future of the economy, with all the changes coming from these technologies and what could be done differently with them. Humanoid is itself kind of a more radical experiment in using blockchain in a different way than we often associate it with traditional crypto coin mining, although I'm sure that's part of it. I'm sure that's part of it. So, Victor, what are some of the key changes you see developing in the new tech and economic landscape that seems to be really disruptive to people. Done a lot more interviews as of late with various people on various sides of these developments and they're kind of hard to get a handle on. So what do you see coming immediately?
Speaker 2:from your position in the field Immediately. It's a very long process, really. Crypto is mostly about speculation. Now it's the main use case of crypto. So most of the systems we have in terms of governance and structures, are purely plutocratic, oligarchic, capitalistic structures where the more money you have, the more power you have, and our world is far, far beyond that. We probably had it 500 years ago, Far, far beyond that. We probably had it 500 years ago, you know. So, to be honest, what crypto is giving us is still the same things that it gave us a few years ago, which is like fast international transfers, you know, which is also less of a risk of a bank run, but you have the risk of smart contracts In terms of financial system.
Speaker 2:You know, people won't even notice crypto. It will be just somewhere in the back end. I really see the value, yeah, of crypto in terms of traditional finance in the well, in moving from the legacy financial system we have right now, which is pretty If you heard about the thing called T plus two, when you have to wait for two days for the international transfer, even between the banks and other structures, it's crazy, inefficient and it actually sometimes becomes a reason for a failure of banks and once we move the real financial infrastructure we have yeah, like the euro, dollar system and all these things to faster blockchain based or decentralized technology based things shouldn't be actually blockchain for sure. Then it would solve some of the problems we have for sure. So, yeah, immediately. I don't see many things you know changing thanks to crypto in the world. It's just a better financial infrastructure, to be honest, there are some cool experiments, but yeah, we can discuss them later.
Speaker 1:Well, I think for most people, crypto is just a speculation asset. It's not even a real crypto. Coins are. They're kind of a currency, but kind of not in how they actually function. They're way too deflationary to be useful for daily purchasing exactly yes, the currency that we use.
Speaker 2:It should be inflationary, Otherwise we'll ruin our businesses. Otherwise, when we have deflation, it's a recession right away. Okay, Endless recession.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I'm glad you kind of realized that.
Speaker 1:I remember the early days of the use of blockchain technology, which now is almost 20 years ago, but it came out of very specific um, gold bug related economics.
Speaker 1:It was um, to put it mildly uh, somewhat delusional about like why we should have an economy based on 18th and 19th century deflationary commodity production. But what I found interesting when I started looking into blockchain and for those of you who are wondering, we're not going to be just talking about blockchain, there's a lot of technological developments that tie into this but that it was actually a very interesting set of decentralized technologies that we were only using for one thing. And I have been very interested in the way technologies that are interesting, would be helpful to humans under certain conditions, are currently kind of deleterious to humans because they are limited on path dependencies that have something to do with systems that existed before they were developed. And you know, you kind of hinted at it. We have a very, in some ways, a lot of the people using this tech don't just have a very old mode of of thinking about economics, they have a exactly the problem is nobody, almost nobody, knows economics.
Speaker 2:You know this is the real problem. Uh, I mean, we are still living in the world where the whole academia is based on neoclassical economics. Most of it is complete bullshit, like delusional. You know it doesn't reflect the real world. You cannot model real world using it. It only makes things worse. You know, some people say that it's better if we didn't have neoclassical economists uh, at all for the last 100 years, because they're just making things worse compared to how economy could function on its own. You know you cannot have cars without engineers, but you can have economy without economists.
Speaker 2:And of course you. Well, yeah, many people are delusional about money as well. Right, of course we can call both let's say, bitcoin, any other asset which has a hard cap on its issuance money and, at the same time, we can call our fiat money money. But these are kind of different money, because if you look at the function of money, you have things like a unit of account, right, you have things like store of value and you also have things like means of exchange. And well, we figured out that you can have both means of exchange and store of value, because if you have a good store of value, it's a bad means of exchange because you live in deflationary economy and it is the worst thing ever. And if you have a good means of exchange, it can in deflationary economy and it is the worst thing ever. And if you have a good means of exchange, it can be good store of value, because it has to inflate, okay, and I I feel like few people understand this.
Speaker 2:So, in, yeah, in my opinion, crypto assets we can consider them assets. Some of them even work almost like just stocks. They accumulate revenue, distribute this revenue or just burn this revenue so that the average asset value goes up because it's less asset right now and some of them have completely crazy token economies which are new, which sometimes are just completely new models of money ever created. I can tell you more about recent experiments we had, but again I would say it's all very speculative plus experimental. When we're going to use some of these new models in real world, well, just tokenization of real world assets to make them tradable 24-7. And yeah, moving from the legacy, let's say code and spreadsheets of the current Eurodollar FIAT system.
Speaker 1:Right. I mean it does seem that the world economy, for reasons that are geopolitical and maybe technological as well, is becoming less and less trusting of a, let's say, a dominant series of forex, national fiat currencies that most countries need to great to gain access to, uh, any number of markets. Uh, when I say countries, I mean both both their states and firms within those states. Um, but experiments to use something like crypto to fix that and there have been some small latin american nations in particular that have flirted with that don't seem to have been particularly helpful for the reasons that you say. If you think the US dollar is bad about something that you need to get access to the international market, a highly deflationary asset, is going to be worse when you need to purchase things and you have a very weak basis in your own country in terms of production to get that asset.
Speaker 2:You cannot export because your asset is very valuable and you know the US economy is kind of in the trap of having the world currency when other countries can basically well make the price of dollar go up and you as a country want it to go down, but you're already a reserve currency. So it's a tricky situation, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. But I've been also wondering about the way things like innovations and LLM based artificial intelligence and stuff might start to change this. And one of the things that I try to be specific when I talk about AI is, one, LLMs aren't entirely new and, two, they're not the only form of AI. In fact, there's all kinds of things, some of which actually a little bit frighten me, like the biocomputer networks which are based off of human brain cells and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:Oh, you mean neuromorphic computers. Yeah, when you create brain cells in the lab and yeah, they're actually very efficient for some kinds of I mean computation.
Speaker 1:Well, it makes sense because the neural networks act a lot more like human ones, for obvious reasons, and I don't think these technologies are actually well understood in the general public as even existing, because people aren't following this space or they're following just you know, the, the, the obvious things in this space, like chat, gpt, uh, our current uh tech oligarchs, flirtations with government, uh, I think in the last week, for example, a lot of the ai like four ai ceos got made lieutenant colonels, which is like a step under general with no prior military experience in the United States, because they're being integrated as some part of a strategic military intelligence asset. And conversely, on the left there are those who think that LLMm based ai is mostly a scam. Um, and it's, it's, uh, it's um. Energy inputs to outputs uh, make it unviable in the long term. It's not profitable. Blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1:I think Ed Citron is probably the most famous person pushing that view, and I find that when I think about that in combination with blockchain, I see something that could be incredibly helpful for the world, or something that could be, you know, nearly world-ending disastrous, in the way that, say, the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy was a similar kind of technology that had massive implications. How do you see these blockchain developments interfacing with these developments in AI? And then we'll talk about some of the other things I mentioned in this question.
Speaker 2:Sure, sure, well, there is a lot to it, okay. So, first of all, many people think that AI should not be and all the data you know when you talk to LLM, let's say, should not be in the hands of these corporations. So there are many, many blockchain projects that get the most funding now who just make decentralized AI computations to make sure that these computations are, so to say, belong to nobody. Nobody can see them and your AI conversations are truly yours, even if you don't run them locally on your PC, which is you have to have a really good one for that. On the other hand, we had a wave of AI agents launching in the crypto space. Of course, it was more speculation, but there were some interesting examples and basically, it's not only about LLMs, okay, not only about those AIs who post on Twitter, but it's also about AIs who can well, basically not only have their own character, but also trade, and people can follow their trades and they can earn fees from that. And we're talking about, like autonomous AI, let's say, who can place bets on prediction markets, right, and then this AI can actually hire people if, for example, he needs to connect to the API of, let's say, trading view, and it can be really autonomous. It can be really fun. I won't say these AI agents that are actually trading stuff is a bad thing because they increase the velocity of our money, right, they increase the number of transactions in the economy.
Speaker 2:And then there is a like third aspect of ai blockchain intersection, which is the governance of ai. Okay, so imagine we create uh, it won't happen during the next few years. I think we're overestimating the basically the becoming of general artificial intelligence, which is someone a little bit smarter than one human, and especially superintelligence, which is smarter than all the humans in the world. But when he comes, do we want him to be controlled by the government? Do we want her to be controlled by a private company? Or we want to have some kind of coordination mechanism between the humans in the world that would allow us to update it or even to shut it down?
Speaker 2:And this is something. This is the intersection of what we do in Humanoid creating like one human, one vote governance systems where we can prove that the person is real and unique through biometrics, without knowing who the person is, and basically then, you know, put under governance some code updates, you know even treasury management, just like money management, let's say, of the communities, and it can also be used to control these more autonomous AI agents or even general artificial intelligence. Oh yeah, and there is, of course, a fourth aspect of it that you probably want to talk later, which is when the general artificial intelligence comes and people are really out of their jobs. But there is economic prosperity. Prosperity how are we going to structure our economic systems?
Speaker 1:yeah, I mean that latter question is something I think a lot about. We will come to that, but I I want to focus in on the, on some of the, the first bits there, um, one. So I I used to be more like ed cit as a, as a skeptic of the possibility of general artificial intelligence. I am less so now. Um, uh, one of the things is, I think there's a little bit too much focus on, on, um, what large language model AIs do and not enough focus on other kinds of AIs.
Speaker 2:Exactly this is right. I don't believe LLMs can become general artificial intelligence. It will be some kind of other model.
Speaker 1:But that does worry me. I mean, the context of where a general AI emerges is sort of not just in a science fiction sense, although I do think sci-fi writers thought a lot about this weirdly it's important. So, for example, if a general eye is developed by private contractors for the US military, we might have a real problem on our hands, because that context is going to be the initial training data and the orientation of that ai, um and um. I know historically that military sectors tend to to beat to push this kind of development, um. You know, I was actually thinking one of the things about a lot of the current ais is um.
Speaker 1:While there is, of course, government investment in them and there's a lot of military uses in gym, it's actually one of the few modern technologies uh developed in the last, say, 70 years. It actually primarily doesn't come out of the defense world explicitly um, blockchain kind of being another one um. But if you look at the history of most 20th century technology, there's a big misconception amongst the American general public and it's probably relatively true in Europe that private industry invented most of them. But when you actually look at it it's like no, a lot of this stuff came out of defense development and then was later on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah yeah, some people believe that all the things we have, like all the best technologies we have, they are also coming from the military, but they're just, uh, not putting it out there. You know this information. But they kind of chose a person to run this company, let's say, and gave the person the technology and but it sounds like I don't know conspiracy theory, to be honest.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's another interesting implication in your last statement that I want to tease out a bit, because people will freak out when you talk about private corporations running all this data.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of left-wing thinkers, however, aren't as concerned about a nation running this data and national governance, and I think they really should be, and you seem to too, because, of course, like, for example, if it's primarily the Us government who has, uh, you know, a super intelligent general ai um, they're going to leverage that in geopolitics in a way that may not be good for the world or even people in the united states, because it will probably be in parts of the government where there is very little democratic control, and I know that people think America is a democracy, but the trend of the last 150 years is to remove more and more of the running of government outside of democratic inputs.
Speaker 1:This is also a trend in the last 50 or 60 years in the EU, and it seems like you are very much thinking about the problems this poses to the general economy and to developments of technologies. If you know, these become basically monopolies of a single government which may or may not be responsive to its own democratic pressures, but definitely doesn't consider the world as a democratic input.
Speaker 2:So I guess we basically should try to build technologies that eventually, even governments could use, you know, if they are truly democratic, because people can come out of the streets and say, hey guys, this is not a democracy, but we have this technology working for thousands of people, not on a national level, but in the internet the coordination technology to make, let's say, more independent communities in terms of they're not told by federal government what kind of lessons should they teach in the school? What kind of buildings should they build for the community? And, yeah, hopefully governments will use this transparent technology, because blockchain is all about transparency. It's less about privacy, but we also have privacy aspects there. And if you have more transparency, if the citizens see it and you can also verify that the votes are legit, then you can pretty much have direct democracy where people vote on everything themselves without representatives.
Speaker 2:Who kind of are the middlemen you know, of people and the state? And this middleman make us less democratic, because it's a very strange thing to choose one person for four years, I would say, especially if you talk about, well, maybe not not the country, but some kind of professional aspect, and in four years, people change, they can become influenced by other people that you don't like. Why can't you change your vote right away? And, on the other side, why do you vote for people when you could vote directly for the proposals? So these are kind of things we're doing with our governance of blockchain, like liquid democracy. With delegation, you can change any time or direct voting, making sure one person actually casted just one vote without casting 100 votes through some means, because we can biometrically verify that this person already voted, so his other votes won't count. So there are many things how we could make the governments better, but of course, these changes can be imposed on the governments only when the people rise up a little bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is actually an important thing about democracy, though, because you get to, in a way, a social technology that representation, historically, was trying to deal with was scaling up beyond traditional communities, where you could have a small R and, for my American listeners, republican discourse.
Speaker 1:Within the community, you had representatives who had a fairly low remove from who they were representing.
Speaker 1:They could get beat up by them, for example. Um, if they now we have a, even with representatives, we have a super high remove in some ways higher than even like early medieval kings to their, to their subjects, um, and and that's for people who are democratically elected, let's just assume, legitimately, we don't have to posit any conspiracies here. But who are they going to be beholden to? Well, they're going to be beholden to who can empower them to run again and maintain their power base, which is going to almost necessarily be oligarchical, and you know, when you read, say, aristotle writing on this or something, it does seem like a natural limit. What I started getting, even before I was aware of, like current innovations in blockchain and how this could be used, I was just thinking about, like general systems theory and, like you know, 1940s, 1950s, cybernetics and going well, this representation was actually a technological problem. In some ways, it's a way of we needed to figure out a better way to organize how to verify things and who does what. This is true.
Speaker 2:This is true. I mean, we actually don't yet have the technology to make communism happen, because what we had was not real communism and we still don't have enough technology to coordinate on this level. I think to have real one and well, to start communism you have to come to the end of capitalism first, of course.
Speaker 1:Right, well, I mean, this is a marxian point, um, but I think it actually is interesting that you know, marx always would talk about how capitalism created the, the technologies, for its own undoing and it kept on pushing further back when that was going to happen, admittedly, um, but uh, I've been thinking a lot about the implications of, you know, things like blockchain plus plus a very advanced AI, and I'm like, well, that would destroy, like it would create a highly prosperous economy that would have also massive unemployment, because that's the only way that stuff is actually super profitable, which would be so social destabilizing that there's a lot of stuff that comes from that, but also that it really is a technology that enables things like direct democracy, humans, not that you know Redistribution of wealth, exactly yeah, and right now it is being used Redistribution of wealth.
Speaker 1:Exactly yeah, and right now it is being used for redistribution of wealth just all upwards.
Speaker 2:So there are some lucky ones. There are some lucky ones, but 0.001%. You know, the retail usually comes in the last three months of the bull run and then loses money over the course of the next three months when it already falls down. That's what happens. Yeah, I'm talking about a different kind of redistribution. So, for instance, yeah, it is all interconnected with AI and stuff and the fact that even with not maybe general AI, but hundreds thousands of AI agents okay, so let's say they do need blockchains to transact money, right, and this is the perfect thing for them it's very easy for them to control a wallet. It's really hard for AI to control a bank account. They won't open it up, right, and you know, every time you do anything on the blockchain, you pay a fee, right? So imagine there is like a swarm of these ai's paying the fee to the blockchains. So now the only question which is left where these fees go?
Speaker 2:You know, in the current structure of blockchains we have, like bitcoin, ethereum and hundreds of others, the fees go to the biggest validators, the ones who, well, just own a huge part of the network by holding the tokens or mining equipment, and, on the other hand, this sounds like dystopian future right.
Speaker 2:You have AI agents always putting money in the pockets of the rich, controlling the blockchains, and, on the other hand, with what we do with Humanode, it can look like a bright future because you have thousands of AI agents doing transactions every day and then the fee can be distributed equally to all the humans who actually well, who hold the infrastructure of this blockchain, who launch these servers.
Speaker 2:And imagine even well, you can have a country where you, let's say, you have banks, but they're all connected to the same blockchain ledger and the fees are not going into bankers' pockets to pay for their cool lifestyle, but the fees are distributed equally among all the citizens of the country. And you know the citizens, they don't just sit, they really contribute, because each citizen proves he's a unique human and also holds the server which holds the history of the whole financial system of the country, and that's why they receive their fees, which can be, you know, your UBI, but it's not really UBI, because UBI is almost money for nothing. It's money for something you know, and this is how we can basically redistribute the flows of wealth in the financial system to the people, and it can work pretty fine, to be honest.
Speaker 1:I think this, actually, I mean this brings up one of the issues that a lot of left-wing thinkers have with technology that they also, weirdly, cannot imagine, a lot of times, another use case for technology than the one that they're currently given. Under these current capitalist rules, which, you know, in some ways fair enough, it is hard to think outside of the ideology of the dominant paradigm you live in, even if that ideology, as we said, based on neoclassical economics.
Speaker 2:Well, it depends when you were born and educated.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very much so.
Speaker 1:For the West it's very hard, I know um, why, I mean, why do you think this has been so hard to even certain things like, um, let's just say, basic insights from modern monetary theory and neo-chartalism? Uh, it's hard to get through to people even though they live um, they live in that world on a daily basis. So, for example, people really seem to think that there is somehow a finite amount of paper currency and that paper currency is limited by something, although they know it's no longer gold or some hard commodity, although they know it's no longer gold or some hard commodity, they. But when you ask them like, well, what backs your money? Um, if you think it's, if you think it's, if you think it's finite, like this, they can't tell you. Um, you know, they might think it's oil sometimes if you get a slightly smarter person in in america or europe, um, mostly I'm gonna talk more for America here.
Speaker 1:Europeans are usually a little bit better on this stuff, but I find that maddening because and it's even true for some leftists because they basically act like we live in a commodity economy of the 17th and 18th century, where there was no state strong enough to compel trade and thus interstate commerce needed to be an agreed upon commodity. That was fairly hard. But we've already talked about the contradictions of that, even the you know just two of them, which is money as a store of value and money as a store of liquidity. Right, you can't be good at both. So these kinds of things just don't occur to people, and that's just in terms of currency and money.
Speaker 1:That's not even in terms of larger geopolitical things, because I've asked people, for example um, there's been an assumption in a lot of people I talked to, even a lot of very smart people who are in the US, who are technological, uh, technologically literate, um, that well, all um, all innovation will lead to more jobs, or all innovation takes away from jobs, and they just have a very binary. One of those two binaries is people's general assumption Either you're creating jobs because the new tech creates all kinds of new jobs. That's the kind of positive, optimistic.
Speaker 2:It's not the car that will take your job. It will be the horse who learns how to drive the car yeah, exactly, that's actually a good point.
Speaker 1:Um, and I I am interested in and what you're talking about, because I think the the idea of a truly human intelligent AI actually real. I mean, in addition, to open up all kinds of ethical questions that I haven't even begun to wrap my head around, it really does lead to a way for people, if they could control it, to have workers that you can totally control and also don't really have to pay, and by workers I mean basically robots. If they're super intelligent, also they're more efficient than people, and if you can get their energy costs down, which is a concern. But again, one of the things about, if you had a truly super intelligent AI and you start asking it to figure out its own efficiency mechanisms, it probably would. So then even the energy costs, unless it's a true physical limitation, would be something that could be handled.
Speaker 1:And all of a sudden, the singularity talk from 20 years ago doesn't seem as far-fetched, and so it does to me matter how we have these technologies distributed and how we can have inputs, and one of the things you're talking about is this like one, one person, one node, you know input system which you can use blockchain for it you could have, you know, a government of this that is truly world democratic, and I actually emphasize that on purpose Are you can, are we can have a massive scramble between nation states and private companies.
Speaker 1:That'll probably lead to a lot of wars and a lot of immiserated people and a lot of social instability, and you know, I can tell you what it seems like. You know, a lot of people are accidentally choosing right now. But I also think it's important that we not limit ourselves to that dystopian imagination about this stuff, that there really is something socially emancipatory about some of this technology. Just kind of like there was, over the Internet, the prior case model to look at, because until we started seeing the gobbling up of of lots of space and and I don't just mean net space also, I mean physical server space you know there's always a physical infrastructure to the surface that people don't think about. But, um, there was actually kind of a liberatory element to the internet that a lot of people just don't see anymore because they experience a very cartel internet that's increasingly subject to power law dynamics that also is becoming a major site of international geopolitical competition.
Speaker 2:It's the same with Bitcoin now. Completely the same thing happened already. It's a cartelized. It's not anti-politics anymore. Every good news comes from political events. Any bad news comes from political events. It was not supposed to be like that 10 years ago. Same with the internet, yeah.
Speaker 1:And so we've already seen, you know, a lot in america there was an assumption that you know the tech overlords, while they may be rentiers and not super great, they were probably at at least aligned to culturally progressive values. As of the last few years, that seems pretty clearly no longer the case. If it was ever actually true and I actually kind of doubt it was ever true but again, and I want you to speak to this a little bit is I think people conflate that with the tech itself, that that that because of these people who control this tech, because of how they're using this tech, they assume that the tech itself is inherently bad and not that it's a case of of like. No, it's been captured, like the internet was captured, and it's been captured for specific reasons. And, yes, people are using it in a particularly vicious capitalistic way, but that's not inherent to the device, um, any more than like um, I don't know.
Speaker 1:I guess the metaphor would be like the agriculture is inherent to feudalism or something. It's just not exactly like it's. You have to kind of break those things as two separate things when you talk about tech the, the, the use case currently and the potential use case are very different. So I wanted to to to ask you like, however, how do we get that Like, how do we start seeing moving people to think about different use cases than the dystopian ones they're currently seeing?
Speaker 2:That's a wonderful question. How do we make people think at all? It's interconnected things, oh my God. Just showing them what else is possible. That's it. That's what we're trying to do.
Speaker 2:It's actually harder to do when you're trying to do less dystopian, plutocratic things, because capitalists support you less I mean the rich ones Because it's not their game. They are used to play. And well, there are just a lot of people, as we've seen. Also, like Peter Thiel, he discovered that for some reason, 70% of millennials, the generation that will, let's say, rule the world in the next 10, 20 years, are very socialist, compared to those baby boomers who love capitalism so much because it gave them everything they have right. Before that there was almost nothing. And there are more and more people who are well, who understand that the world we have right now it's not exactly the structure, the economic structure, we want to live in in the future, not exactly the world we want our kids to live in in the future. So we experiment more and more, and that's the main thing.
Speaker 2:For instance, okay, another example is taking the speculation and turning it into a good thing. We had this wave of meme coins. People went crazy. 99% lost their money on meaningless, useless meme coins. But what if you, for example, have the same kind of volatility but for the hypothesis tokens, which represent scientific hypothesis? Let's say, you make bets on these scientific hypothesis, you earn money, you lose money as a speculator, but the fees go to actually people who do the scientific research. And then boom, you have the same fun thing when you can speculate, win and lose money. But now it has positive externalities. But now it has positive externalities, okay, and you're kind of turning capitalism, crazy speculation wheel, into something good. In the end, even if people lost money, they helped the science a little bit by doing that.
Speaker 2:And how do we make people do things differently? That's a nice question. I mean, it always always comes down to education. I suppose. Just, uh, different education in different states would be awesome, you know, so that we could experiment with education as well and then figure out the best, who was the best state in the end, and adapt new guidelines not the ones that we have for the whole countries that never change in the course of 10, 20 years. I mean, you just asked the most difficult question that I heard in the last year in the last year.
Speaker 1:I do think of this a lot about education because, again, I think a lot about North American leftists and they don't think about education that much anymore. They've been sold a bunch of stuff by neoliberals about education that weren't true. So they then think, well, we can't fix anything with education. But I'm always like, well, you know now that I think the Soviet system was ideal, I don't, but there was a reason why they invested so much in their schooling and actually we're pretty successful at that early on Um and um. So that's not just like a liberal assumption that we don't need to educate people.
Speaker 1:However, I work as a teacher as my day job in addition to doing this, and you want to talk about something stuck in old path, dependencies, and even the reformers who complain about the industrial model of education. They're stuck in a 1970s, 70s market model, um, that's still fairly standard um, and and I haven't, I mean right now it doesn't seem like there's all that much interest in, uh you know, uh, political spaces about innovating education at all. I mean, you know, in the united states and to a lesser degree in Great Britain and France, you've seen educational entropy and decay and also, like you know, the cultural norms, that of the 1950s or whatever, are basically still kind of assumed, even when they reformed the standards we're still talking about like a set of um I work a lot in literature so a set of um. I work a lot in literature so a set of cultural texts that were very specific to, like pre-world war ii, post-world war ii, uh, national identities that really aren't relevant to that many people anymore. And when you go to to change that um, uh, what you get is often even worse. Like uh, um, you get people who, uh, you know, just become hypersensorious, or I mean, in this country that's become a major problem um, or uh, they, they, they want to replace something bad with basically nothing at all. And there's also these assumptions about students, particularly around technology. So I work particularly in a virtual, virtual I hate that word actually for this job, but a virtual environment for a public school. It's not a private school. Um and um.
Speaker 1:We have, uh, tons of issues with even like, uh, like.
Speaker 1:On one hand, um, we have legislatures who want us to uh, to be more technologically literate.
Speaker 1:On the other hand, they want so much control over information that most technology we actually can't use, and then we have this archaic state-by-state regulation and I know for a far leftist it's weird for me complaining about archaic regulations, but it is true that they are where we need private consortiums to sort out the regulations because no government agency is willing to do it, which also means that the democratic input for how to handle these democratic and for those of you who are listening put for how to handle these democratic and for those of you who are listening, not watching, both of those in scare quotes, uh regulations becomes nearly impossible to do.
Speaker 1:This is why I started thinking about something like your, your one person, one note issue, because we really aren't that responsive to our communities by the legislature. In fact, the legislature has its own agenda and like even though a lot of the stuff is sold to Americans, in particular under the auspice of local government, this stuff is written in think tanks in New York City and in California and at Sanford and stuff like that Not at all locally, even though local politicians are pushing them for whatever reason.
Speaker 2:My American friends believe it's going to change very soon. It's going to be, better. Communities will actually have a voice over, like given educational systems, they they choose, at least in us, and everybody will follow. But it sounds very good.
Speaker 1:Hope so you, you, you said this. You sound a little skeptical about that. Why?
Speaker 2:why? Well, I'm over 30.
Speaker 1:I'm very skeptical about things right now yeah, um, I mean there's a lot of focus. I mean, uh, having briefly lived in europe many, many, many, many, many years ago I mean eight months, almost years ago I don't think has any real expertise today, but I did find that there's just an assumption that American education is quite bad, that like the main, uh, the main european countries education was. Actually, when you looked at even the pisa scores, uh was only slightly better. Like brit, like britain, france and and I mean germany did a fair amount better, but britain and france were just like just barely above us what about finland?
Speaker 2:what about sweden?
Speaker 1:those are great, those are. You know why are they great? And I actually I'm interested in that because I mean, you mentioned Sweden. Sweden has a model that confounds both the American left and right wing. It has a lot of choice, but it also has a lot of government support and the idea that you could have both. I mean like, mean, like yeah, it should be like that for sure, for sure.
Speaker 2:I mean government support of education is no brainer is no brainer. Yeah, I think if you fund schools and if you fund teachers, you're not going to have inflation. You know, the only reason why we don't print a lot of money for everything we need is because we're afraid of inflation. But if you do the thing, spend the money right, you can actually fund a lot of public stuff without ruining your economy, but only making it better.
Speaker 1:And healthcare and education are two of those things well, yeah, I mean healthcare, education are interesting because even under a neoclassical model they present a huge problem for neoclassical uh economics.
Speaker 2:I mean, anything is a problem for neoclassical guys because it doesn't work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, uh, my my favorite joke, but I'm actually not really joking as neoclassical versions of of information, uh, uh, you know, equilibrium um required the abolition of time Um to be true.
Speaker 2:It's just like, it's like yeah that seems something very crucial to leave out of your model that we exist in a temporal world where perfect information, symmetry is kind of impossible. Rational people yeah, no time and equilibrium. This thing's just bizarre, you know. Yeah, we're living in a complex evolutionary system with time. That's why we need to build dynamic models, not this supply and demand bullshit. And at the same time, we're living in a world which never comes to equilibrium, because even you have a system with three things influencing each other. That's it. You will probably never reach an equilibrium.
Speaker 1:Well, this is actually, in this, interesting because, one, there's two faulty assumptions that most people make here and I know you know this, but this is for my audience um, that the more you move towards, uh, nominal, this nominal idea of equilibrium, even if you don't get there, that there's like somehow an assumption that you get that much more efficient marketly. That's a logical fallacy. There's no reason to assume that. Actually there's no reason to assume that every investment towards this information equilibrium would lead to that um, in equal manner. In fact, there's all kinds of reasons to think that it may not um, uh. And two, that uh, um, that that rationality is basically circular for neoliberal I mean for for neoclassicals and neoliberals too that basically, uh, we know something is rational because an expression of your wants. We know it is an expression of your wants because you get it. Therefore, anything you do would be, according to um, this model, rational. That's perfectly circular. It says nothing like I can't, I can't, I don't know what rationality means if it's just always what you choose to do.
Speaker 2:Well, in terms of economics it's very simple. You go to the shop, right, and you do the comparison of all the goods between each other, which is computationally so hardcore that you would need a few supercomputers and probably a nuclear power plant to do just in one shop. You know the comparison of products, all of them, between each other, to find the optimal basket of products in this shop. This is crazy. Humans don't work like that. In fact, humans can't even take a decision without having any feelings. You heard about people who, like their brains, were a little bit like cut inside and basically their rational part of the brain, let's say, didn't talk to the emotional part of the brain. You know what? They couldn't take any decision at all Just without emotions. It seems impossible for us humans.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, I mean, just just to think about this, how do you choose between, say, if you don't have an allergy or something, let's just say, apple preserves and an apricot preserves? What's the rational calculus is going to that you could possibly make about that without any emotional input, and I don't think there is one. I mean, maybe you'd be like well, aprils are easier produced in april, although how would you know that, like, how would you know which one's easier produced, which one's better to the environment, the, the? The level of complexity of just that simple um, uh, you know, binary choice without an emotive input is basically, you know, a human being just would not choose. They wouldn't know how to choose. It would lead to choice paralysis almost instantly.
Speaker 1:And I just find this this maddening. When people talk about people this way and I agree I mean, um, I think it's important that people understand that, particularly when we talk about stuff like more advanced tech, like when we're talking about rational optimization of AI use, and I'm like I don't entirely know what you mean by that. If you present that out, what would be the Pare, like Pareto, optimism of optimization of AI? I have no idea, and I don't know that anyone does either. So you know, I like this idea that maybe we should. Just, I tend to be an optimist about people in one sense that if you get a bunch of people together and they have some mild level of risk and they make the decisions directly and don't have some proxy for them, there tends to be, um, a fairly decent answer from a large number of people. Any individual can be an idiot. Any expert actually can be an idiot on things they're not expert, they don't have expertise on, and a large group washes that out like it equals out they. You know you start seeing choices that are even better than singular experts. Um, uh and uh.
Speaker 1:I find this interesting and I also find that, like tech oligarchs are terrified by this, because a lot of them have been moving away from this idea that they were a libertarian technology. I mean, like Thiel basically wants some bizarre form of feudalism that is similar to what Curtis Yarvin or Hans Hermann Hoppe or these kind of ghouls want, and to me, I think about the potential liberatory nature of us being able to identify things, to tie them into individual people, so we can be sure that they're that, like voting and inputs are honest, that we could reduce cognitive load for things and have people, instead of becoming potatoes which they're probably going to kind of become under the current system free themselves up to think about other things and use this technology to think more efficiently. More efficiently Because, you know, I've read studies about exposure to LLMAIs that make people dumb, and I'm like you know, and I kind of believe that, but I believe the research, but I'm also like but that's because the way we're using it, like you can use this well, or you can use this like you think Google works, which Google didn't work that way, either to try to provide all the answers for you, or you can use it as a way to refine your own thought, as a way to mimic social thinking. Most people don't know to even choose the mimic social thinking which would make them smarter and more efficient in a lot of ways. Instead, they choose the individualist, atomized option, which will actually atherapy their skills, and that's not inherent to the technology, that's inherent to the use case.
Speaker 1:Um, and trying to get others to think that way is something that is why I wanted to talk to you and you're not normally. Like you said before we came on the air, this is not a crypto podcast, so why was I interested and this is why. So let's talk for a second. You're experimenting with what could be done with this. What kind of things could we start to do with blockchain and AI and stuff together?
Speaker 2:Well, by the way, speaking of the wisdom of the crowds, yes, you just reminded me of one technology coming from crypto that actually works and it's a very good signaling for the future events, which is the prediction markets. They were in development since 2014 and finally three years ago. Three years ago, crypto guys got it right and we got adoption beyond, like crypto users. That's awesome. That rarely happens, I would say. And, at the same time, you could have, of course, prediction market, which is based on how much money you put in and then you change the percentage of the outcome and then, at the same time, you could just have signaling that we use, you know, with one person, one vote. So you have a company running like, you have a board of directors or you have a government, doesn't matter but you can actually online put a vote yeah, do you guys want to do this or this, especially when you don't know yourself what the community wants? And you can have one person, one vote on any matter. You know, for political signaling or for, I don't know, corporate signaling from the employees to see if the management is aligned with actually thousands of people working in the company. And, yeah, this is one of the things that we could use. Again, it's not exactly based on AI, but biometrics are also using neural networks, just not LLMs, but usually convolutional ones. Well, this is again, this is something I work on. That's why it's easy for me to talk about it.
Speaker 2:What else can it be? I don't know. It can be AI proposing changes to people, like on a regular basis. For example, he's fed with the data of what happens in a certain region and he's like oh, I actually found this thing, maybe we can do it better this way. And then it's not just going as a paper on the table of the politician, but it's going through the signaling of the people, of the citizens living there, with one person, one vote, simply on the internet. Let's say, if 1% of people participated. This is something you should take into account. Probably it was a good proposal. I'm sure there will be emerging coordination of people and AI because AI can check after us. It can propose some ideas. People can check after him. Provide their own opinion to have the wisdom of the crowd, not the hallucination of AI. Provide their own opinion to have the wisdom of the crowd, not the hallucination of AI.
Speaker 1:And we can do a lot of fun things like that with coordination. One thing we've been kind of talking a little bit about, and you brought it up earlier, is a universal basic income and some of the problems with our current conception of it is a universal basic income and some of the problems with our current conception of it that you know we just give. If you just untargetedly throw out money for nothing and I'm putting quotation marks out there yes, it would probably lead to I wouldn't necessarily just say inflation, but all the kinds of of problems that you have within hyper acceleration of the market under the current system. And I want to be very clear on that, because my prior critiques of UBI is not that I'm against UBI, but that if, like you, did UBI and left all class and production dynamics the same, it's probably going to be a problem. But one of the things that I just want to float to people if we start having even relatively actually intelligent AI systems that can innovate, not just repeat what humans have already done, I wouldn't even think it needs to be super intelligent. Uh, you're already in a scenario that is radically different than what we were in even five years ago. Um, which, which means. We do have to respond to that if you don't want the entire planet to look a lot more like the favolas of brazil, um and um and, and you know, a more and more unstable uh uh economy, with, you know, people also still being able to benefit from the prosperity at a level we've never seen before, and you know human inequity being even unrecognizable to the most. You know decadent King uh kingships and empires of the past, um but this.
Speaker 1:But this is interesting because one of the things that, if you think about, both a more diffuse democratic nature of interacting with government and production and also adding to that ways in which people's interaction would actually, you know, profit, the system deliver science, as you mentioned earlier this would not have those effects Like UBI, would have a fundamental different effect. It would actually be somewhat similar to just injecting targeted, targetedly injecting currency, see now, except the target isn't a bunch of bankers at the Fed who just decide this for the entire planet, um, kind of at their own whim, uh, which you know leads to all kinds of problems. I mean, one of the things that you mentioned now is even being the universal reserve currency isn't even always great for the us, even though it gives the us a ton of power. It also means that you know they're effectively tied into dealing with government decisions of governments they have very little control over, which would also lead them to a more imperial stance. Over that I mean because you know, all of a sudden I don't know what a banker in Indonesia decides can affect the US economy, even if it's not a direct trade implication.
Speaker 1:And it does seem like right now we're kind of stuck in the US in particular. We're stuck in a weird world where we don't want to give it the power of being the reserve currency, but we're awful pissed off about the limitations that's put on us as far as the cost of our export, the ability to export, the way it plays on our own worker development, et cetera, et cetera, and it leads to all kinds of political crises. I think the current Trump administration is apt proof of that, but also apt proof that they don't really have any way to deal with it. Because if you totally give up being the reserve currency, all kinds of American power goes away, but if you don't, you also are actually kind of held hostage domestically. And when people ask like, oh, why doesn't China, a very powerful country, largest producer. Why don't they try to be the universal Forex country? They produce them as.
Speaker 2:Well, they are trying little by little with different countries, like starting with Russia, and they are also caught up in this debate. You can't have both great experts and reserve or domain forex currency. It's, you know. It's also very difficult because the financial system we have right now, it's pretty much not under control of the central banks anymore. Yeah, you know, it's almost free from central banks because central banks control interest rates, but market interest rates are more important than the interest rates that the Fed tells there is and at the same time, yes, fed kind of can try and inject the money into the banks, but it doesn't mean that the banks are going to use this money. There is no such thing as a banking multiplicator anymore. Sometimes you try to inject money and the multiplicator is below one, you know, and it just works easily if you have a banking license. Every time you give out the loan, you create money. So pretty much anyone with a banking license can do that and it's out of the control.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I mean, that does seem to explain why, like Fed, interest rate manipulation just doesn't seem to have the predicted response anymore.
Speaker 2:And it's just narrative signaling from the Fed, nothing else, and they are really afraid that they will now start reducing the rates. Nothing will change and people will finally understand that there is no reason to follow Fed anymore, because they have lost all of their power that they had once.
Speaker 1:Hmm, have lost all of their power that they had once. Well, I was going to ask you about this because this has occurred to me in the context of the way diffuse economies work. But how many seemingly irrational government decisions are about masking that they no longer have control over a thing? Because it seems that there's a lot of that going on.
Speaker 2:Well, I could say, only for the central banks. They either take decisions that destroy their economy or they are out of the control, but I think all the other things, like government spending, are totally in control. The only thing they can control I mean the things like inflation or well, avoiding recession is by increasing government spending. But usually this is the decision not of the Fed but of the Treasury, and I mean US is very lucky to have a smart treasury secretary right now, to be honest, because he's kind of saving the economy from what we have right now. You usually have a recession and in order to balance it out, you have to increase the government spending so that actually, we have enough money flowing through the economy not to call it recession.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I actually have been interested in that, because what the Treasury has been doing is very different in signaling than what the public neoliberal narrative that's being pushed by the same administration really is. I mean, you think about all the Doge stunts where you're firing people to save the government money.
Speaker 2:oh my god the, the, the, actually the officials of the treasury. They saved us from the narrative of william musk, who doesn't know how money works, who doesn't know how financial system works. The government cannot go bankrupt. It can only, uh well, end up with hyperinflation of the currency if the government money are distributed in the wrong way to push the prices up. But government cannot run out of money if it is a federal government and it is a money issuer, unlike, for example, like Ireland, that use pound.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, this is one of the interesting things as well, you know this. I just want to remind my audience of this. The EU would have currency sovereignty, except that the charter of the EU itself limits it so to, I think, 3%.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the EU is caught up in a situation where they are two paths. Okay, one path is not only to have a common currency but have common debt, like us states have, and this would be great union. You know, now you have real real currency with real common debt, or it will fall apart. There are two ways. They can choose whatever they like.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, I've actually thought a lot about that. It does seem like they're kind of choosing to fall apart, but it's one of these issues like I think a lot about and this is kind of deep history that in America is unknown, but Keynes' proposal of Bancor, which actually probably would have been, oh yeah that's an interesting one.
Speaker 2:It might work for US actually, because you can. You don't well, in Bancor pretty much you don't need to be a global reserve currency because you have Bancor pretty much. You don't need to be a global reserve currency because you have Bancor. And Bancor also is supposed to balance out the import and exports. What the US is now doing with tariffs could be just done with Bancor, could be just done with.
Speaker 1:Bancor. Well, I mean, it seems to be kind of like a world historical tragedy, particularly for the transatlantic money system, that Bancor was rejected. But I also understand the kind of game, theoretical logic that led it to be rejected, because none of the states wanted to give up what they perceived as their own currency power. It's the same problem that you had in the creation of the EU and that 3% thing that you guys did, where basically the EU decided we're not going to have common debts but we are going to have a common currency and we're going to get around the common debt problem by this weird limitation of our own currency sovereignty. Which benefits? Actually, it doesn't even benefit germany anymore. It used to, kind of, but like um, at the current moment it seems to benefit nobody. Um, it used to benefit germany, sort of um, and and maybe france, um and uh, I, I know we, we just have to get out of this model.
Speaker 1:This model has been disastrous. It's been disastrous for the for the quote, pig countries. Uh, you know, um, it's, it's, I think it's, I think actually it's leading to war in Eastern and Eastern Europe. Um, and you know weird stuff about currency zones and NATO and all this. It's always gotten Russia on edge, and I do think one of the things that that I think people need to kind of grasp from our conversation here is the way we choose to organize these technologies could actually have knock on effects on things. It doesn't seem to have knock on effects to like geopolitical competition and I don't want to sound like an utter utopian and I don't think the world's just magically going to all get along because we have something like a blockchain-based voting system but I do think it would greatly change the way we make these kind of decisions in a way that would probably reduce tensions.
Speaker 1:Because one thing I will say the more information people have, usually the less likely their population is going to be willing to go to war and stuff like that, because they understand the cost of that. I mean, even here in the US, which is a country where we've been at kind of war almost constantly now for 50 years I say kind of war because it's not formally declared blah, blah, blah, but you know there's been, I mean there's been US military interactions that are effectively wars in the past 10 years that most US citizens don't even know happened, years that most US citizens don't even know happened. And you know, I think about, like Americans, finally realizing that we've been fighting the Houthis for five years. Are, you know, learning that we were doing? You know shenanigans in Africa, you know stuff like that, and that information could be readily available and those decisions could be, uh, made more responsibly in a way that I do think would be even um more conductive to world peace.
Speaker 1:I again, I'm not saying that there would never be conflict and violence. I'm I'm not a utopian like this, but it would probably greatly reduce it, and you know it's interesting. But that's, I think, precisely the reason why there's a lot of government investment in us not using this in ways that would be helpful. I don't know what's your take on that?
Speaker 2:I mean, how do you deal with that? Oh God, it's a difficult question. I mean, I think about these proxy wars I would say yes, as a way to test the latest military equipment, you have to have at least one. As a way to test the latest military equipment, you have to have at least one, because if you don't have it you can lose to other guys who wage wars and test their stuff. So this is a tricky thing for national security. There is no particular reason to wage wars outside of it for national security, but there is, at the same time, because the field tests. They don't help so much. So I think this is one of the reasons the guys like to wage wars. Also, it is a great way to destroy the value created in the world which is kind of deflationary process.
Speaker 2:okay, so you do invest money, you do pay for people's jobs, you do pay for technological development, but in the end you just throw these rockets and they're getting destroyed down to zero, and this is a great way to control inflation and decrease the supply of the currency through this. So it's a very tricky question for me. I don't have an answer. How could we structure our economy so that wars become unprofitable for everybody? You know when they become the worst political decision ever, because they are sometimes, unfortunately, a good political decision. So I don't have an answer to that, to be honest.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, I think it's important that you point that out, because this is an insight from classical Marxism that I actually really hold to that when you start having an overproduction crisis, it you can almost time that it's not guaranteed it's going to lead to war, particularly, uh, in a direct way today because of the threat of nuclear weapons. But in indirect ways it's like you're start seeing proxy wars pop off. Because you're doing massive production, you're injecting into the economy. You also bypass conservative instincts about injecting money into the economy, but you're just blowing that shit up, as you're saying. So you're not actually overproducing in the market in a way, that are lower prices and it is an economically rational decision if you have inflation or if you are um uh, you could actually do the same by investing in the teachers yeah, you could so more people earn money.
Speaker 2:there is no particular product created, but eventually people in your country are smarter and in the long term, you have even bigger GDP. Let's say so. I think that the argument, only the argument about the test, stands. I have no idea. Maybe we could just have a place where the countries could test their stuff with each other by killing each other without touching the people. You know, I don't know Some kind of death games between the armies? Yeah, just thinking out loud how to fix this awful, awful part of our society which seems an important part of it we can't get rid of.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it really is. Uh, victor will be going for about an hour and 20 minutes, and so I really enjoyed our conversation. It's been very ranging, so I'm gonna I'm going to ask, uh, you one more question and then we'll talk about where people can find your stuff. But, um, if you were going to tell people, uh, right now, what area of technical development that people are not watching closely enough, that they should be watching, um, where would you tell them to look?
Speaker 2:technical.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but technological development, social improvements. I use technical for a particular reason but yeah, okay.
Speaker 2:Well, there is one science that is the most, I would say, retarded and underdeveloped, like no other science, and this is called economics, macroeconomics. So if you pay more attention to these and know how it actually works, well, the world would be a much better place. We can solve so many problems with just, I know, having money out of thin air, you know, by government spending, and in terms of technology, that's a great question because I'm also kind of following mostly mainstream stuff using crypto, using LLMs. But well, new interfaces are also. Everybody knows about them already. They are not yet there for mass consumption because they are, if they're accurate, they're highly invasive and people are not ready for that yet.
Speaker 2:Then I would say the most underrated is probably genetic engineering, because it's prohibited in so many countries. But there are some countries who don't prohibit it and they're going to have better humans in the next 20 years compared to the countries who prohibit, like genetic engineering on humans. Because I think that we are now looking a lot into technological path of evolution, but not the biological path of evolution, because we can change biology with technology. We don't have to have wires everywhere and hardware everywhere, because we can change the genes and other things. So I would say the combination of biological change and, like hardware, technological change. This is what Stanislav Lem talked a lot about in his pretty crazily written book, the Sum of Technologies, and this is really, I think, underrated under the radar right now.
Speaker 1:It's funny that you mentioned this book, and the next year I'm actually going to do a book club on the Summa Technologicae, the Sum of Technologies, the summa technologicae, the summa technologies.
Speaker 2:Because because it is an insane book, but it's also incredibly insightful um, despite being kind of nuts um yeah I remember when I put it on audiobook and I had the like my friend founder nearby. He says I can't listen to this bullshit and I'm like saying this is one of the greatest books. Sci-fi books, not even sci-fi. It's not just stories, it's crazy theory coming out of the head of the person who lived many, many years ago and what he wrote about is not even happening yet yeah it's.
Speaker 1:It's wild what that book gets right and what I mean. There's stuff it doesn't, but it is wild what that book fore right and what I mean. There's stuff it doesn't, but it is wild what that book foresees and I think it is incredibly under read. So I really appreciate you bringing it up, because I am one of these people who's weirdly obsessed with that book and I realized like, yeah, it's partly nuts, but it's interesting. And your point about biology? Um, but it's interesting. And your point about biology how do I say this? Because of its use in racial ideology and the history of the 19th and 20th centuries. I get why people are afraid of eugenics, um, and I'm, but, uh, genetic manipulation is something we've always done as humans. Even we didn't realize it.
Speaker 2:And, um, you, know things like that yeah, I mean selection.
Speaker 1:I mean um. I mean, for example, just explaining to people when they talk about genetically modified food, this is not genetically modified food. I'm like, ok, I get that there's a problem with information. I get that Monsanto, for example, in specific, pulls a lot of bullshit. I'm with you on that. But, my friend, everything you eat has been genetically modified through selective breeding and most of the animals that you interact with have also been selectively modified by human intervention. And I, I don't know what else to tell you. Um, you know, even showing you what, like a watermelon looked like from a painting in the 15th century, you're not going to recognize it, oh my god, do you know that carrots were different color as well, something like that that I heard about?
Speaker 1:there were different colors of carrots and for some reason now they're all orange, red, right yeah, apparently it was like the 50s or 60s century before we had, like, um, predominantly orange carrots. Before that they were white, purple and yellow, uh, which you can still get, I mean, and like some of these things have been ranging. But yeah, I mean, our, our images of major foods have just are basically from the last 200 years and we just assume that it's always been that way.
Speaker 2:I hate cherry tomatoes. I shouldn't.
Speaker 1:Fair enough, I actually. I mean, I hate what I like to call the red globes of sadness that have been engineered in America for mass production. They have lost most of their flavor at this point. They're engineered that way for packing consistency. But I just when I talk to anybody who's a gardener, I'm just like, yeah, we genetically modify stuff all the time. I mean, we just do it slowly, um, uh, so I just want people to to to think about that, or um, you know, and gene editing, um, I mean, for example, when people talk about we don't have a cure for cancer. Cancer is a complicated phenomenon that has almost infinite genetic mutations, but if you're going to have a cure for cancers, it would be through individual gene editing. Yeah, very customized.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, this is true, because cancer is one word, but there are endless types of it, right? You can't kill it all with one pill.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one very unfortunate way of fighting firewood fire that we tend to do, and so I just I do think we need to look at all the genetic stuff that's going on right now with CRISPR.
Speaker 2:I'm really waiting for the. You know, if we talk about the merge of tech and biology, I'm really waiting for these micro robots that could go through our blood vessels and heal us. You don't even need to genetically engineer yourself, Just let them be there. You know, it would be awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it would be awesome and, interestingly, I heard a lot more talk about that 10 years ago than I hear today and I don't think it's because of technical reasons or lack of technical development.
Speaker 2:Probably because of the noise that we have right now. Compared to 10 years ago, it was so clear, you know.
Speaker 1:Right yeah, where can people find your work, victor?
Speaker 2:Where can people find me? Well, people can find me in any of the human chats and channels, always in the community, and I sometimes shitpost on Twitter. My Twitter is tech underscore Mingler. Don't ask me why? Because I have a different nickname and I was banned on Twitter for an AI-generated picture that I put on the back of it and the algorithms thought that it was something not safe for work. It was just AI-generated gibberish, nothing else.
Speaker 1:That's funny, all right. Well, thank you so much, victor, and thank you for your time. Thank you, derek, it was awesome. I love going to non-.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much, Victor, and thank you for your time. Thank you, derek, it was awesome. I love going to non-crypto podcasts so much. It's so interesting. Have a good day, man, you too. Bye.
