Monetary anthropologist and former derivatives broker Brett Scott, author of Cloudmoney and The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance, talks with Pinchbeck in a Substack livestream about money, crypto and the ideology of the current tech right. Scott describes moving from left-wing finance criticism to writing about the fusion of big tech and big finance and its public expression as an attack on physical cash. Drawing on growing up at the tail end of apartheid in South Africa, he reads the alpha-male posturing of figures like Andrew Tate as a defense strategy born of insecurity, and links that settler mentality to the South African backgrounds of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and David Sacks. He also discusses libertarianism as a cosmology of isolated individuals and a course in economic anthropology he is building.
Guest: Brett Scott
In brief
- Scott argues that big tech and big finance are structurally fusing, and that the campaign against physical cash is how that consolidation surfaces publicly.
- Scott reads hypermasculine posturing of the Andrew Tate variety as a defensive response to fear, noting that his own father, who served in southern African special forces, never romanticized violence.
- Scott traces a line from the defensive racism of white South African settler identity to the worldview of tech figures including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
- Scott describes what his recent writing calls fractal libertarianism, whose underlying image is of each person as a separate island, a cosmology he says is native to capitalism and stated outright in Thatcher's denial that society exists.
- Scott says Substack allows monetary and economic ideas to be developed through extended metaphor and imagery in ways conventional publications did not permit.
- Scott says he is preparing work on how billionaires actually accumulate wealth, so that readers can understand the mechanics of kleptocracy, alongside material on automation, AI and crypto.
Full text
BR maybe um maybe just you know maybe introduce yourself very very very briefly like who you are what you've been working on and stuff like that sure yeah yeah um well I'm Brett Scott and originally actually kind of come from an anthropology background but I also worked in the financial sector in exotic derivatives but also combining a bunch of leftwing politics with that so originally I was kind of known as a kind of like leftwing Finance guy um uh but then I kind of pivoted quite a lot into looking the sort of anthropology of money and also the intersection of big Tech and big finance and my last book Cloud money was all about the sort of structural change that's been going on in the global economy between the sort of fusion of big Tech and big Finance um and how that manifest in the you know public realm as an attack on the physical Cash System um and so people also know me as this kind of like proach guy sometimes um but a lot of my work has also been involved with like analyzing the sort of background ideology of crypto over the years as well how that relates to people's perceptions of money um yeah bits and pieces and people my the substack is actually great because it sort of allows for a lot deeper explorations of these types of issues in a way that normal newspapers historically didn't really allow um so a lot of my substack work work is quite sort of experimental trying to build metaphors imagery like literal imagery sometimes of you know how to understand monetary systems and economic systems yeah that's my basic that's my basic Vibe yeah I mean uh I think that substack is super wonderful in many ways right now as a medium yeah because you can basically you know there's so many constraints if you write for magazines or newspapers and here you can actually go many different directions you know explore your whole but I saw you just had one about Andrew Tate and insecurity in South Africa uh one the yeah yeah so what were you thinking about there yeah I'm from South Africa and I actually grew up at the tail end of aparte which was for anybody who doesn't know about aparte a systematized legalized version of like institutional RAC racism essentially a bunch of laws um and uh this is the reason why South Africa is often lack Israel nowadays because um there's lots of similarities in the way that the structures worked but I grew up at the tail the tail end of aparte um at that time when it really felt like a fascist police state and so I kind of quite a lot of experience of that sort of violent matcher kind of culture um and yeah when I see people like Andrew Tate I guess in the note I was I was saying that that type of like alpha male posture ing type of stuff which is quite a big part of um I guess in a way like certain forms of libertarian individualism um a lot of it comes from fear or insecurity so it's a type of defense strategy used by people when they're when they when they perceive situations of threat this is like a big part of the core part of like sort of white South African identity actually um it also helps you to understand things like the Israeli mentality so for example in the early parts of col when colonial South Africa was forming the African settlers were basically poor peasants who sat on the front lines well not peasants but they were they were like sort of itinerant farmers and they basically developed this whole kind of mentality which is like if we don't crush the native you know black populations we will be destroyed and engulfed right which is actually very very similar to what you'll find in the kind of Zionist mentality um and so they developed this incredibly racist way of seeing the world but it's incredibly defensive at the same time and then at some point during aparte they systematized that into like a whole police state right was like this incredibly repressive State apparatus so this whole kind of like M maop posturing culture in South Africa really come came from that kind of essentially deep deep insecurity um and so you know I have a sort of weird position where I actually kind of hate that kind of culture but I also sort of come from that that setting and it's sort of sometimes helps me to understand some of those Dynamics but is Andrew Tate's not South Africa is he no no no but that kind of vibe right control yeah but specifically like white South Africans are having a huge influence right now in the US obviously you know Elon Musk who um father I think ran a emerald mine and made a fortune and uh Peter teal whose father was apparently an engineer in charge of a uranium m which was apparently incredibly brutal in terms of the the the the sickness and the punishment to the to the black miners so maybe that helps explain what's that David sa exactly so I haven't explored David saxs as as as as deeply as the other two yet um but um yeah maybe some of what you're you know I mean it's sort of interesting that these guys first of all you know either you know accidentally Maybe had some kind of insight that allowed them to make money in the system uh to such a huge degree but then also that ideology which now has seems to have like really surfaced um it seems it's partially driving the situation it's interesting one it's like because I don't know it's obviously more complex in what I'm making out but for example my dad is part of the Special Forces when I was growing up you know in southern Africa you're part of the special forces in southern Africa it's like dirty business right they they it was Hardcore stuff that they were um with my dad when I was when I was growing up in that context he never romanticized any of that kind of stuff whereas lots of the sort of Andrew Tate type figures do partly because they kind of like it's a sort of of a postering sort of situation where they they're sort of emulating some imagined ideal of like I don't know some sort of like over overblown masculinity um which is something you actually often only find with people who aren't really involved in conflicts right um so Elon Musk maybe had some of this too right because at some point he was probably like a kind of victimized type of geek character in in AP partite South Africa right so he's got a weird thing where he sort of like ran away from South Africa and joined sort of geek culture but now he's almost like revisiting this weird like far right racist side of himself I don't I don't fully know what's going on but there's definitely a sou afrian connection to how he's behaving maybe I should explore it sometime yeah um yeah you know what is it that you know maybe growing up from that context like TL and musk did you know is there is there something in that you know despite you know besides just like racism and maybe insecurity and um you know kind of a yeah maybe a strong survival Instinct uh you know that that that led them to kind of like Prosper you know so intensively in the American system yeah you know actually the it's interesting like like white South Africans uh during the '90s and I guess early 2000s there was a lot of like um fleeing the country because of the um well you know they used to basically be in control of the country and then when the Black government came in they were like oh we're going to be persecuted so we better escape and so was a big kind of um Exodus of white South Africans to the US to the UK to Australia austa and so I don't know anybody I was I was based in London for a while and and sort of from like 2008 and so and lots of the Old South Africans there were these kind of people who had sort of escaped in a sense or imagined that they were escaping okay um and so they kind of got into all these positions around in in sort of London's in the London scene and actually historically they were quite valued as workers in in that world because they're quite ruthless in a way um they would tend to have fewer of the few of the assumptions that British workers would have you know British workers kind of expected a degree of protection and so on whereas the South Africans would come in and just be like a bit just prepared to do anything in a sense so they they developed this kind of like mercenary type of vibe to them and I suspect that the kind of like Pay Pal Mafia crew have that same vibe to them they're just like we come in we have our little solidarity networks we take over and the sort of these businesses and um yeah I don't know give me a very crude version of this but there's definitely this kind of like almost a settler mentality that you find in in white South Africans yeah I was just trying yeah of course right now I've been um forcing myself to watch uh Elon musk's interview with Joe Rogan and three hours gez yeah I mean just to sort of um I mean now this person is exerting so much power over American society and um you know it's sort of hard to figure out where he's actually consciously lying uh or where he himself has gotten sort of mesed in this kind of like alternative reality he keeps talking about you know the Liberals the Democrats and you know everybody else being meshed alternative reality what's that super hard to know yeah I feel like it would take weeks and weeks and weeks of research to kind of really figure it out yeah yeah but one thing that's really yeah the contempt that he has for government for public service you know the sense that everybody who's involved with that is like you know a scammer or a corrupt that he has this like Purity and you know he's the one who's going to come in I mean you know there's definitely some sense where he believes himself to be on some kind of U Mission uh and um I mean Rogan is incredible because he's just an incredible like Psy like I it's like propaganda like he doesn't he doesn't push back against anything that um has to say it's kind of extra fing yeah exactly so yeah so I mean musk said that he's not responsible for firing air traffic controllers or us Aid workers or try to feed starving kids or distribute AIDS drugs and then if you do a test you know a search for the Articles you know then you find you know every mainstream article agrees that this is all happening and he's responsible um so yeah it's like um it's very I know a lot of I was just talking to a friend who lives in Austin and he was talking about a lot of his friends who are you know doctors like Mark Heyman like intelligent you know you know people that were really considered like thoughtful important you know members of society have shifted over to this worldview right now kind of through this like RFK Elon Musk Pipeline and um I don't know I I don't I don't I don't I don't know how uh we we recover from this or how this this it's it's like it's like it's like watching like a fever like a like a like a fire take off or something like that yeah I mean I guess yeah actually in my my last I've just put out this piece today actually just like about an hour ago uh which is called the archipelago um and there's one angle in that it's it's about Bitcoin um it's about the ideology behind Bitcoin um but there's there's certain things in there that you know I'm interested to explore further which might you know explain some more elements of of the picture because um and well how do I say this in the non- complicated way in a sense there's like an ideal type version of capitalism that's imagined in the libertarian imagination right then there's actual capitalism which is different and there's always been this weird interaction between those two things all right you you kind of like if you're a Libertarian tough person you sort of either have to reject what you see around you know you're like well we we don't have true capitalism or you have to kind of shorn it into the ideal model and I in a weird way I feel like a lot of the sort of centristy liberal type politicians for a long time just skirted that kind of thing over right they were sort of speak about the system in a certain way um and the C of sort of euphoria moment in a sense as people kind of there's a sort of purity of the vision being pushed out by Trump and musk and stuff the sort of Ideal type imagination of like bottomup capitalism um and I'm attaching this to the sort of euphoria around Bitcoin because historically this is what the Bitcoin community's always done right they've um sort of generate this this like ideal of what money is quote unquote supposed to be all right and they create this whole sort whole sense of a grand conspiracy um in which money right now isn't actually real and if you as long as you can when you can finally see that you can join this kind of enlightened Masters who will um kind of work towards this new platonic ideal of money anyway this article is kind of going into the sort of like thought structure um I could I could go into that more if you want you go to sure go ahead yeah so so basically what I've been interested for quite a long time because I've been involved in the Bitcoin Community for since 2011 basically right so I've had a long exposure to the community um um and how the thought of the thought works but I also come from you know economic anthropology background um a kind of more sort of David Graber style of thinking around money yeah you said you said Graber is one of your big influences yeah yeah exactly right and David Graber historically would kind of represent more of a sort of like left-wing Anarchist economic anthropology way of seeing the world the starting point of a gra risk type of approach but not not only gra I would say just like economic anthropology more generally is that your sort of starting image of an economy is that people are in meshed like that right like you can't you can't like that's where you start in the libertarian worldview though you don't start like that like when you when you start thinking about an economy as a Libertarian you always imagine these like separated individuals right right like like that that book The sovereign individual which is like one of their yeah that starting point has a massive influence on how you then think about money right and so basically in the article I'm looking at how that starting point uh creates certain imaginations of what money is supposed to be in your head um we you can also debate how you get to that starting point so one of my big arguments about the Bitcoin community that the dark dark secret about the Bitcoin Community there's many Dark Secrets but one of them is that the type of mentality you need to start to believe in the basic background story of Bitcoin is created by large scale nation states okay and this is like an economic anthropology Point um it'll come from people like K Pani right who basically you say something like large scale capitalist markets don't EX exist without States all right they form the underlying Foundation of like making markets big if you want to have like really large scale markets you need these big nation state players okay now once you create that and they they they'll have to use their own monetary systems to do that to create that scale and the type of monetary system that they all use will not be a commodity system it'll be a Fiat system right but once you have people in that structure once you're like a tiny little individual in a huge nation state system you can start to generate an ideology of individualism right you can start to like fantasize about yourself as being an individual and that is where the F sort of fascination with commodity money starts to emerge so ironically it's a large scale Fiat money system will generate the mythology of commodity money internal to itself um this takes a little while to kind of uh you know in a sense get your head around but if you look at modern ecomics for example the context of modern economics forms in is in super large scale European cities right which are already created by large scale nation state monetary system structures and legal structures now if you're that person in that context the way you experience the world is you see like these gigantic Seas of strangers who seem to be engaging in this kind of um detached form of exchange and that's the sort of the starting point of modern economics they sort of starting image of these random adults who walk into markets and exchange comes from that very particular historically specific context and then they generate their worldview from from that from that perspective um so lots of the sort of like fantas fantasies around Bitcoin come from this like nation state starting point does that kind of make sense yeah that makes some sense um but of course actually as my friend guy said in the comments this is why it's so insane they're destroying the state because they will realize they totally depended on the state all along yeah been a critique of libertarianism for a very long time right but the interesting thing about libertarianism is that it's actually the kind of native cosmology of capitalism it's the thing you would most likely expect people to believe if they found themselves in a capitalist system if you like plun somebody into a capitalist system at a large scale the the type of worldview they're most likely to come up with is I'm a detached individual alone in a society and I have to fend for myself I have to do self-help right which is basically the libertarian world viiew like the actual political philosophy of libertarianism will then go and formalize that and the discipline of Economics will kind of try to scientif try to make a sort of science out of it um but it is also like very normal in society for people to have these types of beliefs right it's it's like the most typical thing um and actually this is what you know with marxists when they're trying to form you know class Consciousness like what's the whole point of that it's like you have to go to a bunch of people who basically have a Libertarian worldview who see themselves as alone and you got to convince them that actually they're not alone actually they're part of a group that has some common interest right and that was not you know take them for granted I found this uh very interesting kind of like weird Middle Eastern commentator um Islamic guy who's sort of controversial but um I wrote about one of his long videos and um yeah so he he basically said that um what's being done to the US now is you know pretty similar to what you know we've done with to other countries um around the world over time uh so for instance after the USSR collapsed you know Milton you know Milton Freedman style econom economists went in there they were like okay you have to privatize everything and sell it off to the highest bidder you know which allowed for you know the capitalist class to make to make a quick Fortune but unfortunately also led to kleptocracy and ultimately Putin emerged out of that so essentially um what seems to be the idea Al although it is like just so astonishing that they actually seem to be doing this is to basically like crash the US you know like force some kind of economic meltdown um and then those who have a huge amount of wealth while they may use lose a certain proportion of their wealth you know as everybody else does also they'll still have so much more wealth they'll be able to buy the distressed assets you know whether it's like real estate or public parks or companies for like uh Pennies on the dollar uh and sort of complete the sort of privatization um process um of resources and um and centralize that power in fewer and fewer hands which will also be aided and embedded by uh you know artificial intelligence and blockchain Technologies and so on um yeah does that does does that Accord to what to how you think things are happening or why they're happening in this this way I think there's so many different levels going on though I mean yeah and I agree with you there but I think what it's confusing to me is right um and maybe this is because I've been focusing on again if I spent a few weeks like sitting and observing all the actions of the administration like you have maybe I would come to a clearer picture um but I'm what I'm always fascinated with with like ideology is how to what extent the people who are going through those processes like believe in it themselves yeah you know like so you're saying with with Elon it's like a lot of the actions when you when you observe them are clearly like kleptocratic sort of plutocratic actions right if you if if you're viewing the world through like a self-interest lens you're like well these people are clearly enriching themselves like Trump when he's building the crypto strategic reserve for example is clearly handing out patronage to the crypto industry like he's just going to use the just going to use the central bank to buy up Bitcoin to boost it boost its price yeah right it sort of looks like very much like a clear case of just like you know cryptocracy but then like there's there's an actual like deep deep worldview going on where I think like if you're sitting in the position of this person of these typ of people in the administration you might actually be believing like a particular thing like you're believing that you're doing God's work at some level right um and I think with I I think what we've learned is that the human mind has a very great propensity to uh believe things um and to convince itself you know that um it's doing I mean you know like um like you know I have a little bit of a personal analogy like you know I always like tried to like fight for the good or what I saw was correct then I had like my own Shadows around like sexuality when I became famous and so on and you know I acted in some ways really poorly for a while but in my mind I was like you know this is all about sexual Liberation and you know if we can if we can create this huge liberational current in humanity um you know that'll be the thing that saves the world you know yeah so I think I think it's exactly like that and I you know as a man I think also you uh you know you're it's easy to kind of get a little dissociated and also if you're in a position of fame or influence you have you know that ends up to support your own kind of um perspective you know your own delusions in a sense so I think that's kind of what's happened I think that musk you know believe Ian you know they they they've Cobble together an ideology uh some of it works together and some of it doesn't um some of it is a little bit contradictory but you know what one piece is um yeah that the nation state is over you know uh that's like the um you know the sovereign individual is basically we're moving into Pat you know Network States or yarvin calls Patchwork States so um you know democracy is also over according to yvin you know it didn't work it wasn't able to and you know I I suppose like in a way um what's happened to the US now is in a way the the the biggest kind of ironically example of how democracy may not work anymore because Putin who's actually a much smaller actor than the US with much less resources you know because he's been in power for so long and had the capacity to innovate and try different strategies and figure out how to manipulate Consciousness and media you know he he's basically won a war against the US without having to you know get involved with shooting at us you know and you know that was only because he was entrenched in that position for so long um and had the meanwhile with our with our government every four to eight years everything turns around again so you know the the the you know there is a sense I think in a way that this form of you know par republic democracy kind of a thing is not is not is not working very well at a time when you know technology is moving so quickly and the environment is changing so fast and and people are so reactive and responsive I mean you know I'm I I'm still hopeful that there will be kind of like a new more participatory and Cooperative kind of kind of more like authentic or direct democracy that can sort of out compete this but um at the moment this this movement towards you know authoritarianism or even autocracy feels like a a very very powerful thing kind of kind of utar thing like well one of the things I I'm kind of in interested with right now in terms of like the underlying ideologies or or the kind of seeming in inconsistencies between them um is I guess in my last piece I was calling it fractal libertarianism so again I'm I'm kind of unsure about this still but but if you look at the the the sort of the underlying image in a Libertarian World viiew which is a native cosmology and capitalism anyway right is of the sort of solo Islands right like each man in Island this is the vision that Margaret Thatcher put out right which was there is no Society there are only individual men and women right so this is the the underlying kind of like classical sort of Li Al concept of the social contract basically it's like you have a bunch of solo individuals and they recognized through their solo rationality that they can come closer together into proximity to form social relations but it has to be in their interest to do so right so this is how social contract theorists I don't know like Thomas Hobbs John L and stuff use they use this to sort of attack monarchs stuff to say you know all the individuals who come together to form the body of the state should have individual rights because they they they're they could choose to dissolve Society if they wanted to all right um and that's the sort of starting point this is how economists imagine markets they imagine these solo individuals who choose to come and form markets and so on but actually if you take that same vision and you abstract it upwards um you get to basically nationalism right which is like each country is a solo Sovereign Island and the international order is an illusion and if the international order isn't working for you screw it you can leave and dissolve Society essentially yeah right um and it's kind of interesting with the Trump World like this is it seems like these fractal layers work a lot because he often will generate that like underlying image of a sort of bottomup capitalism which is a sort of you know like the sort of every man for himself kind of um the sort of ideal vision of what capitalism is supposed to be but then you'll also and you'll talk about that in terms of winners and losers right so it's like I'm a winner um you know get off your ass and you can also be a winner as well and then he talks about the levels of companies so like you know musk is revered because he has a winner type of companies and then at the level of Nations so it's like America First China second Etc right so there's some weird like fractal libertarian thing happening as well like going on I think um because normally you would imagine something like nationalism doesn't really work with a Libertarian message right that kind of jingoistic patriotism has essentially A collectivist vibe to it right it's like a bunch of people all like cheering for a for a team but actually with that kind of thought structure where you sort of I don't know you're imagining your nation as this sort of like solo individual fighting other nations it actually kind of weirdly like resonates with libertarianism totally um I mean I guess one thing that people you know who want to see this project uh fail are kind of hoping for at this point I don't know if it's legitimately going to happen is the the the Fishers and cracks in in the sort of uh right-wing Alliance you know could potentially uh widen we saw that with the fight over the H1B visas uh basically becoming clear that um you know musk and and and the tech and dreon and so on they have really no they're not make America First make America great or America first people at all they they just want to create the best you know their transnational super wealthy who probably have you know multiple passports and you know mult multiple places to escape to if anything goes wrong and so on and um yes that's one Fisher then the other Fisher would be uh between the sort of more like moral Christian evangelicals who have a very uh you know rigid construct of of of morality and a lot of the the the people on the tech side are a little bit more Liberty and you know as as musk is obviously um I don't know though I'm not I'm not that I'm not that convinced that um these contradictions are going to be what breaks down their um their their uh fast running U boat to uh apoc well there I me there's a couple of things that could break it down I mean one it could be the contradictions in in the like you know like I mean you know Steve Von already hates the tech oligarchs so that you know there's already that kind of descent and you know you um you know well about that then there's like the hitting up against reality of capitalism that could also be the other thing you know it's like wave your fist at China it's like okay it's like in an interconnected global economy China is incredibly powerful you know it's like yeah so there's a lot of sort of posturing about the imagined ability to have this sort of breakaway moment but the reality of the the economic system is different right um and so metaphor you could use about that is always always a metaphor I always enjoy for like interdependent economic systems is to think about bodies you know it's it could be like I mean I was using this metal for my last piece like your you know you could be like um if the liver says you know Screw you we're leaving it's like okay fine you can do that right but it's like you're GNA be you're going to dissolve into nothingness yeah you know um so in a sense to to recreate that kind of thing after you know so many years of globalization which basically is is an integration process where you're creating that interdependence at a at a transnational scale you have to reverse so many things to get out of that situation right you have to basically pull apart a whole body and and rebuild it and that process is politically dangerous because it can have so many backfiring things that go on in that process that that it take that took a long long time to build that interdependence at a transnational scale so you can't just pull it apart overnight I think that's that's a big potential political risk for people like Trump you know they they Bluster about their ability to just like you know have some kind of like you know have their hands on the controls of the global economy it's like global capitalism don't give a about your aspirations or of your your personal ego like that you know it's like it's much bigger than they are I mean Trump's whole business career is like an extraordinary Litany of like bankruptcies and failures um and I was just watching a little cartoony video last night which pointed out that um essentially after he you know crashed and burned he went to Russia I think in like 1987 and they basically made him the mule where he would help the Russian mafia kind of like launder their Fortune uh so you know they built Trump Tower and apparently that's like the only um you know co-op in New York where you can buy Apartments anonymously uh so it was just ways for them to uh move money through his operations and that that's also why he's so totally beholden to Putin to Russia um yeah I get what's that I get that sense too but that also yeah it suggests that um you know I mean I mean you know I don't I haven't do you understand even from their side of the street like what the logic of the tariffs is is it just to kind of um Force as you say the sort of De globalization I mean I mean it just seems like um 25% of on products from China I mean that's going to be um you know or as I said is it really you know the idea is really just to torment the American populace and you know kind of you know because you know musk also floated before the election he was like yeah yeah you know we're gonna have you know we're going to cause some pain to the American you know uh consumer for a while but it's all going to be for the best and we're going to be like you know America will be great again after this this pain period you know do they think that people will will will accept that um you don't you maybe don't know you're you're you're European or or whatever you may not you're not be thinking about as much as I am no no of course it affects everywhere right now yeah I mean it's intriguing I I don't really know I mean my former uh Professor it's called hun Chang he's quite a well-known guy um he's well known in the UK at least so I studied with Haun and haun's um haun's uh dad was one of the guys who was behind the South Korean Miracle um you know with a so-called South Korean Miracle basically you know South Korea ver very poor country and then they basically went hard in on on like protectionism or sort of like strategic protection of Industries um they basically realize it's like you know the sort of official ideology of capitalism says it's all about markets but in reality like markets as KL Pani pointed out are based on nation states right so um you use your power as a nation state to give all your players an advantage and you know in the global system so the South Korean government went and basically you know promoted all its own Industries and and created these strategic protectionist things and Haun wrote a book about this called Kicking away the ladder which was about the American ideology which was about America originally used protectionism to get up the ladder and then it used places like you know the IMF and World Bank to promote a different story to say okay once once we've up the letter we kick the letter away and then we tell everyone else to do free trade all right and that that's how that's that's been a big part of like the US story for a long time and now it's interesting is like Trump's going back to some of that that protectionist retoric right so he's like oh suddenly the International System doesn't work as well for us anymore so we drop the pretense of the liberal International order and we go back to that like throwing our weight around using our like America First right so it's sort of I mean I don't but I don't you know I don't think he's being influenced by Haun Chang I think has been influenced by people with very different like intellectual background so um yeah because he's there's a lot of like contradictory stuff going down in that tariff thing and so someon he's just using it as a tool to bully right so um yeah I don't know yeah um meanwhile you know I mean to get back to the crypto subject a little bit I mean you know obviously Trump launch launched trumpcoin uh right before the election and apparently people are people are saying that that's just um a Avenue for unregulated bribery uh so for instance I think his name is Jason son there was a crypto uh billionaire who um was going through a lot of like lawsuits over fraud and so on um I guess um he don't he he bought $7.5 Million worth of trump coin and then the week later they dropped the cases against him I mean just seems so freaking um blatant um but I guess that's um that's oligarchy or whatever or that's uh that's cryptocracy I guess I don't know yeah I was writing I was wri a not about this around the um I actually got this friend of mine who's writing a book about scams um and he has this sort of uh underlying sense that people kind of like being scammed when enjoy being scammed at some level there's some kind of thing in um yeah he's also sometimes using the sort of um clearly they must you know like like scamming people as part of again talking about the sort of native cosmologies of of of capitalism it's kind of part it's kind of B embedded into some of that story it's like you're sort of supposed to scam people at some level and there's something weird like about people almost getting euphoric about being scammed so VI viously right because most and this is something that my friend Max writes about quite a lot is that there's lots of these sort of like background Vibes and capitalism which are not supposed to be obvious all right like no you know the sort of liberal establishment would never overtly come out and say you know the object of capitalism is to scam peopleas where Trump kind of does come out and say it in a a sort of like very obvious way and he has this kind of like uh sort of SNM Vibe about him he's like I'm going to you over hard right and you're going to enjoy it and it's kind of like there's something about that in that that sort of meme coin thing he's doing he like this is obviously a type of scam but you're going to love it right because at least I'm kind of like upfront and honest about scamming you um and I think this is and in a weird way the sort of moral horror that then emerges from all the kind of you know the sort of New York Times writer or someone who's like oh how could you possibly can't you all see that this is a this is a scam that's kind of the point right it's sort of supposed to be a scam in a sense the jewy S as Lan would say yeah and so yeah the C indry is loving this in a way well some parts of loving it other parts would want to be respectable but like maybe maybe we should distance ourselves but then they stand to be massively enriched by by you know the the the deregulation and also the actual strategic um manipulation of the price that the Strategic Reserve will do I guess I'm always wondering like what I've thinking about a lot lately is how um you know when we look back in history you know things seem quite inevitable you know it's like okay like there was the French Revolution there was a power vacuum in France you know Napoleon pops up and um you know recaptures the Grandeur the sort of you know nobility the sort of monarchy and you know does the sort of inevitable Wars and so on you know viar Germany you know had fallen apart and inflation was you know off the charts and so something like Hitler was maybe more and more slightly inevitable they also had this kind of Aran like racial superiority in the background and so on um yeah I guess um it's you know but it's harder when it's your present moment to fully understand the um the inevitability of it all I mean you know it's like what you know I guess there are multiple factors obviously I mean you know America um Sam we can see the comments but it's just hard to reply when we're chatting um yeah I mean um America didn't seem like it was in such I mean I guess it was in terrible shape in terms of like health insurance and you know most people I mean I you know I guess I was lucky and that I was living in you know coastal city among coastal city Elites you know not like you know um in the terrible Straits that maybe most people in the country are in right now who like think the average American you know lives paycheck paycheck to paycheck and doesn't have more than like $600 in the bank and one health health problem will like basically ruin them um so yeah so I guess things were were pretty terrible um uh but yeah I guess also kind of um you know one one theory that I'm that I sort of been thinking about is like you know it seems like these Tech guys you know were so vastly wealthy and had such incredible secure power in society but maybe actually they felt as you say insecure or fragile um particularly what other countries and other companies are starting to innovate more than they are so um you know so that was like Lena Khan who was Biden's um kind of a person working on antitrust and anti-monopoly they wanted to break up the big the big tech companies you know partially because they felt it was bad for Innovation and for American companies to um you know have these monopolies they would become kind of stagnant you know like as as meta has or or you know Google or whatever um and um I guess the tech you know billionaires felt that um they didn't want to allow that um so it's a little bit like what happened with the fossil fuel companies right in the 70s like they knew that climate change was going to be devastating and they could have said okay we'll take a a loss you know we'll cut back our profits and we'll diversify and we'll you know for the good of for the good of the world we'll go for Renewables and so on but instead they doubled down on fossil fuels and instead of instead of they a huge disinformation Network and you know bought Fox News and all that stuff to just like you know um yeah continue the destructive policies even though they knew it was short-term and was going to lead to massive destruction as we could already see in La North Carolina so it's basically these guys are doing the same thing they were they were at a correx point they could have said okay we'll we'll Dem monopolize we'll allow more competition you know and then um you know because we can see also that China is really out competing the US in a lot of ways right like you know you can't buy byd Cards in America but apparently you know China China's electric car company byd is like much more successful than Tesla much much cheaper um and so it's kept out of the US markets there's protectionism there similarly Tik Tok had outcompeted Facebook by a lot and of course more recently deep seek had out outcompeted um chat GPT for a fraction of the cost and so on so yeah so so so maybe there was actually a um sense of fragility this was kind of their last shot to kind of like take it all you know before before they somehow lost their um their their their standing you know yeah I think so absolutely I mean there's a couple things there which is you know on one hand they they sort of see regulatory challenges right which is like they could like it's it's been a long time since people believe that the internet was fundamentally positive right um if you think back to the sort of post financial crisis there was all the kind of imagination Google being a kind of utopian type of non-evil player in the in the corporate system that that perception's changed now you don't really find people romanticizing big Tech anymore right so um and actually you finding the opposite there's just like a lot of critique of big tech people basically are kind of slightly disgusted by it because they also realize how kind of um well they're essentially like digital crack deers right they they they like like hack our minds and so there's a lot of sort of cultural push back um including from actually I'd say from young people right because you know the sort of marketing sides of the big tech companies always always try to play out make out that they're the kind of champion of the youth or something but but in reality it's like if you're growing up as a teenager um you know you have to use all this stuff but you're also kind of less romantic about it this is like this is the reality of my world have to use it um whereas all these kind of like 40 something you know Tech execs are the ones that try to create the sort of story of how they're you know liberating the youth right and so I think that's all those stories are breaking down though so so they have this awareness that there's a coming Crackdown um if I was putting like my more sort of meta structural kind of hat on I'd say also this is always hard to spot in a global economic system but it's possible we're just like hitting limits right we're hitting limits for sure for sure right and in those context if you're hitting you know the sort of like neoliberal types of stories about capitalism and stuff it's always about it's all about Innovation and everything right but the reality of a capitalist system is it's it's only Innovative in certain context you know um yeah in many other contexts the the capitalist Elites will literally just go to the state and just be like give us patronage and bail us out and um they'll they'll lean on the state for profitability and that could be the thing that's happening right now right they're they're basically hitting against limits to to profitability and growth and so they just start to um realize that they have to now align with the with the state um so I think at some stru it's more than alignment it's like taking over the state from within really exactly yeah exactly basically kind of becoming the state in a sense but so it could be a big meta story about the sort of structural limits to growth in a capitalist system that's going on but of course very hard what do you mean I mean because it's such a large system it's very hard to see when it's hitting limits right because um yeah um yeah and one of the general one of the general like features when a system is hitting hitting limits it start to fragment like in various ways because typically when you have an open Frontier and you have a an economic system that's trying to expand um you for example let's like with like technological unemployment for example like if if you're like out on a um if you have large amounts of open Frontier you can basically destroy people's jobs through automation but they can get new jobs out on the New Frontier somewhere else right so your your system expands as you have that kind of automation but if you hit limits you can't expand so what actually happens is that all everything just starts to fragment into smaller pieces right so um you notice that all the tech billionaires are talking about this kind of stuff now you know even Elon Musk and is talking about Ubi and stuff and one of the reasons why is that he's sensing that that ex that there's no more Frontier so all the automation the company's going to try to do will just destroy jobs right yeah this I don't think he's talking about Ubi anymore he was talking about it a few years ago but I I don't think now that he's taking over the government from the inside it's something that's I mean Sam mman did one test of it that was very successful actually but no nobody seems to be at the moment talking about that's actually one of the um kind of main ideas I have for what could be you know kind of a successful uh organizing kind of model now for people in the US is the recognition that artificial general intelligence is going to lead to such huge unemployment um you know could actually be something that unites knowledge workers and laborers and so on and sort of you know in a way it's ironic and maybe actually not a bad thing that the layoffs are going to hit cognitive laborers first um you know with with other other types of workers pretty soon down the line if you think about um you know the building of humanoid robots and all that stuff you know what are your thoughts about AGI and the sort of mass unemployment that's coming and you know what what Humanity can do or Human Society can do to prepare for this big question I mean I don't know it's like um well at some level I mean it's it's an interesting opportun I guess this is something that's always predicted in um I mean historically the way the narrative works there's a so-called Lite fallacy right which is um as people get removed from jobs they'll find some new job somewhere else this is the typical story that goes on in a a system but yeah as that's as that's um that process hasn't going forever at some point you literally just hit like internal internal contradictions where your system just starts to collapse right um and I guess that's the story about things like agis like will there be will you hit an intern an internal limit in the system where it just starts to break itself right this is something that Marxist for a long time talk about um and if that starts to happen when the first one of the first things that starts to happen is you get like reactionary political movements so I mean one way to start to look at you mean you know the reason that I actually became very aware of the Trump thing long before many other people I work on protecting physical cash right so um lots of the people who were originally following me about that were often actually Trump supporters I would get lots of messaging and emails from people who are basically on this political right so I was very very aware for the last 10 years of this growing number of people who basically at some level felt deeply alienated by automation right and they wouldn't necessarily Define themselves as being politically right-wing but they did feel deeply alienated right and this community of people has now become known as diagonals often right the kind of it's it's a lot of these people who like sort of feel they're being sort of in relative terms Left Behind um by or sort of losing their their middle class status at some level yeah um and a lot of that kind of angst that Steve Bannon and people were tapping into was partly this anti- big Tech thing which is basically an anti- automation story at some level right so like it's like you know your your sort of sense of dignity and your your livel is being undermined by these big Tech oligarchs um and you got to kind of fight back and weirdly physical cash is one of the things so this is how I found myself often encountering a lot of the sort of community around that um I mean I'm I'm coming from a different sort of ideological perspective on protecting physical cash because um but you know that's definitely a big part of the of one element of the Trump base was a bunch of people who sort of were concerned about about this idea that global capitalism represented by financial and Tech Elites doesn't give a about them right and this so this part the story around protectionism and like telling the international order to get screwed and all this kind of stuff is like sort of semi playing into that right orbe it's a very like right-wing version of the story you could also have a left-wing Incarnation that's also where there could be I me I'm we're already seeing these sort of Republican Town Hall meetings where people are extremely angry at the um you know Maga Representatives um it could be that they're beginning to realize that they've just been like swindled on like a large scale um yeah that's all really uh that's really fasinating I guess question I mean this question for you like how they gonna square that kind of like the fact that he's now included these basically like Pro automation Tech Elites into the into the the the you know cabinet into the power structure is going to be a very hard thing because the basic story being used right now will be something like okay we're in this Global fight against China yeah right so and this goes down to that fractal libertarianism thing right he's like at a personal level we have to fight each other in markets right at a company level you fight each other at a n International level you have to fight each other right and um at and you have different roles at each scale so so as an individual you're supposed to fight in the market but as a citizen you're supposed to support your team to fight the other teams internationally right so they create this idea of like an American team fighting team China the reality of course is that there isn't a unified team like the actual teams in the global order are like capitalists and like the middle class and like workers and it's that's a bit of a crude thing right but at some level the American capitalist elite like musk do not at all represent the interests of the the sort of working man right no of course they're trans a lot more in common with the Chinese Elites than he does with the the working working Americans right so in reality that is going to start to become Apparent at some point where it's realized that actually Team America isn't a single team um and that's where that kind of nationalist message gets very politically difficult for Trump but that that hasn't you know the contradictions of that haven't haven't expressed themselves yet yeah yeah I mean it's um you know I guess um as a as a sort of apprentice futurist or amateur futurist I try to plot ahead I mean you know I I feel I feel a lot of sadness and and almost like grief right now because it feels like we're really taking a very dark dark path yeah um you know however you know um you know there is also the possibility for some kind of you know disruption or you know uh uh alternative to emerge um what are you feeling what are you feeling hopeful about it's just um it's an interesting question I mean obviously I mean you know not that I condone you know Murder or violence or whatever but the you know the the killing of the healthcare CEO by meion uh was fascinating in terms of the um level of um public celebration and support uh for that um so there's a sense of there being um you know kind of like a under surface under the surface um kind of a massive desire for yeah just sort of like like a real legit legitimate alternative to this predatory capitalist monstrosity uh but in the US you know since I mean uh since the 60s you know they basically have made it impossible for there to be like a healthy left in the 60s like they you know went after the uh you know Black Panthers and you know other other you know leftist leaders and either imprisoned them or you know did whatever they could to disgrace them or even killed them if if they could so there really hasn't been a a left in the US um and you know calling the sort of neoliberal Progressive Democrats left is obviously ridiculous they can't even you know get it together to raise the minimum wage or whatever I mean it's it's just ridiculous um so there is I think a hunger and a yearning um and on the other side there's um you know it's they're pretty much saying they're ready for war you know they're ready for violence um and um that's very concerning um and and it does sort of feel that um people have gone very down this road of ideological capture hypnotism uh to the point where I mean look what happened with Nazi Germany like when that reaches a certain level it only the fever only breaks you know when the whole thing um causes total Destruction and there's nothing left you know yeah ially some of those the war Vibe you can interpret it as a as a sort of sort of um thing that emerges when those structural contradictions uh are already playing out right it's like when you have the underlying tension in your society and you have the underlying class struggle one of those sort of ways that you create the illusion that there isn't a class struggle is to sort of look outwards into these imagined enemies elsewhere right so you know mean you this is this has always been a big element of of global conflict um of course you know the back to the man Journey thing it's like I suppose the sort of moment being glimpsed by lots of the kind of origin true left wing right rather than the sort of liberal Centrist um Community is like okay could there be because you know for a long time the true left wing has been marginalized from politics right it isn't really you know in terms of like you're sort of more um radical critiques um and in a weird way there's a there's a there's a space opening up there and I think lots of people in that kind of more hard left have have realized that it's like the narratives are becoming more um viable so um and realizing that you know large amounts of the sort of trump base which currently is being whipped towards these type of sort of nationalistic um jingoistic types of things could be could be sort of steered in a different direction whilst addressing the same underlying angst right um and I think that's of course is the sort of the I've seen lots of people who around talking about that right now um yeah's what's certainly not clear in the US is what an effective um type of strategy would be because feel old style of protest is just gonna um feed it feed into the uh the sort of thing at this point you know like they want that like they've ordered the the project 25 has like you know plans for you know kind of getting the white supremacist militia as like their Brown Shirts who will then turn up at these events and start violence um which they can then use as a you know kind of the reason for for deeper repression um so yeah it's very it's a very I see I see I see guy talk about the left wing just you're not talking about the left guy you're talking about a very specific subsection of the left yeah yeah exactly um so I mean I am trying to invite people into like a little bit of a Consortium at least of this point of Brain Trust to people who you know in the US and so I see this guy Sam is writing so Sam you can if you want you can send me an email daniel. pinchbeck gmail. com and I'll add you to this you know send me a little bit about yourself a bio and I'll add you to a signal group we're going to have an initial call and we really are thinking about this um AGI um job destruction thing as potentially a very unifying issue uh that could um you know really really get beyond the red and the blue kind of like factionalism and bring together like knowledge workers and and and you know you know industrial workers and um you know whoever else you know I mean um yeah she also with if you want if you want to see um Grace Blakeley um it's a friend of mine who does really good work on she's got a new uh a new substack uh dedicated to positive types of um political action and so she's going through I'm trying to find what it's called let um anyway go to Grace Blakeley and you can see her new new thing but she she go looks at very specific concrete actions been happening um at a local scale different political groups who are looking to build resistance against the far right in a meaningful way or Prim New Economic Alternatives and great is coming from she's not coming from the kind of you know uh sort of it's called identity politics left per se she's coming from more of this kind of structural economic left right so it's all about how do you make meaningful differences in the lives of people that actually gets people on side you know rather than alienating them um so it's definitely worth checking out her her work i' say she's based in the UK yeah she is uh I mean the UK is a very you know could be a very interesting scenario for um for change to happen I would think at this point yeah absolutely uh cool and um what else what else are you focused on these days what else you before we maybe we'll wrap up in a few minutes anything else you want to share how you're thinking about things or oh I need a holiday to be honest that's what that's what I'm thinking about right now I'm think think about going to South Africa in April I'm so I'm tired um but yeah you know I'm actually I've been working on this um uh a course called intro to econ life which is a series of videos um where I'm basically getting people up to speed about how to think like an economic Anthropologist it's very inspired by David Graber and things like and people like that um and so uh that's pretty that's pretty fun although it's lots of work um and then I have like so many different articles I want to write you know the problem right now is that I have I'm sure you experienced this too is that there's you have to fight on so many fronts at once yeah and basically I'm wanting to do a lot of stuff around understanding the phenomenon of billionaires um like how how people become billionaires so people to kind of understand how kleptocracy kind of works I also want to do a more on on the sort of Automation and AI but then also on the crypto right because people need resources right now on how to I understand of around crypto so um I'm working on those fronts all at once yeah but cool buddy well um let's uh Let's Fold this up for today let's do it again I great just you know if if it looks like they can bring in a third person I saw stepen Reid was on for a little bit be fun to get him on or somebody else or or Grace Blakeley would be amazing also I'd love I'd love to talk to all right well let's uh we'll get some rest maybe I'll see you in Berlin it's possible I'll make it on this trip other time soon otherwise sometime soon and well if you here in April you can you can use my house oh oh that's interesting all right I might actually take you up on that that's that's that's yeah have a great day everybody thanks for listening thanks everyone cheers yeah
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.