The anthropology of value and reciprocity / Sara Polak

Transcript

foreign ladies and gentlemen hello my name is Sarah to those of you that came to watch this thank you very much because it's under the category of miscellaneous and oh boy is it gonna be goddamn miscellaneous because originally I'm an archaeologist and cognitive evolutionary Anthropologist I'm actually a relative newbie to the blockchain world but it completely basically blew my brain apart because it's something it was an anthropologist's wet dream for like 150

years and now it's actually happening and it's scaling and it's basically disrupting the world that we live in so what I really want to talk about are the evolutionary principles that underline blockchain and why that's important and basically how that manifests in the way that um Society is going to be shaped in the future So today we're going to be talking about whether you guys think you're altruists yeah solar Punk really nice charitable clean air everything but why are we actually doing this stuff so I'm going to be asking ourselves some searching questions um secondly we're going to be talking about civilizational structure so the way that these basic human kind of needs the aspects of reciprocity gift giving how they've actually been exploited to create states that are beyond the kind of evolutionary natural which is roughly

250 people per tribe and to maintain something like the Roman Empire you really need to make sure that you exploit the people psychologically so they feel like they're belonging somewhere so we'll be talking about that as well we'll be talking about Christmas because Christmas is nice Everyone likes Christmas but it's got a very dark ritual Underside that I think will be a lot of fun and then finally blockchain so the little that I have learned in the last two years being in parallel police um and where I basically see the biggest um kind of pushes forward that we can implement so you guys can go to sleep because I know that it was a wild party yesterday for those who do not make it be on the third slide these are basically the takeaway messages the fact that reciprocities and ancient ancient practice the fact that blockchain is

completely Natural Evolution it's not a buzzword it's not like a hashtag nft it's not a gif of an ape it's actually something that is a natural kind of continuation of scaling human behavior and finally the fact that well this makes me very happy that nation states are dying but what do we do about that but first some Basics um you might think that these things have absolutely nothing in common but they do uh for example uh carcasson we went there a month ago it was absolutely beautiful the reason the one of the things that fascinated me most is that carcassan actually didn't look like this until about 1853. basically when the French chopped everyone's head off during the revolution and they Chopped all the heads of the revolutionaries because that wasn't quite working either so then

they kind of reinstated the bourbon Dynasty the moment that Napoleon III came to power in 1853 he realized well I've kind of got nothing to give to the people symbolically because I can't give them anything from the 18th century because that's still a bit raw like there's still some survivors who had their family guillotined so can't do that so we've got to go into the Medieval ages as the lowest common cultural denominator so he hired a guy called Eugene Violet Leduc who he basically told you got to repair carcass on mate it was actually the same guy who also repaired uh Mont San Michel Notre Dame and also built the Statue of the so you can really see how kind of State Building Etc and it was like a gift to the French people so this kind of reciprocity give giving can be seen pretty much anywhere else

also key terminology it's important to know we'll get back to them so I won't spend time describing them now but just bear them in mind Social Capital reciprocity social contract um a game theory and swarm intelligence and exchange and the concept of the gift and whether something like the gift actually exists so the basics of the fact that you think you're an altruist well first we always expect something back you might not think that you might think no I'm better than other people [ __ ] no you always expect something back um and I think that there are evolutionary theorists who claim that this isn't true but I'm not necessarily kind of buying that but that's there's one problem we think that individualism and expecting something back is bad because well partly due to the indoctrination by the Vatican who

basically Associated individualism with Satanism because individualism is bad because it rots Society absolutely not and then that's basically where you get your left right kind of political polarization that that the right Wingers are for the freedom and the left Wingers are for the collectivism and yeah like everyone's singing Kumbaya and like dancing in a circle um but it's fine to want something back and I think that this D demonization of the fact that it's fair play between two individuals peer-to-peer is actually fine and blockchain beautifully demonstrates that we also calculate the value in our heads all the time um and this individualism and Community they go hang hand in hand and I'll show you how um so there'll be memes also because I think memes are the god best goddamn

thing ever asking something from people wanting something from people is basically like a peer-to-peer contract that we've had since the dawn of time uh it's kind of originated in this Robinson cruso economy like I give you two stakes you give me a stone that kind of that kind of thing and bartering has been holding Society together pretty much for like the last two million years and you can see that there was a big kind of Divergence into where this went to um there are even things called tobacco nodes they were heavily um kind of supported by the East India trading company and then finally we got to what the academics beautifully call Electronic money but you can definitely see that everything comes from one place the need to barter the need to exchange however the states are very clever at exploiting that um and the state's kind

of now tend to tell us well the gold standard is the standard and like the dollar that we have now yeah that's the you know that's the dominant thing you'd be crazy not to go for it well if you told that to someone in the fourth century and you told them that well the dollar didn't exist um but um if you told them that there's going to be something else that's ever more more dominant than the goddamn solidus that would have probably like put you into an institution because every civilization is convinced that their way of bartering their codification of bartering is the right thing to do um so much so that it actually became a massive political um War of the late 18th um and the 19th centuries as Britain got very good at colonization um they realized that silver that was

traditionally used to basically mint coins is no longer actually as good because you can have more of it and poor people are getting a hold of it so so they were trying to move to the gold standard and then like there was actually even a thing called The Diamond standard which when I was working with the national museum here in Prague they said well yeah well the national museum actually held a diamond standard that was secret that was used to kind of back up the first Czechoslovakian money hilariously though it got um stolen during communism and replaced with bits of glass and they didn't realize until 2016. so they've literally had a com like collection of precious stones that were literally Zircon and glass but more on that another time but you can see that the codification of value and the codification of money and kind of giving

PR to the particular kind of currency has been a massive kind of status quo for states to do in I think 1951 captured the aspect of the gift and he said that like where money isn't necessarily enough or where money kind of doesn't fulfill the social function anymore you have the concept of reciprocity and gift giving so gift giving however is has a really nuanced aspect of basically what you expect back like you do those calculations in your head we'll go a little bit more detail into this in uh the Christmas part of this but believe me or not when you actually analyze it data analyzer the way people give gifts to each other and the kind of heat maps

that they create it's absolutely it's absolutely incredible there's this famous scene from Family Guy when they kind of describe Buddhism to people and um there's one guy who gives him a Lamborghini and another guy who gives a paper clip and he basically says yes those two gifts are like of equal value to me and they just go oh [ __ ] off like no no way um and there is a natural hierarchy to gifts and it's an extra layer of society that money cannot necessarily capture it's one of the reasons why you take the price tag off when you give someone a gift it's very rude from the idea of Bonton to leave it on but simultaneously it's a function that blockchain actually supports really really well and I'll get back to that at the end of the presentation ultimately it's a very simple evolutionary algorithm you're constantly

thinking about the flow of benefits and what is good for you what is a risk for you what's going to like get you the best kind of optimized behavior and result that you're interested in um and a beautiful demonstration of that is um it was basically when uh the aristocracy of especially Britain was expected during the Victorian era they didn't actually have to pay that much tags but they were kind of socially contracted to build museums to build um galleries to build roads and to basically build all the stuff that the state which was actually pretty poor because in like mid 19th century um India didn't belong to the crown it belonged to the East India Trading Company which is a private company when they realized that there's money to be made there the British Parliament said we'll be taking that thank you very much

in 1873. so Queen Victoria got very rich very quick but before that um basically like the state had to pretend like through moral obligations and kind of codifying morality attached to social gift giving or kind of symbolic philanthropy that that is it's basically like reciprocal altruism but that that's the right thing to go forward the state still gets to take the credit for it but someone else pays which is ideal right but then it gets to this um and it's something that I'm I used to live in Britain and America for a little while and this started to get really bad in 2016. this virtue signaling because suddenly the companies realize that there's a lot of money to be made on virtue signaling there's a lot of money to be made when you put Society in a

kind of like obligational contract like oh we built you a museum oh we change our logo to be like rainbow unless it's our kind of area in Saudi Arabia then yeah great I mean let's do that and you certainly feel somehow obligated to that and you want to pay back in the terms of essentially saying they kind of gain Social Capital through this and therefore they hope that they're like kind of money will go up it's very very simple and it's gotten like relatively ridiculous now and I know that we can be very dubious about Papa Elon apart from his memes which are actually pretty good um but uh Ricky Gervais uh is a comedian that is a really interesting character in this regard and comedy in itself and humor is one of like the loud sebastians of like actual Freedom which I think we

should at all costs because it's a psychopharmaceutic it's something that basically allows Society to joke in a relatively like free space about the stuff that they genuinely find frustrating um and the kind of like social justice Warrior thing is basically latching onto perceived values latching onto perceived moral code often exploiting it for your own good but then also like not realizing that this has been done before and that social justice and even the linguistic exploitation of that was actually really really popular with the Nazis as well so um this kind of abuse of the kind of concept of objective morality and putting Society into some kind of contract with you is incredibly dangerous and that's why I want politicians nowhere near this kind of

stuff and I think that the best way is to leave it to Evolution and decentralization and peer-to-peer Behavior which is something that blockchain allows yeah how much time do I have okay we're good we're good because I love talking and so and I love archeology so and I love memes so someone just throws something at me if I'm too long civilizational structure right civilization is just a herd with material culture um civilization was kind of brought forward by Latin and like the literarys that we study at University or the weird one study at University um but basically it's from like civitas like kind of population and city but it got taken into something else a little bit you know better than you guys and especially the kind of idea of we've got

the animistic tribes who are basically dumb and play around with sticks to like yeah we've got civilization like with marble and [ __ ] um that's an incredibly bad way of viewing like social structures tribalism is natural like we evolved our social structures much faster than we're able to evolve our brains so it's great that you can have 3 000 friends on Facebook your brain can't handle that your brain can handle maybe 250 500 connections absolute Max but like uh civilization is basically a way of saying okay we realize that there's more money to be made or it's evolutionary optimal for us to be a bigger group but if you've got a bigger group you've got to put some like unnatural things in process to make sure that group stays together so in the case of States it's Flags national anthems uniforms etc etc that kind of like gives

you a sense of belonging and it's a very ingrained kind of concept of ritualization of belonging and identity again blockchain for me at least kind of takes this away because there's the aspect of anonymization peer-to-peer and the decentralization where you can create your own tribes and you're basically living as we were evolved to do but in a way that's safe in a way that is exciting in a way that's scalable in a way that's Global so that is something that really gets me going um the symbolic value to generate identity for free so if everyone learns a national anthem and you can everyone gets to sing it again like it's like this thing with again you're exploiting the natural kind of evolutionary Tendencies of human so of humans so music is for example again a

pharmaceutical psychopharmaceutic aspect um it's proved that it has like a kind of binding aspect for people that's why a warrior is historically whenever they went to battle there was usually some kind of Rhythm involved some kind of musicality um I I I did Evolution of Music for my for my masters and it's a really kind of strong ingrained thing there's no culture in the world that doesn't sing or doesn't play anything so then when you exploit it by making like a national song that everyone Can chant in the thousands when it's like the national day of Liberation or some crap like that um then you yeah you get people going and it's for free and it's free and it's great and all the kids learn it at school and they Place their hands like this so it's a very clever ritualized aspect again and uh also the fact that

building tribes isn't easy so you need these mechanisms in is to be able to hold them this is really grainy but if you love a Life of Brian like me you can see that um one aspect of culture um uh and one aspect of kind of coming together is like holding certain Traditions um and when those Traditions are evolutionary like the tradition of bartering and the tradition of exchange you've got you've hit the evolutionary G-Spot in people's brain so that's going to be very very profitable for you I love this meme so much um plebs literally only want two things and it's [ __ ] disgusting yes um Augustus was clever um he he took a poem uh that was done by uh avidius uh and he basically gave people what they

wanted bread and circuses he even did this thing where he took pigeons and kind of tied ribbons to their legs and let them free and then the poor people could catch them Etc um but he knew he was very clever he was a new guy he was the first emperor after the assassination of Julius Caesar so you know it was a bit uh tenuous he got rid of his two kind of um main enemies in the second triumvirate which was um uh lepidus and Mark Anthony Mark Anthony was kind of killed off for sleeping with Cleopatra and leopardus literally just like pissed off to Mesopotamia somewhere and like yeah Augustus was very very clever but he also knew he was he also knew he was new and he knew that the praetorian God and the optimatus and like all of these groups in the Roman

senate wanted to be in his place because mate you govern some me an entire swathe of land from Scotland to India like you had big big Power and responsibility and a lot of money so he did several things he kind of gave the people bread and circuses but he also established the first evil Roman Postal Service because he was then in control of how information is spread how information is distributed the speed of at which certain messages are passed that he wanted to push forward Etc so very clever guy he also did a great thing called like the marble campaign so he started in the Forum Roman in Rome in Rome which is amazing you can still go and lie wreaths on Julius Caesar's um where he was stabbed and people still do that which is quite funny I still need to pay my duty but um uh he basically started

bringing in Marble from across the Empire um and the Romans were really good at being able to tell different bits of marble apart from each other so one of the um one of the temples uh in former manam had 15 bits of marble types of marble and every bit of marble was from a different part of the Roman provinces so you could see that they were powerful just because you could see the provenance of everywhere that they've conquered and the average Romans actually knew this they were actually pretty marble literate but the fact that he kind of took over a city of bricks and made a city of marble again it's kind of like subtly when your mom is angry with you and she kind of says don't forget everything I've ever done for you again you're exploiting that reciprocity you're exploiting that natural thing of I'm creating a city for

you I'm creating all these services so we can all live together in a group that's big bigger than like a sub-Saharan tribe so that's a kind of a bit of like you know um uh excitement shall we and like maybe that you won't feel too bad about those taxes after all uh this is what I find the funniest the social contract um Hobbs and Russo and all these kind of philosophers from the 18th century they basically said well people can't really be trusted so we need to have in place a social contract that then often evolved into constitutions a social contract in place where you by your duty as Citizens to the government that is creating that big kind of Colossus of a society that shouldn't really be working but is because you've got the anthem Etc

um and then they give you this is great a high quality Universal Public Services um and they build those roads for you Etc and then you can feel all great and then that's a beautiful feedback loop that kind of happens um again um what is however being done as a part of the kind of uh desire to stick together is that there's a lot of cartoons that kind of belittle the role of the individual if you're an individual you're selfish if you're an individual you basically like take Society apart because you're pursuing your own needs rather than like thinking about the society first and foremost well if you look at it like from the perspective of we're not talking about humans what we're talking about like mountain lions or something you can't blame an animal for wanting to survive that's absolutely fine and there have

been mechanisms that very very neatly in place in tribal societies where for example um if the the Kung of the sub-Saharan Africa of of the of the Serengeti when they hunt a kudu and you've got the strongest hunter in the tribe they actually kind of really downplay it so they say oh the kudi wasn't like a beast like that I wasn't that big just a little larger than a rabbit it's totally fine hey you guys go eat because he's automatically kind of lowering his position in society to take Social Capital artificially from himself so that he doesn't kind of walk around the village being like yeah [ __ ] you guys I killed a kudu and tomorrow I'm going to do it again because someone would probably murder him in his heart so these processes are natural we're fine we're actually really good at doing

them we don't need someone telling us like oh don't be an individual because it's incredibly bad for us yeah it's incredibly bad for you because then it makes it difficult to get taxes out of people and that's why and let's not forget that Academia is very very strongly state-sponsored so it's going to follow these kinds of narratives the people who follow those kind of narratives are the ones who are going to be getting grants um and I'll talk about that at the end because I'm actually in the process of starting uh it was approved two days ago yes a research group um and I want uh if anyone by the way has any experience with running um Academia on blockchain I'd really like to talk to you I spoke to someone yesterday here which was really kind of exciting but I'd love to have it funded in a decentralized way so

I'd love to talk to you guys about that um but basically what Academia in this kind of social aspect boil down to is that you've basically got individualistic cultures and collectivist cultures and it's like looking at a boomer meme this like that's not true you don't have it's not that United States is an individualistic culture and Indonesia is a collectivist culture that's a really kind of like 19th century anthropological kind of perception of like how you view people because you're viewing these countries based on the symbols that they put forward basically like you are like fencing in a group based on the flag and the language they speak in a national anthem that's not how societies form we're in parallel police parallel societies are absolutely normal they form all the time you're a member of

several societies at once so to say that yes me as an academic I'm going to say that the entirety of the United States is a highly individualistic culture you need your degree taken away in my opinion um and that that's when the kind of qualification and things like objective morality come in because of course what follows up I don't know this is from some cheesy presentation from I don't know some kind of like highly motivational uh kind of internal cause or something but is that collectivism is good it forces you to work as a group you're doing what's best for society what's best for society that's that's quite a funny phrasing and families and communities have a central role well yeah that's the same thing that Mark said that basically family is like the unit of society like please

um and this becomes really dangerous when academics so-called Like official postulates become wrapped up in political discourse because that's just that just becomes scary you're basically creating like national socialism in many ways and where that became really interesting is during the time of vaccination because in when the vaccines kind of came out um because people are kind of so angry with each other they'd naturally polarize because they don't want to be treated like idiots which is absolutely fine and what I thought was really unhelpful when kind of like all the uh like uh I don't know whether it was politicians or people in a position of power who somehow think that they know better than everyone else was saying if you don't get vaccinated you're a goddamn [ __ ] and I think it's good to get vaccinated is my personal

opinion but I also know that someone's genome oh God that is grainy I'll explain it however sorry um that also my personal genome might might make me more susceptible to certain aspects of the vaccine so I might need to get a different one or I might need to get a combination and that's fine that's called personalization and that's possible thanks to things like artificial intelligence so what we do now is like current medicine it's collectivistic you're taking the right the center of the gaussian curve and you're saying yeah because 8 out of 10 people don't die that's how we're going to treat everyone well no if you actually do something as simple as like analyzing your DNA analyzing your allergies analyzing your hormone hormone hormone levels um sometimes the British accent ain't easy um your hormone levels then you can

actually personalize the medicine that you're giving to that individual treating them like an individual whilst living in a society that's fine those two things don't Clash but we seem to like find it very difficult to philosophically get our heads around and again just if in case you think of this whole collectivism thing is very new it's not uh that which is not good for the Beehive cannot be good for the bees um to take it further the Roman Architects were very very good in pretty much every single triumphant Arch that you see in Rome or pretty much any other kind of Rome dominated City or Palmyra timogad Etc uh leptus Magna you see these hexagonal things it's meant to be a beehive because the Romans knew how the kind of um subtle marketing work because if that person walked underneath

that tribal Arch 50 times a day to go sell I don't know gyram which was this like really gross um Source made from uh uh kind of rotten to fish it was like Roman ketchup and if you keep walking underneath this you're going to think yeah beehive good awesome bees um it's not a coincidence that some of the first jewelry that was ever found found with the minoan culture was that of bees like people um have been kind of having these like political metaphors to explain to the people why it's good about how about the kind of like in unfair relation of the nation and the individual um that's been here for several thousand of years however there are some checking the time yeah good um there are some things uh that are natural to the human beings and we're

going back to exchange here that like when the concept of exchange and basically blackmailing people about like how much good you're doing for them so you know they need to buy your product or need to pay you taxes um but there are other things I just like natural evolutionary things that everyone does one of those things are exchange rituals so this is the North American Potlatch where basically it was a feast everyone got together everyone brought out all their stuff and gave it unconditionally to everyone and it was like a social event that basically like once a year you had it's like The Purge once here everyone can kill everyone this was kind of a bit of a happier version of it um everyone like you could you could get loads of really cool nice stuff funnily enough when the United States were being established pot

latches were made illegal because it was something that really brought together a North American Native communities and they thought well we okay we thought we got rid of you with the you know um smallpox on the blankets but [ __ ] you're still trading and you're still feeling a lot of belonging we don't like that so um they were actually made illegal which is interesting in itself shows you the amount of value that you have in reciprocity and how core it is as a social lubricant and so we get to Christmas so um this this might by the way I'm not like um uh critical of religion at all I'm not really just myself but I like if you want to believe in like the goddamn spaghetti monster I don't care um but um it's actually a really interesting way the way that

Christianity is positioned because you've got Jesus is dead he died for your sins and so basically you can never get to the point that like that can match it because you literally killed the Son of God with your greediness so Vatican basically has an infinite feedback loop of constant reciprocity and the fact that like the you're always feeling guilty you're always feeling like oh Jesus something because it didn't end too well um similarly you've got a very complex ritual of exchange and symbolism and finally um the gift-giving rituals to create by in our Universal so it's not an aspect of Christmas it's an aspect that is very much Global um like we could see in the potlatch uh so the fact that memes like this exists show you that you do do internal calculations in your head about like

what you get like unless you've really like been born and live a Buddhist like in a Shaolin Temple somewhere you you will kind of make that thing so when you buy someone diamond earrings and they give you a pair of socks you're going to think ugh really um like you will you might pretend that you don't care but you do um and uh so it's very interesting to see that um for example rapping is a really important part of this one of the things is to conceal the gift so you can't see what you're necessarily going to get and also there's um a book I'll get back to this slide in a second unwrapping Christmas if I urge you to read one book read this uh by Daniel Miller he talks about the fact that even the aspect of wrapping the visual uh kind of representation of rapping is

really really important um and there are certain cash rules around this but I'll get to this in a second because it has the other slide is connected to it but I want to return to this Saturday you see I love I love ancient Rome that's the parallels you need to absolutely everything um the saturnalia was actually like a pre-christian tradition it was Pagan I mean it's where um the kind of first official Christmas uh kind of came from it was first in 376 A.D I believe and the the ritual was that the slaves and the owners exchanged roles just for one day yeah just so we don't have like Spartacus scenarios happening again but the whole idea was again to like have this like um let Society be free for a bit you know that's that's very important um and basically they would give each other gifts um there would be

like a lot of drinking obviously feasting um that has its importance in Christmas because it's around the time of winter solstice and your cattle literally probably wouldn't survive the winter so you did have to kill it and then either dry the meat or just eat it so like hey great times so the reasons why you have a rich um kind of Christmas lunch or a rich Christmas dinner is literally like practicalities of being an agriculturalist and like I don't know 10th century Europe um but the switch of the slaves and the Masters is really interesting because the way that nation-states and big civilizations work is that you can't really easily hack your social position because you might have social capital but if you're unable to pay the rent then you know you can't do much with that and but if you give them the illusion of Freedom if you give them the

Illusion for at least one day then that can often be enough that actually like you live from Christmas to Christmas because like once a year you're going to feel like a master um and that is something that's very much in the aspect of gift giving and reciprocity is very much mirrored this is from 2021 where um both the plan to give and plan to receive most important was money now it's in very stark contrast to these statistics from 2018 and I know we have to be kind of wary of Statistics because one can cherry pick really easily where actually the respondents and even then the calibration from the academics uh there was a really strong disagreement with that that money is kind of the the kind of best gift to give because like then the person has the freedom to buy

anything so you don't get socks then you like secretly go return them and get yourself a I don't know Bioshock to play um but um but that that basically like money is like more free and people both respondents and the people who wanted to receive it really strongly disagreed with that is before covert it was before people started thinking also about the structure of society and the fact that actually maybe like it'd be great if I like a couple of eats like landed in my um wallet rather than like a pair of socks off which I have 20 because suddenly people are in crisis and people are thinking evolutionary differently so it's a really interesting contrast there I also I love this um the the giving Which is the orange the slide kind of Temptation it has to go towards a disgust that's just that's hilarious you

have to give someone something um but predominantly it's joy and it's also sadness which is also interesting but the the fact that you actually also get an evolutionary kick from giving something to someone I'm going back to the like whole altruism thing like like it's it is it's all selfish it's fine like it's good that you're excited from like giving something to a grandmother that she's happy for like that's not demonized like individualism and the fact that oh you've got to be an altruist all the time and ideally like put a little one of those flags on your like a pro Facebook profile pictures because that then you'll show them you know thoughts and prayers and things like that um and it's fine to be happy from the fact that other people are happy like that's like Life Is For Living so I know I sound like a

motivational coach right now but um it's just interesting to see like how strongly that correlates um oh yeah I was already mentioning um Jesus um so yeah to have like an uh unreachable level of uh kind of The Ultimate Gift the ultimate sacrifice the ultimate heroism that you can kind of never match up to then you know very very useful and it has been very useful for the Vatican and the Spanish Inquisition in the past as well um and the fact that also uh Christmas is again um very strongly tied to the idea of the nation state but we might not realize it's happening there was a really interesting study by Miller as well who kind of updated his book um for uh 2019 I believe and he actually said that Christmas is becoming a lot more

insular uh that basically like it used to be very Global like Father Christmas Coca-Cola truck Etc and in the last two years um because uh politics has become more populous then funnily enough Christmas has become more associated with the traditions of the nation-state so there's been like a regression from uh English to the local languages there's been things like a massive um uh kind of attention to for example baby Jesus in the case of Italy or the Czech Republic like all kind of like the really local Traditions so anthropologically we can see that Christmas is actually becoming more kind of closed up with it and associated with the nation-state the more populous everything is becoming so this meme isn't necessarily too valid and I also want you to think about like that your everyday lives so so this is

something that actually like the study of anthropology ruined me because now I analyze everything around me all the time I don't want you to become those monsters but think about the way that eat Prague which is by the way [ __ ] Kick-Ass and I I love it and thank you again for being able to be here um but think about how um when you go to a stand there's free t-shirts they're not there just because they're free t-shirts they're there because they want you to have a memory again that's fine and they want you to think hey like maybe this company is like pretty chilled out again that's okay um but you can see those rituals happen absolutely everywhere around you um so it's uh just try to be more wary of that is that things like blockchain they're not like separated from the real

world I'm really upset that a lot of like the average people on the street they hear the word nft and they kind of recoil and run into a cave but actually to share with people and I think it's our responsibility as well to popularize these buzzwords and demystify them to the general public so that my grandma can use nfts and to her benefit hack the social system and to be an individual if she wants to and to like get get money out of it if she wants to Hell there's nothing wrong with that because she's not getting a great pension that's for sure this is by the beautiful national anthem that we have but um I just want to encourage you to do that to kind of translate it to the Ordinary People Because unless it's really scales which is on a good kind of trajectory of doing

and the technology matures then we cannot really do the social change that I think that we all really want and then finally yes I'm on time miraculously um I might I might go of course here I don't know um but blockchain is basically um it's beyond the buzzword I'm interested in the majority of the tech so we're talking about um uh uh we're talking with galaxis yesterday uh and we were talking about the fact that they too are sick of the whole kind of like nft scene being just like a buzzword and like pictures of monkeys that actually the possibility to for example commodify and quantify your everyday Behavior to like turn your assets like into digital assets and then to be able to kind of on a peer-to-peer trust basis kind of like deal with them

that that is that's the social hack that means that you no longer have to be this is going to sound really cheesy you no longer have to be the slave for like 364 days a year and then on the one day air super freedom and then you have to revert back it means that you can actually change your life in an evolutionary flexible way which is exactly what happens in tribes they're much more flexible when they get too big they separate and everything's fine when like Czech Republic like I don't know like the region which is a kind of industrial region like in the uh in the north they can't say ah you know what screw it we're going to like start our own like um country with Blackjack and hookers they can't do that um and that's fine um I think that the nation state is slowly

going to die but I do think that there's a parallel world being created thanks to technology like um uh like like blockchain and web 3-0 and then like the kind of personalization of data and services as well thanks to things like artificial intelligence um I think blockchain is a technological manifestation of roughly three million years of evolution and I also think that it um yeah it hacks a social adder with regards to tribalism in 1971 wrote a fantastic book about social capital there's several types of capital economic cultural social and symbolic um uh cultural capital and Social Capital are things that you do that basically makes you appear cool even though that you can't pay your rent and

that and then you can trade that Social Capital because people are constantly doing these calculations um for um uh for like financial services for example so it's being Incorruptible it's like okay when influencers use the word authentic it makes me want to throw up slightly but um It's that kind of thing where you are an individual the people kind of reward you for being an individual for being true to yourself and then you can trade with that um by getting a cool boyfriend or by getting a cool girlfriend or by uh I don't know getting a divorce if you're a social capitalist too low whatever that might be um so again we were we were talking a lot with a lot of the people here and being able to for example turn like content creation into something that is actually monetizable um into something

that like you don't just do that in your spare time that actually is your job again with things like um game game five which I'll get to in a little bit that is actually something that's possible and again I really want to encourage that kind of thing so for example I'm really popular online so I think it's about time I start making money out of it huh another massive aspect is education that's the kind of like big trajectory where I see a blockchain helping massively because our standard educational system is is not not great like the re-skilling the fact that technology is evolving like this while our society evolves like this there's a massive increase in gap and then whenever I hear someone talk about like re-skilling and stuff it kind of makes me want to throw up a little bit um so what I think is really important and

when I where I see it helping is perhaps for example um I was introduced to the idea of perhaps in um in parallel police and like my absolute dream would be if there was actually a parallel educational system where you get tokens basically for the fact that you either attend a seminar or you do something or you finish a project and then that that is also actively supported um by the market and kind of agreed on with the market that that can be an equivalent to an official education I think that if we do something like that that would be a great message to the Educational Systems like yeah you guys fine it's like with the nation state you do your thing and we're just going to put a little bit of evolutionary pressure on you and that pressure will kill you unless you change

so uh that's one of the things that I'm really excited about and just to go back to this I I stole this from uh porn's um uh Instagram page because it's a brilliant meme but like philosophically and again I'm really not a pro in blockchain I just want to be absolutely clear about that but it fascinates me I want to get to know more and but because I've been working artificial intelligence and I think the mechanisms are slightly similar about like a massive hype yeah dot AI domain great I'm gonna sell my startup for like 40 million dollars or like be like Elizabeth Holmes and teranos I want to go from the hype to actually the technology maturing and being helpful to people um and I think the combination of um blockchain and artificial intelligence but also like evolutionary anthropology can achieve that uh and then finally GameFly as well um

uh I'm not gonna lie this is something that's like incredibly interesting to me because game theory is something that again is like three million years old um and the fact that you kind of like let people do their thing it's incredibly scalable it's uh addictive because it's kind of like tokenization you can get social cultural but also if you could get economic capital from that that'd be great so then actually my shoddy playing of hearthstone could achieve something and I was really excited that um when we did some videos with popularization videos with porn um that there's actually like possibly in the pipeline so that's uh I'm really excited that that's happening and finally yeah just about on time um uh the research group that I'm planning oh that's actually been confirmed I still can't believe it um I I'm going to be basically studying

The evolutionary effect of technology on civilizations but like throughout the course of human history so literally going from the stone tool through electricity to um the steam engine Etc we've just got a really rough we're preparing a new website so we've got like a really rough outline but basically what we're doing is recreating Plato's um gave so much to me in this regard because it completely changed my mind and my life for the last two years and so I really want to take this forward and like make it into an academic project um and we're going to be recreating Plato's idea of an ideal society which is of course hilarious because full of eugenics and stuff like Plato really wasn't as nice a guy as um he's portrayed as just because all of his writings survived so we tend to think

that he was the absolute best of the best but he also had very good PR um and uh basically put people into this virtual simulation and wait for the first person to kill someone or the first person to like be on the run or the first person to Rob someone because when you kill someone in Counter-Strike it's like all jokes and LOL but if you actually kill someone in Virtual Reality as yourself as that person it has completely different ethical um kind of connotations and we want to see whether the policy is going to break apart whether there's going to be rival policies that are going to be basically built whether people are going to run whether they're going to murder whether and we want to study that and also simulate that behavior with the help of artificial intelligence so we're getting started and we'll keep you updated so if

any of you are interested then like yeah we can talk about a bit more so we went from Trading shells 140 000 years ago in the blondeboss cave and the pijon in Morocco that were used as kind of social capital and exchange mechanisms by ancestors we're now kind of talking about poapps nfts Etc the connecting evolutionary line is absolutely the same except often organizations either big institutions or nation states have been really able to hack into this evolutionary algorithm of ours and exploit the nature of reciprocity and value to basically keep themselves themselves alive and I think that demonstrating that we don't need those kind of structures that we can maintain that tribal Freedom whilst progressing as a civilization and having like a natural kind of order I think that's

really exciting and that gets me really excited as an archaeologist in the 21st century okay thank you very much thank you okay we have both live stream co-hosts on the stage at the same time you have I think about seven minutes for questions uh there's a roving microphone I'm I'm assuming there will be many questions phew uh so okay okay thank you uh as you said at the end of your talk regarding the uh creating alternative educational system

and what do you think about uh emerging of crypto blockchain community and academic Community regarding to financing or funding uh research science research and creating new you know new technology so just to understand properly the kind of intersection of like uh like basic research and the blockchain community kind of like merging so it can be financed yeah um yeah well that's exactly what I don't want to do with my research group because like the um politics of Grants is like it's pretty sick especially in uh Humanities like archeology which is a lot less quantitatively tangible so I was present at many many kind of like of these meetings where they said yeah

we're going to give you a grant but you've got to talk about gender and I was like yeah no that's not research that's basically just like me fulfilling something that's considered like to be morally the right thing to do in 2020 but that's not the search for truth that's just the search for proving your point um and uh so I think that like the but actually like being financed by like one company as well I don't think that's healthy either so I think like to be really pure if I want to live what I'm actually advocating the ideal stage is to be a funded completely decent in a decentralized way from across the world so that I can really do the research that I believe in and not the research where like big Bank sponsors here and they say hey if you mentioned that this

product is great or that like bank again dead that'd be great it's like no I'm not going to mention that because then I become corruptable it's incredibly difficult we found it really difficult in uh polish as well to like function the running of like this whole place um but I believe that it's like the ideal thing to get to and I'll be striving for go Sarah okay any more questions yeah we got one here hi uh hi Sarah oh yeah sorry hi uh you talked about the death of the nation-state so I guess uh shall we expect a revolution and bloodbath or do you see a way where this can happen sort

of peacefully naturally great question um I think that um no uh we I don't think that we can necessarily expect a bloodbath um but it's not that because people became more civilized it's because it's um uh it's more risky and I think that people have found technology is the ultimate vent you no longer have to drag people to the guillotine you basically just say you know what screw you I'm not going to be using your bank I'm going to go kind of all that into crypto and I think that that's the revolution that the nation states didn't see until very recently until like all the regulations started coming in because like they see it as competition and the only way to get rid of that competition is not to become better but to regulate it which is like that's the standard kind of procedure it's basically censorship and I think

that the worst manifestation of that when it came from the European Union was Article 13 when they tried to regulate memes that was just like goddamn ridiculous um so I think that the nation-states realizing that they're screwed that's why the regulation around artificial intelligence crypto is coming into play but I think that um the technology world will always be one step ahead and people will kind of it'll be like um what what you don't want to hear like in an argument or like in an argument with your parents like I'm not angry I'm just disappointed like that that though we're just going to drift away slowly and like good luck with your goddamn national anthems um and that's why however I think it's so important for the technology to mature and to get to the average people because like if like you know I'm preaching to the choir right now but I

genuinely need my grandmother to start like uh like investing in crypto and like relying on blockchain rather than relying on the state sending her like 200 Euros every month um and I think the moment that we achieve that that's the time of like the very quiet very evolutionary Revolution so yeah pretty comprehensive answer I think we've got time for one more question from down here thank you for this it was like really amazing this talk so I love that I'm not expecting anything back for that compliment um so I was wondering Scott thank you so much um so um do you think it's like fair or okay to use these uh you know manipulation techniques that nation states do if you

use them to do good like like in for instance like if you want to to get people into more like let's say crypto tribes and you want them to do a specific behavior would you feel that it's okay to use these techniques like creating a new Christmas but like an airdrop Maybe oh uh the ends justify the means um I I guess there's aspects of our behavior um which uh which will be doing subconsciously anyway um and that like you can't be critical towards everything but like for me it's important it's like Alcoholics Anonymous like the person needs to go there because they realize that they need it not because like they've seen a million adverts for get in to eat now because like that's just like that's not the way to do it so I think that's why I think

education is the most important thing like if someone at the end of the day like has all the information that they need and they say I'm going to vote for Communists mate fine like you're a free person you go vote for comment I'm not going to spend like five extra hours trying to manipulate you into voting otherwise and it's I think the same thing like with um like gaslighting in relationships when you've got an incredibly toxic partner you don't see it for a really long time everyone around you tells you but you need to like reach that conclusion yourself and then think I need to leave this person and that's exactly the kind of uh like Eureka moment that we need to get into society but I think that education and like giving people space and freedom to do that stuff and showing that we can

function for the average person that we're not just a bunch of technological elitist snobs who are like you know huddling stuff and like doing like little like blockchain things and like not really talking to anyone else that's going to be I think crucial for the next stage of uh just general adaption of these Technologies yeah I'm quite sure that has fully answered your question absolutely and unfortunately we're done for time you may see Sarah around if you have more questions for her but uh Sarah thank you very very much thank you thank you very much thank you [Applause]