Well, thanks, for your, for your question. And it's really a pleasure to be on the socialist blockchain. I think it's really important if I might just add as a perfor per factory comment. It's really important. I think that, folks who are for the commons, really claims technologies, towards building the commons. So thank you. But in terms of your question, I mean, it's a really long answer, but I'll try to keep it, you know, manageable. I mean, I guess the first time we thought through this or it came to my mind was in 2002 when Slavoj Zizek asked about where's the Frankfurt School today? We were having a conversation, over a conference that I had organized called ontologies and practice in Charlottesville, Virginia. And so he asked, like, where's the Frankfurt School for today? And it sort of got me thinking, sort of cranking the gears in my mind about what would it look like in the twenty first century. So with that in mind and, you know, you know, collecting conversations around, you know, drinking alcohol at at conferences with friends. And, you know, you just sort of wax, you know, romantic about a potential for developing an institute. And so my friend Clayton Crockett and Jeff Robbins was in on that early. And but eventually, you know, you end up getting your PhD and, you know, taking that tenure track job. I had two little boys and, the pressure of, you know, keeping a family going while I was pursuing my PhD. And then finally, you get that tenure track offer. And so it was sort of tabled for a while. But going, you know, being a professor at a liberal arts college, a pretty decent one in Florida called Rollins College, you know, for me, just seeing your students graduate and you really want them to succeed, but then you start to get feedback and not just a little feedback, trickle feedback. You get, you know, kind of droves of feedback where really good students who are amazing thinkers and have amazing gifts can't get employed at levels that are commensurate with their education. So I started digging into what what are the kind of the mode of productions that sort of undergird and give rise to the contemporary university and college in The United States. And once you start digging into that kind of mode of production, looking at the old deep throat question, the old deep throat from all the president's men, if you remember the famous line, follow the money, right? So you start to follow that money and you start to realize that since Reagan came to, power as the president, he he really shifted how higher how higher education functions, you know, kind of using the political platform of cutting massive taxes to the commons to, you know, state funded, institutions or the humanities, the arts and of course education. And what he did was he signed into law, I think it was 1982. I might be wrong on that, but he signed into law basically saying that education is an entrepreneurial, exercise or it's an entrepreneurial engagement that if you are gonna go off to uni and get a degree, well, that's a risk. And ultimately that risk falls on the individual as opposed to the collective, the state or the community, or the nation. And so when you start to atomize the risk factor to the individual, you know, you start to see what you have is a massive increase of tuition going up, massively going up. And this is because state funds are cut, federal funds are cut, you know, at 70% since the eighties. And so how do how are colleges and university gonna survive? They're gonna survive by raising that tuition level. And of course, the individuals, most individuals can't afford, you know, massive tuition increases. So what does the government do? It steps in kind of like a Ponzi scheme, a pyramid scheme of sorts and says, oh, don't worry. Just sign on this piece of paper and we'll give you the guaranteed funds so that you can get your education. Isn't that great? Well, it's you know, to an 18 year old, signing a loan is kind of like, who cares? You're 18. And there's a quite there's a very deceptive motivation behind it. Right? And you don't really perceive the risks, the economic harm on signing that paper. Furthermore, because colleges and universities are competing amongst themselves, they you start getting luxurious kinds of infrastructure on universities. You get away from the library as a real research, you know, investment and books and articles and and so on, and you get more of gyms. Sports becomes much more corporatized with the NCAA, the rise of the NCAA through the eighties and nineties. And then you eventually end up with absurd kinds of, things happening on campus including like lazy rivers. And so now it becomes for the student a kind of hedonistic environment in which you party, and the emphasis is moved. So now you can start to see from the Reagan shift of cutting massive funding to universities, how that ultimately leads down the road to the lazy river, if you will, and creates an environment of animal house. The, you know, the kind of hedonistic party who cares, I'm going into massive debt, let's party hard. And as a result, academics really goes by the wayside. Not only that, but when you're in a classroom and you know you're going into debt, you need to see an economic outcome of reading something like Homer or reading, you know, Shakespeare or or understanding sophisticated philosophical or economic, you know, arguments. And as a result, you end up by, I think, by the apparatus itself, undercutting the humanities, undercutting critical thinking, and shifting everything towards more STEM or science based education and or business based education. So now what you've effectively done is you've gutted the university, which was designed the modern university emerged in the late, eighteenth, early nineteenth century, in which it it basically emerged on the scene with advanced industrial capitalism or early stages of, capitalism, industrial capitalism. And as a result, you know, the university was really set up to hold into check these corporate powers. I mean, Jefferson was very clear when he founded the University of Virginia of which I had the privilege of attending. But Jefferson was very clear as were others who founded universities in the early nineteenth century. Look, the university is there to train minds so that we can be critical of corrupt power, including corrupt corporate power. There was a real fear of the New York Wall Street Federalist Hamiltonian, position in in in early America. There was a fear and that's one of the reasons why they ended up moving, you know, the capital of The United States away from literally on Wall Street. In fact, the first capital of The United States was built literally by the wall that was called Wall Street. There was literally a wall that surrounded the corporation. Because keep in mind, in in 1624 or '25, when New York was founded, it was founded by the West Indies Corporation. It was a corporation. And so when you have the capital of the early country, you know, built out of the wall of from the Wall Street, the street on which the wall was, then you end up having a collusion. Now that collusion still exists today. Wall Street and politicians, we know what that is. But so stepping back and sort of summarizing how all this came into being, as I looked into the mode of production, I didn't realize just how corrupt and what a scam higher education really is. If you think about it, Harvard University a couple years ago, there was a article put out, I think, in 2011, in which it basically stated gonna made very clear that the top four hedge fund managers of Harvard's massive endowment, which I think now is pushing 40,000,000,000, made more money than almost the entire faculty combined. So what do you end up having? You don't have universities that are concerned with critical thinking and developing a rich, dialogue within the citizenry so as to create more progressive, more advanced ways in which human beings can get along with each other. No. You have just the opposite. You have that gutting of critical thinking to the point where you can have a popularist like a Donald Trump rise to power and, you know, 4040% of the populace, buys into patently false claims that can be easily disproven, but you end up having an uneducated populace voting in a president by the, you know, four years ago, very narrowly. He didn't win the popular vote, but he won the electoral vote. So you end up having a destruction of society as a whole. And all this is built in in part and parcel of how the neoliberal university, let's call it that since the Reagan era emerged and functions and recapitulates itself over and over again, putting more and more people into harm's way. You know? And you you hear these things in the universities where, oh, come to our university. We teach the whole person. Well, it turns out you end up maybe you teach, but you don't teach the whole person. You don't give a damn about the harm you're doing economically to that person. And why? Because it's disguise in terms of 18 year olds taking advantage of 18 year olds to sign loans to party hard for four years and not be able to get a job afterwards. So you can see the whole thing is set up. And it's it's more complicated than this, but these are just sort of the general strokes. And as a result, I was thinking through that and I was like, you know, is it possible given advanced technologies that we have, like online learning, which I loathe in many ways, but can you do it? Like, is it possible to put together resources in a way that's strong enough and can start to to reproduce themselves, like Aldisair asked the question in in his 8069 essay, the ideological state apparatus. How does capitalism reproduce itself? And with that question, I was thinking, well, how can we set up a mode of production that's that's built into education that can reproduce itself in a way that resists, the corporate neoliberal position? And so we tweaked the model. It took a couple years, but even after the first year in 2013 when I when I founded GECAS, in Colorado originally, you know, six, eight months later, we're having buyout offers from firms, and it's like it's not even for sale. They don't even understand like, it like, it's almost like you're speaking a different language when you're starting up something like this. And the beauty of it isn't in the bottom line of like, oh, we're 10 x. You know, we're startup 10 x or, you know, we're we're we're making funds hand over fist. Rather, the beauty is what does that collectivity that you're creating do consciously? So it's a question of, like, what Luke Koch was asking in the history of class consciousness is the question of how do you create a consciousness that understands the world differently than centralization, than capitalism, pure capitalism in terms of profit making? And can you sustain a business model that's outside or thinks differently from that? So yeah. I mean, that's sort of the gives you the background. I'm sorry.

I mean, for me, when I was an undergrad, for it was a question of, like, I wanna study after I came out of the army. I had, like, 50 saved up $15,000 in the early nineties, mid nineties. And I was, like, so focused on learning that it didn't, you know, it didn't occur to me. But as a professor, you start to see this kind of decadence and this opulence that surrounds what it means to be a student. And, you know, and like you were saying about neoliberalism, I mean, it started with the first case study was really Chile as a country in which the Chicago boys with including Milton Friedman and har Harnack, Kajak. What's his name? Harnack? Hayek? Hayak. That's it. Kayak. Kayak. It's it's Austrian. And, you know, those those they trained, pretty wealthy upper middle class students that came from Chile up to the University of Chicago, because let's face it. You know, you have to be wealthy to to make that track. And, ultimately, they were they were there and designed to undercut public assets. And this, of course, gave rise to the or the military dictator, Pinochet. And, you know, the CIA backed, coup in 1973, September Yeah. '73. But what things really cool was when we established, and it was actually almost three years ago to the day that we established a center, a GCAS center in Chile. And it was kind of like poetic justice. Like, you know, you can destroy a country and and mark it out the water and privatize the electrical grid and so on. But, you know, there's still there's still resistance. And it's not just resisting the trend of neoliberalism. It's actually producing something positive because it's one thing to be defensive, but eventually your defenses wear down. And unless you have a strategy of internally, you know, keeping going and sustaining one's own organization, you're gonna eventually wear down, burn out, and wither away. So it was really poetic when when I was down there in 2017, and we established GCAS Chile, which has now become GCAS Latin America and associated with, Mexico City and Peru. And it's pretty amazing how that started. There's a lot of energy in the global South for a collectivity. And in part, I think maybe it's because of its Catholic background, but also its indigenous, ethos that binds communities together.

Yeah. So there's there's two basic, approaches or options. One is anyone from the public can take courses with us in our eSchool, which is available. You can subscribe it for $10 or €10 a month and take all the courses you want with these leading, philosophers and theorists and and connect up with our community of researchers. We call students researchers because we're all searching together. And so that's the first option is the eSchool. The other option is enrollment and matriculation into degree programs. So we are, in fact, the first that we know of. Well, we are the first historic college that grants degrees that is co owned by faculty, graduates, and some supporters on blockchain. And so it's and using our crypto token. So it is really exciting. I I originally thought of the whole blockchain possibility. I don't know. Maybe it was five years ago in 2015, 2016 when I was in Slovenia as a dean or a vice dean there starting up a master's and PhD program for an accredited university, in Europe. And while I was doing that, I was thinking, gosh. You know, unless you're a millionaire, you're never gonna start a college. Unless you have millions and millions of dollars, there's no way you can start it. And and if you have millions, any think about this. If anybody who has that kind of resource, you're not going to be thinking about how can we create a a debt free culture and a co own culture. You're gonna be thinking, how am I gonna return on this €10,000,000 dollars that I have or euros? How am I gonna make a return and keep afloat? That's your thinking. And as a result, you don't get projects that are like, a com a commons project that is really serious about rigorous education at a level that's even more quality than, you know, high r one institutions. Like, I attended Oxford for a bit. I went to Duke, did my masters, went off to Yale, and started my, you know, postgraduate studies there and ended up finishing at University of Virginia. So, you know, I've been to really elite so called elite universities. And I can tell you this, that the way we've designed our pedagogy in terms of what students can expect is far better even online because you're connecting. You you have to have a a mentor or a supervisor, academic supervisor with whom you are in constant contact, and, you know, you have to be very serious. When folks look at what we're doing, they think, wow. That's amazing. And then they they, you know, they throw in an application. But if they're not serious and they're not really good researchers that has all the the toolkit that you need to be a good researcher, you you just don't make it. Because we we are creating and we are developing very, you know, front cutting edge leading researchers, that are doing things like, for example, one of our students did her masters at the London School of Economics, and she's thinking through a dissertation on human trafficking in relationship to global warming. There's a connection. Now it's that's a hard connection to make ethnographically. You know, what what are the evidence bases, how what's the methodology and so on. But she's doing that kind of research, and it's incredible. It's these are the kinds of researchers that we we're developing and nurturing. So it's there are two ways, eSchool, anybody can take, and then you can matriculate. It's it's difficult to to get accepted, but and we only accept folks that we believe are gonna be co owners when they graduate and therefore, decision makers in our community and how we move forward. So we're very particular about who who comes in.

Yeah. I mean, we we do a blended we actually do blended learning where we have, you know, at times before COVID, we would have, you know, in person seminars in Havana, Cuba, New York, where Oliver Stone, you know, and Chris Hedges taught for us directly, Richard Wolf. Slovenia, Athens, we had several thousand people at our conference in Athens and our summer institute there. So we do a hybrid where you can teach together, and students or researchers in GCAS who are close by can can show up. So that way, they're not burning a lot of c o two, and, you know, fossil fuels to show up. And anybody else who can't afford it or don't want to, you know, burn fossil fuels to show up can do that online. So actually, you know, it is a blended style. We do have a a place in Dublin, where we're building out after COVID, where we'll be holding classes there more on a permanent basis. But we also wanna think about the earth. What's the what's the best for the Earth, and how can we become zero carbon emissions university or college? And how can we stimulate a culture behind that, but without also losing people in the Zoom sphere. Right? Because that's also, I think, alienating. But it does work, and I think people are kind of adjusting to that.

It's less stiff maybe than before. Yeah. I think so. But, you know, I I always knew that this was gonna take off. You know, the online learning was gonna take off, and it was only gonna take off because profit margins are much higher, 30 higher when you can get rid of overhead costs like maintenance, maintaining liability cost of, you you know, buildings. And so it's gonna go that way. And, ultimately, the the bubble that is the higher education neoliberal structure is gonna bust. I mean, that's I think that's inevitable. And so it's really important to bring, you know, to to create this kind of structure where you don't need overhead costs and therefore, you can pass the cost on and alleviate the student from going into debt. And yet at the same time, you can pay your faculty, you know, decent enough wages that is competitive, and you stimulate quality that way too. So it it is working. I mean, of course, there's always adjustments and tweaks that we're constantly making, you know, and and, and yeah. So and there are challenges for sure. But, you know, we also work with farms and all that, which we can get into a little bit in terms of how our token functions, as well.

gcas.io. Gcas is gcas, globalcenterforadvancedstudies.io. And it's a it's a landing page where, if originally anybody could come on and earn tokens, and that was exciting. But there were some issues, and we needed to clear up some of those issues where we had trolls, functioning at a pretty high level. We we've had alt right come in and and and troll us as well. So what we had to do is we had to close it down so that, only folks who are matriculated or what we call in our core community or members can participate in our currency exchange or the crypto hub. And it is a it's a it's a site where you can you can cash in tokens that you've earned for classes. You can earn tokens and claim tokens through the bounty sheet. So you can do certain tasks and earn tokens. If you do what really well on a research paper, you can earn tokens. If you publish a book, for example, one of our faculty members, Braha l Edinger, just, published a book, and, you know, it's she's the distinguished faculty for GCAAS. And so she gets tokens, you know, around it's not a security, but it's a cent the way we look at it is it's roughly 100 tokens to €10, something along those lines. And students can what we have one student who's earned enough tokens to get themselves more than halfway through their PhD without without fiat. And when I say fiat, as I'm sure your audience knows, that's dollars or euros. So it's quite amazing to see an economy, work like this. Now we only have, like, 400 people in the economy itself. Okay? And out of those 400 people, around 50 or 60 are really active. That is they're trading, they're exchanging, they're earning, and and, you know, and and so on. And what when you graduate from GCAAS, you can also cash in your tokens for more shares. So it's it's an asset. We recognize the asset. However, you know, we have it very clear. It's not a security. It's not money. It's rather our way to recognize work and track work accurately, put it on the block. You can claim it. We we go through a crypto committee. And if somebody's claimed so many tokens, we look at the work that they've done and award the tokens. We haven't had an issue like that. I think we've issued maybe half a quarter of a million tokens, so far. And, you know, and people can exchange them, pay down tuition. They could they could trade them for, we're we're not quite at the store level yet where we can sell books, through our tokens. We're getting close. We were close to working with Fairmundo in Germany where we own we had an MOU. We didn't quite finish the MOU, but, essentially, you know, others can recognize our tokens for in exchange for goods and services or products. And we're getting there. You know? We're slowly moving in that direction. And, yeah. So it's really exciting to think of you think, you exchange ideas, and you earn tokens. And so what you end up having is a recreation of a consciousness where your vis your understanding of how you think and exchange ideas with others and create your own methodologies and scientific developments, and that turns into a fluid way to exchange and create a mode of production that can reproduce itself. Okay. Does it purely reproduce itself? Not exactly yet. But keep in mind, even Marx, Karl Marx, I think it was in volume three of Das Kapital. He talks about the transition from capitalism to communism using tokens. Okay? So there was there's a there was a moment there that Marx identified. And and I think we are if you step back and you look at Bitcoin, you look at tokens, something is happening clearly. I mean, Bitcoin just you know, their cap is at an all time high at 18,000, recently. And something's happening whereby the centralized structures of the control fiat, the control dollars and euros and pounds are starting to have a rival, a rivaling, you know, value structure. And what we're trying to do is is accelerate that value structure in terms of how we get along with each other, respect each other, how we publish, how we, define, scientific research. And that creates a whole different level of of how you think, okay, together in a collective. And the dynamic is very different than, oh, I'm an individual, and I'm gonna party my ass off and have a lot of loans and not get a job. Our dynamic is very different. My success as an individual is only contingent upon this the success of others who are in my cohort, who are my research, partners and collaborators. And that's where the beauty of what the human can be when it's more than just itself starts to get traction. And that's that to to me, there's nothing more like it. I I once put a twit Twitter, up, and it said something like, you know, moving towards a blockchain consciousness. And, of course, one of the head blockchain people, the you know, a German guy who was like a blue whale or whale of some kind, you know, immediately tagged it and and made fun of it. Okay? But there is a there's real truth to under and that that tells you the limitations of somebody who just thinks in terms of a libertarian, it's me, myself, and I versus the world. A consciousness develops when you're working together in a mode of production. You're surrounded by a context that others are working with ideas that are pushing the limits of of academic enter the academic enterprise and creating together. You're like, you're out there in interstellar space, you feel like, and you're creating this. Like, okay. Elon Musk might wanna go to Mars, but in a way, we're already creating a different kind of world in in so far as our consciousness is shifting towards a common good where we're all benefiting at the end of the day and in the process

you tell people what you're doing, and they don't believe it. Right? They they just they they they think your head's in the sand or in cloud on cloud nine. And, you know, when you show investors actually what we're doing on paper financially, they're just they're taken aback by the the possibilities that are that have emerged. Indeed, just last year around this time, I was in Helsinki while talking to a fintech investor, pretty well known, investor there. And he, you know, he he, committed to investing. And so because he he knew that education the future of education, if you can tokenize it, in in some way, then that's, you know, that ultimately is gonna win, the gambit. However, when you think about education as tokenization, sometimes that can be very dangerous. Right? Like, I'm only doing this to earn tokens. Like, I'm only gonna read that extra footnote, you know, because I'm gonna get an extra 10 tokens or something like that. And, you know, to alleviate that possibility from happening, I mean, we we don't line up in competitive you versus me ways of earning tokens. It's a collective collaborative. So we do small group work, and that small group accomplishes a task. I mean, I would love my dream is to do something like have undergrads solve problems like the Flint, so lead in the water or the contaminated water in the the city of Flint, Michigan. Like, imagine having, you know, 100 GCAS researchers doing their bachelor's degree, working with engineers to solve that problem in three years before they graduate. You know, it's those kinds of, those kinds of, projects that really wanna get off the ground.

It's a great question, in fact, and I'll answer it in two ways. So first, how overwhelmingly the professors in the humanities and social sciences have embraced what we're doing, but there are exceptions naturally. So that's that sort of answers your first question. And the second one is, how do you overcome that when you throw down when you throw your cards on the table, you know, we're gonna we're gonna do this token. We're gonna do this blockchain cryptocurrency. When you throw those words down on a card table in front of all to see, you definitely have a high education curve to deal with. Because that pump and dump schemes, like, here's my token. Buy, buy, buy. So, you know, you get a you pay a celebrity a $100,000 to wear a t shirt, and there's a pump, you know, and everybody buys it. Meanwhile, the ones who created it, three or four people that created it, dump it. And when it's high, and so therefore, it's not worth anything. We've seen this time and again, and it it it's scammy. Bitcoin, it's, you know, it's it's still I think Bitcoin is functioning, but the but we can talk about the architecture later about the Bitcoin in particular because I think that's another question altogether. So how do you communicate that? Well, it's a lot of that's one of the reasons why we created that crypto hub to to educate. Like, what is it? And how how can, you know, a professor when they're lecturing somewhere else or when they publish an article, you know, how do they participate and grow the value of GCAS through that very act of disseminating good research and good teaching? So those are the kinds of things. And, you know, when we connect it up to our our shares, when we can have conversions to our shares from our token, then that helps people because now there's an exit. There's an there's an asset right there. Not as the token, but the token can be recognized by owners of GECAS as an asset, or can rather, the token can be we can recognize, you know, as potential assets through the token that are not assets or securities, but we can convert that into such without there being issues with the, you know, SEC or any issues like that, because it's just an internal token, that we've recognized. And that's one of the reasons why we didn't go public or we pulled back from going public, early on. We would I would love to do more of a public, thing, but, you know, you have to figure out ways to keep controls out or pump and dump schemes from coming in and blowing it up. So we we did the conservative route to protect our commons or more socialized token and the potential that that has in promise. One last thing, just returning back to your first question about how some have reacted to GECAS. Again, overwhelmingly, absolutely in favor of what we're doing. Indeed, when we when we started GCAS in August 2013, over a 100 and well over a 100 leading academics, intellectuals, you know, from Alain Badiou to Slavoj Zizek and to, you know, leading in fact, Ernesto Laclau. I don't know. Are you familiar with Ernesto Laclau? Anyway, he, also joined, but, he, he he passed away. Humberto Eco, for example, the great Italian, writer and hermeneuticist, and polymath, would write me, email saying it's beautiful. It's a beautiful vision. So I knew I was on to something. Yet, at the same time, we had a minority, only a handful. But the there is one or two of these folks in the minority that saw us as a threat. And what was weird, and I won't mention names until I published the book, but what was strange and uncanny about it was they were publishing radical books, incredibly progressive radical books. But yet and I talked to, you know, some folks that had inside information. They you know, these people were the 1%. So on the one hand, they were publishing radical books saying revolution. Yeah. On the other side, they were getting masses amounts of money, free apartments from universities, charging $50,000 for a, you know, one hour lecture. And when we created GCAS, I think they could start to see the future even in its notch in in its very seed form or germ germ of GCAS. They could see the threat, and they took exception to that threat, and they went to war. They tried to get us they tried you know, they pulled strings in ways that were very strange and and, and but in any case, it was kind of gangster, actually, early on in 2014. Academic gangsters and Yeah. Gang yeah. This but anyway, we we managed to askew that threat, and, and we just keep moving on.

Oh, actually, you know, he and I talked quite a bit. Not quite a bit. We we, you know, we email on occasion, let's say. But I, yeah, I wonder. I haven't actually asked him that. I would be really curious. I think that the concept of cryptocurrency is is sort of a younger generation kinda thing and older minds that have been shaped by fiat. And, again, it's consciousness. Right? It's the consciousness about fiat and how you how the world functions in relationship to centralized money sources and power. You know, that to me like, Richard Wolff, for example, won't touch it. But but maybe, you know, I think it's the future. It's the way to it's it's ultimately it's a it can be seen as a it can be weaponized as a social collective that can really do a lot create a lot of space for keeping that space, sustainable over time. You know, it's one thing to protest on the streets, black lives matter or whatever, and Alain Badu and I were having a conversation about this, that it's great to have, you know, those protests in punctiliar ways, but eventually, protests flame out. The passions can't be sustained over time. And as a result, what you need is a catalyst and a catalyst that sees social change a hundred years from now. And so when we were putting together the model of GCAS, we always think a hundred years ahead, or what would we imagine humanity to be a hundred years from now and start building towards that vision? And cryptocurrency is part of that vision. There's no doubt. Do you think so?

you know, the ways that we can keep, you know, smart contracts working in objectively encrypted ways that can't be, you know, that can't be tapped or hacked, or it's extremely difficult to more difficult than, say, you know, stealing money out of a bank physically, you know, that's promising to me. You know? And when you look at all the, you know, businesses going on blockchain in terms of logistics, distribution logistics, for, you know, shipping companies. I mean, this is the this is the future, but all you need is a crackdown from centralized authority, and it's gone. Like, you know, if you do have the crackdown, then you have to go underground. You have to go into the dark web, to function. And, you know, that's another thing. It's there's a lot of laundering that goes through Bitcoin, and that that was something that we thought you know, one of our students from Iran who actually created the Iran's first token, Iran coin Iran or Iran coin. And, Solomon is his name. He's really great. He pays his tuition in Bitcoin. So I mean, in you know? But a lot of a lot of but he he earned it. Like, he, you know, he actually came from a very educated family. But, you know, there's there's sketchy investors. When I was in Cyprus, you know, sketchy people from old Russia, you know, saying, hey. I'm I'm gonna give you a million dollars investment. And I'm just like, okay. You know, that's all I need to do now is just float a million dollars from an old Robert Baron from the Russian era, the COB era, and land that in my bank account. Sure. That sounds really pleasant. And so, you know, even investments that for me look even the littlest, they're not, like, totally legitimated. You just can't take it. You can't play you can't play that game, especially with reputations like ours on the line. So but I do think you know, I would bet more than 50%, that tokenized some form of tokenization is is going to happen more and more, I think. In education, you might as well just try it out in education. So I I to,

to cut off any opposition is, you know, prevent them from accessing the very means of reproducing themselves. I mean and that's what, you know, the Claus von. What was his name? The famous war theorist, Clausewitz. He said one of the basic axioms of war is to ensure that the enemy cannot continue resisting. And the way you do that is you cut off their resources over time, and eventually, it'll collapse. And, you know, you're right to to say that. And I should mention that GCAS, I mean, we have people from all over the ideological spectrum. And for us, it's it's not a question of hiding behind a big name, you know, big s socialism or or big c capitalism or communism or whatever. It's for us, it's a question of, like, what can we produce ourselves, and think through different modes of human interaction that aren't centralized? Let me let's face it. Socialism is is a form of of centralization, at least in its in its political formation, right, in its state formation. And that's what makes what you're doing very interesting because there's a at the heart of it, what looks like a contradiction, socialistic blockchain. So how how does that function where, you know, socialism is you know, where communism centralized, you know, a central committee, literally. So how do you, yourself, when you're asked about how does socialism relate to blockchain or crypto tokens or currencies, how do you respond to that? And how can it prevent the corruption of centralization?

you know, these have Well, I mean, don't you think it's clear? And I'm curious what you think about this. I mean, the way we're using our resources in terms of burning fossil fuels, in terms of, you know, this whole mentality of profits at all costs and ethics have to has to be reshaped in terms of, you know, what what's profitable and, you know, this cult of personality where you raise up people like Bill Gates, you know, people that already had a massive leg up in life, but then just use those resources well. But then, you know, this hero, you know, this billionaire heroes, like, oh, they're obviously, you know, smarter, and they're they're more human than most people. And I think you you have very dangerous ways that humans are relating to each other in terms of how we perceive what is the value and how we link that value to wealth as opposed to, nurturing environments where value can be seen in a much more interesting horizontal ways. Right? So, I mean, yeah, it's it's it we need we need something else besides the mode of production that's killing the I think, objectively, we are slowly killing the earth or the atmosphere, and and we're cooking ourselves slowly like a frog in a pot boiling. Right? Or that doesn't doesn't feel it because they're cold blooded. And, you know, that seems to me the direction that we're heading. And unless we start to think differently, like what how you're starting to conceptualize blockchain in terms of more of a socialization or a socialistic position that's not state backed. So it's kind of actually as as, an anarcho socialism, actually. It seems to me your position is. Although, you know, who knows? One has to has to be careful about labeling people. Like, okay. Let me let me put a Sharpie on your forehead. That's what you you know? But but it does seem like if you don't have a state backed, then you are thinking through a syndicalism or an anarchism in some in some way. But it, you you know, you know, it's true. People aren't making what they used to make. When you look at the actual, like, objective facts, not these Trump people who churn out fake and fake realities and hoaxes and so on like that, which is itself really interesting propaganda wise and post truth. But when you look at measured wealth, used to be able to, as a bank teller, you know, buy a house in the seventies. You could you could, you know, as a as a teacher, one teacher in the household, they could raise a family of four. And nowadays, you can't even consider doing that. The way unemployment is, you know, measured is very different than how it was measured in the seventies. It's much more high way higher unemployment, 18% or over depends, if you measure in nineteen seventies terms. So we're all being duped here. Like, you know, this the idea that we marginalize science, we marginalize experts, and we and we we, we slowly over time cook the pot, you know, cook the frog in the pot. And who unless we wake up and create alternatives that are self sustainable or imagine them even, then we're we're headed for in a very in a very dark place. And you can start to see that even with the Republicans, how they're functioning, around this whole election thing. They won't even capitulate to truth. Right? It's interesting to see that. Now imagine with all the money behind them and all the military power behind a regime like that, this is this refuses to acknowledge reality or science and just starts to put people in cages. And already that's happening. Right? You see that on the border in the South southern border. I I mean, when these things torture was all, you know, in the Guantanamo Bay, you had torture. You know, and now that's suddenly legitimated. You know? And and then when Snowden comes out, Assange comes out, and, you know, it reveals truth. And what happens to them. So it's it's not a pretty place. And what I think you need is a kind of psychological muscles that develop a sense of horizontal, connectivity, a consciousness that is decentralized, respecting individual nodes, but also seeing the power that we have is far greater than we can imagine. And I I know that sounds like John Lennon singing imagine all the people and all this kind of jazz. Right? You know, but but there is a power in it. There really is. And if you can just shake off that neoliberal mentality that it's me against the world or it's in fight or flight. And all these psychological problems, all the pharmaceuticals that we're on, you know, that people are on more and more and more, it's not looking really pleasant for humanity in the next bit. And the fire's going I mean, one can keep, you know, a big list that can go on. On. That's true. Sorry. I feel like I'm a preacher or something. I used to be a preacher, actually. So maybe that's I need to

their packages or something like that. Yeah. For a penny. Pay you pay 5¢ more and they the company gets a penny, eventually goes trickles down. It's ridiculous. But you're right. Value is limited.

you know, the the a sense of, you know, a sense that if you're not thinking in those market terms, then either you're a loser and you're gonna be homeless or, you know, you get end up getting depressed. And if you can afford it, then you're on pharmaceuticals. Like, it it just it just seems like alternatives that we have are super limited. I remember in the nineties when I got out of the army, there was a sense of which, like, alternative music was it was really was coming into the mainstream. And, of course, it got gobbled up by the mainstream. Something that if you watch a group like Pearl Jam struggled with with Ticketmaster and all that, they struggle with it, but eventually they fold it. You know, money wins money wins. Unless you can create a culture where you're looking at value in terms of use value, as opposed to exchange value. And it's really interesting how Karl Marx in the beginning of book one of Das Kapital deals with that and talks about, like, once you have exchange value, you start to see people not in terms of, you know, what value they have intrinsically as a human being, but rather the kind of, value that other people will perceive as valuable who have the money. You know, the m there is the is the middle term through which, you know, everything gets, you know, reified and alienated and commodified ultimately, to the point where you internalize that commodification. So it just yeah. I mean, we're heading we're heading in a direction that for me, I couldn't consciously as a professor be in be at a college and asked all my students who are taking the class that I was teaching about, you know, liberating oneself, of overcoming one's own demons, and using intellectual and logical tools to to deploy in a way that can overcome some, you know, some things, some problematics, and ultimately for emancipation. I couldn't, in my own conscience, ask people to go into massive debt, you know, to the I had one student with $300,000 in debt. Right? And they weren't even completed their master's degree yet. And I couldn't rightfully ask people to sit ethically ask them to sit in the class to learn how to emancipate oneself while at the same time going into massive debt. It's a contradiction. And, you know, some people can deal with that, and that's fine. I don't put a blanket statement. If you're a professor at the university, you know, getting paid by the neoliberal, you know, profit making, you know, debt creating scheme, you know, I don't judge you. But for me, as in terms of my own consciousness or conscientiousness, I I couldn't stay there. I had to figure out another way. And GCAS is one of the projects. There's a couple other projects, but GCAS is one of those projects.

Yeah. That's a good question. I mean, it's like you you live in the world but not of the world. There's something like that in in in the bible or something. You, you know, you have to you have to end up paying taxes. You have to end up paying for your platforms that you're that you're putting together, paying for quality assurance measures. So there there is a sense in which you have to earn, you know, funding to keep it going. So that's a reality. And, but the way I think if if you have the business model set up in a way that, you know, has researchers or students contributing tuition funds after we after they graduate, we convert that into ownership shares. So they can start to see at least at the kickoff point. Look. They're investing a couple thousand euros a year, but at the end when they graduate, they're gonna have an a legitimate asset certificate that will grow as we grow. And so, you know, that's an incentive for our faculty. You know, they get one twentieth of a percentage of their percentage of ownership every year. So by the time they can retire, let's say, 60, 55, 60, or 65, whatever, they can they're gonna be able to sell their shares in a way that would afford them, you know, a a a nice size investment. That's the idea anyway. But you do have to have, you know, you do have to have strategies. Like, one of ours is, you know, people, subscribe to our our eSchool, and so that generates funds. You know, our tuition funds help keep us going. We have people who are investing, who are my friends or family members who are investing. So early investment is key. You know, but our our commitment is we don't go into loans. We don't crawl to a bank with the tail between our legs and go, please, mister banker. Please, miss you know? And you remember Pip the scene with Pip and the banker in in the, Charles Dickens. What was that? Oh, not David Copperfield. But in in Great Expectations, where he he could smell the stench of the wealth. Right? And, in fact, I'm in a place in London now where Charles Dickens' father was put into debt prison. Like and that's quite interesting. It's just maybe a ten minute walk from here. But the point is that, you know, we're out of debt, and we we're committed to an ethos that doesn't capitulate as much as possible to centralization. And so far, it's been working. We're this April, it'll be three years. We've grown, amazingly. And, I think the model, you know, one can see the GCAS model. We have, like, 50 enrolled students right now. So it's not big, but it's super high quality and it's intentional. But this model could certainly be scaled in a way that could literally subvert higher education as we know it. I think it's important to be able to think globally, but also be able to focus on the small details in rigorous, analytically sharp ways.

Yes. You do. Yeah. That's great.

No. It's really nice to see your project going. I remember seeing your project on Twitter going blockchain socialist. Now that's cool. But then I immediately thought, oh, gosh. You know, these these these leftists are probably puritanicals and moralists. And if you don't fit into a perfect box, you're, you know and and GECAS doesn't fit into the perfect left wing box, and therefore, you know, I I've I've seen it all. So I was kinda hesitant. And then I think, eventually, either I liked some of your stuff and vice versa, and then eventually, we, you know, started talking, and I really appreciate that. Yeah. Of course. Try to be inclusive.

head head to our website, I think, gcast.ie and, and gcas.iefor Ireland. And, and you could check out videos, learn some learn some stuff, look at our information on the about side of the website, and try out a course or two. I think I I think you'll be if if you like a challenge, you know, like to start thinking, you know, interestingly with different people, it's it's really quite something. So, yeah, I and then you can always drop us an email, you know, myself or Ivana, or others in GECAS. So you can email us at contact@gcast.ie.

Yeah. I really appreciate, I think you what you do here was really great. Thanks so much for your questions. Let's let's keep collaborating and see where this goes.