← Unlimited Hangout with Whitney Webb
Unlimited Hangout with Whitney Webb
The PayPal Presidency Part IV: Teaching Technocracy with John Klyczek
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Welcome to Unlimited Hangout. I'm your host, Whitney Webb. For much of the year, this podcast has been exploring the phenomenon of the PayPal presidency, that is the extremely significant influence of the Paypal mafia and their allies in Silicon Valley on the current Trump administration. From healthcare to finance and beyond. Today we will be taking a look at how big tech, neoconservative think tanks and the Trump administration are shaping current education policy, including the so called school choice movement and the promised dismantling of the Department of Education that seem at first glance to be about reducing federal control over education. However, the deeper reality is anything but. Other education policies we will be interrogating today include efforts by the current administration to control anti war protests on campuses under the guise of combating quote, unquote antisemitism, as well as how this effort and other potential future efforts to control speech in classrooms and on campuses could soon be aided by the growing importance of the fintech industry on education funding. We will also touch on how AI analytics of students learning metrics and other data harvested by Big Tech are being used to steer and determine children's futures. Joining me to discuss these topics and more is John Kleezak. John has a Master's in English and and has taught college rhetoric and research argumentation for over a decade. He is the author of the book School World Order and is a contributor to several publications including Unlimited Hangout. Today we will be focusing on John's recent pieces for Unlimited Hangout on education policy. The first entitled Trump Ed 2025 School Choice Corporatization, Social Impact Finance and the dismantling of the Department in Education. And the most recent being from Project 2025 to the PayPal program residency school choice, FinTech for a blockchain, Social Credit Economy. Thanks for joining me today John, and welcome back to Unlimited Hangout.
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It's great to be here. Whitney, thanks for having me back.
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Of course. My pleasure. So a lot of your recent work on education for Unlimited Hangout has focused on the groups behind the so called school choice movement. And school choice sounds like a good thing, just looking at the term superficially. So why do you believe this movement is hiding ulterior motives and who benefits?
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Well, I mean, you know, the reason why I think that it's not a great thing was many, many years back. I mean, it really stems from the research of my mentor, Charlotte Thompson Izerbeat, who worked in the with the Ronald Reagan administration. She was a senior policy advisor in the Department of Education and she blew the whistle on something called Project Best that's basic education skills through technology. It was a program to set up public private partnerships between big tech companies, Department of Education, other local education agencies in order to set up basically operant conditioning through computerized education. And I've written a few pieces at Unlimited Hangout, sort of tracing the history of that and how it ties into something called UNESCO study 11 and basically how that set the groundwork for all things global ed tech and fourth Industrial revolution. But during her time at the, the Department of Education under Reagan, she was also a liaison with a task force on private sector initiatives. And during her time there she's, you know, part of that private sector initiative was the school choice movement. And as the liaison she basically asked the question, isn't this like corporate fascism? And they're all kind of like, gee Charlotte, we, we didn't think about it like that. And then, you know, they moved her to another office at that point. Point. But you know, is the way that she pointed it out from day one, it's essentially, you know, she wouldn't use stakeholder capitalism, was the, wouldn't even have phrase she used. But it's public private partnerships. It's the merger of corporations in the state. That's, you know, sort of Mussolini's definition of fascism. Yeah, it's probably an apocryphal quote, but colloquially we understand that to be his definition corporate fascism. And today we would call that, you know, stakeholder capitalism. Right. It's the mixture of the public and private on a, on a global fail. So basically it's stakeholder capitalism for schools. It's going to subsidize private companies with public tax dollars and it's also going to remove any sort of civil process. Right. So you know, you're not going to have a local school board. Two parts of the school choice movement more broadly is the charter schooling movement, which is pretty much locked in. So charter schools are private corporations that are subsidized, a couple of tax dollars. But then this next round, school choice is basically these different funding mechanisms. So you know, you might just call them all vouchers colloquially. I think part of the reason why they've come up with these different terms like education savings accounts and scholarship granting organizations or tax credited scholarships is largely to kind of muddy the waters, make it harder to figure out what, what they're doing. Now there are some, there are, are some nuanced differences between how the money is distributed and access, between a, you know, a traditional voucher, an ESA and a tax credit. But basically what they all have in common is you're taking public tax dollars. Instead of subsidizing a school or a, you know, a charter school, private corporation, you're just, you're subsidizing a basket of. Could be a charter school, could be a private school, could be a religious school, or could just be any range of edtech products and services, you know, including now they're adding into it therapy. So like mental health services as well, that, you know, could be also serviced with different technologies we might talk about. So ultimately. Right, all that, all of that together indicates that, you know, with the charter, as I mentioned, with the charter schools, there's no, they, they don't have an elected board. Right. And the same thing with, if you take those, those vouchers or those ESA monies and you purchase, you know, your tech products, I mean, essentially you're being serviced again by a company that doesn't have an elected board. So whether it's the charter schooling system or the sort of neo voucher system, the school choice movement, again, right, it's basically destroying the public sector. It's privatizing everything. And then it's also cutting off any, any routes that we would have had towards any court of civic recourse, right, through an elected school board. So those, those are all the, the bad things about school choice.
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So in that kind of scenario, what happens to the kids that can't go to these private institutions that are like the bulk of public school students?
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Right, that's the thing. I mean, and that's like, if you really think about the situation, right? So, so the pitch is that, oh, fun schools or fun students, not schools, Right. And the idea is that, well, how is it fair that, you know, if you're stuck in this zip code that you should be forced to have to go to that school? You should have an option if you want. And so the pitch, you know, like people like Corey DeAngelis, the people that are really selling this, if you, if you listen to the buzzwords and the sloganeering, it almost sounds like these, these students in these impoverished zip codes are going to be able to take their voucher money and go to like some elite private school. Okay, let me.
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That's the sales pitch. Yeah.
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They're nowhere nearby. Okay. So the first problem is transportation. If you're in a very impoverished neighborhood, right. It might be a food desert and also, you know, have problems with transportation. Now you can use some of your voucher money for transportation, but then you're not going to have as much left over for the tuition. If you could even get to that school. The other thing is the amount that they're going to give you with these various ESAs, vouchers, scholarships, et cetera, wouldn't cover the entire tuition anyways. So where's the, where is all that money going to go for the average student that actually, you know, really wants to get out of the stuck position they're in with whatever, you know, with their public school, with their so called government school, you know, the main thing that's going to be their option is maybe there's a charter school nearby or maybe they could go to another public school in a nearby district. But most likely most of that's going to go to Ed Tech products and services that can be serviced online right in their home. Right. So basically turning your home into the government school because with that vouchers comes the government regulations. Right. So a lot of the other pitch was that, oh, you're going to get rid of the woke stuff and you know, during lockdowns, everybody, you know, that didn't want their experimental gene therapy, you know, they exited the schools thinking that, right, this whole, they're going to build this homeschooling co op pod movement and they're going to sort of create a parallel structure. Well, that could be the case, but it's. If you take that voucher money, as I've showed in the first article in this series at the state levels that the federal pitches are based on, all of those come with some sort of strings attached. And some of them include you have to be up on all your health code regulations, which would mean you'd have to have your experimental gene therapy. And so all of that to say that, right, the, the money that you're going to get, right, is going to be largely, is going to be used for bringing in government regulations into a quote, unquote homeschool environment and also bringing in big tech to data mine the students in your home as well. And so, you know, that's, that's what those children are going to get with those vouchers.
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Okay, So a few months ago, Katherine Boyle, who's a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, which is a VC firm that's very much in the PayPal mafia orbit via Marc Andreessen and other figures, told an audience at the neocon think tank, the American Enterprise Institute a few months ago that quote, technology is the backbone of the education choice movement, meaning school choice. So how are Silicon Valley quote unquote libertarians and some of the people in Silicon Valley backing these pandemic pods and kind of these, this parallel idea of a parallel system, at least, you know, publicly. And how are they teaming up with neoconservatives to sort of shape the role of technology in US schools, whether it's public schools or some of these schools that you know, you know, the Silicon Valley people are sending their kids to.
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Yeah, well it's interesting to note that, I mean right there you have a connection between an executive at Andreessen Horowitz and also one of the Koch backed state policy network think tanks known as the American Enterprise Institute. And one of their representatives is actually one of the authors of Project 2025. And the Project 2025 education section does call for. They wanted to transform a certain portion of Title 1 funds into ESAs, right, ESA vouchers. And then they also wanted to push this ECCA bill that would basically get tax credited scholarships authorized. Now they didn't pass that, but the quote unquote big beautiful bill did ram through something that actually kind of combines the worst parts of both of those bills. So like the scholarships for the ECCA was just supposed to go to for tuition for schools. But what they have now is this tax credited scholarship program so they can use it for a basket of curricular materials, educational therapies, personal tutors, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. And so just that's just one little example of sort of where like the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tech Bros sort of overlap with sort of the old school neocon Koch brothers think tank consortium. And so a couple ways that that sort of the Silicon Valley arm of this, this partnership is pushing sort of ed technocracy. So one we could look at would be the fintech angle and the other one would be the actual educational technology products that would be funded by the fintech product. So in general what we have is they want to service these vouchers, scholarships, education savings accounts, et cetera. They want to service these through these digital wallets. And so you have a range of various companies to do this. So one's called Class Wallet, another is called Odyssey, another is Merit International, another is Student First Technologies. And then you have another one called SAP ariba. So I can sort of break down some of the Silicon Valley venture capital connections to some of these companies. Then we can talk about how they, how they are used to facilitate the funding of the EdTech products through those, through those voucher systems. So Class Wallet's been around for a while. It's been funded by Lazard Partners and Lazard Incorporated is a partner with the World Economic Forum, Lazard has people that have worked for Lazar that are notable being Nathaniel Rothschild, who's actually a young global leader of the wef. And another one would be Vernon Jordan. Vernon Jordan being a close sort of an advisor to Bill Clinton. I believe he's the one that.
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He took Clinton to Bilderberg, didn't he?
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Yeah, yeah, I believe he's the one that brought him to Bilderberg. Yeah. And he's trilateral as well. And Clinton again is world. World Economic Forum.
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So.
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So I note all that because to keep. I want to note these World Economic Forum connections because this is right. All the, the based right wing people that think that Trump is like somehow this foil to. To the. The wef. I mean, only in, in so far as it's a dialectic, but not an actual.
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Oh, absolutely, yeah. Mark Goodwin and I were saying that like January of last year, that basically, you know, everything that they had tried to sell through the public sector during the COVID era, they were going to swirl it away and try and market it through the private sector and from the right instead of the left.
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Yeah.
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After they demolished trust with COVID you know, the, the World Economic Forum's goal after that, openly stated, was rebuild trust. And how do you do that? Well, you, you build up the opposition or what looks like the opposition and you sell the same policies through the opposition. Right?
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Yeah, yeah. Like Andreessen Horowitz is. I think they're part of the WEF's like blockchain digital Council.
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Would not surprise you.
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Yeah, I got a screenshot of the actual profile up there in, in the article. You know that SAP, Araba company, that's a WEF partner or the, the parent company is. Okay. And then that company partners with IBM and Amazon. Both WEF partners. Peter Thiel, wef. But yeah, so, so other, some of these other companies, fintech companies that are facilitating these digital wallets. One would be Odyssey. Now Odyssey is funded by Andreessen Horowitz. Andreessen Horowitz also funds Merit International. And Odyssey also won the Yass Prize for what they call Stop Education. So it's sustainable, transformative, outstanding and permissionless education. And Jeff Yass, another billionaire that is also supported by Jean Allen center for Educational Reform. Cer, I believe I got those words right in the acronym. And she's somebody that's partnered with Bill Bennett to push, I don't know if it was voucher scholarships or esa, one of those programs. And Bill Bennett was the guy that set up first online charter school. Former Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan after Charlotte left and K12 Inc. Basically, you know, brought in sort of the, this online corporate charter school industry which also provided the online platforms through which you integrate all these other applications that we might mention. So some of these would be like adaptive learning course where like Clever and Newton, these are both funded by Peter Thiel. Basically this is the modern digital version of B.F. skinner's teaching machine. So it's using operant conditioning algorithms that basically trains and trains students for performative compliance. You have something like Course Hero and Simbo Lab. So Course Hero basically platform symbol app. Symbolab is more adaptive learning stuff that's been funded by Craft Ventures, which is Sachs's venture capital firm. Andreessen Horowitz has funded Udacity and a company called Effectiva, which I've written about going all the way back to my book. Basically it specializes in what they call social emotional learning. So the adaptive learning course where is going to data mine students thinking algorithms or behavioral algorithms. The social emotional learning stuff is going to basically data mine their effective or emotional algorithms. And that's going to be done through like wearables. So either EEG wearables data brainwaves or EKG wearables. The data mine heart rates.
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Well, HHS has recently announced that they're all behind the, the mass use of wearables and that it's a major priority for them. So having it become a priority also for education policy, I guess that means they're going to be, they're going to try and make them be everywhere soon.
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I wrote a piece once upon a time in I think Natural News was the only people that put it up. And it's called Precision Medicine Initiative. There's two, it's a two part series. I can't remember the subtitle. It's the second one. And the second one I looked at a guy by the name of Eric Dishman. And Eric Dishman had. This was the head of this thing called all of Us. And it was this project like basically. So precision medicine is where they want to basically make personalize your medicine just like they want to personalize your learning. So that means AI analytics, but in particular for medicine. Right, Analytics. Extrapolating correlations between your, your DNA, your actual genes, genetics.
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Yeah.
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And your environment as well. So what Dishman was known for before he got on the all of Us experiment was smart homes for people with Alzheimer's. Okay. And so basically, basically what he. The project was to come up with, it's sort of an epigenetic study. So it's to take A look at, like, what sort of genetic predispositions do you have? Data? Mine. What you're doing all day, what are you eating, how many steps do you get right. Your activities, and see what correlations between your activities in the environment might trigger. Right. The pathological expression of a particular gene, et cetera. Right. And so I've said, I said it a long time ago. And I was, you know, I speculated, I said, you know, I feel like, you know, Bobby, I, I was, you know, gave me some hope during the, during the lockdown years. But when I sort of looked into some of his investments, I was. And they, and they let him in there and then they put Jim o' Neill in behind him. I'm like, we're gonna see wearables all over people. I bet you we're gonna see the Dishman product. And I guess I was right.
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Oh, yeah, totally. Well, it goes back to what I was sort of saying about the, the rebrand of the quote, unquote, opposition during the COVID era. A lot of those people were the big names, record neocons or neoconservative adjacent types, like during COVID I mean, you had people like Frank Gaffney creating websites like Stop Vaccine Passports and stuff. And Gaffney used to work under Richard Pearl, if I'm not mistaken. I mean, he's like a well known neoconservative figure. And Pearl helped create Palantir, among other things, which is, you know, I mean, the more you look at these Silicon Valley, quote unquote, libertarian types that have been really elevated in the last election cycle or so by figures like Trump and also like in Argentina of, of Malay, a lot of them have a surprising amount of overlap with neoconservatives who I, you know, have at least, you know, in terms of what their policy solutions are for things. And I, I think that's, you know, neocons used to be so hated in the US and now this very successful rebranding and built rebuilding of trust has allowed them to basically, you know, continue pursuing, you know, their policies under, you know, different names, basically. And so I think that's why it's very interesting that it's also happening in education among, among other areas. But I think it's been a very successful rebrand. And it's not exclusive to, you know, where these guys most often operate, which is, you know, finance or social media or some of the things we most, you know, are most publicly associated with Silicon Valley. You know, it's, it's really a partnership that is, is Permeating through everything and is, is very bad. And a lot of these, I mean, I think the wearable thing is definitely something to watch. I know in the past you've covered it pretty extensively for unlimited hangout where it sort of fits in with the education stuff. But this push to have it be in, in healthcare and I'm sure there'll be, you know, pushes to have it, you know, for other reasons too. At some point, you know, it's, it's gonna get, it's gonna get weird. And also a lot of these people that are known, you know, Silicon Valley billionaires that are known for funding a lot of this suspect stuff in healthcare and also education, like Bill Gates, if I'm not mist. If I, If I remember correctly, he like funded a wearable that was being piloted in New York State for students where like, if they weren't paying attention, it would like give them a light shock. It's like a shock collar basically, but like it's on your wrist or something like that. I mean, just absolutely. I don't know it. I mean, I have like a seven year old in, in, you know, basically kind of a public school here and she like gets distracted. I mean, she's just an easily distracted kid. I can't imagine her having to go through that kind of stuff at school or like most kids, you know.
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Yeah, I, I know what you're talking about. It was a galvanic skin response monitor they called gsr. Like through skin conduct, supposed to be able to infer some sort of the emotional intensity that you're experiencing, but they have to kind of correlate it with other, other metrics. I, I don't know about the, the shock part, but I do know that Amazon, which I also wrote about in my book, did have something like that. I don't know if it was a shock, but it's like a, it's a very disturbing vibration, I guess. You know, like it, like it doesn't.
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I think that's what it was. It was, it was that. But it basically came across as being like, you know, a nice version of a shot collar. I, I probably shouldn't have said that in the sense that it's not exactly accurate, but I think the, the idea of like giving you a, a jolt that's non painful or whatever to, you know, because the algorithm decided that you're too distracted from learning. I don't know, we don't need that kind of stuff for our kids, obviously. I mean, it's just so bonkers.
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It's entirely Skinnerian.
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Right.
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So, I mean, I'll break it down for people that aren't familiar, but, you know, it's basically a very simple system of punishments and rewards with four quadrants. So positive and negative punishment, reward, positive and negative, just means adding or removing a stimulus. Okay. And so the idea that is that, you know, Skinner basically believed he wrote a book called Beyond Freedom and Dignity. So for him, there is no bad students. A bad student is just the student whose environment has not conditioned them to respond appropriately. Right. And so it's the best mix of reward and punishment through stimulus response is going to get the student to so called learn. Right. Or in other words, to be programmed the way that, that you want that student to be programmed. Now, if you believe that humans are basically just little widgets in a supply chain, I guess that's a great way to make things efficient. But if you believe that human beings are agents that have a, you know, a soul or at least a consciousness. Yeah, it's pretty horrific.
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Yeah. To say the least. Well, where to go from here? I guess in talking about all of these things, it comes to my mind how Trump has been pledging to make the US the world capital of crypto and artificial intelligence. And obviously that's going to have an impact on his administration's education policy, and it arguably already is. So you sort of already broached the top topic of fintech and education, but we didn't really talk about crypto in the sense of the recent passage of the Genius act, which is, according to Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, going to unleash billions of stablecoins around the world. And obviously that's going to affect some of these things you brought up earlier, like education savings accounts and scholarship granting organizations, but also AI. So there was this recent executive order from Trump, I believe in April, and it was called Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth, which is part of, according to the order, quote, ensuring the United States remains a global leader in this, meaning AI technological revolution. So what are some of the impacts of these policies on education thus far, and where do you see this ultimately going?
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Well, okay, so that AI executive order is largely focused on training, basically like stem, so basically making students literate for the artificial intelligence era more so than it is about using AI to teach students. Now, obviously, you know, they're gonna, it's gonna be a recursive sort of reciprocal relationship there. I didn't mention this in my article, but the American Federation of Teachers, who I have written about at Unlimited Hangout, and I, and I traced the history of their involvement, you know, not only with Rockefellers and the Trilateral Commission, but, you know, big tech companies like IBM and the whole edtech industry. They recently, Randy Weingarten, who is part of a global union federation called Education International with all sorts of ties to the World Economic forum. They, the AFT just announced that they're going. Is it like 500,000? A big chunk of the AFT unionized teachers are going to be trained to integrate open AI. I think there's two other, I think Anthropic is in there and then the third one's either Google or Microsoft. And then she also announced specifically a partnership with the World Economic Forum to directly partner with them to set curriculum. So it's interesting to note that OpenAI and Anthropic were also to the AI companies that were supposed to be part of this AI.gov platform that now that it's actually been launched, doesn't seem to be launching the same things that the archived website had previously announced, but two of them were the same companies. We know that OpenAI is also part of the Stargate project. So this is sort of indicating to us that we're basically setting up a centralized Panopticon while everything else is going to be so called decentralized. Right. We're still, we're going to have as much as it looks like Open AI and Palantir and these different companies are competing. If you go through my article, you'll see that the portfolios of Sachs and Thiel and Andreessen, the, the pr, a large portion of their portfolios overlap like a lot of these AI companies.
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Absolutely. Yeah.
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So I mean, that's, you know, indicates to me it's all part of the same sort of ecosystem. Okay. And you know, they got that, that recent article about Palantir's master database. I mean, maybe I'm, you know, maybe I'm a stickler for being overly precise, but technically not making a natural database. It's just the case that it basically has contracts with essentially every federal agency. And then there's an executive order that was recently Trump issued to basically remove any barriers to sharing information across agency. Right. So therefore you can see how all these different AI companies are basically have the green light to share all this information. This is going to, this is why, you know, the, the deep, the so called decentralization part is super important because then we can actually have personalized profiles on everybody.
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B
Right.
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And that personalized social credit profile is going to aggregate your HHS Dishman wearable data with your AI school choice voucher, FinTech EdTech data, right? And it's going to give you career pathways and maybe mental health services based on those, those analytics. And so that's sort of the, that's why the fintech is super important to this, to this process. Now they pitch it as well. Look, if you got, if you have an education savings account for each individual student and the education savings account can be used to purchase, you know, a huge array of products, right? This is a lot of accounting to make sure there's no fraud and waste and abuse and stuff like that, right? So how are we going to solve that problem? Oh well if we can have programmable money and we can have these third party digital wallet companies service it, basically that's supposed to solve the accounting problems and the waste, fraud and abuse problem. But what it also is, basically it's putting in the building blocks for a tokenized system in which, right, the monies that you get are programmed only for particular types of school choice products, services, et cetera. And then based on how you perform, you'll either get new tokens or you'll get less tokens or maybe, you know, you and those tokens can be either be used for maybe career pathways training or mental health services. But all, all of this is basically a way to not only track and trace all the data, right in terms of learning data, health data etc, but also to control how it can be used and sort of make it like you know, a, a global or a, a Skinner box on steroids, right? Where like everything like if punishments and rewards we just mentioned, like maybe you have a wearable, right? Another one that might, you know, like just peer pressure, okay. Back in the day maybe it was a detention or a gold star for punishments and rewards. Well, you know, one of the, probably one of the strongest incentives is money, right? So if you take away people's money, right, As a, you know, that's a pretty good way to sort of can condition people to behave accordingly. So that, so that's why this, the fintech system is it's integral to funnel people, to forcibly funnel them into these EdTech products and services to data mine data track for social credit. But then also right, this is important to streamline this new stable coin economy that's you know, also being set up to basically prop up the dying dollar, right?
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B
So bringing up stable coins here. So the Genius act, I mean, you know, since it's passed, treasury has been asking for comment about various pillars that are required to implement the Genius act and enable, you know, the bulk of Americans to hold digital dollar stable coins as opposed to digital dollars. And I don't know, a Bank of America account or something like that. And one of those pillars is surprise, surprise, digital id. And so questions are being fielded about that. So it seems likely that, you know, with stablecoins, you know, if they move to only fund these wallets, you know, these digital wallets for education funding, they only will work with stablecoins at some point. It seems more likely than not, then in order to finance an education with these savings accounts or granting organizations or whatever, you'll have to have a digital id.
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A
Yeah, well, and one of the companies I think I mentioned, Merit International, this is another one that's funded by Andreessen Horowitz. It's also funded by another venture capital firm called Alumni Ventures, which shares common investments with Andreessen Horowitz and also with Peter Thiel's Founders fund. Another company that funds Merit International is Experian, which is one of the big three credit reporting agencies. And I remember during lockdowns that in Illinois they were supposed to be somehow managing the databases that were going to have your vaccine passport. And so, you know, so when I see a credit company basically allowing me to come to work based on my health records, I see like social credit. I mean, essentially that's a step in that direction. Right. One other company that funds it, or rather I should say it's another venture capital institution is Stand Together. Venture Labs. Stand Together is another one of these SPN Coke backed think tanks which is, which, you know, again the SPN State Policy Network and its consortium of think tanks being adjacent with and behind the development of Project 2025 neocons.
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B
Right. I mean the Koch brothers and American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage foundation of Project 2025 infamy. Right.
- [34:58]
A
Yeah, that's. Yes, this is the neocon arm. And I'll tie that into sort of because. Because it's. It was interesting to find that. Right. We think of the sort of this PayPal mafia is like this Silicon Valley arm maybe sort of maybe like a so called radical libertarian arm that you know, maybe boulders with the neocon. No, I know, that's why I use so called and ra. Yeah, right, but. Right. Sort of the Cato type. Right. Which again, that's a Coke funded institute, you know, before they start. It was founded by the Koch brothers before they broke away from Rothbard. But you know that, that so called libertarian arm has always in this sort of, you know, old school neocon. Yeah. You know, they would maybe get together but you know, you know, maybe, maybe didn't always agree on stuff, but if you, if you go back far enough, you know, feel and David Sachs, you know, starting the Stanford Review as basically this push back against Jesse Jackson's rainbow push coalition and then later come up with this book, the diversity myth, which just becomes like this, you know, pillar against, you know, so called all things woke. Like they've been sort of, you know, I guess rubbing elbows with or also fueling some of the culture wars that the, the neocons have propped up just as much as they've been funding this futurist arm of this pseudo libertarian cato arm of basically the right wing establishment. But I had set all that up on Merit International to say that one of the things that they specialize in is a digital identity ecosystem to verify their purchases. Okay. Now if you look at another one of these companies called Student First Technologies, which partners with MasterCard, they have their platform which quote unquote empowers stakeholders, uses something called Quiniq, artificial intelligence, human in the loop, machine learning, AI. A third company that I mentioned, SAP, Ariba, right. They do all sorts of fintech services but they'll do blockchain AI and they also do ESG monitoring. So between those three companies, what you have is digital wallets, digital identity AI, ESG monitoring and blockchain. So you know, they're not, there's not one company that's, I guess SAP kind of is, but you know that it largely is like servicing other companies so that it's up to the company how much of their product they want to integrate together. Technically they could give you all of it. But the point is this digital wallet industry which has been funded by, right, all these PayPal mafia venture capital people backed by these cokeback neocon people across the board, they are all leaning towards either digital identity AI or blockchain platform. Eventually all this stuff is going to converge and when you do, you're going to have a system in which, right, the government takes taxes, sends it to a digital wallet company. The digital wallet company looks at your AI, your analytics for your ed tech learning. It's going to give you the, the money, it's going to tell you what you're eligible to buy. It's going to, the AI is going to analyze not just your learning analytics on the EdTech product, but also it's going to correlate like which types of voucher payouts and correlated with which kinds of outcomes, right? And so there's going to be predictive analytics on the edtech and there's going to be predictive analytics on the fintech and, and then the blockchain part is the one that's going to basically lock you into a permanent profile ledger and it's going to program so that you can write to restrict how you get to use your coins until you, you know, comply with your, get your social credit up to, to use them in a different way. Basically.
- [38:45]
B
This is turning out to be a real mess. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. I, I haven't really heard. Well, I haven't really been looking extensively. But you would think since digital ID was such a big issue during the COVID era with the people that now form a large part of Trump's base, there'd be a lot of uproar. Perhaps, maybe that's hoping too much about, about this, whether it's coming through, you know, the Treasury Department or, you know, education policy and these things. And it just really, really doesn't seem like it's happening at all. I mean, it's not really surprising if you were paying attention and noticed all the Silicon Valley people and some of the worst people in the crypto industry line up behind Trump pretty early on. And I don't know, I'm unsettled by it and I think, you know, I was thinking the other day, I don't want to get on too much of a sidebar here, but I was trying to figure out something because along with the Genius act, you know, it was passed during the so called Crypto week, there was another piece of legislation passed that was called the Clarity Act. And in there there were a few blockchains that they like singled out as they gave them the mature labeling and they classified all these blockchains based on their maturity and only three were in sort of this top tier and it was blockchain. I think the second one was Ethereum, which had been around the longest arguably. But then they put another one called Cardano there when it doesn't belong there. In, in my opinion, I think in a lot of other people's opinion. But it's interesting because Cardano was created by Charles Hoskinson, who was a co founder of Ethereum, but he's also, you know, the Cardano guy. And Cardano, if you look into them at all. Well, not only are they teamed up with the extremely Epstein funded scientist Ben Goertzel very extensively, who's behind Sophia the Robot and all of this stuff, but they also did a digital ID for education for all Ethiopian school children. And so I wonder why was Cardano Put in the Clarity act and given this boost. Well, they have this whole, you know, digital ID platform for school children and basically for, you know, I guess the general public already ready to go. So if you need a digital ID on a blockchain out the door to make the genius act stuff work, why not sort of king make, you know, something like Cardano, which by the way Hoskinson was a big donor to Trump last, last cycle. Why not sort of single out, you know, the blockchain that you want to use for digital id why you're signal signaling out the ones that you want to use for a lot of the, you know, stablecoin crap too.
- [41:38]
A
You know the other thing about like so with Class Wallet it got a really big boom during lockdowns because it was, it was a lot of states. I, I can't remember the particular number it's in the article but you know, many states and I think some federal, I think maybe some like FEMA projects, etc if they, if they're not doing fema, HUD and HHS yet they are set up to do it. But they definitely were distributing some of the CARES money and cares, you know, under cares there was like, like the gear and here it's an esf. I don't, I think it's CARES and esf. But that was how it sort of got its foot in, in the door. I mean it had been around like that's really how it like locked itself in as like one of the go to's for this fintech stuff. So I mean that alone you would think, right, these, you know, the people that were against lockdowns, you might look at something like, wow, maybe this all of a sudden the, the people that are, you know, supposed to be against this are basically propping up. The company that, you know, took off during lockdowns is maybe, maybe a red flag. But in the long term and this is kind of speculative, but I, I'm pretty sure, I'm, I'm pretty sure this is the case, you know, and shout out to Mark Goodwin who took his time to help me make sure that I understand some of the financial stuff better. And one of the things I was asking about was like, you know, like what exactly is the definition of a security? Right. Because they were trying to figure out these digital assets, should they be like a security or, or not commodity. Yeah, right. And so he, and basically we explained it was security is basically expected future profits and not on just like the appreciation of a, of a basic, you know, asset like a house would. But it's like you're buying of the. An increased value that is expected in the future that is not just part of its, you know, natural valuation as an asset. So if you think about, like, I think where they're going to go is basically securitize human beings and like, own them with, like, human capital. Yeah, Human capital development. And I'll tell you about a company that's already taking some of my tutoring hours at the end of this thing. It's called upsway. And it ties into this because. So basically this is, this is how I see it. So where's the expected or the future value? Well, let's see if we can get student X to reach education goals Y through career pathway Z. Right. That will produce so much money in the economy because they'll get this job and they'll produce these products, and it'll also save us the money that we would have had to spend on retraining. And maybe the student needs, maybe they need, you know, they fall out of the. Fall through the cracks and they need to have mental health or maybe they become delinquent, they go to jail. Right? So. And I've seen metrics at like, AEI where they actually are talking about impact investments in this manner. They're quantifying education outcomes in terms of, you know, either money's lost in those ways, right. Student falls through cracks, goes into, you know, you got to take care of them with health care or prison or. Right. What do they produce if they're successful? So you quantify that algorithmically, right? With this, with this, all these AI analytics and supply chain dynamics. And then basically the, you know, you send that information out to these companies. Maybe it's one of the SGOs and the SGO, which, right. A lot of them are focused on impact investing, social impact investing. So they look around and they go, they go, okay, well, I'll sponsor this student. They've got some decent analytics. I'll give them these tokens through this digital wallet to buy these products, because I know these products are the most likely to make these outcomes. And if they meet these outcomes, then I get my money back. And potentially if they exceed those outcomes, I get a profit if I don't. The way something like pay for success. Impact investing is basically a company puts the money up front. And if for some reason the student doesn't meet any outcomes, then the government doesn't subsidize it, the government eats it. But if they do meet those, then they get the money back with interest. And so basically, what you'll have in that situation is basically you'll have these human capital bonds, you'll have companies, quote unquote, sponsoring students or in other words, they'll be like, you know, this would be a legit techno feudal system in which, right, you'll have these feudal big tech overlords that basically, you know, own these digital surfs on these blockchain digital wallets and they'll be forced to go through their Skinnerian operating conditioning programs through whatever wearables or screen based AI platforms they got. And that'll, that'll all be geared towards them sort of, of stabilizing or growing the global supply chain. Economics.
- [46:23]
B
This reminds me actually some of the stuff we're talking about of this policy that Javier Millay promoted I think a year ago and I'm not sure what progress he's had on it since it was announced, but I think it's kind of fitting to go over in some of these because of some of the things you brought up and also because this, this shift in dialectics from public to private and whatever that we were talking about earlier. I think Javier Millay was absolutely the poster child for that. He's like beta testing kind of for all these policies, you know, so like he was the first one to be like, I'm going to eliminate the Department of Education. And now Trump, you know, has made that part of his policy. But you know, and Malay's also, you know, been like public education is not a right and all of all of these things and this sort of promise to sort of take the state out of schooling entirely. But what if has he proposed in its place? Right? And so the thing that he sort of proposed as a replacement for public schools was basically having Facebook come in with their, or Meta, you know, their parent company come in. And he, his quote is, so MAA has, has a whole system set up for the formation of human capital, for the formation of the people so that they can set up a career and said that he, you know, planned, planted this idea with his minister who's in charge of this stuff. And we're going to start making the contacts with the people at Maida so we can implement an artificial intelligence plan for the formation or you know, the schooling of our, of our kids basically. And so I'm kind of thinking back to what we sort of broached earlier about school choice, how a lot of it leaves kind of like public, public school kids behind and sort of this idea of human capital and where it's going and you know, the idea of oh, we need more efficiency and like rightly identifying that there's a lot broken with the education system, but also, you know, offering a solution that's arguably just as bad, if not worse. And in this case, you know, he's having, talking about Facebook AI coming in and deciding basically what you laid out, this idea of career pathways for kids and having AI, you know, be teaching kids from the beginning all the way through, having, you know, preparing them for a career that the AI determines essentially. And I, you know, I would like that not to happen in the US but it seems like that, you know, as you've been pointing out, that kind of is where it's ultimately going. And I'm also thinking about, you know, so, you know, if Facebook were to do that in the US and you have, you know, all of these fintech wallets, you know, to fund education or whatever, and a lot of them are set up by, you know, entities to like Peter Thiel or other people in the PayPal mafia. So what better way to have, you know, those companies that are tied to people like Teal manage your funds and then Facebook, that was put on the map by Peter Thiel who was on the board for decades and I'm pretty sure he still has stock in it. You know, they're the ones that are being fund funded by their funded fintech company. And then, you know, I mean, it's just like a. Passing the, the money around the same people basically, at the end of the day is kind of what it's starting to look like and doesn't really seem to be about, you know, education. It seems to be a lot more about profit motives and quote, unquote, efficiency. But efficiency under the paradigm of like, you know, humans are hackable, programmable animals and this is how we can, you know, more efficiently, efficiently milk them for profit. I don't know if I'm, I don't know if you agree with all that. I kind of just went on a deal. No, I.
- [50:18]
A
100%. I mean, look, it's. And it's even, you know, I had conversations with my socialist friends not too long ago and you know, they talk about profit and capital. I think it's a little bit past. I think we need to go a little bit further than that. It's really just about supply chain management systems, dynamic control and creating a cybernetic control grid. I mean, because at this point, like, I mean, I don't see how the very notion of profit with when everything becomes automated and basically the human beings become again, these human capital bonds Essentially you own everything, you know what I mean? Now it's just controlling the slaves and keeping the wheels turning as smoothly as possible. Okay. I think that if you look at the history of the Macy Cybernetics Conferences, these are set up in 40s and 50s. Well, this is basically the exact same time that some of the first venture capital firms are set up. Now what did they do at Macy.
- [51:13]
B
Cybernetics Conference with military involvement?
- [51:17]
A
Exactly. And they laid out right, what they said. Basically two things. The, the theoretical implications of how the feedback loop. Computerized feedback loops. That's right. It's transmitting data. Analyzing the way that the response to that data, taking that new data, that response data and then adjusting the, the transmission in accordance with. Right. The feedback. Right. And you could do this to map right. The human psyche cognitively what they called the conditioned reflex, but also the subconscious which they called I think mesmerism or hypnosis. But it's basically the Freudian, the psychoanalytic, the two parts of the behavioral school of psychology and the psychoanalytic school. So you take that, they understand theoretically that this is possible. Then you get these venture capital firms set up, they get Moore's Law laid out and they basically know how long it's going to take for the transition transistors to exponentially grow or be improved until they can actually process all the data. Right. And so they, and they, they look okay, we have however many decades and what do we have to do in the meantime? Well, we set up these venture capital firms, some of them like NQ Tel, directly set up by the ca, others like Security Coya, like you know, all, you know, saturated with CIA connections. And basically what do they do? They throw they for that time period, they look around to see which programmers are coming up with something that might be promising or otherwise useful. They throw money at it. If it doesn't go anywhere, no biggie. If it does, they pull it into their control group grid. And so basically in the meantime they have to do two things between the Macy Cybernetics Conference and sort of the climax of the fruition of Moore's Law. And that is control the development of the technology through venture capital and also manipulate the culture in ways that people will accept this or otherwise be unaware of it. And that's your sort of this right wing, left wing cultural war stuff. And so I mean I think that all of that together and as you know, you know, as you, as you've done, you know, good research on show that, you know, companies like Palantir and Facebook basically were Lifelong and total information awareness. Right. Which came out of post 911 era. And we can argue that that was sort of this inflection point where like we were able to start to sort of integrate some of these technologies. Right. We went from the theoretical and sort of the pilot phases and right. We. And at that point, right. With the national security threat we had sort of reasons to onboard this stuff. So I mean if you just look at the last, you know, 60 years, it looks like it was all very much all everything converging not accidentally towards basically creating this control grid. I do want to note something you mentioned about Venezuela. I just thought it was really interesting and that is that, you know, so. So Charlotte wrote before she wrote the deliberate dumbing down of America, she had wrote a shorter piece called Back to Basics Reform or OBE Skinnerian International Curriculum. It's a short little thing she used to rail about how she said I wouldn't have had to write the big book that's deliberate dumbing down if the conservatives wouldn't have boycotted me on the little book. And that was a big thing she used to tell me too say, you know why you don't get as much traction as you should? She says, because of me and because of school choice. Those are the two things. And in this piece she mentions here, this is According to March April 1981 issue of Human Intelligence International newsletter. Critical thinking skills research is taking place within the United Nations Educational, Scientific, Cultural Organization, the Office of Economic Cooperation and Development and the World bank, which plans on increasing the bank's international lending for education training to about 900 million a year. The Department of Education, that's the U.S. department of Education's National Institute of Education. Possibly in response to a meeting Luis Alberto Machado, the Venezuelan Minister for Human Intelligence, had with former Secretary of Education Terrell Bell and various senators to update them on the progress of his nation's work in human intelligence and was awarded a three year contract totaling approximately $780,000 to Bolt, Berrimack and Newman Incorporated. That was a tech company back in the day, it might still exist to analyze current programs of instruction on cognitive skills. And then she also cites in here a bill that had in there. There was proposed. Here's a quote from it. The Community Intelligence Project and the Applied Thinking Skills Project in Santa Barbara, California and the Nationwide Intelligence Project in Venezuela have shown good results with promising social and educational benefits. So it looks like Venezuela. Terrell Bell, by the way, that is the Secretary of Education that Charlotte was under. He was the one that was in Charge of Project Best. So while they're setting up Project Best and you had sort of all the precursors to this Trump version of neocon, Silicon Valley, you know, weird amalgamation, you know, the origins of this school of choice revamp go back to TH Bell, and it looks like Venezuela was basically on the same page as us then as well. And as we know, you know, I mean, if we look at this administration as like, you know, I know that for a long time the word fascist got thrown around way too loosely, but this is corporate fascism. And where did all the Nazi fascists go, or a lot of them go after the, you know, Project Paperclip? Well, they came here and they also went to Latin American countries. I don't know if they went to Venezuela, but, you know, I know Brazil.
- [57:04]
B
In Argentina, I was talking about Argentina. And they definitely did go there also. Right.
- [57:09]
A
So, you know what I mean? I just, you gotta wonder, you know, how much of that is, how much of the parallels between the way that these different, these Latin American countries and we're going maybe, maybe stems back to some, some of those, some of the stuff that they both brought back from Project. Project Paperclip.
- [57:27]
B
Yeah, well, whether it's from then, I mean, I, I don't really know, but definitely now there's a lot in sync between, you know, the Trump administration in South America, and it's likely to only increase, particularly with Chile's upcoming election. I mean, the kind of Malay Trump equivalent candidate is probably going to end up winning. So we'll probably see a lot of those policies pop up here, too, in the not so distant future. So before we wrap up here, John, I wanted to bring up something in the context of these, the, the fintech angle here and the stablecoin angle here. So in terms of Trump's education policy, you know, a lot of it hasn't gotten that much coverage. And just in general, I think, you know, in, in favor of a lot of the other wild stuff that's been going on over the past, you know, 8ish months or so. But one thing that I think most people are familiar with in terms of Trump's, what he's done with respect to educational institutions has sort of been this, this crackdown. Well, it's been framed, it was initially framed as a crackdown on, quote, unquote, woke ideology, right, in schools and universities. But then it sort of became this, this clampdown, particularly on finances of educational institutions, where students were protesting the war and Gaza being waged by Israel. And the administration justified these moves under the guise of combating quote unquote anti Semitism. So if we're in sort of this paradigm where education funding and just basically Americans money in general is going to be moved to these digital dollar stable coins that are just in the sense of being similar to CBDCs, they can be seized, you know, and they're surveillable and they're programmable. You know, if, if as you brought up earlier, the administration couldn't program these, you know, education savings accounts and things like that to only be used on certain things, it seems more likely than not that there's also a precedent being sent here where they could just turn off institutions money or also turn off, you know, offending students money, you know, off at the spigot basically with some of these, you know, fintech companies. Not sure how you feel about that, but you know, do you see this, the creep of these technologies enabling the government's capacity to control speech on campuses, whether it's about Gaza or really anything else. Like if we have another sort of COVID scenario and criticism of, you know, the narratives there or the policies there, you know, what are your thoughts?
- [60:19]
A
Yeah, you know, so the third, I think it's the third chapter in my book I looked at what are called p. Well there's P16, P20 and P20 plus, you know, another one of these where they got to have 12 different acronyms for one thing, so you can't have a concise conversation about it. But they're. We'll just call them P20 councils. Okay. To export bedight. And basically there's these consortiums or these clearinghouses to set up public private partnerships between educational institutions at the state level. Most, I think, I think every state does, but if it's not everyone, it's very close to all 50 between the education department or a local education agency and various other. What they call in the community schooling model, so called community schooling model would be what they call wraparound services. So these are public private partnerships between again these schools and either health care institutions, but also what they call community oriented policing. So in other words, right, they're part of these, the, these P20 consortiums is not just to help the students with their workforce training skills, but also to help them with their mental health and also to make sure that they become delinquent and fall through the, the cracks. Right. So they have this like preemptive criminal justice component as well. Well you can, you know, tie that in both of these in actually with national security and that is mental health and criminal justice.
- [61:44]
B
So as As I mentioned now. Yes, yes.
- [61:49]
A
Yeah. And now they're gonna, they're going. The next part is, you know, this is, this is one of the scariest things to me is this homeless thing that they're doing. Because if you're going to destroy the economy and basically make it so that even people with multiple jobs can't, you know, can't get by, then then. Right. You know, it's not just going to be. And even then it wouldn't be right, you know, because of. I'm gonna explain why, but even then I wouldn't recommend this, this homeless project. But, you know, it's not going to be necessarily because, you know, you had a substance abuse problem or gambling problems. This is going to be that the economy pushed you out of your house. And then, you know, if you get angry or, you know, you have the wrong tone of voice when somebody tells you, you know, that get off the street, they just put you in a mental health facility and be. Basically become a ward of the state under conservatorship. And if you, you know, this is part, part of where this defund the police stuff is going to go. The middle ground is going to be, oh, well, we're going to have AI I've seen, I've written about it.
- [62:47]
B
Make them more efficient by outsourcing police work to artificial intelligence and predictive policing algorithms. That's the Palantir bread and butter. And there's a litany of companies that are doing that.
- [63:02]
A
Right. And then on the other end, they also have for. And that's just to catch him. Right? Oh, he's mentally ill, which means he might be a national security threat or, or a criminal threat, etc.
- [63:13]
B
They also want AI to determine if you're mentally ill. That is the, the new CDC director, Susan Menarez, she used to be head or not head. But this number two at ARPA H, the health DARPA that Biden made and her whole. One of her main priorities there was about having like generative AI determine if people screen people for mental illness. And Trump in his first term promised that he was. Or called on social media companies to stop mass shootings before they happen by going over their, their people's posts and like analyzing them. And then he was considering this program for Harpa, which again was made under Biden under the name of ARPA H, to have people's social media post analyzed by an algorithm to determine if they're mentally ill and that they might be violent at some point. And if they do determine that, you know, so don't get angry on social media, guys. But basically, you know, you could be ordered to like a court ordered physician or like rehab place or put under house arrest by an algorithm. So the homeless stuff, I mean people need to see it in the, in the appropriate context. And also the move to federalized police, if that happens on a bigger scale, that just means the federal government can be like, well, we're going to have the federalized police outsource their police work to these specific AI algorithm companies, you know.
- [64:40]
A
Right. And, and they're also going to do for the no cash bail. They're going to say, oh, you get arrested, you know, so Palantir goes predictive analytics say oh, you're this type of a threat and you go in and oh well, or let's say they get you after the crime, doesn't matter, they bring you in there and they go, well, you know, bail. They're going to determine your bail not by money amount but by the same analytics. Oh well, you know, you've reoffended three times in the past and you live in this zip code where you know, everybody's a criminal in your neighborhood. So we're just add that to the analytics, whatever.
- [65:10]
B
Right.
- [65:10]
A
And that's going to determine whether you get in or whether you get. So you know, like people that think that sending a mental health person and having a no cash, like do you think that if you. I will take my chances with the prison. I'm sorry, I'll take my chances with. Because at least I still have. If I am going to the courts, I still have, you know, I can still make a case. Right. Pro se or with a lawyer, et cetera. If you're mentally ill and they put you in conservatorship, doesn't matter what you say, I don't care how lucid you are about it. You don't have agency as a human being anymore. Like you don't get to challenge it in court. So I mean that's terrifying to me and to your point about AI and mental health. So you know, maybe this is one of the last things we'll wrap up on because I know you got to keep going a little bit, but so I, I'm come to find out about. I got a big chunk of my tutoring hours taken from me because at one of the schools, this is the school right where I tutor, we're going to contract with a company called Upswing. An Upswing sounds so upbeat, John. Yeah, it's fun. Somebody's going to have to swing me up Because I'm going to swing, I'm going to swing me up by my bootstraps here when I don't have a job by the end of the year. So they're going to do half and half now. Okay. It's going to give, it's using generative AI to tutor students, but it also gives them mental health checks and it also will make them connections with like what they call basic needs like transportation, food, etc. There's a little tutorial on it when you go on the company and it's like got this really happy music, you know. And like then there's, and it just shows a text, you know, between the, you know, supposedly the student and the bot. And it starts off with like, oh, you know, I need some help. And like this AI is like overly affirmative. It's like, it's okay. A lot of students have that problem like you know, every response before it gives them the solution is like, you know, to me, if somebody talked to me like I'm like, man, I'm an adult, please don't, you know, please don't belittle me. But by the end of the thing, I'll cut to the chase. By the end of the thing, this, this, you know, a little video they made, it's like, it doesn't say I love you to the bot, but it's like it says I can't believe you cared so much about me and you're a total stranger. And it clicks the heart emoji. So I mean might as well say it loved it. Like so, you know, not. So this thing is going to be, you know, not just replacing me, but it's basically going to be checking this student mental health. So it's going to be also collecting the students education records under FERPA and their health records, which is hipaa. Okay. So I don't even know how, how they're gonna, you know, does it have two different databases that they go into or is it just allowed to aggregate them and then I don't probably aggregate them.
- [67:56]
B
I mean like you said way earlier, they want to remove the information. Information silos.
- [68:00]
A
Right. And here's, I'm going to lean towards that. I just, you know, I like to steel man my case. Here's why I'm going to lean towards that because half the companies that fund it are venture capital firms and impact investing funds. And I, I had some of them. I gotta go. I'm luckily the, the director is actually skeptical. So I'm gonna go and meet with the director tomorrow and so I got some of these tabs up, but I did. It's a little fresh in my mind, but a bunch of them are. Social finance is one of them. I've written about social finance. In the previous piece I mentioned that they were in some partnership with one of the impact investing companies that I wrote about in the first Project 2025 piece. But I also mentioned social finance in a video I did on UNESCO's Study 11, a follow up to the article I did for Unlimited Hangout and Social Finance partners with I think it's Future Learn, which is this online learning company out of the UK that was partnering with Study 11 back in the day. But so, so what I'm so. And then it's showing you like on the, it's, it's like, oh, we improve students by this amount, this percent had all these different metrics that it's going to give you about how the students improving. Okay, so if it's taking all that, all that data and it says, and it, they sent us an email, it's going to keep it not just for the student but for the institution. So that means that what I see here is that what we're leaning into is the company is going to become or the school is going to be leaning into social impact grants. I think social impact grants are going to take off big and you're going to have to have the AI because in order to get the, the impact grant, you're not just going to do an old school grant, like qualitative, like, hey, I got a good idea for the, for the money you want to hand out. No, no, you're going to have to show very precise metrics, the types of metrics that can only be calculated and crunched with something like generative AI, at least at the speed and scale. Okay. And so, so in other words, the extra incentive for this company to get this upswing isn't just to pay me less and get me, you know, save money and not have me tutoring, but they're going to use that data to go, oh look, we contracted with Upswing and our students mental health increased by this much and their education outcomes increase. So then they'll take that data and they'll write a grant proposal to some, you know, for pay for success for some big tech company or venture capital firm or whatever. And, and then that person will, you know, that will be how they finance this new education system. And so I mean, like I, he said, we got one semester and I'm going to tell him, like, listen, I don't know what we're going to do, but at the end of this semester, they're going to have a bunch of numbers to show that it's either as efficient or more efficient than paying us. And I'm pretty sure that by next year I'm going to be done tutoring at that school. I mean, I mean, they're not going to let me anymore. So that'd be. Maybe that's a happy ending, happy note to end on.
- [70:54]
B
Just think it's a, it's a signpost of where we're going with, with AI and how a lot of the hype around it, I mean, ultimately what's happening is just the, the outsourcing of way too much stuff to AI. And when you start outsourcing, you know, education so extensively to AI, I mean, historically, you know, student teacher relationships were really important, you know, and so having that relationship be built instead with a, with an algorithm, maybe they'll put it in a, like a little nice cute robot casing or whatever like they're doing with domestic robots that they're, you know, they have similar videos like you mentioned for those two, where it's like, the kid is like, I love you robot. It's like very creepy. But the idea is to sort of, you know, prepare the future generations for, to have this sort of very extreme connection to an AI that knows everything about them and can predict what they're going to do. And, you know, it basically, you know, leads to a very Orwellian future. When you consider to the impact of wearables and some of these things that some of these, you know, Silicon Valley house philosophers like Yvonne Noah Harari have said about, you know, hackable animals and the end of free will when the algorithm has studied you so extensively. And so even though a lot of this is framed, you know, a lot of these introductions of AI into schools and things like that is sort of being framed as having kids learn how to use AI. It's seems increasingly like where it's going to end up is it's going to be about AI learning how to use us most efficiently, not the inverse. And who does that benefit?
- [72:38]
A
You know, I've said it, I. That was one of the, that was like my epiphany moment. Why I even wrote the book because I was sitting there and I was tutoring for, I'll say the company now because it's. The non compete clause is way past. But it was Pearson. I used to work for Pearson. They had subsidiary called Smart Thinking. And guess what? They paid me with my Master's degree, they paid me $11 an hour. Now you know, mind you, if I would have went in five years more school and got my PhD, I could have got a whole 12 hours dollars an hour. Now you know, so. But they had one day sent me an email and said, hey, IBM's Watson, which you know, people don't know, was basically like the premier AI system before generative AI by the way, it's named after Thomas J. Watson, who did business with Hitler and processed the punch cards for the Nazi concentration camps. Okay, but so I'm looking at it and I go, well so basically every day I go to work, this thing's going to basically data mine me and replace me. And I go, well, okay, So I start thinking, you know, you think down the line you go, well if it replaces me, then if it can teach better than the teacher, then it can learn better than the student. In other words, right? Like anything I can teach the student, the AI can, right? It can do that just as good as it can teach it. So not only are you making the teacher obsolete, making the student obsolete, like over time, whatever you might be gaining from the algorithm, you might so called be learning from it. It's learning more and it's learning faster. So the fact that it's data mining you and you're basically feeding it is not a secondary effect. It is the primary effect. Because if I can think that from just being a tutor that's making 11 an hour and going like, well let me see if I just go three steps down the line, know where the ultimate outcome. You're telling me These venture capitalists, PayPal mafia, these big technocrats, they don't know that? Of course they do. These are people that write the code. Which goes back to why I, you know, I speculate that, you know, that timeline I gave you from the Macy Cybernetics conferences through venture capital, through Moore's law to 911 to where we're at now, you know, they were basically just doing their scenario planning, you know, ran corporation style scenario planning for 10, 15 years at a time. Right? But the scariest part for me now though, you know, is something that I never really thought of a whole lot. You know, when I was seeing how eventually, you know, I'm looking at it, the ed tech and I. And you extrapolate out, well, it's basically just building AI. And then you also look at, well it's just one part of this broader panopticon. So the ed tech metrics or the education metrics and healthcare metrics, and the workforce metrics and the, the criminal justice metrics. It's all one system at the end. What I didn't anticipate was that people were going to have emotional attachments to these bots, which is frightening because we watched a little short piece on, like, people that are dating their AI chatbots. Well, this product that I just mentioned, upswing, by the end of it, it's advertising it to the teachers as if it's a great thing that your student is going to have an emotional, emotional connection to a bot. Like, if it's one thing for it to be pushing you around algorithmically, it's another thing for you to actually bond with it when that happens. I don't. I just, you know, I don't know. I don't know where we go at that point. That is. That is terrifying to me.
- [75:51]
B
Yeah, well, ultimately, you know, I mean, there's been a lot said about, like, the cognitive drain of regular people just using AI for whatever, you know, but having that, I mean, I think I feel like it's so different than having like a grown adult use it and the cognitive drain that causes versus a kid learning stuff in schools and then having that cognitive drain happen, like, before they're, they've like, learned very much at all or like, learned how to think any sort of critical thinking. Not that schools are good at teaching critical thinking anymore, but you know what I mean? Like, it's just, I feel like the developmental, the impact on something that's still in development versus something that's more developed is obviously going to be the type of dependency that'll create on AI, I think is going to be really different and really significant and very troubling. And I just. The more I think about AI, the more I kind of see it as like, you're feeding stuff into it to make it basically, you know, you're feeding it to become this. You're like, basically giving it your brain power to become a big, giant global brain. And then at the same time, it's like also taking all of these things, like the amount of pollution it's creating, it's sucking up all the water, it's using all the power and like, raising our power bills. Like, why, why are people, like, still using this? I mean, not that I don't. I want to crap on people for using it, you know, but it's like the more we become dependent on it, the more that trend is going to exacerbate to the point where, like, we don't have brains left and we don't have an environment flash. And it just seems like crazy that there's really no talk about it, and there's just all this hype about it online. And also, like, AI slop everywhere. Like, I feel like even people in independent media are leaning so much on the AI, and then, like, I don't use that at all. But I have people. I have, like, AI bots. And, like, AI using people clip up my interviews, and they get, like, tons of views on YouTube. And it's like, they put, like, clickbait titles of, like, things. I've never said these.
- [77:56]
A
I've seen these.
- [77:57]
B
They're everywhere, by the way.
- [77:58]
A
It's narrated, too. It's like that. And, like, yeah.
- [78:00]
B
And they attribute things to me that I've never said. And so I'll have people be like, I don't like Whitney because she says this. And I'm like, I've never said that. And then they'll, like, link to the video, and I'm like, oh, my God, I can't get rid of them. I tried to go on James Corbett, like, a year ago to talk about this problem, but, like, I feel like I have to constantly remind people. And then, like, a lot of them will say, like, whitney's final warning. Or Whitney warns, this will happen by June. Or. And then there's another one that comes out two weeks later. This will happen by July. This will. I mean, they, like, constantly come out. And I'm like, I'm not warning about anything with, like, a date.
- [78:34]
A
I've seen one.
- [78:35]
B
Like, I mean, it's so crazy. And so it just.
- [78:41]
A
I saw one where it cut you. It was like, it cut you off yours. Like, you said something, like, halfway through the sentence. It literally goes to. To the narrator, and they finish your sentence. And I was like, wait, what? You know, but the cadence of them and the way they, like, splice in these still images. Like, I've seen a lot of videos where I'm like, this is AI.
- [78:57]
B
Like, you know, they are AI. It sucks. And they're. But I mean, it's ultimately a weapon of perception at the end of the day, you know? And so it's like, people that like my interviews and my points. I won't say what they want me to say. So they've taken AI to make it sound like I'm saying what they want me to. To say, even though I'm not saying it. Isn't that crazy to your point?
- [79:21]
A
Look, you know, like, I said, I don't want to poo poo on people that are using It. But you know, I think you've also been had the black pill label thrown at you. Like I have you here. You want a black pill? I'll give you a black pill. Keep using it. You know, I'm sorry, I don't want to like, you know, poo poo on people who are using you because I. Lots of friends and you know, people in, you know, my colleagues, etc. Here's the thing though, like I expect the average consumer to use it because it's, you know, convenient, etc. And you know, it's just, if you just buy into the, the way it's commercialized, I expect the administrators and the people that run big companies, right, because it's going to make them profit. I don't expect people that. I've had these types of conversation, conversations with people that are on the same wavelength. People that know about social credit, technocracy, transhumanism, all of this. People that know that like I was in a meeting the other day for a conference, right, and all nice people and everything, but somebody was supposed to take notes for the conference. Well, I didn't register at the time and I'm looking at it and it didn't, didn't, didn't mean anything to me at the time. But one of the windows in the, in the meeting was like something AI and didn't have a person on it. And like so later they email out the minutes, you know, because the person thought that would be faster than writing them down. Well, that's fine enough except that when you read the printout of the notes, it had three other metrics in there. One was did you get the objective finish whatever the title of the thing was. Did you actually come to the solution? But the two other ones, one was engagement and the other one was interest or something. So engagement was how often were people participating. But the other one was an emotional analytic. Did we like it? So I don't know if it was just going qualitatively on the things we said or if it had facial recognition and was like looking at like the facial expressions. But this is in the. Part of this conversation, right? We're talking about part of it. We discussed my presentation and data mining and so forth. We talk. So if the, you know, if the people that, the few people that are aware of where this goes are just going to lean into it, that's a black pill that you're going to swallow whether you want to or not. Because you know, people, you're just gonna, I feel like I'm gonna Get dragged into this whether I use it or not.
- [81:39]
B
It's the slipperiest slippery slope I feel like. And the more you slip down the slippery slope, the harder it is to get back up. So I know a lot of people sort of in this space like you're mentioning, you know, use it for only a few things, but eventually, if you don't check yourself frequently, your reliance on it grows and grows and grows and grows. And then how do you get back to a point where you're not using it at all or, you know, it just kind of. It gets harder for people. The dependency thing is super real, and that's really troubling. And also, I mean, some of the stories about people, like, doing insane stuff and like starting new religions with chat GBT and all this stuff, I mean, it's crazy. And having the idea of that being in like, elementary schools and telling elementary school kids to like, develop relationships with this stuff and middle schoolers, like, if adults are having like these psychotic episodes where like, they're creating their own cult with chat GPT and stuff, I mean, you don't think that's going to be even worse with like, preteens and teens and kids with, with trans, you know.
- [82:49]
A
Like, so people that are worried about transhumanism and they're worried about neural link and the brain chip, dude, you don't have to have anything plugged into you to have technology take over half of your consciousness. All you got to do is outsource half of your thinking to generative AI. Now, you know, I'm not a math teacher. Maybe a generative, a large language model might be, maybe could help you with like, numeracy, quantitative skills. But I'll tell you that as a language arts instructor, as a, as an instructor of writing and rhetoric, that if you're using generative AI, I don't care if it's just a Grammarly to like, make your sentences more efficient. But if you're definitely, if you're doing it to organize your paper or to make the connection between the thesis and the topic sentence, you know, more clear. If you're doing that, you're outsourcing your thinking skills to generative AI. And if, if there's one thing that makes you a better writer, a better speaker, better communicator, it's having an inner monologue and monitoring it. It's having an introspective awareness of whether or not the words in your head, right? The categories of your mind match the categories of reality. Being able to look in and see. Did I Contradict myself. Right. And so when you're writing a piece, I had a moment where it was like, you know, I wonder if I could just do like a rough draft, really like throw all my citations in there and just have it throw stuff in there. Well, the problem with that is that like, for me to be able to have this conversation as efficiently as possible, a lot of that comes from the recursive process. Not just of throwing information on a page and having something organize it, but like the process where I.
- [84:23]
B
Right.
- [84:24]
A
Make sure that the thesis connects to each topic, sense each topic sentence has reasoning, evidence, warrant that the summary statement connects. Right. That there's transitions between each paragraph, that everything is cohesive, that I have a citation for each sentence, that there's no wasted waste words at each side. That recursive process is not only what makes me better at speaking and writing, but it's also the. My ability gives me the ability to actually have a cognitive map of the thing that I just researched and wrote about. So, you know, there is no way in which you can have this thing do part of your reading, writing or speaking and, and have the. Your language arts muscles in your brain. Actually there's no way you can do it.
- [85:03]
B
Right.
- [85:04]
A
And so at that point, basically the.
- [85:05]
B
Studies that have been done on it, they basically show that when kids do that, they don't retain anything. Like they're able to execute the task with AI, but they didn't actually like learn anything and the information just doesn't stay in the. Like they learned literally nothing, you know.
- [85:19]
A
And add the emotional attachment to it on top of that.
- [85:23]
B
Yeah, you know, weird getting weird. And now, you know, they'll dress them up as anime girls or I guess like the Grock one. And Grok also has an Alex Jones alter ego, so, you know, a chat bot for every segment of the populace. I guess it's a mess. Well, John, I probably have to run here, but it's been a great conversation, I think. And are there. Do you have any final thoughts as we wrap up?
- [85:54]
A
Nah, that was, that was good. We. We covered pretty much the waterfront.
- [85:58]
B
Okay, super well, where can people find your work and follow you and support you?
- [86:03]
A
So all my most recent articles always you can find at Unlimited Hangout. I'm always kind of slow on updating the website. So that's where you find the most recent articles. I'm Taoist professor on X. But the website is schoolworldorder.info which has links to all the social media. There's also a link to Trying Day where you can get my book. That's School World Order, the Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education.
- [86:29]
B
Well, thanks so much. And thanks to everybody that that listens to this podcast and that supports it. And if you found this content interesting, please share far and wide, especially as social media algorithms become more restrictive and it gets harder to distribute important information like this. And yeah, thanks a lot John, for being here. And and thanks again to everyone who listened and we'll catch you all in the next episode.
- [87:14]
A
Sam. Sa. Sam. Sa. Sam.